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Class testing feedback: Mage vs Archer vs Fighter

Discussion in 'Release 12 Feedback' started by Maerlin Rebeard, Dec 17, 2014.

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  1. Maerlin Rebeard

    Maerlin Rebeard Avatar

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    Once I reached level 40 in R12 and has some skill points to easily throw around I spent some time playing different classes of character builds. These are some very basic observations based entirely on Solo play. I'm by no means an avid MMO, RPG, or D&D gamer - these are strictly my observations and opinions. I don't claim to play any of these classes particularly well and I'm fairly new to SoTa with limited hours invested thus far (started end of R11).

    Mage (pure magic user): This is what I have played the most in R12
    • Almost impossible to play without constant death. This is not uncommon to other games and has always frustrated me as it is my favorite play style. While its not clear yet how much sting to death there will be, death in a game in general detracts from the game being immersive. A pure mage should be wearing cloth. I like the fact that there is a downside to wearing leather or heavy armor (in slugs and fizzle), but I think that should be a much larger downside. I found I could still cast 'well enough' in plate armor which is a joke. In fact, I would vote for no spell casting ability at all if you are wearing heavy armor - not even light spells... torches and lanterns should have a purpose.
    • Armor types: I'm sure this is coming so I won't harp too much on it - there should be types of cloth armor with magic enhancements including increased casting abilities and decreased damage (physical and magic). By no means should cloth ever be magicial enough to provide damage absorption of plate but there should be types with different tradeoffs. In addition there should be a much larger penalty for wearing heavy metal armor or perhaps you flat out just can't cast with such armor. I also think that heavy metal armor such as plate should always have an inherent susceptibility to electrical, fire, and cold damage (its freaking metal!) regardless of how many skill points are put into magical resistance.
    • Instead of dying within 5 seconds of being ganged by 3-5 mobs, it would be nice to see some sort of ability to flee within an inch of your life. I assume death will have more sting to it as the game evolves. Because non tank's not only have limited health but loose it much quicker, they need some amount of time where they can inflict no damage what-so-ever but can still run and hide. Perhaps there can be a 10 second minimum time period where you can not cause damage and your health can not drop from 1 to 0 to allow for this (maybe even 5 to 0 to account for lasting fire or poison effects).
    • Area protection spells: perhaps these are coming (or already there and I've missed them) but it would be nice to see some sort of defense bubble spell so that mages do not die immediately when attacked by more than one mob. I did explore root, but it doesn't hold long enough in my testing to be useful (I never saw it hold much longer than its cast time). There are anti-agro spells coming which may help but I think those are more for group crowd-control and I'm not clear how easy they will be to target when in the heat of battle.
    • Area affect targeting is broken: The targeting required for the area effect spells like fireball is completely broken. It seems to only work reliably for me on completely flat ground and elsewhere would constantly cancel. Additionally it would make you loose your current target. Both of these seem like bugs to me.
    • Stacking difficulty: Not that stacking spells is difficult but it is extremely annoying and detracts from the enjoyment of the game. I find myself so caught up in stacking that I'm not even watching the scene which is a waste. The effect of stacking spells can be thought of as learning to make a spell of greater power through earned experience - that experience should be innate and not encumbered with a click-and-drag fest.
    • Reagent prices: Reagents are currently way too expensive. It costs perhaps 60g for a spell, when the rewards of killing a mob are using 1 to 3x of that. Furthermore there seems to be very few reagent spawn nodes currently in-game. I'm assuming these will increase and I'm assuming nodes will be added for other types of naturally occurring resources as well as loot table increases for those that come from mobs. It should be a player choice between purchasing reagents in town, trading with other players for discounts, and gathering them - all three methods should have a good balance of time and effort required.
    • Reagent requirements: why should you be able to cast a spell that uses reagents at all without having those reagents. Perhaps this is currently in game for testing purposes only but I fear not as you merely have an increased chance of fizzle if you don't have the reagents. Either make them required or increase the fizzle chance even more and decrease the spell's power IMHO.
    • General Feel: I played a pure Mage the most and despite constantly dying I enjoyed it the most. I'm hoping it continuous to evolve and that magic has some penalties for magic users (non cloth wearing) and has great penalties (if not available at all) for heavy armor wearers.
    Archer:
    • Armor types: I'm not sure I buy into the full plate-mail wearing archer. There should be a huge hit to dexterity if its even allowed. This should be based on weight of the armor IMHO.
    • Arrow Availability: Currently it seemed difficult to find where to buy arrows and I don't believe you can craft them yet. I hope that you will be able to craft arrows vs buying them with a decent payoff - it should be able to be a source of income. There should be more arrows available on archer mobs. I find it very disconcerting that a skeleton archer which has the ability to put 100's of arrows into me dies with only a few if any. It also seems to me that some percentage of my arrows that hit a mob should be added to its loot table.
    • General Feel: I rather enjoyed playing an archer and found that (perhaps by design, perhaps considered a bug) I could strategize quite a bit in places like Obsidian keep with many vantage points.
    Fighter (played less than on hour):
    • General Feel: I played the proverbial 'tank' for only about 2 hours - in fact I resorted to it one night as a last ditch effort of trying to figure out how to solo the Ravensmoore Liche Lord. While I was still unsuccessful I found that I was very disgusted at how I was more or less invincible compared to the other styles of play I tested and could easily just run through until I had 5+ skeletons on me and within about 2 minutes finish them all off. Where is the challenge? I was rather surprised at how easy it was to get to the Liche Lord as a tank yet I still couldn't best him and I haven't had time to try it again and analyze the combat spam to see what it was that was keeping me from being successful. I only made 2 runs at him and was ganged by him as well as 5 or so of his skeleton fighters and mages.

    I'm expecting more tuning to come and I'm really hoping that there are some changes that force a bit of a division between these classes so that we don't end up seeing deck-swapping mage/archer/fighters throughout the realm. I'm also assuming that there will be a much heavier cost to re-allocating skill points perhaps not just in the way of spending gold but in spending time. As you have already spent the time/experience gaining the points my comment is more about how to limit you from constantly re-allocating the points. Perhaps there should be some period of time or experience before you earn back points that you have un-trained. I think this would be nice to see in the final game but while testing is underway there should be a way to either override that for testing purposes, or we should have more than one character slot to test varied means of play.

    I hope this feedback has been helpful.

    - Tim
     
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