Update Discussion: August 25, 2019

[Tagamogi]

I haven't made it to the new zone yet, so take my opinions for what they are worth:

I'm concerned with the price tag for the new unlocks. 300K plus is large enough that percentage discounts become very significant. (At least to me.) One of my first thoughts when seeing the new prices was that there is no way I'd ever be silly enough to uncap any skill past 70 if there wasn't an NPC training discount event happening. I forget whether the weekend training events are usually 10% off or 20%, but even at 10%, that's going to be 30K+ I can save by waiting for a weekend event, aka the profits from 3-4 good work orders. So, it makes a lot of sense to just wait for a weekend event and remain capped until then, but it's not a mechanic I'd consider fun.

Rubbing a little bit of salt into the discount wounds is that notoriety now gives reduced training costs past level 50 too, so obviously the most efficient way for me to train skills is to do a bunch of group dungeons I don't enjoy first in order to collect notoriety so I can train cheaper. if I don't do that, let's say I miss out on a 5% discount every time I train, that's 30K needlessly spent just when unlocking 2 combat skills, never mind their abilities. ( FWIW, my main is at 72 notoriety now, missing primarily Dark Chapel and Gazluk Keep since I did run the other group dungeons at times. My alts are a both a little bit past 50, through about 95% pure solo effort.)

My suggestion for the NPC training discounts would probably be to cap them - make it so you can at most get a 20% or other fixed number discount, either from an event or from a combination of notoriety + civic pride + whatever. I think that might feel like less of a race to collect as many discounts as possible.

My other concern about the price tags for the new skills is that they make lower level content progressively less relevant. I understand the idea is that higher levels costs more so that not everyone gets level 100 in everything, but that also means that higher level drops need to be worth a lot more to support the higher level skills. So, the most efficient way for someone to level multiple skills is to get to max level asap, farm at max level for cash, and then speed-raise any other combat skills to max level asap too, so they can do the well-paying content. As someone who likes both efficiency and puttering around in lower level content at level, that makes me a bit sad. I'm not sure what the best way of scaling this is. The level 61-70 combat unlocks still feel painfully expensive to me ( in an "ok, so this takes effort" kind of way). The level 71-80 unlocks sound more like "haha, no way" to me right now.

Edit, on a totally different topic:

I am curious what you and others think about all the other examples I gave where you are either killed instantly or unable to act for so long you might as well have been killed instantly, though. For example a 5 second ae disable is completely nuts when you can potentially die from 3 hits. I don't want things to be easier btw, I just want to have time to actually react, if I wanted to play an "avoid the red circles or die instantly" game, I'd play one. In fact I actually want it to be a lot harder but less stupid, as in mobs with much larger health pools, but not 10 at once, and them not being able to kill you in 1-4 hits.

Yes, that. I don't normally play group content, but even solo, I'd like fewer stuns and less spike damage and overall slower combat that takes a little bit longer to resolve.