Clearly losing to greens was overpowered...

I'm NOT using one of there classes, That's why I got nerfed. There's no point in me doing light armor at this point. Hell there's no point in ARCHERS taking light armor. I already know a number of heavy archers (I'm sure once they realize it, they'll find a way to nerf that too). Why not? The aren't balancing light armor vs heavy, they are balancing their preconceived notion of an archer (archers are light armor, so when they wanted to nerf archers, they nerfed light armor) verses their preconceived notion of a melee (melee is heavy armor, so clearly nerfing light armor will only give them an advantage). They are balancing away from being able to play outside their notion of classes. It is a class-based system, and they will penalize you for playing otherwise.

EDIT: and you're an archer. You're largely conforming to their classes. I'm light/melee, so I'm largely not. Light archers didn't get penalized ANYWHERE NEAR as badly with this as light melee did (BECAUSE light/archer *IS* one of their classes).

 

Me with a bow or with a sword doesn't matter. The point is that while wearing light armor (Not Bone) and using the tactics listed in this thread and all the other Archers are OP or light armor is weak threads I am able to take on multiple orange/red archers with out a lot of issues. I do believe heavy armor wearing archers are better but I have no issue with light armor.

 

Well then, it only goes to show, nerfing light armor didn't affect you BECAUSE LIGHT ARMOR WASN'T THE PROBLEM. It sounds like the other skills are what needed nerfed.

EDIT: The reality is, this *ISN'T* an "archers are OP" thread. The only reason that comes up is because the change was made (allegedly) to nerf archers. It was ill-conceived because (despite what some of the devs think) archers don't all use light (I think most of the people running archers I know are running heavy archers). *IF* archers are OP, then they need to nerf the ARCHER abilities. Balance the skills against each other, NOT based on some classes.

This change didn't greatly affect archers because it's much easier for archers to keep things from getting behind them, and a significant portion of archers are heavy anyway.

 

The Light Armor nerf was to the Dodge skill only. It only made it so you couldn't dodge attacks from behind. If you were letting archers shoot you in the back were they have a significantly higher crit chance and will ignore all your avoid and dodge anyway, you wear already failing. The nerf to Dodge just made that more apparent.

 

It's not a matter of "letting" them do anything. It's a matter of things spawning behind and having nowhere to go.

 

By being a better game. Expecting success and expecting efficiency are two very distinct concepts.

Good on you for having the tolerance to accept game design that only works from a mathematical perspective. I don't. The game needs to be more than a mindless grindfest; story alone won't be able to save it.

The fact that the game is basically giving XP and gold for free "just by showing up" is a clear indication of the strength of this game's design.

As for "it's not going to change", just look at what Final Fantasy 14 had to do in order to survive. It is NEVER too late to improve.

The ball is in the developer's court to fix what is ultimately broken.

 

I don't understand this at all. I walk into The Rise and get nailed for 140+ damage by the archers / mages. It's unplayable for me solo at AV79 with high dex and 60+ in those buffs to add avoidance - even with Death Shield active.

 

Send me a message if you ever see me online. I run Ice Shield, Fority, and Dodge. Douse when I fight mages. My Avoid is only 39 with those up but that doesn't include the +24 Dodge.

 

Thank you. I am Romaan Sebulska in game. May I friend request you?

 

yes

 

I don't know what's going on with the combat in this game, and man, I'm glad I'm not alone. It seems like a lot of hardcore players have just gotten used to raising their skills to super high levels but it's left players with even mid level builds out in the cold.

I thought the thing about using melee in light armor was a joke at first, surely you'd be using heavy armor, but maybe I'm missing something.

It's been mentioned, but having to use all of the evasion/resistant abilities without having them accessible seems absurd. I hear the same ones mentioned regularly - Dodge, Deflect, Shield of Ice (a tier 3 water ability), Defensive Stance. The idea of having your character be pure melee, or be pure ranged, or be pure magic seems like it's out the window. It can't be done; you need all these abilities, you need them all at a bare minimum of 60. That's insane to me.

I was pretty heavily invested in magic using cloth, but cloth seems to be killing me and I wasn't interested that much in water - until I found out Shield of Ice is apparently an essential ability for every mage. There's a few other abilities which are supposed to work the same in the Earth and Air trees but from what I can tell, aren't really meant for the same thing, and possibly don't really work in any scenario unless you are playing some sort of hybrid melee/mage or ranged/mage.

The combat system is so awkward to understand and feels very inaccessible. I was going around to different vendors and looking what armor other players are selling - I can't understand the stats. Avoidance, Resistance, 3 other things - how do I compare all of these? What does it mean when I find a Supple Leather Resistance Tunic +3 that doesn't mention a 3 anywhere else on it?

All I could think about is how I wished armor would give some standard AC value and light armor would give some easy-to-understand benefit over heavy armor, like fizzle chance and some sort of ranged penalty. Maybe shields can work a bit differently for "avoidance" or "resistance", I don't know.

 

A few of us (remaining) are still very vocal about this sort of thing. I'm particularly concerned about skills requiring a minimum of level 40-60 to be of any sort of use (like, wtf is the point of 1-to-40 if the skills are useless and people claim it's easy to power-level through?) but, as someone who wants to play a Thief, I too have issues with not being able to play a "pure" character archetype just because this RPG (one that claims to emphasize role-play over anything else) is supposedly "classless". The dev team wants to build encounters that encourage us to not use the same skills over and over depending on what we fight, that's fine but:

• I should be able to use different skills from my already-invested skill trees to confront different types of enemies.
• I haven't encountered any enemy type where my build was particularly effective against... it all plays out the same.

And then there's the issue of having a "check list" of skills (mostly related to defense) you need to use in order to perform.

Some would have you believe that it's your responsibility to adjust.

You can't, that's the thing. Some of the terms are somewhat self-explanatory but the way it's presented makes it nearly impossible to figure out what the bonuses are supposed to entail.

The "+X" thing is a nomenclature that originated from D&D and it had a purpose as it gave (as far as I can remember) +X to your "hit" roll. In SotA, its purpose is most likely based on how it was crafted, like a "quality rating" of some sorts. I don't really know because I don't craft and, like you, I can't fathom how that value influences any of the stats.

I just buy armour if the numbers are higher than what I'm currently wearing. I have the advantage of ignoring Fizzle Chance (which is a stat that works backwards / higher number is bad) because I don't cast spells.

 

Yep, the armor trees where balanced, because you could be equally effective with either. The reality is, all those stats that you absolutely HAVE to take with light now, you could just as easily take with heavy....

It's just the number of improvements over the base it's gotten. Frankly the +X on armor/weapons is useless (other then filtering out stuff that really isn't worth your time), and you're doing it exactly correctly.

 

I have to wonder... do the "added" stats even do anything?

Like... if I throw on some +5 armor and then throw on the same armor (no +)... is there a tangible difference?

 

Like I said, the +5 doesn't mean anything in-and-of-itself. You need to look at the actual stats being added. It's fairly easy to show that, at least, the "cast spell enchantments" are doing something.

 

Pay ZERO attention to the + "#". Means absolutely nothing in terms of how effective something is and only relates to how many times it has been MW'd/Enchanted. Quite frankly a lot of the time you'll see higher #'s and it's a shittier piece because it has less durability.

 

This is sadly very counter-intuitive. I guess that sums up the game pretty well, though.

 

Yes, in order to know if a piece of armor will benefit your play style and skill set you must read the actual benefits listed

 

Reading is hard, complaining is easy.

 

I twiddled around with not using the avoidance buffs I was telling you guys to sport while wearing heavy armor yesterday. Pretty much got destroyed as a melee build doing so. Was actually scared. So it's got nothing to do with light armor at all. Melee simply need many more defensive skills to prosper.