We can't dumb down the game any more than this! YAY

No it is not. You seem to have an "all or nothing" mindset. It does not have to be exactly the same... most RPGs and MMO's take something from D&D which in turn could be said most fantasy games take something from Tolkien. Don't be naive.

 

Yeah would love to see different dragons as well, maybe with different fight mechanics and different kinds of attacks, like acid, lightning, poison, etc. But I would also like to see special reward stuff from each one added to the current loot tables to give an added bonus to encourage players to tackle the challenge. Also... dragon skin/scales and other parts for armor crafting or other forms of crafting would be great as well.

 

I think we can all just agree and summarize this as simply "Boy I'd love it if this game had loot" lol.

 

lol, yes ^^

 

I might be the only person who thought buff duration was OK the way it was. I prefer to manage my buffs every few minutes to taking away my focus for a longer, ridiculously lasting buff. I was happy with a few minutes for Strength of Earth and almost two minutes for Inner Strength. Now, SoE has a silly duration of 16 min at level 53, but IS went down to just over a minute at level 51 (I think it was nearly halved, and only having it for one minute kind of stinks).

I prefer to have maybe 5 minute, non-stacking buffs that don't take away focus. And that's only at higher levels, it gives you something to work for. I was excited to get Air's Embrace to about 2 minutes and IS was getting there, and now the whole structure of leveling them up has changed. I'm not counting Light, that can last forever and I wouldn't care. I play with a fully unlocked deck and would just buff when the appropriate buff came up and the old one was almost over. It put a little challenge into the game without being a burden, IMO, and I solo almost all of the time.

 

The @Baron Drocis Fondorlatos is correct about a great many things in what he stated in his initial post and is quite accurate in most all the things he says, which can also apply to others who have commented here on the subject. Yet there is or was little mention of why such changes were made and is left to believe that public opinion had lead to the total of it's needing change. What was left out, is that which developers cannot promise or tell of until delivered and what spaces were opened within an ease or change of our combat design that would best accommodate their delivery. We can't assume our monster pool is filled, nor can we assume that those new monster would be of the same strength magnitude. This is where it leads me to believe that the only logical conclusion of our future is a place where larger dangers exist than those we have now.

Some see things from specific while others look to the over all picture, some see the minute detail, while others may see that our mounted combat will be limited by the areas provided, because it's as easy as measuring the height in the branches of our trees. To some, @Baron Drocis Fondorlatos 's precision view of our skills cannot be comprehended because the minute detail of his observations have allot of understanding which is needed as a prerequisite to seeing all his reasoning. As well, some may not comprehend some of what I may say because the larger picture also has it's prerequisites to understand all it's meanings. Yet it's through both such differing views, "no matter who or what the information source", that a forum such as ours can "begin" to see a much clearer picture of what, why, when and where our changes could make good sense for all our assumptions, predictions or conclusions for our better suggestions that our developers could better make use of.

I want to see monsters that take a hunting party of 40 to bring down with half of those players having died within the proses. Others may feel differently, but I think the current changes have made an opening for larger game to come.

EVL and The Bear Tavern have invited us all to hunt together. Maybe "we all" should take those invitations so we can see better comment from what we all could see there together to be on the same page for our observations. Maybe some here could even solo something large so we can see what that demonstration brings.
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...ar-tavern-pub-crawl-sundays-at-2pm-cst.77626/
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...-build-the-bloodshed-evl-26-apr-19-jul.87564/
~Time Lord~

 

I'd love to attend but 8PM GMT is 4AM over here - the adventure party will just end up having a zombie companion :)

 

Technically if you could get a party that size together, you could have that happen now if you took a bunch of lower level players to some of the boss areas. It would be nice to see some challenge areas where it can auto-add everyone to a large group while the challenge is active and reward everyone accordingly afterwards.

 

With the recent massive XP bonus... the game rewards players improperly with a level grind which just doesn't make sense for this game.
Spam abilities for gain since they do cost XP.. It's a very bad setup.
Much better would be to stop the ridiculous grind for abilities like this. Give players all normal abilities to choose from.
Let players just 'have' skill points to spend as they choose right up to around rank 40 equivalent.
Then from there new abilities are earned by accomplishing specific task and gear or skill checks - thus making them more powerful.

Almost all the abilities trigger to level with no requirements or target selected. It's just ...

 

Looking at huge giant skeletal remains in the new seguanna area I suddenly thought wow now what if the earth started pounding like jurrasic park and an alive version of one Of these creatures was running at me? Yikes, Scarry surprises like that would be so lovely and atmospheric


edited to add

 

I know exactly what you mean @Numa I'm still recovering from having drank one of these when I was invited to that OoC hunt
(I'm trying to make the rounds a visit each of our most active guilds that use our official SOTA forums).

Spoiler

Red Bull gives you dragon wings

Red Bull was first invented in Thailand in the year 1976 to keep truck drivers awake and costs only around 15 Thai Baht = 25 US Cents.
Yet the carbonated brand from Europe is imported into Thailand and still sells for around $2 USD

 

And you seem to have an "if it's not D&D you're not doing it right" mindset. I happen to LIKE the deck system. If you don't there are plenty of games out there that already are what you want. I already have an entire library of games that use systems based to varying degrees on D&D (including, but not limited to licensed D&D products). I don't need another.

 

Once again... an "all or nothing" or "extreme" view. Never said or even hinted that it had to be that way. Just said there were systems out there that already had worked out similar mechanics and had years of testing. D&D was one of them. And lets get this straight... Most people coming to this game are old Ultima Online players which had a lot of D&D features so get off your high horse there "Mr. I don't need another game like D&D". Just because it uses some features or similarities does not mean its the same game. Do you even game bro?

 

Get off of yours. They did a poll on it a few months ago, almost half the user-base listed the deck system as the single feature they liked the MOST. You said you wanted to remove the deck system, despite you're "oh it's not all or nothing" you've yet to come up with any ideas as to how they can "partially remove" it.

Does it need balancing? Yes, but so has every single system ever developed. The only MMOs that don't get re-balancing regularly are in their death-throes. Should there be a distinction made between buffs and counters? Probably. I'd like to see a wider verity of combo skills. Combo-skills need a balanced pass. None of these are fundamental problems that require a major redesign of the deck system. The only fundamental problem with the deck system is the unwillingness to implement trade-offs between schools of skills (I'd even argue that's not truly fundamental, but just a balance-pass away). @Baron Drocis Fondorlatos ' suggestion of wiping buffs when you change decks may kind-of solve part of the issue, but ultimately it does it in a somewhat bland way. I'd rather they have negative side effects, and stacking them causes less duration increase and instead makes them more powerful (including making the negatives stronger).

Trade-offs were something we used to have with attunement, but unfortunately they removed that, and the game has suffered for it. Magic should interact. It should do strange and wonderful things. You want see a game that Implemented magic in a dynamic, fun way? Get four people together and play Magicka by Arrowhead Game Studios. It's completely hectic, with what someone else is doing (usually one of your friends, unintentionally) interacting with what you're doing in awesome and/or terrible ways. That's what happens with you throw "doing what we've done for 40 years" out the window: you can make something new, something fun, something that's not been done before.

So, yeah, I game. Have you played anything other then D&D?

 

Just a point of clarification. The poll was posted on a Sunday morning and closed the next day. It was not advertised and only the forum posters knew about it. It is not accurate in any way or form. For it to be accurate the survey should have been mailed out to all backers. The small sample size coupled with such a short duration and only on this forums cannot be considered scientific at all.

 

Reading comprehension dude... reading comprehension. Please go back and re-read and then do so again... I never said to get rid of the deck system. I said if they keep having problems with it they should review whether or not its worth keeping. As far as other games including D&D to base things off of, I was referring to the buffs, durations, balances etc etc ad nauseum.

I game a lot, have gamed, and will continue to game... many types as well. It's how I can see there are so many possibilities and other systems that we can take inspiration from. Don't be so narrow minded. Just because you have beef with a beloved game doesn't mean it's not good nor does it mean we cannot take something good away from it. No, you do not have to reinvent the wheel just to have fun. There are many things you can take and twist from the original and still be new and refreshing (especially regarding spells & buffs).

 

Yeah this is a problem, not everyone goes to the forums all the time. It's usually the *same* people so that's not really getting a feel of everyone. I know some will feel that people should always check the forums but not everyone does. If you want a poll of all players, have it where they login and you may see a better poll or even make it last for a longer period to get people who come and go from the game.

 

This would be a much more useful poll.

The one on the forum was nice to get an idea, but by no means should be treated as fact or truth as it fails many necessary assumptions required for any statistical analysis, one of which mentioned above being "representative sample".

 

Yeah, I would even take it a step further and email those players who have not logged in for a while. They could simply be dissatisfied with the game or they could be off playing something else like the new Diablo 3 - Necro expansion for example. Email them a poll/survey and get their input as well and see why they are not still hooked as well. Some game companies already do this.

 

Not to mention that the game has been in persistance long enough that the people who who didnt like the system, most likely have left.
Im playing this game, yet of the large group of people i brought into the game with me, im actually of the minority left playing it. If you were to actually account for the people who ALREADY left over mechanics.. well thats a different story.
Hense why the *polls* are so.. almost un reliable at this point.

Which made me laugh about decay.. this far along and its a near 50/50 split of STILL people who want it done differently Lol.

That being said, the combat mechanics are such a massive part, if you didnt like them, chances are your not still here 6 months later to take that poll in the first place.