Overworld encounters - good job.

Except one of the things I liked about encounters at lower levels were the resources. If you have to bail after killing five or six mobs, the encounters go back to just being horrible nuisances. If you're high enough level to deal with the later waves, the resources are probably less important to you. Maybe a longer timer between the waves, so lower level players have some time to gather and mine before having to ditch?

 

A Tier 2 player entering a Tier 2 Encounter can gather most all the resources in there (they will have to fight a few, well spaced out creatures that are also Tier 2).

They will however need to completely ignore the large group of creatures near the entrance. Those are the wave creatures that will spawn the higher level creatures.

 

First I recognized the changed “grouping” of enemies in e.g. the bandits T2 encounter…a camp fire with some roasted pig…bandits that stay at a specific spot and not roam the entire scene…liked it. As always I simply was harvesting some resources while bringing some “justice” to the scene as a side note…and was surprised as some of the bandits where not falling immediately to the ground and instead where reducing excessively my hp. I needed some seconds to survey the new situation and was gladly just fighting against one of the respawning groups as else my lvl 76 avatar would have been wolf food.
The two 1200 hp wolves and their adds are a nice addition and I really hope we will see a lot more of that.

I’m not sure that this a bug…even if they label it currently as that.I think @Ajumma simply did not recognized that these are scene bosses like the dragon in the deer encounter or the lich in the sieges.
I think the normally/mainly to be found enemies in scene should define the tier of a scene and not the strongest…as else much more T2-T4 scenes would have to be called T5 or even T5+...even the T0 outskirts would have to be raised to I guess T2 or even T3 as even there can be found some stronger enemies that are a lot tougher than the normally found enemies in these scenes.

 

I think the Tier 2 label is too low - it should be at least Tier 4 - the new plains encounters had their label changed to Tier 5.

With the expansion to Tiers 6 - 10, I hope we get better labeling on all the scenes so people get a better idea of what the difficulty is when deciding what they can handle.

 

I generally explore T5 areas right now and everything is yellow, the Lichs that spawned in the T2 skeleton encounter were all orange.

 

I love the new encounter mechanics probably because I am not a low-level avatar...

I hope they make it so the encounters scale to the avatar level so new and low-level avatar can have fun with those as well. Maybe for those avatars, spawn lower level mobs.

If you can make those sense to scale to the avatar adventure level, those are going to be fun for everybody!

 

This.

 

Those three are in Deep Ravenswood, which is a Tier 5 zone.

One of them was a 900 HP Lich Mage, I have seen that one in Hilt Fortress on the way to the forge.

 

Happened to me from a skeleton encounter outside of Soltown.

 

Yeah that the whole point of changing the label/color coding to say Tier 4+ to warn people who cannot do them yet.

Maybe they could add some old Tier 2 encounters around Soltown, Resolute so newer players have something they can do.

 

I went into the undead one with my alt, who on his own is not that bad (he farms essylum) and the lich's killed me.

I think they need one tier in between with a few next level skel's before 3 big bad lichs pop out and murder new players

 

I used to use these encounters to mine and gather resources, I had to be careful and methodical and it surely wasn't a massive farm session, it took time and steady work for me to get what I have. I knew which encounters I could survive and worked to get them, which in itself isn't always easy (luring skeletons off roads to get plains encounters, making sure bandits were on the road to avoid the bandit plain encounters and so on). With the recent changes, I was in a road skeleton encounter, enjoying the bit of variation in the mob when suddenly 3 orange lich (maybe one red? I didn't take the time to look too closely) nearly killed me and I was lucky to get to the border and exit but one crit from the mob would have killed me. I didn't get any resources and didn't get to loot my kills. Once again, I wasted my time trying to do something I enjoy in this game.

These encounters have once again turned into something I have to avoid to survive, and with the changes to most of the mines and resource areas I used to go to, I am finding enjoyment of this game difficult. It's disheartening for devs like Chris to come in here and say the game isn't hard enough and make these massive changes and not seem to be able to see the other side of things. While I love the idea of the increasing level waves and I was really liking the variation within the encounters, the waves come on too quickly and the level increases way too steeply and that doesn't give the people who aren't so great at the game's clunky and unresponsive combat a chance at success.

Poor execution of these ideas that could be pretty neat is causing me to log into the game less and less, and I definitely won't be recommending this game to any more of my friends the way things are going, and I hate that. I was a huge supporter up to about a year ago. I've been thinking of how to reply to this thread as I was really angry about it earlier, so hopefully I've stated my case respectfully. I don't expect things to change, though. Oh well.

 

It isn't a bad idea it just needs some adjustment. Zone Teirs need to mean something.

 

I do agree that there is a perceived shift that has been negative in the last few months; a lot of change. Change is not always bad, just different and we have to get use to it and move on. That said to much change has an additive effect to the point where it is too much change in too short a time frame. For many and including @zyxe the road encounter change is that step too far; it's a fine line between usability and advancement in game content.

What would be interesting is data on who are the predominant users of the road encounters i.e what level they are as a majority, publishing that data so that the change made does not appear and give the perception of being purely random and as a change made just because as devs you can...

I think few people would argue negatively if there was a justification made alongside the change made; for instance if the majority of players that used road encounters are 100+ level, scaling it to be harder would be the right choice...

At the core people need to know why changes are made, this is universal from workplaces to home life, we have a need to understand "why". To much change with no explanation at work means you lose staff by the bucket load, same rules apply in games.

 

Even with a few liches they still aren't worth the time. Fun to do a couple times then they are back to being a time sink to run around when you are on the way to where you want to go.

 

I see more and more a tendency to place insanly high level mobs into places where they do not really are of use.

Road encounters are not what groups form to go into, groups go to places and do things, things that are "static", very few groups travel much overworld, they meed in or one entrances, or one goes and the others port.

Right now there is much done for 100+ players but by taking it away from lower levels.

My favorite place to hunt is ravenwoods, no idea if i bother logging in as soon that is all 10+

 

If you barely manage to kill these green dudes, your victory will be stolen from you as two red and one purple(?) Lich spawn on top of you.

This is one important detail that a lot of people seem to neglect: the threshold to determine what’s yellow and what’s green is very narrow. Meaning a single level difference can turn an entire group of mobs from green to yellow...

One player could be level 20 and encounter green enemies and they’d be green for another player at level 120 as well. The same message is communicated to both players, but one’s idea of a “finely turned” encounter is another’s nightmare... the level 120 player thought it was a nice surprise but little did he know that he out-leveled the green enemies by 100 levels.

It’s a horrible, horrible design. Green and orange + enemies should never be within a bow-shot away from each other.