Killing my way across R41

Documenting my experiences with the new content from a nearly ogre mentality (find thing, kill thing, loot thing). After getting to AL90 and finishing off a few more GMs I decided to make some time to get some experiences and provide feedback for R41. This will be a combination of new info and old pet peeves impacted by the new content.

I set myself up to go to Artifice tomorrow when the bug with entry is fixed, then got down to business

First stop, new high level mobs in Twin Foothills. I hit this at night and hit the new higher level mobs (swashbucklers) and their somewhat wimpier friends (rogues) immediately. These were a good add, but like the other instances where high level stuff has been added, I don't know what Port's goal here is, they were not in added enough quantity, especially since the higher level ones mostly come out at night as the notes say (mostly), and they don't drop anything better than the mobs with half their HP in the other areas of the zone, however they are relatively good XP, and using the same loop as serpentspine foothills that I've used forever to farm halberds (SSF still better loot) even during the day this should be the best cultist based XP in the game (loving the new outfits) , but probably still behind deep ravens wood undead for best XP total. Overall I'll probably be back on live to get a better XP/hour clock in.

Next stop Skrekk, didn't take long to find the new high level mobs here either, again added in a fairly small quantity, but with a fairly quick spawn. The lower level gunners, grenadiers and brawlers are the same as in kruul, as are their beefier brothers. Which leads to two problems
1. Why do tier 10 mobs have over twice and as much as 4X as much HP as the tier 8 mobs?
2. why is the reward for actually killing them so poor, I finally managed to get one alone(ish, I did have to kill some of the green trash mobs) long enough to kill it and what did I get? 20g). PET PEEVE 1, its better to kill 4 mobs in a 3 skull than 1 tier5(normal mob in a 5 skull) both for XP and for loot. None of the zones or the mobs is worth doing for loot, its all what you can sell it to an NPC for.

While trying to break the spawn enough to get the big boy (a brawler every time I saw it) alone I got spawned on and decided to just eat the death for science (106kish with 9 GMs and about AL88 on this copy of my character) which brings us to Pet Peeve #2.. Chris, we really need to talk, I don't know what you think the death decay is going to accomplish, but it isn't the one you think its going to be. 100K lost XP is annoyance for me, 20-30min lost XP. I suspect you have a graph with the gap between the average-average player and the average-powergamer and you keep seeing it go up, its always going to. I'm not going to eat that 30min as lost progress for the day, it just means I have to play 30min longer that day to get to whatever the goal is and I'm just going to increase the gap the same amount. If you ever succeed in making it punitive enough to stop me from progressing, I'll quit playing and more importantly PAYING for the game. Further I only had an idea what the penalty would be by guessing, I haven't died on live in a month because again, its safer and better reward to kill things that have no hope to kill me. Who you are going to hit are casual players who only get X hours a day period and less knowledge of the game/skill/gear/appetite to grind the same thing over and over result: you're going to wipe out their progress for the day, everyone will hit high AL/skill eventually, with a lower tolerance for pain than I have they will just quit. Cut it out, remove decay you're already slowing down advancement with the Everest like skill cost curve, no good will ever come from trying to emulate Everquest here.(and there XP loss could be recouped by some player abilities)

Back from hijacking my own thread, I one to check out the new mine. As an adventure zone its a vast improvement over the last one that was done(which doesn't work as either and adventure zone OR a mine). And at least this time it still looks like a viable mine as well without as many death traps , better use of the breakaway floors, or the best mining room guarded by quick spawning extremely high level undead. Not sure I'll be back (again, if its not worth killing for the XP or the loot why do it), but a neat zone.

After a short side trip through the rise (hey I can actually kill things there, guess my recent development schema was effective), I decided to do alternative weapon testing.

I've been blades from day1, but I'm cut out for this testing better than pretty much anyone who isn't a dev and can insta-skill for one simple reason: I GM'd the top skill in bludgeon and polearm months ago and have roughly 80 skill in all the sub skills already. I also already have a pretty good +9 axe and relatively for its surface level, a +5 halberd

so off to Sequenna colossus we go after retrieving them from my tower. Using the same gear other than the weapons and the same survival/buffs, I gave the current status of the other two a trial.

..aaand I dont see much change. the stuns and knockdowns from bludgeon don't even stop the mobs even when they do hit. Polearms the listed change is better critical damage but it hit on me part of the way through the test what was really wrong: Both of the schools have weapons with half the crite rat of blades.
Because of all of this, neither school has the utility or damage parity or advantage over blades to warrant their use.

 

As a note, I just missed the cutoff on a slew of Artifice hookups for tomorrow's build, so most likely it will be incomplete until the next one.

 

Well written, good post. Great Points.

 

Hookups or the fix for the bug that keeps entry from working?

 

If the current build goes live (QA is still looking at it) you'll be able to enter and the first third should have working conversations, and then you'll start running into incomplete content.

Next build will have everything live but the last few NPCs.

 

Coming in hot, is everything going to be in by Thursday?

 

yep, today's build will actually have most of it since it had to be rebuilt