Air Shield users

My air shield with 585 dex is still .1 that is with 425.1 air att

 

what level is your air shield? your dex is in the right spot for sure. If you like we can meet up in game when I am on and do some tests to verify a few things

 

Nahh, Necronut pointed out Barding as a source of real power creep. The way it works, being useable by anyone, takes under 3 seconds to cast, and the bonuses it gives, heck 1 song gives the effects of Air's Embrace, Strength of Earth and Fireflies all in 1, and either as powerful or stronger than all 3 at equivalent levels (maybe Fireflies beats Savage but still). He simply said that Bard skills are a bigger problem, than the 2 or 3 air shield users that can negate all sources of damage, because the bard song requires very low investment.

I understand that people have been building around the way the skills work, but it had been mentioned in the beginning that they were gonna be useful with an instrument out. I agree, dumb they didn't fix this sooner, but it should be done, that is what the skill tree was supposed to be.

 

I think the skill that boosts dex doesn't boost your own dex, though- only pets and party members.

 

Ok it is possible but at that point my focus is so low I can just stay alive - no need to change things we ought to earn things when we level up. Plus I need 2 gambler rings to get my dex in the 600’s

 

171 air shield

 

I still want to see it work in a high-end mob scenario........

 

Well, when you are forced to rush things into the game without actually finishing the intent of the implementation, or without proper testing and vetting, and since you don't actually play the game at an advanced level to understand the impact, all in the name of appeasing your dwindling customer base into thinking you are actually making progress on something, so that you can later come back (maybe in a couple of years) and completely change how it works, how can it not turn out good? I could probably make a 20 item list of unfinished scenes/skills/game functions without even trying very hard. Yet, in response to the player's cries to fix loot, i'm sure a new scene announcement is in the immediate future that will just continue in the same mold of the past.

Again, none of this really matters, without a FUN & REWARDING playing experience, only the true die hards or the ignorant are ever going to be here. The true die hards don't need to buy your loot, gear, resources, or deco because they have it already, and the ignorant (not meant in a bad way but in a newbie way) will take years to be able to afford your loot at any level that will actually impact the economy. The biggest driving force of game play is mostly to gain xp to build a character better at gaining xp. I guarantee you ERG is the most used scene in the game.

When I started doing the breach, I looked up the stats and saw the kills in the scene by each person and their kills on the boss mobs. I wanted to move to the top of the list. @Jikininki and I started grinding there and mostly as I and her moved up the list, most everyone on the list simply stayed where they were, because after the initial rush of doing a new scene, It quickly became evident that the effort wasn't worth the reward (surprise!) If it was, people would be there doing it. I have double the kills in the scene of the next nearest person, and most people's kills on the list haven't changed at all in the past 2 weeks while I was moving past them. While we have gotten some of the new arti drops there, most of them still sit on our vendors, not selling. the only reason I have spent the time there that I have, was to prove that @Jikininki and I could 2 person it, and get attenuated in the process. Definitely not worth the time and effort to complete the scene.

Same goes for Tartarus maze, Spindleskog, South Drachvald Spur, Despair, Spider Queen, Upper Tears, etc etc etc. the only zones I have found that are actually worth the time and effort/cost (if you are doing them solo and are a good player, group play just dilutes it into nothingness loot wise) are Ruined Keep and NW Blackblade Mountains. If it takes 5 people to kill a dragon that spawns every 10-15 mins, and drops an arti about 1 out of 8 times (roll 5?) how many times are people going to do that?. We spent an hour at South Drachvald Spur earlier and each got 1 arti drop that you practically can't give away. But what do I know?, i'm just a player.

As much as I love the genre and the history behind this game, why does it bring out the worst in me?

 

A cap is a pretty simple and practical fix, but you could also just set transfer rate at a good but not OP place and make something else the thing that scales up with level. That wouldn't necessarily have to be a bonus that already exists on the spell. Could just add anything that makes sense. Then you'd have a shield that isn't OP but is still good and worth leveling up.

It doesn't really make sense to scale effects with level that already scale with mob or player power without leveling. I remember playing a shaman in EQ back in the day and having combat slows that started at something like 30% and just kept going higher and higher until it got to the point where mobs would be falling into their bored animations between attacks because they were so slow, which led to then making almost all mobs partially or fully immune to slows because they were just dumb. That's why it makes a lot more sense to scale stuff like damage, stats, heals, etc that actually need to scale to keep up.

 

The biggest impact Chris could make that would excite the current user base, stimulate the economy beyond the current few that have a lock on it (looking at you @Elrond, @CICI, @Daxstalker, @Cristiano Kimberlin and maybe 2-3 others), and give new players the reward for their efforts to retain them in the game is to fix loot. I breathlessly await his new year's announcement that 'this is the year we fix loot'. And I don't mean scalable loot, i mean loot in quality and quantity that actually covers the cost of getting it. If Chris makes spindelskog loot scale so that you get twice the loot at harder levels, but it takes you twice the time and twice the resources to get it, what the **** have you actually gained? Not a damn thing.

For a game that is supposedly putting crafters first, with crafted gear to be the best in the game, what new player is ever going to be able to afford the materials and gain the crafting experience to compete? They won't.

 

Sorry to go off topic, but what's there? I don't think I've ever visited that scene. Or, if I did, it was a long time ago and I've forgotten it.

 

It has the big boars that drop taming artis, that's the only reason to really go there, and even that is debatable

 

Ah. Not a tamer, that explains why I'd never heard of a reason to go there.

 

I'm not a tamer either, but you have to try to find something worth selling.

 

Nice. I was saving up 90 mil to get it from 140 to 150. Hopefully they won't nullify my progress.

 

I agree with a lot of your other points, especially your point that the devs should focus on providing more carrots and less sticks.

But on the above quote, I disagree. In my opinion, bard should be designed mainly as a support class. Nothing else makes sense.
How can a player call themselves a bard and not expect to hold an instrument?
The current inplementation of barding doesn't make sense, and thus breaks immersion.

So I think the devs can totally change barding, and the devs should totally change barding.
Yes, the changes will be painful and cause squawking from some players.
But sometimes the devs need to endure the pain and do what is necessary to get the game pointed in the right direction.

----------

 

I didn't say it was a bad idea for bard to be a support class, and it would actually be viable if it had a provoke skill where you could provoke mobs onto each other.

What I said was, you can't implement it incorrectly, leave it for a year, and then go back and make major changes after people have developed play styles around it's current implementation and expect it to go over well. Especially with such a pitiful player base, that you have already screwed over in the same fashion multiple times before, which kinda helps explain why there is a pitiful player base. How many times can you cut yourself before you bleed to death?

I don't necessarily disagree with your vision of a bard, but this was a self inflicted wound, representative of many other such decisions.

Enduring the pain of what you created because you didn't do it right the first time, and didn't even try that hard, and you had PLENTY of time to do something sooner to fix it, but instead you spent your time on new unfinished content and shiny stuff, while watching your customer base get smaller and smaller with almost every decision (do they even watch?), yet you won't make it a priority to fix the NUMBER ONE complaint from your customers (this is the year we fix loot, right?) is not 'necessary', its business incompetence. Here's a pro tip: if you get rid of ALL your customers, you don't have to worry about inflicting pain by making changes that 'need' to be made, to correct what you should have done right the first time.

I have watched the player's numbers in this game do nothing but go down since before 'release' because of this exact type of situation. According to the actual factual numbers of customers and the nonstop trend to the bottom, i have zero faith that the people in charge even know or understand what the right direction is. The right direction is the one that increases your customer base, not destroys it. We haven't seen that since before they stopped selling dreams and actually started putting their product in front of their customers.

I know i'm probably out of line, in the grand scheme of things, but what I say is very true and i've been saying it off and on for over 4 years now. Usually i'm forum banned by this point, (i've got at least 8 under my belt going back to the very beginning with firelotus). If this was almost any other business, it would have been a shuttered failure long ago, which basically it was when they shut down Portalarium and Chris took full operational control. The only reason it still exists is because the operating costs are so low that it has survived from the existing players who continue to support it through the store and monthly subs. I know chris works hard, I know he has made improvements in some areas and i'm sorta glad that he took over instead of it actually just ending. It isn't ALL his fault, Starr and Richard (mainly Richard) share the blame, and I know he doesn't have full creative control (and i can prove it), but he has to have a priority of fixing the things that bring customers to the game. He has to quit adding half assed content to the game that takes a year to get tweaked into what it should have been when he added it. He thinks he is helping make his customers happy, but in reality he's just making them madder when the things he implements don't get finished for a year, and then when they do, it is very hurtful to the players who built around it for the time that he was off working on other shiny things instead of 'fixing' his most recent eureka moment. Nothing has been done on loot, the new user experience is still very difficult and cumbersome for new players, there are no incentives to pvp, and the game is not rewarding for the time and effort put into it, unless you really enjoy getting xp for the sake of getting xp, or housing, or social life. I don't have anything against any players who enjoy housing, etc. But good lord, are we ever going to have a game that actually attracts customers who are expecting a decent RPG or whatever this thing is supposed to be? The main reason the economy is in the tank is because everyone is selling the same stuff, and there are not enough players to drive demand for much of anything outside of crafting mats , and how much fun is it to spend hours and hours mining because that's one of the only ways an average player can make any comparable profitable gold?

If Chris would take the following steps:

1) FIX F****** LOOT to the point that if you grind in a zone, you come out ahead, not behind, with a small but decent chance to do really good. It would open up soooooo much of the current game to actually be fun and rewarding to play.

2) Stop making new scenes until you have finished correctly implementing the ones you have (spindelskog, despair, anyone? )

3) Finish some of the good things in the game that give players more creative control (dungeon building, player questing tools, guilds, PoT content, )

4) Re-vamp the quest system with a better log, interface, and guidance to direct you to quests (long promised, probably never to be delivered in this decade)

5) Put valuable items in pvp zones (just the influx of pvp'ers alone would triple the population within 3 months of this happening and spur the economy like something that hasn't been seen in 3-4 years and benefit EVERYONE) , but oh wait, pvp'ers are the spawn of satan, worthy of cancel culture attention, because non pvp'ers are the righteous ones, of course, and the holders of all truth, forgive me for forgetting my place.

Then MAYBE, we could have more players in the game. Nothing is going to change anything dramatically about the viability of this game until we have a player base decently larger than what we have. We can keep doing what we've been doing, and we'll just keep doing it with the same few people we have been doing it with.

Maybe i'm wrong, maybe we are on a 15 yr development plan before we intend to have a product that isn't a patchwork of unfinished ideas. Afterall, i'm not an 'industry professional' so I wouldn't be an expert on these things.

 

On this point I agree completely with @Grumpy Krabnevir

 

Yo. Air/Bard Archers are the equivalent of playing Goldeneye one hit kills, slaps only, Oddjob only.

If people are going to play that... EVERYBODY play that. Let's just ALL do it and make it more fun for everybody.

=

 

Meanwhile, a dexxer can hit with coup de grace for 16k, a fire mage can burn down a whole room of mobs, a good tamer can just stand by while his pet wreaks havoc . . . . .

If ya'll would all take the time to learn the damn game and how to build a proper character, invest 5 bil xp in the right places, every character could be a bad-ass. Stop crying about other people who obviously know what they are doing and learn how to play.

I'm one of the best archers in the game, please explain all these non-existant one hit kills you keep talking about.