Update Discussion: March 9, 2020

[Sokar]

Thorns:

While I agree that it is very powerfull for farming lower mobs - it is just that. It just gives you some councils. No usefull items to wear. If you want to farm high level elites there are way better ways than doing it with thorns and in most of the cases it didn't work anyways.


Fairy:

The only thing that prevents me from useing it as an real alternative to my main is the death penalty. Just one thing to think of: Maybe don't put nearly all advantages of the fairies at the "outside of fighting" situation (skill unlock, space, flying, food) and the disadvantages on the "during fighting" situation (death, metal amor,). Because in most cases skill sets/races/what ever is compared on the performance in battle. While it is very nice to have ice freely unlocked it is "just" saving "some" time at the beginning of your character. On the other hand if you die it will costs you time all the time (doesn't matter if you spend the time on farming the resurrection items or running back). So the battle advantages are the fairy magic skills. But you only get them while useing mentalism. So useing a fairy without the mentalism skill set is a very hard decision. Maybe let the fairy magic skills still be unlocked through leveling up mentalism but useable with all skill sets but with a (25%?) penalty if mentalism is not active.

If sticked to mentalism skill set: Maybe let atleast 1-2 of the 4 fairy magic skills be useable from the sidebar as an small benefit. Because if you want to use mentalism you allready had the harsh situation that you have not enough skill slots (same with all skill sets, but mentalism suffers a bit more of it because of the waves). So the new skills would only add a very tiny benefit because you have to throw another skill away for them.


Stun locks:

Suggestion For mobs: after the first stun hits them and has last, the next one only lasts 50% of the stun time and so on and if you stun one while it is allready stuned it reduces the original stun by half.

Assuming a stun time of 4 sec's it would be in the first case: 4sec + 2sec + 1sec + 0sec as the maximum time you can stun the mob regardless of fighting duration.
Assuming a stun time of 4 sec's it would be in the second case: 2sec (halved) + 2sec if you stun him two times directly one after the other.
Assuming a stun time of 4 sec's it would be in the second case: 2sec (halved) + 1sec (halved) + 1sec if you stun him tree times directly one after the other.

Suggestion for players: First stun works as it is now and after it the player gets a stun imunity of the same time.

[alleryn]

Because in most cases skill sets/races/what ever is compared on the performance in battle.

If that were true then you wouldn't see so many people in pocket gear, you wouldn't see so many people choosing skills based on sprint boosts, you wouldn't see people who avoid combat whenever possible and spend most of their time crafting.

You make some good points about fairies, but i have to disagree with you here. Personally i find the ability to fly a MAJOR perk (then again i think druid is significantly overtuned so if you have a druid main i can see why you might find this perk to be a little underwhelming).

[Sheawanna]

If that were true then you wouldn't see so many people in pocket gear, you wouldn't see so many people choosing skills based on sprint boosts, you wouldn't see people who avoid combat whenever possible and spend most of their time crafting.

You make some good points about fairies, but i have to disagree with you here. Personally i find the ability to fly a MAJOR perk (then again i think druid is significantly overtuned so if you have a druid main i can see why you might find this perk to be a little underwhelming).

I agree with druid , personally never used pocket gear ( perhaps not hoarder ) never used spring gear either or confusing double . I must be in the minority .
Will agree Fairies are fine even with the loss of inventory ( they fly right :P not to mention skills start at 30 . plenty of perks .. Perhaps the issue for many fairies is not understanding the way out of fae realm and dealing with it .. perhaps questline or starterline should be easier to understand .. no idea … but they seem fine to me .. few tweaks all is good .

[Glythe]

If that were true then you wouldn't see so many people in pocket gear, you wouldn't see so many people choosing skills based on sprint boosts, you wouldn't see people who avoid combat whenever possible and spend most of their time crafting.

You make some good points about fairies, but i have to disagree with you here. Personally i find the ability to fly a MAJOR perk (then again i think druid is significantly overtuned so if you have a druid main i can see why you might find this perk to be a little underwhelming).

I would love to see pocket gear be nerfed and to have the extra inventory spaces be folded more gradually into endurance. Maybe this would be something along the lines that pocket gear will give you your extra inventory from endurance again - of course with most of the "+20" becoming part of the eventual 100 endurance. It is disruptive to the balance of the game that you can put on 2 pieces of gear and suddenly have +40 slots (this is very obvious with fairy). The problem is that you can have pocket gear in your backpack and say ok I need to add 42 spaces now (bing). You can do the same thing with sprint boosts. I carry a few pieces of gear for a run spec that I use for extra speed out of combat (gloves and boots add 3x mods for speed and one of my characters has +3.5 speed on his boots). So looking at those ~40 spaces : if I carry extra boots/gloves/ring/pants/amulet for running and extra pocket pants/shirt for +40 spaces I still gain +33 extra slots.

To me that is inherently broken. I can have the best of both worlds - full fighting power with fully modded armor and pocket gear to give me more inventory. You make it seem like you have to choose but that is not the case. If you are carrying pocket gear you have extra inventory. Why would you not carry pocket gear unless you just want to make the game harder? You can double up if you wish and make combat pocket gear for a different skill spec.

Flying is not all the hype people make it out to be. At level 30 with no mods for it I can already run much faster than I can fly with battle chemistry/shield. If I had a mod set I would likely be twice as fast on the ground than a flying fairy (with full power to fight if I run into trouble). Having that much speed gives you equal security to flying but you lose the convenience of saying I will just fly this shorter distance over point xyz. None of my other characters fly and I do just fine - because I can "olympic sprint" past some of my friends using their speed boosts (recent guild mate quote).

I suppose I would like to see a combat benefit of some kind for the fairy once you get inside the dungeon where the "MAJOR perk" has no function. This could be as simple as allowing fairy conduit to remain a side bar ability (maybe require 2-4 energy for it to be used as a sidebar ability). The storage thing is a cute mechanic but I would have preferred flat inventory. If someone else summons it in a dungeon I will for sure use it but otherwise I plan on it being extra storage for things like work orders that I can access in town (where my ice will not melt).

[Sokar]

Personally i find the ability to fly a MAJOR perk (then again i think druid is significantly overtuned so if you have a druid main i can see why you might find this perk to be a little underwhelming).

Indeed Druid is my main, and i'm using raven form a lot. But you don't need druid active to do so. So everybody can use the raven as long as you have unlocked it.

For my builds i'm useing fighting mods and pocket enchantments at the same time. It's not this or this. Because with a purple/yellow item you have 2-3 mods to cover the must have mods. There are only a few builds that have 4 or more "must have" mods on an item. Beside this 2-3 must have mods the others are more like "nice to have" or "would help to deal more dmg". And by that point we are not talking about a second set of items for pockets/traveling which can solve most of your problems.


Fairy sidebar skills:

The point from Glythe should indeed also work if you make the skill use from sidebar with some small fairy energy costs. So you can choose to have some costs from side bar use or no fairy energy costs from main bar use.

[Glythe]

On the subject of flight and fairy things - is there a post somewhere about Geometry Exploitation?

In Everquest it was a ban offense to fight monsters that could not fight back due to terrain/engine limits (this was known as geometry exploitation). To test it out and make sure it worked I killed the bear in the barn by luring it out of the barn and blasting it form the roof of the barn (and put in a ticket right after). I have been told there are people who do the same thing in the fae realm to solo elites. Is that approved behavior? I assume it is not (if that is approved behavior then maybe fairy characters and flying are op).

For anyone unfamiliar - rooting, fearing, snaring, etc. mobs is completely different than placing your character in a position where a monster cannot hit you but you can hit them. There are places in the game where you can melee monsters but they will not fight you back.

Indeed Druid is my main, and i'm using raven form a lot. But you don't need druid active to do so. So everybody can use the raven as long as you have unlocked it.

This is one of the reasons why I feel that flight is not a big deal. So many people are/were druids and you can just press a sidebar button to fly. Flight would be more valuable if you were forced to have druid active to fly (and available on your sidebar). Does flight form make you have a wooden object in hand (or foot)? Maybe it should if it does not.

I cannot use extra toes unless I have BC active with a flask in hand. It has always seemed abusive to me that the restrictions for druid flight form were so lax given how big of an advantage flight can be in certain situations (See above GE note).

[Citan]

A quick status report, since I mentioned the next game update would be soon -- it'll be soon A few more days. It started as a quick bug-fix update but then I had to go and add new game mechanics (like the aforementioned stun-decay tweaks), which always take a ton of testing. And meanwhile Sandra's added a bit more fae newbie improvements.

So probably Thursday, Friday if we're unlucky.

[Glythe]

While it is very nice to have ice freely unlocked it is "just" saving "some" time at the beginning of your character. On the other hand if you die it will costs you time all the time (doesn't matter if you spend the time on farming the resurrection items or running back). So the battle advantages are the fairy magic skills. But you only get them while useing mentalism. So useing a fairy without the mentalism skill set is a very hard decision. Maybe let the fairy magic skills still be unlocked through leveling up mentalism but useable with all skill sets but with a (25%?) penalty if mentalism is not active.

D&D 3.5 made an alternate rule that is on the same idea here. Many of the monster races - when played by a character are worth a +2 or higher advantage. But as you get closer to level 20 those racial advantages fade in value rapidly. There was an alternate rule made so that as you leveled up you could 'pay off' the level disadvantage. That part is not applicable here but I think the idea is sound : an initial advantage (still an advantage) becomes less valuable as you move towards max level.

Ice is by far the cheapest and easiest class to get to max level. The only real difficulty/expense are the ice hearts - which are often found on vendors for 2k each (and maybe the ice pouches which are also found on the same vendors for 400 each). The only expenses I had for Ice magic were the unlock fees and the limited cost to unlock each research tier every 5 levels. Without adding it up I think the mentalism skill unlocks through 70 (all trainers before FR) would be pretty close to what I spent for unlocking Ice all the way to max level. If everything were available in the right quantities I think you could buy it all for less than 100,000 councils.

By comparison you can barely get 12 runestones for that price right now - but that is just the player perception of the value between fire/ice. Everyone told me that Ice magic sucked (just like necro). I tried it and found it to be amazing for group play. The main difference is that you trade some raw damage to get a ton more cc abilities.

On the issue of stuns and cc abilities - I would really love to see players and monsters follow the same rules.

[Mbaums]

Players still don't know how weak/strong fae are. But the downside of going back to FR when you die is steep and requires storage organization to minimize the hurdle. The age of the current content makes all of the encounters "old", so players can judge the risk. But when new stuff comes out, then what? Learning new content is the biggest downside to fae, and it’s really not on the radar our conversation yet. The fae choice is like a classic curse-yourself for new powers. Rogue-like choices are great. But I think excluding the players who are currently experimenting, I fear the overall consensus is going to be a "no" to fairies. And that might be okay, but you don’t know how much of a “no” it’s going to be! What’s the threshold for a race-failure? It feels kind of foolish to argue everything so early because we don’t know much strong fae magic is, only that knife/ice/AH are more approachable to fae players, and those are uncommon skills to begin with.

Here is what I think is reasonable: The verbiage on the summonable Fairy storage portal makes it seem like it shouldn’t be shareable, but it is. I vote keep it shareable, change the text.

I harped on the stick-method of -15% direct damage from plate as being steep, but what about a bonus to balance it out. No, not with plate. A +5% electric/cold/fire/ knife fighting?/pet speed buff for wearing fae silk armor, which has abysmal armor. Whatever the bonuses, it should obviously fall in line with Fae. There might already be a buff on fae silk on fairies, because I have not tested it. Another option for the “more carrot” approach is have a small cloth-wide buff that is in effect until the fairy is hit, this would obviously help herd the players into the direction of playing fairies like you had hoped (gameplay wise).

[Aionlasting]

A quick status report, since I mentioned the next game update would be soon -- it'll be soon A few more days. It started as a quick bug-fix update but then I had to go and add new game mechanics (like the aforementioned stun-decay tweaks), which always take a ton of testing. And meanwhile Sandra's added a bit more fae newbie improvements.

So probably Thursday, Friday if we're unlucky.

Happy to hear it. Hopefully you'll work on making those monster abilities stand out more too since all i seem to notice is AoE stun or AoE knockback... would love to see new mechanics like monster jumping onto an area and anyone in it gets damaged or stunned, or maybe they charge in a linear direction and anything they collide with is badly injured, or maybe they can sleep a random party member requiring a dispel or maybe they can mind control or maybe they can shoot projectiles out that can be avoided but if you get hit you take lots of damage or w/e.. just some kind of mechanics besides unavoidable AoE knockback and stuns...