Game is WAY Too Easy

Not sure if this has been discussed in detail, but there are a lot of variables that would potentially make death penalty/decay much worse for one person vs another with both players at adv level 91. The innates, for example have different rates of increase. The 3 big ones are Train Dex, Train Str, and Train Int. Doesn't it take like 8x or 12x the experience to gain levels in those three? If one person decided they absolutely HAD to have Train Strength and Train Dex both at level 110, they'd have MASSIVE losses at death compared to someone who just stopped at 80 for both items. Even if these people have the same Adv Level.

 

All your saying here is a person made a bad decision and is too stubern to let the xp back out of those skills. No character is broken... They all can be fixed with work.

 

oh, of course anything in a character can be "fixed" in the game. I'm not sure I was saying that the person with the 110 in Train STR and Train DEX had "broken" characters, though. Perhaps that person made sacrifices in a few other areas so that their damage with a hammer and their crit chance would be crazy high. Maybe they chose that, and have almost no skill points in the magic trees on purpose. I'm not sure that is "broken" per se. Not necessarily a "bad decision." I am merely pointing out that two players with the same adv level can certainly have VERY different results upon death.

 

I thought your adv level was based on the total amount of xp you had applied to skills, not which skills you had applied it to. So I don't think in your example both people would be the same adv level, unless my belief is wrong.

I think though with what Chris has talked about doing to the death penalty (making it different based on how high each skill is) you would/will be right.

 

Adv Lvl only is a reflection of XP that your character has acumulated. I have a level 60 character that has not spent any of her xp. When she dies she looses nothing.

Decay is determined by your skills you have above certain benchmarks. Sub 40 = 0 % 40-60 = 25 % 60-80 = 50% 80-100 = 100% 100-130 = 150 %, 130+ = 200%

 

When it first came out, the tooltip for Fireflies was worded such that it wasn't clear, so I leveled it to 40 and tried it out. Didn't seem to do diddly as far as increasing my bow attacks. This release when I saw the change I tried it again and my damage output is markedly, immediately noticeably higher against a mob I cast it on, especially a boss or any higher level warrior type. I'll take your word that it was effective for ranged attacks before (you're usually right about these things), but the change in what it does was a BIG change, at least for me. Cut my daemon and troll kill times by 40%. Works wonders against things like elite skels.

Plus I'm just trying to derail this thread, kinda, since it's now 12 pages off topic.

 

Is that actually in yet, the change to decay to be based on the skill levels? Thought it was just still in planning.

 

As Cryodacry stated, the XP penalty at death is based ONLY on how high those skills are. So yeah... It really has nothing to do with how much XP you have gained over your character's life. CryodaCry illustrated that pretty nicely with the character that has Adv level 60, and no skills in ANY tree yet. That is probably pretty rare, but that character would lose zero when killed. On that same note, a character that has ALL skills in the entire game at level 39 would lose nothing (as Cryodacry said in the benchmarks thing there).

 

That is definitely a thing right now. It has been implemented for quite some time, if I am not mistaken.

 

Just to be clear, I know that XP just sitting in your pool is not part of the death decay calculation, it's only what you have actually applied to skills. It used to be a straight up calculation of a percentage of the total XP applied to any skills x hours (up to the max decay). Chris discussed changing it so that it was calculated differently for each skill based on the level of that skill, but I don't recall seeing in any release notes that he actually implemented that yet. That discussion was maybe two months ago, so you're saying that's already in? And I guess I just missed it or it wasn't in release notes. I'm going to go back and read the last few...just don't recall seeing it actually changed.

 

Now you've got me second guessing things. I could have sworn he said that was definitely changing at a very specific time. This was a LOT more than a couple of months ago, too. Like half a year ago maybe.

 

I have the base blades skill at 113 for instance. Though I died once today and only lost about 85,000 so my earlier figures may have overestimated the loss from the penalty and underestimated how much was lost to skill gain (I was in a party with someone who had GM in a skill I was using).

This may sound facetious to you but: that would be my definition of different builds. It may be that we've been talking at cross purposes somewhat.

Well either it's 188M to be 'specialized' or it's not, I'm just confused as you seemed to be undermining your own point.

He did actually implement it, it was implemented wrong at first (extra penalty was introduced at 40 and 80 instead of 41 and 81). I don't remember the formal announcement either but the mistake was discussed for a few minutes at a telethon (either the September or October one) and the change had been in for a while at that point.

 

To be specialized with archery means : to use ranged skills when attacking. IF the game was well balanced, the 6 skills would have a use, as intended. And you would need 188M to get those to 120. Currently, only 2 or 3 of them are useful, and that's another valid argument for me because the jack of all trade will use the best skills in each tree when the specialist will get limited. Thank you for your help in this demonstration.

 

I missed this in my previous reply.

I think we're circling here. I don't believe anyone is forced to level up skills every tree, my evidence for that would be that most people I know haven't - there's not many people I know other than myself who have GMs in both blades and archery for instance. I don't believe levelling just "what you truly want to play" should guarantee that you should be able to kill the everything in the game (taking into account appropriate levels).

 

Thanks for the clarification on when the death penalty changes were implemented there, @Wintermute of CoF

 

Yes, that helped immensely! I think my confusion was that I didn't notice any real changes in my death penalty recently and I was expecting to. Guess they just happened longer ago than I thought. Thank you to both of you!

 

I am sorry Standorn, i do not know you, by default respect your opinion, but you are totally wrong...
You want a game where everything is already given to you, no grinding, no experience to get to advance in levels, but I am sorry, this simply does not exits, I am an old Role player, started to Role Play 35 years ago on AD&D, and many others since, played video game for Role Play, including all the games you are citing, it just does not exist. Even AD&D, more flexible, require game play, you will never meet a dunjon master that will accept the pre made high level character you would need to be happy.
You want a god mode switch, in a roleplaying context, it just does not exist, i am sorry for you.

 

Ahem... well here is one, the proper term is game master

We did this numerous times to allow honored players to join a campaign, and sometimes after a few campaigns, its nice to start at a certain level, then it all depends on how you scale your game.

I think Stundorn has played enough RPGs for it to count as more than a few campaigns

 

Thing is : what do Portalarium expect as a public for SotA ?

Roleplayers ? I have many exemples of people around me who felt forced to give up with their play style and to adopt skills that they would never wish to develop if they had been free not to do so :
- one pure swordman who learnt every AOE in this game just to kill more ennemies and grind experience faster (and is disheartened about that),
- one pure fire mage who learnt every other school to get the better spells,
- one archer (me) who learnt every magic school to get attunement,
- and so on...
For exemple, a paladin who don't want to be weak against death spells and necromancers has to learn ... death spells to get the proper attunement (not that it is illogical but well, there should be another way) and a moon spell to get the flat minimal resistance (Celestial Blessing). Ok, he has the Banish Undead thing in the life tree, but where is his /her defense if he /she don't want to use necromancers' weapons ?
Roleplayers don't have any problems with classless systems but SotA doesn't have a classless system. Everyone has the same class and train almost the same skills as long as they want to stay competitive. I could bet that real roleplayers won't like that, and we have already many roleplayers here who don't like that, including Stundorn and myself.

Challengers ? I agree that one can't say that SotA doesn't require player skill. But look at that :

Spoiler: Kor duel against Joe

This duel, like many others, is pretty static. Like every "organized" duel, you will have the "buff time" (here between 0:19 and 0:33) where people will have something like 15 seconds to stack something like 10 buffs and defensive skills. Then you will have the duel in itself. Movement is minimalistic, except for the jumps, which are used to get ride of stuns. People stand right next to each other and the best will be the one who can get the best crit or place the best defense at the right time.
Now look at that. It's a random video taken on the net, with Diablo 3. The difference will not blow your eyes because the movements are not that fast, but things are pretty different nonetheless. Except for the melee who stay ... in melee, placement is important. Cover get a real utility. Players are more attentive to their actual situation in the game than to their hotbar.

Spoiler: Duel

In my opinion, challengers are not here to play cards. Here is what they are looking for :

Spoiler: Cool PvP event in SotA

Fun.

Casual players ? With the current system, most of them won't be able to go into pvp in this game. With decay, some even lose experience in a single play session. And softcaps don't help at all against the Jack of all trades as long as they train the easiest levels with all the stackable buffs and defensive skills, which will give to them a "slight" superiority in a fight.

Really, the system as it turns to be now does not seem to be appealing for anyone but those who don't care about pvp at all, and those who were able to level everything and doesn't care about playing in a particular way. Some times ago, everyone took @Sara Dreygon as the best exemple of successful specialization. But she had to admit that she had to learn magic spells to get attunement and resistances...

Now think about it : when most RPGs are advertising with slogans like "Be the paladin who will save this village from the undeads", "Be the sorcerer and burn your enemies", or "Be the mighty warrior who will crush the bones of the cabalists", what could you say about SotA ? That's the true question here in my point of view.

 

"Be that guy that has leveled all skills because... well... because he had to!"