very disapointed with the continued Archery nerfs

Sometimes the devs have to do things with the long view in mind, sometimes these things cause them to lose a few customers. In the long run they will gain far more than they lose. I think back to when EQ first came out in 1999 everyone said UO was going to shut down their servers within a few months. Well both games are still going strong in 2019! If a few people leave over skills or mechanics being fixed, I'm guessing the game will still be here for many years to come.

 

And sometimes they become reactionaries as opposed to visionaries by catering to the squeaky wheels, and lose it all! I am certain that I will not be missed, or one of the folks that Chris reaches out to because I cancelled my subscriptions today, no illusions here.

I hope SOTA makes it.

A great many people have invested in the outcome, you are one of them, and I hope they figure it out soon; as the needs of a business are often different than the warm and fuzzy things in life!

I respectfully disagree that the cause and affect of this was good for business!

 

I think that the game is in a state enough to confer it is necessary to act
https://shroudoftheavatar.net/how-many-people-play-shroud-of-the-avatar

 

That's all the evidence you need to understand that this game is dynamic, fun, enticing, empowering, balanced, rewarding, enjoyable, and most of all . . . . . addictive to anyone who touches it!!

As long as the Devs keep making these quality decisions that reward and entice players like they have been since forever, what could go wrong? WoW classic might as well close the doors in reverence to the most morally advanced, groundbreaking, market-share owning game for the next half century baby!

Go Team!

(*note: These game goals may be farther than they appear, use caution when changing templates, not for use as directed or intended, please keep away from small children)

 

A full balance pass, as well as fixing all the basic core combat system functionality is really long overdue.

 

My only gripe with the last patch was that the whole balancing of the game in the past months was around the broken DR for mobs. Now, they fix the DR, after having all the fixes/balancing passes with how the system was at. This means we are all effectively 2x weaker (except for elemental mages) than what we were before, and this didnt even occur to them when they fixed it.

But yeah archers got screwed over right? Not anyone else

 

Archers just got extra nerfs this release.

 

The metrics from steam charts and shroudoftheavatar.net speak volumes about the impact of the changes made this release to the overall player population. I've played SOTA since persistence, and as an archer (because supposedly it was the only class that was even close to "ready" at that time). It was years of grinding for little reward. There was one release (the last one) where I actually had fun playing the game after respecing to an air archer. And to note, I always charged my shots to full, so I was not taking advantage of the 1-2 ticks being the same as a full shot. In reflection, I would say the issue was not that archers (and fire mages) were overpowered. The problem is that other forms of play are under powered.

When you look at the story in this game, it's about 3 people who came from our world to this one, and were so powerful they became near gods. By contrast, my puny avatar struggles with most anything. It took nearly 3 years to get to the point where I could really grind out some good XP, in a game where it takes massive amounts of XP spent to get skills to solid levels. I don't have 18 hours a day to play and drop into leveling. I generally have 2-3 tops. Nor do I have the inclination to group, and that was one of the things that I liked about SOTA, it actively encouraged single player, at least for a while. I don't really find that to be the case anymore.

I think it's quite obvious that few of the devs play this game to any extent and the damage they do with their theories of how things play out vs the reality is damaging the game. Of course, it's also difficult to expect them to have time to do development and dedicate time to actually playing the game enough to understand the mechanics and game points, so I don't know how those conflicting priorities get resolved.

For now, I've kept my subs going, but I don't know if I will in the long run. There would need to be substantive positive changes in the next few releases for me to continue, and I don't see those in the roadmap.

 

Going out on a limb here, break out your saws and get to sawing.

@Schleiph started most of this IMO! You can agree or disagree, but he made it public, with in your face video proof.

But what was really going on with the man behind the curtain?

He was my friend and mentor, and I hope he returns to SOTA one day. Awesome guy!

I think people saw his videos and went nuts because never, has anyone made something look so easy, that seems much harder for the rest of us; and he was having FUN!

What people don't know can be dangerous, what they assume, can be the demise of themselves and others.

TRUE OR FALSE: SCHLEIPH USED MORE POTIONS THAN ANYONE IN THE HISTORY OF SOTA.
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TRUE

I hope some data mining guru will actually take my comment to task and STARTLE people with the results. He literally used hundreds per day. When I tracked it before he left the game, it was staggering.

He was not taking advantage of a damn thing, he is a freak in gaming with an IT Masters Degree and figured out the maximum damage capability by crunching the numbers. But there's little to no room in this game for the extraordinary. We must have our cold bowl of balanced oatmeal and like it.

PS: I think PARA is another player that created an innovative build and used it extraordinarily.

 

Now that major masterwork stat bonuses are in, you can get over double the stats on crafted pieces compared to before the recent changes. The amount of focus that's achievable now with the new bonuses and +%focus gear is pretty crazy too, so even air shield got something back. Not that this is all going to even out, but I don't think it's sunk in quite yet how much of a gear power up everyone is about to get.

 

Every time they give a boost to items, Chris "notices" that archery is doing well and nerfs skills.

 

Can I haz your stuff ?

 

Things have a tendency to work out in the end. I’m sure it will get better. Archery is still a working spec it might just take a bit longer to kill stuff or find the right combo but it takes time. They may even reverse some of the nerf seeing how it drove a lot of people away.

 

I can assure you that you are doing something wrong or are insisting on using the tactical-air build with charged shots that is not anymore the op fotm.

I tried archery after nerfs since it's 100% unlearning (skills between 100-110) and i can still solo the spider queen (i can do it only with archery, no chance with other weapons and schools), i can still do dragons faster than polearm, i can still do pretty well in UT with multishots, the only thing that changed is the damage resist of mobs that affects everyone and not just archery and i'm happy with this change cause pve is still brainless but atleast less than before.

If I had to leave the game for every balance or fix that influenced my builds it would have happened a couple of dozen times now, it is necessary to understand if devs are interested in having a balanced combat system or whether to satisfy a certain type of user by keeping things broken in order not to make them complain.
It already happened with meteor shower time ago, people were standing afk under them killing everything in game with no effort, even dragons, (MS was hitting 4 times in a second for over 700-900 damage before the fix ) and despite this, people had the courage to complain to the fix.

I really hope we didn't get to this point because it would be ridiculous.

PS: It's time to level up your active skills, wear a slipshooter and use a bow with skills power masterworks No more 4 passive skills ftw.

 

6 years of development and their product can't even draw 1000 actual players . . . . . . I think what's more important is for the devs to figure out if they want a game that people enjoy and play or if they just want to keep having sex dungeon dance parties for their biggest contributors. How many more years do they need to get things right, and who is going to even be interested at that point when and if they do? Keep 'having the courage' to complain, I think we can get the daily numbers down to under 200 by the end of the year. Agree?

 

The giant problem with the game is that they don't deliberately create a variety of equally valid choices for people to make, they just allow everything to stack together and then try to balance the few optimal builds that shake out.

I'm willing to bet half the people who are sick of archery nerfs aren't air magic spec with heavy bonuses to air attunement on their gear. They wanted to play an archer, or a ranger, and specializing in a magic school is not at all an intuitive way to achieve that. Of course having extremely high dex and weapon crit chance is exactly what makes a great archer in this game, and air spec can make one hell of a contribution to that.

That's the real issue, the game isn't built on making choices, so when people start making choices regardless instead of just robotically optimizing they wind up at the receiving end of a nerf that wasn't ever necessary or intended for them.

It's the individual bits and pieces you can put together to make a character that need to be balanced before the game can be balanced. You really can't answer the question whether or not archery is overpowered before you've addressed issues of the most intuitive archer builds usually being much less powerful than an optimized one.

 

So if I list all the nerfs that happened this release :

Charged shot now stacks probably each tick : This was a bug fix, not a nerf. If you feel like this was a nerf you should have known that abusing a broken game mechanic might someday be fixed.

Impact : Everyone who used charged shot


Shield of Air balance : this one made sense considering some people could get a 0.1 focus damage multiplier.

Impact: those who had a high dexterity stat and used Air shield.


Charge attack damage balance, reduced the damage across the board for charge attacks, up to 11% less damage.

Impact : those who used charged attacks.



So... unless there was a ninja nerf not written in the patch notes or release notes, archers did not get attacked by nerfs this patch. Those who can truly complain are those who played a very specific playstyle : Charged attack archers who use air shield.

Anyone else feeling like their class got destroyed doesn't understand what happened, or relied way too heavily on ONE specific aspect of the game to work, and were lacking adaptability. Archers did not get ruined, charged attack archers received an 11% MAX DPS nerf. Air mages didnt get destroyed, only those who relied on air shield for anything and had huge amounts of dexterity.

The only ones who really got hit hard are those who were using a very specific build which they knew was overpowered and was expecting a nerf. And honestly, I had my air shield before at 0.5FTR and now at 0.7FTR, and my FULLY CHARGED charge attacks do on average 120 instead of 132, not a huge deal... barely even felt these nerfs considering I'm so fast I usually kite everything I fight...

 

It wasn't just this release, it was last release and the one before too. Actually, if you go back and watch Chris' streams, he also turned down the high end range of crits possible and lowered damage overall as well for archers, and don't forget, he plans to nerf aimed shot as soon as he get to it.

So now your fully charged attacks do 132 while melee can still crit for over 2k . You are correct, everything is perfectly balanced now. You barely felt those nerfs because your character level and skills are still relatively low. My damage output was cut to less than half of what it was previously, yet melee can still do major crits, and magic can aoe everything in the game. I'm looking forward to Chris' balance pass on fire tree and melee. I mean, after all, this is SotA, no measly avatar should be able to do over 200 on a single hit.

 

you should report that to chris, i'm sure he can 'fix' that right away. Melee still hits over 2k, archer max should be 200