Before you nerf Meteor

Before you nerf Meteor consider this

In the past few weeks I have seen more group activity (especially the pick-up variety) than in the history of SOTA.

There are groups running all day long, with virtually every type of Sota player joining in and mixing together at some point.

There have been PVP Battles over control of the terrain in Open.

The inadvertant buff of this skill has created some excellent results.


Clearly this is not the ideal way to achieve these results, but for the time being it is working and you would be better off just leaving it as it is for a release or two and figure out how to get this same kind of result without requiring the overpowered spell.

Apply the nerf to PVP damage only for the time being.

 

I have mixed feeling about this.

On the one hand it makes farming exp less painfull (and exp per hour is limited anyways)
But then it is incredible strong.

But moon is otherwise an school that was not invented for sota so taking away moon (nerfing it the way sota likes to nerf, turning it into something useless) is for sure not the way to go, think about sledgehammer nerfing speed, it had to be done but was done in an way that mainly hurts lower levels or people who never reached the problematic speeds anyways. so they paid for a solution they where not part of the problem in the first place.

To have people grouping, make fun dungeon crawls, it was always the bread and butter of RPG, the adventure (and the reward was not the ton of gold at the end of the dungeon but the journey, the gold was more the excuse...

Maybe you have undead swarming areas if the dungeon X with its necro lich king remains undisturbed for too long, we need some heroes to put that villain under!

Presto, reasons for groups to clobber an path into the place and disassemble the guy. Fun!

(and then add earthquake double the radius to meteor that damages everyone so there is some tactical consideration involved, add something like that to all area spells, make them powerfull but not something you sling around for **** and giggles, that is frigging meteors hitting the ground so fast they are glowing MOLTEN FRIGGIN STONE, offcourse you have an earthquake for your troubles.

Magic should be very powerfull and very finnicky, you burn more than your fingertips if you use it careless!

 

Meteor Storm is super OP. I use them myself and will take a hit on it. I hit a 500+ Crit using Meteors with about 160 Attunement; this was among all the other hits I was doing. I clear the mage room in The Rise in under 2mins. Of course everyone enjoys watching 10+ mobs die in seconds, but this is ridiculous.

 

Like Sorthious says, the problem is at the very high attun level with meteor storm, situations we aren't seeing in PUG groups. I dont think their changes will actually effect PUGS much. Where its to powerful is the 2 man groups running it that you dont see. They can just pull the mob into the ring of fire and meteors and drop the lot of them in a few seconds.

 

Its even worse than that, people are soloing it. Along with anything else exploitable at the present.

Port can look into the numbers and decide what kind of effect it's having.

If a month or two more is going to be relatively negligable to the overall state of the game, I would leave it as is.

The increased group activity has been a pleasant surprise.

It would be good to keep it going while simultaneously getting a proper solution in the works.

 

Is this in QA yet?

 

Someone reported this right after r54 release. It was tagged with "Not A Bug." I made several comments on the bug report, which were ignored. @Chris , obviously, started looking at his logs and noticed what I, and others, had already reported and determined that something was really out of whack.

[Not a bug] Meteor Showers hitting twice as much as normal

Thus, the change that is coming. Don't get me wrong, I love watching masses of mobs drop in a couple seconds, but it basically removes all of the challenge from the game and just becomes a rote exercise of gaining XP, which ruins the longevity of the game. How long before you get bored with just standing in one spot killing things over and over? There is no sense of accomplishment, or any kind of gratification from surviving a difficult fight. Even with Meteor Storm doing only 33% of it's current damage, it is still, by far, the best AoE in the game and is a very useful spell. Do like I do, and just roll with the punches! It will give you the motivation to find a new strategy to defeat your foes faster! As far as the increased grouping, that is partially due to the Double XP weekend and the previous Double XP weeks.

 

My attunement isn't that high, so I mostly use it as an aid while kiting multiple melee mobs. It helps, but there's no way I could just sit back and let it do the work for me. It'll be a shame if it's considerably less effective at my level.

 

Well to be honest, I am lvl 90 and i do not need metoer storm to get bored, killing things over and over is what you do at lvl 90, meteor storm just makes it a little bit faster.

Is MS OP?
Totally

Is MS the root problem in Sota?
No, the problem is that best exp comes from very static fighting the same things over and over.

Meteor storm is just an convience that makes you hit the exp limit a little bit sooner.

Make long dungeons where you get exp reward at the end so there is a little bit of running involved, make it so that the outcome has influence on the world (shifting politics/make school powers/prices at vendors, whatever.

Meridian hat this and it was an 2.5D game running on 486 series PC with like 100 players max per server.

Sota lacks factionplay, aghering to virtues has no consequences beside the color of an piece of fabric with stats on it that are kinda not interesting for many classes.

There is nothing but grinding more exp to do if one is not PvP (and what i read in the forums that is not that much fun right now either)

So well, Meteor storm is op but it does not really damage the game, it just means you need 10 instead 20 minutes to hit attenuation and log off for 40 minutes to take a break.

 

I agree it can get boring if you're doing it all day.

But atm Tears Groups are a good example of where you can just open the LFG and queue up for a quick group/social experience with some decent rewards.

Something that this game is lacking.



Since it only takes 1 or 2 mid range players to keep a group running, there is a large pool of players capable of creating and sustaining these runs.

The potential pool of group mates for these runs is practically anyone online.



I can tell you it is pretty rare that you will get RPers, Casuals, PVPers and all other assorted players grouping together daily.

It is the OP meteor that is currently making this possible.

 

Well they did nerf all magic about 10-20% on DPS + many other spells specifically. Time to roll melee guys people