Game is WAY Too Easy

It's like you're not bothering to read anything I've said save for that one part you quoted... so I'm not going to bother elaborating on it.

A couple of posts ago, you deliberately told me that I'm "limiting myself" for specializing... what is that if not telling me that I should level up more (different) skills in order to do more content?

So because you're "okay with my play-style", you're "technically" not telling me to do it? The game isn't forcing me either because it can't point a gun to my face? I decided to play the game "wrong" (you know, because I can no longer progress in the game ~ my evidence is that I... can no longer progress in the game) and that's your idea of "consequences"?

"It's super easy to train the skills you don't want... there's no consequence to train them until they're at level 40."

Right, I'm not bothering with this asinine loop anymore.

@Hornpipe I think that concept is lost on the devs and anyone currently supporting this system.

 

I sincerely hope that it isn't the case.

At least, I know for sure that some are not supporting this system, far from it. Personaly, this "skill accumulation" system as it is now, is one thing which can prevent me (and some of my friends) to have fun. But there are many other things in SotA that I love. Problem is that most people (even Atos when he talk about some special zones with flat leveling) are thinking about hard caps as a solution when everything is about how skills are interacting, in my opinion.

 

I don't think the game is too -easy- per se, but I do think that the skill system the way it is encourages diversification. To be effective regardless of your 'damage style' you need passive skills from all over the place - subterfuge, tactics, focus, your chosen armor type, your chosen weapon type, and probably at least one or two things in each magic school. If you choose to dabble in magic, well, you gotta level it all for attunement. This results in players levelling absolutley everything for the passive bonuses received - and when someone who has 20 hours a day to grind over the course of a year adds up all the invested XP, then yeah, they're going to be powerful and yeah, they're going to solo bosses. I wouldn't say that investing a year + of time grinding xp to be able to do content is an indication that the content is "easy". I'm far from a hard core grinder myself (I probably average a few hours a day of actual xp generating gameplay) and I can do them - after nearly a year and a half of levelling up skills and investing millions of gold in crafting/breaking gear.

But basically, the way things are set up now, after playing for long enough, you can do most anything. That doesn't make it easy, it just means it requires dedication.

The game essentially forces players to level everything and then punishes them the more things they level. The vicious circle :X

Of course, the more exp you invest - the more you lose dying, to the point where if I died right now I'd lose more XP than I've gained all week. I play a few hours a night, but I've been doing it for a year and a half now, that adds up.
This for me is the thing that is ruining the game.
It is killing the incentive to group, as the diminished xp/loot returns means I have to grind that much more to accumulate pool. If someone dies, then that's an afternoon of grinding gone, do it again. If they added super hard bosses that required raid strength, unless they dropped something spectacular RELIABLY I can't see myself even bothering with it. Death costs too much to learn/wipe to new content, death costs too much for me to 'share' my experience with a group when there isn't enough mob density anywhere to make up the loss from the split.

And death costs too much that if I can't dedicate 100% of my attention to the game and ensure no interruptions, well, I can't play it. In most games if you have to step away due to RL or answering the phone or whatever, and you come back and find your character dead, its an inconvenience. In Sota its just downright demoralizing.

You can't have dangerous group-required content when the cost of a death is as high as it is. If you make something so hard that nobody can solo it, then, its gonna be killing folks even in a group so...yeah.

The best course of action for me is to come up with a build/gear that lets me solo things on my own at the best rate of efficiency.
So its natural that, for those who are much further along than I am, they go kill 20 dragons an hour.

 

The way the character progress is designed everyone's skill cap is very individual up to ones own incompetence in making more XP than losing it.
I can understand that it frustrates people and they give up. Usually game design wants people to try and get better over time and not punish them for trying.
Can't come up with something better though, if they don't want hardcaps at all

 

There is a possibility that they'll rework it but Chris already admitted a long time ago saying "Yeah, purists are going to have a pretty rough time" elaborating that pure melee "might want to consider" using some form of magic. Considering it's probably been a year (if not more) since that comment was made on a Post-Mortem livestream, I don't think we'll see any changes.

So, to me, that either means that they don't care or they haven't found the solution to it yet.

It's one of these things where I don't believe they need to scrap much of anything to fix it; merely to increase the XP cost of a skill increase by how many other skills there are and how high their respective levels are. Aka: the more skills you have at high levels, the more XP it takes to increase another skill.

That doesn't rectify the perceived issue with decay, but it fixes the power gap between someone who trains lots and lots of skills with those who want to specialize. I mean, damnit, the Blade tree alone has 6 active skills on a 10 button action bar... why WOULDN'T you want to specialize in 3-4 skill trees?

Why do you think lots of people want to store more combat decks? It's because they have:

• Their PvP deck.
• Their Healer deck.
• Their Buff deck.
• Their AoE grind deck.
• Their Solo deck.
• etc...

 

I don't know if @Chris and @DarkStarr don't care about that. I hope that they do.

However, one could consider fixes :

Apply this simple rule : When casted, every active skill providing some effect over time replace the same or the opposite effect over time provided with one other skill.
- Ice Shield replaces Douse or Fortify Defense, which replace Evasion or Glancing Blow, which replace another damage avoidance bonus skill, etc...
- Soothing rain replaces Elysian Illumination or Healing Grace, etc...
- Ice field get canceled with Fire ring casting.
- Fire dots get canceled with Ice arrow or Ice fist, just like when the target use douse.
- Earth attacks cancel stun effects from air attacks. Air attacks grants the target with a protection against earth.
- Every single death spell decrease life attunement and heal undeads opponents while hurting you. No death spells effect on mechanical creatures. Make the raised undeads great again.
Bye Bye Buff of the Avatar. Pick up the defense and the heal you want and go fight something.

Create an active skill with strength buff in the Tactic tree, a dexterity buff in the Subterfuge tree and intelligence buff in the Focus tree. With the rule above, those can't cumulate with the actual buffs in the magic trees.

Move every elemental and magic resistance passives to the first level of each magic tree, so people can train those without being forced to train other spells.

Move Celestial blessing into the Focus tree.

Change Sympathy of Stone and Bulkwark of Earth, because those passives are currently used as additional bonus on defense by everyone. For exemple, one can make those skills more circunstancial, adding bonus to Strength of Earth and Earth's embrace while used.

Delete the attunement's influence on resistance. Change the attunement so that it only reduces slightly the fizzle chance. Improve slightly fizzle chance on every spell.
With a very high attunement (a lot of experience points for a specialized mage), that would allow the specialist mage to wear a full heavy armor AND use his prefered spells.

Color the nameplate of every pvp player like you do with every pve opponent. Higher level players are red, orange or yellow. Lesser level players are green.
Reduce the price of the Oracle for the green players when they are killed in action and grant them with a bonus on their Courage stat. Increase the price of the Oracle for the orange and red players killed by green and punish them with a hit on their Courage stat.

Maybe those fixes could imply some other issues. I don't think they would, but it would be interesting to discuss this.

@Vallo Frostbane : I'm perfectly fine with the "you get killed, you get punished". Simply, the way it is done actualy is presumably punishing the most virtuous behavior (bravely killing a difficult boss) and is encouraging the most reprehensible behavior (dying several times when trying to test a way to exploit something).

 

I thought that already does happen to an extent, you can only have two out of Ice Shield, Fortify Defense and Evasion active at once?

 

Yes, and that was clearly a good move which showed the right direction if you ask me. The less skills you can activate at once, the more strategic choices you will have to do and the less skills you have to train simultaneously in order to be competitive. Less grind required. More tactics needed (using cover, staying out of range, preference to the skills with bonus on reactions like fortify defense...).

 

Well I have to agree and disagree partly with your statements. I love role play, specialized in fire and death (did not know when i started the game 2 years ago that death would be so practical for grinding btw), i have no skills in weapons, maybe 60 in life a hundred in some other magic for the fun (blink, dash...), specialized in heavy armor for chain, abandoned it and re-specialize in light armor, not a pure mage I would say but close.
I am now level 89, not as skilled in video games as my son who can play drinking a coke, looking at a youtube video and chating with friends (true!), but have a lot of fun in this game, some zones are very accessible to me (I do not solo cabalists though just the siege engineers ), was fine with the kobold camp and many other fun things, and go with my guildies to kill dragons trolls daemon , the rise, you name it. For Sota, be the sorcerer and burn your enemies would be perfectly fine with me.

I do not PVP yet , maybe because i do not have the buddies to do it with me, because I know that being so specialized in fire with secondary in death , i would not stand in front of the hardcore pvpers in this game, but it was the same in all the games i played until now, skill /class uncapped/capped or not. And I believe the majority of players in this game or other are the same. But would have no problem going with 1 or 2 friends and dying most of the time, just for the fun.

The mechanics become different with the Hard Core (HC with capitals), the players that need to optimize and i think a lot of you guys are part of this category (without any judgement wether if it is right or wrong, everybody play the way they want). You get as powerfull as possible, PVErs and PVPers, the first one will be crazy about their DPS, the other one in their ability to crush players. But I am not sure it is just SOTA, these players, because of the optimization of their characters, reach the limits of the game pretty quickly, sometimes overpass them, and therefore because of their will to optimizea are much more sensitive to the problems at extremely high level. But they are present at probably the same extent in all games, and the same exact discussions with different terms occur in every single forum attached to these games.
IMHO in SOTA but other prereleases, the HC is extremely usefull for the devs, because they discover, before the launch, all the concerns that may be fixed when you reach the end game content. But remember, the rest of the crowd, does not see them and rarely understand you! My advice to you guys would be very simple, do not give up, continue optimizing, but please, pass feedback to the devs, your work is IMHO crucial, but only with feedback, and only if constructive. It is quite hard, a Fire mage would hate having to say that some of his abilities are wrongly implemented , but this is an alpha, we have paid the entrance to the alpha for this exact reason
I have been involved in software testing for many years, what i can also advice you, is to build cases, with numbers, demos etc... in a very organized way. Not dumping comments in a thread, it wont help the devs and may even be counterproductive.

I will just end my post with a comment on RP, to answer on your first comments
I am perfectly fine with my sorcerer, and I have no will to train other skills for my RP, i just do not need it, I am definitely not as powerfull as I could be if i was training other trees, but it fits my RP of a fire mage, I am even heading a school of fire magic that I have built in my 5 story town basement (this is all RP of course I have only one student).
Now, the problem lies elsewhere, knowing that UO oldies (I am old as well anyway ) where in the game, I thought the audience would different on a RP point of view but it was not. I was not surprised as I know RP is quite hard to find in video games (the HC is on paper/table games). Very few people in SOTA do fully RP, they do nice events, call themselves with titles, but do not fully role play in the sense i see it. Let me explain, it is very hard to RP alignments (which is the core of RP games) in any games, and particularly video game. In this game and others (there was a RP server on UO you guys remember ? ), I tried, and am realizing now that I wont be able to continue because people have a hard time to understand that there is a difference between what I am, and what I play, and not because i have to change my magic to be more powerfull Hornpipe. Role Play is about playing a role, not playing a mage and calling yourself a sorcerer, but acting with a defined alignment and sticking to it.
But again, this is common to most of video game trying to do RP. Something is also critical for RPers and this may explain why some Rpers like you and stundorn get frustrated, is the ability to create adapted level content. With POTs we should be able to populate zones with creatures to be used in RP, they may not give XP and loot at all btw, it does not matter, but this is a complete discussion on RP ...Now, something that I will investigate, is the possibility of using players to do so, but it requires having RPers to enter a POT in PVP mode...which is usually something they refuse to do.

 

Maybe that will surprise you, but my comment is based both on theory and practice.

Today (and that's not my first experience), I fought with someone who has approximatively the same level as me. He somewhat didn't agree with all my terms here and we agreed to do some tests. I used an optimized deck. I suggested him to try to kill me. I didn't attack at all and I didn't even move. I only used all defensive skills and self healing skills I had. The fight lasted for 3 minutes (checked my log about that so I'm quite certain). With his usual deck, most of this time, he was unable to make my health drop below 90% (and my focus was ok). He had to call it a draw. The only reason why he was not dead is because I didn't attack him at all. He had to use a combo (evaporate which has a very short range) to kill me for the second try while I didn't move at all and let his ring of fire kill me. That's totally obvious : defense and self healing is the most part of SotA duels because there is no limitation with those. I don't say that you can't lose a duel with those, but they certainly introduce balance issues, in addition to being totally illogical. Seriously, using douse with immolation, sooting rain with elysian illumination, etc...

I agree. The game is not the only ingredient in role play. But it is an important ingredient. If the system encourages behaviors that break immersion, that's a problem. If every player is encouraged to develop the same build of skills, without any consideration for consistency, it's a safe bet that it will not be noted as a positive point for the game when it is released.

 

The worst thing about combat balance has always been that there is no clear direction in which the game is going... By some this is interpreted as freedom, but if you look closely it is lack of design. Not saying this will come in the future, but right now we don't know. Are raids planned? Big Player Battles? Guild territory control? Faction Battles? It is not very clear what skills overwrite each other and why. What debuffs are additive and which aren't. It is very hard to balance a game if you do not know what sort of content you will be aiming for.

 

Do not miss the point, I am not questioning at all the fact that you guys know the mecanics and test them, I am sure of that , what I think is missing in all game, is a very organized way of sending feedback to the dev team that incite people to do so. with kor on board now it may help though.

 

Wow. I feel so bad for the development team if you actually have to read 13 pages. Holy ****.

 

Play as a Tamer and try soloing end content!

Fix Taming!

 

Ok,

So I have read some of this and have not read a lot but I would like to put my thoughts on the table. For me the difficulty is just right I mean leveling though skull 1 to 5 solo is hard, I get strong enough to were skull 2 seems easy but go to skull 3 and I can face one opponent then a little time and I can face 2 maybe 3 opponents then eventually it gets easy right now I'm transitioning form skull 4 to 5 and its the same story. But they plan to add higher tier zones later, with new enemies. We have faced some trolls dragons and demons a phoenix but what if it goes further we face giants then a giant boss creature. If we face a half troll half giant boss that leads the trolls and has two trolls like darc as his bodyguards. what if we find the mother of all phoenixes and spawns two phoenixes each time it dies and it dies three times. Or we face a major siege that has all the cabalists there and the commander that we have no idea about at this time. What about krakens in the sea and leviathans. We are only just beginning to explore this new world we have no idea who are true enemies are !!! You might think your strong now just to find out you are still nothing to the enemies that lie ahead.

 

Sorry, but misinterpretion.
I wont argue anymore, but this is what others lay in my mouth and is totally wrong.

 

I don't. This is valuable feedback.

 

I have read them, Portalarium does not pay me I pay them but I care so I try to be involved as I know is true for developers as well. no need to feel bad for them, no one said it was going to be easy ^^ also something I am pretty sure they were aware of before starting the project.
PS I hate my job but noone feels for me :O and reading forums is then my escape to "happy" place lol

 

this game rocks almoust a new game evry month how can you beat that
sure some things not always posetive but over all this game rocks

do have in mind devs work with and take input from players so if you not happy abouth some thing i would just wois it out and maby they shange the game in that direction
over all spendt close to 3000 hours in game so fare in around a year and im haveing allot of good times

 

Yeah i know everything i say is valuable like gold or wait diamonds even