Novitus, Herald of Beginnings Submitted

Please feel free to comment and make suggestions regarding this dragon! I want to refine it a bit before I post it to the Trove forums to fall under the scrutiny of the devs, so I'll need help to make sure it's good enough!

While crystalline-and-metallic-with-lots-of-gold in appearance (we have a lot of dragons that do that, don't we?) seem to be commonplace and all Radiant/Radiance-themed, Novitus is not meant to be related to the Radiant Ruins. Instead, he's actually meant to be related to the Prime worlds in general, though I wasn't able to make that too apparent in his design. Furthermore, I wanted him to look fast, that was actually the whole idea behind him starting out. A dragon that genuinely looked "fast," which is where all the extra bits sticking off came into play.

The crystalline appearance was meant more to help make him appear more visually appealing, as without that he just had three subtly-different shades of gold for his scales and two shades of light, minty green for his underbelly, and believe me, it looked quite odd in Zoxel at least to take that away/off of him. But I digress.

With the idea of speed in mind, Novitus also ended up a lot more bulky and powerful looking than I'd originally had, which somewhat hampered the whole concept of "speed" I was trying to go with, but I decided to see it out and ended up quite pleased with the results. The first iteration of the wings also looked a little bit too Neon City-esque with the glowing stripes, though I originally decided to stick to them, hoping that the curved shape of the wings would offset the Neon City-ish look from the stripes a bit. But of course, I've changed things up since then. Older versions are available for download if you want to see what I was talking about!

The name "Novitus" is, honestly, something I just got out of Google Translate by looking up a bunch of Latin translations for words like "newbie" "novice" "starter" "beginning" and the likes, and splicing them together, it's nothing to be proud of but it fit the concept that I was forming as I worked on him quite well. That concept being...

Novice worlds. Or rather, worlds of Uber-1 difficulty and below. The idea was, originally, that Novitus's "Swift Dragon Egg Fragments" (of which he would've taken ten of to craft) would have a chance to drop from any enemy killed in Uber-1 or below. His drop-rate would have been double that of the standard "takes 5 fragments" fragments, and his first fragment would have had a 10x drop chance (to try and be sure newbies ALWAYS had 1 egg fragment before they got out of the low-tier worlds,) but seeing as the Geode update is making all those 5-frag dragons take 100 frags that drop much more commonly instead, Novitus would instead simply stick to those numbers.

But that's not all. Ideally, would also bring high-tier players into low-tier worlds for long spans of time, helping to showcase what endgame players can do to all the newbies who've just started playing, potentially providing an incentive for them to spend lots of money and/or spend lots of time playing, both of which being beneficial to the game, and with the drop rate of dragon egg fragments being just enough to provide a sense of progress, this would hopefully act as a newbie hook.

Of course, Novitus is not meant to JUST be a hook for newbies to try and get them invested in the game, he's meant to be highly beneficial to new and old players alike, for the sake of making grinding just that little bit faster, and with that said... movement speed. I can't think of a single dragon that provides extra movement speed. Almost all of them provide health, plenty provide damage, there's even a handful that provide attack speed, but no movement speed. Novitus would be the first to provide movement speed, as well as being the first to provide extra flask capacity (but just one, wouldn't want to go too overboard now would we?) A decent increase to movement speed without having to gear into it wouldn't be overpowered, but it would be a boost worth grinding for for a lot of people, and that extra flask could make the difference between a successful run and a wipe in Shadow Towers.

I'm kind-of on a tangent here, but I'll force myself to stop and summarize the idea I had for Novitus's stats, which go as follows.

Requirements to craft: 300 Dragon Coins, 100 Swift Dragon Egg Fragments, 25000 Flux, 10000 Shapestone, 500 Diamonds, and 2500 Radiant Shards.

Stats provided: +10 movement speed, +1 flask capacity, +1 jump, +50 Magic Find.

These stats I feel would benefit all players both old and new, without being overpowered, and at the same time being a unique break from the recent meta of "1000 max health, a percentage stat boost, extra damage if you're feeling lucky, and 50 Magic Find" since no dragons have provided movement speed OR flask capacity before, and only the OLD dragons (and the Block Dragon) provide anything in the way of jump increases. Of course, all of this is entirely up for the devs to decide if they even bother implementing this in the game, I'm just throwing my hat in the ring with this one.

Za'Hadeen, Heart of the Flame

Replaces the fire primordial dragon: Za'Hadeen, Heart of the Flame, and as of version 1.5, finally replaces Za'Hadeen's particle effects with something a little more green!