Difficulty was fine in mod 5. In fact, Mod 5 was entirely too difficult as I never once got in a successful Tiamat run. Tiamat should have been balanced in mod5 to allow for at least a 60% success rate in a 25 man PUG, instead it had like 1% of lower.
The game did NOT need a difficulty spike after that.
Anyone who claims it was too easy would be among the minority of people who like to punish themselves with impossible tasks. Someone who works hard to gain level 60 purple gear should be all means power through all content except end-game epic dungeons, including being able to solo non-epic dungeons, considering it's not easy to obtain that level of gear.
Solo content should remain solo content, as per what Sergeant Knox said. Meaning the level 60-70 zones should be solo capable for the average level 60 character wearing all greens, of any class.
Campaigns NEED to have rewards that a level 70 character can use. This includes purple gear that they can use to enter dungeons and succeed at T1 dungeons. The more difficult campaigns (IWD, WOD) NEED to reward T2 purple gear at least, obtainable by the average solo player without being forced to endure the painful, broken dungeon queue. Not everyone likes to endure that hour plus queue that most classes have to go through. In fact, most people don't like it at all.
600 protector seals for a piece of armor is absolute garbage. Ain't nobody got time to do 300 impossibly difficult dungeon bosses with an hour plus queue just to get into the dungeon and a low success rate. No. Just no.
I'm going to abandon all hope of level 70 game play until things are fixed. The only thing I care about currently is leveling up my paladin. But once he makes 70, if things aren't fixed I may simply stop playing completely.
Scott, thanks for the letter. As a developer myself i KNOW that sometimes you just cant do it NOW. As a start: filing in a ticket and getting the message "ticket #3,395,357 successfully submitted", brings the AAAND, IT'S GONE-meme into mind. Please provide us with some sort of bugtracker. Knowing that the reported bug has been received, someone confirmed it and someone is at least moving it onto the todo-list is a big step forward.
THIS would really, truly be awesome - it would go a long, long way toward making players feel the game gods actually care about the end users/players. Right now, it feels like the developers and game teams are in their own world, doing their own thing, and not caring a bit about the players nor the problems they are having or that they report. I've submitted several tickets where no action was ever taken as far as I could tell having no feedback nor any fixes done. I've had useless responses, such as reporting a problem with Sword Coast and getting back a generic form letter telling how Sword Coast is supposed to work, not EVEN acknowledging my problem, but responding back as if I had no clue how to play. If it WORKED as listed in the generic letter, then all might be fine, but I was reporting a problem about how it is working.
(BTW, that problem was reported in the early days of bringing out SCA and to this day STILL has not been fixed nor acknowledged, because I was "answered" - even though the response I received had no bearing whatsoever on my problem. I am not allowed by the system to bring it up again because my questions received a response. NOT a viable answer, note, but a generic, non-applicable response.)
Kinda like: Q. I have a problem. Problem details.
A: Yes, today is Tuesday, thank you goodbye.
It would be soooooo much better to think that there actually was some Customer Service and concern for the players included in the Game Team.
Artifact gear broken, ie powers not working or giving 0% increases
Companions rating broken...ie purple companions no longer giving 8% rating to character as active bonus.
Poor programming fixes by giving gear with more HP. Seriously lazy shortcut.
nothing to play for anymore...no drops, no rewards, mo salvageable equipment to be able to work towards buying gear off of auction house.
Making the only decent gear pvp. great for your pvp clientele, but for those of us that disdain pvp and all that comes with it not a smart move.
being a part of a guild that had 250 active players, i can tell you 75 % have left the game ...Mod 6 is epic fail
of our 250 active players the ones that have stayed mostly were the pvpers because they have gotten the gear ...the others didnt want to pvp so they are off searching for a new game or have gone back to older ones they use to play before here.
i am not a pvper ....and i too will most likely leave soon, what can you tell us is in the works?
thank you for your time,
a casual player who use to enjoy this game.
After waiting a while for this... here is my take on what needs addressing in the game:
Loss of playable Content. The removal of content playable solo is in my opinion the biggest flaw with Mod 6 so far. I understand the desire to make content more team oriented in some places and to eliminate the over powered soloing of content that should require multiple players, but to totally remove the ability to play alone in most of the areas we were playing in already is in my opinion, a huge error. I have several players that were playing through the Sharandar, Dread Ring, Tyranny of Dragon and Well of Dragons campaigns and that has now all but stopped because I am no longer able to survive for more than a few hits in these areas. Yes, some players/classes can still solo most of the content, but the people that have worked for over a year building and playing their characters are basically out of luck now. I can limp my way through some of Sharandar, Dread Ring is almost instant death, Tyranny of Dragons is ok as long as I do not plan of completing Common Cause as the dungeons are ridiculous now, and well of the dragon(And Tiamat) are now a wasteland as they are totally unplayable unless you have a full group or are a Tank(who seem to be the only ones that can get through things, albeit very very slowly). I do not personally know of ANYONE that has successfully completed Tiamat since the Mod was released.
I know you can pull stats from your datatbases and if you are seeing this and think it is ok, then I don't understand where you are taking a successful game to? I know for a fact the loss of players has spiked yet again, with some guilds I know having gone for 40or more active players down to 20 or less.
The nerf to Lifesteal and Regen I can understand as they were very powerful, but the same nerf to the mods and adds would be nice! I watch my health go down with the slim chance of Life Steal happening very rarely, while the mobs that I am fighting have their health go up while they hit me. This needs to be fixed/addressed.
The fact that all mobs we seems to be facing in level 70 areas/dungeons are now at the 2 level target you have introduced to do significant Damage to players 2 levels below them basically is a game breaker. Add the Flanking bonus they get and invariably make use of and your survivability is so low it is not worth even trying. Being 1-2 shotted is not fun and does not make one want to play the game. I would suggest taking out the hard number damage and putting in a percentage damage. This way no matter what level you are fighting, they will still do the same damage to you percentage wise, and no scaling would be required. This would also balance out PVP, as while the percentage can be increased by intelligent building, the skill of your attacks and strategy would play more into the game than just "I am more powerful than you!"
I will leave it at this for now as although there is a lot more, this is what I feel is the most significant issues. Please start working on the playability issues rather than the fluff patches we have mostly been seeing. This was a GREAT GAME. Now, it is becoming not worth spending time on due to the insane changes that have all but made the game unplayable unless you are just leveling up a new character. And once you hit level 60, you hit this wall where things are just not playable again.
You have increased our Health by a fact of 3...but the new Healing potion only increased it effectiveness by approx. 12-15%. What this means is the old potions would heal for 30-50% or more of your health before, but now you only get 5-10% or less! This make healing potions all but useless when you have 50-100k Health and only get 10k from a potion every 18 seconds , but you have made the adds hit harder than the 10k the potion is healing! Once you pass level 60, again this makes for an unplayable game!
Quite a while i expierenced my first 1-2 hours of Module 6-Elemental Evil and was so disappointed and annoyed of this content i couldn't play Neverwinter for nearly 2 Weeks only occasionally logged in to make my profession task and at the current i am not sure if i want to continue this torture.
But i packed out my grind gear and logged in to get my little dwarven cleric to level 70 and complete all four new areas and quests to start the new old journey to gear my character up (again).
So i started the intro quest that was quite entertaining (did it with another character before) and then was at the new area the Drowned Shores only to drown in quests. Normaly i would appreciate it but the whole design concept of the hourly quests is broken.
It seperates the community because from like 7 quests you can only have 4 active which means in a small area everyone makes different quests. So random quest-groups are quite rare.
Never accept quests which needs an heroic encounter to complete because you will end up with one of two problems. If it is a small HE which is do able alone you can't do it because it is most of the time offline/inactive. The reason for that problem is the big downtime of an HE and that other player block this specific HE. If it is a bigger HE you can't do it alone and need other players but because that not all players has all quests you end up with a fraction of the community to do this and this means you are most likely alone or in epic HE's even with a group the HE's are hardly do able, this means a majority of the player avoid them.
You need 16 hourly quests which means you will need at least 2 hours to accomplish the story quests to get to the next quest hub. This is not the reason that the quests are hard or need big time complete it is the problem that every quest hub only provides you with around 7 hourly quests at once. This means you have a personal downtime if you did all hourly quests because there aren't enough to get 16 hourly quests at once. I had the problem that i was almost finished with one quest hub and only needed 2 more hourly quest to proceed and must wait over 30 minutes because i already finished all quests at the moment. That is dumb!
Besides that utterly broken mechanic i liked to go back at the Drowned Shores but in my opinion you wasted a great opportunity to show your players something new. At the start of the Drowned Shores you can enter the mines. You could have make a small mace with several entrances and exits that ends in a special HE-Zone like a great dripstone cave and show some new set pieces but instead we have 2 different generic mines that are only a tube and spammed with monsters and necessary items to interact if you have a quest for it.
The Drowned Shores could be a bit more special, for example include diving at a part of the ocean to complete some quests. Maybe not fighting because to implement a whole new combat system would be too much but some simple diving animation and gathering quest would be cool and show the player something new. But instead we got a small rework of the map that feels pretty generic unspecial and a pain of the *** because of massiv monster spam, that left a disstate after finally finishing this area.
The normal Story-Quests which lead through the area are not helpfull and feeled like grinding an hourly quest and not special at all, maybe the small dungeons are nice and walking through the wall of water in the Drowned Shores was something new but nothing breathtaking (I stand like an hour in the water wall and didn't died). Some kind of awkward funny was the Endboss of the area as he procced to throw waterbombs on me, at least for this you could have made new animations. Felt pretty cheap. After the good introduction quests i was hoping to see Minsk and Boo again because they was ordered to help me (or simply the archdruid needed some spare time from them) but we got more generic stuff that couldn't be rushed or enjoyed.
I have a suggestion to fix the hourly quests. Set the quest giver to a small map. If we want a quest in one of the three different zones in one of the new area it display us the "battlefield" and what should be done, which are simply the hourly quests with their quest areas. Make the quests smaller in description like "We need some medical supply for our wounded soldiers, search this area for some XY Herbs" and then display it on the map. This would be helpfull to pick up hourly quests which are close to each other or have similar subjectives.
To kill the downtime if no quests available the questgivers could say: "You did all the tasks we requested. Every hour we get new scout reports. Come back later for some specific tasks, in the meantime you can help us with these problems." And then it displays the heroic encounter in the area which means we can make progress with heroic encounters, but for this you must spawn them more often or say the system "if HE is finished open another" and give us more of it (especially smaller ones).
To help merchants is nice but how about a officier of the cultist walking through there camps with his guards we must simply kill and some of his abilities is to spawn something similar his elements as finishing move (For example: Calling the giant HAMSTER to ride on it to purge some heroes, calling giant flame tornados which decrease our movement area, giant earth elemental breaking through ground and trying to smash some heroes, calling flying monsters which trying to capture some heroes to throw them in the deep - something awesome).
In addition delete all quest rewards like the elements (not XP and Gold) and give us instead faction coins for each area to buy the stuff we want and need for our character instead of waiting for the quest we need to get unified elements. Farming is part of the Game but if the player can choose it by himself like choosing the area, quests and other stuff it is easily endurable (and can be fun) but to let us wait for quests only as a cheap timesink is unpleasant and simply makes no fun.
P.S.: Sorry for the Wall Of Text-Spell
Platypus wielding a giant hammer, your argument is invalild!
Although the 60-69 areas should have been done a lot better, they are only leveling areas.
Make them as good as you like, but once done it's back to the old end zones - this is the biggest problem with Mod 6 - the complete lack of anything new at lvl 70.
I must have run tiamat easily over a hundred times to get artifact gear and all the ToD campaign boons. Relieved when I didn't have to go in there anymore. Same for the other old end zones - Shar/DR/IWD - been there, done that, got all the campaign boons.
Was running dungeons, bit repetitive, but a bit of a break from constant tiamat-ing.
Now what? Back to that, only changing the 60 to a 70 against my character level? Pffft.
Nothing of interest until Mod 7 then - and that's not going to happen tomorrow, next week, or next month.
Cryptic - you guys completely messed it up, and I really don't know what you can do in the short term to re-introduce interest at end level.
...............vote for your favourite expansion.......... "Mod 6. Oh my f****** god. It gutted the game pure and simple. And what wasn't gutted was messed up by the poorly thought out new level cap and equip. The game never recovered from that atrocity". ..............not this one then.............
I would prefer mere backtracking to the four new areas to improve your character. Like getting easier refinement stones, element agregate, unified elements and other stuff. It would be easy to complete such a task and would give us something to do and see the new areas as a bit of new content instead of leveling treadmill.
New dungeons would be nice, but i have the feeling we will get that at module 7.
Platypus wielding a giant hammer, your argument is invalild!
Mod 6 is the closest to class balancing I have seen yet playing this game ,.That said players are leaving in troves . Its not unusual for new players to try a game and leave but Im seeing alot of veteran players in my guild giving away their stuff and just leaving .Players are sick of sitting around in protectors enclave for hours at a time trying to get in a group and not because they arent a tank/DC/CW if you dont believe me I challenge the devs to go to PE and see for yourself . To get in a group you have to have a certain item level , say 2.8k before you will even be considered to be invited to a T2 . The thing is a character that has every IWD ,Shar,DR,ToD boon ,Perfect enchant , legendary ioun stone , etc is still seen as just a 2.2k toon thats never getting in a group outside his guild.Im glad guardian fighters are in demand now , they had it rough for a looong time . I also understand that the game is based on DnD where its a group effort but Mod 6 has killed this game for casual players . The game also seems to go in two opposite directions between levels 1-60 and 60-70 , its like you are playing a different game almost . Solo content is dead in IWD for most , you cant really go there and farm when you cant get in a party and who wants to spend every day farming Sharandar with a lvl 70 toon . Cryptic you really need to include a stat for effective character level that isnt based soley on what a player is wearing . Take a character that has every boon , transcendant weapon enchant , 5 legendary companions with all rank 12 enchants , wearing alliance/grim gear and he is seen the same as a brand new lvl 70 wearing the same alliance/grim grim gear ,no boons ,no companion in the Looking For Group Channel .
The mobs cause too much damage. The devs confused " make a more difficult module" with "make every single monster able to one hit you". Epic Dungeons and Skimishes are nearly impossible, and the normal content, wich should be playable solo barely is.
The mobs cause too much damage. The devs confused " make a more difficult module" with "make every single monster able to one hit you". Epic Dungeons and Skimishes are nearly impossible, and the normal content, wich should be playable solo barely is.
There are no solo'able areas come 70, and even 61-69 is dicey. If you were level 60 before the patch, and have a full boon set, maybe, but even then, come 70, just getting through the campaign area's introduction sequences alone is a horribly painful grind. ...and then there's the epic areas... Gawds, they are just, broken beyond belief - and we knew and said as much during the play tests.
Ideally, fighting through a level 60 dungeon or skirmish with a moderately equipped level 60 character, and doing the same with a moderately equipped level 70 character, through a level 70 area, should be about the same.
It should, at the very least, not be the difference between night and day - on two different planets, orbiting two different stars!
It's basically yanking the rug out from under folks at the last moment. "Hey, remember this game you loved so much you spent dozens of hours investing time in it to get to max level? Well now we're going to completely change everything and repeatedly kill you for entertainment! Surprise!"
Doubly so for the "solo" campaign areas. There's no call for open world difficulty to change exponentially, despite the fact that you've trained to the recommended level. (And, indeed, come 70, due to the adjustment system, you become weaker.)
But this has all been said, and supposedly, it's all been heard. But over the past month, it's yet to be addressed. Indeed, all we've seen in the past few patches, is players and items getting steadily weaker, and rewards being steadily reduced (coupled with a sprinkle of, yes, much needed, but much less important, bug fixes).
@Game Difficulty: Tune down the damage and let the monsters attack more often and i mean not special skills, normal distant and melee attacks. Everyone can try this at a monster. They hit like once every 5 seconds. Some breaks between attacks are okay but the attack speed is like = Swordslash *goes in idle animation* 5 4 3 2 1 => Swordslash *goes in idle animation* 5 4 3 2 1 => Swordslash ... etc. It is stupid if you think about that a melee character class can attack continuously only with small breaks or none breaks between the animation. It is like the NPC-Monsters are stuck in a round based fight while we use real time system.
Another problem i don't get is why Heroic Encounter run out of time? I would understand that some special heroic encounter in which the enemie force is trying to accomplish something but a heroic encounter like earthquake to run out is something i don't understand.
Platypus wielding a giant hammer, your argument is invalild!
I have written my complaints or tried to many times.
Today i was playing a bit and over heared a conversation in Zone. Won't go into details, cause i don't wanna cause trouble to anyone, BUT i have to ask myself, how long are we fooling each other, both we players and both the officials behind the game.
Let me tell you, what i mean.
I have leveled now 2 of my toons to lvl 70 and while i collected the glory and PVP seals for my TR, i didn't do this with my GWF and he is also more PVE orientated. I have done a few painful T1s, with many bad PUG groups to get him the gear.
Now i am standing at the point, that i don't know, what to do with poor GWF. T2 dungeons should await and the Protector Seals, BUT i haven't met or seen any group doing it, without huge tricks, cheats and exploits.
I have to ask myself and the officials- no demand, just thinking loud- why and how long are we fooling our selves. I was in a group in a T1 dungeon, with famous guy from here, he came with his CW, bang 2 shotted the Boss in epic Lostmouth, i was just watching, what the hell. Ok, next day been to epic Cragmyre, people yell at me, go at the wall and don't attack, cause other wise we die. Ok, i was foolish, i did go near the Mobs, they killed the team and all i got was yelling.
Other situation, i was standing amongst players in PE and see, that the ability points "fix" is trendy again, i see changed toons all over the place and some of them whales, who actually wouldn't need it.
Ok, i did go on my way, met a few players, who had already the Elven "set" all over. I mean we all know, how much seals we have to gather and how much BI too it and suddenly players in full Elven "sets" on more toons.
Ok, i go with my 3rd toon leveling and all i see before the caverns in Ebon Downs are bots.
I had my little troubles with Mod 5 too, but this is getting ridiculous.
Apparently the harsh environments, the broken dungeons and the loss on RP points have made many people so desperate, that they have found the grey zone again.
My question- yet again, just thinking loud- why do we have to live through this mess until the new Mod comes out? In my eyes we currently can choose between either not equipping our toons or we can be exploiters, cause let's face it, those, who are in full T2 or full T3 PVE "sets" cheated or exploited massively.
Wouldn't it be better to scale down the one shot trash mob thing and make those poor 3 remaining dungeons playable again, the legit way?!
The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
I'm convinced that the issues are being worked on, but I believe they don't really know how to adjust it and maintain their future plans. Mob increased damage, statistics decreasing at level 61+, etc. are obviously intended balance measures that are appearing in too obvious a manner.
The longer this takes, the more I am convinced that they do not know what they need to fix. I'm kind of at a loss of what to do at this point, and I really don't feel the concern is genuine at this point. I'm just invoking and doing professions in a holding pattern right now.
I'm convinced that the issues are being worked on, but I believe they don't really know how to adjust it and maintain their future plans. Mob increased damage, statistics decreasing at level 61+, etc. are obviously intended balance measures that are appearing in too obvious a manner.
The longer this takes, the more I am convinced that they do not know what they need to fix. I'm kind of at a loss of what to do at this point, and I really don't feel the concern is genuine at this point. I'm just invoking and doing professions in a holding pattern right now.
I think many people do that now, sadly.
I do play a bit, but only a bit of leveling, lol never thought so many toons can be a game saver for me, a bit of skirmish and maybe i help out a friend somewhere, but that's it. As i wrote earlier, dungeons above T1 are a no go for me currently. We have a small bunch of good old friends, we used to do dungeons all day around Mod 3, now...
I am in the 4th guild in short time now and as it seems i may have to switch again, this is a PVE only and causal guild, currently 277 members and there are times, when i am all alone.:(
Sadly game isn't a bit casual friendly anymore and those, who loved soloing are in bade shape now too.
I am a hard core and holding out, but not all are that addicted to a DnD style game and yes we need some major improvements now, especially in this 1 shot direction and in more content, the old dungeons are missed very much.
Off topic a bit: Couldn't help to laugh (ironic), i was helping friends in IWD and at BIggrins i saw a player named Conan asking for help, well isn't this funny in an odd way.
Since i am working together with Devs in our company i could get a glimpse of their nature. Changes in IT are hard to ask for, cause all the programmers have the mentality of getting used to current builds. They think, that changing something won't result in a better product and that's why many hesitate. On the other hand they feel that modern thrive to change something to stay competitive, but changing a good product will in most cases introduce a weaker end result. LOL that's why even a cog gets a new paint every year, people demand it, companies do it, but you shouldn't change the working core, as this example shows us again. Personally i am against the modern eras constant change, but now it would only make things better, game could only change for better.
The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
Further Observation:
Its not that the Mobs are necessarily hitting that much harder as we are not killing them as fast, therefore they seem to be taking more advantage of Flanking Bonus Damage now than before. So the mob strength may not be an issue(you may have got it right??) but the issue may be in the flanking bonus damage?
The Second Part of my Feedback of Elemental Evil...
After the Drowned Shores i entered the Reclaimation Rock and liked the rework of the area and the story behind it but i disliked that the streets was spammed with enemies. I understand that the cultist was sneaky and said they where mercenaries this means they infiltrated the city but every 5 seconds i got attacked and it was nearly impossible to avoid the monster spawns. I would appreciate bigger enemy camps and more hot spots instead of infesting the streets every 20 feet with heavy groups and if you want me to feel that the City is swarmed with spies and other threats why not generate an small HE (1-3 player)? Like i pass a specific area and then the enemie force attacks me with an: "Haha, petty little hero, the city is ours, you have no chance!". And then i fight them, get some extra loot and other player would come and join me to get some nice loot too.
A total disappointment in this area was at the second camp (Church/Temple of Helm). The NPC said to me "you can go back to camp 1 and do hourly quests also" which sounded like i could enhance my progress at the current camp too in doing quests of another camp in the same area and i felt pretty dumb because i thought i missed it in the Drowned Shores and all my rage was pointless.... yeah... it wasn't. I can't speed up my progress to do 16 hourly quests for the story quest of another camp, it was a pointless information that such hourly quests not vanish (which i simply saw in Drowned Shores)... thank you... 1 hour of hourly quest was pointless.
What bugs me the most in the Reclaimation Rock was such dumb quest to get hit for 500,000 HP damage in 15 minute... for me it was a concentrated form of my last expierence in the Drowned Shores (endure the pain to succed).
The Reclaimation Rock was a bit less a pain in the *** as the Drowned Shores and i liked the Monsters especially the Bullette. But you started with a new kind of bull****,... ADVANCED bull****. Some of the Heroic Encounters simply override the questmonster. The new Heroic Encounter Monster are the same and probably count as questmonster too, but they are simply to strong if you encounter an epic HE. I must kill 40 of Slaads and was almost finished and then the Heroic Encounter started which replaced the normal monster with epic monsters and i got killed instantly, and that is not the only Heroic Encounter.
At this point i walked to another Quest. Finished all other hourly quests at this time and must waited at the camp side with one unfinished quest to wait till the HE was run out of time because no one is doing HE's.
Another thing what annoyed me was the "Kill 6 Bullette" and "Kill 6 Gorgone" Quests. There are simply not enough of each to get the quest in one respawn rotation done. I only found 4 Bullette in the Area and 4 Gorgone and only 2 Gorgone was accessable because the 2 other was at the Big Epic Heroic Encounter Area with the Slaad, so i must wait till they respawn and other player wanted to kill them too... this means a very annoying gaming expierence.
Platypus wielding a giant hammer, your argument is invalild!
Further Observation:
Its not that the Mobs are necessarily hitting that much harder as we are not killing them as fast, therefore they seem to be taking more advantage of Flanking Bonus Damage now than before. So the mob strength may not be an issue(you may have got it right??) but the issue may be in the flanking bonus damage?
Opinions? Thoughts?
I would recommend to reduce the damage and let them hit more often with their auto attack (and reduce the range of melee attacks a bit too). Then you must move and dodge more often and annoying one hits are less a problem.
Platypus wielding a giant hammer, your argument is invalild!
Further Observation:
Its not that the Mobs are necessarily hitting that much harder as we are not killing them as fast, therefore they seem to be taking more advantage of Flanking Bonus Damage now than before. So the mob strength may not be an issue(you may have got it right??) but the issue may be in the flanking bonus damage?
Opinions? Thoughts?
Oh, they're hitting harder, all right. Half of the time I get one-shotted by a single minion-level enemy, and I have 18.6k defense, 55.3% DR, and 100k HP, and I'm debuffing them with a Pure Terror enchantment.
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My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
I have written my complaints or tried to many times.
Today i was playing a bit and over heared a conversation in Zone. Won't go into details, cause i don't wanna cause trouble to anyone, BUT i have to ask myself, how long are we fooling each other, both we players and both the officials behind the game.
Let me tell you, what i mean.
I have leveled now 2 of my toons to lvl 70 and while i collected the glory and PVP seals for my TR, i didn't do this with my GWF and he is also more PVE orientated. I have done a few painful T1s, with many bad PUG groups to get him the gear.
Now i am standing at the point, that i don't know, what to do with poor GWF. T2 dungeons should await and the Protector Seals, BUT i haven't met or seen any group doing it, without huge tricks, cheats and exploits.
I have to ask myself and the officials- no demand, just thinking loud- why and how long are we fooling our selves. I was in a group in a T1 dungeon, with famous guy from here, he came with his CW, bang 2 shotted the Boss in epic Lostmouth, i was just watching, what the hell. Ok, next day been to epic Cragmyre, people yell at me, go at the wall and don't attack, cause other wise we die. Ok, i was foolish, i did go near the Mobs, they killed the team and all i got was yelling.
Other situation, i was standing amongst players in PE and see, that the ability points "fix" is trendy again, i see changed toons all over the place and some of them whales, who actually wouldn't need it.
Ok, i did go on my way, met a few players, who had already the Elven "set" all over. I mean we all know, how much seals we have to gather and how much BI too it and suddenly players in full Elven "sets" on more toons.
Ok, i go with my 3rd toon leveling and all i see before the caverns in Ebon Downs are bots.
I had my little troubles with Mod 5 too, but this is getting ridiculous.
Apparently the harsh environments, the broken dungeons and the loss on RP points have made many people so desperate, that they have found the grey zone again.
My question- yet again, just thinking loud- why do we have to live through this mess until the new Mod comes out? In my eyes we currently can choose between either not equipping our toons or we can be exploiters, cause let's face it, those, who are in full T2 or full T3 PVE "sets" cheated or exploited massively.
Wouldn't it be better to scale down the one shot trash mob thing and make those poor 3 remaining dungeons playable again, the legit way?!
It is sad that it's come to this, that T2 dungeons are so stupid-hard as to be unbeatable by 99% of the playerbase, and it's driven so many people to exploiting. I have to ask: if the difficulty is WAI, then if there had been a crafting task that let us turn our Draconic Templar armor into something like T1.5, would it really have been the end of the world to the designers' future plans? And if the difficulty is not WAI, would it really have been the end of the world to heed the feedback on the preview forum? It was made crystal clear that the T2 dungeons, especially eCC, simply could not be done.
Edit: I've got T1 gear and, from my experience, I honestly don't believe that the T2 dungeons are beatable even with T2 gear (except in *extremely* rare circumstances by a party with luck and network ping heavily on its side). The stats just aren't that much better, when we're talking about a 400:1% stat ratio.
I added up the defense boost that T2 would give me and it yields about a 1% DR boost at best, if even that. If enemies are one-shotting me through 55.3%, I doubt that 56.3% will stop them much. Extra 10k HP will help a tiny bit, but only a tiny one: an extra 10% isn't anything to write home about when healing potions can't even restore that much.
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Oh, they're hitting harder, all right. Half of the time I get one-shotted by a single minion-level enemy, and I have 18.6k defense, 55.3% DR, and 100k HP, and I'm debuffing them with a Pure Terror enchantment.
Oh for the sake of Jesus mate, your stats are unbelievably tough and if you can't do it with them, what the heck should an average Joe do. I think your stats and Mod 6's combo needs no comment, i mean how broken the Mod is damage wise.
The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
Oh for the sake of Jesus mate, your stats are unbelievably tough and if you can't do it with them, what the heck should an average Joe do. I think your stats and Mod 6's combo needs no comment, i mean how broken the Mod is damage wise.
Because his choice of stats is 100% wrong, and this is an accurate figure. A dps character should have 56% crit chance, not 56% DR. Soaking hits is the tank's job. On a ranged character, I'm going to tell you how much DR you need: 0%. Just bring a good cleric, a good tank, and a good controller (CW or trapper ranger), and you're good to go. Stand in the cleric's circle, don't mess up with adds, give the tank some time to restore his stamina with as much CC as you can, and T2s become doable even with T1 gear.
I do T2s every day with people in the 2000-2500 range and even if wiping at the boss a couple of times happen, people quickly get it, adjust their choice of spells, swap enchantments, and they're good to go.
Because his choice of stats is 100% wrong, and this is an accurate figure. A dps character should have 56% crit chance, not 56% DR. Soaking hits is the tank's job. On a ranged character, I'm going to tell you how much DR you need: 0%. Just bring a good cleric, a good tank, and a good controller (CW or trapper ranger), and you're good to go. Stand in the cleric's circle, don't mess up with adds, give the tank some time to restore his stamina with as much CC as you can, and T2s become doable even with T1 gear.
I do T2s every day with people in the 2000-2500 range and even if wiping at the boss a couple of times happen, people quickly get it, adjust their choice of spells, swap enchantments, and they're good to go.
This is relatively condescending-free for once and actually good advice. The issue hustin1 is having is that he is trying to build soaking hits and survivability into a class that even pre-mod6 could not stand up to punishment well. The coping strategy to getting these dungeon runs done, at least as far as my guild is concerned, is a very focused, no-nonsense group composed of cleric, tank, controller, and some pure DPS.
The problem is not adjusting from faceroll to strategy, that is not hard - most of us have a history from other MMOs - so it's just a matter of turning off lazy mode, but the fact that a single mistake facing trash mobs can wipe an entire party. It is military grade precision, timing, and reflexes... the controller sneezes at a crucial point, the tank's cat jumps in her lap (or dog bumps them), the cleric gets a hand cramp from moving that mouse continuously, or some other real life thing and that delicate balance collapses. There is no give, no forgiveness. Computer controlled npcs don't miss, don't hesitate, and have reaction times way beyond any human can cope with... and that is the stuff outside of our control. So, this punishing difficulty can be fun a few times, but I personally think it needs to be toned down a bit.
An IS of 2500 is hard to reach for casuals.
Even with 2500 a wipe is pretty guaranteed if you run with a random party, and few guild still have the number of active mambers to frequently organize 2500+ runs.
Even with a guild party, you usually get wiped, if the members a seconds apart due to lat, lag and client performance.
So, yes, T2s are doable, but it's just a economical forbidding challenge for 1% of the customers.
The rest keeps pining of successful T1 runs or even any dungeon at all without getting kicked or any HE / Minidungeon, where no worthwhile loot drops.
(Or do the sensible thing and stay away from NWO for the time being, until the next mod totally changes everything again in another surprising and unexpected way.)
An excellent point that has been echoed elsewhere. Cryptic needs to find the balance that works for everybody and that will mean that the major hardcore players and super casuals will have to be disappointed, but the majority needs to rule.
I wouldn't mind there being one or two "OMG impossible" dungeons or skirmishes like these, but as it is now, there's really no where to go at 70 that doesn't involve either neigh infinite grind time (ie. "solo" areas) or certain death (ie. epic areas).
Again, key thing is the difficulty ramp shouldn't remain the same for 60 levels, and then suddenly jump, and then do so again, exponentially, come 70. It's basically just killing the game you've been fooled into loving come max level, pulling the rug out from everything you've learned and built upon over all that time. The overall play should remain roughly the same, or at least in the ballpark, with maybe one or two "You will die" Crawmerax the Invincible areas for the hard core (and even the hardest of hard core players don't appreciate having no non-hard core areas to quickly cruise through).
My dear Scott Shicoff, as a former player of STO with lifetimer account over there , notice the former pls !, i am looking forward to seying the wanderfull changes comming to Neverwinter. Not like i stoped playing STO with the launch of the expansion that: increased lvl cap , launched new tier of gear and ships that rendered everithing in existance not useless but obsolete, and ofc redesign of all pve "ques" knewn as dungeons in NWN , me beying the guy with 20 zen ships and 5 box ships scattered over 5 characters .....
My journey through the elemental evil continues...
Things warmed up at the Fiery Pit. I enjoyed the return to Gauntlegrym and there where so much improvements:
Sepcific Bossmonsters can only be casted by the Questgiver, so i had no problems with a long respawn time.
The amount of monsters i must kill to complete some Quests was reasonable. I had still some quest to kill like 40 Duergar but that was a piece of cake because i could find groups of 3-4 Duergar, not much to complain, only the "search mithril bars" was annyoing because i must searched 25 unique mithril bars. I liked the small glow of them because it maked them easier to find but 25 is to much. More around 10-15 (i would recommend 15) because the other ones doesn't respawn and i had the feeling there are only 25 mithril bars to find which really means to find 25 unique mithril bars in the area.
I enjoyed to squash some of the little scorpions! I appreciate to see more new death animations.
I escpecially liked that grapical style of gauntlegrym. On maximum graphics it is a beautiful sight and i get a good feeling for that giant underground cavern. The whole area had more immersion as the others. There was giants that patrouled the brigde or small groups of monster guarded the entrances of the great hall. It felt less like a random monster spawn area.
I also liked that i unlock the questgiver of the camp side instead to send to another camp. It is a better feeling for me and it left a better impression of progress in the specific area.
Wonderfull was the idea of the starting quest that i must collect knowledge in the base and got a little test to know what's going on in the area (i liked commanders Montrose attitude ^.^)
There was only a few things i disliked. Like the HE that spawns a giant scorpion which i must kill with the geyser. Like any other HE so far no one participated in it, that means again not doable for me alone and blocks a quest area.
Or that ******ed idea to block entrances to small quest instances with a party of 4-5 monsters.
Long waiting times between hourly quests which forced me to log out and wait 30 minutes till i could proceed.
Such stuff is unnecessary and annoying.
But overall the Fiery Pit felt a lot better than the Drowned Shores and the Reclaimation Rock combined.
Platypus wielding a giant hammer, your argument is invalild!
If i may add another thing to my already long list of complaints about all the bad things Mod 6 brought us.
Devs made a complete mess out of the game class wise too.
In PVE only 3 classes are demanded Pali/CW/DC.
PVP and skirmishes would hold now life in me, but sadly both are screwed up. If only these would work as intended, we could somehow survive this boring and desert like content Mod.
In PVP there are now the many useless classes also, like in PVE, but we got the "unkillable" CWs added and the perma phenomenon is back again. Both are so frustrating and annoying, all the people without any sort of skills back on perma again. (Don't bash on me, i got all classes, so i can view it from more angles.)
IN PVE skirmishes it's a pain to see, that still many casuals can't cope with the difficulty. A DR skirmish takes sometimes up to 20 mins or more, cause half of the team dies out or they simply leave, caused they got tired of falling many times on the battlefield. It would help to introduce those skirmishes to lvl 70's only and get an item lvl min for entry. I know many old 60's would now be shut out, which is also sad, but still better, than reviving half the team.
Overall, still waiting to see a patch which scales down difficulty. Heck if many people can't do a simple skirmish, then what to expect in higher tiers.
The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
Comments
The game did NOT need a difficulty spike after that.
Anyone who claims it was too easy would be among the minority of people who like to punish themselves with impossible tasks. Someone who works hard to gain level 60 purple gear should be all means power through all content except end-game epic dungeons, including being able to solo non-epic dungeons, considering it's not easy to obtain that level of gear.
Solo content should remain solo content, as per what Sergeant Knox said. Meaning the level 60-70 zones should be solo capable for the average level 60 character wearing all greens, of any class.
Campaigns NEED to have rewards that a level 70 character can use. This includes purple gear that they can use to enter dungeons and succeed at T1 dungeons. The more difficult campaigns (IWD, WOD) NEED to reward T2 purple gear at least, obtainable by the average solo player without being forced to endure the painful, broken dungeon queue. Not everyone likes to endure that hour plus queue that most classes have to go through. In fact, most people don't like it at all.
600 protector seals for a piece of armor is absolute garbage. Ain't nobody got time to do 300 impossibly difficult dungeon bosses with an hour plus queue just to get into the dungeon and a low success rate. No. Just no.
I'm going to abandon all hope of level 70 game play until things are fixed. The only thing I care about currently is leveling up my paladin. But once he makes 70, if things aren't fixed I may simply stop playing completely.
(BTW, that problem was reported in the early days of bringing out SCA and to this day STILL has not been fixed nor acknowledged, because I was "answered" - even though the response I received had no bearing whatsoever on my problem. I am not allowed by the system to bring it up again because my questions received a response. NOT a viable answer, note, but a generic, non-applicable response.)
Kinda like: Q. I have a problem. Problem details.
A: Yes, today is Tuesday, thank you goodbye.
It would be soooooo much better to think that there actually was some Customer Service and concern for the players included in the Game Team.
Companions rating broken...ie purple companions no longer giving 8% rating to character as active bonus.
Poor programming fixes by giving gear with more HP. Seriously lazy shortcut.
nothing to play for anymore...no drops, no rewards, mo salvageable equipment to be able to work towards buying gear off of auction house.
Making the only decent gear pvp. great for your pvp clientele, but for those of us that disdain pvp and all that comes with it not a smart move.
being a part of a guild that had 250 active players, i can tell you 75 % have left the game ...Mod 6 is epic fail
of our 250 active players the ones that have stayed mostly were the pvpers because they have gotten the gear ...the others didnt want to pvp so they are off searching for a new game or have gone back to older ones they use to play before here.
i am not a pvper ....and i too will most likely leave soon, what can you tell us is in the works?
thank you for your time,
a casual player who use to enjoy this game.
Loss of playable Content. The removal of content playable solo is in my opinion the biggest flaw with Mod 6 so far. I understand the desire to make content more team oriented in some places and to eliminate the over powered soloing of content that should require multiple players, but to totally remove the ability to play alone in most of the areas we were playing in already is in my opinion, a huge error. I have several players that were playing through the Sharandar, Dread Ring, Tyranny of Dragon and Well of Dragons campaigns and that has now all but stopped because I am no longer able to survive for more than a few hits in these areas. Yes, some players/classes can still solo most of the content, but the people that have worked for over a year building and playing their characters are basically out of luck now. I can limp my way through some of Sharandar, Dread Ring is almost instant death, Tyranny of Dragons is ok as long as I do not plan of completing Common Cause as the dungeons are ridiculous now, and well of the dragon(And Tiamat) are now a wasteland as they are totally unplayable unless you have a full group or are a Tank(who seem to be the only ones that can get through things, albeit very very slowly). I do not personally know of ANYONE that has successfully completed Tiamat since the Mod was released.
I know you can pull stats from your datatbases and if you are seeing this and think it is ok, then I don't understand where you are taking a successful game to? I know for a fact the loss of players has spiked yet again, with some guilds I know having gone for 40or more active players down to 20 or less.
The nerf to Lifesteal and Regen I can understand as they were very powerful, but the same nerf to the mods and adds would be nice! I watch my health go down with the slim chance of Life Steal happening very rarely, while the mobs that I am fighting have their health go up while they hit me. This needs to be fixed/addressed.
The fact that all mobs we seems to be facing in level 70 areas/dungeons are now at the 2 level target you have introduced to do significant Damage to players 2 levels below them basically is a game breaker. Add the Flanking bonus they get and invariably make use of and your survivability is so low it is not worth even trying. Being 1-2 shotted is not fun and does not make one want to play the game. I would suggest taking out the hard number damage and putting in a percentage damage. This way no matter what level you are fighting, they will still do the same damage to you percentage wise, and no scaling would be required. This would also balance out PVP, as while the percentage can be increased by intelligent building, the skill of your attacks and strategy would play more into the game than just "I am more powerful than you!"
I will leave it at this for now as although there is a lot more, this is what I feel is the most significant issues. Please start working on the playability issues rather than the fluff patches we have mostly been seeing. This was a GREAT GAME. Now, it is becoming not worth spending time on due to the insane changes that have all but made the game unplayable unless you are just leveling up a new character. And once you hit level 60, you hit this wall where things are just not playable again.
You have increased our Health by a fact of 3...but the new Healing potion only increased it effectiveness by approx. 12-15%. What this means is the old potions would heal for 30-50% or more of your health before, but now you only get 5-10% or less! This make healing potions all but useless when you have 50-100k Health and only get 10k from a potion every 18 seconds , but you have made the adds hit harder than the 10k the potion is healing! Once you pass level 60, again this makes for an unplayable game!
But i packed out my grind gear and logged in to get my little dwarven cleric to level 70 and complete all four new areas and quests to start the new old journey to gear my character up (again).
So i started the intro quest that was quite entertaining (did it with another character before) and then was at the new area the Drowned Shores only to drown in quests. Normaly i would appreciate it but the whole design concept of the hourly quests is broken.
Besides that utterly broken mechanic i liked to go back at the Drowned Shores but in my opinion you wasted a great opportunity to show your players something new. At the start of the Drowned Shores you can enter the mines. You could have make a small mace with several entrances and exits that ends in a special HE-Zone like a great dripstone cave and show some new set pieces but instead we have 2 different generic mines that are only a tube and spammed with monsters and necessary items to interact if you have a quest for it.
The Drowned Shores could be a bit more special, for example include diving at a part of the ocean to complete some quests. Maybe not fighting because to implement a whole new combat system would be too much but some simple diving animation and gathering quest would be cool and show the player something new. But instead we got a small rework of the map that feels pretty generic unspecial and a pain of the *** because of massiv monster spam, that left a disstate after finally finishing this area.
The normal Story-Quests which lead through the area are not helpfull and feeled like grinding an hourly quest and not special at all, maybe the small dungeons are nice and walking through the wall of water in the Drowned Shores was something new but nothing breathtaking (I stand like an hour in the water wall and didn't died). Some kind of awkward funny was the Endboss of the area as he procced to throw waterbombs on me, at least for this you could have made new animations. Felt pretty cheap. After the good introduction quests i was hoping to see Minsk and Boo again because they was ordered to help me (or simply the archdruid needed some spare time from them) but we got more generic stuff that couldn't be rushed or enjoyed.
I have a suggestion to fix the hourly quests. Set the quest giver to a small map. If we want a quest in one of the three different zones in one of the new area it display us the "battlefield" and what should be done, which are simply the hourly quests with their quest areas. Make the quests smaller in description like "We need some medical supply for our wounded soldiers, search this area for some XY Herbs" and then display it on the map. This would be helpfull to pick up hourly quests which are close to each other or have similar subjectives.
To kill the downtime if no quests available the questgivers could say: "You did all the tasks we requested. Every hour we get new scout reports. Come back later for some specific tasks, in the meantime you can help us with these problems." And then it displays the heroic encounter in the area which means we can make progress with heroic encounters, but for this you must spawn them more often or say the system "if HE is finished open another" and give us more of it (especially smaller ones).
To help merchants is nice but how about a officier of the cultist walking through there camps with his guards we must simply kill and some of his abilities is to spawn something similar his elements as finishing move (For example: Calling the giant HAMSTER to ride on it to purge some heroes, calling giant flame tornados which decrease our movement area, giant earth elemental breaking through ground and trying to smash some heroes, calling flying monsters which trying to capture some heroes to throw them in the deep - something awesome).
In addition delete all quest rewards like the elements (not XP and Gold) and give us instead faction coins for each area to buy the stuff we want and need for our character instead of waiting for the quest we need to get unified elements. Farming is part of the Game but if the player can choose it by himself like choosing the area, quests and other stuff it is easily endurable (and can be fun) but to let us wait for quests only as a cheap timesink is unpleasant and simply makes no fun.
P.S.: Sorry for the Wall Of Text-Spell
Make them as good as you like, but once done it's back to the old end zones - this is the biggest problem with Mod 6 - the complete lack of anything new at lvl 70.
I must have run tiamat easily over a hundred times to get artifact gear and all the ToD campaign boons. Relieved when I didn't have to go in there anymore. Same for the other old end zones - Shar/DR/IWD - been there, done that, got all the campaign boons.
Was running dungeons, bit repetitive, but a bit of a break from constant tiamat-ing.
Now what? Back to that, only changing the 60 to a 70 against my character level? Pffft.
Nothing of interest until Mod 7 then - and that's not going to happen tomorrow, next week, or next month.
Cryptic - you guys completely messed it up, and I really don't know what you can do in the short term to re-introduce interest at end level.
"Mod 6. Oh my f****** god. It gutted the game pure and simple. And what wasn't gutted was messed up by the poorly thought out new level cap and equip. The game never recovered from that atrocity".
..............not this one then.............
New dungeons would be nice, but i have the feeling we will get that at module 7.
There are no solo'able areas come 70, and even 61-69 is dicey. If you were level 60 before the patch, and have a full boon set, maybe, but even then, come 70, just getting through the campaign area's introduction sequences alone is a horribly painful grind. ...and then there's the epic areas... Gawds, they are just, broken beyond belief - and we knew and said as much during the play tests.
Ideally, fighting through a level 60 dungeon or skirmish with a moderately equipped level 60 character, and doing the same with a moderately equipped level 70 character, through a level 70 area, should be about the same.
It should, at the very least, not be the difference between night and day - on two different planets, orbiting two different stars!
It's basically yanking the rug out from under folks at the last moment. "Hey, remember this game you loved so much you spent dozens of hours investing time in it to get to max level? Well now we're going to completely change everything and repeatedly kill you for entertainment! Surprise!"
Doubly so for the "solo" campaign areas. There's no call for open world difficulty to change exponentially, despite the fact that you've trained to the recommended level. (And, indeed, come 70, due to the adjustment system, you become weaker.)
But this has all been said, and supposedly, it's all been heard. But over the past month, it's yet to be addressed. Indeed, all we've seen in the past few patches, is players and items getting steadily weaker, and rewards being steadily reduced (coupled with a sprinkle of, yes, much needed, but much less important, bug fixes).
Another problem i don't get is why Heroic Encounter run out of time? I would understand that some special heroic encounter in which the enemie force is trying to accomplish something but a heroic encounter like earthquake to run out is something i don't understand.
I have written my complaints or tried to many times.
Today i was playing a bit and over heared a conversation in Zone. Won't go into details, cause i don't wanna cause trouble to anyone, BUT i have to ask myself, how long are we fooling each other, both we players and both the officials behind the game.
Let me tell you, what i mean.
I have leveled now 2 of my toons to lvl 70 and while i collected the glory and PVP seals for my TR, i didn't do this with my GWF and he is also more PVE orientated. I have done a few painful T1s, with many bad PUG groups to get him the gear.
Now i am standing at the point, that i don't know, what to do with poor GWF. T2 dungeons should await and the Protector Seals, BUT i haven't met or seen any group doing it, without huge tricks, cheats and exploits.
I have to ask myself and the officials- no demand, just thinking loud- why and how long are we fooling our selves. I was in a group in a T1 dungeon, with famous guy from here, he came with his CW, bang 2 shotted the Boss in epic Lostmouth, i was just watching, what the hell. Ok, next day been to epic Cragmyre, people yell at me, go at the wall and don't attack, cause other wise we die. Ok, i was foolish, i did go near the Mobs, they killed the team and all i got was yelling.
Other situation, i was standing amongst players in PE and see, that the ability points "fix" is trendy again, i see changed toons all over the place and some of them whales, who actually wouldn't need it.
Ok, i did go on my way, met a few players, who had already the Elven "set" all over. I mean we all know, how much seals we have to gather and how much BI too it and suddenly players in full Elven "sets" on more toons.
Ok, i go with my 3rd toon leveling and all i see before the caverns in Ebon Downs are bots.
I had my little troubles with Mod 5 too, but this is getting ridiculous.
Apparently the harsh environments, the broken dungeons and the loss on RP points have made many people so desperate, that they have found the grey zone again.
My question- yet again, just thinking loud- why do we have to live through this mess until the new Mod comes out? In my eyes we currently can choose between either not equipping our toons or we can be exploiters, cause let's face it, those, who are in full T2 or full T3 PVE "sets" cheated or exploited massively.
Wouldn't it be better to scale down the one shot trash mob thing and make those poor 3 remaining dungeons playable again, the legit way?!
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
The longer this takes, the more I am convinced that they do not know what they need to fix. I'm kind of at a loss of what to do at this point, and I really don't feel the concern is genuine at this point. I'm just invoking and doing professions in a holding pattern right now.
glassdoor.com - Cryptic Studios Review
I think many people do that now, sadly.
I do play a bit, but only a bit of leveling, lol never thought so many toons can be a game saver for me, a bit of skirmish and maybe i help out a friend somewhere, but that's it. As i wrote earlier, dungeons above T1 are a no go for me currently. We have a small bunch of good old friends, we used to do dungeons all day around Mod 3, now...
I am in the 4th guild in short time now and as it seems i may have to switch again, this is a PVE only and causal guild, currently 277 members and there are times, when i am all alone.:(
Sadly game isn't a bit casual friendly anymore and those, who loved soloing are in bade shape now too.
I am a hard core and holding out, but not all are that addicted to a DnD style game and yes we need some major improvements now, especially in this 1 shot direction and in more content, the old dungeons are missed very much.
Off topic a bit: Couldn't help to laugh (ironic), i was helping friends in IWD and at BIggrins i saw a player named Conan asking for help, well isn't this funny in an odd way.
Since i am working together with Devs in our company i could get a glimpse of their nature. Changes in IT are hard to ask for, cause all the programmers have the mentality of getting used to current builds. They think, that changing something won't result in a better product and that's why many hesitate. On the other hand they feel that modern thrive to change something to stay competitive, but changing a good product will in most cases introduce a weaker end result. LOL that's why even a cog gets a new paint every year, people demand it, companies do it, but you shouldn't change the working core, as this example shows us again. Personally i am against the modern eras constant change, but now it would only make things better, game could only change for better.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
Its not that the Mobs are necessarily hitting that much harder as we are not killing them as fast, therefore they seem to be taking more advantage of Flanking Bonus Damage now than before. So the mob strength may not be an issue(you may have got it right??) but the issue may be in the flanking bonus damage?
Opinions? Thoughts?
After the Drowned Shores i entered the Reclaimation Rock and liked the rework of the area and the story behind it but i disliked that the streets was spammed with enemies. I understand that the cultist was sneaky and said they where mercenaries this means they infiltrated the city but every 5 seconds i got attacked and it was nearly impossible to avoid the monster spawns. I would appreciate bigger enemy camps and more hot spots instead of infesting the streets every 20 feet with heavy groups and if you want me to feel that the City is swarmed with spies and other threats why not generate an small HE (1-3 player)? Like i pass a specific area and then the enemie force attacks me with an: "Haha, petty little hero, the city is ours, you have no chance!". And then i fight them, get some extra loot and other player would come and join me to get some nice loot too.
A total disappointment in this area was at the second camp (Church/Temple of Helm). The NPC said to me "you can go back to camp 1 and do hourly quests also" which sounded like i could enhance my progress at the current camp too in doing quests of another camp in the same area and i felt pretty dumb because i thought i missed it in the Drowned Shores and all my rage was pointless.... yeah... it wasn't. I can't speed up my progress to do 16 hourly quests for the story quest of another camp, it was a pointless information that such hourly quests not vanish (which i simply saw in Drowned Shores)... thank you... 1 hour of hourly quest was pointless.
What bugs me the most in the Reclaimation Rock was such dumb quest to get hit for 500,000 HP damage in 15 minute... for me it was a concentrated form of my last expierence in the Drowned Shores (endure the pain to succed).
The Reclaimation Rock was a bit less a pain in the *** as the Drowned Shores and i liked the Monsters especially the Bullette. But you started with a new kind of bull****,... ADVANCED bull****. Some of the Heroic Encounters simply override the questmonster. The new Heroic Encounter Monster are the same and probably count as questmonster too, but they are simply to strong if you encounter an epic HE. I must kill 40 of Slaads and was almost finished and then the Heroic Encounter started which replaced the normal monster with epic monsters and i got killed instantly, and that is not the only Heroic Encounter.
At this point i walked to another Quest. Finished all other hourly quests at this time and must waited at the camp side with one unfinished quest to wait till the HE was run out of time because no one is doing HE's.
Another thing what annoyed me was the "Kill 6 Bullette" and "Kill 6 Gorgone" Quests. There are simply not enough of each to get the quest in one respawn rotation done. I only found 4 Bullette in the Area and 4 Gorgone and only 2 Gorgone was accessable because the 2 other was at the Big Epic Heroic Encounter Area with the Slaad, so i must wait till they respawn and other player wanted to kill them too... this means a very annoying gaming expierence.
I would recommend to reduce the damage and let them hit more often with their auto attack (and reduce the range of melee attacks a bit too). Then you must move and dodge more often and annoying one hits are less a problem.
Oh, they're hitting harder, all right. Half of the time I get one-shotted by a single minion-level enemy, and I have 18.6k defense, 55.3% DR, and 100k HP, and I'm debuffing them with a Pure Terror enchantment.
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
It is sad that it's come to this, that T2 dungeons are so stupid-hard as to be unbeatable by 99% of the playerbase, and it's driven so many people to exploiting. I have to ask: if the difficulty is WAI, then if there had been a crafting task that let us turn our Draconic Templar armor into something like T1.5, would it really have been the end of the world to the designers' future plans? And if the difficulty is not WAI, would it really have been the end of the world to heed the feedback on the preview forum? It was made crystal clear that the T2 dungeons, especially eCC, simply could not be done.
Edit: I've got T1 gear and, from my experience, I honestly don't believe that the T2 dungeons are beatable even with T2 gear (except in *extremely* rare circumstances by a party with luck and network ping heavily on its side). The stats just aren't that much better, when we're talking about a 400:1% stat ratio.
I added up the defense boost that T2 would give me and it yields about a 1% DR boost at best, if even that. If enemies are one-shotting me through 55.3%, I doubt that 56.3% will stop them much. Extra 10k HP will help a tiny bit, but only a tiny one: an extra 10% isn't anything to write home about when healing potions can't even restore that much.
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
Oh for the sake of Jesus mate, your stats are unbelievably tough and if you can't do it with them, what the heck should an average Joe do. I think your stats and Mod 6's combo needs no comment, i mean how broken the Mod is damage wise.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
Because his choice of stats is 100% wrong, and this is an accurate figure. A dps character should have 56% crit chance, not 56% DR. Soaking hits is the tank's job. On a ranged character, I'm going to tell you how much DR you need: 0%. Just bring a good cleric, a good tank, and a good controller (CW or trapper ranger), and you're good to go. Stand in the cleric's circle, don't mess up with adds, give the tank some time to restore his stamina with as much CC as you can, and T2s become doable even with T1 gear.
I do T2s every day with people in the 2000-2500 range and even if wiping at the boss a couple of times happen, people quickly get it, adjust their choice of spells, swap enchantments, and they're good to go.
This is relatively condescending-free for once and actually good advice. The issue hustin1 is having is that he is trying to build soaking hits and survivability into a class that even pre-mod6 could not stand up to punishment well. The coping strategy to getting these dungeon runs done, at least as far as my guild is concerned, is a very focused, no-nonsense group composed of cleric, tank, controller, and some pure DPS.
The problem is not adjusting from faceroll to strategy, that is not hard - most of us have a history from other MMOs - so it's just a matter of turning off lazy mode, but the fact that a single mistake facing trash mobs can wipe an entire party. It is military grade precision, timing, and reflexes... the controller sneezes at a crucial point, the tank's cat jumps in her lap (or dog bumps them), the cleric gets a hand cramp from moving that mouse continuously, or some other real life thing and that delicate balance collapses. There is no give, no forgiveness. Computer controlled npcs don't miss, don't hesitate, and have reaction times way beyond any human can cope with... and that is the stuff outside of our control. So, this punishing difficulty can be fun a few times, but I personally think it needs to be toned down a bit.
An excellent point that has been echoed elsewhere. Cryptic needs to find the balance that works for everybody and that will mean that the major hardcore players and super casuals will have to be disappointed, but the majority needs to rule.
glassdoor.com - Cryptic Studios Review
Again, key thing is the difficulty ramp shouldn't remain the same for 60 levels, and then suddenly jump, and then do so again, exponentially, come 70. It's basically just killing the game you've been fooled into loving come max level, pulling the rug out from everything you've learned and built upon over all that time. The overall play should remain roughly the same, or at least in the ballpark, with maybe one or two "You will die" Crawmerax the Invincible areas for the hard core (and even the hardest of hard core players don't appreciate having no non-hard core areas to quickly cruise through).
Things warmed up at the Fiery Pit. I enjoyed the return to Gauntlegrym and there where so much improvements:
Sepcific Bossmonsters can only be casted by the Questgiver, so i had no problems with a long respawn time.
The amount of monsters i must kill to complete some Quests was reasonable. I had still some quest to kill like 40 Duergar but that was a piece of cake because i could find groups of 3-4 Duergar, not much to complain, only the "search mithril bars" was annyoing because i must searched 25 unique mithril bars. I liked the small glow of them because it maked them easier to find but 25 is to much. More around 10-15 (i would recommend 15) because the other ones doesn't respawn and i had the feeling there are only 25 mithril bars to find which really means to find 25 unique mithril bars in the area.
I enjoyed to squash some of the little scorpions! I appreciate to see more new death animations.
I escpecially liked that grapical style of gauntlegrym. On maximum graphics it is a beautiful sight and i get a good feeling for that giant underground cavern. The whole area had more immersion as the others. There was giants that patrouled the brigde or small groups of monster guarded the entrances of the great hall. It felt less like a random monster spawn area.
I also liked that i unlock the questgiver of the camp side instead to send to another camp. It is a better feeling for me and it left a better impression of progress in the specific area.
Wonderfull was the idea of the starting quest that i must collect knowledge in the base and got a little test to know what's going on in the area (i liked commanders Montrose attitude ^.^)
There was only a few things i disliked. Like the HE that spawns a giant scorpion which i must kill with the geyser. Like any other HE so far no one participated in it, that means again not doable for me alone and blocks a quest area.
Or that ******ed idea to block entrances to small quest instances with a party of 4-5 monsters.
Long waiting times between hourly quests which forced me to log out and wait 30 minutes till i could proceed.
Such stuff is unnecessary and annoying.
But overall the Fiery Pit felt a lot better than the Drowned Shores and the Reclaimation Rock combined.
Devs made a complete mess out of the game class wise too.
In PVE only 3 classes are demanded Pali/CW/DC.
PVP and skirmishes would hold now life in me, but sadly both are screwed up. If only these would work as intended, we could somehow survive this boring and desert like content Mod.
In PVP there are now the many useless classes also, like in PVE, but we got the "unkillable" CWs added and the perma phenomenon is back again. Both are so frustrating and annoying, all the people without any sort of skills back on perma again. (Don't bash on me, i got all classes, so i can view it from more angles.)
IN PVE skirmishes it's a pain to see, that still many casuals can't cope with the difficulty. A DR skirmish takes sometimes up to 20 mins or more, cause half of the team dies out or they simply leave, caused they got tired of falling many times on the battlefield. It would help to introduce those skirmishes to lvl 70's only and get an item lvl min for entry. I know many old 60's would now be shut out, which is also sad, but still better, than reviving half the team.
Overall, still waiting to see a patch which scales down difficulty. Heck if many people can't do a simple skirmish, then what to expect in higher tiers.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke