Health and focus Regen rate

Lol, with the current break rates? No chance.
Especially since some schools of crafting with no breakage would be immune whereas enchanters and masterworkers would be screwed

Crafting is already punitive enough and expensive enough to level, I don't see how delevelling crafting levels - at all - would improve the game in any way, shape, or form.
What are we hoping to gain by delevelling crafting skills? What does it achieve?

If there had to be a trigger, I'd suggest some number of days passing without using the skill, which makes a bit of logical sense, as you'd be out of practice. But I'm thinking weeks here rather than hours.
If you haven't chopped a tree or mined an ore or crafted an item in that tree for so long, possibly. Of course, this is pretty punishing to casual folks and/or people returning ot the game. Perhaps use online time rather than calendar days?

 

It's just that, since persistence, there has been a series of changes to make everything from traveling to recovery take much longer. So much so that it's all grind now and no fun.

A few times over the weekend, I started the updater and before logging into the game I thought about how much grind and waiting were involved, and how much work I would have to do just to prepare for that grinding, and then I closed the updater instead of launching the client.

 

I like the idea here, but not every crafter is trained in skills that destroy upon failure. That is only tied to Masterworking and Enchanting. Theoretically one could do everything but that and never be subject to decay.
I believe tying it to standard item failure is too punitive, it happens way to often.

 

He doesnt want it more hard core, he doesnt want to be punished for playing the game; and honestly, no one else here does either.

Just ask yourself this: Does staring at a screen/going afk between each fight while waiting for your mana/health to reg = fun? Most people, including myself, say no it does not.

I am totally on board with food, I think that mechanic could be really fun. However, how you currently have it in QA is not fun at all, it is a punishment.

If I ate a piece of food, have it have a positive effect. Don't shut us down hard with the regen rates, forcing us to eat food, that still shuts us down hard.

If you feel that the current R33 regen rates are too high (which I'm not convinced they are), I say only marginally reduce the rate (maybe 5 ticks/second) but make it so that low/mid tier food at the very least gets you back to that R33 rate.

To add fun, you dont penalize the player base, forcing them to use a mechanic that provides no added benefit (I dont consider slamming the breaks on regen and then giving food ridiculously low regen bonuses as benefiting). Instead, introduce a mechanic that adds benefits.

How about: Dont mess with the R33 regen rates (or just marginally as described above) and have the food be an optional FUN mechanic, such as: added to hit, added crit, added str, int, dex, etc etc etc. Make it ADD to the game if you CHOOSE to partake in it.

 

Crafting is already over "balanced". No need to add further "balances" to crafting. You hesitate to add this punishmen err I mean "balance" to PVP, yet happily add it to crafting which already has the heaviest punishments and for this reason is the most hardcore activity in the game?

 

I'm at the point where part of getting ready to play SotA is figuring out which DVR'd show I want to watch or which program to stream on my second monitor while I do some grinding. I started gathering silver to level up master working, but I probably get more value back by selling the ore. The failure rate for crafting is depressing.

My adventuring friends don't play much anymore. Maybe that will change once the raffle is done and people aren't trying to grind out one more ticket.

 

@Chris
There kind of already is a cap in that the most producer xp you can currently earn is 500 per mined node or skinned monster (with the exception, I guess, of skinning big 'group' mobs like the dragon, etc.)
At 500 xp per shot, getting any producer skill to "really high" levels is going to take months if not years.

Even if higher tier materials are added which buffed this slightly, there's still going to be a point at which the time investment doesn't give any discernible benefit.
With adventuring, this is more fluid, and presumably as harder and harder content is added the amount of "experience per hour" players can grind will increase.
This curve is pretty fixed for crafting, as you're limited not only by your gathering speed but also by node availability/respawn and the overall xp rate that you get per node.

That being said, I think additional diversification in the crafting trees themselves - ie more skills that need to be levelled up, particularly in the refinement skills, will 'spread' this static xp amount thinner requiring even more time for a player to become truly proficient. There have been many suggestions as to what, ie refining skills that increase the no. of items you can make at a time (from 20), speed increases, perhaps material recovery, etc...

If we absolutely must have decay or a hard limit, honestly,I'd prefer the hard limit. At least then you could grind for weeks/months whatever and it would be done, until the limit was increased with the addition of new content.
While lvl 100 isn't the hard limit currently, going beyond level 100 takes hours and hours of grinded mining xp for a minimal, sometimes not even visible, benefit. I have enchanting at lvl 107, and going from 100-107 probably I could have gm'd another crafting skill entirely for the amount of xp, and the only benefit is a 2% increased success chance on the 2nd attempt (from 82 to 84%).

Losing that amount of xp, nevermind material cost, to dying in adventuring doesn't make sense to me because I can't earn it back by adventuring. I have to go grind out producer xp and materials again.

If that's not feasible and a decay mechanic is absolutely necessary, I suggest a different trigger is the way to go.
Elapsed time without crafting anything in that 'school' makes the most sense (due to being out of practice) but would need some sort of limit for folks who have extended periods where they can't play at all.

Another alternative would be to draw a line at grandmaster. You're a grandmaster, you can't un-grandmaster, but would be subject to decay down to that point.
It would be an excellent incentive to level the skill that high in the first place in order to be free of the decay mechanic, but pushing it higher would entail risk.

Again though, in either case, I think linking it to death doesn't really make sense.

 

You seem to have a misdirect anger toward PVPers. If you could keep an open mind I can explain it further to you why skill decay should not trigger in PVP.

1) For PVPers if they are going for PVP session, they probably expect to die several times. Yes, the first time may hurt the most if they haven't die for awhile, but after that 100 next kills within an hour wouldn't hurt their skill (although ,they will be paying ton of GP for ransom).

2) The folks who hurt the most are those crafters or gatherers who either flag PVP by accident (let's say accidentally heal a PVPer and got flagged) or those who like to risk into Shardfall to harvest cottons and trees. They would be an easy prey to the PVPers.

3) There are also those who like to spar with friends via dueling, there will be one less fun thing socially if they become more concern over accidental kill during dueling and lose the skill.

4) With the current decay accrue to 6 hours, it should be much less skill requires to cover the death.

5) Also, it wasn't the PVPers that call for making crafting harder. It's those crafters who do not want everyone else to be able to craft stuff themselves.

 

I think having skill decay in pvp is only going to discourage pvp -and/or make it even less desirable for less 'hard core' folks who might like to dabble from time to time like myself - I'm glad that this was reconsidered.
There is already a cost to dying in PvP and I don't think we needed another 'blocker' to keep people from doing it.

But that's kinda the point with the crafting, there's already a high cost and we don't need another blocker....;P

Dying while adventuring should do something to affect your adventuring. I don't think skill decay is the answer, I think its just going to cause more grind, more frustration, and more despair, but agree that there needs to be some sort of reason to 'not want to die'. But if you take it too far, then you end up with 'not wanting to do anything risky and/or challenging' if the loss is too harsh, too. Permanent skill loss crosses that line for me. Experience debt / having to regrind before I could raise something further I could probably just about stomach.

 

I was making a point, that kaeshiva above outlined nicely for you.

 

Hard Caps would be nice. At least I would know how much to work and could create a use for my alts.

 

Agreed, if all the support systems are in place. They're not, and so all of this feels unnecessarily punitive.
The issue isn't that all of this is so hard on a player base, its that we are persistent.
I'm fine with testing like this when we were wiping, but now putting certain players and classes at a disadvantage when this relates to our permanent build is a tough pill to swallow. You already have power guys out there that are 'over-leveled', stuff like this just puts them farther ahead. How does that 'balance' out?

BTW I hate arguing these points, I can power level too, I'm trying to take it easy and provide a mid level player response.
I'm more a fan of hard caps than...well, lets just call it an 'innovative system' of decay.

 

is this an indicator that you guys will be lowering the xp gain of 5 skull zones to force the min maxer players into far more difficult zones that result in death far more often? Or will XP gains remain the same?

 

I think what @Chris has said here is great. There should be no decay for PvP deaths because you don't gain experience for PvP to counteract the loss of XP and you're going to die a lot more frequently in PvP than in PvE unless you're just being reckless in PvE. Having decay for PvP deaths would completely break PvP imo. Less people would want to do it. Losing your items is already penalty enough for death. Crafting skills decaying from a PvE death does seem a little odd, but I see it as death being such a traumatic event that it negatively impacts your accumulated knowledge in all things including your crafting skills.

There's an anime called Log Horizon (possible spoilers ahead if you plan on watching it) that has a similar concept to this where the characters are all trapped in an online game world. You can die unlimited times in this game world, but each death consumes a portion of your memories regarding the previous world you came from (Earth) until the point that you completely forget about the world from which you came. This page describes how this works in the show: http://log-horizon.wikia.com/wiki/Spirit_Theory

 

This makes a lot of sense to me as a player. The power gamers tend to min max in order to be effective in PvP and at some point might even leave the PvE environment for the most part (thus stop the level grind and settle on a build they feel comfortable with).

In which case a player who grinds for the sake of grinding out GM everything probably will be so busy with PvE that they won't have the PvP skills to be effective even if their skill points are a bit better. Since at higher levels of skill the item bonuses start to make more difference due to diminishing returns on skills.

I'm clearly not a game developer! I'm only thinking from the perspective of min maxing which may not even be nessisary in this game, but the psychosis still exists in many gamers. Seems like this system might be good for all player types and ultimately we can recover from a power gamer mentality over time (if we have one) and enjoy the stratigy of PvP, social, and crafting persuits.

However I'm really looking forward to the storyline and basically I've only held off because of the final wipe and getting situated (since we've waited a few years for this game). Personally I don't need an incentive to do the story, but having an XP bonus for those quests will likely draw in the new players and keep them from doing what I have done (which is grind xp from monsters and stuff).

 

It looks odd because the design for skill decay has evolved from its original approach.

Originally : Skill decay was also meant to be applied when you gained any skill.

So, when you gained points in one skill, the accumulated decay for all the other skills was meant to be applied. This would have resulted in a smoother decay rate, and would have reduced the impact of the catastrophic drop we are seeing upon death.

Unfortunately, that portion of the decay system was abandoned... And now we are left with what we see now.

 

It seems to have been un-nerfed a bit in the latest build (399), so thanks for that @Chris.

 

Fully in agreement here. In my opinion (as someone who's invested a lot of money into the game and as a casual player) this breaks the game for me as a mage/healer. I'll be useless in groups as a healer if I don't invest money in ways to speed up focus recovery, but I won't get to play enough to make up the considerable adventuring costs. I hope game devs reconsider this change and do NOT increase focus regen rate.

Again, this 50 second to 5 minutes increase in focus regen would make the game unplayable for me, and would have me quit. 5 times the regen rate is absurd.

 

Also agree with this. Why should a mage have to pick up melee to afford to be a mage, that's just silly.