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My state of the game . . MOD 16 testing edition mid-stream
ragnarz2
Member Posts: 208 Arc User
After taking 4 classes to 80 my take away is as follows:
In conclusion, Cryptic took a very flawed game and is replacing it with a simplified system where high TTK and limited options are going to put many people to sleep.
What has been your experience so far?
- The implementation of the vision is not close to being done. Whatever that vision might be. Sadly it was not shared.
- The weekly radical shifts is classes appears to be trial and error. Just look what they are doing tomorrow and how it unbalances races and devalues enchantments and legendary mounts. It reeks of panic and bad management.
- Personal choice (or its illusion) is being removed from the game. Starting stats are fixed. Feats are binary and mostly useless bc you can play without them and not notice a difference most of the time. Boons can be ignored and you wont notice much of difference.
- Most classes resemble their predecessors in name only
- At-Wills have almost no value atm
- Paladin tanks can be successful using only 2 buttons. Feels like punishment.
- Barbarian is all about encounters which just feels wrong.
- Lots of quests and mobs are buggy or broken
- Scaling is going to punish people with low IL
- Forced group play which by itself is not a bad thing is going to alienate a lot of people
In conclusion, Cryptic took a very flawed game and is replacing it with a simplified system where high TTK and limited options are going to put many people to sleep.
What has been your experience so far?
5
Comments
113 lines of code on the wall, 113 lines of code, rewrite one line, compile it again.......
Wait For It
1. spot on analysis
2. "the pendulum swings back and forth in our attempts to maintain balance" - a statement from one of the devs, seems to be applicable to all of MOD 16 (except the campaign story line, which is good). Testing is a waste of time, because of the the erratic swings
3. only choice left is how much money (or months of playtime) you want to spend to increase the tier of the 30+ enchants per character. For new players anything beyond tier 10-11 will either take ages, or cost hundreds of dollars
4. yup
5. might be better with the last patch (dont know for sure, quit testing because of 2.).
6. Poor pallies, loved to play them in MOD 15, still broken on preview
7. Poor barbs (former GWF), fluid fast paced combat with great AoE has become boring with long phases of kiting, waiting for encounters to recharge
8. Practically all instances in RLQ, RIQ and RAQ broken. Mostly undoable for players with the IL intended for the instance, one-shotting all over the place (even from "normal" mobs), contrary to the promises that i) "healing will become more meaningful" (cannot heal a dead player and cannot pre-heal a player at full health) and that ii) the current state on live, where players are "either at full health or dead" will be improved.
9. spot on, scaling does the opposite of what it is supposed to do (err, dont really know what its supposed to do - quite obviously no plan at all on part of the devs, only the repeated shout "your feedback is appreciated", but a direction or plan is still not in view)
10. Yeah, bye bye casuals ...
I really wish the Devs success, but there seems to be no coordination at all. The Devs are frantically working individually, constantly changing things, not seeing how it affects other stuff, constantly introducing new bugs, so that the number of bugs and (very likely) unintentional behavior ("outliers") seems to remain constant from one build to the next. I have the highest respect for all players that have the stamina do go through this wobbly mess and still are active in preview providing feedback. I have given up at the moment. Might look into things, when they are more stable, but likely that will be 3 months after April 23th...
The counter argument here for these scores is that they already do nothing now anyways. So having 9 strength vs having 20 or 30 is EXACTLY the same. So having a 9 is no different than having 30 points in the new mod. The bonus reward for having high scores does so LITTLE that if they decided to give us the ability to set our own scores we wouldn't even notice a difference between two characters with different scores. No as a veteran, seeing the changes to what the scores are now, I would want to re-roll my scores. I checked on my Cleric, and I don't want any more wisdom, I already have too much and it is now going to be a HAMSTER throw a way Ability Score. If I can re-roll my Cleric in the new mod, I would ditch the wisdom for sure. Look at the bonus. From 9 to 30 would give you basically 0.1% difference.
Cons:
1. Boons are useless, going to 80 on my cleric i didn't slot a single one.
2. At-wills do close to no dmg, they are only usefull on my cleric or on the barbie with hidden daggers buff.
3. Some of the feats relate to a single encounter you will never use, btw you can lvl to 80 and never slot them either makes no difference.
4. Won't even comment about class features.
5, We don't need to worry about stats re-roll because they gives us no noticeable changes like they did on previous mods.
6. Companions do all the work now, i literally go in on my paladin / fighter, use 1 encounter, block and let my comp kill everything because it does more dmg than i do.
7. Paladins (tank/healer) should gain divinity when they use at-wills.
8, Gameplay now is just tedious ...
9. AD farming appears to be getting a nerf again ...
10. I won't talk about professions because i haven't delve into it, but i'm not hearing good stuff about it.
11. End game players shouldn't be penalized and get downscaled to run a dungeon besides Lair of the Mad Mage, makes no sense...
12. They didn't want us to solo dungeons but as you can see on youtube people already found ways to do it as a dps ...
13. Some groups are not running a healer or tank because again there are ways around it.
14. I can already imagine the bad environment random q's with random people will create if you are not pulling your own weight ...
15. Still a lot of bugs to fix and every week they pretty much rework the entire system (combat / companions/ classes).
Pros:
1. No time gated campaign.
2. Beautifull graphics.
3. A lot of gear options.
4. Introdution of Challenge Campaigns
5. The option to try until success while upgrading a enchantment.
6. Cleric only : ty for the width buff to searing light best thing you could have done.
I still feel like they should add a delete all read mail, but thats just me.
Some weapon/armor enchants need to be buffed or removed from the game.
Overall at this point in time i can't have positive thoughts about mod 16 there's too much work to be done in only 22 days, but hey they did say most of the feedback is positive on a stream a couple weeks ago so i guess i'm the only one beeing negative about this... oh well
I can (and will happily) ignore over priced packs. I haven't bought any packs since the class packs were removed. I won't start now, even if the pack was 1/2 of what it is set to cost on 4/23. It is laughably overpriced.
Of more concern to me is that the companions issue has not been addressed. All unbound companions are still listed as BtoC on preview. I know the devs have been promising - for weeks - that they will fix this. That it is not their intention to make this a new "feature" of the game. But they haven't addressed it yet, despite all the patches that have been implemented, and we are less than 4 weeks out from 4/23.
I also think the scaling and new mechanics will kill pug queue's. As the number of failed runs increases the level of toxisity will increase, with people blaming one another until you get to a situation like pvp is currently whereby you cant find a run without at least one person being completely obnoxious. Even more so than currently people will only ever run in premade groups, gating dungeon runs from new players.
Community managers who essentially never interact with the community, broken events, broken code, dev blog errors, shutting down portions of the game, completely throwing out other portions and putting in "hey, you paid us before, now we throw it out and you can pay us all over again!" 'additions' to the game... all these things tend to put developers into a defensive position where they wall themselves into their little cubicle and pretend they know what is 'good' for the game.
Certainly NW had issues, issues directly created by bad game design and selling power creep on Cryptic's part (though Cryptic has a long history of blaming the players whenever bad game mechanics get out of hand). These issues, for the most part, applied at the high, end-game, min-maxer level. That is a significant population because they crank out so much rewards and blow through new content so fast, and are also extremely vocal about what they perceive as problems with the 'end game'.
I doubt they make up more than 25% of the playing population. For the other 75%, still levelling, or kicking around at 70 but not very upgraded, or casual players who don't have 5 legendary companions, 3 leg mounts, and all Rk14 enchants... the game still worked pretty well. The actual issues could have been addressed with modifications to the existing, not a complete "nuke everything and throw the resulting steaming mess onto live, then let players deal with the result".
People say, "Oh, new players won't even notice, they won't be used to the old system". Well, from what I've seen, new players will still find the game slower, more boring, more everything-the-same, less rewarding for progress made, less attractive to add new things (companions, gear, mounts) to their character. So, no, it won't be fine for them... it will be tedious.
As for the 'vision', I suspect it has to do less with a 'vision' and more with 'can we get rid of all this old code none of us understand anymore anyway, and get something new in we can work with?', combined with a near-total lack of design vision, and a stunning (but typically Cryptic) lack of comprehension on how their '15 million' player base will react to the changes.
It seems likely they are also simply trying to dumb the game down to the point where 4 guys can be left to manage it, while they shift everyone they can over to developing the M:TG game… because you can be certain that with Cryptic, that game is way behind in development.
No dev wants to kill a game on purpose, that just doesn't make any sense anywhere.
And yes - for the top end BiS maxxed out 18k iL players powercreep was a problem. [5% of player population?]
For the rest of us mostly NW is great fun as it plays right now. Sure I can solo most content outside of Epic Dungeons on a GWF at 14.5k iL. But that is how it should be - those Rank 13 enchants took months to earn, the legendary companions, the purple insignia, the rank 13 bonding stones. All those things took over two years play to accumulate.
Honestly, if combat goes really slow the player base will fall dramatically. Nuff said. No one wants to spend five minutes killing each group of mobs in a dungeon making the whole run take over an hour [for example]. People have real lives and disconnects and internet failures.
I remember the WoW Dungeons which took 2+ hours to finish. I walked away...
Yule (Barb): 72k : Siren (TR): 78k : Torun (DC): 73k : Siren OP (OP): 76k : Siren SW (SW): 78k : Modern (F): 80k : Cherry1 (CW) : 68k Siren HR (HR): 78k
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
* Dungeon runs will be slower
* REQ is gone so one random queue less to make money from
* RAQ now has CR, Cradle and Tong in it in addition to the old dungeons, so he likelihood of getting a workable RAQ run will be less. It will be harder to hit edemo or get a RAQ Tong run.
And everyone will need a lot more AD to catch up on gear.. my rough estimate is 40M AD to get back to BiS, assuming no need legendary mount needed.
A clear understanding of why some segment of the base play is not understood.
You need an average of 86 Preservation wards for each of your...what 26 enchants? That's 22360 Zen or 11.180.000 AD. If you bought the wards during a 40% off sale, that's only 6.7 million AD.
for each of the 24 (I might be off by one or two) regular enchants, you need a MoP, Rank 7. You can farm them, or buy from the bazaar for 125.000 AD. That's 3 million AD - less if you have a VIP discount, or buy during a sale.
To get your Armor and weapon enchants from R13 to R14, you need 30 UMoPs and 6 UES. I'm at work, so I cannot check the current price of those.
You also need various stones and stuff to rank up your new weapons, artifacts and artifact items (neck, belt). I'm assuming you will farm the items - if you are impatient and want to buy them that will add to the cost.
Then what, ah yes you need a ton of RPs, of course ... expensive if you have to buy gems.
And yes, the insignia. upgrading all your insignia is expensive - in particular if you have the really expensive ones like Brutality, and you might need to upgrade a set of new companions too.
So yeah, you might not be too far off on your 40M estimate.
However, the good news is that there is no need to. R15 enchants give so little extra compared to R14 that it's really not worthwhile to upgrade. Upgrading companions from Epic to Legendary just for the bolster value is a waste as the difference is only 0.5%.
Yes, it's worthwhile to upgrade your bonding runestones from R14, but that's about it.