Update Discussion: May 25, 2018

[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

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.