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FC.31.20220311.2 - Forum Malvanum
kaiserin
Posts: 3,195 Cryptic Developer
Forum Malvanum
UI
Imperium
Caliburn
Powers
- Added the option to skip cutscenes. At least 3 players must activate the option before exiting the starting area.
- Timers no longer count down during cutscenes. However, all timers have been adjusted to be their intended times (as they had the cutscene timers added onto them).
- Gave Firewing unique FX for his abilities.
- Increased the area effect range of Firewing's abilities.
- Updated visual cues for Firewing's abilities.
- Slightly increased Firewing's health.
- Adjusted Firewing's costume.
- Adjusted Tateklys's costume.
- Black Fang, Zoe Loft, and Kevin Poe can now appear during Round 9.
UI
- Added option to change the tailor background. Currently there are only 2 options.
- Added option to hide the tailor UI.
Imperium
- Added a Eidolon store. This store is only visible if you have defeated the Eidolon of Destruction.
Caliburn
- Added a Therakiel's Lair store. This store is only visible if you have completed Therakiel's Lair.
Powers
- Lightning Arc Blindside Adv: Fixed a bug where the duration of this effect lasted longer than the maintain.
Post edited by kaiserin#0958 on
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Most often Slice N Dice@zap-the-eradicator in-game.
The non-costume items in the Eidolon store are showing a "You already have this Costume unlocked!" message for me.
I don't know if the prices are final, and I understand that some players are already sitting on a stack of Qliphothic Essence; but the token costs for both stores (50-100 per item) seem awfully high. That's over 3 months of daily successful runs on a single character to obtain one of the 100-token items.
Suggestions
Add some low-token-cost evergreen items, for players who don't intend to farm the content heavily enough to afford the more expensive wares.
I second Lunny's suggestion for account-bound tokens, similar to Rampage tokens or the Drifter salvage deposit in the account bank. Eido and TT are both heavily role-dependent encounters, with players often switching from their ideal character just to get an attempt started. Locking the currency to individual characters discourages this, and leads to a stubbornness contest until someone reluctantly swaps to a character that doesn't need the currency. I understand that running multiple characters is a way to bypass the daily mission limitation, but I feel that the content is difficult enough to justify a faster token rate for players willing to fill necessary roles with a larger roster.
Please consider either altering the prices or changing the token system to allow us to use other characters in that grind. Not only does it discourage people from using different roles ("I can't go on my tank, I'm currently grinding to 100 on my DPS"), it's more likely to see you burn out before you get even close to the goal. We've been playing TT and Eido for fun and random drops for the most part, and even with that, I can barely stand playing a single character for too many times in a row. It gets stale to do the same content, the same way, on the same character, every day. If this goes live the way it is, I don't see more than maybe 1% of players ever making use of this store in their life. Maybe that's intended, but then what's the point of the store if no one's supposed to use it?
Bug
Qliphothic Essence and Therakiel's Burnt Feather
Both of these currencies still direct you to spend them at the Gold Champions Recognition Vendor in Ren Cen, instead of Imperium in QWZ or Caliburn in Vibora Bay.
Suggestion
The token costs (Essence / Feathers) for the devices & mods are discouragingly high. As other people have said, Eido and TT have pretty demanding role requirements. Having to successfully complete 100 runs (limited by the daily nature of the mission reward, too) to get a Bind on Pickup device on one specific character is nuts. Seeing prices like this in the store doesn't encourage me to keep doing the content- it just makes me want to write the whole thing off as not worth bothering with. I say this as someone who actually has done Eido enough to cap the currency on one character.
By the time anyone manages to farm this many feathers one one character, they'll have farmed enough Gs just from raw TT runs to buy the costume unlocks off another player who got one to drop naturally, or have gotten another drop that they could trade directly for the one they want from another player. If anything, it's likely that someone grinding TT every day on several characters for 50 days will have all the unlocks they could've bought otherwise just from drops, and possibly even gotten extras, and then the only reason to keep going would be for grinding towards Brilliances for each character.
The Eidolon store has the exact same issue.
So, who are these stores being added to please exactly, considering how functionally useless they are? It'd still be problematic but would be way better if feathers and essences could be swapped between characters, but that isn't the case, so these are... effectively pointless near as I can figure, outside of someone wanting to have their cake and eat it too by farming all the unlocks (the slow way) while still selling every last single thing they get, and/or farming towards Brilliance (EDIT: and QWZ equivalents) on multiple characters at once.
This is my cry for help
BTW, HUGE QoL upgrade for Forum. But you might as well get rid of the cutscenes entirely, as anyone who doesn't skip them is going to get abandoned by the rest of the team immediately.
I agree. Players who aren't familiar with current vote-skip content aren't going to recognize the console, and people are just going to drop out of a run that has cutscenes enabled. With the voiceovers still playing, I don't think the cutscenes add anything of merit. The one at the end feels fine, and you could justify reinserting the brief introduction so newer players can be introduced to Tateklys.
It feels weird to have a big open arena, when the ideal strategy for most waves is to stay inside the spawn tunnel. Maybe have enemies spawn inside the arena itself, or experiment with multiple spawn points? It doesn't feel very engaging to spawn-camp a single location for 10 waves.
The Legendary bosses feel like a nice addition to wave 9, which was anticlimactic otherwise.
Firewing is definitely more difficult, with a larger AoE sphere that's tough to avoid and the heavy DoT from Continuous Burns. I do wish that Continuous Burns had a more obvious visual cue; it's a pretty serious threat.
Premade teams will likely be more common, as tank/healer are useful in the last few waves; but with a faster completion time, hopefully more people will want to join those premades.
Adding something new to the drop table would help reinvigorate interest.
The prices are high as the store is intended as a last-ditch option to get drops you're after that you aren't able to get via running the lair normally.
There will be no pooling resources between characters.
As other have said, coercing people to run the same character 50-100 times just makes it dull and harder to fill roles.
Now THAT I can get behind. 2 DUC drops in 8 years just ain't my bag.
The "aren't able to get via running the lair normally" part is a bit funnily worded. I say this because there have been people who have done TT 200+ times and haven't received anything from it. You could say that since it would take 100 runs + whatever SCR/GCR is required to get one thing from the store that this is a benefit, but you also have to recognize the fact that it shouldn't take over 200+ runs for RNG to actually offer something up. That doesn't feel good to grind for and it's why I personally haven't even touched TT, never mind other factors. Content's done based on how worth it the rewards are. If the rewards are next to impossible to achieve, then people will not do that content. Because of this, hardly anyone does TT. The rewards simply just aren't worth the grind, and to make people who couldn't get said rewards within 100 runs (though at this rate, we can assume they've done more 100 runs) have to grind even more in order to get those things they want despite the effort involved in the grind isn't going to make anyone happy.
By the way, I say 100 runs, but it's literally 100 days of TT. And that's if you get to pick the character that has the resources to get what you want from the store. Reducing the fun of making alt characters by making it harder to actually make good use of them is a problem for another day, though.
All in all, these new stores seem pretty toxic for the game, and the fact that they don't even have everything makes it even less appealing overall. Me personally? I'm not even going to think about either of these because the grind is antifun. My urge to try new TT is still dead, and while I would be willing to fight Eidolon, I'm not even going to think about this store, since I fight him across potentially five characters. I can't always tank him, or DPS him, so there's no way I can actually make use of the store.
TL;DR, drop rates themselves need a rework (and to be posted visibly so people know what they're in for), grinding for literal months for one item isn't fun, and making it harder to use multiple characters goes against one of the most fun aspects of CO.
Did this arc recently and Surhoff specifically says Loft, Ludwig etc. are "in custody" after the culmination.
I have a few of some various items and none of the top-end pieces. Which I'm fine with. None of my characters need this stuff.
So, I'll continue to play these contents with whichever character I choose. And whenever I choose, if the Lair/OM/Rampage is available or PQing, if I play them at all.
Otherwise, I'll just wait for RNG to favor me. That, and I'll be able to buy something I'm missing and need in a few years from the vendor. Unless you give these tokens the same treatment as other event tokens.
^^^^^^^^^^^ Now, that's just me. Other players will most certainly have a different attitude.
-=-=-=-=-=-(CO in-game handle: @WarCan )-=-=-=-=-=-
"Okay, you're DEAD, what do you do NEXT?"
"that you aren't able to get via running the lair normally" I mean, that'd be nice if there was anything you couldn't get via running the lair normally. But everything related to the lair has enough of a chance of dropping that, by the time I've run 50/100 runs on one specific character (let alone several characters,) I'll have already either gotten several other drops, one of which I could trade for the thing I want, or I'll have earned enough Gs from it alone and/or been able to get enough tradable SCR+GCR items to buy or trade for it from another player who's gotten it outright, and still have plenty extra left over.
Frankly, the fact that the feathers are character-bound means the only use there is for them is, with how this game's flow of progression and flow of money and loot earning goes, for people who play Therakiel's Temple hundreds and thousands of times over to be able to grind for Brilliances and Dissonances (and any other on-one-character items) while selling every last bit of loot they get to other players who don't have the patience or expertise to run Therakiel's Temple that much (or at all,) including tradable copies of the single-character/single-use items like those mentioned that these players would have otherwise been grinding in the hopes of getting themselves.
It's... almost uncomfortable, how exclusively this does the opposite of providing a last resort for items people are having problems getting to drop, by instead just providing a larger abundance of items to the select few players who grind frequently enough to be allowed to use the store in the first place, giving them more to sell to the mortal peons below by proxy of ensuring they don't have to use Bind-On-Equip drops they could've traded away, or slot mods they could've traded away otherwise. And that's to say nothing of someone intentionally "going about it the slow way" by not even unlocking costume unlocks and selling their first copies of THOSE, and just getting them from the store later. It's what I noticed immediately when I sat down thinking about it for three minutes after seeing the patch notes and getting a look screenies of the stores, and it's why I quipped "who are these stores being added to please exactly?" in my first post. It exclusively benefits the tiny minority who already have everything they personally need, not these more casual players this supposedly helps who don't have squat unless they bought it from the aforementioned minority.
Here's my take. If you want people to have more access to TT drops if RNG is flipping them the bird, then make TT more accessible to the normie masses instead of further rewarding the few who already grind TT non-stop for hours every day across a wide array of characters (Is it any wonder the Doomsday Clockers I know personally are celebrating "being able to sell more stuff/being able to hoard more Gs" while most of the non-TTers I know are just passively commenting how this changes nothing and they'll never waste their time on TT?) Now, with how this tends to go, I'll provide a few better possibilities outright.
One, and the most obvious pick: make a duplicate of Therakiel's Temple with difficulty and mob count and numbers scaled to the Therakiel's Temple Alerts and Rampage that were originally created to entice people to revisit the reworked Therakiel's Temple in the first place. It would be best if this version of Therakiel's Temple had a chance of dropping the items and unlocks that the Alerts and Rampage could, perhaps at the same rate as Therakiel's Temple proper, for enticement for lowbie players to try the easier of the two TTs and be trained up towards the difficulty of the harder one, which could be renamed anything from "Therakiel's Temple Elite" to "The Epic of Therakiel" for all we'd care... but honestly, even if there were no drops at all? It wouldn't be too bad of a loss if there were no special drops tied to this easier Therakiel's Temple whatsoever; what would matter would be allowing casuals to train for the real deal at any time rather than just during the TTAlert event, without the gear and time investment the real deal requires up-front Just tie some daily SCR, GCR and Qnite to it and people would run it more than TA, honestly. You could still keep TTAlert Week in either way; it'd just serve to draw more attention to both easy-TT and hard-TT and be an easy jump-in point for people wanting to practice a specific boss or run for a specific boss's loot/unlocks, rather than rolling the dice on the entire loot table and getting something they
Two: remove the hidden "Elite" modifier from TT mobs. Yeah, yeah, I get it, "TT is supposed to be big and scary and impossible to run unless you bring meta builds, and also healers should suffer anyways because healers are big nerds," but seriously. If you want to get people into TT? Make it so that difficulty actually affects TT mobs, and higher difficulty settings increase drop rates for shinies from the reward circle at the end. Just like that, you've already solved the entire problem by making TT more inviting and easier to run without punishing people for wanting a challenge (because why would anyone want to run it on Elite if it didn't affect drops at all?)
Three: introduce items and/or mods specifically designed around running TT. Honestly? This is a totally lame way to go about it to me, just personally in my own opinion. But Kigatilik's... Frozen Ward mod, wasn't it called?... and the Hermes Requisition Elixir consumables both make it abundantly clear that "item to make doing one specific area or piece of content easier" is entirely on the table. So providing mods and consumables to make TT more approachable is an absolute option. Heck, give us permanent Hermes Requisition Elixirs for bulk SCR+GCR+Hermes and even that would entice people into TT, since TT, to my understanding, uses some overlapping damage types.
Four: provide alternatives to existing powers for Therakiel's Temple viability. Therakiel's Temple is overtuned to only be comfortably playable for builds using the absolute best powers for instant healing and fast damage-dealing to large groups of enemies both. Many of the people I know who don't want to play TT refuse in part because they'd be shoehorned into specific builds, and anything outside those would just be making things needlessly worse and more complicated for teammates, which means they can't enjoy playing their own characters, only whatever character is dictated as "passable" by the buff and nerf fairies. If you refuse to make TT more approachable by actually cutting down on the grind, or by making it easier so that players running less overtuned builds can get into it, then make more powers stronger and more usable for the job of mowing through massive groups of mobs. Make Fireball 100' instead of 50', widen the sphere to 15' and make it do full damage to all targets rather than around 1/3rd damage to secondary targets. Give Archery as a whole a unique gimmick by making its mainline AoEs have a 10 target cap instead of a 5 target cap (inspired kindly by Storm of Arrows, which is a 100' 15' sphere that does low damage but hits up to 7 targets at a time instead of 5. Speaking of, make that thing 25' to make up for its low damage. Feed the gimmick. Empower it.) Increase the strength and/or target caps of reverse-repels such as Ebon Rift and Soul Vortex. Give TKBlade its own 1:1 equivalent to Sword Cyclone, complete with matching "knock-toward" and "charge instead of maintain" Advs. Give us more proactive targeted heals that aren't garbage in general. Give us more unique tanking powers that could allow things like damage-sharing or life-linking, providing unique accessible alternatives to "use three Fire All Weapons when Baron hits 1/3rd" that aren't just "use three of some other ult or heavy attack." Come on, we've got how many powers and room for how many theoretical hundreds of times more?
Five: fix certain... "unintentional mechanics" that prevent diversity of play in TT and/or make things needlessly harder than they were intended to be. Things like enemies who are affected by Sentinel Mastery, Dependency and the likes and then Corrupted by a player power or device healing other enemies (and more importantly, the bosses,) as well as other things like Baron Cimetiere occasionally just not saying his Near/Far tell in a chat bubble OR in the player's chat tab (introducing a visual indicator would make this infinitely better, like a circle forming around him the same diameter as the bubble he forms when blocking, and the ground either inside it or outside it turning green and having particles rise from it indicating which side of him's actually about to become a death zone regardless of his lying and saying to stand in the danger area.)
Six: rip off a certain other MMO which we shall not name that recently had a new DLC involving time travel, moon bunnies, depressed birds and existential nihilism. That is to say, implement a feature that, if used by the party, disables the Doomsday Clock achievement but provides an escalating boost to health, energy, defense, healing and damage output that ramps up higher and higher the longer the instance has been open. Something something something, "Blessing of the Light," something something. If it ramps up successively over time then it shouldn't be usable for exploitable speed-running of TT way faster than intended for drops, but should allow weaker builds and less-skilled players to ease into things (especially if they're willing to wait around at spawn for a half-hour talking battle-plans and strategizing, or watching an episode of Doctor Who on Netflix.)
C'mon, I'm just giving out all these ideas here for free! Someone else, suggest something, keep the chain going!
This is my cry for help
But I'll humor it! How, mechanically speaking, do these stores promote equal opportunities, instead of what I described which has gone unrefuted thus far?
This is my cry for help
OK. Lol