Discuss the Dev Blog: May 6 2018

[askjosh]

Could fix Serbule through lore and an in-game player event.
1. Host one-time druid event.
2. Monsters overrun Serbule and destroy the town (like Lion's Arch in GW2).
3. Vendors that we have already earned favor with, fear for their safety of the constant attacks and move on to Hogans Keep/ Kur/ Rahu.
4. To help fight the invasion and save Serbule, Yetta agrees to teach Weather Witching to all those that wish to fight.
5. Host event where players gather resources to rebuild town/ gain favor/ gain civic pride/
6. Insert the new building art assets in Serbule.
7. The rebuilt town is now smaller and less desirable for veterans but good enough for the newbies.
8. The old vendors we've earned favor with can be found in other locations to help spread the load.

I second that idea.

[Lyramis]

Excited to read about work on DOTS, it is one of my favorite ways to play but I have given it up the last couple years. Been hoping for a new full city for good long while and am super happy to hear about the plans for it and the new lvl 80 city in the future!

What I would like to see for the lvl 50 ish full city hub and the lvl 80 full city hub is storage expansions rather than brand new storage. If each new full city had a storage that corresponded to each storage in Serb it would be quite useful. Favor up the new npcs and the same storage places one has in Serb are also available in the new city but can be expanded with more slots. This may need some tweaking..most ppl don't need more storage for alchemy pots, lol. It would relieve a good amount of traffic in Serb because higher lvl players would no longer have to go there to use whatever mats they have stored in Serb.

Please also consider having:
cows
teleport (recall hearts home) Some of us will want a new home and changing that spell will take long!
the many other things ppl have already mentioned that make a city useful

The teleportation system has as much to do with the traffic in Serb as anything else. I use tele to Serb to get to Serb Hills for making my cheese and mushroom boxes...would be so much better if I didn't have to go through Serb. Also, I keep my alts in Serb for milking cows. If Serb Hills had a transfer chests and cows in the same field I would move them there and stay out of Serb.

Have you ever considered adding teleportation skills as bonuses to combat skills or even crafting skills? What if at lvl 30 cow or cheese making you could teleport to any cow spawn point with grass? Or lvl 30 spider or tailoring could teleport you to any cotton gin etc?

If I had my way there would just be simple teleport options to any tele circle but I know that is not how you want it be for your game.

[preechr]

I think games that make teleportation easy are sacrificing a lot for "quality of life"

Life in a game is moving through the world, experiencing the stuff you stumble across along the way... While teleporting to wherever you want to be in the world at a whim may seem attractive from a time-investment point of view, I think it damages the overall experience and can have a massive detrimental effect on game economy

But yes... a few more cows and crafting locations here and there would be terrific

[lab1702]

Hi! First time poster, not very long time reader... but I already love this game so much!

My two wishes:
* Please don't make things too stratified, where you only really bump into people near your own level.
* Don't make travelling by foot obsolete.

Most MMOs nowadays have done both and it takes so much away from them...


Also, Serbule graphics:
If you're a newbie like me, you may not know you don't have to use the slider, you can type in fractional numbers. On my PC (recent generation xeon and nvidia 1060) the number 0.50 seems to be a good balance between being able to walk in and turn around in a vendor room while also feeling like the people near me are alive.

[Tagamogi]

Looking at the Twitter screenshots for dots, I'm now curious: It looks like we could have damage dots tick at different intervals. The Venomstrike example has 6 ticks happening presumably 2 seconds apart. This seems to imply that we could have another dot also acting over 12 seconds, but applying 3 ticks happening 4 seconds apart instead? I'm mostly wondering why - it seems easier to me to just have all dots use the same interval between ticks. (And then we'd know how many ticks any dot has by dividing its duration by 2 if that interval is 2 seconds. Although I guess it would still be nice for the game to show it...)

I'm pretty excited by the upcoming changes talked about in the blog. It's possible I'm too excitable but I squealed "ooh" aloud both when reading about the elven city past Sedgewick Forest and about the coming knife offhand change. I knew that the knife change was coming but didn't expect it so soon. That should open up a lot of fun new combos.

[Taledar]

I guess I never submitted my reply and now I've slept since then so darned if I can remember what I said. I'm not exactly to the point where the nerfs would impact me, but I'm still in the camp of pulling the band-aid off quickly and getting it over with.

While you're working on the UI and trying to make it easier to scale DoT effects for knife skills, can you please make it so that we can see debuffs on the target frame with time remaining? Its really frustrating not to know when to reapply a debuff or a DoT or anything for that matter including buffs on teammates when you can't see the time remaining or if they are actually missing the buff. This would be HUGELY appreciated! Please ....

This would be very useful.

[Grious]

Not sure if this has been suggested before but would making Serbule Keep its own zone help with handling the large amount of traffic it gets? Not sure how hard it would be to implement this but separating the town and the monster ridden 'outskirts' with a zone wall seems like it would help alleviate some of the problems.

Also +1 for Ripping the Bandaid off

[Arundel]

The new dev blog is up! You can read it here.

This is the discussion thread.

It's really long... and this is the shortened version! There's just a lot of topics to cover. But if you want to skip over boring technical stuff, you can jump to the "Treasure and Skill Changes" section about halfway down.

I have mostly heard people asking for "rip the bandaid off" or the "get it all done at once" change for damage. I will say there are some builds that way overperform even after the changes. These are mainly due to a few problematic combos with +x% damage to a type or skill. I don't want to ever suggest that everything be homogenized or damage be the same across classes - obviously though the overall of the abilities have to be factored in and it is hard to determine the power level of a freeze ability or a heal vs. direct damage. However, if you want I can send a PM with some of the really busted combos but I think you are aware as I have only been playing a year (active only half of that) and some of the people and you have been looking at balance for like 6+ years right? Regardless, it doesn't matter much in a beta but certain skills being too strong is pulling people away from testing and playing other specs because lets face it, we all want to be able to get stuff done and accomplish goals and sometimes an unfair build can help us do that. If you remove or alter the broken combos or abilities then it could at least encourage testing more with other skillsets. Of course power level is hardly the only determining factor in what people playing but I'd love to see the numbers on people sticking with Archery after trying something else, because for a long time half of the people I played with Sword/Archery for the damage.

The classes are unique and you guys, for having a small team, have created the most fun MMO I have played and with the least boring or repetitive gameplay because you refuse to make zones tightened to only one level range and you refuse to homogenize classes or abilities: and I and many others greatly appreciate that. If you want my suggestions on abilities or skill sets that overperform I can give them, but like I said I want to PM them (so as to reduce chances of others cheesing after reading about it) - and I'm sure someone else has already reported them.

[Murar]

Hi,
We are 3 guys from France to have bought the game, three different machines, three different connections. The game runs at 60 fps but since we left the island the game is totally unplayable because of massive lag. Please open a European server, or do something. We have a ping of 130 I dont know if it matters.The game is excellent but we can not play it anymore...

[Darkian]

Personally, I want the band-aid ripped off in this situation, as I've gotten closer to end-game and done Gazluk Keep a few times, I've noticed a trend of any combat skills that don't either A.) Do a lot of damage or B.) Bring a lot of healing, are irrelevant to the end-game content. This of course doesn't affect solo player's much, but it really hurts to get to end-game with a combat skill that ends up having bad damage. I primarily played Lycan for the majority of the 4 years I have played PG, but as I got to Gazluk Keep and realized that my ability to solo well doesn't translate well to group play at all, the long cooldowns on my abilities and the one-trick-pony of the Skulk ability just doesn't keep up with the combat in GK, when you have sword, hammer, archery, and mage players doing way more damage on shorter cooldowns.

Right now the combat just revolves too much around the *do as much damage as fast as possible before the mobs overrun you* and this is a problem with several key systems in the game, mob density and respawn rates in group-based dungeons makes it difficult to progress if you cannot kill the mobs as fast as possible. Power regen without a mentalist in the group or the greatest food in the game means you become power starved fairly quickly, and while I like the dynamic that needing food and power regen skills brings, IMO its not very much fun for anyone who doesn't have either of those things, personally I would rather the combat be slowed down specifically in the group-oriented areas of the game like dungeons, unless you are over-leveled and over-geared, a tank/healer should be needed, mobs shouldn't die in a matter of seconds, make the mobs harder, worth more exp, and respawn slower so that we can slow down as players and enjoy the game, enjoy the dungeon, and clear at a nice pace rather than rushing to get to the next safe area before respawns overwhelm us.

This is also a similar problem I've had with animal handling, no matter how many updates AH seems to get, the skill just isn't justified having over any other combat skill at end-game, the damage potential of your pet is a 1/5th of any other combat skill in the game, and since the bears have a +25 cold mitigation special trick (which should just be a passive for the owner btw) instead of a decent AoE threat attack, the pets are basically useless for fighting more than 1-2 mobs at a time, if pets had their own skills, and rage bar and you had a bar for *pet attack *pet follow * pet guard *pet stay and the combat skills consisted of "buffs" to your pet, and some heals to the pet, along with better mods for AH gear boosting damage, you would see many more people able to stay relevant in higher level content using animal handling, but having to micro manage the power cost of your pets abilities, for the considerably low amount of damage they provide, is just not worth it right now.

That's why I think you should just rip the bandaid off on combat damage, drop everyone down to the same level across the board on damage potential, so that combat skill is a preference on utility and playstyle, and not a choice of either being able to do end-game, or not being able to do end-game without being carried.
Maybe then skills that are underperforming will be able to be relevant.

Lastly, the group UI NEEDS a massive overhaul if you are going to start putting in full-time support classes like the Priest, targeting players in your group is clunky and half the time just plain broken when using the group window, some players are un-selectable, sometimes HP bars just show as empty, its a mess, and it makes healing with direct heals a pain.

This is just all my personal opinion though after playing for 4 years off and on, so take it with a grain of salt because I realize I don't represent the majority of players, but I want to see this game succeed, and not just have a niche following.