R 21 General Feedback

Feedback broken down into sections:

1) Combat:

Combat at the start is, IMO, too difficult. The difficulty arises from the lack of focus. The focus pool for new characters is too low and the out of combat regen rates for focus and health are too low.

The lack of focus leads to a reliance on auto-attacking, which I do not find to be fun. Auto-attacking minimizes my interaction as a player--and I play in order to DO things, not to watch my avatar auto-attack.

Low regen rates lead to a lot of down time (standing around waiting to regen). Again, I don't play a game in order to watch my avatar stand around.
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I do not mind difficult fights. What I do mind are boring fights or fights where I essentially have little or no chance to win because of resource limitation and the placement and interaction of mob pods.

WRT mob pods: these need to be thinned out and/or the agro range on mobs needs to be reduced. There are many locations that are essentially death traps due to mob placement and agro range combinations. There are also zones where, when I log in, I immediately gather an entire train of mobs without actually moving from the zone-in point (the woods outside of Owls Nest come to mind).
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At higher levels:

Tanking seems to be an exercise in futility. Taunt appears to be non-functional. Getting agro via damage doesn't work very well (mob usually dies first or succeeds in killing the other player). Root and stun chances (via skewer, body slam or shield bash) seem to be too low to keep mobs off of squishy players.

With 86 blade skill and other skills in the 40+ range, I miss waaaay too much.

Out of combat regen is still too slow... down time is boring time.

Magic seems to be substantially weaker than melee (have not played any ranged at this point to compare).... casting progression also seems to be slower, especially given the prevalence of fizzles and the use of reagents (which means it actually costs gold on a continuing basis to level up casting skills).
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Deck:

I like the theoretical flexibility of the deck, but the flexibility is largely theoretical. Less so in practice, especially skilling up. If you want to skill up skills at a reasonable pace, it seems to me that you essentially have to lock those skills, which defeats the purpose of the deck. If you want to have that heal available when you need it, you need to lock that skill.... want to buff strength, probably going to lock that skill. Clear poison or zombie disease? Lock that skill. Right now, at AV 43(ish) I think I have 4 slots that aren't locked.

Not sure that the system is ever really going to work as intended... NOT really sure what the intention was, other than to do something "different." Difference for difference sake is generally a poor design choice.

I like the idea of stacking skills or building combos, but the system is clunky and the advantage of doing those things doesn't seem to be sufficiently great enough to make me actually bother with it... especially since I often seem to stack or build a combo and then miss anyway.
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Armor:

Plate armor seems kind of OP. I burn down multiple wizards and archers using largely my wand auto-attack with the few spells I have (flame arrow and searing ray) and shrug off their attacks... hmmm. Yes, its slow but it works... and it means I don't end up being chased by 20 mobs because I chased a ranged mob.

Conversely, the armor characteristics of cloth and leather seem essentially non-existent. Have watched the wife go down multiple times to a wolf that kills her in three bites, while I fight three wolves at once. This is kind of realistic, in a sense (actually, I am still trying to figure out how a wolf is even damaging me ITFP through plate using his teeth ) but makes for bad gameplay.
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Weapons:

I like the look of the weapons (more realistic) and the general combat animations. The skill trees for blades and polearms seem good and there is a substantive difference between the two so that playing them feels and looks different. Kudos on that. Have not used ranged or blunt yet. Will probably do blunt after next wipe,just to check it out, but going to stick with polearms just because I like the tree and the look and feel.
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General combat stuff:

Taunt needs to work and it needs to be early in the skill tree (earlier than it currently is).. and maybe this should be in the shield rather than heavy armor tree?

Hit chance needs to improve, especially at higher skill levels. and against non-parrying/blocking mobs like wolves and animals. I don't mind being parried or blocked so much as I do simply missing.

Out of combat focus regen needs to be higher to reduce down time.
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Next Section: Crafting

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Nice write up, thanks...

 

2) Crafting

I generally like the crafting system, especially with the addition of repair and salvage. Salvage has made the system less costly and more viable.

Gathering is simply far too slow, period. Any time I click a button (or double click on an item/node) and then open up a book or magazine or start watching TV while my character mines or chops or whatever, it is too freakin slow. I don't really think it should be a design goal to encourage that type of play behavior. This is particularly bad when I am gathering at a low% chance and it is going to take me several tries to succeed. Basically, at that point, you have removed me from anything that resembles an actual play experience.

Gathering skill ups are also too slow, particularly given the paucity of ore nodes out in the open world... you can go into a mine to mine, but those seem mostly higher level, hard to get to and extremely slow.

Without salvaging, it is difficult to get resources to make any high value items in any timely fashion... especially with the change to meticulous collection.

Crafting Journal and UI:

Need some sort of mechanism to sort and search the recipes in the journal. I get tired of having to page through the pages to find a recipe, especially since they simply appear in the order in which I learned them. I like the LOOK of the journal but it needs more flexible functionality.

When I salvage or make something it would be SUPER nice if the items went into my inventory rather than remaining on the table, forcing me to drag them off. It is really tedious. It would be very nice if I could batch process, as well. A lot of this stuff is convenience features--but there is no real reason why these processes cannot be convenient rather than irksome, other than development cost. If it is an issue of cost, fine. If it is an issue of thinking that doing it that way makes the system somehow better (more verisimilitude or somehow more difficult (thus lending cachet to crafting) you are, IMO, mistaken. It just makes the whole process more irksome and time consuming. I am over 50 years old (and have a real job that I use the game to escape from), I really don't want to spend a lot of time in game doing this micro management kind of activity that adds nothing to the actual process or outcome. I get enough of that IRL.

Tedium is invariably the bane of good gameplay.
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I like the range of craftable items and the fact that I can tailor the specifications of equipment via material selection. I just wish I had more control over item appearance or could at least get a preview of what it is going to look like.

I have no feel or idea of what advancing in crafting skill is getting me... could be because I have only ever critted a make once. The numbers and descriptions of the effects of the skill advancement are not particularly iluminating (WTH does +.5 gather time get me?). Terminology in skill advancement needs to be reconsidered (for combat as well) to make actual functionality (vice technical function) more clear.

Crafting generally looks good so far.. looking forward to further development. Not really much else to say at this point.

Next Section: Skill system​

 

I think it needs to stay in the heavy armor tree, just at a lower tier then where it´s currently at. That way tanking with a polearm/twohanded weapon is a viable option, while a shield remains optional.

I don´t think it´s overpowered (or at least not by a large margin), it´s rather that the other armors are severely underpowered, especially leather and chain due to the lack of a medium armor tree.

 

Another good write up, thanks...

And I will add that this r21 is the 1st iteration of the skill use system, and although I like the system very much, it IS much harder than the last system we had, simply because we need to level up the skills to get to the same point we were at before... I was a level 60 player with gathering in the 45 level range and I felt it was very easy to go anywhere and gather / fight just about anything in the over world areas... I had plenty of resources to craft with, now I have nothing used it all up, my chr sheet (V) says I'm level 34, which if that's any comparison, I'm half way to where I was before...

 

Good point about keeping Taunt in the heavy armor tree... and you are probably right about heavy armor. It is actually going to need to be about like it is if any serious tanking is going to be done--the other armors need to be improved.

 

Thanks

I only went through 1 iteration of the previous system (only been playing since R20) but I think this system will be superior once it gets polished. Right now I am at adventure level 45 with my gathering in the mid 20s. Yes, buying skills like the previous system could get you up faster--if you had the gold--but I prefer actually having to do things to improve my skills.. at this point I am not really sure why we actually have a level (adventure level) at all, I kind of think that the skill trees and the passives cover what used to be covered in the "level" aspect. I was initially under the impression that we DIDN'T have levels anymore (as I never saw a level up of the old type) and only found out after a while I did have a level, lol.

 

Section 3: Skill system

I like the new skill system so far. It feels more "realistic" to me and has a reasonable internal logic. None of the skill trees I have utilized have seemed totally out of whack. There could be some re-ordering here and there and some adjustments to advancement rates. There will also need to be some DPS balancing, but I think that will be a bit down the road, as yet.

I think that 100g is a bit steep for the Tier 1 skills, I would like to see a graduated pricing scheme, with the cost going up over the tiers. I think this would allow for more experimentation at the lower levels for new players--IOW, not a major investment to find out what you like to do.

Some of the skills start out too low (the first few levels essentially have little or no effect). I actually think that this is kind of an issue across the board. A lot of the short range magic skills that I might actually use or that are gating passives that I like do essentially little or no damage. Many of the melee attacks with secondary effects (stun, root, etc) have essentially no chance to proc that effect at low levels--but then, it seems to me that a lot of the secondary procs either aren't working or simply have a very low success rate. About the only skills that I note working (maybe because they have a notable visual effect, while others don't) are push and pull in the polearm tree.

Right now, I think the system simply needs tweaking and balance--but it is hard to judge what needs to be done at this point (for me) simply because I lack a great deal of experience in the game, overall.

One comment I WILL make is that I think you need to balance things so that the combat pace is faster. Right now it seems kind of draggy to me. If the goal is to keep combat slower so that it is more tactical, then the skills need to be substantive enough in effect (mostly secondary effects) that it "feels" tactical rather than just a time-consuming slog. Right now things don't feel very tactical.

next section: general comments.​

 

4) General Comments:

Overall Interface and Information:

A few things I do not like... while I can appreciate the desire to maintain immersion by limiting overt informational elements, there are some things that I sorely miss--maybe because I spent a long time playing games like WoW and LotRO.

Target indicator: I think the game sorely needs some kind of indicator to let me know which of the 4 Timber Wolves I am fighting is actually my target... or to let me know that the mob I THINK I am about to pull is actually the mob I am going to pull, not the one off to my left that got tab targeted and that I can't even see on my screen.

Mob state indicators: if a mob is tripped or stunned or has some other effect on them, it would be useful to have some sort of visual indicator other than something on their health bar, which I am rarely looking at anyway. This is particularly useful in situations where the effect has no actual visible effect.

On the other hand, I am not sure of the value of the symbology appearing over the heads of PCs when they use skills, most of the time I can't see or don't know what it is, anyway, so it isn't really informative and simply clutters the screen. You need to consider the usefulness of the information as well as the "wow" factor of the visuals. As a raider I usually had a lot of the FX turned off, simply because keeping track of the information was important--and most of the FX weren't really informative, simply decorative.

The visuals need to be useful and/or I need to be able to turn the non-useful elements off.
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Tab targeting: I continually find myself pulling mobs other than the mobs I EXPECT to be pulling, because it actually targets the nearest mob, not the nearest mob in my field of view. Target indicator would resolve this issue.

Initiating auto attack: Double clicking the target seems clunky (and I often end up clicking on myself rather than the target and then don't immediately notice). Need a better system than this or need to allow me to auto-attack by default or auto-attack initiate on skill use. This is especially critical because of the current importance of auto-attacks, given my skill miss rate and the general (apparent) weakness of skills.

Resource nodes: It is VERY rare that the "glow" or "sparkle" effect actually clues me in to the presence of a node--REGARDLESS of how close I am to it. A lot of the time the effect does not seem to be actually working unless I am on top of the node, in total darkness. Trees and cotton plants are highly visible, regardless--but small plants and ore nodes in the open world are hard to see.

The darkness is simply too dark. I feel freakin blind, even with my light skill up. This does not bother me so much in mines or caves, but it makes my eyes ache after a bit, especially in the open world. My eyes are no longer what they once were, so cut me a break here and lighten things up a bit please Eye fatigue does become a real issue for me.

That's it for now.

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There is a white border arround your targeted mob's healthbar, it's easy to miss thought.
But that way you can currently tell which of the 4 wolves you have targeted.

Auto attack, hit the "T" key. Works quite well, i couldn't deal with the "doubleclick" either.

 

They did add a brightness slider in video options, if you haven't messed with that yet.