Welcome to Project: Gorgon!


Project: Gorgon is a 3D fantasy MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role-playing game) that features an immersive experience that allows the player to forge their own path through exploration and discovery. We won't be guiding you through a world on rails, and as a result there are many hidden secrets awaiting discovery. Project: Gorgon also features an ambitious skill based leveling system that bucks the current trend of pre-determined classes, thus allowing the player to combine skills in order to create a truly unique playing experience.

The Project: Gorgon development team is led by industry veteran Eric Heimburg. Eric has over a decade of experience working as a Senior and Lead Engineer, Developer, Designer and Producer on successful games such as Asheron’s Call 1 and 2, Star Trek Online and other successful Massively Multiplayer Online Games.



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  1. #11
    Senior Member Easylivin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ErDrick View Post
    Hiyas, long time since I posted..mostly because I was too lazy to make a new forum account when you changed venues for your forums. I have still been following the game obviously, and log in to play once in a while.

    Anyways with that being said I thought I'd leave some feedback about why players head in the direction of pure dps builds so often. ( because I read all your patch notes and blogs). It has pretty much been forced upon us because of how hard mobs hit, coupled with how big heals are not spammable and heal over time abilities are much much too weak to counter you being hit for 300+ a pop. In addition to that your current system of multiple respawns encourage dps checks ....because frankly if you don't clear areas fast enough ( and keep moving with very few short rest breaks) you get swarm-raped. The multi-repop-at-once mechanic is sooooo bad in this aspect, I know your intent was to make things difficult but there is a huge difference between difficult and " if you don't kill fast enough and or take too long in one area you die with zero counter-play options."..There is literally nothing you can do to save yourself or your group when 10 things respawn on top of you...You are just dead....when I say this I mean a fully decked out group in level 70 ( optimal / transmuted /augmented ) yellows will still die if a respawn happens...god help you if you are geared in gear with 3 modifiers like you specifically mentioned in your blog.

    I personally feel like big damage numbers and twitch reactions are better suited to action-rpg's( as in the kind of games with manually controlled dodge and block mechanics). The time-to-kill in this game is much to short from both ends here. As in most level-appropriate encounters are basically " you or them in 10 seconds"...if you don't kill them that fast they WILL kill you. Even your highest end ( gazluk keep ) boss fights follow this pattern, except maybe they up the time to kill to 20 seconds, after that you run out of resources for both healing and damage..so again, you or them in a short time frame.

    Correct me if I am wrong here but I was under the assumption that you wanted resource management to be important to combat, currently it isn't. Mobs hitting for extraordinary amounts coupled with the sheer amount of creatures you face at once and the respawn shenannigans negate any sort of resource management, the simplest way to explain this is again...you or them, in 10 seconds.

    Rage reduction and healing mechanics are correctly balanced for 1 v 1 encounters, but not for group content....no rage management skill in the game even comes close to negating the rage that 5-6 players are dishing out. Same for healing...same for tanking...it all seems to be balanced against solo situations. As you may remember I tried so very hard to make a tank build and a rage management build work...tanking is possible versus one target only( which can be useful on bosses, there are also a very few specific builds that can actually keep you alive versus multi-targets but that's mostly due to 90-100% invulnerability mechanics, such as staff spins...once those invulnerability windows are up you are just as dead as anyone else, healing is almost a non-factor.). Tanking still has a plethora of aggro issues versus multiple targets however, such as not having abilities to generate said aggro on more then one target. Rage management also is nowhere near viable as a primary build in group content.

    if you would like to see people playing other roles in group content besides dps then you need to balance content for that...My advice would be to lower the mob density in group content but make every mob take much longer to kill, as in 5-10x current health totals, but also reduce their outgoing damage so it's manageable. If you are going to force players to fight 10 mobs at once they need to be the low-health variety, not 10 elites that each hit for 250-300 damage per shot. This would have the added benefit of making content that is intended for grouping be non-soloable, because you would run out of resources in a long fight by yourself...the other benefit is of course, is if someone needs to afk for 2 minutes it isn't a guaranteed wipe ( which it kind of is atm).

    Thanks for reading, I would like to see others opinions on these topics and feel free to agree or disagree as the situation warrants. Don't just read it and say nothing though, they need our feedback..it is super important in a beta like this.

    (P.S. - I have mentioned all of this and more in feedbacks in-game, but I don't know what you have or haven't read, also I have more room here)
    I agree. Combat needs some tweaks. Back when sword was the agro holder we seemed to have roles in groups. Then that was removed so everyone started healing. Now we say "screw healing, kill it ASAP" and its working so far. Sure groups wipe when there is a respawn or a bad pull, but that isn't a challenge really as much as it is an annoyance.

    For odd balanced mobs the best example I can think of for a mob that takes too many resources to kill is the golem in GK. When I've killed it with a group with a cheese and a good power food, I use all my power, energize, and dig deep. Then I wait for energize to come back, use it and try to finish the golem off. Maybe this is a lvl 80 mob but killing that golem is "annoying"

    I don't have any suggestions at the moment for improvement but willing to help with combat testing and offer feedback.

  2. #12
    Senior Member Khaylara's Avatar
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    Fire was always very high dps, it was tweaked few times as well, combos were added then removed etc. I never found it lower dps than archery. I agree with Erdrick that the game (although the abundance of dungeons is nice) is not balanced around groups. Group roles don't seem to be the focus.


    On the update topic-especially the augmentation and transmutation skills. Imo the changes are absolutely insane. First problem is filling our inventories with pure crap. Second problem is the crazy amount of items needed to hit one level of either augmentation or transmutation. Example lvl 64 to 65 weapon augmentation requires 51200 EXP, decomposing low level items gives 50 exp per item, decomposing a lvl 60 item gives 400. There is still an insane amount of items needed. That relates to what Erdrick said about DPS, that's the only way to farm so many items really, high dps so you can solo as many mobs you can in order to get drops and level. Using extraction recipes is almost out of question unless one is crazy enough to use heaps of gems and carry lots of beads to do that (it's just too costly).

    Now I normally don't bitch and whine about grinding, as I told a guildie I did poetry and cheesemaking when that was considered crazy..and it was crazy He argued that Citan wants us to specialize BUT augmentation and transmutation are not specialized skillsets. I understand that as specializing in carpentry, toolcrafting, leatherworking...but not that much transmutation and augmentation. Especially transmutation was meant to be a user friendly skillset, it was absurdly hard anyway to reroll mods now it's nearly impossible to level without 24/7 solo grinding. One would argue that dungeons are better for that purpose but in practice they are not. Imagine a whole group standing around waiting for me to extract augments and fill my inventory with useless augments that i'm gonna have to drop anyway.

    I would revisit those changes and touch up the exp. As always I'm not talking about me in particular, i'll finish all to 70-90 in a couple of weeks max but imagine how it is for a newer player who doesn't have my dps or my gear to have to grind 1 million items in a lower level dungeon to gain 10 levels of augmentation. Imho it's a bit much. Cause yup, by rough calculation, using crypt and goblin dungeon drops it takes 800-1k items per level above 60 (which, coming back to the inventory issue, results in heaps of different types of beads, prisms and phlogistons).
    Last edited by Khaylara; 08-29-2017 at 01:56 AM.

  3. #13
    Member Malice00's Avatar
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    Excellent update. The new/revised area of South Serbule is top notch. Much better content, great goblin war base, goblin logging area is kewl also. Nice touch with tunnel from starter area. The updated Ranlon villiage is really a nice upgrade also. Dispersion of fish in lake was right amount. Lastly, the new NPC's is a much need upgrade to that area. Came out of tunnel with levels 10 in three fighting skills...still died twice to Megaspider, and gave up..."Boss Monster". Good call on stacking milk, boy that was a inventory killer before the update.

    One question on my behalf is I do not understand blacksmithing and armor manufacturing. Is there a difference, will it get an upgrade. I currently have not topped out the leatherworking skill yet...but as a traditionalist, I am partial to metal armor verse leather. So I am looking forward to expanding that skill, even if it is bastardized into using both skills.

    Or all including textile, tailoring, leatherworking, blacksmithing, etc..
    Last edited by Malice00; 08-29-2017 at 11:16 AM.
    Love reading RA Salvatore!
    AC was my first passion, played some Ultima, WOW, RIFT, Starwars, Lord of the Rings and Elder Scrolls.
    It's just a game.

  4. #14
    Junior Member jaspen's Avatar
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    Inventory management has always felt a bit like a subgame to me in PG and the latest patch with all these tiers of prisms and baubles along with extra recipes, became the expansion pack to that subgame. I already spend far more time managing my inventory than I would like to admit to. It often exceeds my active hunting and exploration time but that is another topic. Killing a NPC is often far quicker than looting, processing the body and then first stage processing of the loot.

    I agree that leveling these skills is going to become a somewhat daunting task due to the number of items/experience needed, extra inventory management and time. Don’t forget that the current interface with its shifting recipes groups, large number of groups and now even larger number of recipes, puts a time delay in finding the recipe you want for the type, and now level, of the item. Then you have the fun of dragging items into that tiny box, hoping it doesn’t snap back to the inventory and then if not wanted, dragging the results to the bottom of the window to drop it. All the while trying to keep up with spawns and if grouped, the group. Also, while you are fighting, dodging spawns and trying to keep up with the group you also have to frequently obscure your vision with two extra windows and then get rid of them. It also makes random exploration a little less enjoyable as you accumulate 3 times more prisms and 3 times more baubles as you plow through multilevel NPCs along with, once again, sorting the level of the items you have looted with the proper recipes.

    I have mentioned this before long ago, and I am sure others have as well, but could we have some way of getting master recipes for the transmutation and augmentation skills? Have all the sub recipes you want but include additional unified master versions under a unified recipe tab?

    I will give two examples. The first example is having one single master recipe for Distill, for all rarities (The game can check the rarity of the item and then see if you have the sub recipe and then either processes the request or complain). The second example is having one single master recipe for Decompose that not only combines all level types but also combines weapon and both armors (The game checks the level and item slot type, sees if you have the recipe that matches and either processes the request or complain). The other skills can be done like this as well, with other checks obviously. The amount of unneeded clicking, searching, time and frustration this would save would be substantial in my opinion. Having all these tabs and recipes for something that is related and frequently used is very inefficient. If I didn’t explain that well let me know and I will go into more details or even do a mock up.

  5. #15
    Senior Member Khaylara's Avatar
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    Yes to the "master" recipes. The way I see it both distilling and transmuting could have this kind of recipes. For example decomposing a low level yellow item would give 2 baubles and 1 prism, the highest level would give 8 baubles and 3 prisms, but all of the same type. I'm already going crazy managing all the medium and large baubles of few types, prisms of few types PLUS I sold some of the medium mats by accident. That on top of the-almost impossible-exp needed for one level, it's just too much.


    Few reasons I don't like this direction in development (more and more tedious things to do):
    1. It reduces the amount of fun I can have as a gamer, most of the times I can't be bothered cleaning my inventory in order to run a dungeon. I used to be able to just log and jump in Nexus w/o much notice, that's impossible nowadays. By the time everyone cleans up their backpacks the group is sometimes ready to disperse.

    2. Citan shared his vision for this game some time ago, how he sees it in the future (correct me if I'm wrong)-a game to which players will come back again and again, played with long breaks even but in PG players should be able to pick up where they left off and just have fun. It was like that for me but lately not so much, it feels like I took an unexcused leave of absence from my job and got left behind (if I play less or not log at all for 2 weeks even).

    The problem here is not the new content, new content is amazing! But the lvling process is becoming more and more tedious and boring, doubled by the eternal storage and inventory issues. And frankly the new content feels a bit all over the place. I explored Serbule Hills and instead of enjoying it I was thinking "why another cook NPC and how many stacks of this/that do I need to gain favor with these new NPCs"...and I don't lose my sense of wonder easily Guildies can testify that I still follow NPCs around and crack up at their dialogues but getting more and more disorganized recipes (that I can hardly find in my recipes book),spread between half a dozen NPCs is kinda dampening the mood.

    In order to keep up with these mindless (and boring) daily tasks one has to be a true completionist and play a minimum of 7-8 hrs a day then spend some time to write reports (and tbh I haven't read many written by "completionists", there are like 3-4 of this type of player who actually bothers to write detailed forum reports). There's not so many of us in general, the player base is small and as a result you don't get enough data collection and accurate feedback. Most of us simply don't have the time to play for that long every day (although some of us would like to). So you might end up putting hundreds of hours of work into changes that are and will stay insufficiently tested. In the end that might attract some hardcore type of players who enjoy long daily grinds but might be unappealing to the niche target this game initially attracted.
    Thinking just of last few patches, how many played bard at top level and in different situations? And wrote detailed reports on the skill. I can only think of one player who did both.
    How many people maxed brewing and how many offered data about the lvling process and the bugs. At least on the forum I saw almost none.
    (I'm not criticizing because I haven't done any of those myself, I simply don't have enough resources, storage and uninterrupted game time to do all of that).

    Idk what prompted these crafting skills changes but as I said in the long run it might be appealing only to people who actually enjoy having alts for storage and playing solo a lot (nothing wrong with that but that might become the core community of PG with nobody to test group play, terrain or other small type of bug etc).

    I also don't know if my long explanation made any sense but in a nutshell I feel like some of these changes towards a more "grindy" type of game are going to alienate many existing and potential players and I don't think that is Citan's intention. He doesn't have to ask us for opinions every step of the way of course but adding more and more game changing content without knowing if the players/how many of the players actually enjoy this content could prove to be a slippery slope.

    Imho few funny dialogues and a few challenging mobs are way more enjoyable than adding 1921736435 extra decomposing recipes


    PS the changes in poetry reading, although very socially impactful have a downside-it did make lvling poetry trivial and Poetry Appreciation was a "goals" skill, something that was challenging and kinda fun in a masochistic way...you either had to farm the crypt for primers or maybe become a necromancer and talk to corpses about poetry. Now you only have to take your char at the inn and click on a podium, nothing challenging or excessively fun about it, just more tedium (don't go afk for too long, keep clicking the darn desk, rate rinse and repeat).
    Last edited by Khaylara; 08-29-2017 at 02:13 PM.

  6. #16
    Senior Member Tagamogi's Avatar
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    I thought the transmutation blog update made the reason behind the transmutation and augmentation changes pretty clear - remove the incentive for high level players to farm low-level stuff. That seems pretty reasonable. If you use only transmutation during dungeon runs, you'd only need 2 extra slots for the new prism sizes, or maybe not even that if you know that only high level gear will drop and you will only need the large prism.

    Of course, you'll still need a place to store the unneeded prisms, and all the different augment sizes... Somewhat related to that, I was finally looking at the new cooking recipes yesterday, with the division between great and regular meats. Yes, it makes sense in the high level vs low level kind of sense, but it's still a lot of crap to keep track of as a player, much less store, and it makes storage alts more and more necessary.

    I liked the old one-size-fits-all augmentation rules, just because I was playing a lot of lower end content still and had a use for the items I found that way. I'm not really unhappy about being told that if I want to level high-end augmentation, I now need to farm high-end items, that's fine, just less convenient. Storage-wise ... well, I just cleaned up my t&a alt before the patch, so I have plenty of room for the new augs. Obviously, that's not a desirable way to play though, and players shouldn't feel that t&a alts are mandatory. (Actually... people tend to vendor a lot of their augs and phlogiston, so maybe t&a alts aren't mandatory and I'm being too hoarding again. Still, it seems that most times changes in game complexity result in more items without a corresponding match in storage upgrades, so I find it really easy to get overwhelmed unless I can sort out stuff on my storage alts. New UI, etc.)

    Yet another edit: I kind of like the new augmentation recipes as far as extracting augments goes. For some reason, it feels more intuitive and less math-y to me to say that I need 20 aug ornaments of size x in order to to extract an aug from an item of a particular level range, rather than looking at the item's exact level and then calculating the augs needed based on that. This makes it easier for me to look at a stack of aug ornaments and see at a glance how many extracts I'll be able to do with them, and whether it might be time to finally sell off a few.
    Last edited by Tagamogi; 08-29-2017 at 03:40 PM.

  7. #17
    Senior Member Khaylara's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tagamogi View Post
    I thought the transmutation blog update made the reason behind the transmutation and augmentation changes pretty clear - remove the incentive for high level players to farm low-level stuff. That seems pretty reasonable. If you use only transmutation during dungeon runs, you'd only need 2 extra slots for the new prism sizes, or maybe not even that if you know that only high level gear will drop and you will only need the large prism.

    Of course, you'll still need a place to store the unneeded prisms, and all the different augment sizes... Somewhat related to that, I was finally looking at the new cooking recipes yesterday, with the division between great and regular meats. Yes, it makes sense in the high level vs low level kind of sense, but it's still a lot of crap to keep track of as a player, much less store, and it makes storage alts more and more necessary.

    Why i said what i said...many players who are in theory level 70 (but w/o adequate gear or bonus levels etc) will not be able to farm Gazluk or even Rahu solo, they are forced into lower level dungeons like KT, WC. I think everyone was at some point in that situation when you have to downgrade because where you should be kicks your arse. In order to get these skills up many players will be forced to go into the lower level places (removing the incentive you mentioned) and they will be needing a lot of said lower level drops to lvl augmentation or transmutation.
    Not pulling this out of my hat, I do know a lot of players who are in theory lvl 70 but are unable to farm in ilmari, rahu or gaz due to lack of endurance, gear, etc. That is why I think these changes are beneficial only for high level players who put a lot of hours into grinding these (more complicated) crafting skills.

    Note-I can actually farm all the high level places (with some difficulty but still can) so not lobbying for myself

  8. #18
    Senior Member kazeandi's Avatar
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    This looks like a P2P-typical scheme to make players buy inventory upgrades - only that there's no such cash shop (yet?): Lots and lots of item drops, recipies that use many different items, but only limited *and* scattered storage across the different zones.

    I get that you want many skills in game, each with an important purpose, but then you went ahead and made it all worse by requiring trash like "tufts of fur" (4 councils vendor price). And now this. Also don't forget, we're only midlevel, 70/125. Smells like lots and lots of additional tiers of required vendor trash, prisms, baubles, wood, metal etc in the future.

    There was nothing wrong with highlevels farming lower content either. We did that in other MMOs, too, and "at least I get some baubles out of it" was a good motivation to help lowbies kill bosses in lower dungeons.

    Then there's the point Khaylara is talking about, 70ers stuck in lower zones, because higher ones are too difficult to farm in for various reasons (one point being that winter gear is absolutely mandatory).

    I'm not looking forward to content higher than 70 TBH, looks like a long, bleak grind, all while fighting the inventory war.

    Please give these points a good thought.

  9. #19
    Senior Member Tagamogi's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Khaylara View Post
    Not pulling this out of my hat, I do know a lot of players who are in theory lvl 70 but are unable to farm in ilmari, rahu or gaz due to lack of endurance, gear, etc. That is why I think these changes are beneficial only for high level players who put a lot of hours into grinding these (more complicated) crafting skills.
    Hm, hard to evaluate how other players are doing. I personally would consider the Tower View Cave in Gazluk to be pretty accessible to anyone 60-65+, and that has 3 chests and a named (although the named would be tough at the lower level range). You do not technically need any winter gear to reach the cave, although obviously it helps.

    As a point of anecdotal reference: I believe I finally maxed my second combat skill ever right after the Mushroom Farming patch. Prior to that, I had completely explored and mapped the Tower View Cave, Snowblood Shadow Cave and No-Name Cave, as well as a good portion of the Windy View Cave (before the introduction of mummies, haven't had time to go back since). So, I don't think the Gazluk content is overly hard, challenging in some places, sure, but that's what makes it fun. All of the gear for my max level skills was obtained solo, although I possibly qualify as an above average player since I do have 4-5 bonus levels for both of my max skills, and I have been crafting and wearing a nice set of primarily purple, primarily level 60 winter gear.

    I wonder though ... if someone hasn't been grouping to get gear, and hasn't been crafting to get gear, and hasn't talked to other players to see if they could craft gear for them ... do they really care about maxing transmutation and augmentation asap? And if so, why? It seems like they wouldn't even have the gear that would require the higher level t & a recipes.

    Sorry if I've been wandering completely off-topic, it's just that I don't feel it's really a problem for someone level 70 to get 60+ gear. Whether it takes a reasonable amount of time to farm enough gear to level transmutation and augmentation at a reasonable pace is another question. I can't really answer that - I haven't really been paying enough attention to either set of skills, so I'm not sure what a good pace of leveling for them would be and whether the new xp distribution allows for that.

  10. #20
    Senior Member kazeandi's Avatar
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    I farmed the Gazluk caves when I was 70 fire / 60 druid, in 60/60 gear and it wasn't exactly smooth sailing. I'd not have been able to do that in the typical mix of 40/45er gear with the odd 50er piece you loot in dungeons you can handle (wolf cave, dark chapel entrance). I killed the named by death-rushing it, in 2-3 "runs". Maybe, if you spent lots of time on single pulls and used every trick in your arsenal, you could "progress" there as a fresh 70 in 40er gear, but would that be fun?

    I'm in a guild, only brought gems and stuff for my suit (60/60 would be entry level), but I know at least 2 people in rather inactive guilds who just couldn't get even that level gear to only get started.

    Killing stuff that tough also hardly counts as farming - progression beyond 50 is borked from the POV of a solo player without long friend list, of whom there are many. I see 70ers in Ukorga blues every day.

    Doesn't help that the Gaz DOT is just crazy for PG's equivalent to Arathi. Punishing a player for daring to step out of the newbie zones, with a vengeance.
    I dread the thought of the maxlevel zones.
    Last edited by kazeandi; 08-30-2017 at 04:06 AM.



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