Update Discussion: May 25, 2018

[srand]

The update notes are here: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?1507-Update-Notes-May-25-2018

Discussion in this thread! (But please remember to report any bugs through the in-game reporting system as well.)

Edit: Rather than starting a new discussion thread for today's bug-fixing hotfix, we're just going to add to this ongoing discussion thread. The hotfix notes are here: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?1519-Update-Notes-May-27-2018

[Aionlasting]

The update notes are here: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?1507-Update-Notes-May-25-2018

Discussion in this thread! (But please remember to report any bugs through the in-game reporting system as well.)

I saw some animation changes but nothing to suggest the new system is in place. Is this correct? If so, is there any ETA on when it will be ready? I thought the previous blog stated we would see it this patch. I could be mistaken of course, maybe wishful thinking! hah.

[Ortallus]

The AOE nerf rage is real. I am curious, because as I understand it hasn't been described very well:

Does the damage apply full to the first 3 targets, and then diminish beyond that, or is it as one person suggests and the maximum damage per target is simply spread out among the various targets if more than 3 are there? Is there any way we could see an exact formula?

What was the purpose of the nerf, exactly, and what are the expected side effects that might not be desired?

[Mbaums]

I have not tested all of the changes so far but I think the AoE nerf is a solid change quick fix. I hope mods/armor in the future loosen the 'drop off point' if it is very steep. For those that don't know, some classes were able to pull 15+ mobs and AoE them down Very fast. Like 1 person doing the DPS of 2+ full groups fast. I feel as long as the total damage per additional mob goes up past 3 NPCs, I don't think it'll be a big deal. We'll see though!

The knife changes look strong. Interesting choice that mez did not make it into the "not facing you" list, but I guess it would make the psych-knife combo too much of a 'must have'

[poulter]

Burst /AOE damage for both Archery and Fire was OP for high level players in max crafted with augmented gear even on mobs that dropped level 60 /65 gear (i.e. Gazluk mobs).

Personally, using a Fire /BC AOE build I have 1 or 2-shotted 17 panthers in Kur at once and 7 wolves in the Gazluk wolf cave in a single fight with very minimal danger of dying.
The number of mobs killed was only limited by how many mobs I could aggro for one fight.

This was a 'bit' unbalanced and needed to be addressed.

The current changes will no doubt be reviewed for potential change in the next patch, so it is worthwhile for people to provide considered and respectful feedback to the devs.

[Ortallus]

I have not tested all of the changes so far but I think the AoE nerf is a solid change quick fix. I hope mods/armor in the future loosen the 'drop off point' if it is very steep. For those that don't know, some classes were able to pull 15+ mobs and AoE them down Very fast. Like 1 person doing the DPS of 2+ full groups fast. I feel as long as the total damage per additional mob goes up past 3 NPCs, I don't think it'll be a big deal. We'll see though!

The knife changes look strong. Interesting choice that mez did not make it into the "not facing you" list, but I guess it would make the psych-knife combo too much of a 'must have'

I'm really surprised more people haven't tried running KF/Necro or KF/AH. With Graz (whose special attack is a stun + self heal) you'll be able to do even more interesting things with AH though, including being able to use 'not facing' stuff even if you're holding aggro.


Burst /AOE damage for both Archery and Fire was OP for high level players in max crafted with augmented gear even on mobs that dropped level 60 /65 gear (i.e. Gazluk mobs).

Personally, using a Fire /BC AOE build I have 1 or 2-shotted 17 panthers in Kur at once and 7 wolves in the Gazluk wolf cave in a single fight with very minimal danger of dying.
The number of mobs killed was only limited by how many mobs I could aggro for one fight.

This was a 'bit' unbalanced and needed to be addressed.

The current changes will no doubt be reviewed for potential change in the next patch, so it is worthwhile for people to provide considered and respectful feedback to the devs.

Thanks for confirming what I pretty much figured but was insulted for assuming on the Discord, in regards to Gazluk, and late game AOE in general. It seems some people think that anything that affects their build, that they brag about being OP, is the end of the world.

I think the balance also really puts crowd control into the running as something needed. If there's a room with too many pulls, your CC can mez/root/fear some of them, so the AOE can do its thing. It also creates other elements of strategy being required, instead of "Mod AOE into next week, all 6 party members use all AOE. GG dungeon cleared" which, again, I think is to the advantage to the game as a whole.

[spider91301]

Awole_Isd I agree and what I dont get even more is why nerf shield and sword aoe when it barely does any like wtf I can understand nerfing bard bc and magic skill aoe but come on really you had to mess with my sword and shield

Whatever intill they increase the level cap I might as well hunt lower stuff for cash inless i have a badass group literly today just 10 minutes ago went into the slime room in gazkeep with my group and got ganked ra*** we all died only 2 lived also the power regen seems slower


This is the most hardcore half baked blanket approach I have ever seen

[TimeBomb]

This patch looks awesome. Been starting out knife fighting myself, so this'll encourage me even more to level it up.

I do agree with awol_lsd. Unintuitive and potentially frustrating change that may nerf certain scenarios that shouldn't have been nerfed, despite other scenarios being problematic.


Fixed a bug that caused some buffs to stick around for an arbitrary length of time after the caster had left the area (most obviously with Battle Chemistry mutations, since they last the longest). The intent is that any buffs that come from an ability (and that last longer than a few seconds) should abort if the buff's caster is not in the same server area as the person they buffed, OR if the caster switches to a different combat skill.
This seems a little odd to me. What's the reason behind this intention? This is another change that seems unintuitive and potentially frustrating, or at least odd sounding. I wouldn't expect a buff that someone gave to me to disappear because of what that person changed after they buffed me. I already have the buff, why take it away? It shouldn't matter that the other person moved locations or changed classes - they used their ability on me, I got the buff, that's that. Taking it away just feels bad and seems unintuitive. I can imagine a lot of "why is my buff gone?" questions. Is this trying to fix a specific problematic scenario?

[sudostahp]

That's a disappointing change to AOE. From the beginning, the trade-off for BC was high AOE and poor single-target damage. For an advanced skill it now seems mediocre at best, and it'll become even less relevant for the increasingly group-oriented content. I'll need to see how it plays out, but the past year of development has put the game on a different trajectory than the one I had enjoyed greatly so many years ago. At this point I can only hope that the development pendulum swings back to the game's sandbox roots.

[Ortallus]

as others mentioned some AOE dmg for some classes was OP as hell and needed nerfed... this AOE change was NOT the fix for it that should had came....

this blanket aoe nerf is simply a cop out fix for it + another attempt to "force" people to play the way he wants us to.... many aoe builds didn't have crazy dmg but what this does is makes it so everyone HAS to slow grind any time they want to level another skill and it's stupid to force people to slow grind threw content 5, 7,... hell 15+ times....

not to mention this severly hurts people properlly leveling in MANY places it is impossible to pull mobs 1-2 at a time.. meaning it is impossible to not get hit by this change and people that are leveling normally and don't have the gear/skills are still going to feel this change.

why the fk not just fix the mobs... they have been fked forever.. fix the broken builds (left the rest alone) and then and only then AFTER these thigns are adressed start looking into blanket adjustments like this....

this is so fk'n stupid.

I find your statement to be indicative of everything that is wrong with entitlement in the gaming industry today. Thank you for so eloquently pointing it out.

[TimeBomb]

I find your statement to be indicative of everything that is wrong with entitlement in the gaming industry today. Thank you for so eloquently pointing it out.

Come on man, let's try to be glass half full today. My personal perspective is that gamers have often been passionate very much like that for decades. People are entitled to their opinions, and they're so passionate about things like awol_lsd is because they care a lot about the game they're playing, and that's awesome. Most professionals I've seen are aware of this - they're gamers themselves, right? For example, the game director of Overwatch has a particularly famous ridiculously aggressive hate post he made, targeted at the developers, due to a new raid at the time in... Everquest, I think it was. Feedback can be given in all forms, and weeded through and understood without taking offense to it, especially if you're a professional.

Either way, let's leave the interpretation to the mods and admins. Even what I said here may be too unnecessary. Let's get back to talking about the update :).

[VanHelsing]

I don't have a problem with the aoe nerfs mainly because my main source of damage is single target, so this buff didn't really effect me.

But even so the AOE nerf is something temporary until he nerfs the op AOE stuff (Atleast i hope it is). I also would like to know if he has set a date to implement the proper AOE mod nerfs for specific skills instead of this all around AOE nerf. If not i highly recommend reverting because of the amount of problems he has potentially created for the noobs, and alot of veterans don't see themselves playing the game until its properly tuned. (not good when the server population is slowly declining again)

Problems:
1)Running dungeons in which packs and nearby packs are present (Which is just about every dungeon in the game, even Kur packs consist of 4-5 mobs with another group of mobs always close by) will now almost always require a party member. From the changes he has implemented over the years and this one now i don't really see soloing as much of an option. It's certainly still possible but if you want to progress properly i don't recommend it. *Especially if your just starting out*

2)Forcing Vets (Geared players) to rotate to lower tiered zones to farm out necessary mats/gear. From the aoe nerfs the geared players who only farmed wolf cave because of the big pack pulls and can no longer clear it as fast (Therefore it is no longer the best source of income for them) they will migrate to the lower leveled zones so that they can actually 1 shot mass packs. (*i know because i am currently doing this*)

3)Forcing players to prioritize single target damage--- with the aoe nerf which is pretty big, there is really no reason to priortize AOE. With what he did he is better off just removing all AOE to prevent any future complaining about why AOE is so weak. With that being said, your better off getting single target mod abilities *There are alot more of those* and just 1 shotting every mob 1 by 1, it will be slightly slower but we should be able to bounce back and get past this if the AOE nerf stays. The plus side is we will kill bosses alot faster since now we don't have to prioritize AOE on our kits for farming. (That is until he sees people killing bosses to fast and buffs bosses)

I have many more in which i will make a post thread about(Assuming i don't forget). But these are 3 i came up with, the others i forgot them i'll get some sleep and i know ill remember them by tommorow.

[Aionlasting]

Well as A 73 BC / 70 ICE all I can say is I support the AOE mechanic changes. AoE was always too powerful in its current state and this is a good start towards addressing its ridiculous potential. Perhaps it will allow for more thinking in gameplay, more variation among players, allow for things like buffers/debuffers/ccers'/healers to get some playtime. Even in high groups in GK I would run my AoE build and it was pretty effective single target or AoE target so the argument that BC had a trade off is rather silly. Unless you didn't play BC at high lvls then I guess I could understand your ignorance.

Either way, I'm sure there will continue to be rebalancing and changes to get things just right and I'm okay with allowing the development team the room and space they need to get this right even If it means nurfs here and there. Better now in beta than later live at launch. But I think this change makes sense to how AoE works in general. Individual class balancing around this new mechanic for AoE will surely follow and help bring the various AoE class playstyles in line with one another.

[INXS]

I used to 1 shot pretty much everything in Kur tower , caste haste gather as many as I could and done. We knew nerfs were coming what I found trying out new Battle Chemistry mechanics is you want to kill that group of critters it's not happening in 1 shot so you'll have to use a few more abilities. Let's think about this we are capped at lv 70-80 atm but we are not at end game level, makes sense to be able to to be "powerful" when your lv 100-120.

[spider91301]

Was loving the aoe nerfing till my sword and shield abilities got nerfed and got rekt in gatzkeep

[spider91301]

I don't have a problem with the aoe nerfs mainly because my main source of damage is single target, so this buff didn't really effect me.

But even so the AOE nerf is something temporary until he nerfs the op AOE stuff (Atleast i hope it is). I also would like to know if he has set a date to implement the proper AOE mod nerfs for specific skills instead of this all around AOE nerf. If not i highly recommend reverting because of the amount of problems he has potentially created for the noobs, and alot of veterans don't see themselves playing the game until its properly tuned. (not good when the server population is slowly declining again)

Problems:
1)Running dungeons in which packs and nearby packs are present (Which is just about every dungeon in the game, even Kur packs consist of 4-5 mobs with another group of mobs always close by) will now almost always require a party member. From the changes he has implemented over the years and this one now i don't really see soloing as much of an option. It's certainly still possible but if you want to progress properly i don't recommend it. *Especially if your just starting out*

2)Forcing Vets (Geared players) to rotate to lower tiered zones to farm out necessary mats/gear. From the aoe nerfs the geared players who only farmed wolf cave because of the big pack pulls and can no longer clear it as fast (Therefore it is no longer the best source of income for them) they will migrate to the lower leveled zones so that they can actually 1 shot mass packs. (*i know because i am currently doing this*)

3)Forcing players to prioritize single target damage--- with the aoe nerf which is pretty big, there is really no reason to priortize AOE. With what he did he is better off just removing all AOE to prevent any future complaining about why AOE is so weak. With that being said, your better off getting single target mod abilities *There are alot more of those* and just 1 shotting every mob 1 by 1, it will be slightly slower but we should be able to bounce back and get past this if the AOE nerf stays. The plus side is we will kill bosses alot faster since now we don't have to prioritize AOE on our kits for farming. (That is until he sees people killing bosses to fast and buffs bosses)

I have many more in which i will make a post thread about(Assuming i don't forget). But these are 3 i came up with, the others i forgot them i'll get some sleep and i know ill remember them by tommorow.

Yeah Im about to hog all the nooby areas as well If my growth is going to be stunted cuz of this half assed blanket fix then Im going to
dont get me wrong Im not doing this out of spite to get back at the admins or players but if its the only way to progress and for me to keep interest in the game then goddammit I will do it legit screw everyone else I want to have fun to

[Aionlasting]

Yeah Im about to hog all the nooby areas as well If my growth is going to be stunted cuz of this half assed blanket fix then Im going to
dont get me wrong Im not doing this out of spite to get back at the admins or players but if its the only way to progress and for me to keep interest in the game then goddammit I will do it legit screw everyone else I want to have fun to


Hey man, you need a time out and a chill pill.

[Mcnasty]

as others mentioned some AOE dmg for some classes was OP as hell and needed nerfed... this AOE change was NOT the fix for it that should had came....

this blanket aoe nerf is simply a cop out fix for it + another attempt to "force" people to play the way he wants us to.... many aoe builds didn't have crazy dmg but what this does is makes it so everyone HAS to slow grind any time they want to level another skill and it's stupid to force people to slow grind threw content 5, 7,... hell 15+ times....

not to mention this severly hurts people properlly leveling in MANY places it is impossible to pull mobs 1-2 at a time.. meaning it is impossible to not get hit by this change and people that are leveling normally and don't have the gear/skills are still going to feel this change.

why the fk not just fix the mobs... they have been fked forever.. fix the broken builds (left the rest alone) and then and only then AFTER these thigns are adressed start looking into blanket adjustments like this....

this is so fk'n stupid.

I applaud you'r honesty.

[INXS]

Archer/BC here double Nerf on archery and on BC, things are bit rough, this is beta after all, adapt and move on this is they want the game to be it ain't that bad like I said can't kill everything in 1 shot but 3, how about giving it a few days/weeks to throughly give a constructive reviews than just whines.

I used lv 24-30 BC to lv up Priest yesterday in Kur mobs still go down, not 15-20 at once anymore, no more instant gratificlation kill but still achievable end result, difference now is you actually have to work for you kills not just push 1 button.

[ArkadyRandom]

as others mentioned some AOE dmg for some classes was OP as hell and needed nerfed... this AOE change was NOT the fix for it that should had came....

this blanket aoe nerf is simply a cop out fix for it + another attempt to "force" people to play the way he wants us to.... many aoe builds didn't have crazy dmg but what this does is makes it so everyone HAS to slow grind any time they want to level another skill and it's stupid to force people to slow grind threw content 5, 7,... hell 15+ times....

not to mention this severly hurts people properlly leveling in MANY places it is impossible to pull mobs 1-2 at a time.. meaning it is impossible to not get hit by this change and people that are leveling normally and don't have the gear/skills are still going to feel this change.

why the fk not just fix the mobs... they have been fked forever.. fix the broken builds (left the rest alone) and then and only then AFTER these thigns are adressed start looking into blanket adjustments like this....

this is so fk'n stupid.We asked the bandaid be torn off quickly. You should have taken the time to be part of that discussion if you wanted to drag out the pain over a long period of short nerfs and re-nerfs. Crying and raging like a child is one way to get your point across though.

Of course the nerf is too broad. If you'd taken the time to read about how this balance cycle was going to work then you'd have know that and there will adjustments to individual skill lines as necessary.

[Ortallus]

Perhaps it will allow for more thinking in gameplay, more variation among players, allow for things like buffers/debuffers/ccers'/healers to get some playtime.

This. Right here, this.

The problem is, too many people want a single player game with a chat where they can brag about their accomplishments, and have no idea what an MMO, especially the likes of Pre-WoW MMOs, are all about. Well put.

[spider91301]

Hey man, you need a time out and a chill pill.

Not raging just stating what Im going to do not like its illegal to farm in lower level dungeons when they fix this or make it banable to go in lower level dungeon and hog kills let me know then I will have to find another solution besides guys gotta eat cheese costs money and I need to find a way to pay for food someway lol

Also as a side note that I dont care about steam reviews just went from very positive to mostly positive thats not a good thing

[ArkadyRandom]

This. Right here, this.

The problem is, too many people want a single player game with a chat where they can brag about their accomplishments, and have no idea what an MMO, especially the likes of Pre-WoW MMOs, are all about. Well put.
Playing solo should be perfectly viable. Early MMOs, except EQ, offered flexible game play. The game already provides magic bonus xp just because you "grouped". I'm not sure how much more hand-holding incentive "groupers" need. Classic first gen MMOs made people split xp, not give them a bonus, for grouping because it's so easy to steamroll content the more people you have.

AOE is out of control. People shouldn't be able to mow down packs of 5, 10, or 15 overland mobs without thinking. The same way groups shouldn't be able to steamroll group tuned content (as much as I think that shouldn't even be a thing). Players at all levels should need to use more than their AoE button DPS skill with the tank easy-mode faceroll taunting, and the priest one button healing them.

The point of balance changes, hopefully, is to tune game play so players need to approach content thoughtfully, no matter the party size not make one play style pay at the expense of another.

[srand]

Feedback is good - even the bits that are perhaps a bit pointed. We understand that you are passionate about the game and upset about this change.

I will not, however, tolerate posters throwing insults at others.

I've deleted a couple of posts that didn't contain actual feedback. Everyone, please try to keep it polite and on-topic so that I don't have to delete any more.

[Ortallus]

make all aoe builds obsolete, no reason to run any aoe skill


Simply untrue. I was running around with my aoe build absolutely fine. Even fighting up to 6 mobs. It goes slower, yes, but not completely obsolete. It just made it not ridiculously OP.

Furthermore, if you can't pull less than 4-7, then you'll just have to pull smart. Which I know is difficult for a lot of people.

Enchanter pulls with a mezz, you've got 20 seconds (6) left. Party of 6 should have 2 DPS. Peel off 2, and single target that's 4 left, which tank can handle. The damage on AOE is still enough to blast down those 4 after the 2 have been spanked.

There are other ways to handle this, too. Most of them involving more CC. Which people have been telling Citan is useless. CC is now useful.

Poor guy can't win for losing with players who take a sky is falling attitude. It's sad.

[Ortallus]

Playing solo should be perfectly viable.

Sure. Playing solo should be perfectly viable. But not if you want the best rewards.

[Ortallus]

+ another attempt to "force" people to play the way he wants us to....

this is so fk'n stupid.

What's stupid is thinking developers should build the game how you personally want it, and not how they want it. This being a temporary rip off fix was, as someone else pointed out, announced. From here, it's going to take fine tuning.

Welcome to beta. If you can't handle it with a mature attitude, maybe you shouldn't play beta games anymore. That was a choice that you made. You also chose to play the game Citan wanted, not the game you wanted. Forcing you to play the game as he intended is EXACTLY his job. If you and others have found ways to play the game outside of that scope, fixing it is EXACTLY his job.

Your job is to continue trying to break it. Just so long as you're prepared to see the next nerf.

If you want to play a game where everyone is DPS rolling everything, I would strongly recommend GW2. It's free to play and seems to fit your play-style very well.

[Ortallus]

all he had to do was fix the dmg's on the broken builds... and fix the mobs/spawn rates and groups.. which they STILL very much need to do. and common sense says needs to be done first before a blanket approach like this.... IF AFTER those changes are done and we see things still need changes then by all means start doing these blanket approaches and try things.. but you see time to kill is too high, you know there is a few builds that do 15k+ dmg... you don't say ok lets nerf everybody... then you just hurt the plethora of builds that was fine. instead you first fix the ones hitting them numbers adjust the mobs a bit and then collect data on TTK's and such

Changes to Other Skills' Treasure Mods
Note: in the newest developer blog, we discussed an upcoming adjustment to percentage-based-damage treasure mods. This change has NOT been made yet because it needs more internal testing; it will happen in a future update.

[Ortallus]

i didn't mean it 100% literal, sorry i assume most ppl know me so can understand what i mean since i've been around so long... that said i'm sure now that you know i didn't mean it literal you understand more. so i won't go into that any further. instead i'll ask you.

1st in your opinion should someone that fully geared 70/70 not be able to go level other skills with aoe grind, instead be forced to slow grind again and again? (if you think they should be forced to slow grind over and over again ignore the rest)
2nd aside from the above did these AoE mechanics changes do anything good that a simple fix to the dmg outputs wouldn't had done as well?
3rd does making broken builds not hit crazy numbers on 5+ mobs make much difference when they can still hit those numbers on 1-3 mobs?

i think people are miss understanding me, i am not wanting to keep broken builds in the slightest, i also don't mind the non-broken builds being nerfed some if Eric feels they need it. what i am apposed to here is this blanket mechanic change that seems to me to have 0 benefit over other changes other than an attempt to stop or slow capped players aoe grinding off skills.

Your complaint is that Eric is expecting you to play the game the way he wants. That's what I'm getting out of you. The rest is meaningless babble, because that very statement is so incomprehensibly silly that it just negates anything else you might be trying to get across.

Drop that part of your line of thinking, start over, and I'll try discerning what you actually mean, as opposed to what you're saying. Because my mind reading skill is 50/100. I can totally discern what you're thinking when you're not saying what you mean, and your expectation of my doing so is 100% reasonable. </sarcasm>

[Stikes]

What a spicy patch day

[Ortallus]

What a spicy patch day

Despite common sense, people don't seem to understand that their builds are subject to change. My main build was heavily affected by this too, but I'm not taking a 'sky is falling' outlook. It's an opportunity.

[BabyBlue]

What a spicy patch day

Right? I just wanted to know everyone's first impressions on priest.

[Crissa]

I think the change is reasonable. Even at three mobs the AoE is doing more damage than the single-target skills are. It gives us a sweet-spot to aim at.

And as far as I can read, the split of damage is such that every additional mob means the AoE is doing more damage, it's not like it's being split proportionally. You still do better with more mobs - you're just less likely to blow them out of the water.

[Karamasha]

Is it possible to see my pledge i game?

[ErDrick]

What up my glipglops!

I'm not sure where to even begin, but here goes.
------------

AE changes:

Firstly I want to point out that being condescending to other players about mechanics which you don't seem to even grasp or understand completely is not helpful. Nobody here wants easy mode. Most people that are being vocal about why this is a bad idea are doing so because they care about the game and want to see it succeed.

That being said, there are only 2 reasons why you would ever level and gear an AE build. The first reason is to make money, which is sort of needed because costs become extremely prohibitive later on in the game...especially when you are working on leveling your 15th skill to 70....so you do the work of leveling up an AE skill so that you can use it to speed up the grind of whatever new skill you want to level.( which is the 2nd reason to even level an AE build) and also pay for this new skillset. You might be asking yourself what's the rush? Welp after you play this for several thousand hours you might understand that a bit more, the slow way starts to lose it's charm. AE builds are utter crap in group content ( unless you severely outlevel the content in question)...because not only will you cause every mob being hit to rage on you at the same time ( thus killing you instantly) But you will also break all forms of crowd control your party is using to stay alive. It is important that you understand that AE builds only have those 2 uses, because without those, there is no reason to ever use one.

When people reach the apex of their chosen skills and have explored all current content, the only thing that keeps them logging on is that they can level and try a completely different skillset and playstyle, slowing down that process does more harm then good ( aka prohibitive costs and unreasonable timesinks). When the "pain in the ass" factor becomes greater then the "enjoyment for time spent" factor, people stop logging on.

Another important thing to consider is the change would be reasonable if he stopped throwing 10-15 mobs at us at once. Go and try to fight in goblin annexes or on rahu plateau to get a good idea of what I mean, there are a million other places but both of those are simple examples.....So I guess there is a 3rd use for AE builds, and that is because it is forced on you for certain content. That is not our faults, it is by design. Another example of this would be how respawns in dungeons currently work, as in....10-15 things suddenly appear on top of you and then proceed to rape you. This is the main reason btw why people are forced to focus on DPS builds and skillsets, because if you are too slow at killing you lose the game, the respawn will make sure of it.

For reference for the newer players, respawns didn't always work like this...they used to happen singly.

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Archery treasure effect changes:

Just why? I have not been using archery for a while now and that is because the inventory space lost is already not worth using it over another skill, combined with the horror of fletching and the fact that every attack effectively costs money to fire it just isn't worth using over another skillset. Adding to that the "utility" that archery used to have has been rendered largely useless. I mean the only utility it ever had was hookshot and snare arrow. Hookshot is not only useless but it can actually kill you when a party member uses it on a monster that disables in an area when they pull it on top of everyone else ( or any mob that does any sort of PBAE). Snare arrow is okay for solo play but goodluck with that in groups. I cannot understand why archery damage was reduced farther, especially when you consider that the effected skill was mostly "heavy shot" a 40 second cooldown that at BEST ( as in with any and all buffs you can use for it including calligraphy) it hits for 4300 damage, which is comparable to the druid skill cosmic strike off the top of my head, which has not been changed.

For the newer people: Hookshot ( and the spider equivalent ) used to be the only way to single pull reliably besides proximity aggro ( body-pulling). Archery was 100% worth it when that was still effective, especially considering it sped up single pulling to the point where you could beat the dps check for respawns.

-----------
DoT effects:

DOT builds have a lot more issues then the damage from them being sub-par. The biggest of which is that at level 50+ stuff starts being resistant or even straight immune to the damage type you are using, since we only have 3 damage types to choose from atm ( fire / trauma / poison). Building a spec that relies on DOTS will always assure that you are useless later on when this becomes an issue, because no matter how good your DOT damage is at least 1/3 of it will be irrelevant. From a solo standpoint however, DOTS are and always have been viable regardless for a defense or crowd control focused build....Where you really start to see problems are in group play...in fact the whole game falls apart when group play is introduced.

----------
Group play VS solo play:

I would go as far to say this game is pretty well balanced for solo play.

-Rage reduction is great for solo play.
-Heals are well-balanced for solo play.
-Crowd control is invaluable for solo play.
-Incoming damage is manageable for solo play ( due to heals and rage reduction and crowd control actually working).
-DOTs are great for solo play.
-Pets are fine for solo play.
-Being a defensive fighter is great for solo play.

In a group however, all of this goes to shit.

-There is no rage reduction skill in the game that can manage the rage from more then 1 player effectively, making it useless and a waste of mods to even try.
-There are no heals in the game that can consistently keep up with the incoming damage your party starts to receive....yes some of them can keep you alive for one big pull, but since you are essentially forced to keep going without stopping even for a second or you will eat a "game over multi-mob-respawn" to which there is zero defense against or warning it is coming....yea, not great.
-Most crowd control is equally screwed in group play, mezzing is a joke unless you are using it as the puller to separate mobs before they even get near you( unfortunately it is also unreliable weather it will successfully land on the mob or not). And mesmerizing a mob that is already in close proximity to your group is just laughable, if it stays mezzed for more then 2 seconds you better go buy a lottery ticket, because it is your lucky day.
-Incoming damage starts to get utterly ludicrous , with 1k health and 900 armor I can survive maybe 6 hits in gazluk keep...thus you are forced into building for damage, aka kill them before they kill you.
-DOTS are useless because nothing can be allowed to live for more then 5 seconds, aka one dot tick....or else you will die.( again because of the forced dps check respawn timer and the incoming damage).
-PETS ....see DOTS explanation above, same issues, except you also have to deal with "assist mode" not working correctly and accidentally pulling 10 more monsters onto your group.
-Defensive fighter ( aka tanking)...there is no skill in the game that has a short enough recast timer that you can use it to aggro more then one mob at a time ( for bosses or solo pulls tanking is great, but if all you do is solo pull you run the risk of the ever-popular multi-respawn-rapefest. And even if there WAS a good AE taunt, you could never survive it unless you use ONE specific skill to make yourself immune to incoming damage for 10 seconds, and when that fades( or is on cooldown) you die like anyone else.

My main problem I guess, is I play this game to be social and group up with friends and explore and conquer new stuff. And right now group play isn't fun at all besides the first time you explore a new area.....I realize it is super easy to complain about things then to come up with workable solutions, so that being said....

------------------
Some suggestions to fix group play:

-Give all mesmerize type abilities an invulnerability window where mesmerize cannot be broken by anything for at least 5 seconds. Fix pets so they stop breaking them also.

-Make all taunt effects in the game a flat amount instead of being % based, 300 % of "no damage" because you didn't penetrate their armor is still no taunt ( this includes pet taunt effects) also raise the flat amounts to reasonable levels where they can actually take aggro off someone else hitting for 3k spike damage.

-For all elite ( group) mobs and bosses, reduce their outgoing damage by a large margin, at least 50%. Increase their health pool by an even larger margin, 500-1000%...basically slow this shit down and make it interesting instead of the spam strongest attacks fest it currently is. Group fights that last a maximum of 10 seconds because you have no choice, as in if they aren't dead by then...you will be, are not fun.

-Change the respawn mechanics for elite mobs to either respawn one at a time or in small groups...In fact It would be perfectly fine to link 3-4 mobs together, as in pulling one aggroes the other 3 every time, but they also respawn the same way, with that group counting as a single mob for that purpose....space them out a bit more so that this is possible. Basically make them harder more challenging fights, and allow us to see the respawns "catching up" behind us so we have a fighting chance.

***I cannot stress enough how badly the respawn system needs to change, it is 100% un-fun in it's current form....there is nothing fun about forced dps checks in every single fight, and even less fun in instantly wiping 2 hours deep in a dungeon because someone had to afk for 30 seconds and we didn't beat the timer for the respawns.***

Longer fights will have a few benefits. Tanking will be more important ( but still not required to the point where you have to have a tank). Dots and pets will have a chance to shine and do what they are supposed to ( but I would also suggest fixing pet assist mode and removing immunities to dot types). Also it will stop people from soloing elite content that you do not wish them to solo...because power will run out in longer fights. Lastly, changing fights and respawns in such a way will give us OPTIONS besides building for straight killing power....right now we don't have them , if we want to succeed it's damage or bust.

----------------

@ Citan I hope you realize that I am only taking the time to write this stuff out because as always, I want to see you succeed....you have done a lot of good, and I know it can feel like you are being attacked for what others perceive as being wrong..... But this is not my intent, my goal is to see a game that's fun to play and will have staying power. You have been moving farther and farther from the "fun" side of the pendulum to the "this is more trouble then it's worth" side. As a developer and not a player, there are some things that look good on paper or mechanically, but in actual practice aren't fun.

If you want a different sort of feedback then tell me what your vision is, and I can try to tailor feedback towards making that a reality....atm all I can do is 'guess" that having fun should be the top priority. Remember that I am the guy that leveled several skills that I had zero interest in just so I could try to give good feedback for them back in the early days.

@ Everyone else, if you read all this you have my thanks. If your opinion differs feel free to give your own viewpoints...just be respectful when you do so.

If you agree with anything I mentioned though ( or even disagree)....please do not remain silent about it. From the 30 or so people I have had lengthy conversations with about these issues ( either in-game or on skype or discord) Almost all agreed with every point I have made here. You are not doing the game any favors by just reading it, saying "yep" to yourself, and moving on....they need to know that these are actual issues and not just "ErDrick issues".

Thanks for reading the wall of text...sorry about that but I feel like all of this is important or I wouldn't have bothered.

[Lyramis]

ErDrick great post. Agree with all of it.

[Erthiel]

I support making Elites weaker and with more HP to prolong the fight, I sent a suggestion for this before, but it truly is stupid, when a mob can kill me in 3 hits. Getting so much dmg that I cannot even click the fighting abilities but just the 2 heals I have and die anyway cos the delay between when I click and the heal/armour is applied is so long.
ErDrick 1k health and 900 armour - how is that even possible, I have nearly half less and I am actually lvl 70 with full yellow gear -_-

Anyway ErDrick, thanks for a great post, I agree with all the parts I read from it :-)

[ErDrick]

I support making Elites weaker and with more HP to prolong the fight, I sent a suggestion for this before, but it truly is stupid, when a mob can kill me in 3 hits. Getting so much dmg that I cannot even click the fighting abilities but just the 2 heals I have and die anyway cos the delay between when I click and the heal/armour is applied is so long.
ErDrick 1k health and 900 armour - how is that even possible, I have nearly half less and I am actually lvl 70 with full yellow gear -_-

Anyway ErDrick, thanks for a great post, I agree with all the parts I read from it :-)

Shamanic infusion on "red" gk armor and mods for druid skills fill with bile and brambleskin that increase max hp / armor, also top tier foods.

[Celler]

Agree with Sudo, and pretty much every word ErD used with the exception of Welp, I'm sure I could of used something far more deserved than that.

I really don't like game mechanics that push me back to lower lvl dungeons to be under the feet of the up and comings to be honest. Must suck for them to battle bravely as a group past fog just to find some old timer bashing on endless spawns of elementals.

Never been the min max gamer that Awol and ErD and others are, my builds tend to just be some semi workable things to have some fun with whilst I grind the lvls before moving onto the next or newest thing. So I'm not overly attached to much.

Have seen how dramatically broken Bard was/is, Hammer I understand can hit 3 things for 10k or so damage, also think wolf had an issue that it could buff its damage to a stupid point.
Were any of these actually addressed or are they to be left as is?

Still can't understand why the 2 most important things have not been added.
1 Where is the Spider Crossbow Harness?
2 When do I get a Harmonica (preferably with a neck rack and bard enablement) ?

[SausageJavelins]

<Post>

<Knife_Fighting>

As a psycho knife killer, I welcome the damage mod changes and ability changes that made knife a lot more fun, but also more viable at higher levels. The expansion of "not looking at you" to include stuns and fears was much needed, and opens up new combo possibilities where before it was *always* the same (mes, then backstab or surprise throw). I especially love the bleed mods for DoT trauma and poison, which bring my bleed abilities up to a useful level for Venomstrike and Backstab.
The buff for throwing knife abilities makes my heart sing, as those are my bread and butter knife damage. The damage might need a little reigning-in, but I have not tested extensively and I was not taking more than 40-60% of the kills over an archer/druid while in Gazluk Keep (with all useful mods on her suit). It's still not terribly overpowered because metal slabs are required for the throwing knives, and that seems loosely-akin to archery's fletching.
Adding the offhand knife was a great way to introduce knife in combo with other skills with a wield requirement in the main-hand, although I have not seen any with skill wield requirements (they were all no wield) and they do not seem to be dropping on Gazluk Keep mobs aside from a select few bosses. This means that unless you are lvl 1 Knife, the offhand knives are not viable at the moment since you cannot get the full whack of offhand mods necessary for a build.
</ Knife_Fighting>

<AoE_Damage>

I am guilty of at least partaking a few times in the Kur AoE farming gig (although I never did so when anyone else was out there) and Knife does have an AoE, That being said, I can see where a diminishing return on damage for AoEs is necessary or one risks everything high levels camping low dungeons and areas using these attacks, leaving little to hunt for the lowbies. Personally, I never really use burst attacks on more than 3-5 mobs, and its usually just to grab their attention away from a group-mate about to get toasted. Sure you will have complainers, but I think that is a necessary growing pain for a game in development.
</ AoE_Damage>

<Performance>

Serbule still seems bad during peak times, but I have noticed a decrease in bottlenecks and increased response time during these times of server stress. Oddly, even though the peak times seem better, there is still a little stuttering even with <120 players logged in. This is somewhat perplexing but since I am not privy to the inner workings of the server it would be inappropriate to comment much further. Keep the performance fixes and changes coming, because they seem to be working.
</ Performance>
</ Post>


Thanks for reading :cool: (hopefully my joke XML doesn't get parsed as such! :p)

[Aionlasting]

Excellent feedback Erdrick! Great job.

[Yaffy]

ErDrick I find myself agreeing with a lot of what you said and you do point out some big problems, but some things I would disagree with. I feel like we have very different perspectives about issues since I'd call myself a tank, and it's interesting to get your view point.

- AoE Changes
I would disagree that AoE isn't very helpful outside of farming/grinding or forced situations, as I feel like there are many times where you can try to speed things up in dungeon runs or such by pulling more than one mob if you know you can handle it, or maybe just pulling a couple of mobs while leveling since you know you can handle two mobs. I definitely agree that the game has situations which forces you to fight many enemies at once, which is fine, but I do think the AoE nerf should be slightly changed because more mobs actually start to make AoE worse than just single target which feels really backwards.

-Archery Changes
I'm not an archery main, but I agree. Archery's damage has honestly never seemed that great, and I feel like this nerf is mostly a result of people spreading around the idea that Archery is super strong or something. I never understood it, but for the longest time I keep hearing people talk about how strong Archery is when in reality it doesn't seem OP or anything. I think this archery nerf is just a case of the skill being popular rather than actually being strong which I don't think is fair. However, if everything is going to have its damage lowered the same way like it's been hinted at, then I guess archery was just hit with the nerf first and it'll balance itself out later.

-DoT
I do think DoT's are a bit on the weak side, but they show a lot of potential! I think that a Knife fighting DoT based build could easily have the best DPS over a long period of time, but enemies dying too quickly does kind of put a hamper on it. It's hard to use in a group scenario, but if you pull more mobs then DoT's do get a bit better, especially after the AoE changes.

-Rage reduction
Yes I agree, rage reduction skills can't keep up with a full party. That doesn't mean they're useless though, as I have seen some players with strong rage reduction and good timing lower the enemy's rage just as they're using their rage attack, which cancels it. When a player can do this with bosses it's excellent... but it's quite hard to do (Especially with any kind of lag) and I do think the system could be a bit better.

-Heals
Now this one I do disagree with. I think healing can be very helpful! Healing can be a huge life saver in dungeons and a good healer can make a dungeon go much smoother! Not only that, but having even just a semi-decent healer around can make a dungeon run much faster by removing down time if the puller can constantly pull. I think one big thing to note though is that typically single target heals are very ineffective at lengthening's one's life span unless if they're very tanky. A heal on a strong tank could keep them alive for another 20 seconds, but could only keep a DPS alive for another 3. Another thing to note is that heals in this game are limited by cooldown rather than mana/healing rate like in other games, so even though you might not think an extra 3 seconds is much, it could let other heals come off cooldown and end up turning into another 10 seconds of extra life or even an infinite loop quite easily.

-Crowd Control
Some crowd control, like Ice Magic's AoE Roots, are incredibly strong in group play. In fact I would say it's OP because as a tank, you can taunt a rooted enemy and then just back away which essentially reduces that mob's damage to 0! Mez on the other hand, is in a weird spot. A well coordinated mez where you know none of your team mates will break it is extremely useful, but trying to use it in the middle of a fight or without communication is basically impossible. I don't think Mez should be unbreakable for 5 seconds, as that would just turn it into a 5 second stun which is ridiculously strong, but some brief period of unbreakability like 2 seconds would be enough for players to realize they should switch targets. Either that or mezzed targets should take less damage.

-Incoming damage/Tanking/Clear Speed
Now this is a big topic, especially as a player who looks at tank builds all the time. Damage from mobs IS high, especially when elites from Gazluk Keep seem to do just as much damage as bosses. The thing is that the answer to surviving against these enemies isn't more health or armor, it's getting more mitigation (Although armor kind of counts for that). Additional health is just an extra buffer before you die, and armor is the same although it gives you a little bit of direct mitigation for the start of the fight. More mitigation not only increases your survivability, but it also makes things like heals much better because heals are based on flat amounts (A 200hp heal basically acts like 400hp if you negate half damage).
The issue I find though is that there's two kinds of mitigation, flat and percentage. Now flat is good when fighting weaker things because it can reduce damage to 0, but against big mobs like Gazluk ones it's extremely ineffective because mobs do so much damage! A skill stacking all the flat mitigation mods on it typically gets around 30-50 flat mitigation, which isn't enough to be noticeable with the 200-300 damage hits you take at Gazluk, and most flat mitigation is only for a few damage types too! This means unless you have a huge amount AND you have a support character helping you (Ex. A battle chem with thick skin giving you more) it's not going to reduce damage by much. On the other hand, percentage based mitigation is excellent in Gazluk keep, because it reduces a ton of damage due to the high amount of damage. Just using the 20% fire resist meditation reduces the damage you take from Elite Troopers by a huge amount, more than any non-fire magic build could even get close to with flat mitigation. This is also why unarmed tanking is so effective, because it works with percentages, not flat amounts.
My suggestion to the devs would be to improve how flat damage reduction mods scale (Surely 6 physical mitigation on a mod isn't enough at level 70! with mobs hitting for 200!) and consider adding more percentage based mitigation options. I do know there's the worry of making a character with so much flat mitigation they become invincible, but if every tank could get a bit of good flat mitigation and good percentage based then they would be a lot stronger without the worry of being invincible due to how the mitigation formula works (Flat first, then %). Also maybe some % elemental resist on gear pieces would be nice.

I feel like we have very different opinions on tanking in general, as I would argue tanking is very helpful and a big reason why dungeon runs can go much faster. A competent tank can make a dungeon run go much faster than adding more damage, because they can pull more mobs more reliably and with less downtime. I've had some great Gazluk Keep runs where I've reached Beakhorse by the time the first room repopped, so the respawn timer isn't nearly as harsh as you seem to make it out to be (If you have a good tank). I do think the repop mechanic is pretty dumb though so I agree with you with that. AoE taunts are helpful (Although I wish there were more!), and players can definitely pull more than just one mob at a time consistently! This makes AoE builds better, sustained DPS builds better (Like DoT builds) and healers better, and it's all faster too! I think Citan should give more love to weaker tank skills, but at the very least I believe players should get into the habit of trying to pull two or three mobs at once if they want to call themselves a "Tank" and to avoid downtime between pulls.

I do think the taunt skills need more love in the game's current state, as I find that it's very difficult to pull aggro from higher DPS players without investing very heavily into taunt bonuses, and I believe many taunt skills simply can't keep up. This is probably a result of damage being higher than Citan expected, and if damage is getting lowered over time it will make taunting easier, but I do agree that some skills need to have their taunt bonuses boosted. However, I would highly disagree with your suggestion to remove % based taunt bonuses, as it's those exact bonuses that make holding aggro much easier with some builds than others! The thing about % based taunt bonuses is that they also multiply flat taunt, which is what makes shield so helpful for taunting things when you combine take the lead with something that applies flat taunt. I think that other tank skills either need much more flat taunt, or their own little % based bonuses. Something like Deer can only taunt for around 2500 while something combined with take the lead's % bonus can potentially taunt for over 12k even before damage!

-Reducing mob damage and buffing health
Now this is a really huge change, and while I'm interested in it, I don't think mob damage should be halved currently, not with how mitigation works currently. If you were to halve damage, it would be very easy to reduce damage to near 0 so you could live forever with some cantrip healing or a dedicated healer. Now if this big change also makes the game more interesting, then sure! But halving damage right now isn't a good idea if you ask me. You'd need to make a lot of other changes before a change that big.

-Respawns
I totally agree. Respawns in dungeons are pretty ridiculous and unforgiving! Although I think the timer is a lot more lenient than you think, but that also depends on the area and what your plans are. Backtracking through an already cleared area is so risky because of the sudden repop, and some areas like in Labyrinth make it very risky to go through the side branches because you risk wasting too much time. I think things respawning a few at a time would be a nice change (Enough so a good party could handle it, but a single player can't farm). It would also be nice if there was some kind of warning too so it wasn't so sudden, like if respawning mobs wouldn't aggro onto players for 5-10 seconds on respawn (But would attack if you started attacking them). That would give you some time to run away at least.

Sorry for the huge wall of text, but a wall of text must be answered with another! I do like some of your suggestions, but I do disagree with some of the ideas you have as well. Your post has given me a new perspective to view dungeon running which is quite interesting and I thank you for that! Please let me know what you think of what I said!

[ArkadyRandom]

Tanks should have to invest in taunt bonuses. Well geared DPS players need to dial it back.

The problem I see in some of the thinking is that it disregards group interaction. DPS should be aware of their threat, pulling aggro, and breaking CC.

People want to burn through dungeons, but group content should be challenging beyond mobs having bigger health and more damage. The complaints about taunts not overpowering well geared DPS tells me people expect skills to do their job in a vacuum. Group play doesn't exist in a vacuum but we're discussing skill tuning and group balance like they do. People are okay with the nerfs as long as they can find some other way to burn through stuff as fast. That's not how it should be.

I agree mez breaking should be shorter. LotRO, as an example of a CC heavy game, has short safety timers on mez and root that are about 2 seconds. It's enough to allow for an "auto attack" or bad timing for an attack that hits when the mez does, but not so long as it ends up being a stun + mez combo like Yaffy pointed out. CC and debuffs should be required overall or every encounter will always be a dps race.

With regards to high levels being driven to low level zones. If that happens then there should be a drop nerf to prevent farming trivial con mobs. I hate that solution because it stratifies content and contributes to zone abandonment. But if high level characters are going to exploit level mechanics for easy farming then that is necessary. Gray con mobs shouldn't drop items. Those items should be found on appropriately conned enemies.

[Aionlasting]

Perhaps there should be a threat meter for dps to keep an eye on to know when they are pulling too close to the tanks current threat. Perhaps the party interface should also have a way to set a player as a tank so everyone else can know who the tank is and follow behind, and also track on the threat meter where the tanks current threat is and play accordingly..... there are many improvements both in gameplay, mechanics, and user interface that could go a long way into making group content much more enjoyable.

[srand]

Rather than starting a new discussion thread for today's bug-fixing hotfix, we're just going to add to this ongoing discussion thread. The hotfix notes are here: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?1519-Update-Notes-May-27-2018

[HardRock]

There is a glaring issue that is very abusable, as I have been demonstrating for a few days now. When in Gazluk Keep I can body-pull mobs and before they close the distance to engage me, I run into another room that has a wall nook with a thin section of wall. While the mob/mobs are still on the other side of the wall, they will think that they can attack me because the thin section of the wall puts us close enough. What this does is allows me to hold the mob in place while the script tries to melee attack me, but is interrupted by the wall being there. I can hold multiple mobs this way and while in a doorway scenario the abuse gets worse, as the AI can't go through the doorway more than 2 at a time.

Currently In a nearly fully augmented all yellow gk suit I can solo two mobs at a time. I mez one with "tell me about your mother". Then kill the other before the mez is up. If I do it all properly I can break the mez on the first one with my stun mod from tell me I love you.

If you play BennyHill music and I can eat great bacon while running around crazy I can sometimes take 3 elite gk mobs. IF I do everything right. This includes circling, charging and backing off at the right times.

[ErDrick]

Yaffy You taking the time to reply with that wall of text is appreciated and your points are valid. You are probably the strongest tank I have seen in a long time so your tanking insight is especially helpful.

Few things I would like to add:

Mesmerizes wouldn't be a 5 second stun because mobs would be immune to damage for those 5 seconds ( I should have been more clear in my wording there).

As for tanking / damage / clear speed...well that's all subjective, if I roll in there with a full group of people that already have level 70 legendary /optimized/ augmented gears and know wtf they are doing ...yea beating repops is a lot easier. The problem is that excludes anyone that doesn't meet those criteria if you want to have fun and not suddenly die over and over to repops. I mean I have been in groups where we absolutely destroy the whole place, but I also have been in there many times with people that just got to 70 and are wearing 50-60 gear...and it can be hell. The content isn't supposed to be intended for people that are effectively lvl 90 due to optimal gear, it is for 65-70ish people. Also you have to build extremely focused and with specific items and modifiers for specific skills to achieve those results, you are essentially "maxed out" ( or close to it) as a tank...Not just as a tank but as the uberest skill combo you can possibly be for it. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it's fun to put that much effort into something then see it work...it just isn't a good example from a balancing perspective. I'm having flashbacks of Citan telling me this exact same thing years ago when I was suggesting some balance changes, and he was right.

What you said about taunt modifiers and how they stack...that's also a good point, I cant think of another skill that can achieve those results though, only shield. Having only one skill be effective at a specific role is still a problem. A generic sidebar skill with a percent based taunt modifier might solve that for other skillsets though...something like a defensive/aggro stance ability.

Another thing to note is that if you are clearing to beakhorse before the first wave of repops your group is 100% 2 shotting the mobs to do it. And part of the reason for your extreme survivability and the reason heals seem effective, is because the mobs are dying before they can really put a dent in you, remember that the damage you take gets higher and higher once your armor depletes under normal circumstances.

I just find the current system boring. I have also noticed some threads where people complain that GK is a loot pinata, and that is absolutely true as long as you can 2shot mobs...it would be less true if fights were longer and harder.

You mention that lowering damage would make you invulnerable with the right kinds of mitigation, this is a good point that I hadn't considered, although I'm sure I would have if that change actually happened. You also have the best self-mitigation set up that I am aware of ( unarmed). I know when I put thick skin on you on top of that you are godlike.

It's still pretty boring to have to 2-shot every mob you come across, so that still needs to happen in some form, just with better numbers ( at least that's my opinion).

You have some great insights that are definitely food for thought. And I am glad you contributed, I can't think of every unforseen consequence by myself, this is exactly the kind of dialogue that is needed.

ArkadyRandom What you mention about dps holding themselves in check is something I am very aware of, I played everquest for about 9 years. The problem here is holding yourself in check will still lead to a wipe when respawns happen. If combat were made slower and repops were singly ( like they were in everquest, and used to be here) you could accurately gauge how far ahead of the wave you were and use skills accordingly. Right now that's not really an option.

srand from the patch notes you said "Previously, pets could attack monsters that were 'mezzed' if at least half the mezz duration had elapsed (the same time in which players can break the mezz). Now pets never directly attack mezzed or feared targets. Note that as a side effect, this means you cannot order your pet to attack a mezzed or feared enemy; pets now consider them "invalid targets"."

Currently you can break a mesmerize instantly, a 20 second duration mez does not have a 10 second window where it is unbreakable. And a pet would charge forward when you cast mesmerize and instantly break it, because it considers mesmerize an attack ( which it is, they do damage for some reason) and break it immediately. This obviously might work differently now ( for pets) but I'm not sure what you mean by the part about if half duration has elapsed ( in regards to players breaking them), because that isn't a thing.

[Niph]

The mezz change for pets seems to be working. This is a very nice fix.

The fact that we must learn low level recipes first is understandable. However, some of them are just too hard to get. For example, I've yet to meet anyone having found Flamestrike 1 or 2. As far as I can tell, they don't drop. They probably do of course, and eventually we will know what from, but invading low level dungeons where we high level players don't belong isn't very fun.

[Rhawkas]

Perhaps there should be a threat meter for dps to keep an eye on to know when they are pulling too close to the tanks current threat. Perhaps the party interface should also have a way to set a player as a tank so everyone else can know who the tank is and follow behind, and also track on the threat meter where the tanks current threat is and play accordingly..... there are many improvements both in gameplay, mechanics, and user interface that could go a long way into making group content much more enjoyable.

All the yes. FFXIV has threat meters listed under each player's name when in a group and it's a godsend not only for tanking, but for playing DPS too. In that game at least, it can be worth it to back off of an enemy if you're pulling aggro from the tank. Granted, PG needs more work on team roles all around.

[Silvonis]

As a general reminder, please report bugs, exploits, etc., using the in-game reporting tool. Additionally, if you find an issue and continue to exploit it - your account is subject to being banned. Please report players who are taking part in such activities. It is a Terms of Service violation to take advantage of unintended game functions. If you're unsure, please send in a detailed report regardless. As a general rule, if it seems 'too good to be true' then it probably is.

[Niph]

I have tamed a Fire Rat, and as far as I can tell it's fighting as expected. It is way too early to compare it to other pets, not until I level it to 70.

However, I will probably not use it because of the "on fire" animation. It is something I dislike very much, to the point that when I fight at the entrance of Lab I just look down at the floor, shoot at random and just watch my health bar.

Since the rat is small, is there any chance you can also downsize the animation by a factor of, say, 10?

[preechr]

As a new player coming in from the Steam EA release, I can't offer any feedback on the changes as I'm just not at a high enough level in the game to see them. I do find the conversation in this thread fascinating though and I wish there was more of this kind of discussion on the forums not revolving around patches.

In this corner, wearing the blue trunks, is the group of players that thinking about group dynamics and that are advocating the kind of game I signed up to play, and in the other corner, wearing the gold trunks, are those that seem more interested in solo play centered on farming and grinding. Thankfully, the PvP crowd is relegated to the audience, but there still is some talk of balancing between "classes" common in games that try to cater to those that think that's fun.

From watching the veterans discuss this, I get the impression that the evil overlords are building a game where tanking, healing, crowd-control and careful dps is important. If its not, I wish that were clearly stated now because I've no interest in investing time in another MMO where 2-3 massively over-powered damage dealers can speed clear all the end-game dungeon content and the quality of a build is based only in how much dps it can do. I can only hope that while many new players may be coming into Project:Gorgon with that style of gameplay being their only experience that they will be shown the older way of designing dungeons is WAY better, even if you are required to think and plan to succeed.

If a player can single-handedly kill everything in a dungeon, either they are in the wrong dungeon or their build needs some serious attention. If AoE was truly that powerful, kudos on ripping off the band-aid and good luck on the fine-tuning.

Personally, I really dig the low-tech UI and feature set. I like the idea of feeling a part of the game world, so I will generally not ask for more bells and whistles, like player stall search functions, teleport anywhere or aggro meters on mobs or players. I think there's a lot of fun to be had without having a heads up display on everything like this was some sort of sci-fi game. Thinking, observing and communicating with your team may seem off-putting to younger players, but I like games that encourage it. All those "quality of life" features are abundant in tons of other games and I feel like they have more negative than positive long-term effects when implemented.

There was also talk about lessening or removing reward from "farming" low-level content, and some worry that might stratify the game... I think all materials needed in the game should be available in all areas and players should "farm" in level appropriate areas. Some stratification is a good thing if it means leveling players can have mobs to kill and resources to scavenge. Sure, it may cost a ton of money and time to level up every single skill in the game, but that's only a relevant argument in alpha/beta stages when you are doing that to test everything. Once the game gets launched, that should be REALLY long-term goal and a rare accomplishment.

Using one maxed-out skill to level up another skill quickly is not a thing in real life, so being a really good wizard shouldn't matter at all when trying to learn how to use a sword... and that's a general rule of thumb for me: everything in the game should belong and be explainable within the game's world. It's all fine and good to want something like a searchable market or graphs on mobs, but (in my opinion) those things don't make sense contextually.

I may be just a P:G noob, but I hope these comments can be helpful.

[Mesk]

Yeah Im about to hog all the nooby areas as well If my growth is going to be stunted cuz of this half assed blanket fix then Im going to
dont get me wrong Im not doing this out of spite to get back at the admins or players but if its the only way to progress and for me to keep interest in the game then goddammit I will do it legit screw everyone else I want to have fun to

This is ridiculous, let me start by saying I've seen you do many nice things to help guildies, now this is where the praise stops. This statement is disgusting, you plan on griefing up and coming players because you are upset about a nerf you fail to fully comprehend? Lets review some of your statements both ingame, and discord, and here...

"BC is just a movement skill now".

This could not be further from the truth, in fact Ive shown you the power of BC as a support with priest. Despite having to carry you (which i will get to in a second) through GK, we had no problem clearing any of the content we wanted in there, and ended the run with full bags and a dead slime... As a DPS skill its still very viable, I used it to power level my priest just fine to 70, and yes taking on 8 wolfs in the wolf cave in Gaz has gotten a little rougher, but it's still doable no problem since we have CC that outlasts our cooldown on our damage bombs.

"GK is impossible, we wiped in the slime room."

Whatever intill they increase the level cap i might as well hunt lower stuff for cash inless i have a badass group literly today just 10 minutes ago went into the slime room in gazkeep with my group and got ganked ra*** we all died only 2 lived also the power regen seems slower

Above as I mentioned GK is not impossible, but when you go in with 4 guys in offspecs, and Veal as a single target tank, and a complete liability like yourself things are going to be hard. In fact what I've noticed is that that room used to have 6? slimes and now only has 4... and I've never so much as seen someone drop below 90% in that room in any GK ive been on since the patch.

"I cannot progress in GK any more, so i'm going to sit in serb and whine for 2 days straight, and threaten to grief n00bs"

Ok, so this one is a bit of paraphrasing, but is in fact what you have said/done. This makes me embarrassed to share a guild tag with you. You without even fully testing, or looking into the patch based on a single bad group experience have written off the game, and decided you will do what you can to ruin other people's experience?

I think you need to take a break from the game, step away and put things in priority, and maybe do some inward reflection. You are generally a liability in dungeons because you don't listen, you think you know better and you do things that cannot be rationalized by any intelligent life form. I wish there was a montage of all the times out puller (awol, saint, veal if he had a mic) has said "Death where are you going?" because you insist on running ahead of the puller, or the times when people have asked why you where taunting, when you shouldn't be...

Full Derp (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/266299241?t=6h20m)

In fact on the run where we killed slime, we where having a good time fighting a ton of mobs, and you decided to pull aggro on several then run half way down a hallway outside the room, risking pulling more aggro. Putting the party at risk, and forcing your healers to try and locate you in a different room way away from your party.

Sometimes the issues are not with the game, but with the player sir.

[Yaffy]

preechr I can understand your concerns, so I can try to answer some of your questions/comments about end game.

A very big thing about end game in Project Gorgon is that it's not actually that hard to clear! Personally I find it a bit too easy, but this is due to a lot of factors and it has some benefits as well.

First off, the end game currently is not meant to be the end game in the future, as new content is planned to be updated, therefore it should be a bit easier because when there's higher level content, you won't be building a full set of gear just for level 70 content and many people going through the dungeon will have scrapped together sets. Secondly, many players have had a lot of time to build their sets for this level of content, so many players are essentially over geared and have access to a lot of bonuses from grinding other things (Like the best food in the game currently, the best consumables, etc).

Because the end game content is "easy", it means that you don't need a meta game party/build to go through it. It's not like other games where if you don't have specific classes/party composition you're going to wipe, in fact it's easy enough that you can use a full DPS party, which commonly happens because the majority of players are DPS, and still beat all the bosses.

However, the thing is that because the dungeon is "Easy", this means that the real challenge isn't beating the dungeon, it's clearing it quickly and efficiently (And with as few accidents as possible). Yes you can beat it with 6 DPS, but it will actually be a pretty slow endeavor, as you have to be careful not to pull too many enemies, deaths are common, and wiping can happen at the drop of a hat. This is typically where you'll have issues with respawns as full DPS parties can be pretty slow, and to a DPS player the best way to go faster in this situation is to just get more DPS. This is why a lot of people keep talking about how you need super high DPS in order to avoid respawns happening on top of you.

This is where healers/tanks/support/etc come in. None of these archetypes are required to beat the dungeon, but you can make it way faster/easier/safer/consistent. Even if adding these people lowers your damage output, your progress through the dungeon is going to be way faster because you don't have to play as safe. Tanks can pull bigger groups so AoEs can be used and don't need to be as careful, healers and support mean you don't have to sit around waiting for your health/power to regen and good mob control makes killing things easier and safer.

This is why I have disagreements with ErDrick over the value of tanking/healing because they clearly improve runs, even if they aren't strictly required. He stated that for my best runs I must have had some good damage dealers (Which is totally true) but the thing is that those best runs weren't about stacking as much damage as possible on each character, but that each person has their own way to contribute and that only 3 or 4 players really focused on damage. Our potential damage output would be lower than a full DPS group (In fact my tank build basically does complete garbage for damage so my damage might as well not exist) but our clear speed is higher, which is what really matters. The fact that many people are starting to talk about the strength of unarmed tanking, even though it has double digit DPS even at end game is proof that there's more things than just DPS that matter! I do wish that other "Tank skills" got some better mitigation options though.

As for soloing dungeons, usually when that gets mentioned it's from some really high level person going through much lower level content. But there aren't any builds that can solo the end game Gazluk dungeon or anything. They might be able to solo an elite mob or maybe even solo a specific boss or two (Probably with some form of extreme cheesing), but the whole dungeon? There's nothing like that yet at least.

I hope this answers some of your questions about end game (Or at least how I feel about it). I hope you enjoy your time spent in Gorgon!

[preechr]

Yaffy Thanks for the clarity! Its great to hear that even with Gazluk in a less dangerous state nobody is soloing it... I did get that impression from some of the comments... and it's great to hear that a support crew already makes runs faster and better!

The main I'm building is staff/unarmed/shield and I've got a pig, a cow and a rabbit I work on when Escwine isn't able to log in, so it's good to know there will be something for me to do support-wise whenever I eventually get them to 70+

Helping people in the lower dungeons, I've seen several healers being built so I'm hoping we will eventually have a decent percentage of support in the game

[Aionlasting]

Yaffy Thanks for the clarity! Its great to hear that even with Gazluk in a less dangerous state nobody is soloing it... I did get that impression from some of the comments... and it's great to hear that a support crew already makes runs faster and better!

The main I'm building is staff/unarmed/shield and I've got a pig, a cow and a rabbit I work on when Escwine isn't able to log in, so it's good to know there will be something for me to do support-wise whenever I eventually get them to 70+

Helping people in the lower dungeons, I've seen several healers being built so I'm hoping we will eventually have a decent percentage of support in the game

There are people who can and do solo a lot of gazluk. lol. Maybe not all of it but when you can solo the elite who drop legendaries like pinatas who cares if you can't solo all of it?


If you read prior in this thread, HR, hardrock, who is In my guild, explains how he solo's some of it.

[Niph]

I think Yaffy means you can't solo the entire place. Many people can solo the entrance, and move in, but eventually respawning mobs catch up.

[Yaffy]

Yeah, people doing a solo Gazluk run would be news to me. Many people can kill the elites there with burst damage and pick them off one by one, but then that's extremely slow and the respawn risk is high. You can make some progress with a bit of luck, but I haven't heard of anyone say, reaching and defeating BeakHorse solo, which isn't that far into the dungeon and would be a pretty great goal for a solo run. I've been able to manage the first few hallways but a room like the kitchen is a huge barrier to solo players, especially now after the AoE change. I think the most manageable would be a solo healsuit tester or golem run because I can think of some ways to do that, but I haven't heard of anyone doing it yet.

[ErDrick]

Yeah, people doing a solo Gazluk run would be news to me. Many people can kill the elites there with burst damage and pick them off one by one, but then that's extremely slow and the respawn risk is high. You can make some progress with a bit of luck, but I haven't heard of anyone say, reaching and defeating BeakHorse solo, which isn't that far into the dungeon and would be a pretty great goal for a solo run. I've been able to manage the first few hallways but a room like the kitchen is a huge barrier to solo players, especially now after the AoE change. I think the most manageable would be a solo healsuit tester or golem run because I can think of some ways to do that, but I haven't heard of anyone doing it yet.

I soloed beakhorse. ( not saying it was easy though) I ran past gut aches room and straight to the 2f stairs, died, ate a green.

Would have to "cheese" golem which I wouldn't do because I'm sure that's an exploit ( I bet you know what I'm referring to)

Could conceivably do slime boss on 2f if I brought enough greens to make it to the back of his room.

I may have soloed the urak boss on 2f also, although I didn't get to him by myself, I asked the group to let me try killing it myself. This was like a year ago though when archery was a bit stronger then it is now, archery + chem... I say "may" because I'm not 100% sure I succeeded, I am 99% sure though.

[Tagamogi]

That being said, there are only 2 reasons why you would ever level and gear an AE build. The first reason is to make money, which is sort of needed because costs become extremely prohibitive later on in the game...especially when you are working on leveling your 15th skill to 70....so you do the work of leveling up an AE skill so that you can use it to speed up the grind of whatever new skill you want to level.( which is the 2nd reason to even level an AE build) and also pay for this new skillset.

Nope. Those are the only two reasons you would ever level and gear an AE build. Don't try to tell everyone else how or why they should be playing. I've been vaguely fuming over this statement for the last couple days, so I'd like to emphasize that your listed reasons bear no relation to why I enjoy AOE builds.

Ok, with that bit of animosity hopefully out of the way:



You might be asking yourself what's the rush? Welp after you play this for several thousand hours you might understand that a bit more, the slow way starts to lose it's charm. AE builds are utter crap in group content ( unless you severely outlevel the content in question)...because not only will you cause every mob being hit to rage on you at the same time ( thus killing you instantly) But you will also break all forms of crowd control your party is using to stay alive. It is important that you understand that AE builds only have those 2 uses, because without those, there is no reason to ever use one.

When people reach the apex of their chosen skills and have explored all current content, the only thing that keeps them logging on is that they can level and try a completely different skillset and playstyle, slowing down that process does more harm then good ( aka prohibitive costs and unreasonable timesinks). When the "pain in the ass" factor becomes greater then the "enjoyment for time spent" factor, people stop logging on.

See, this part doesn't make sense to me at all. I'm reading this as:
Problems:
AOE builds are not good in group content.
You get bored after spending thousands of hours in the game.
You want to level new skills fast.
You want to make money fast.

Single solution:
Preserve the previous aoe build despite it being useless in the type of content you enjoy playing.

I think the problems are worth discussing, but I don't think the solution makes much sense except maybe as a bandaid.



Another important thing to consider is the change would be reasonable if he stopped throwing 10-15 mobs at us at once. Go and try to fight in goblin annexes or on rahu plateau to get a good idea of what I mean, there are a million other places but both of those are simple examples.....So I guess there is a 3rd use for AE builds, and that is because it is forced on you for certain content. That is not our faults, it is by design. Another example of this would be how respawns in dungeons currently work, as in....10-15 things suddenly appear on top of you and then proceed to rape you. This is the main reason btw why people are forced to focus on DPS builds and skillsets, because if you are too slow at killing you lose the game, the respawn will make sure of it.

Yes, that's a problem, even when playing solo. I'd generally like fights to take a bit longer, have more survival options and have some reasonable way to avoid respawns. "Pop - you are dead" is not fun.



I have not been using archery for a while now and that is because the inventory space lost is already not worth using it over another skill, combined with the horror of fletching and the fact that every attack effectively costs money to fire it just isn't worth using over another skillset. Adding to that the "utility" that archery used to have has been rendered largely useless.

Archery has stun, aoe, mez, great single target damage, modded rage reduction and a small heal. At least for the content I've done, piercing damage seems to be quite effective, and archery also has the option of pulling in a couple other damage types if needed. So, I think the utility is there. Whether it's worth losing x inventory slots is debatable, but it's not been a bad skill, especially since it's offhand and can be paired with all kinds of exciting main hand skills.

I also don't find fletching particularly horrifying - it's not the most fun mechanic in the game if you just want some arrows right now, but it's pretty easy to buy them from other players too. And a stack of arrows lasts a long time.

All this being said, when I was playing archery I found myself in situations in the game where I chose not to dps when in a group because I didn't want to waste an arrow on a mob that was going to go down anyway. That feels pretty dumb... I tend to avoid using consumables in general, so I don't know if that's a just-me-problem or not. My main quality of life suggestion for archery would be to have some kind of quiver that reduces the lost inventory slots to 1 or 2, and to have a certain percentage of arrows be retained automatically in your inventory instead of having to loot them (or having to ask your group members to collect the arrows for you if it's their loot turn, ugh.)

When I was playing archery, it felt that Mangling Shot was more epic than my actual epic attack, so I can maybe see the patch changes from that aspect.



Group play VS solo play:

I can't speak for group play, but a couple quick opinions:

I'd agree that solo or small group play is generally quite well balanced. I have had rage reduction work well in a two-player group, with both of us doing rage reduction. So, it seems likely that it could similarly work in a 6-player group, as long as all 6 players are using their rage reduction abilities. I don't think that would be a particularly desirable group play style though - it would be nice if the necessary rage reduction could be handled by 2-3 players out of the 6...

I've never found much use for crowd control in solo play. I think part of it is just that I'm not all that fast at retargeting, so taking the time to target and mez a mob and then target my original mob again loses me precious seconds that I could spend dps'ing, and the mez tends to not buy me enough time to feel worthwhile. If the mobs are hard enough that I want to mez one instead of having it beat on me, the odds are that I won't be able to kill the other mob(s) before the mez wears off and then I'll still die.
My main spot for mez use has been the winter nexus in a 2-player group, when we really wanted to avoid rage attacks from any ogre adds. Coordinating that was difficult though - even with both players in Discord, there was some voice chat delay and we'd end up breaking each others mezzes fairly frequently. Having some temporary damage immunity on newly mezzed mobs would be great. Having fewer mobs in some dungeons would also be helpful in that aspect - when ambushed by 5-6 mobs at once, being able to mez just one of them feels fairly useless.

I like the direction of your proposed group play changes.

[ErDrick]

Btw I would also like to add that while a tank and support is nice to have, a full group of 6 DPS people in the level of gear that Yaffy has suffers no problems destroying groups of 6 elites at once, because each group member is capable of soloing a mob ( although we focus fire instead). The only thing that can kill you besides player error is bad timing on AE disables from tacticians in that situation....or if someone needs to afk for a minute, or if you have to stop to phlog stuff because you have full inventories( repops). It is still boring though ( imo).

But again we are talking about people that are essentially level 90 in level 70 content. Which isn't useful info when talking about balance.

Not trying to attack the valid points you have made though and I hope you don't see it as such.

[ErDrick]

Tagamogi

What do you use your AE abilities for if not to kill trash mobs quickly? Do you AE manticores to death or something? Do you use ae skills from skillsets that are level appropriate for dungeons or areas that you are in? As in, are you using ae's to kill things @ level 40 that drop level 40 gear that you actually need ( aka you are wearing level 30-35 gear, and using the level 40 versions of those skills, as an example). If so, how do you survive the pull long enough to kill them ( at appropriate skill levels). If not, what exactly are you doing with them? ( these are honest question for the sake of clarification and balance btw, not an attack).

I would love to hear your perspective. I didn't tell anyone "you must play the way I say" I just stated the only reasons that I know of, why you would use them. Could I be wrong? Of course I could, show me how... it's 100% possible that you can change my mind. I definitely don't mind that you disagree with me, your points are equally valid.

Also I proposed more then one simple solution, the 2nd was stop throwing groups of monsters at us if you don't want us to ae them. I am 100% fine with AE being nerfed if we are not then forced into fighting multiple opponents at once.

As for your opinions on archery, valid as well...but you can't have all of the things you mentioned on the same set of gear.( at least not at amounts to make them effective) And a lot skillsets have those same options in different flavors.

Rest of what you said I can agree with to some extent, and even if I didn't your perspective is valid and welcomed.

[Crissa]

I loved using crowd-control skills in WoW but the targeting in PG is just... Alot sloppier. I haven't played in the last few weeks and hope the patch before last made it better (having the tab list order change all the time was annoying, and having click-targeting use a different formula somehow than mouseover has been... limiting) But this is beta, so you expect some ongoing troubles.

Of course, I played a Feral Druid and even when I played Resto I wasn't above going bear to stun something so I could have breathing room.

[Aionlasting]

I loved using crowd-control skills in WoW but the targeting in PG is just... Alot sloppier. I haven't played in the last few weeks and hope the patch before last made it better (having the tab list order change all the time was annoying, and having click-targeting use a different formula somehow than mouseover has been... limiting) But this is beta, so you expect some ongoing troubles.

Of course, I played a Feral Druid and even when I played Resto I wasn't above going bear to stun something so I could have breathing room.

Ay I agree with you Crissa. This game leaves much to be desired when it comes to the group interface and targeting in general. It makes healing really painful when it comes to targetted healing. Its one of the reasons I won't try the preist class right now.

[kazeandi]

The "Enhanced Client" in UO has a target frame that contains the health bars of "mobs in range" you can click. Some other game (forgot which) had a frame that listed all mobs you're currently in combat with (FF14 maybe?). Something like this would be handy, also the marking of mobs.
With such tools, planned crowd control would be doable, smooth and fun.

[Tagamogi]

ErDrick - Yes, we have pretty different playstyles. I picked up an aversion to anything resembling endgame in my WoW days, so my usual approach is to level a couple skills together and then switch to something else when I get close to max level with them (or get bored of them earlier on). I wouldn't use a max level aoe skill to powerlevel a second skill because it doesn't make any sense to me to speed up the leveling process which is the part of the game I like the most.

I also wouldn't use aoe to mass-farm lower level mobs because I find farming boring.

So, I use skills with aoe just the way I'd use other skills. I tend to solo or duo in vaguely level-appropriate areas, and the aoe works out fine for that. I don't really go out of my way to look for aoe opportunities - I'm quite happy if I can splash some aoe on just one or two adds. If I pull more than that, I'm usually dead, so I don't try for it. It's not all that exciting, but it basically amounts to me having fun dabbling around with aoe without feeling any particular need to go for max efficiency.

There are a couple mass aoe exceptions to that:
- Kur Tower. I find playing chicken with a bunch of zombies to see how many I can group up before they kill me to be insanely fun. I am actually quite sad that experience got nerfed. I think when I was leveling fire magic, I spent a lot of time in Kur Tower - level 38-56 or maybe even a bit higher. The last few levels weren't as fun because things were getting rather too easy but I stayed there because there isn't much else to do between 50-60. So, I suppose this can count as power-leveling but I would probably spend just as many levels in Kur Tower if I was leveling two skills that did not include aoe.
- Outdoor Gazluk orc camps. I was duoing with a bard tank friend and we were definitely trying to stack as many mobs as we could to aoe them at once (which was usually not that many thanks to all the casters and archers.) So, that's been nerfed now too, but my preferred solution would really be to have the spawn rate in those camps changed, so that we don't have 5 casters popping on top of us at once. Madly spamming all available aoe seemed to be the only way to live through that.

So, I can definitely see some of the problems you are talking about, even while mostly staying out of endgame group content myself.

Maybe this is getting off-track a bit, but how would you propose making the money-making and repeat-leveling process more fun? Just grinding through things as fast as possible with an ae skill you otherwise don't want to use sounds not fun to me... I realize definitions of fun differ, but would you be actually enjoy grinding for money/xp if aoe was changed back to the way it was before? ( Also a serious question aimed at understanding your point of view. My own answer is basically to avoid anything that starts feeling like a grind and take game breaks if needed, but that certainly does not make anyone money fast.)


Archery - yeah, I really shouldn't say "I'm ok with a nerf for a skill that I don't play anyway." :) It is a nice skill though, and I felt you were undervaluing it a bit. It's correct you can't use everything at once but sometimes it helps to be able to just quickly switch in an ability even if your overall gear isn't optimized to make the most of it. I also felt the archery nerfs in this patch were primarily aimed at Mangling Shot which I would very much rate as the most powerful and possibly overpowered archery ability. I don't know if it needed nerfing, but I know it's the one ability that I never took off my archery combat bar, no matter what other abilities I tried.

[Tagamogi]

The "Enhanced Client" in UO has a target frame that contains the health bars of "mobs in range" you can click. Some other game (forgot which) had a frame that listed all mobs you're currently in combat with (FF14 maybe?). Something like this would be handy, also the marking of mobs.
With such tools, planned crowd control would be doable, smooth and fun.

Ooh all of that. (EQ now has a similar list that shows all mobs currently in combat with your group. As someone who started playing EQ around 2000, it still feels a bit like cheating to me but it makes a mezzer's job much, much easier. )

[ErDrick]

Maybe this is getting off-track a bit, but how would you propose making the money-making and repeat-leveling process more fun? Just grinding through things as fast as possible with an ae skill you otherwise don't want to use sounds not fun to me... I realize definitions of fun differ, but would you be actually enjoy grinding for money/xp if aoe was changed back to the way it was before? ( Also a serious question aimed at understanding your point of view. My own answer is basically to avoid anything that starts feeling like a grind and take game breaks if needed, but that certainly does not make anyone money fast.)

That's a very good question, I don't really have an answer that will apply to everyone. A good start would be making group content fun and engaging so that people wouldn't mind starting from scratch as much. For me personally, it's not the exp that is the problem as much as It's just not enjoyable to repeat as is. Mowing down your enemies in a matter of seconds before they mow you down is acceptable in a twitch style combat setting, as in where you can do dodge rolls and active blocks and interrupts to avoid getting instantly killed, but I don't find it acceptable or fun in this type of tab-target game. But hey, maybe that's just me, that's one of the reasons I posted...to try to get a feel for if anyone else feels the same way, or if they don't....to find out why they don't.

But not everyone wants to be in a group 24/7 either and that shouldn't be forced, I myself just want to kill stuff alone at times, so that is not gonna alleviate the issue for everyone.

Other then that....reduce the costs of unlocks and upgrades to manageable levels. Yes, AE grinding is quite boring, I don't even really do it for the exp, I do it for the cash to pay for the unlocks and skills...it comes to roughly 400k to fully unlock a skill ( plus whatever you had to do to get the required favor with 2-6 different NPC's depending on which skill we're talking about). But while I am grinding that cash I might as well not waste the exp, so I level something up while I do it just to make it a tiny bit less boring and wasteful. I have never sat at panthers in kur for a whole day doing this btw, I do it in 50-70 level content usually...and only for 1-2 hours at a time because it drives me crazy with boredom. I wish I didn't have to do it but if I want to try something new, I do have to.

Like if I log on tomorrow and decide to level a skill that I have not worked on before, like...knife fighting. I know I am going to require 400k-1million councils when all is said and done to do that. All the other options for making that money in a reasonable time frame have been systematically eliminated. AE grinding for it is kind of the last bastion, and no..I don't enjoy it. That said, I do enjoy AE'ing for 5-15 hours more then I'd enjoy grinding 1 mob at a time for 100 hours to accomplish it ( although both options are still shitty to me). This is only gonna get worse @ level 91 unlocks.

Grinding is part of mmo's, I get that. When I played everquest though the group combat was closer to what I want to see here so it felt like less of a grind ( not to be confused with EQ in it's current state though, not even close to the same animal). Dungeon or named bosses also had unique drops to keep you going in there for. ( which is another thing this game desperately needs, more things like the ring from the gargoyle in GK). To be clear both dungeon bosses and soloable nameds "in the field" had items like this, there was always a solo alternative...maybe it wasn't as good ( but in some cases it was) but it was still something to do even while alone.

Another nice feature that EQ had that I wouldn't mind seeing was that monsters that were a certain amount of levels below you stopped giving you experience, but they also didn't aggro you when you were trying to run from point A to B. Just a quality of life thing though.

It seems like the costs are also pretty prohibitive for first timers as well, I have seen quite a few new people getting stuck at 50 or 60 for a few weeks at a time, simply because they can't afford to buy the unlock ( or afford the favor grind itself). Now I could go to GK with groups and sell everything that drops...except that I also need phlogs and stuff so.... screwing myself one way or the other. Better to just go mass kill some stuff that drops nothing I need and sell it. But neither of those things would help first timers. I should note though that I always try to avoid screwing with newer players, I will usually leave an area rather then kill everything and deprive them of their fun...although not everyone is going to be that respectful. ( although sometimes I don't even know other people are there)

Speaking of the cost issue though, some input from first time players would be pretty helpful to determine if this ( money) is as big of a problem as I think it is... I know it is to some of the other veterans I have talked to about it. In most games though, your money would be going towards upgrading your gear instead of unlocking skills so...this game is in a strange place as far as that goes, and I could be completely off the mark.

I feel like when changes are made the only question that they should be asking themselves is "is this going to make the game more fun?" Balance and realism is nice but if it isn't fun neither of those really matter. If the answer is "not really" then they need to be thinking of alternate options. Easier said then done though, and I also understand that. On top of that there is no change you could possibly make that will please everyone, also understood.

I'm not trying to say "OMG do what I am saying or the game will fail", I'm trying to start discussions that might lead to the game becoming better.

But the short answer would be : Make it more fun ( by fixing group content), lower costs so we don't HAVE to focus on making a ton of money just to try something, and stop throwing swarms of mobs at me. Alternate goals like unique items ( or even skillbooks) would also be a plus.

[ErDrick]

As far as acrhery changes btw, we really need to wait and see how the other skills balance out after the next patch before I jump to(more) conclusions. My point about that was mostly it isn't any better or worse then any other skillset, while having extra requirements ( fletching ...which also requires foraging and alchemy and gardening and mining / looting trash mobs you'd never loot otherwise just to get your arrows back/ other people stealing your arrows / arrows eating up 8-12 inventory slots/ every attack costing you money/ If you don't pay attention and happen to run out of arrows, that skill just became invalid...hope you aren't 2 hours deep in a dungeon).

It used to have an ability that set it apart from other skillsets, in the utility that hookshot brought, which made it worth using in some situations regardless of the downsides ...but that is gone. The stated reason for it's removal was that the single-pull offered by it made things too easy...leading me to believe that he also does NOT want us body-pulling single mobs either and they just haven't figured out how to address that yet ( could be wrong, if a developer wants to correct me on that, please do).

Some people used it purely because it could be modded to do insane damage though ( if anyone remembers at one point it was doing 10k+ critical hits consistantly), and that's how it got attention and also a nerf bat, and that's understandable...but if it's just "in-line" to other skills then the drawbacks aren't worth it. ( as always, in my opinion..not as a fact).

[ErDrick]

I really need to log off here and stop posting walls of text, but my 2 cents on a aggro meter would be a no. I don't want to see the game be easier, I just want to enhance the fun of a few systems that I feel need it, or even make it harder in some aspects.

I had to add that or id be a hypocrite for asking people not to just read my posts and move on without leaving their own thoughts or feedback !

[Crissa]

I don't really like the 'lists' but we do need a way to consistently keep track of what 'monster 2 of 6' is doing.

[ErDrick]

Just thought of something else that needs mentioning, but before that I would like to say the reason I'm posting stuff in this thread instead of making a new thread for combat issues is because we have tried it before, and those threads immediately die. People actually read patch note discussions.




-Crowd Control
I don't think Mez should be unbreakable for 5 seconds, as that would just turn it into a 5 second stun which is ridiculously strong


If you want to talk about how ridiculously strong a 5 second stun would be ( like you thought I meant ) we really should bring up how stupidly powerful AE disables are, since they're essentially the same thing.

Especially when certain bosses ( at least 3 I can think of) have AE disable + ae stun+ ae knockback as their skillset. The current work around is stun the hell out of them before they can do it....Kill them before they become unstunned if you can.

If I CC a mob it becomes immune to the same type of CC for 60 seconds afterwards, why doesn't that apply to players?

At the very least if that's going to remain a thing then disables shouldn't gray out healing abilities.

Can you imagine if a player skillset had a 5 second AE disable like mobs do? on like a 5 second cooldown ( like they basically do because their rage bars are so small)....everyone would be using it.

We should also bring up how multiple mobs that stun for 1 second each are able to stack those stuns into 10 second durations.... it's not very fun when you get caught in it and don't have 60%+ stun resistance.

I feel like this type of ability should be reserved for something special / insanely powerful, not to every boss going forward ( which seems to be the trend atm). Not to even mention a plethora of trash mobs having the ability.

Thoughts?

[Yaffy]

ErDrick

When it comes to AoE disables and stuff from bosses, honestly I like them, since they make the boss more difficult and a bit crazier. Now, I don't know how other people feel about it, but one big thing that I like about those bosses like the golem is that they can reward good movement from players, which is a big thing Project Gorgon has that other MMORPGs don't (Probably by accident). If you aren't the one tanking, you can actually dodge those AoEs by moving out of range and then coming back in, which I think is really cool, but I really don't see people do like ever. (Most people just run away to heal if they're dying). It doesn't just save health but also increases damage since you get to avoid the disable/stun.

This is basically the same thing as other MMORPGs where enemies spawn big red circles around them to warn everyone around them of the attack you need to dodge, but this one doesn't give you such a blatant warning and it's based off of cooldown/rage meter instead, which makes it feel way more natural rather than the typical MMORPG Dance Dance Revolution. It's kind of awkward before you understand how the boss works though. I would love to see these moves be telegraphed in an interesting way and have their ranges shown, but without resorting to the typical MMORPG style of "Step out of the red circle". Maybe something like a telegraphed animation before the move comes out would be neat? Like if the Golem did an animation that says "I'm going to explode" or something without drawing anything on the ground.

I know what I said would be a bit of work on the animation department and kinda push Gorgon to being sorta actiony. But I do think it would make boss fights more interesting. You wouldn't have to change stats or anything (Since I know some games would use the give away animation as an excuse to triple its damage) but it would just encourage players to do what they already could be doing right now and make it a bit easier to understand. It's a bit of a silly proposal but I do think movement in combat in PG is completely different than movement in other MMORPGs and could have potential to be implemented in a fun and interesting way.

[Leodane]

I typed out a nice, long response to the question of the cost of unlocking higher level skills, but the internet went out when I hit submit =\

Short version: I'm reaching the part of the game where I'll have to be unlocking 61+ pretty soon. I'm bard 57/ psych 50/ ment 48 right now, and I just don't see the point in grinding money for hours to unlock 61+ yet. Being higher level doesn't really change the game. I don't get more options, just harder versions of the same options. I get the same enjoyment out of murdering piles of goblins that I get from murdering piles of anything else, and I can murder piles of goblins just fine with my L50 skills. Most of what I find enjoyable about this game can be done at pretty much any level. The only incentives to killing stuff and leveling up past 50 is to get the ability to kill more stuff and level up more. There's no land ownership. There's no political offices to run for. There's no interesting game functionality which unlocks at higher levels in combat skills, so right now, it's really not a good investment relative to the amount of work it requires. I say this from the perspective of a relatively casual player - my play time is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 hours a week, mostly on Saturday.

Said another way, I don't think I'd enjoy the game more at level 70 because I'd just be doing the same things, but I'd have to sink 20 hours of grinding into just gathering money.

[preechr]

Speaking of the cost issue though, some input from first time players would be pretty helpful to determine if this ( money) is as big of a problem as I think it is... I know it is to some of the other veterans I have talked to about it. In most games though, your money would be going towards upgrading your gear instead of unlocking skills so...this game is in a strange place as far as that goes, and I could be completely off the mark.


Someone called for a noob?

While there seem to be a few new players that may not have much general MMO knowledge/experience, I think the first thing newcomers to Serbule do is find an NPC to unload their inventory on... Asking whether there is a vendor on Anagoge is pretty common, as is "How do I get back to the island to get all my stuff out of that chest?"

Marna's Used tab shows evidence of this as well, and then we get the questions about weekly spending limits and people learn to increase favor and spread their loot out among appropriate vendors. The game already provides hints in this regard, but just as they are already familiar with the concept of stockpiling money, they are used to not reading what NPCs say

I may be guilty of not getting a hint myself, but it seems like the NPC Work Order Board requires someone to just stumble upon it, way out north of town, and that's a great way to earn some money if you are willing to learn the crafting skills required. I did this for a while, and didn't mind having to learn some carpentry, gardening and cooking to earn some cash, and it didn't take long to understand how the rotation works.

While the game's lack of "hand-holding" is admirable, the community generally steps in to thoroughly explain to those that ask a question in Global that they should focus more on favor and less on cash at first, how vendors and storage work, how to get back to the island, how to find the More Info tab on items, where to look for stuff they need, how to access the wiki.... part of me thinks the game is still holding hands, but since its the community doing it, I suppose that community-building is the point of the game not providing that information

In my case, once the Work Orders I could easily fill ran out, I was pretty close to being able to farm cotton, so I grew enough flowers to get there so I could start filling Player Work Orders to make cash... By far my first level 50 skill was foraging, followed by gardening, so I realize I don't play like most people I suppose, but I haven't had a huge problem finding ways to make money so far

The thought of farming up a several million councils though... Sheesh
Escwine and I are probably going to start setting up a store on the weekends though, so I've been stockpiling some valuable stuff and we may turn a fair profit that way... I'm sure as I progress into Kur and Rahu other sources of councils will become available as well

TL;DR - So far so good for this noob

[snowe]

I typed out a nice, long response to the question of the cost of unlocking higher level skills, but the internet went out when I hit submit =\

Short version: I'm reaching the part of the game where I'll have to be unlocking 61+ pretty soon. I'm bard 57/ psych 50/ ment 48 right now, and I just don't see the point in grinding money for hours to unlock 61+ yet. Being higher level doesn't really change the game. I don't get more options, just harder versions of the same options. I get the same enjoyment out of murdering piles of goblins that I get from murdering piles of anything else, and I can murder piles of goblins just fine with my L50 skills. Most of what I find enjoyable about this game can be done at pretty much any level. The only incentives to killing stuff and leveling up past 50 is to get the ability to kill more stuff and level up more. There's no land ownership. There's no political offices to run for. There's no interesting game functionality which unlocks at higher levels in combat skills, so right now, it's really not a good investment relative to the amount of work it requires. I say this from the perspective of a relatively casual player - my play time is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 hours a week, mostly on Saturday.

Said another way, I don't think I'd enjoy the game more at level 70 because I'd just be doing the same things, but I'd have to sink 20 hours of grinding into just gathering money.

It's unfortunately true, the game peaks at 50 in many cases currently. Some of the fault can be found in the mechanics (they feel very repetitive for any given skill line), some fault can be found in the wicked forced council grind (the 51-60 unlock is annoying, the 61-70 unlock is a kick in the nuts and all the abilities you will need to buy and/or research along the way are simply soul-crushing), some of the fault is on zone design (sub 50, you're mostly able to walk around outside of dungeons without worrying about maintaining body heat or hydration levels) and some of the fault simply rests on polish (sub 50 content has been in game longer, and correspondingly has more polish and variation).

There are a few things that have been more fun for me past 50 than prior, however. Messing about with transmutation and augmentation has been enjoyable, but the cost to do so is prohibitively high for some (both in time and councils). Some of the group dungeons are fun (I'm not sure they're more enjoyable than Serbule Crypt for it's level, however), and have interesting verticality. They're also pretty punishing for bad or even slightly sub-adequate pick up groups and nearly impossible to solo in.

Perhaps the thing I found most enjoyable about post level 50 content, however, was AE farming places like Kur Tower and the Wolf Cave for councils and phlog/augs. There was something satisfying about building out a skill and equipment set to accomplish that efficiently. Keeping this post apropos to the thread, however, that's been severely nerfed during the last major update.

Always remember, however, that sometimes the only winning move is not to play.

[Niph]

Eventually your friends unlock 61+ to see new hunting grounds. That's their incentive (and you will want to follow).

[Mikhaila]

The money seem daunting at first, especially if you are trying to concentrate on just one thing like leveling combat skills. People say they feel they are being punished. And they are but.....They are the ones punishing themselves. Sounds harsh, but if you ignore all of the game except leveling combat it means you will hit an expensive part of the game very early without a lot of ways to make money. The same will happen if you pick any tradeskill and decide you are going to max it out quickly. Or foraging, corpse talking, cheesemaking, flower arrangement, nature, poetry, etc etc etc.

If you take time off from leveling combat and explore a bit, gather a lot, do work orders, and broaden your base of skills, then the money flows in and you have a way to pay for things.

[Raviollius]

some fault can be found in the wicked forced council grind (the 51-60 unlock is annoying, the 61-70 unlock is a kick in the nuts and all the abilities you will need to buy and/or research along the way are simply soul-crushing)
It's only going to get worse, higher skills being huge exp/time/moneysinks is done by design, so it becomes incredibly impractical to be a master of everything.

[snowe]

It's only going to get worse, higher skills being huge exp/time/moneysinks is done by design, so it becomes incredibly impractical to be a master of everything.

If that is the intention, I'm at peace with that.


Always remember, however, that sometimes the only winning move is not to play.

[preechr]

That saying references War Games, in which the stakes were a bit greater than paying a little extra fake/free money to fight at a higher level and keep playing the game... but y'know, your call

[OpieFisher]

Just wanted to say that I really like Priest but I wanted to float an idea, I think we should give it a small heal as an alternate combat refresh you can learn for it.
Nothing crazy just 75 health on a 5-6 second cooldown or something like that.Thinking in terms of a BC pet's healing injection kind of level of healing.

[snowe]

That saying references War Games, in which the stakes were a bit greater than paying a little extra fake/free money to fight at a higher level and keep playing the game... but y'know, your call

The lesson of War Games wasn't about the stakes of nuclear war, but the futility of a challenge which can't be won. As I'm sure you recall, that lesson was taught to WOPR by making it play itself in Tic-Tac-Toe repeatedly - and I doubt anyone would argue the stakes of Tic-Tac-Toe are on par with Global Thermal Nuclear War. :)

Cited in response to a comment from someone who has found gameplay repetitive by level 50 and questions the enjoyment of advancing further, or in response to seeming enthusiasm for even more onerous future grind being added to the game... the reference seems apropos.

...but hey, a Buddy Christ finger point for getting the reference!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/93/Buddy_christ.jpg

[Mikhaila]

I've seen a lot of discussion in chat lately about how bad it will be to raise skills to 80, 90, 100+. Almost every discussion focuses on the increased costs. But those skill increases won't come without higher level content. Which will bring higher levels of money we can earn. Work orders will give more. Skins will sell for more. Higher value items will be forageable. I expect that it will take longer to go from 70 to 80 than from 60 to 70. Which is consistant with pretty much every other game i've every played.

[kazeandi]

The costs for unlocking skill caps and the prices of skills were not linear though, and if the current trend continues, lvl 80 will cost you a million just to unlock, then a million to get your skills (or 3-4 mil if you're Fire specced, lol).

[Rhawkas]

The costs for unlocking skill caps and the prices of skills were not linear though, and if the current trend continues, lvl 80 will cost you a million just to unlock, then a million to get your skills (or 3-4 mil if you're Fire specced, lol).

Geez, that's beyond crazy. I don't know much about making money in MMOs (the most I've ever had at once in Project: Gorgon is around 10k, and my main combat skills are around 30), but that sounds like it could be prohibitively expensive to the more casual players. =/

[Mikhaila]

Not enough data really to actually get a trend. And Citan can set them at whatever he likes. I'm not worried about it. We'll see how much it is, and how much you can make in the new content. Assuming both come at once.

For now i'm going to keep working on Psychology so I'll have one skill already at 80 when we go up to that point :)

[INXS]

What i really would like to see is more synergy levels to push most skill to 80, kinda unfair atm with only a few skills in the 80s, this way if unlocking lv 70-80, 80-90 is drastically expensive gives a little bit more leverage for players to earn money a bit better.