How long is it supposed to take to Unlock Fangbreaker's Island?

niadan

I would like to see Empowerment not drain outside of EF areas. That would help to some degree. Example of the drain, if you run all your stonghold tasks you will drain 5% of your empowerment.

drkbodhi

oldbaldyone said:

Meh...once its unlocked, it will be on farm mode 24 7, and people will complain again there is nothing to do and that people dont run the other dungeons anymore....



For those already geared...consider this a vacation. For those not geared..clocks ticking.



People need to realize this company cant generate content real fast. This mod is pretty weak....3 new maps....and 1 instance. They need to make it last and easiest way to do that....a carrot on a VERY long stick.

Farming for what? It drops nothing... but the same things that CN drops, but no chance for a ring or an artifact. The only thing people will be farming it for is the blood you need to get the boons... which are completely worthless.

drkbodhi

asterdahl said:

weaver936 said:

It would be nice if the Devs would explain their reasoning for putting the time needed to access Fangbreaker's Island so far away.

Hi weaver936, I'd be glad to! There are a number of reasons we often gate a new dungeon behind some level of campaign completion but in the case of Fangbreaker there are two standout reasons.

One, there is an everfrost resistance requirement on Fangbreaker Island, as well as a much higher item level requirement than many previous contents. For those that don't frequent the preview server or read developer blogs, the new dungeon appearing in the queue list will be their first time seeing these requirements. We want to give everyone an opportunity to improve their item level and start earning everfrost resistance in the meantime without feeling completely rushed.

Two, it gives us a bit of extra time to make some last minute tweaks based on feedback from our preview server. Endgame content like new dungeons or trials requires a lot of coordination between our departments and usually isn't ready for balancing feedback until late in the development cycle. We're working to try to get this sort of content on preview earlier, but having the extra week or two after a module launches to get those final adjustments and bugfixes in helps to ensure higher quality content.

Hope that answers your question!

P.S. We're aware of an issue wherein on live right now there are no everfrost resistance requirements displaying on the queue. For those wondering the requirement is 31% and it should be visible by the time the queue is available. I apologize for any inconvenience the display issue has caused.

The requirement is 28%. I feel that this will end up being like Black Ice Gear... where no one will use it or even bother doing anything but the campaign.

theycallmetomu

jaysun1977 said:

theycallmetomu said:

I'm actually somewhat annoyed that it looks like the story's resolution is locked behind party gated content?

Spoiler Alert:

It is not.

Hooray for spoilers. Does that mean the group content RESOLVES NOTHING?!?!?

jaysun1977

theycallmetomu said:

Hooray for spoilers. Does that mean the group content RESOLVES NOTHING?!?!?

In my opinion that is exactly the case. Unless you count vengeance.

ironzerg79

asterdahl said:

For one, gathering voninblod and maintaining your equipment has been balanced to be easier than black ice.

@asterdahl First, thank you for the in-depth explanation. While I know not everyone will be happy to hear it, we at least should appreciate the transparency.

However, can you please double check your equations on maintaining the empowerment in your Relic gear. I've actually found it to be SUBSTANTIALLY more difficult than Black Ice. With Black Ice, assuming you were using the upgrade pick, you could farm nodes much easier and gain large amounts of Black Ice more quickly than Voninblood. I appreciate the fact that I don't have to then refine Voninblood, but it's not easy to get quickly.

It takes 2k Voniblood to empower your items to for 2 hours of combat per level. So that's 1k Voninblood per piece per hour of combat. Currently I'm finding that running with 15-20 man HE farming zergs (which is almost exclusively time in combat), I can maybe achieve 3k Voninblood an hour, maybe a little more if I'm lucky on the relic drops. But that still puts me at a deficit of 1k per hour. At that rate, there's no way I can keep up with my empowerment.

Even if the rate of Voninblood gain or empowerment loss was twice what it is now, you'd still be looking at hardcore, efficient farming every hour for every two hours you spend wearing the armor. That's a pretty huge grind imho.

I'm also talking from the perspective of someone who's in a guild and alliance that can easily organize "speedfarming" HE groups. For those who don't have access to these social resources, I can only imagine farming Voniblood is substantially more difficult.

oldbaldyone

So basically, this gear may be worn in FBI as people learn it. Since this gear is not significantly better, and the maintenance costs are pretty high and boring to complete, it will likely be shelved for less high maintenance gear.

Add to this the tediousness of moving enchants around, adding armor kits to things, etc......

I can't imagine how anyone looked at the black ice mod and thought players enjoyed it. Just because they play it and complete it, doesnt mean they liked it. You didnt exactly have a ton of content back then (and less now), so the new stuff would have been run if people had to do it backwards even. Don't mistake people DOING it for people liking it.

ironzerg79

As I said above, and in a few other places, Black Ice was easy to farm.

Another solution would be to make Relic Hunting more important by multiplying the Voninblood from each piece, by like 5 times. If you did that, it would make Relics more meaningful, make it easier for people to get Voninblood by NOT farming HE's in combat, but also enhance the Voninblood drop rate from HE/Fangbreaker.

So:

White: 250
Green: 500
Blue: 1250
Purple: 2500

I think that's right.

weaver936

@ironzerg At fully empowered... how much more stats does RELIC gear give then the next highest gear (other than Frostborn). Also, might all the multipliers etc from feats powers etc cause 100 power or w/e to effect performance in content substantially

asterdahl

weaver936 said:

@ironzerg At fully empowered... how much more stats does RELIC gear give then the next highest gear (other than Frostborn). Also, might all the multipliers etc from feats powers etc cause 100 power or w/e to effect performance in content substantially

When fully empowered relic armor is item level 150, and gives the expected stat values that an item level 150 piece of equipment would give. The armor as it displays in collections, or in the restoration UI is at charge tier 2, which is the charge tier it will be at when you restore it, which is item level 145. When discharged, relic armor is item level 140.

jaysun1977

asterdahl said:

When fully empowered relic armor is item level 150, and gives the expected stat values that an item level 150 piece of equipment would give.

How exactly do you calculate that? The total number of stats per items seem to be entirely independant of iL throughout the game. Mythic Artifacts have 160iL and grant 2600 stat points. Legendary Artifacts have 130 iL and grant 1300 stat points. Yet, an iL 135 Chest piece grants 3.100 stat points +hp and an iL 130 Chest piece grants 2.800 stat points +hp. Compare that to an iL 145 ring that grants 900 stat points, or yet another iL 145 ring that grants 1,300 stat points.

The way it is set up right now, iL means nothing. It's just a number, so how exactly should we judge what to expect of an iL 150 item?

I am really not trying to be a kitten here, @asterdahl , but if you want your iL to actually mean something, it needs to be standardized. If you want Chests to grant more stats than Boots, that's fine with me, just give it a higher iL and call it a day. IL should be a first glance indicator for the player to see how many stats he can expect from a particular item. The way it is right now, it's plain superfluous.

asterdahl

jaysun1977 said:

asterdahl said:

When fully empowered relic armor is item level 150, and gives the expected stat values that an item level 150 piece of equipment would give.

How exactly do you calculate that? The total number of stats per items seem to be entirely independant of iL throughout the game. Mythic Artifacts have 160iL and grant 2600 stat points. Legendary Artifacts have 130 iL and grant 1300 stat points. Yet, an iL 135 Chest piece grants 3.100 stat points +hp and an iL 130 Chest piece grants 2.800 stat points +hp. Compare that to an iL 145 ring that grants 900 stat points, or yet another iL 145 ring that grants 1,300 stat points.

The way it is set up right now, iL means nothing. It's just a number, so how exactly should we judge what to expect of an iL 150 item?

I am really not trying to be a kitten here, @asterdahl , but if you want your iL to actually mean something, it needs to be standardized. If you want Chests to grant more stats than Boots, that's fine with me, just give it a higher iL and call it a day. IL should be a first glance indicator for the player to see how many stats he can expect from a particular item. The way it is right now, it's plain superfluous.

While the way item level corresponds to stats on a pair of boots vs. stats on an enchantment or an artifact may vary, the way stats increase on a particular category of item as item level changes is predictable. A pair pair of item level 140 boots will have a certain allotment of base defense, hit points and then a certain amount of secondary stats allotted to (almost always) two other stats, such as power, crit, recovery, etc.

So if you look at the difference between say, drowcraft and elemental drowcraft, which is item level 135 and 140 respectively, you'll get an idea for the difference in power between each tier of charge. For the sake of clarity though, here's an example of the base hit points and critical strike rating and how they increase relative to item level on a Shieldbearer's Ward Breastplate at each of the three tiers.

Charge Tier: 1
Item Level: 140
Hit Points: 21,109
Critical Strike: 1460

Charge Tier: 2
Item Level: 145
Hit Points: 23,178
Critical Strike: 1597

Charge Tier: 3
Item Level: 150
Hit Points: 25,248
Critical Strike: 1733

mrvincent1959

Well, the big problem I am having right now is with the Ten Town Supplies. There is no way to grind for this by doing a skirmish etc. I get a small amount doing dailies and then have to wait for the weeklies. This Module is going to be a very long grind.

weaver936

mrvincent1959 said:

Well, the big problem I am having right now is with the Ten Town Supplies. There is no way to grind for this by doing a skirmish etc. I get a small amount doing dailies and then have to wait for the weeklies. This Module is going to be a very long grind.

I do believe you get TT Supplies from loot in Fangbreaker's... at least I think i saw taht somewhere. if so... Fangbreaker will help to lleviate the Supplies issue in the campaign.. however.. that other Campaign Currency for boons.. idk what it's called.. that will be a pain.

qexotic

weaver936 said:

mrvincent1959 said:

Well, the big problem I am having right now is with the Ten Town Supplies. There is no way to grind for this by doing a skirmish etc. I get a small amount doing dailies and then have to wait for the weeklies. This Module is going to be a very long grind.

I do believe you get TT Supplies from loot in Fangbreaker's... at least I think i saw taht somewhere. if so... Fangbreaker will help to lleviate the Supplies issue in the campaign.. however.. that other Campaign Currency for boons.. idk what it's called.. that will be a pain.

It's called 'Secrets of Ostoria' and it will definitely take time to accumulate. On the plus side, there is only one thing you can spend it on so no choosing about what you want to get first unlike Voninblod and Ten Towns' Supplies >:)

sm0ld3r

asterdahl said:

The everfrost resistance system and relic armor share a number of common factors with black ice, however, we also made a number of adjustments based on feedback and data. For one, gathering voninblod and maintaining your equipment has been balanced to be easier than black ice. Secondly, although everyone can gain access to the relic footwear, the majority of the chargeable set that may be earned through in-game content is targeted at only the highest tier of players. This is doubly true regarding the need for any sort of resistance requirement, as only Fangbreaker has such a requirement.

We've also made sure that the relic equipment provides competitive stats even when fully discharged and should be more than strong enough to warrant wearing over alternatives. While you are certainly welcome to sit out Fangbreaker Island, bear in mind that if you choose to invest in working on your relic armor, your investment will not be immediately invalidated. We have no plans to ease the everfrost resistance requirement while Fangbreaker is still highly relevant content.

I do not think you know what the word "easier" means. I was able to gather enough black ice in 1 hour to empower my armor for a week. With Vonimblood it will take me a week to get enough to empower the armor for 1 hour.

urabask

sm0ld3r said:

asterdahl said:

The everfrost resistance system and relic armor share a number of common factors with black ice, however, we also made a number of adjustments based on feedback and data. For one, gathering voninblod and maintaining your equipment has been balanced to be easier than black ice. Secondly, although everyone can gain access to the relic footwear, the majority of the chargeable set that may be earned through in-game content is targeted at only the highest tier of players. This is doubly true regarding the need for any sort of resistance requirement, as only Fangbreaker has such a requirement.

We've also made sure that the relic equipment provides competitive stats even when fully discharged and should be more than strong enough to warrant wearing over alternatives. While you are certainly welcome to sit out Fangbreaker Island, bear in mind that if you choose to invest in working on your relic armor, your investment will not be immediately invalidated. We have no plans to ease the everfrost resistance requirement while Fangbreaker is still highly relevant content.

I do not think you know what the word "easier" means. I was able to gather enough black ice in 1 hour to empower my armor for a week. With Vonimblood it will take me a week to get enough to empower the armor for 1 hour.

Honestly at this point the way they've handled SKT feels like they're trying to find out how hard they can gate content behind cost, grind and time gates before they start losing players. It just makes no sense given that they know this mod is more or less targeted at their more loyal customers and even the rewards just add to the already endless grind.

jaysun1977

asterdahl said:

jaysun1977 said:

asterdahl said:

When fully empowered relic armor is item level 150, and gives the expected stat values that an item level 150 piece of equipment would give.

How exactly do you calculate that? The total number of stats per items seem to be entirely independant of iL throughout the game. Mythic Artifacts have 160iL and grant 2600 stat points. Legendary Artifacts have 130 iL and grant 1300 stat points. Yet, an iL 135 Chest piece grants 3.100 stat points +hp and an iL 130 Chest piece grants 2.800 stat points +hp. Compare that to an iL 145 ring that grants 900 stat points, or yet another iL 145 ring that grants 1,300 stat points.

The way it is set up right now, iL means nothing. It's just a number, so how exactly should we judge what to expect of an iL 150 item?

I am really not trying to be a kitten here, @asterdahl , but if you want your iL to actually mean something, it needs to be standardized. If you want Chests to grant more stats than Boots, that's fine with me, just give it a higher iL and call it a day. IL should be a first glance indicator for the player to see how many stats he can expect from a particular item. The way it is right now, it's plain superfluous.

While the way item level corresponds to stats on a pair of boots vs. stats on an enchantment or an artifact may vary, the way stats increase on a particular category of item as item level changes is predictable. A pair pair of item level 140 boots will have a certain allotment of base defense, hit points and then a certain amount of secondary stats allotted to (almost always) two other stats, such as power, crit, recovery, etc.

So if you look at the difference between say, drowcraft and elemental drowcraft, which is item level 135 and 140 respectively, you'll get an idea for the difference in power between each tier of charge. For the sake of clarity though, here's an example of the base hit points and critical strike rating and how they increase relative to item level on a Shieldbearer's Ward Breastplate at each of the three tiers.

Charge Tier: 1
Item Level: 140
Hit Points: 21,109
Critical Strike: 1460

Charge Tier: 2
Item Level: 145
Hit Points: 23,178
Critical Strike: 1597

Charge Tier: 3
Item Level: 150
Hit Points: 25,248
Critical Strike: 1733

I understand that part. What I am talking about, however, is the applicability of iL as a measure of potency. A Character with 2500 iL for example could have gotten there with drastically different means, meaning drastically different stats. Why even build such a lopsided system in the first place? The result is a measurement (iL) that's for all intents and purposes next to unuseable.

If you'd streamline iL into an abstraction of stats rather than an abstraction of individual components, you'd get a much more useful measure as a result, allowing for a far preciser estimation of difficulty and performance.

greyhawk

@asterdahl I'm sure everyone appreciates the replies to seemingly cherry picked portions of these posts, but is there any feedback you can give about this absurd empowerment grind?

To give you some context... I know several Xbox players that are reading these posts and planning to leave the game. I'm almost positive that that isn't your company's desire, so can you please explain how this whole mod is actually good for the game? And how important, or NOT important, player retention is to Cryptic?

You stand to lose a lot of long time players, and the responses have not touched on anything of major import...

Please give us something useful!

Thanks

beckylunatic

asterdahl said:

I think there's a slight misunderstanding about why black ice damage resistance was removed....

We got a lot of feedback, both for and against during and after Module 3, but when we looked at the data for how many players were actually playing the system overtime, both during and after Module 3, it was a success overall. Of course, there were certain problems areas that we noticed when playing, and that we received a great deal of feedback on.

From the personal experience of inspecting many players over the years, I would say that a very large part of the playerbase did use BI Armor as their end-game equipment at level 60 (3 pieces if they failed to obtain bracers).

I would also say that those players were not the segment of the population you're aiming at with FBI.

BI Armor for PvE was embraced by solo players, who were happy to have access to epics with high stats without having to drag themselves into dungeons. 3 of 4 pieces could be farmed totally alone without even requiring interaction with anyone else. This niche is now sort of filled by Drowcraft (also Dusk and Frostborn if you have t-bars), since you can do demon HEs alone or with minimal cooperation.

From more personal experience, I was able to craft a full set of Corrupted BI on my CW fairly easily (bracers dropped early on), which I gradually replaced with HV and Draconic pieces and finally full HV as I was able to obtain it. I wasn't very confident about playing the CW in any group content until she was fairly geared, so the Corrupt set was an important stepping stone for her, but not an end goal.

The old BI sets also had fairly interesting set bonuses, and actually were BIS in a lot of cases for PvP. Obviously the Relic armor has no application in PvP at all.

Also, Purified had some popularity for boosting your HP pool higher for tackling a back-in-the-day solo CN run. Anyone doing that wasn't using it as their primary set though.

Wandering around alone and digging up relics seems to be the best return on time for farming v-blod. Group content, not so much, and that's really counter-intuitive to equipment that is aimed at the most devoted of dungeon-delvers.

Edit: @loboguild also brings up a *really* important point that grinding BI initially appeared in a game with far fewer demands on gaming time. Now, we need to farm RP, we need to farm Influence and campaign currencies for our Strongholds, we need to try to earn AD somehow (which is necessarily more time-consuming than it was), and many of the activities have little overlap. So you want us to also find time to farm v-blod and lanolin... wonderful. We can't even salvage the new bling-blanged unrestored armors.

weaver936

That was an intelligent response. ty. .

asterdahl

jaysun1977 said:

We can't even salvage the new bling-blanged unrestored armors.

@rgutscheradev went ahead and made the unrestored relic armor pieces salvageable on our local build last week. We'll be getting this change out at our earliest opportunity.