Themo: end of release feedback

In no particular order...

The balance between "classes" in PVP is really good. As a high end melee player i had no set advantage/disadvantage when fighting ranged or mages. A good ranger like Margaritte can keep distance on me and wear me down, but if i catch her i will kill her most of the time. Pro mages like Turin and Mimner.. our duels have no set outcome, half the time i will win and half the time they will win. There is no "must have" skill that every player uses, though most people do use healing touch for obvious reasons.

The blades skill "whirling blades" could use an adjustment to hit more targets since its special function was to hit multiple targets and now pretty much everything hits multiple targets. It is still useful however for hitting targets behind you.

Reagent requirements for high tier spells is disproportionate with reagent availability and very few people use high tier spells outside of pvp tournaments. An endgame PVE mage requires hundreds of thousands of gold per day and there is no way to gather enough reagents, not even with agriculture.

The new areas are great and had far less bugs to report than newly released areas in the past. There was however a record high amount of unobtainable decoration used in these areas that pretty much everybody was disappointed they could not steal.

GMs seem about right with the accelerated exp gains. I managed to get 20 GM and am close to 6 more with level 93 adventure level. I play allot but a large amount of my time is spent doing noncombat related activities. At least one other player was able to catch up to me with adventure level and a few others got close (first time ever), i think this is mostly due to the new high exp mobs in the west ravenswood cave.

Decay rate is extreme and upset many many people. We saw a drop in our most active community members playtime due to this mechanic and others have become "social only" players, not wanting to put time into temporary advancement. Decay amount is uncapped and you can lose an unlimited amount of progress on any one application. Levels did not drop, we just went into "exp debt" and though this was not intended.. i think this is actually a far less punishing function than its intended affect. Powergamers can literally shrug off skill decay by working a rotation while more casual players found themselves either going backwards or failing to advance. Ignoring mechanics and "just playing" will 100% ensure that you never move beyond a 3 skull zone ever. I know decay makes sense if you are just looking at math, but it makes far less sense if you look at things on a human level. It kills in game socialization and events and makes roleplay and exploration expensive and undesirable. If it is going to stay, it really needs to apply itself far less often, and stay as an accumulated debt rather than a vacuum that eats players levels. It is a ragequit mechanic, i would not keep complaining about it if it was not an extremely serious issue.

Bugs in general were far fewer this release. Having Attenwood logging in daily and actually seeking out players with bug reports was an extremely good idea.

Performance in player owned towns seems pretty bad at the moment, though Wizardsmoke seems to have fixed the worst of it.

PVP participation is decent, though it is mainly in organised events and tournaments. Anti-PK groups did too good of a job patrolling shardfalls and as a result.. those are the last areas you will find a PK'er. Guildwars as it is now.. WILDY unpopular and not going to be used.

The new life innate for heal strength on other players is AWESOME and we eagerly await more support style abilities.

MAWR BOSSES (or finished boss AI) AND DUNGEONS PLEASE (group activities for the win)

 

Very true! This is something I wanted to point out myself.

This is also even worse for Alchemists: while a high level spell like Resurrection requires a total of 5 reagents, a very simple and minimally effective healing potion requires 10.

Reagents cost 20 (or was it 40?) gold pieces each, and you need hundreds of them just to brew a dozen potions...
If you gather them, it will take you literally days of hard work just to get enough for a few potions.
If you plant them, it will take you a huge plantation, and again days of hard work for a very dim return.

Lots of TLC is needed here.

 

As a purist mage (no melee and in magic boosting cloth which is nearly suicide with current game design philosophy) I FINALLY managed to dip my toes into a 4 skull zone last week (thanks to Riya's Large Red Spider from her holiday super sale). Intentionally NOT turning off skills (except for when I was training up purify burst because of how stupidly slow that spell levels and I really wanted rez to help other people), I only just dinged lvl 40 on Saturday. I don't play every day (real life doesn't allow for it sadly, but I generally get 3-4 days every week for a 2-4 hours a day with upwards of 5-6 hours on Saturday) and the decay has made it nearly impossible for certain skills to advance by this point. Also, the shut up, don't think about it and just play style has effectively limited me from ever hitting a 4-5 tier zone without having a god like pet. T3 zones do not give me any xp whatsoever (I go into major XP debt trying to kill anything there, i.e. I spend over 1-2K killing things but they don't give anywhere near that in reward for killing) but T4 is unsurvivable for me for the most part (even with the spider of awesomeness, a lot of the mobs will ignore the spider and kill me in 4-5 hits, and if there are more than 2 enemies pulled in aggro the spider dies and then I die right after).

Yes, I am aware of the min/max philosophy of turn off everything you aren't using, but that is a really stupid design style so I don't do it because it isn't intuitive to turn off skills in a skill use system. It's easy to play to min/max design styles you are aware of, but I try to play how I think a new person unused to our system would most likely play.

 

What if you are training 15 skills?

 

Distribute it evenly. Who cares?

I think we're over complicating a lot of this with extra math. At the end of the day we should have a goal to keep everyone in the same hemisphere of power with some people getting a marginal advantage based on situational choices (like you cast Moon Magic at Night).

 

Then you're not min/maxing a build. 8^)

 

Still drunk from yesterday winter telethon?

 

Min/maxing is not a good thing, it's a byproduct of bad game design.

Anyone can exploit bad game design, it doesn't take a smart person. Min/maxing shows a lack of intelligence and imagination, imo. Anyone can force the game down into the lowest common denominator. The game is limited by technology and its design. Monsters don't handle kiting well, so you kite. AI doesn't understand what you're saying, so you just click on key words. Players can't counter stuns so you stun.

It's not rocket science, it's just a lot of time spent exploiting the limitations. In the case of training 15 skills at a time verses 1, that would be a player action that we wished to reward.

 

Also my PVP tally for this bracket. (always flagged)
Event kills: 214 Event deaths: 46
Open PVP Kills: 114 Open PVP deaths: 12

Most common build that killed me was air mage, with water mage coming close second. Hardest build for me to kill was light armour ranger with life magic. Hardest opponents for me to fight: Turin, Mimner, Number4, Badname, Margaritte

Successful pickpockets on me: 26 (6 of whom were devs) Times i got my stuff back after being pick pocketed: 20

Most effective skills used against me: Lightning/chain lightning, Ice field, confusion and disabling shot.

Areas where i encountered the most open PVP: Grunvald Shardfall and Owlshead.

 

Great post, sums up my feelings about the subject. I think the min/max added with decay will be a big turn off for new players, especially casual players. I really hope this can be more simplified and become fun to play. It's not fun combat at the moment at all for me.

*edit* btw I would consider myself usually as an upper medium to hardcore player when it comes to playing mmo's, (though not so much in Sota because combat just isn't fun for me to play atm) many people I know fall into the casual category. I'm trying to think of them as I play the game.

 

I ussualy don't make statements like this...

But Decay Sucks...

The current system is not good at all and frustrating.
We are being punished for simply not having the time to play.

Also idk if they changed it yet, but its not suppose to decay until you die? Is that in now or something planned?
Cuz seems like I just loose xp when I use something after having to work 2 double shifts in a row...

 

applies on skill use also at the moment.

 

Yea, that's just crazy...its just way too frequent. I know it happens as short as 2 days, myb 1.

 

Sounds great @Chris !

Just take away the decay over time mechanic... its not right man, Noone should be punished for not being able to play for a set amount of time.
Having it taken away from getting killed is totally fine, but this "slow" drain of skill is just not intuitive to how people play games.

 

train str, dex, int is very slow and a large drain, but i think this was intended. Most passives seemed to go at a decent rate compared to active skills, but attunements could probably do with leveling a touch faster in my opinion.

 

Id say you are spot on with that.

 

Regarding Decay:

I think it should be more intense the more GM's you get. But then my goal would be to keep everyone in the same playing field. People often mistake my desires as a way for me to level faster without "working for it". That's not what I'm trying to do at all. I'm trying to make SOTA a game where everyone is closer to being similar in power so that we can have competitive pvp. There's a huge difference between those two things. I think Decay is a major part of that.

There are A LOT of people that don't want competitive pvp either because they're on the top of the mountain or because they don't care much about pvp. I wish we'd stop listening to these people on this subject as their answer will always be "just give me as much power as I can min/max and don't slow me down".

Regarding Innates:

I just want this to be competitive. If one person can get the innates to level 100 and I'm still in the 30's, that's not competitive. The rate at which skills increase is relative to competition in pvp (for me). I'm a killer playing style and so that's how I see the world. I don't care if I'm level 100, I only care if I can have enough power to kill other players. This is where people are getting confused because they have their achievement glasses on. When I see that someone is level 100 something, I just think "ok that person has too much time on their hands". I never EVER think, "that person has really accomplished something special". So to answer your question @Chris. The innates go up way too fast for people with too much time on their hands, and way to slow for people that just want to kill those guys.

I hope that makes sense because that's the crux of everything I think is wrong with grinding in this game.

 

I'm all for skill decay....for all skills above 100.
Until then? No skill decay of any kind, ever, if a skill is 1-100 and I'm a happy customer.

 

For me that would be a nice way to do it, that way casuals to medium players won't give up early in the game knowing they'd never reach to 100 in skills, and I can still power up past 100 and not feel like I'm leaving friends, guildies, family in the dust.