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We had a heated "discussion" online. Thanks for the personal message after, but to make things clear.
You have a great game on your hands. And i understand it is your game with your vision. But player numbers do not lie. Now, you can chose to ignore them and maybe player numbers do not even matter for your business case. If so, fine, just tell us, and we (I) will not give that kind of feedback anymore. But fine tuning systems will not make a dent, imo, in getting more players to stick around. Some core design systems need change, and i am not talking 1 mod less or more. I am talking storage space, end game longevity, time sinks, yadda yadda.
I am not the kind of person to give detailed information on if skill X needs 10 or 20% more damage. But i can tell you if i have more, or less fun playing your creation, than when i started years ago. And my answer is, less.
To the why..i want to feel like with the skills i chose, i make progress every day i log in. I do not want to be forced to run certain dungeons i dislike because you want us to reuse content, do dailies, or read a spreadsheet (pet breeding). And my precious free time needs to be respected. Thats why i play a MMO, for the PERSISTENT world, not like moba where you start new over and over. Case in point, changing how crafting fits into the game or mods after 8 years, really?
And above all, will those changes get more or less players to stick around (again, if that even matters) ? Because at this stage of the game, that would be my prime focus: will this change make the game more fun and will it bring in more players overall. There is a core number of players that play no matter what you do. But what about the rest? I for one dont see these changes have any positive impact at all on the concerns raised above.
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Max Enchant Changes:
I am actually quite excited about the loss of max enchanted gear. I say this as a crafter and as someone who currently has 6 actively used max enchanted set at lvl 80 and who has previously crafted and abandoned many others. What I like about this change is that it puts drops and crafted on a more even playing field. Spring fairy for a lot of builds will continue to be best in slot b/c its implicit mods are great. Previously I have ignored dropped gear outside of a few specific pieces and even gear with decent implicit mods couldn't hold a candle to a 7th skill mod. This also means that gear will take less time/rolls to go from crafted to finished. Long term I would like to see a lot more variety of gear drops and implicit mods while still keeping a slight slant towards crafted. One of my favorite things about PG is that it asks its players to be situationally prepared - and I think this change gives us a better chance of doing that. I could see keeping a set of FF dropped gear for nature resistance and using that there, but switching for WT or GK even on DPS. To that end I would also love better ways to store/retrieve loadouts, sort gear in inventory by loadout, and a means to put loadouts that are not actively used into long term "loadout storage" so if you take a break from a build you don't have to recreate the loadout later.
But on the whole, I think assuming the game is balanced in the end (I would hope mobs get some nerfening as players do through this) it doesn't really matter if we have 7 mods or 6 - 6 mods means there's less "wrong" choices to make so a player who isn't great at theory crafting vs an overtuned build will naturally have a lower absolute difference of dmg output (even if relative dmg is the same) which should help the more casual playerbase.
As of right now crafting yellows is too easy, but I hope it doesn't scale back to exactly what it was when it changes - or I hope this change doesn't come soon. With gear being more accessible from crafting right now I feel even more excited to test out builds that I don't have high hopes for b/c it no longer costs me an arm and a leg to give a build a fair shot. As for making crafting continue to be useful I could see at true end game higher tier recipes with better implicits and less accessible or more time gated resources - I think that would appease the concerns of crafting focused players.
As for how to make yellow max enchants useful - one idea I had is to give naturally rolled yellows from max enchant recipes more transmutation durability. That way even if its not best in slot there's a reason to go for it - it speeds up the time from crafted to rolled and could be a huge boon to testing out builds you're not sure of.
The timeline of change is obviously a concern many of us have - the gear we have now was intended to be temporary, but people put a lot of time into these sets (myself included). We knew we would move on from them, but the terms of which we'll move on have changed and we don't have a clear picture of when or how that change will happen. We're also now in a transitional period where the existing "end game" veterans have a quality of gear that is inaccessible to new players. If I could set the timeline we would keep our existing gear until 90 comes out or maybe a month after to ease the transition - in that time max enchanted for lvl 80 would return so new players could craft (with a warning) gear that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. My guess is that you will be tweaking mods in a way that will make some max ench gear feel more exploitative or unbalanced before 90 and we'll see the departure of these items sooner than many of us hope.
To that end though, I think this would be a perfect time for a dev blog. Even if you're unsure of the future, even if things are likely to change, I think the community would be grateful to be let in on where things are going. Let us know what your thoughts and plans are in a detailed way and how you see the game unfolding from here. I know you've written things in the patch notes and on discord that give us some insight, but this is a pretty big and unexpected change for many and some messaging around it could go a long way in comforting those who are afraid of or unhappy with this change.
XP curve rework
I really like the core aspect of these changes - it changes the "leveling meta" in a way that encourages people to go to places that were previously not great for xp - I am max on Deldaron in every combat skill except druid, lycan, fairy magic, and now weather witching and most of those skills were leveled in the same few locations. I agree with Celerity's point on kur tower having lvl 50 mobs mixed in with the lvl 40 mobs - I think the more recent patch has addressed some of this, but I think it might be worth looking into flattening the mob level differences if possible so mobs in a given section of a dungeon are more likely to be same level or in a tighter range.
Also, part of the reason I leveled in the same areas on my characters is that I was using racial xp boosts with booze and other buffs. Rakkies have the best options here in that you can boost your righteousness such that killing a few sentients riddled in with non sentients isn't super likely to mess up your buffs, but for elves even if I was in water in rahu sewers killing too many at once could lose my cleanliness. With the encouragement to move around and find more areas to level I would love to see a rework on humans/elves racial xp boosts.
Weather Witching
I haven't played around with this too much yet, but I'm excited to see this made it back into the game and love the flavor of it - the rituals are a fun concept, I wouldn't mind seeing more uses for the energy and hope we see it on a bar/visual representation sometime soon. I was a bit sad to see more nature/electric dmg since there are already so many builds that benefit from this - more cold or even crushing/trauma (force of water hitting you) mixed with elemental would be interesting. Haven't thought too long on that point and I feel "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" is appropriate since we got a new skill that benefits from an already strong craftable gear set, but my initial reaction was that of disappointment. Outside of this, the two issues I see with WW out the gate are channeling and knockback. For solo play unless you're using a pet to tank, channeling isn't exactly viable and for group content so many mobs have burst attacks and rage control is in a rough space imo so its unlikely you'll get many of your attacks off. It's nice that you can continue to case, but you're launching a lot of universal CDs in hopes an attack goes off. Theoretically you could learn and time it right, but for that to be the case I think we'd need stronger rage reduction mechanics. I second Celerity and Melk's ideas here I think they are good ones. I could also see rage attack evasion being interesting here, but I think WW needs something to assist getting channels off in situations you otherwise wouldn't. Priest builds often come with high burst evasion so they're less likely to see that with their channels, but WW/priest doesn't have natural synergy and as a DPS skill not getting attacks off slows down the encounter.
The other issue I have is the knockback from tornados. Knockback is fun in theory, but from my experience (running gauntlet with a WW) it detracts from combat encounters. I haven't tested if clear skies applies to mobs, but even still I don't think that would "fix" the issues we encountered. Tornados were able to knockback mobs but more importantly bosses such that they were constantly on the move and out of range of melee attacks. Moving in combat costs power and a decent amount of it, I found myself losing time (and therefore DPS) from having to run to the mobs as they continued to move and then being out of power more often because of all the running. I like the idea in theory, but I would love if the tornados came with a toggle to prevent them from knocking mobs back or make it so only the first attack on each mob triggers knockback. I can't imagine any situation that isn't incredibly cheesy where having a persistent aggressive seek pet knocking back w/e mob it lands on with every hit is a boon to combat. Having their knockback be more situational or controlled however sound like a lot of fun.
Overall I am happy with the changes made in this update, I know a lot of people have strong feelings to the contrary and I hope many of those who are stepping away return after the dust has settled.
Edit: I would also like to add that the level 35 requirement for seeing buffs/debuffs on elven players is a huge ask - I've been playing for 6 years and Deld isn't lvl 35. Granted I don't run DC much, but there aren't a lot of elves in game. I know Sedge is coming soon and will likely have some elves to kill, but I would love if this change was reverted until sedge comes out unless its in the next patch.
