Newbie's initial thoughts

I just started playing, and am about level 25 now, and wanted to share my criticisms, hoping to enlighten me perhaps, and to also make the game better.

1) I'm stuck in the vale. I spent about an hour walking all around Owl's head looking for the lunar rift to no avail. I finally gave up, and took a dingy from Kingsport to get out of the vale, only to wander around the town it led to for 30 minutes trying to find an exit, only to give up, and log out, hoping that going to the world map on login would take me out of the vale, but it didn't, it landed me right back in kingsport.

2) I cannot play multiplayer, whenever I enter Owl's head, the game crashes to desktop.

3) When I enter owl's head I usually want to do one of 2 things, train skills, or sell my loot. The Skill trainer and the armor vendor are quite far from the entrance, if the merchant pavillions were closer to the entrance, this would save a lot of time.

4) Dark is too dark. I find myself actually walking away from the computer to do other things waiting for daylight because I honestly cannot see (even with the light spell) more than like 5 feet in the dark, which means I cannot navigate my way around.

5) The light spell. You start with 1 level of it. I thought that by training it to 5, it would make it brighter, but it doesn't seem to. What's the point of having levels of this spell? Also, it often expires in combat, and then I'm really hosed because EVERYTHING is pitch black and I cannot see what's attacking me or how to position myself to defend. Why not just have it stay on permanently, or just make things brighter in general? Casting it before combat is a bad option because of:

6) Respawn rates, aggro range, and low damage make fights last far too long. I actually went through an entire weapon's durability in one fight at the obsidian keep, things spawn too fast there, but in general, it's far too easy to pull aggro from tons of stuff. I'd like a bit more strategy in play when exploring a new area rather than pull the entire hex into battle at once.

7) weapon durability goes down waay too fast, and my 2 handed sword is not easy to replace. It costs me about 500 gold each trip out to repair my sword back to normal. This is not only expensive, but it's time consuming.

8) It's quite hard to find the merchants one is looking for. AFAICT, there are no resources which tell you where they are. Exploration is fun, but it's also quite exhausting.

9) In places like the dragon cave and caverns in general, its very easy to get completely disoriented due to close quarters. Is there any chance of a mini-map to aid in naviation? UO was a nice bird's-eye isometric view, which made navigation easy. The first-person view is bemusing, motion-sickness-inducing, and in general adds nothing, but eye-candy to the game.

10) Archer AI is annoying. Sure, the first few times you fight one it's fun for some people to chase them down, but after a while, it's just tiring.

11) run speed in general is just too slow. I'd love to see the base-speed bumped up by a minimum of 50%, or have a castable buff that is easy to acquire that would do the same.

12) More obvious in-game information about where things are, i.e. everything. Lunar rifts, sewer entrances, merchants, etc.

13) Most towns in the vale that are not Owl's head or King's port are pretty useless. Why not put some weapon and armor shops in the random towns so I can buy/sell equipment?

14) Many hexes are quite difficult to exit. I usually end up quitting the game to get back to the world map because it's faster. Would be much more convenient to just have a button to do that for me ingame without having to quit every time.

15) Encumberance is quite low. I find that if I loot every mob I kill, I am encumbered after 8-10 skeletons or elves. I'd love to be able to carry more, or have things weigh less.

I know that's a lot of stuff, and no I don't hate the game. This is just a list of stuff that is making the game less enjoyable for me. yes, I also realize the game is pre-alpha.

 

Welcome to the game rob2!
I'll just answer your first question - at least that might give you a head start. The town you are taken to by boat from Kingsport is Ardoris. And yes it is a huge town, and easy to get lost in.
A tip - make sure your compass is showing on screen (M key) and head north. Keep heading north. As far as you can go. You will go past the market square, the Oracle shrine, then look for a bridge across the river. Take the bridge, keep walking down the road - you have found the exit to Novia mainland. Heaps to explore!

Good luck!

[Edit - there is no lunar rift in Owls Head any more. Since the mainland opened up you can get to wherever you need to go by more conventional means]

 

Welcome rob2!

 

Depends what you take, of course if you cannot carry dozens of swords easily. Also there are skills increasing your encumberance, at higher level you can carry more.

 

Welcome to Shroud! I'll try to address all your concerns - many of which are very valid and I agree with.

For getting to Novia - There is a boat on the world map, outside of Kingsport, that takes you to Novia. You will be on the novia world map when you arrive, not in a scene.

Multiplayer crashing - That's definitely a bug, not one I've encountered. Sorry you're experiencing that.

Owl's Head trainer and vendors are indeed a bit of a trek from the entrance - This actually will wind up being a blessing in disguise once we have player vendors in-game as it means those home lots in the route between the entrance and the vendors will have the most visible vendors.

Dark is too dark - This is on the known issues list, you should give that a read.

Light spell - additional ranks in this spell give it a lower cooldown in combat when it's locked to your bar, they also provide more copies of the glyph if you wish to put it into your combat deck (Not sure why you would, but hey, that's what it does). Also it's required to put 3 points into it to get access to things further in the Sun tree, like Enlightenment which is actually a fairly good buff.

You're entirely correct about respawn rates in combat, but the cause of your low damage is your level. Damage at level 25 is quite low, you are correct. I am at level 52 right now and I'm getting crits for 60-200 damage using my air/death magic build. When I was testing melee I was getting autoattack and melee ability crits for 60-150 damage. I assure you it scales up quite nicely if you're taking advantage of the right passives and increasing your core stats. I also admit, the right passives and exactly what it is your core stats do, is unfortunately quite difficult to discover - I managed to learn some things via testing but so far that's it.

Durability DOES decrease far too quickly without the Tactics passive that makes your gear more durable, and repair kits are indeed far too expensive - this is representative of incomplete and improperly balanced in-game systems. These issues are likely going to be addressed in release 17 or 18.

For being able to find vendors and such - Yeah it can be a little time consuming. It'd be nice if guards could give you directions (and thus mark vendor locations on your compass). In some towns, not all yet, when you do discover the merchant areas, the area gets marked on your compass, but that system is not yet fully integrated in every city.

For access to a Minimap - Booksellers sell area maps in-game. These effectively function as a mini map, including a marker to indicate where you are on the map. From a gameplay standpoint it's inconvenient, but I will also admit that for roleplay and immersion purposes, it makes sense. At the Navigator tier, you will have access to a book that has all of the in-game maps in it, so to open a map for an area you would simply use that book. It's not yet finished but it's a planned feature.

I agree, Archer AI is annoying, but that's realistically what something that uses ranged attacks is going to do. I might suggest running a root or snare ability. Also note that you can use Line of Sight blockers to effectively herd them back to you - walk behind a wall, tent, rock, etc and they'll come running right to you.

There is a passive in the Light Armor tree that increases your run speed and attack speed, as well as an active ability called Sprint. If you're more of a fan of heavy armor, there's a spell in the Air tree called Dash, though in heavy armor you will be dealing with fizzle chance unless you're spec'd far enough into the Focus tree to have it reduced.

The more obvious access to info - this will be accomplished via the Compass system (Hit M to bring up your compass if it's off). Some areas feature discoverable points of interest that show on your compass. In the future, getting directions from an NPC will discover the POI you are looking for. The Compass system is still very much incomplete, in fact this release is the first we are seeing of it.

Useless towns - They're useless for the time being as we don't have player vendors yet. Lots of these towns are simply large collections of home lots. It would be quite nice to see some more NPC's there, so I also have my fingers crossed that they make these areas more interesting.

Having a button to exit Town scenes would be great, but I've heard dev's speaking towards the issue of exiting the game and starting on the world map - they're likely to put limits on this. The system I heard discussed was one where your character remains in-game for X amount of time, and you have to wait for the character to time out to be able to "Load on World Map." - otherwise your only option is to Play and play from the same point you were at when you logged out. This is done to stop players from rushing to the end of a dungeon, looting a chest or killing a boss, logging out, then logging in again at the entrance to the scene.

For Encumbrance - Train the Tactics skill that increases your max carry weight, or increase your Strength. Both of these things affect your carry weight.

Hope some of that helps!

 

Hi @rob2 , good to see you here. I"ll tackle your light/visibility questions.

re: light spell, the levels determine how many cards there are in your combat deck. The more cards the greater the chances that it will pop up when you need it. Most people though lock the light or heal card in place so it's always available during combat. You can find the card deck mechanics in your SOTA user guide.

There IS an alternative to the light spell btw if you go into the Moon magic. I find the Night Vision spell very useful because of it's duration , range seems to be fine. As a result I hardly use the light spell anymore unlike in older game versions. The Vanish (invisible while not moving) and Shadowform spells (move while invisible) are very nice pluses up in the spell /skill tree.

 

The Night Sight effect gives me a bit of a headache. Also in areas without any ambient light (caves, etc) night sight is still far too dark to see by, or at least it was as of a week ago last time I tried it out.

 

Hi, and welcome rob2!

Just thought I'd try to help with a couple of these:

4) Darkness: Have you tried using a torch? The darkness you are experiencing does not seem to be the same as mine or others. I can see well beyond 5 feet in front of me in most areas. This may be a bug that will need to be addressed.

6) Respawn Rates/15)Encumbrance: These go together for my answer. Don't pickup everything you see! Learn to prioritize what you need, vs. what is too heavy or not worth your time. Keeping some items on a corpse will also slow down the respawn rate of that enemy!

7)repair/durability: This is an incomplete system. repair kits are meant for emergencies only, it is repair skills performed by players (not implemented in the game yet) that will be worth the price. Until then, it's better to just replace your gear!

13)useless towns: SotA is being designed to have a player-driven economy. This means, once player-owned NPC vendors are implemented, you'll rather visit them than the competing NPC shopkeepers. Suddenly the 'useless towns' will become much more helpful to traveling adventurers. Skill trainers as of now, are still planned to stay fixtures in the 'NPC towns' though.

14)difficult to exit hexes: I have had no trouble exiting hexes. The travel between POI and an exit is part of playing the game. When people complain about travel time, I always look at the stretch goal for 'Horse Mounts'. Ideal travel times need to be optimized for the fastest forms of travel. If we all felt travel was plenty fast now without mounts, then no one would feel the need to work toward getting mounts. I personally want 'foot travel' to be a little slow for this reason.

 

Oh about Darkness, try to enable tonemapping, it works quite well ,though sometimes yo uget blackscreen bug and need to disable it for a bit.

 

Wow, guys, this was some serious fast, thoughtful and quite useful feedback. What a community! Thanks!

Glad to know that some of the issues I'm experiencing are being looked into, and that that there are workarounds for some of my issues.

Probably the biggest right now is the darkness thing, since I spend half the game unable to play. I've tried the tonemapping bit, but what it does is make everything go pitch black, and waiting doesn't seem to help.

Another quick question, how can I modify my stats?

 

I believe in the Tactics tree there is a str & dex innate skill, forget where int is.

 

Hey rob2

Enjoy being lost and not knowing where everything is. If you keep playing you will catch up to the content and start waiting like the rest of us for each release. It wont take you that long to mentally map Owl's Head, Kingsport, Ardoris and Solania.

Thankfully there are quite a few sewers and dungeons now for you to figure out.

There are a lot of great community resources built into all the signatures on this forum. Start making a SotA bookmark folder!

 

Welcome to this great community.

 

The Tactics tree has skills for Health, Strength and Dex, as well as carry weight amd skills to reduce durability damage to gear. The focus tree has focus and int.

 

As far as the darkness goes...the whole point is not being able to see at night without some light source. It's a realistic challenge. You can either put a point in Moon magic for Night Vision or put a point in Sun for the Light spell. Or you can carry a torch. If this is still too dark, even with tonemapping off, you may want to check your video card settings?

Raising stats: You'll find Str and Dex in the skill tree under Combat>Tactics. Below Str there is a skill that you can invest in to raise your carry weight but Str does this as well. There is also one called Armor Preservation and Weapon Preservation. If you're concerned about the cost of repair kits it might benefit you to invest in those. Intelligence can be found under Focus.

Concerning not being able to play in multi-player mode...what are your computer's specs, especially the operating system? When I first started I was on a 32-bit boot and the game crashed every time I tried to exit Braemar. Switched to my Win 7 64-bit and no problems. Just food for thought.

PS...

Skills levels don't work the way you are thinking. Each level of a skill determines how many instances of that particular spell you can have in your Deck. If you hit 'Y' in game, click on a deck then click modify, you will see a window with the hot bar where you can add spells to your locked deck. Above that, in the same window is where you build your random unlocked deck. There should be a separate window to the left with the list of you spells. They call them glyphs in game but think of them like cards. Double click one, it will put it in your unlocked combat deck. Say you have 3 levels invested in Rend. this means you can put rend in your deck 3 times, thus increasing the chances of Rend being drawn during combat. Ideally, the more instances of a spell you have in your deck, the more often that spell will be drawn.

The other benefit of having more instances of a spell in your deck is that during combat say Crushing Blow popped up 3 times in your deck. You can drag them together in the same way you would make a combo so that you now have a 3x stacked Crushing Blow spell ready to use, which reduces focus cost and increases damage. Instead of dragging you can also hit R, then hit the hotbar numbers then the number to activate.

Example: I have lvl 3 Death Ray. That means I can put it into my deck 3 times. Say I'm in combat and it happens to come up 3 times on 1...3...and 5. I would hit 'R' then hit 1,3,5..then 5 to use that 3x stacked Death Ray. Alternately, you can simply drag like I mentioned above.

In the case of the Light spell, you can have it in your unlocked deck or your locked bar in addition to or instead of your non-combat bar. To add things to the locked bar you might have to invest points in Focus> Eidetic Memory. Hope some of this was helpful to you and enjoy. Feel free to contact me in-game about deck mechanics maybe I can explain further.

 

Hi Rob2, ya, what Rasmenar said...

You're doing well to get to level 25 already, but Obsidian Keep is higher level than that, so maybe you'd want to back down a little, until level 35... I'm level 55 and I have trouble there too... Now that all skeletons resurect by themselves, plus if you take too long to kill a group of then it will appear as if it's a non-stop battle... I use a tactic called "run for your life", try and pop out of combat and regenerate, then back to the action...

Everything you mentioned in your post has skills related to ease there effect, weapon/armor wear slower, HP regenerate faster, encumbrance is reduced, High str lets you hit harder/carry more... I'm pretty sure dex lets you move/swing faster and int lets you throw magic with less fizzle, higher focus pool... I play (SPO), a hybrid 2hd blade weapon I crafted myself, and bronze chair set I found in Blackblade pass (has lower fizzle)... I mainly use life drains during battle to keep my heath up, and if it goes south, then heals... Flaming fist and immultion works good too on groups, if you can pull it off... Plus all the blade swings, I'm old school Dallas and us a locked deck...

You can dbl tap the "a, s, d" keys to do rolls, and the "w" with holding it down after the dbl tap to go into fast run mode (it uses focus, but you speed up a bit), I combine the keys w/ mouse to move fluidly around... I think the controls are cool once you get the hang of it...

Dark, it's not Dark, only certain scenes are Dark, you shouldn't be able to see past your lighted area... It makes adventuring very interesting or am I the only one who likes it or have I just gotten used to it...

 

Hi and welcome to Shrouds Rob2. All very good comments regarding what you've seen so far. A lot of lighting issues are being worked on and over the next releases we should see lighting and preformance optimizations improve a lot. Also 64 bit is important and really if anyone is not using it there will come a day when nothing much will play on 32 bit, well just an opinion but I saw it in my case. I had to upgrade to play Tera. I had bought the game and couldn't even play until I upgraded. Windows 7 had a security thing in it is what the Tera person told me that I had to have to play Tera, so I did hustle and dive in. lol Anyway I don't know what your system is but that was just my experience. I have a fairly new system and not a powerhouse and wish I could do over, but it plays the game very well. Best wishes and if you need anything or to chat please friend majoria in the game and send me a whisper.

 

Also...

I agree with you on this. It would be very nice if perhaps guards served some purpose other than to tell you to behave and how many lots are available. Like if you could ask them where some common locations are. E.g. "Where is the bank?" or "Where is the reagent vendor?" I should think they would be happy to help and hopefully something like this will be implemented although there are maps right now. I've been here for a couple of months now and I feel like I know my way around everywhere pretty well, but having been a new player not long ago..when random encounters still happened too, so I get the frustration of being new and not having many resources to help you out. In talking with new players things often went like this:

Hey I'm new and i can't find where I need to go.
You can purchase maps from the bookseller.
Where is the bookseller?
There's one in Owl's Head up the hill.
Oh. How do I get to Owl's Head exactly?
From Braemar just run North as far as you can and the trail dead-ends into it.
An hour later....
Thanks! Finally found it.

Maybe even the guards nearest the entrance could give you a one-time free map of the town. (So you could actually go find the place that sells the other maps). It's easy to get overwhelmed and lost with all the in-town player homes, so that would be a neat feature.

 

I thought that new characters started with maps in their inventory bu i could be wrong