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R21 Feedback, Several Issues

Discussion in 'Release 21 Feedback' started by agra, Aug 31, 2015.

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  1. agra

    agra Avatar

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    1. Title: R21 Feedback, Several Issues
    2. Reproduction Rate: 100%
    3. Blocker? No
    4. Details: See Below
    5. Steps to Reproduce: Play the Game
    6. User Specs: Win7, AMD 6950, 8GB, i7, SSD
    Details:
    • There doesn't seem to be a an auto attack weapon for a mage type character? I looked for NPC's selling wands or staffs, and found none. It's fine if that's the way it is, it's just a bit odd. If it's a design goal that all characters, regardless of role, use melee weapons or bows, then I guess it's working as intended? To me, it's strange, and not in a good way, if this is supposed to be a 'fantasy themed' RPG.
    • The sky is always broken, in some way, in every scene. Not sure what's going on, but it looks terrible, and in some cases, like the starting bridge scene, it's actually completely missing. A missing skybox, of course, leads to the "can't render infinity" problem, which looks really bad, in game.
    • I can't see Cotton Plants. I can see the shadow's cast by Cotton Plants, but not the plants themselves.. They're entirely invisible. I wonder what else I'm not seeing?
    • I can't harvest from stumps? Ok, if the stump indicates it's been harvested, then 100% of the "trees" I've seen have been harvested. I don't see the point?
    • Harvesting in general is pretty annoying. Playing hide-and-seek with static plant models in a sea of moving grass doesn't require skill, it just requires patience to endure the trial. A 'highlight interactives' button (like the tab key in NWN) would go a long way to alleviate this annoying mechanic. As well, why would plants exist in a scene if you can't harvest from them? In some scenes, even in single player, more than half the plants cannot be harvested. What's the point? If it's not harvestable, don't spawn it.
    • Having to press and hold the right mouse button CONSTANTLY to have a reasonably fast camera is terrible. It's the worst form of repetitive stress injury type interface I've seen in years. Solution? Put in a keyboard turn rate slider that is at least as sensitive as the mouse turn rate slider. That way, I can just use the keyboard, and save my tendons from years of agony.
      To be clear, if you don't use the mouse, your turn rate is terrible. In short, make the camera like NWN1, with all the NWN1 options, and everything will be fine. Currently, it's not ready for beta, never mind production, imo.
      If it's a design goal to discourage keyboard users, then skip to the end and remove the ability to turn with the keyboard entirely. Leaving it as it is, that is, with such a massive disparity in usability between mouse and keyboard appears either malicious, lazy, or unprofessional. Not a great impression, regardless of the real reason.
    • Skill use rates aren't too bad. I'd say they're a little low, because after doing something hundreds of times, I'm barely above 10 in those combat skills. That's a little discouraging. I would say start the slowdown around 50/100, but I'm less about the punitive and more about the fun.
    • Also skill advancement, that is, effectiveness, is really weird. Searing Ray seems about right, but compare that with Flame Fist? Why would anyone use Flame Fist, ever? melee range only, 6 focus, and at 21 it does 1-5 physical/fire (what does that even mean?) and maybe 1-3 fire damage for 8 seconds (4 ticks). So, worst case it does 5 total. Best case it does 17 total. Searing Ray? 8 to 17 instantly, 4 focus, 3 second cooldown, ranged! /confused.
      For that matter, the whole Fire tree seems terrible, so hopefully that gets some love.
      And for the love of god, don't nerf Searing Ray. It's the only magical ability I have that actually kills things. :( Buff Fire Fist.
      And I don't just mean in this case, I mean philosophically, as you go about your buff/nerf balancing, buff first, then nerf. Be a different development team, not the terrible short sighted ones. :)
    • No loot all hotkey, that's annoying. All people are going to do is macro it, and that's not a good thing.
    • When attacked without warning, and in combat, all hotkeys are greyed out. You can't do anything until you press tab to target. While I appreciate the desire to make combat interactive, it seems reasonable to have the OPTION to "auto select target when hit" if I have no target. Otherwise, it seems like something is broken with the game. I thought it was. I was thinking I had to flee, because I could not use any combat abilities, simply because the creature attacking me wasn't automatically my target. Again, just the OPTION would go a long way to alleviate this impression.
    • Creature difficulty seems very high. I had a hard time finding something to kill that wouldn't kill me very quickly. This, again, is discouraging. Why isn't there an auto adjusting scale for difficulty, especially in single player mode? Why lock the player out of all this content, when you could simply adjust it, within a range, even optionally, so that all scenes are consumable? It seems strange not to have it this way, in 2015, when it expands the target content base so much. Even if this was up to level 10 only, to cushion the impact of arrival, so to speak, that would be positive.
      I can see why I see all these players macro'ing combat in town, so they don't die in their first fight. Not good.
    • The deck building interface is very confusing. What do the 3/9 indicators show? Three of nine? Of what? Apparently I can have more of some skills in my deck, but as to why, that's a mystery.
    • The only reason I tried R21 is because a friend told me you can lock glyphs now, instead of playing wack-a-mole on the combat UI. Ok, that's true, but there's no feedback as to the consequences of locking vs. not locking. Apparently there's an increased focus cost, but... it's not indicated ANYWHERE in the game. That needs to change. If I'm being punished for making the combat UI intuitive, tell me exactly why and how, please, in big red letters.
    • IMHO: The wack-a-mole combat UI is.. not good. This rolling/random combat thing has been tried before in another game, and that entire game failed. (Chronicles of Spellborn) It could be argued that the random skill placement wasn't entirely at fault, but it sure didn't help. Why would you try this again? It was horrible in CoS, and it's horrible in SotA.
      The only way combat is in any way playable, currently, in R21, is because you can lock glyphs and not be glued to the combat UI. As well, the whole "you are currently doing something else, so no, you can't do that, and we're going to punish you for trying" is really annoying. As well, why is there a global cooldown AND the wack-a-mole combat UI? Both, really? I guess you guys are all about the punitive, huh? Not a fan, don't like it. I get the individual cooldowns, but the GCD is what? 1.5 or 2 seconds? How about 0.5 seconds?
    • NPC placement during combat is... buggy. Large Skeletons are among the worst for this. There is something hinky with their hitbox and/or pathing/placement. They approach you, and then stop, and can beat the hell out of you with that big two-hander, and you can't hit them. But if you move forward just enough to get to the point where you can auto attack, the skeleton re-positions so your auto attack doesn't work anymore. Great, that's sooooo fun. (not really, no)
      It's like a smaller/nearer version of the skeleton archer (shoot, move, shoot, move) behavior, but more subtle and deadly.
    • It would be really nice if there was an "auto attack is on" indicator somewhere, because there's no way to tell if it is, or if it's not working, or buggy, or whatever.
    • Target highlighting is terrible. What happened to the outlines from the past? Why not a customizable reticle? That would be awesome, and distinctive for the genre. I can't even tell when something is highlighted, in R21, with highlighting at maximum.
    • EDIT:
    • I don't see particle effects for any spells. None. I see moving light sources for things like fire arrow, but actual particle effects, zero.
    • Strafe cancels run. This is really annoying, especially in concert with the whole camera, right click always thing. (and yes, I'm aware you can switch to mouselook, but that removes the cursor, which given the number of interactables you have to manually search for, is untenable, imo)
     
    Last edited: Aug 31, 2015
  2. Kendaric

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    Actually there is a wand weapon, though I doubt you´ll to much autoattack damage with it.
    Large skeletons... yeah, they´re annoying as hell. I suspect it´s a sort of weapon reach (twohanded weapon/polearm vs. onehanded weapon) and don´t get started on the archers/mage skeletons...
    Creature difficulty is incredible variable, depending on the area you venture into.
     
  3. Magnnus

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    There are wands and staffs. You can loot them off kobold and skeleton mages. The staff however is currently useless due to using a lot of focus to auto attack.
     
  4. Elwyn

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    First of all, this is still most definitely a Work in Progress, as you can see by the "Pre-Alpha" at the top of the screen, and the button you click during start-up. They're still making this sausage, and I'm here because I want to see it. (I like to think of it as "a new game every month")

    Video driver issues? Try re-installing?

    Generally scenes don't come with ALL harvest nodes ready. But you also shouldn't underestimate the diligence of other players' harvesting, particularly when you're in a random overworld encounter scene that another player is already in.

    There's a specific "survey distance" skill which is supposed to let you see firefly particles rising from a "ripe" node. However, the R21 skills change has made it very slow to get to a useful distance. You'll just have to start learning what they look like. Trees are easy, nightshade and mandrake roots are harder, garlic is the hardest to see in a sea of grass. But they'll always be in the same place in a scene, so you can learn where to look. Also, in some random scenes, certain nodes are more likely to be ripe than in other scene variants.

    I hear you brother. I'm used to playing FFXI mostly with just a controller, and typing in CLI commands when being party healer.

    The worst part about right-click-to-pan is that some areas on the screen accept right clicks, so if you're unlucky, you could end up doing stuff like moving your action bar (very easy in non-combat mode) or resizing a window, and if you're using the mouse to select stuff on the action bar, guess what, the cursor is going to be right near a UI danger spot. Also, when trying to chase something, it's too easy to end up with the camera pointing straight up.

    Then there are the skeleton archers/mages that run around randomly, so you're trying to move with your left hand on WASD, pan with your right hand, and... still need to activate actions somehow. I call this a problem of insufficient "handwidth".

    They just made a major change to this way last week, and still haven't shaken the weird out of it yet. (This is when I could tell you were new with R21.)

    Flame Fist also can inflict DoT fire damage that stacks with a lot of other stuff. And all of these will increase in power and/or duration when you skill them up. It used to be that 5 was enough to unlock the next tier, now it's 10, and all skills are now supposed to go up to 100.

    However, adventuring level and XP is still lurking behind the scenes, so you still depend on the (now invisible) amount of XP that you get from killing a mob.

    I'd like a key binding for the Take All button so that I don't have to use my wrist (that is already getting enough of a RSI workout from right-click-drag) to aim at the (relatively) tiny button.

    I'm an R20 baby, and from what I can tell, the deck combat system isn't really useful until you get enough skill icons to build one, so stay with locked (where I am right now) until you've learned the ropes. But yeah, it looks like reduced focus cost is the benefit you get in trade for the randomness. And the "1/3" stuff indicates how many you've added out of how many you have (one in the deck out of three available), with quantity based on the skill's level.

    You should've been here during R20 when the "hitbox" was the center of the creature. It made bears and wolves so much fun. And you probably haven't noticed the icing on this cake, which is that you get a "stillness" bonus of reduced focus use if you can stay in one place without moving!

    Stupid two-hander skeletons need to check their long-weapon privileges and quit inching out of my range. I swear they know what they're doing and laughing at us when they move a little bit sideways.

    Probably not unrelated to the invisible cotton bushes. Maybe you should look for updated video drivers? At least you're not running Win10.
     
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  5. Hammershtein

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    1. Title: R21 some issues
    2. Reproduction Rate: 100%
    3. Blocker? Not sure what this is ? you mean spy where or something like that not enabled for this game.
    4. Details: See Below
    5. Steps to Reproduce: See below for how to reproduce.
    User Specs: Win7, AMD64 phenom II x4 964 , 16 gigs of ram,SSD, Nvidea Geforce GTX 770 total ram avail 7892 Driver version 355.82


    First bug: Daggers
    when daggers are equipped in a single wield,dual wield, or dagger and shield. you have to stand on top of what ever it is you are trying to attack. Constantly have to keep pushing the mob or player back to get any hits in.
    Auto attack will not work with any of the combo wield types-i listed above. or at least if it is working its so minute that you never see it animate. Also i never see any dmg being delt unless i do a skill attack. Some times i can click on the monster to get it to attack.(normally have to spam the left click.)

    side note It does seem like a huge exploit to me since i can more or less force mobs to miss me in melee so long as i keep right in top of them.
    Fix seems to be a collision box size issue.


    audio:
    Feet steps no longer makes foot step sounds, they now make like an inverted clip clap kind of sound. and its very poppy sounding.

    Birds in towns seem to be on a to fast of repeat. they some times over lap and the bird chirping starts to distort the sound. to me it seems like maybe one of the tracks is running at a faster speed then the rest.



    UPDATE : Todays mini patch
    Other players magic spell effects no longer play to other players only to self. all you see is there hands raise up in the air.
    so far i have observed heal spells, fire spells and some air spells. the sound effects for them are not playing as well. how ever when i self cast i can see and here the effects. same seems to happen for the light spell i can see them raise there arms to cast the spell no effect or no light source from the light. relog ONlY made it to where i could see only the light that was casted before i reloged. still was unable to see any spells or effects when casted.
    Zone or scene did not seem to change any thing for me. i tested in soultown, and in east pern trail.
     
  6. Soulicide

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    As Elwyn said, there are staffs and wands. You can craft them pretty easily. Not sure if select NPCs are still selling them. I thought they were and you had to go to the right place.

    Sounds like you are having video card/driver issues. I would re-post those specifically in the R21 bug forum if you haven't already.

    As to your gathering frustrations, try harvesting in places that don't have heavy traffic. Anywhere on the main pathways will have more people depleting the resources. Explore a little. Maybe head over to Hidden Vale. From Solace Bridge, take the moongate to Owl's Head. Alternately, you can go to Ardoris, talk to the boatman, have him take you to the docks, go to the little skiff on the far right dock, go to Kingsport. Both will get you to Hidden Vale. I never have much trouble finding wood and ore and the further South you go, the lower level the mobs are.

    I agree with you on the Take All button. I keep wanting to press 'E' because that's what the default hotkey was in Skyrim. Several of the elements in the UI need considerable tweaks. I have been pining for a "Clear All" button in the deck building window. I guess I have a thing for efficiency.
     
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