Why I think new Sharandar is bad so far (and I'm currently doing SKT!)

janhow

I came in 8 months ago after playing a wide variety of MMOs for the past 15 years. Although I think it's pay to play I enjoyed it. Avernus when I finally got to it was great. I got my butt kicked daily and after a few weeks I kept getting better. When I first got there I'd see people grabbing a whole mob and destroying them. I'd blow all my cool downs to try to kill 1 of them. Then I geared up and smiled every time I got even with those mobs!

Then came the combat changes. I adapted and got to 52k and my stats were good. I had most of my Boons but still needed some older campaigns. They were tougher now, but still enjoyable. I spent a lot of time crunching numbers and strategizing to tune my build.

Sharandar dropped. I don't do group content but even if I did only the pants and shirt appealed to me from Seals. But to get them I have to do random queues, so that gear is out. I could do tons of HEs for RNG stuff that I don't need or a Heroic dungeon for gear that I don't find optimal for my build. Played enough to finish part 1 and done. Started part 2, now I can kill rare spawns every day and hope for a piece of RNG gear I can use. Not much of an incentive.

I don't mind grinding, I LOVED Avernus. But grinding for RNG isn't fun. Joomla the RNG isn't bad because in the beginning you could use most of the gear. Then you had treasure maps and hunts with gear you could probably use.

So here is my recommendation - have the Seal gear be able to be purchased with drop currency and/or from HEs also. If you are going to do bounties, improve the drops or allow them to be unbound at least for AH. Also you need something to get better gear than just an Epic Dungeon. If people have to grind to get it like Avernus, that's fine. I really hope the last installment gives rewards for playing it and playing it for more than 3 days total...

This ties into my other recommendation on gear. Now that stats are so important, ALL gear should be like artifact gear where you can choose the stats. You can use the current artifact concept. Also choose the bonuses, that way ilvl 1500 gear doesn't screw up my entire build because I just lost 2700 Crit but gained 2700 Accuracy etc.. Then I lost 5000 Power but my party gets 1000 Defense etc... At some point you are capped anyway so why bother upgrading to the highest ilvl?

callumf

fair enough - but the RTQ isnt too hard to succeed in a PUG group these days.

REDQ depends which one you get, so yeah I avoid those.

But overall, I agree, its fairly weirdly not really an incentivised campaign to work on.

thornigar

This new rng-based direction the game is leaning is boring imo. The bounties aren't fun, people have been camping them (like they did with the avernus bounties, but at least they had a fun fight! Though that is small consolation) and the stuff is dull, like most of the gear in Sharandar. It's a prettier landscape, at least.

empalas

The new seals were supposed to drop in the new HEs in Ep 2 per an interview of one of the devs... but Ep2 is hear and still the same seal dropping as the HEs in ep1... I started to do week 2 but since there is no new weekly I don't even feel like completing the 100 on 1 character...i did ep1 on 4 at a time and started first week of ep2... and the bounties...no thanks for that rng which will take too long for the chance.