Update Discussion: August 25, 2019

[Tagamogi]

I have a lot of sympathy for the dev team. They are trying to entertain people ...

Yes, and then they have us whining on the forums about how we aren't entertained enough.

Just to be clear, I'm not unhappy with the game or the devs. I debated whether I should jump into this discussion at all since I haven't actually done the new content but well, I like talking and maybe I can add some viewpoints. The reason I haven't done the new content is that I checked my skills (capped, very near capped or around 50) and my money (can't afford a single 70+ skill unlock). It's largely a temporary problem - I drifted out of the game after an NPC training weekend and I'm just now trying to get back into it and haven't had time to restock money yet. Still, my enthusiasm for finally having the fae realm available is dampened somewhat by the idea of needing 4 times more effort to level past 70 than it took to get past 60, and I find myself increasingly planning my playtime for the weekend events that give me more cash or require me to spend less cash. Which, really, were a heavy part of my game planning before this latest patch already, and it kind of feels they shouldn't be.

Where I think it breaks down is when you get some aspect of the game that's effectively impossible unless you're constantly grouped. Gear farming at level 70 was an example, where GK elite runs were the only feasible way. (by a factor of 100x or more time investment). Grouping elites, the biggest problem is decomposing/phlogging and shoving stuff in crates as fast as piles up. If there was a way to advance solo at 20% the rate of groups, that'd be just fine, but this update probably takes bit of a step in the opposite direction.

I thought that was ok - I was able to do non-group content fine with the gear I had, so there wasn't really any need for me to worry about max-efficient gear. What frustrated me about GK is that I really wanted to learn Orcish and couldn't ( no, 5xp per rare drop from solo orcs doesn't count) , so I still can't talk to the orcs in New Prestonbule, and I know there's at least one NPC inside GK that I'm missing out on too. So, I'm really looking forward to getting to 80 because then I can maybe finally talk to those people.

How do you feel about only having to do the dungeon once, as opposed to having to run it repeatedly? If you can get the notoriety by joining a zerg run or good group, and then never have to repeat it, does that make it less bad than having it be a mandatory part of your daily play?

Well, that's rather the current system. I just don't like zergs or feeling like I'm being carried, so my personal choice has always been to wait to do group content until I can do it myself or with a group of 1-2 friends. (Possibly solution there could be just that I need to make new friends but I like setting my own play schedule and not having other people rely on me.) Anyway, I'm ok'ish waiting, it's just that it feels this patch added a new penalty to my wait and I don't really like that since there isn't any alternate way for me to get the training buff except to suck it up and zerg, and until I do that, I'll just be paying more than other people.

(Yes, yes, I'm a shameless mercenary and a glass half empty person, why do you ask? )

Now I need other things then crédits to unlock my crafting skills ... Maybe build in the choice to pay all crédits instead of the new items ?

I'd expect the royal jelly to be offered for sale by other players, so you can buy it from them instead of farming it yourself. Right now, the prices are probably a bit crazy but once the update's been out for a while, it hopefully shouldn't be too bad.

That being said, I'm not sure I'm fond of the royal jelly idea myself - I found the bargain aspect of fire and ice magic to be somewhat annoying at times, and I don't really like the idea of all skills requiring a special item instead of just councils now. Still, I'm hoping that since it's just single item used for all skills, it won't be too rare or hard to get.

* "Tier" unlocks on all skills and abilities removed altogether (ie, the unlock for the right to continue earning experience) - this allows people to experience what they want, when they want, without risk of taking the hit to the pocket for the privilege

* The cost that was associated with the tier unlock, is re-distributed (added and spread evenly) to all abilites/recipies associated to that skill, within that tier. So if an unlock was 400k, and a skill had 10 new/upgraded abilities through that teir, each ability and/or skill has its own cost increased by 40k. The net cost for progressing fully through the tier is the same upon completion. This suits the casual as they can plan for more incremental upgrades, go at a slower pace, etc while still progressing through said tier, and the more involved player, perhaps one with bigger balances, doesnt feel any impact either, its all the same to them, just the cost spread over time rather than sudden lump sums.
This means ability costs for 1-50 would be unchanged, and jump considerably there after.

I like this. It would help my playstyle - I basically tend to lose interest in a skill once I can no longer level it. The current unlock system doesn't particularly bother me - I usually switch to another skill or alt once I'm capped, but I think I'd slightly prefer a capless system.

* Wider expansion of exp penalties. The reason for this is with the removal of the tier unlocks, there needs to be some form of "hand break", sorry a better term escapes me, to stop someone thats say, level 75 Combat, going back to say Rahu sewers, or similar, owning the content there as a way to progress with considerably reduced risk, and at the same time potentially spoiling the game experience of others in the zone who are appropriate tier.
Note this would just take form of an exp penalty, opportunity for drops etc remains unchanged, no EQ style "Trivial Loot" BS. This point is only intended to attempt to say to people "If you want to experience leveing in Fay Realm - Level in fay realm, or Gazluk. Dont expect to see full reward below level 60 content".

Mmm. This would be similar to the current crafting xp penalties. I'm on the fence about this - I feel the existing system is set up so that each level takes lots more xp to get, so while you could get full xp for lower levels, it doesn't really make sense to do that because doing the higher tier recipes ( or killing the higher tier mobs) is just more efficient. Adding a low-level xp penalty on top of that feels a bit weird. I'll see how the crafting xp shakes out - I don't really have an objection to the xp penalty system, it just seems a bit odd.

[Yaffy]

As a quick comment about the cost of uncaps. I've always been under the impression that the current exponential scaling of costs is too high, but only exists because end-game players have saved up way too much money. Training costs are basically one of the only money sinks this game has, so that's why the costs are so high.

I'm not sure at what level of content the economic wipe is planned, but I would hope that if it happens, it would be a good excuse to cut down on training costs so newer players don't have to deal with such ridiculous prices, since everyone will have lost their money and presumably all the older players will have already bought whatever training they cared about.

[Coglin]

Let us trim the fat of these talks. We ALL KNOW the most pressing issue at hand. The travesty that is truly a detriment to the morale of the ENTIRE community. THE ABSOLUTE LACK OF LEVEL 80 LEATHERWORKING BARD ARMOR RECIPIES. As Coglin, Master Bard, I am forced to resign myself to the second rate look that is the new astounding leather armor in order to upgrade my states and mods along with my level 74 bard/75 druid, as it has progressed to 84 bard/85 druid.

I expect a solution to this lampoonery that is the look of the new tier of leather is resolved immediately. NAY, I DEMAND it. I have seen these changes obviously and directly harm the spirit of the community to its core. EACH and EVERY player, old and new, displays a clear lessening of cheer in-game due to this mockery of leather.

It is in EVERYONE's best interest that a level 80 version of the bard armor look be implemented or the ability to remove the appearance skin of it to apply to new gear. Elseways the entire communities resolve is in danger of spiraling toward a disastrous level


Please take my language in the fun it is intended.
Coglin, Master Bard, subsequent druid.

[DamageIncorp]

I love the new area and have no problem with it taking considerable time to level skills up to 80+.
I am trying to focus on a few select skills at a time.
I would love to see more mobs in the 7 to 12k health range, which would be challenging but more solo friendly.
Could we get an icon that shows how long trollbane oil will burn for?
It says it lasts long, but the elite war trolls definitely regen up while on fire.
The amount of time that went into the area was considerable and the effort shows.
I am having a very hard time finding mushrooms, especially fly amantia...so maybe increasing spawn density would help.
Might also need to increase the drop rate slightly of new combat scrolls .
After close to 70 hours in the new area, I have found none.
I am enjoying the area immensely overall and always open to grouping or helping others complete quests.
Hit me up or wave if you see me.

[Tagamogi]

At the risk of beating a dead horse: I hopped over to the fae realm yesterday and checked out the trainers myself. My price tag for unlocking pig 71+ was 356K, as compared to the 332K for Yaffy in the screenshot posted earlier in this thread. So, that's a 24K difference for one single skill unlock. If I consider all the skills and abilities I have trained or could train right now, that's going to be what? A million councils penalty for not maxing my discounts? Two?

A nicer way of looking at this might be that people who've played a lot are getting a nice discount on the exhausting task of farming up all those councils. However, I have a less nice personality and I'm just interpreting this as every time I train, I'm getting ripped off.

In all fairness, I checked the training prices on an alt with 63 notoriety and a mere 16 civic pride since I apparently ran out of fuel oil or the desire to use it. Still, it seems that the most cost-efficient path through the game is to max notoriety and civic pride before doing anything else. Both of those are done best as a group zerg. Civic pride can also be leveled solo of course but as someone who's done that to 49 on my main, I wouldn't really recommend it.

Anyway, now that I finally made it over to the fae realm, at least I can add something else to this post: I think the fae realm's pretty and I love the pixie model. I proudly discovered the way in the Gazluk Caves myself, and I went "oooh" as soon as I saw the pixie standing there. I loved the conversation with it and I really enjoyed meeting everyone in the fae realm so far. In the initial area, I was able to kill 1-2 mobs at a time by myself ( level 58/59, in level 40 purples with a couple yellow 55 pieces), and I was really pleased by that. It looks like in the future, this is a place someone could start exploring in their mid/late 60s and make friends with the level 70 trainers before reaching the level 70 cap which I think is nice design.

I haven't done anything noteworthy in the fae realm yet, but I'm definitely looking forward to coming back with a friend. Did I mention it's pretty?

[Celerity]

Both of those are done best as a group zerg. Civic pride can also be leveled solo of course but as someone who's done that to 49 on my main, I wouldn't really recommend it.

I'm really interested how you would group zerg civic pride considering only 1 person can fill, light and extinguish the lamps/torches and get exp per in game day.

[Tagamogi]

I'm really interested how you would group zerg civic pride considering only 1 person can fill, light and extinguish the lamps/torches and get exp per in game day.

At least one of the weekend events in the recent months gave civic pride xp and required grouping ( https://forum.projectgorgon.com/show...ht=civic+pride ). I didn't participate, so I don't know the amount of xp given and may be vastly overestimating the impact. It just feels that about anything's likely to be more efficient than refilling lamps.

So, yeah, since it's a weekend event that ran twice afaik, I don't know if it was fair of me to say that civic pride xp can be zerged. It's just that I know I could have more civic pride xp right now if I didn't mind grouping, and I'm going to assume there will be more events like this in this future. ( I don't mind that the events favor groups, it's just that right now it feels like it combines with notoriety to give me a double penalty.)

[Lasc]

On the subject of unlocks and pricing again....
Now this has been a few weeks, are people still thinking things are too steep on this front?

The use of 'jellies' i thought was a great idea and mitigated things rather well. A way to manage the initial player market it created would be what id like to see handled better if this idea is taken further (I dont want to suggest NO-TRADE items, but......)
Perhaps a 'neater' way, for future such content, could be to increase the favor-based training discounts in these scenarios, and, at the same time, giving npc's more, and repeatable 'favor' quests, then each tier of favor unlocked can have the 'cost adjustment' the equivalent of 1 jelly.


Also on difficulty, and again aimed at those casual/limited play styles - do you still consider the Fae Realm too punishing? or now that things are bedded in, you know/understand the geography, populations, etc are things better?

Im genuinely curious, as i consider myself a casual player, and my experiences within FR have honestly been great.... love the zone.
I really think once you establish where to find things, and where the good grind spots are, it becomes like any other zone.... Stay away from the mountains, and the Basilisk area and things are good to the soloer....

I think FR has been a great addition.

[Oxlazr]

The zone itself is fairly pretty, though in terms of variation it's rather lackluster, which is understandable for the time being.

I haven't really bothered unlocking skills - seems like more effort than it's worth right now, but it does highlight an issue that goes hand-in-hand with the overall combat difficulty that others have brought up - the game seems to be balanced around players who are, well, playing optimally. I never really enjoyed the augmentation system, so I.. simply don't use it. All these min/max buffs exist, like flowers, meditation, what have you, but again - it all comes off as tedious and temporary.

But when that stuff becomes sort of essential, min/maxing damage output to quickly kill monsters becomes more or less compulsory.. well, we run into problems. At the moment, from what I did play, I largely identified what monsters weren't worth killing and tried to avoid them (such as the bears, or the trolls that need to take fire damage); those monsters quickly become obstacles rather than content. Sure, some builds can adapt and overcome, but not everyone's going to look at a challenge and figure out how to beat it. They're going to stick with their current build, and if it doesn't work the content is simply nonviable to them - given the excessive cost of increasing level caps coupled with the increasingly large amount of time-investment required, there's.. very little room to adapt to monster types by yourself.

Much like some of the others, I still log-in to check chat or otherwise check the forums fairly frequently, but I just can't motivate myself to consistently play; I distinctly remember the level 1 - 50 content being "better" than the current set-up.

Whenever I bring up discussions in chat - regardless of the topic - there's always a huge array of opinions and none of them are conclusively right... I'm just hoping that things eventually fall into place.

[Tagamogi]

I only spent a few hours in the fae realm so far, and from what I've seen so far, the difficulty of non-elite mobs is spot-on. I had two duo groups - one with both of us around 58-62 fire/battle chemistry purple solo gear, and one with a 76 sword/79 shield in Gazluk Keep gear plus my wimpy alt at 59ish staff/battle chemistry. In the level 60ish group, we could kill most things fast and easily, without feeling it was too trivial. The mobs further south gave us more of a challenge - both of us could solo a winter soldier if needed but also die if we didn't pay attention, and the hippogryphs were better duo'd at our level.
The 70+ Gazluk Keep gear was definitely overpowered for the northern half of the zone - my chief contribution to that group consisted of watching him take down everything in a few hits. We still managed to die a few times to sheer stupidity - like ending up in fight with 5-6 spiders at once.

So, to me, it just seems like a pleasant zone to explore - not too easy, not too hard, and I like that you have to pay a bit of attention to avoid elites and not confuse winter soldiers with scouts.The only mildly negative thing I'd say about the mobs I've seen so far is that the speed debuff from the carnivines is really annoying as a melee - I'd love if the speed debuff was a bit less or lasted a shorter time, or maybe auto-disappeared once the carnivine is killed.

I like the size of the zone - it doesn't feel overcrowded and it feels like there's lots of stuff to explore. The zone landscaping seems fine to me - you got the trees and the ruins and the big fire hill, and it doesn't feel to me like it needs more variety. How far you can see is definitely fun - I like being able to see the orb from quite a way away.

I still think the overall atmosphere of the zone is great. My friend enjoyed the conversations with the fairies as much as I did, and got a huge kick out of Felmer asking him all kinds of weird questions about elves. I liked both the rakshasa and elf conversations, and I'm almost tempted to level up a human just to see what those fairies will say. My friend also promptly started leveling animal handling (from a previous level 25) because he was that inspired by the idea of a pet bee. My husband is less conversational, but seemed to enjoy the zone and commented that he liked how far away the fire mountain looked from a distance.

I think I like the royal jelly requirement. It seems they aren't too hard to come by but just rare enough that you have to think a bit about what you want to use them for next. I won 4 jellies in the casino (I like that the new fae items can show up there!), we got a couple from non-repeatable quests, plus the hourly pixie quest can reward jelly, so it didn't seem terribly hard to get started collecting them.I do like that they are tradable - we got to pool ours to get my husband uncapped sooner than he'd been able to manage on his own. Since it seems the jellies can be pretty reliably obtained solo, I don't think there's any need to restrict trading to control prices. If someone wants to pay exaggerated market prices to get 500 jellies RIGHT NOW, by all means let them.

The council cost of the training gets a "not interested" from me. My general feeling is that I can make money and making money can be fun, but I'm not interested in it currently and I'd rather play than worry about training costs. Worrying about affording the level 70+ training seems to much effort in general and then there is that discount...

The difference in the training discounts between players continues to have me sulking big time. It's possibly worth noting that I appear to be the only person thus affected, but it just makes me want to not train anything. I uncapped foraging 60+ for one character which I regret in hindsight. My current game plan mostly involves pretending high level training doesn't exist. Since it looks like we may finally get a semi-weekly trio group going, flat out not training may not be possible, but I intend to put all training off as long as possible and train as little as possible. Fortunately, I don't think the pace of our group will be very fast. I have zero motivation to level past 70 on my own currently.
I'm not sure what I'll do about my crafting skills - maybe in a few weeks, my sulk will recede far enough I'll be ok uncapping them slowly, but for now I'm putting on a one-person training strike to protest unfair pricing.

But hey, I picked up a piggy lemon yesterday and playing a baby pig does sound like fun...