Any improvements to "the grind"?

Hello forumites.

I left the game for a few months. I got tired of the grind. Spending hours upon hours upon hours mining silver to build up producer XP and spending hours upon hours at control points to build up adventurer XP got really boring. Being in the same guild as people like Coswald and Violet Ronso, as well as having been reached out to by people like Robert Baratheon was a blessing since they could occasionally take me to the breach or spindleskog or Ulfhiem (that barbarian and dragon fight is a blast!), but even that got repetitive after awhile.

Have there been any improvements to this aspect of the game over the last few months? Any new places to amass producer and/or adventurer XP? Any ways to do so that afford a little more variety?

Hope the question made sense and was actionable,
DTXCF

 

If your entire gaming experience while playing Shroud of the Avatar is focused solely on staring at your Producer and Adventure xp numbers, there’s nothing at all they can do about that, as that’s your chosen play style.

 

For my part, im mostly gaining my exp looking for the new stuff they add each release. If your goal is only to gain exp, nothing else, well as anpu said, that is your choice.
There is so much to do in this game.

Diablotine

 

Lots of cool additions lately. Many more daily quests that you can earn artifacts and blessings and daily elixirs that increase your duration and power for potions. New revamp on pets so they are more different and usable in different situations, and also gear that increases the power for tamed and summoned pets.

But I have never mined if I was bored of it and I hardly ever do control points. There's no reason to grind, if you don't want to. Plenty of things to do to keep busy and have fun. I enjoy the treasure hunting in the pvp zones they've been running lately. And of course there are tons of different scenes and quests to explore that you may have skipped over if you were just leveling at control points and mining.

 

Getting producer xp is stupid easy now since they added imbued jewels for gathering and all expedience effects stack to the moon.

 

Awe well it's always a matter of perspective. If you grind in a game you grind in a game. If you stop and smell the roses, play some tunes, create something and just enjoy other things this game offers you will. I would be happy anytime to teach you to sync songs for example. It's always for me Just enjoy what I do and take your time with this game. There is no rush unless you say so. Anyway that is my motto. This game is like my virtual home but that does not mean I can't get out a game like the Gothics or putter on something else a bit. My heart is here. Hopefully the new quests for Episode 2 will trickle in soon but of course they will when they do. So check back or come back soon. I'm happy to help if I can. as Majoria in the game. Whatever you do have a great time and take good care.





We have come a long way baby.

 

Rule #1, HAVE FUN.
Rule #2, Refer to rule #1.

But honesty, so much to do in the game. Forge your own path. My 2c.

 

With all of that heard and understood, there are still quests out there that require traversal of T8+ to T15+ zones. Those are very difficult if not impossible zones for an AL 115. Yes, better gear can make it easier, but then you have to grind for the materials and producer XP to be able to MAKE the better gear.

When I first started out, my main goal was simply to complete as many quests as possible. I've finished the 3 titan quests and am about 15% through the Oracle quests and have done a mess of the side quests. I got sidetracked when I learned how much fun cooking, enchanting, masterworking and crafting is.

But I definitely have several quests in my journal that are going to be almost impossible for me until I grind up another 20 levels at least, like getting all the way through the Compendium, the dragon quest in Ulfheim, the Spindleskog rune, the sarcophagus in Ravensmoor et al.

If the answer is simply to stick to quests in zones that have survivable combat, then I guess that's that and it is what it is.

I hope this made the reason for my question more clear. Erst the while I'll probably get back in and try to finish the Oracle quests.

 

Don't forget you can do almost anything with aid from another player too. If you'd rather mindlessly grind until you can solo the content yourself, well I guess that's your choice.

If you set goals for yourself that seem impossible. Just set some different attainable goals for a player at your level. Nothing needs to be done in this game, but eventually you can do everything if you want. That's the beauty of it. I've been playing since release 21 and I still have tons of things I haven't done yet and quests I haven't completed. The list of those things just keeps getting longer for me, and I'm in no rush to complete them. Just enjoying the ride.

 

Unfortunately, that's all there is. Everything in the game involves some form of grinding. I had always hoped for regular long-quest/story content but that will never happen.

 

Indeed. I think the honest answer, despite what our more loquacious proponents have to say on the matter, is "check back in another 6-12 months." While it's nice to have such devoted players who will expound on the games virtues at the drop of a hat, they can often be the mirror image of the game's worst detractors, and will promote their own (albeit positive) agenda over your likes and dislikes.

 

Hello @DalTXColtsFan good to see you once again!
I'm a grinder myself, and a boiled down answer for your inquiry is SotA doesn't excel at grinding.

The other responses kind of show it: you're going to get bored if you chose to grind, here's decoration, RP, trading, fishing and other stuff in which the game does better.

In order to get good grind, a game should have consistent linear-ish scene progression, so the player is always a small gap away from being able to advance and get clearly better rewards with sizeable risks involved.
With SotA's non linear struceture, the grind is basically stuck to a handful of scenes and the perceived progression is sluggish.
This is a design choice from the devs and I don't expect it to be changed anytime soon.

 

I think this is actually a really good way to put this into words. I don't know how many of you played the first Wizardry game, but it was a 10-level game, it only took a couple hours to get past level 2, but then there was literally ABSOLUTELY NOTHING except fighting on levels 3 through 9, and you had to grind for dozens of hours for your character to be strong enough to survive level 10. Contrast this with a game like the first The Bard's Tale. You could survive in the Wine Cellar after a few hours of grinding the monsters on the streets, then the sewers after a few hours of grinding in the cellar, then the catacombs after a few hours of grinding in the sewers et al through Kylearn's tower and the last couple dungeons. That's a game that pops out to me as having done a pretty good job of being balanced as far as grinding vs. story.

I think that the progression from the tier 2 zones to tier 3, then 4, then 5 is actually excellent. But there is a lot of room for improvement in the transitions from tier 5 to tier 6 for example - East Sanctus Forest and Wynton's Folly really aren't that much tougher than, for example, Deep Ravenswood or Crag Foothills. Northwest Blackblade was already way too hard to tackle after conquering tier 5 zones with the darkstarr destroyers and yellow dragons, and now that they've added aether scorpions and even MORE dragons it needs to be reclassified. Kiln Cistern is just a quest area.

Here would be my suggestion for improving Tier 6: Create an area similar to Deep Ravenswood that has, for example, packs of Large Obisidian Bears instead of Obsidian Bears, swarms of red spiders that have a higher percentage of ferocious red spiders, packs of obsidian wolves with some large and/or ferocious obisidian wolves thrown in or something similar. I acutally like the Naughty Brat area in East Sanctus - that's actually a good quickly-respawning grind that gains quite a bit of XP and gold. Another idea that would be a neat one for a Tier 6 area would be an area like the Forest Siege or Hill Siege scenes that are ALL Ebon Cultist champions, high wizards and marksmen.

Let me pause there: Are there any areas like Deep Ravenswood that have large packs of monsters that are significantly tougher than those in Deep Ravenswood but less tough than, for example, the swarms of Elite Skeletons and Skeleton Warriors/Archmages in Ravensmoor? Hope that made sense.

 

There's a new zone Outlaw's Run (T8) in Mistrendur, and lately I've been hanging out in Spectral Peaks (T10) . Not easy, but if you stay away from the spiders there's nothing that can 1-shot you. There's also Lord British Castle; you can do waves there that start easy and progress in difficulty, so you can choose your own moment when to stop. And there's always Tanglemire and Ulfheim. Ulfheim "behind the gate" is rather fun and you don't have to spawn the dragon!
And yes, I'm about your level I did have to make a few changes to my skills and deck to be more effective, but people helped me out with advice!

 

Lost vale trolls (advanced wave) give very fast cap att solo. Try Well of Aldure - good loot.
If you are good with good gear, during x2 you can get great XP(cap/near cap) literally everywhere.

 

Yeah, for a guy who said the rune stone in Spindelskog is too hard, I'm sure getting through all of Lost Vale in normal mode in order to unlock it on hard mode will be a breeze. Maybe a bit harsh, but RTFT.

 

Here is my honest opinion on most systems in Shroud :

Combat : combat is a constant creep to increase your power. You have to give yourself goals and consider stopping once you reach those goals, otherwise there will always be more creep to be crept. There are very few monsters that are challenging enough to justify all this grind, but there is also no reason at all to do anything other than grind if your main focus is combat, there isn't rares rare enough to keep you busy, there aren't achievements, or titles to work towards, only the same artifacts, resources and exp that you will endlessly gather.

PvP : some recent changes make PvP a lot more balanced, but there still isn't any goal in doing it, except a few titles in the Obsidian Trials, a cool concept, but sadly not frequented enough. Add a queue system for the Obsidian trials allowing people to do something else while they wait for a lobby and it might actually get used more. For open world pvp, there needs a rewarding system, either be it factions you can build reputation with, allowing you to reach tiers with cosmetics, titles, PvP exclusives, anything of the sort would help it be attractive.

Crafting : many things have been added through crafting to make it fun, one thing I dislike about it is how boring the early steps can be, I want to craft an epic sword, but 95% of the time will be dedicated to refining materials, creating the components and what not, so the fun part (for me) is only 5% of it. I also would love a system that allows you to pick rolls instead of nonstop praying for RNG, at a cost, this could be great.

Housing : wonderful system, but with no actual uses. Housing could provide buffs in some way, some healthy/rested buff for being in a house with a bed, some light sources, etc, or some combat buffs with your trophies. Basically, anything like that.

Dungeons : here this might be my fault, but dungeons don't seem to offer any type of classic progression, you join the dungeon, go anywhere, and grind the most optimal area. If dungeons had stuff like no respawns (or area specific waves like tartarus's zombie room), but then allowed a challenge with a "climb", and good enough rewards if you clear all the stages of the dungeon (all bosses/puzzles, etc). This would make dungeons much more special outside of just another grind zone.

These are the systems I can think about right now, but yeah, there is clearly something missing, something to help give players goals outside of self made goals, because otherwise the game is simply play/grind till you bore yourself, the game won't guide you outside of the quests, which once are done, are over, repeatable quests aren't guides, they are simply another grindable system.

The systems in place are great, but there is just something missing, I love the game, but I too grow bored every so often and don't touch it for a while, until a new shiny draws me back in until I regrow tired of doing the same stuff I've been doing for over 5 years now.

 

So much incentive to play never got built into the game to keep players immersed in it like the in game achievement system promised for years. We've had to create our own self thought out goals throughout the years to keep busy. Not everyone likes doing that and if a game doesn't provide things such as a rewarding experience to keep players going like progressing in some way the game can get stale. New shinies are only temporary fixes and a poor design for a game. Yes shinies are great if they are in addition to a game that let's the player see progressions and achievements and feel it. So unless we keep mentioning improvements that make a difference there is no chance for it to happen. The good thing is imo there is still that chance for someone to hear at this point. So rally on guys.

 

Off-topic. Raises hand to both. Loved both of them. Maybe the newness of a computer RPG was part of that love.

Have you tried the Ruins of Utheim (original Ulheim)? On Mistrendur/ Episode 2 content now if you haven't been there. Tier 8+.

 

We have actually suggested that possibly we could get another Quest Reset via some means and in some way that can't be exploited (obviously) to at least allow you to get some more xp that way.
Granted, yes that's the same old quests, but it's what we have for now. I personally would like that added even if it was once a year or even once every 6th months etc...

There is however the Episode 2 Main Quest, but that's still probably a long ways off.