Training agianst a Gust ball is NOT training, needs to be fixe ASAP

As always I could be wrong! I am posting from home currently. I will ask the server programmer tomorrow how it is implemented and the producer how it is SUPPOSED to be implemented.

 

ok, I am not a noob and spent literally ALL day in single player and can't make enough money to train. Wanna try again?

 

Yeah, I thought someone mentioned a while back it was all items, but I thought it was a bug so didn't want to attempt it especially if it had been fixed.

As to the matter of the skills again...it also feels like it is too easy to get to the second tier.

 

I went straight to s valley road and made 1000 gold quicky. Why are you having money issues?

 

I find that financially, the new system is easier on my pockets that the previous. 100g flat rate here and there? I'm sure this will change but right now..liking it so much better than before. Simple to go adventure, sell some trash, train, rinse and repeat.

 

have been. all day. Now I am logged out as its not working. I got better things to waste a whole day on.

 

Then sorry ur doing something wrong I've made 3k killing skellys in s vally trying to level.

 

Second ..

 

If oyu are killing Skelies you are already pretty skilled out or playing with swords, which already had a bunch, or oyu hit a Gust ball for a while. If oyu started fresh skill trees, and went out adventuring you are NOT killing skellies right off the bat.

 

Please don't!

 

I disagree. I was still in the single digits with my first tier skills, with 0 dex and maybe Str 5 and taking on multiple skeletons at Solace Bridge. Died once, but that was because I didn't notice the plague DoT from a previous zombie.

I'm no expert, but having multiple Defensive skills early on= huge difference. You can turn off training for them later once you get a little beefed up but they are invaluable at the beginning. Also, make sure you are turning OFF training for skills you don;t intend to use.

 

I don't usually chime in on threads like these, because I don't have a lot of MMO experience, and I can see the valid arguments coming from each side. However, I wanted to pop in and say that I had a blast today hanging out in Owl's Head pounding the stuffing out of my gustball! I saw a lot of folks that I have never met before all playing together and generally making merry. It was like Christmas morning, and I even saw a few Santa Clauses running around in their Yule hats.

Sure it was loud and bright, and there were people running around sporting underwear as outerwear, but there was this jovial, carnival like atmosphere and it was just great fun. Once my xp pool is spent, and I am not rewarded with music and lights every few seconds for leveling up, then yes, I will go out and adventure. I love adventuring, but it's not that much fun to feel like a weak kitten when you know you have all this xp in a pool that begs to be spent!

Like many other players have pointed out, today was not a normal day, and I don't believe it's indicative of how the system will play out with a full wipe. Today felt like a party, and it was fabulous. I say everyone should lighten up a little and appreciate the great fun we have together as a community figuring out how this new system works.

My hat's off to the team for pulling this use-based system together. It feels like a million bucks <3

 

No I went straight to the skeletons in s valley lowest level ones with 0 polearm skill and stayEd there till I was killing them in 3 blows less than 2 hours

 

I say the dev-team should officially formalize the idea.

Set up a Gymnasium building with some of those training dummies and some invincible gustballs, and have users who want to do so whack away at them until they have consumed their entire supply of experience.

Just put them far away from the trainer, so I don't have to bother seeing them.

 

I spent all day in Novia, and the closest I got to Owl's Head was in sight of the rift. Hopefully there will still be Gustball Disco tomorrow morning so that I can see it for myself, but I am too tired to log back on tonight.

I figured out the Tap Soul thingy very quickly, even though I only trained Tap Soul because I misunderstood how it worked. At least I didn't do it in a city. But clearly there's a point of diminishing returns with these, and if this is all due to hidden-stat XP, then let's enjoy the silliness while it lasts.

I'm just glad that I can solo pairs of wolves and bandits again. (Adventuring level on V-key stats window is now 8.)

 

If players were expected to level naturally, monsters needed a serious balance pass before this system went live. Determining where to go and what to fight has become extremely difficult in R21. Areas that were considered prime candidates for advancing in previous releases are seriously imbalanced. For example in Greymark Forest and Ravensmoor (above ground), monsters (elves and skeletons) zip around at incredible speed and attack in huge packs of six or more. Their hitpoints also have either been dramatically increased or player damage is way down from previous releases. (As an aside, when I entered Greymark forest for the first time, the path was absolutely filled with player skeletons as far as the eye could see all the way to the first broken cart.)

I fought a ghost in Owl's Head's sewers for 10 minutes straight on QA yesterday... almost broke my two-handed sword. Tried to fight a red spider in the corridor beyond... all six from the nearby corridors and the room with the switch immediately mobbed me.

The proper way to level right now appears to be: have a tamed obsidian bear/polar bear/obsidian wolf, use it to kill things to build an xp pool, go back to Owl's Head and practice the skills you actually want to increase on a gustball.

There just isn't a clear route to natural progression in R21 because of the balance issues.

I'd also recommend doubling or tripling starting player hitpoints and focus. Small spiders are lethal even after burning your initial pool of xp, and the only targets for advancement seem to be the weak skeletons in Kingsroad and Solace Bridge.

Another gripe: the skill I use most frequently in normal play, Double Strike, went up a whopping 3 points in over eight hours of play (20 -> 23), whereas my sword skill for autoattack has reached 86! Even skills that I have spammed for the sole intent of improving using the bear+gustball method have only reached the high teens or low twenties. Advancement is seriously in need of a balance pass as well.

 

I agree that mobs are too quick, I can't hit anything any more, and posted feedback to that effect myself.

I remember reading that the areas would be marked on the overland map designating the difficulty level. This will be a great help for new players.

But since you know that Greymark and Sewers are not beginner areas: I don't think we should expect to be able to combat elves in Greymark or a ghost in the sewers on the very first day of playing the game before we have acquired the appropriate skills through gameplay. And skills shouldn't (and won't) advance solely by spamming a gustball. It makes no sense for a new player to be able to tame a bear on the very first day of playing.

We are seeing the first pass of a use based system, but it is skewed by players starting out with a huge pool of adventuring experience from R 20 that really wouldn't be available to a new player.

 

Trust me -- I'm the antithesis of a new player. I knew exactly when I felt I should have been hitting Greymark and Ravensmoor. I run (or ran) a monthly event where I needed to create characters I would play as NPCs in my events. I could take a blank character slot and create a desired adversary around level 35 in 8-12 hours, and then do it four times straight in R20 and prior releases. I know when and where to level and seek out exploits (like bear+gustball method I describe above) to try to trim the time down on the process.

Leveling in R21 with the current system is going to multiply the amount of time involved to do the same thing by a factor of four or more (and perhaps much more if exploits like the one I describe as removed).

The main point, though, is everything is terribly balanced at the moment. For example, I went to the Epitaph this evening. The monsters there were placed almost in reverse order of power. At the entrance were giant crocs that were strong enough individually they could defeat me and the bear working together. A little ways in were elven underdwellers. They put up a stiff fight and were pretty even matched singly. Deeper still -- satyr and human underdwellers that I could defeat in pairs without the bear.

Or here's another example -- South Grunvald Desert. (S)Corpions, small corpions and desert wolves. Corpions were an even match (and one of the few monsters I've encountered that don't move at light speed... though still a bit on the fast side). The wolves were balanced for characters several "levels" higher, and what is worse were often concentrated in large packs.

There just isn't any sensical balance or progression in the current release. (Just to be clear, I am not criticizing the move from levels to use-based, but rather the fact inadequate time was spent balancing the system and world before pushing it live.)

I would have liked to have been able to give some critical feedback in QA, but I was working on 3 hours of sleep Friday, Saturday and Sunday because of the event I ran on the 22nd.

Oh, and by the way, that "huge" pool of experience seems to evaporate rather quickly. I was level 60 at the end of R20 (2.7 million xp), but already burned through that pool. (Either that or the pool is just accelerating new xp gain like previous releases -- either way I burned through my starting xp in the first hour or two.) I've got a friend who started from scratch today (he's not in QA and only played R20 briefly), and he is noticing the same issues with progression. The roadrunner skeletons were also harassing him.

 

Just to understand your issue: are you distressed because you are no longer able to become a powerful warrior after a few hours of gameplay and because exploits are not working as quickly as you would like? Are you advocating that players should not have to gradually gain skills by real adventuring?

 

As per the very first line of my very first post in this thread: "If players were expected to level naturally, monsters needed a serious balance pass before this system went live."

A system should be designed to encourage the style of play desired, not punish it. If the only way to advance with a feeling of progress and a minimum of frustration is to do something nonsensical like let a bear fight for you, then beat on a stuffed ball, then that is exactly what players are going to do.

I think Richard might have discovered something to that effect when he read the feedback on Ultima III.