I'm positive there will be people calling me out for this - for those of you who will, stop reading. If you're content with what you got, you won't like reading the following.
I'll start from the positives, because some kudos is well deserved for things we've been complaining about for ages now and finally got addressed.
- the economy is taking a slow healthy turn, the slight AD changes are not bad.
- the new trade bar store is great!
- the gear preview is a cool tool that was most definitely desired by players for a long time now.
- MT was done on time (or 20 minutes late, but compared to previous mods this is a huge achievement)
- No big bad noticeable bugs as of yet (at least game-breaking ones), so good job on that.
And yet, all of the above could have been done as an extension to Mod 7, slow fixes over time people would appreciate. Instead? We got a whole new mod that is, let's be frank, extremely not justified as an expansion for the quality and level of content we actually got.
2 hours into the game, so far:
- 20 minute worth of a questline (and I'll be honest, other than feeling cheated and teased by seeing old maps such as Dwarf King, GG, etc, it was brief and not really enjoyable, despite the plot.)
- 2 extremely HORRIBLE skirmishes. Both are way too easy, boring, repetitive, closed minded - a foundry author could do better than that.
- One supremely long campaign that god help me, I don't understand why each task has to be 18 hours, the boons are pretty meh (other than the 3rd tier) and the capstone is completely useless.
- And finally - Demongorgon. I can't even call it a raid. The normal version so far is very easy, easily completed with poorly geared pugs without a word in party chat for strategy. Epic version from preview did not seem promising either, same thing, more HP.
- This whole Masterwork thing is a giant cluster****, it's not needed. Adding spice to crafting could have been done in other ways
- Drizzt looks like a drag queen (just saying, not even going to mention the voice acting, that needs a whole new thread)
I already know how this mod is going to look like. Leveling weaponsmithing to 25, getting the SH set, refining, doing dailies, groaning whenever I have to do the super boring skirmishes and more HE's on top of the ones I already have to do. All that for 3 months, all over again. 130 guildies online, watching guild chat is getting depressing as more and more people realize that what they've done for the past hour is all this mod has to offer. That easy, that short, that boring.
New dungeons? Nope. Old dungeons coming back? Nope. Class balance/changes? Nope.
The game is based off of Dungeons & Dragons, not 'HE's & dailies' nor 'Just3DungeonsYou'reGoingToGrindFor3Mods & Dragons'.
Although smoothly executed, this was poorly done and the lack of content is breathing down the game's neck, not to mention all of your loyal, crazy-enough-to-still-be-here players such as myself. This is purely feedback, I'm not expecting Dread Vault to show up tomorrow in my queue (I can only dream) and I know it's on the works, but my god, it should have been here by now. All of the above is at best mod 7.5, it doesn't deserve the 8.
Sigh.
#WaitingForMod9Already
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I have become so disappointed with the state of the game and its new direction, that I cant even be bothered to download the patch.
A. Thank you, that we only have to do the quest once, I literally rushed through it on my dc.. I wish I had known before hand I Would've done on DPS and saved myself 20 mins, but at least I dont have to do it again. I might do it on a dps toon now and actually enjoy it down the road at some point.
B. Some of the hes Ive done are actually sort of fun.. but lets face it they ARE he's. It wont last.. a few times is ok.. 450 times ghastly.
C. Trade bar rework.. thank you, much appreciated!
D. Some of the increased AD gain, again, thank you, I still think costing is a little out of hand though.
Negatives..
A. WUT... is this skirm things.. they are barely skirms.. they are go around in circles things killing things.. and DPS is king x 1000 and they are very easy.. you listened to the wrong batch of people calling for ezmode on these. I would INCREASE difficulty and GIVE more of the daily items so we can just do two skirms and be done wiht this thing. There is no skirms that are not much better then these things.
B. I just dont.. know what to say, UNDERdark is really, super nice looking. Great, we are not actually doing anything there though are we? We get to ride around and um.. do nothing really.
C. For the love of.. did you not listen to feedback, WE WANT Dungeons back.. WHERE is DV? WHERE IS IT? WHY did you not put it into this mod.. it wouldve made perfect sense to everyone.
D. I really ... do not appreciate the reminder that karrundux, fc and dk are gone. Thanks, kinda of insulting in the end dont you think? almost near troll level worthiness in fact.
Overall.. the mod is weak, the added functionality is good.
I can live with a weak mod , if YOU COME out right now and PROMISE us no more HE's .. not for a year at least.. and TELL us that DV is going live in Jan 2nd for a new years gift.
Seriously that's sort of the news we need to hear from your folks right now.
Mod8 has come with _virtually_ zero content. Just a lot of abusive-to-the-players grind. Grind that has become repetitive the first day of launch.
As the OP said, I'm highly tempted to just pretend this mod never happened than deal with it's annoyances.
Time didnt make the character suck, it sucked right from the get go.
Some of them even have this madness mechanic that forces you to move to circles or be half disabled the whole time. Who ever thought that this would be fun, challenging or engaging in any manner? I seriously fell asleep during a Prophecy of Madness (we got Bronze, but I didn't even care about trying harder for how BORING it was).
Ah, and now Dungeon Delves are a complete waste of time. You can get their seals + new and better rewards elsewhere for less time invested, so... fail.
Changes to the game in terms of bars, AD etc, all good and in the right direction.
New content. Bad. The new quest line is like a short series of basic lair quests but re-using old content (seems extremely lazy). They're extremely short and not very engaging. The new skirmishes are painfully long and boring. New HEs - who wanted new HEs? Same old HAMSTER.
No new zones, no new dungeons, nothing expansion-worthy.
Good Lord Cryptic we have foundry authors that can churn out stuff so much more engaging than this. You guys are getting PAID for this. Treat your license with some damn respect.
On content, I wish there was more content. I did the level 60 and 70 quest lines in literally one hour and am bored again.
I do not find the massive amounts of new rings anywhere near useful to wear and I see them as nothing but a new way to bring in rough AD from salvaging them non stop.
Thanks for raising rough Ad refine cap from 25k to 36k (if my numbers are right).
I kind of expected it to be a NEW ZONE like IWD, DR, TWoD, where you could do dailies and then you can farm the mobs/monsters if you wanted to within the new location (forgot the location) not a new "hub" with zero monsters to kill.
I sort of wish it was like a new "stronghold" type map, meaning that large in size, with tons of HE within it as well as other locations to farm regular demon mobs. Everything should not be "HE, HE, HE every mod update.
I rate the mod a 6/10 just because to me it is lacking content.
What we all expected was a new ZONE and a new or old/reintroduced Dungeon.
How about the same happened with DPS and Control they started churning out content where dps is irrilevant and uncontrollable monsters died at fixed intervals and all you have to do was to survive though insane amount of damage? I'm sure DPSers and controllers would take it glady, oohhh yes they would. But hey, after all every class has some form of survivability and self healing, so they would be fine, right? *rollseyes*
I didn't even enter Underdark map, not touched the quest line and all - so nothing for me to say here.
But Dear God...the Prophecy of Madness...I mean......GOD! what a crappy piece of ...this is.
Running around in square type room filled with ghostly portals whatever spitting demons at us, and only thing you need to do is to AOE DPS them down? I mean I didn;t even had a chance to have a look around, didn't even notice there's something like rank system. But when I saw it, it was clear it's only a DPS race in a claustrophobic room filled with chaotic spawning demons.
One word - TERRIBLE.
I do salute other changes like AD increase, trade bar changes and the gear preview feature.
And agree with previous posters, this should all be made in mod 7.
I still wont judge until I start the questing, but finding another round of HE's together with absolutely worst skirmish ever introduced in the history of Neverwinter...just looks like a bad bad dream.
A proud member of "mythical horde of DPS GFs"
1). Is SW more dps or tank based?
2). Yes. I am panzer!
3). Get ACT if you want to celebrate your epeen.
4). Horniness will not stand between me and what I believe - "MM"
I didn't play UD on the preview server and probably I'm going to be inaccurate.
9 chapters: I've joined a group with my guildmates and we did it in minutes by running through the quest and killing the boss at the end. The storyline is fine, the content is just a waste of time. Why did I do it? Because I've just 2 hours in the evening and I wanted to go throught all the new contents.
Skirmishes: as a support cleric, it's just...crazy and boring.
HEs: next please....
Demogorgon: it sums up the features of the skirmishes, but nothing really exciting
Replayable vs repeatable: I had some expectations here, but it's just the same skirmish in two flavours. Time to learn them is zero, so at the end it was a delusion.
Boons. 18 hours waiting = 1 boon per day more or less. At the beginning each step costs 200 Faerzress. If the cost is the same for each step, as soon as I have enough Faerzress to collect all the boons, I will stop playing this campain.
New drops: nothing really valuable till now, at least for my cleric and my build.
New gear sets: at least for my build.... I dont' care: both sets destroy my recovery stat. My elemental helven at IL 137 is still the best for me. I could use them, but I would had to change my enchantments a bit. Too expensive.
New artifact weapon: I go the fire one. I went to the Fiery Pit and start wating, waiting, wating and waiting the HEs. I did 3 HEs and got just 1 out of 100 motes. This will be an infinite grind. HEs should spawn more frequently there.
The good: I appreciated the changes to the taralume shop and to some extent the new AD refine cap.
Finally I believe that this module is powered by a complex mechanic to support poor contents.
Oltreverso guild leader
Maga Othelma - DC | Svalvolo - SW | Dente Avvelenato- GWF
Terrible guys.. DID you not even think about support builds?
New skirms = gwf first, cw second, sw/hr/tr third in order of usefulness.. the quicker you can kill things the better and since your also 50% of the time locked out on skills, GWF reigns here by far.. as mobility, and use of at wills come into play alot. all support can do is buff/debuff and if your locked out of skills alot.. meh on them. You do nothing of value to the team. Due to the ROUND and ROUND nature of this.. dc skills like HG is completely useless as well.
CWs if they can control first with massive aoe, can lock and destroy items. SWs are not bad as they can sprint to sanctuary zones at least.
I hate these things..
I had my cleric out of order intermittently and sweating, while the gwfs around me were in Beep Beep mode. The Blessing of battle buffs are powered down as the players around you are often out of range.
Clerics should discuss such issues at the Temple. I won't switch to righteous.
Oltreverso guild leader
Maga Othelma - DC | Svalvolo - SW | Dente Avvelenato- GWF
But sure it might be a discussion for the temple, if not for the matter that AT this very second, it boinks some classes from completely being useful at all in these things.
Its not a issue of optimal, its a issue of being useful at all!
I hate these timed events.. a player group should be as good as it is, if they were going to give us 1 timed skirm, the second shouldve been WAY more standard so everyone ones builds could at least be viable in one or the other.
That being said, After mod 6 almost destroyed the game I hope they never try putting out that much content in one mod ever again. It was too much, too game changing, and too little time to test it. If any mod deserved to be split into two parts it was mod 6.
Mod 7 was nothing more then just a big costly guild campaign that to be honest, you really don't even need. Sure having the boons and other stuff is nice but not really needed unless you have some vain need to be BiS. I do not have guild boons yet, Im using elven gear and elemental weapons we got from mod 6, all items refined to epic with R7 enchants and I have no problem playing any of the content.
Mod 7 part 2, was pretty much pointless. Even if it had worked correctly it would have never lasted. It would have ended up just like the open world pvp areas in Ice Wind Dale....empty and unused.
So, right now even though mod 8 seems lacking, it did bring a lot of things we wanted like the AD changes, T-bar store changes, new armor that isn't a complete pain in the butt to get and looks 100 times better then that FUGLY Elven gear. And some interesting ideas like scaling HEs, battles that have at least some form of mechanics other then dodge the red spot.
A nice storyline quest. Although I do wish it had just been a completely separate quest instead of the intro to the campaign. Something I could do when I have nothing else to do and come back to later instead of having to run the whole thing at once. The 2 skirmishes aren't too hard but seem to take way too long for the rewards we get. Haven't tried Demogorgon yet but I played it on the preview server so im not suspecting there will be much difference.
Personally I just wish they'd stop with campaigns altogether. They are boring and pointless once you've got all the boons. I miss storyline quests, I miss running more then 3 dungeons, I miss the game play style I originally leveled up with, not this "wash, rinse, repeat" style we been getting since mod 1.
Edit: and whats with the rings? they seem kinda useless to me. Sacrifice stats for some simple and quick thing? Like ring of fortress, even if I had he legendary one, dropping stats for1.1 sec of invulnerability every 30 sec seems dumb to me. So every battle im invulnerable for 2.2 sec a min, would be better if I can choose when that power fires off. Being invulnerable just after the boss fires off his skill wouldn't help much.
I would like to ask a simple question.
Is this module representitive of what we can expect from this game going forward?