plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,453Arc User
edited November 2016
I don't know if that is meant to 'entertain'. I used more health potion in one fishing session than the total I used in a month. May be that is their way to help me to reclaim bag space. I was not killed by the Turtle though. I was hurt because it was too 'cold' and stayed idle for too long. I guess fishing is not a good physical exercise.
*** The game can read your mind. If you want it, you won't get it. If you don't expect to get it, you will. ***
0
beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
I have not actually gotten far enough into the update to access dailies, so I have no personal sense of how much time goes into "mandatory" fishing. Likewise, with the marks from Svardborg, I don't know if skipping the Elk Tribe unlock means that you have no way to get a particular reagent without using Zen keys, but it has kind of sounded that way, as each of the three new marks correlates to a particular chest... not really sure.
I don't feel like I spent a huge amount of time fishing once I abandoned that abomination of a misbegotten HE. I fished up two bottles, but only had time to track down one map, and that scored me an epic fishing pole right off the bat, which actually does please me.
On the subject of "getting into the update", I had the same feeling from SKT, but I don't think I've really gone off on it thus far. So these are some feelings on how these campaigns have been introduced and how the progression feels as you go.
NW's earliest campaigns have had introductory bits that take... oh let's call it 20 minutes or so to play through even if you're quite slow. Anywhere that there's more first-day content to it than that, you are earning the campaign currency that will allow you to start seeing some progression. Weekly missions add a substantial boost to some area of currency shortfall, which builds in a lot of flexibility for taking a slower or casual approach to each campaign. More recent campaigns have been structured quite differently, but the deeper story portions have been very well-received. And in most cases, players wanting even more depth could turn to the lore entries added to their journals.
Starting Storm King's Thunder, you begin with a brief and amusing instanced quest. So far, so good. You reach Bryn Shander, except... you have to do one bullhamster quest after another before you actually get anywhere with it. The material rewards for the quests aren't bad, but it takes forever while you get dragged all over the map, tripping over relics you can't dig up because you can't get a trowel yet (unless you got the epic one, but... yeah... no), and fending off seemingly endless waves of mobs, and every time you think you might be done, you get told to go fight a ton of hamsters again except over somewhere else now. The biggest chunk of background story is buried in the voiceovers from the pseudo-HE at the town gates (this is incredibly easy to miss, incidentally). You finally get into town and have to do a whole bunch more bullhamsters and the entire process probably takes several hours, give or take depending on personal DPS, whether you've done it before, whether anything gets bugged, and whether there are other players around doing bits like the pseudo-HE.
Finally, you get dailies, many of which are buggy and/or time-consuming. You get a weekly, which is disappointingly underwhelming in payoff, particularly for the length and difficulty for many players (these modules include far too many DPS checks when their ultimate grouped content is meant to require the participation of support classes). When you reach a certain reputation threshold, you get sent to Lonelywood, then latherrinserepeat for Cold Run later. And going to a new zone each time requires yet another sequence of what are primarily time-consuming quests with very little story and no lore. Most of the quests are just a non-repeatable version of something that will be offered as a repeatable quest for all eternity once you get access to it. But if you get burned out or bogged down on the zone intro, your reputation progress grinds to a halt, because you're locked out of dailies for the duration. The weekly quests don't offer enough to make up lost time. The idea of alts is just... basically, I don't want to have to do this again. And again. It's numbing. If we're looking at the module and going "well thank goodness the boons suck so I don't have to feel bad if I don't do it"... something's not right at all.
And the Sea of Moving Ice does the same thing over again with the volume turned up to 11. I spent between 2 and 3 hours on it, allowing a lot of sidetracking for fishing and treasure-hunting, and I think I might be half done the introduction on a single character. I'm a slow player. I read dialogues. I wander around and gawk at the scenery. These optional activities actually are right up my alley, which is why I didn't skip them for now to focus on the quests. So I'm letting myself get set back by more days yet again.
It's impossible not to notice that "kill 10 minions" quests have ballooned into "kill 40 minions" and what used to be "kill 3-5 champions" are now "kill 10 champions plus their very powerful unavoidable friends". Environmental doohickeys we're asked to go fiddle with have gotten farther and farther apart, and you can't just tap them, but have to sit there while a progress bar fills. Collecting macguffins, instead of them dropping from the majority of mobs killed so that you can finish quickly, drop rates are typically set low so you have to kill a ton of excess mobs to gather enough macguffins. And none of this is engaging. It doesn't matter if any individual quest takes 2 minutes or 5 minutes or 20 minutes to complete, because all those quests are doing is standing in the way. They are an obstacle to be overcome before players will let themselves free to do what they want in the game, whatever that might be. If you burn us out on a bunch of tedious and exhausting grind, we never get to do what we like. Keep the "mandatory" stuff short and sweet, so we can knock it out quickly and then go have fun. As long as there is something fun to do, we'll keep doing that, of our own free will. You never needed to put us in grinding jail if you'd been able to keep producing content that we wanted to play a lot just because it was so fun.
beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
Named giants - There are a ton of these in the Sea of Moving Ice, and prior experiences in SKT have conditioned me to believe that "special" monsters should yield a bonus reward (a pathetic one, but nevertheless a bonus) for killing them. Thus far, they have rewarded me with nothing other than a fight I probably could have avoided. Not pleased by that.
"Found" quests in general - I suppose the rewards are balanced based on them being daily as opposed to the Hammerstone Queen's weekly, but they're sad even in comparison to the scheduled zone dailies. The Bryn Shander ones have to be turned in very far away from everything else, so they're not worth the trip. Lonelywood and Cold Run are better since you turn them in at the same hub as everything else. Relatively better since some may still not be worth the trouble or the inventory spaces. Sea of Moving Ice seems like basically more of the same. Would it kill you to stick 200AD and a minor resonance stone on these?
I have not actually gotten far enough into the update to access dailies, so I have no personal sense of how much time goes into "mandatory" fishing. Likewise, with the marks from Svardborg, I don't know if skipping the Elk Tribe unlock means that you have no way to get a particular reagent without using Zen keys, but it has kind of sounded that way, as each of the three new marks correlates to a particular chest... not really sure.
I don't feel like I spent a huge amount of time fishing once I abandoned that abomination of a misbegotten HE. I fished up two bottles, but only had time to track down one map, and that scored me an epic fishing pole right off the bat, which actually does please me.
On the subject of "getting into the update", I had the same feeling from SKT, but I don't think I've really gone off on it thus far. So these are some feelings on how these campaigns have been introduced and how the progression feels as you go.
NW's earliest campaigns have had introductory bits that take... oh let's call it 20 minutes or so to play through even if you're quite slow. Anywhere that there's more first-day content to it than that, you are earning the campaign currency that will allow you to start seeing some progression. Weekly missions add a substantial boost to some area of currency shortfall, which builds in a lot of flexibility for taking a slower or casual approach to each campaign. More recent campaigns have been structured quite differently, but the deeper story portions have been very well-received. And in most cases, players wanting even more depth could turn to the lore entries added to their journals.
Starting Storm King's Thunder, you begin with a brief and amusing instanced quest. So far, so good. You reach Bryn Shander, except... you have to do one bullhamster quest after another before you actually get anywhere with it. The material rewards for the quests aren't bad, but it takes forever while you get dragged all over the map, tripping over relics you can't dig up because you can't get a trowel yet (unless you got the epic one, but... yeah... no), and fending off seemingly endless waves of mobs, and every time you think you might be done, you get told to go fight a ton of hamsters again except over somewhere else now. The biggest chunk of background story is buried in the voiceovers from the pseudo-HE at the town gates (this is incredibly easy to miss, incidentally). You finally get into town and have to do a whole bunch more bullhamsters and the entire process probably takes several hours, give or take depending on personal DPS, whether you've done it before, whether anything gets bugged, and whether there are other players around doing bits like the pseudo-HE.
Finally, you get dailies, many of which are buggy and/or time-consuming. You get a weekly, which is disappointingly underwhelming in payoff, particularly for the length and difficulty for many players (these modules include far too many DPS checks when their ultimate grouped content is meant to require the participation of support classes). When you reach a certain reputation threshold, you get sent to Lonelywood, then latherrinserepeat for Cold Run later. And going to a new zone each time requires yet another sequence of what are primarily time-consuming quests with very little story and no lore. Most of the quests are just a non-repeatable version of something that will be offered as a repeatable quest for all eternity once you get access to it. But if you get burned out or bogged down on the zone intro, your reputation progress grinds to a halt, because you're locked out of dailies for the duration. The weekly quests don't offer enough to make up lost time. The idea of alts is just... basically, I don't want to have to do this again. And again. It's numbing. If we're looking at the module and going "well thank goodness the boons suck so I don't have to feel bad if I don't do it"... something's not right at all.
And the Sea of Moving Ice does the same thing over again with the volume turned up to 11. I spent between 2 and 3 hours on it, allowing a lot of sidetracking for fishing and treasure-hunting, and I think I might be half done the introduction on a single character. I'm a slow player. I read dialogues. I wander around and gawk at the scenery. These optional activities actually are right up my alley, which is why I didn't skip them for now to focus on the quests. So I'm letting myself get set back by more days yet again.
It's impossible not to notice that "kill 10 minions" quests have ballooned into "kill 40 minions" and what used to be "kill 3-5 champions" are now "kill 10 champions plus their very powerful unavoidable friends". Environmental doohickeys we're asked to go fiddle with have gotten farther and farther apart, and you can't just tap them, but have to sit there while a progress bar fills. Collecting macguffins, instead of them dropping from the majority of mobs killed so that you can finish quickly, drop rates are typically set low so you have to kill a ton of excess mobs to gather enough macguffins. And none of this is engaging. It doesn't matter if any individual quest takes 2 minutes or 5 minutes or 20 minutes to complete, because all those quests are doing is standing in the way. They are an obstacle to be overcome before players will let themselves free to do what they want in the game, whatever that might be. If you burn us out on a bunch of tedious and exhausting grind, we never get to do what we like. Keep the "mandatory" stuff short and sweet, so we can knock it out quickly and then go have fun. As long as there is something fun to do, we'll keep doing that, of our own free will. You never needed to put us in grinding jail if you'd been able to keep producing content that we wanted to play a lot just because it was so fun.
+1 Becky, all of this!!!
My experience in SKT and now in SMI on a heal/buff DC has been awful and depressing. Provided I'm high enough geared to comfortably solo at some pace (as opposed to not being able to solo at all), but the quests all feel so tedious and long, and the rewards are frustrating. It's also difficult to partner with friends, as some of the quests aren't too conducive to party play (although to be fair some are, alarm spells count for the party so you can send one person to each corner of the globe).
At least SMI lets you do them in sets of 3 rather than 1 at a time, but it's still WAYYY too long and WAYYY too repetitive. And the rewards are WAYYY too underwhelming. Each time you turn in quests it's like a slap in the face. And then you see 3 new yellow exclamation points show up and you sigh, depressed you haven't reached the end yet, rather than excited to continue your questing.
I echo the sentiments of how long it takes to get actually working on the campaign. The opening quest arc took me about 2 1/2 - 3 hours on each toon. The underdark took a couple 2 or 3 hours to unlock to the campaign as well...but you only had to do it ONE TIME if you didn't want to do it on all chars. I halfway wonder if they just said oh well we will just have them do all of the available dailies so then they will know how to do all of them instead of a subset. like BS, LW and CR.
One other thing I found was that after I opened the vip per diem enchanted key bag I couldn't open the uncommon one on that toon. Click the button and nothing happened. switch to other toon. was able to get it there. switched back but still it wouldn't let me get it. After I did all of the opening quests to get to the actual dailies in SOMI it then let me actually open it. tweird
1) Fish caught do not always count towards the 200 for Fish Fry (It apparently only works in HEs, which no one is running because people hate this zone for good reasons). This is seriously irritating and frustrating. 2) It is absurdly hard to land on islands. 3) Having to check in with Duvessa Shane IN A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ZONE to get a quest your runic fragments is nonsensical and also PLAYERS ONLY FIND OUT BY ACCIDENT. This is a huge fail. 4) The sabiki rod does not work with fishing and does not help with fishing rewards, which are far too slow and too small. Probably WAI but if so it's a terrible idea.
1. The fishing frenzy HE is the stupidest HAMSTER I've ever seen; I've done this HE a couple of frustrating times - it says it's a 3-person (small) HE. Are you kidding? One time I had 2 others and myself, we maybe got to a third of the goal. The other time there were like 6 or 7 people for the entire 15 minutes, and we still didn't get above the 500 point mark. What in the world is the point in having that stupid turtle knocking everyone out and giving everyone hypothermia for no reason? I finally learned that if I spam health potions, I can maybe reel in the fish I had. I see no point in doing this HE anymore, I hope feanor is incorrect and that fishing in a "spawn circle" counts towards the 200. It counted towards the first 10 intro quest. 2. This drives me crazy - Why in the world are you forcing us to land only on a tiny sliver of a spot with a big group of unnecessary enemies spawned right in the middle? 3. What? I didn't know that there is a quest somewhere else for this ungodly place. I also didn't know that I still have to do all the dailies in all the other areas in order to get campaign currency, that SOMI doesn't grant any. I haven't finished the beginning quests in SOMI yet, I was getting frustrated enough that I have to get through those before getting campaign currency. After 2 days on my DC with more than 2 hours each day, I still haven't gotten past the STUPID EXPLODING RUNECLAD TROLLS! I thought I'd killed several, then through asking in zone chat, I find out that I need to kill them before they disappear. Great - my DC is 4k+, but she is not dps. By the time I can get through the surrounding buddy trolls to try to take the runeclad one out, he explodes and kills my companion. Obviously, have to move powers and companions around yet again just to get through one daily. 4. I read in the blog that our fishing rods from Winter festival would not be usable in this area. It is just another grab for bag space and grind.
Named giants - There are a ton of these in the Sea of Moving Ice, and prior experiences in SKT have conditioned me to believe that "special" monsters should yield a bonus reward (a pathetic one, but nevertheless a bonus) for killing them. Thus far, they have rewarded me with nothing other than a fight I probably could have avoided. Not pleased by that.
"Found" quests in general - I suppose the rewards are balanced based on them being daily as opposed to the Hammerstone Queen's weekly, but they're sad even in comparison to the scheduled zone dailies. The Bryn Shander ones have to be turned in very far away from everything else, so they're not worth the trip. Lonelywood and Cold Run are better since you turn them in at the same hub as everything else. Relatively better since some may still not be worth the trouble or the inventory spaces. Sea of Moving Ice seems like basically more of the same. Would it kill you to stick 200AD and a minor resonance stone on these?
+1000 to everything Becky has said in this entire thread. I'm in approximately the same place as she is as far as completion, and just as frustrated. And I am another "slow" quester, especially with new content. I like to go wander around, I read all the dialog, I'm trying to figure out what the big picture is, and really - you guys have disappointed me so much.
And one more thing - As usual, RNG hates me. Always. I don't care if someone out there says "well, I get drops, so there's nothing wrong with it" - I just don't. I have actually taken time to fish - those 2 he's, trying out all the various areas, spawn circles of jumping fish, whatever. Not one bottle or treasure map. Pretty sure this is how it will be for my main. Doesn't really give me the warm fuzzies thinking that I have to rely on rng for every piece of equipment PLUS the upgrade components.
0
obsiddiaMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,025Arc User
edited November 2016
Feed the Troops: Collecting food from dead giants in the blue shaded area. Got 2 pieces of food. Killed every giant on the island. None had any more food.
Returned there hours later... Still no food. Abandon quest?
Bait puzzle: The fish monger doesn't sell bait. The tribesman sells worms for 40 [special hard to collect stuff] each, and a third person sells worms for gold... (I bought 999). Why these people weren't combined, I don't know. The price for ONE WORM from the tribe is nutters.
Post edited by obsiddia on
Did you really think anyone could steal the power of the god of thieves?
Vow of Enmity, as a toggle power, is broken for the Devotion OPs. It doesn't stick when cast and the animation doesn't always register that its been applied. On occassion, it will be off and you try to apply it and it starts a cooldown. It damn near impossible to cast and get it to stick when being swarmed by the mobs in SMI. Its to the point where I just eagerly accept the chilling embrace of hypothermia, instead of being beaten to death by mobs because my divine call is drained, I'm out of stamina and the potions are on cooldown. I've tried to hold my ground with Cleansing Touch and spamming Cure Wounds, but they just don't cut it like the Vow does. Please fix this. :
Member - Houseclan t'Charvon (STO) Shiarrael e'Tal'Aura t'Charvon, LvL 60, Rom Sci S'aana ir'Virinat t'Charvon, Lvl 60, Rom Eng T'Lyra, LvL 60, Fed, Vul Sci Ta'el, Lvl 60, Rom Tac
1
beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
edited November 2016
Movement animation of imps is broken. They run on the ground instead of flying. By the way, this looks hilarious and everyone should go find some imps to laugh at.
I doubt this is a bug and it's probably working as intended, but it's pretty much impossible to run past aggroed ranged attackers in any SKT content, as the double hit of regular and EF damage counts as two blows per mob and will add up to enough to dismount you, no matter how little damage it actually is. I just wanted to express that it's pretty annoying if an orc warband respawns around you and you're in a hurry to leave.
Edit: Having had more time to digest the cape "fix"... all I can do is facepalm. For one thing, NPCs viewed from a distance are still affected, since you didn't disable neck items on their costumes. If you use one of the cloaks with a hood visual, you look especially ridiculous while mounted since the hood remains while the cloak vanishes. Basically, you've attempted to make other players look a little better to us while we're adventuring, but your solution has spoiled our own appearance for us as great deal of the time. We don't play dress-up-dolly in order to have the game ruin it for us as soon as we try to go anywhere. Even if you're using a choker or other small necklace, it vanishes. I can't begin to say how stupid this was to do.
Having had more time to digest the cape "fix"... all I can do is facepalm. For one thing, NPCs viewed from a distance are still affected, since you didn't disable neck items on their costumes. If you use one of the cloaks with a hood visual, you look especially ridiculous while mounted since the hood remains while the cloak vanishes. Basically, you've attempted to make other players look a little better to us while we're adventuring, but your solution has spoiled our own appearance for us as great deal of the time. We don't play dress-up-dolly in order to have the game ruin it for us as soon as we try to go anywhere. Even if you're using a choker or other small necklace, it vanishes. I can't begin to say how stupid this was to do.
It saddens me so much to see the current dev team at work.
Our pain is self chosen.
The most important thing in life is to be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.
0
arcanjo86Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,093Arc User
Feed the Troops: Collecting food from dead giants in the blue shaded area. Got 2 pieces of food. Killed every giant on the island. None had any more food.
Returned there hours later... Still no food. Abandon quest?
Bait puzzle: The fish monger doesn't sell bait. The tribesman sells worms for 40 [special hard to collect stuff] each, and a third person sells worms for gold... (I bought 999). Why these people weren't combined, I don't know. The price for ONE WORM from the tribe is nutters.
Awhile back it was said that they wanted to make the game more alt-friendly. SKT has moved away from that idea. With the introduction of this lastest mod, I have to assume that not only is this idea no longer on the table, but has since been changed to actively make the new content alt-averse, for whatever reason.
It's been hard enough to push myself to go much past opening the new area up to the daily grind on one character. I find it hard to imagine, particuarly with the RNG nature of the drops, to unlock the new weapon set for this one character, and impossible to imagine grinding all over again for another.
And why the complete disregard for support classes? I just don't understand it. Why is the majority of the content based on doing as much dps in as little time as possible? You build fun content requiring a balance of dps and support, but then make progression for that support so arduous, painful and frustrating that it approaches not worth doing. And why, if it takes support classes so much longer to hammer out daily tasks, is there not some extra reward built into the system acknowledging the extra effort it takes, like perhaps an increase percentage chance in drops, or requiring fewer things to meet a goal, etc.
A lot about this game feels punitive. Just about all of my friends have quit after the release of SKT. They saw nothing fun anymore. Drops are so rare there was little point in running anything - we hardly ever used our keys on chests. I, myself, am hanging on by a thread. I want to like the new stuff. I want to keep playing and having fun. But progression seems so far out of reach now that it's just not worth it.
I and others have a vendor bug where selling items always calls up a slider for how many, even non-stacking unidentified green items. While I haven't paid attention to in a while, pretty sure the previous behavior is that double clicking an item should never bring up the slider. I am perfectly capable of splitting stacks beforehand, if that's my choice.
As far as the questline goes, I've gotten part of the way through it. Mostly I went to the new zone to mess with the treasure maps and I started doing the quests because I wanted the better boat. After that, it was just to see what they were about. I really don't have interest in taking more of the awful 5th tier boons. But after several hours and much sailing around, it doesn't seem like there is any end to this. I feel like I'm doing a week's worth of dailies at once, and judging from previous modules, probably am.
That said, much like the previous three zones, the art team is greatly to be commended. It's a shame their efforts were paired with the campaign design and the numerous bugs. Chains of Blazing Light seems to be purely visual in it's buggyness, but Impossible To Catch isn't worth slotting at all now. The Queue bug is really obnoxious. The vendor bug is annoying. The cape fix (bug) is grating. The SH HE bug is mostly bad if there are multiple people or if you get SNR while loading the SH map (frequent) I also experienced the unending camera shake bug, though ramming an ice floe stopped it.
"We have always been at war with Dread Vault" ~ Little Brother
0
beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
edited November 2016
Give a Man a Fish - The infamous buggy fishing quest in Lonelywood. Actually, I didn't have the quest and was able to fish in Lonelywood (w/ Simril angler's pole). I caught enough fish yesterday seeing if it would shut off, to be able to turn the quest in today immediately after accepting it. It's not really all that drastic since the fish aren't good for anything else, but it does make the associated achievement easier to get for the moment, for anyone motivated to do so.
Kill rune-changed trolls - Nearly impossible for support characters to complete. Also griefable quest: have lost several kills by getting the stupid things to "almost dead" and having a TR run up, drop a smoke bomb, and drop it dead.
Frost enchantment changes - not enough technical tracking to be sure, but seem to need to un-slot and re-slot enchantment in order to get it working. I was doing so little damage, I un-slotted all enchantments on my main weapon and re-slotted (2 rank12 darks & transcendent frost) and seemed to kick-start the damage.
Some additional information regarding the vendor bug. Restarting the client definitely fixes it. I've only had it return after selling fish to the fishmonger.
"We have always been at war with Dread Vault" ~ Little Brother
0
arcanjo86Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,093Arc User
I'm getting a visual bug on my DC whenever I cast Regular Bastion of health and the boon Healing Warmth Procs. My Bastion is invisible if Healing Warmth Procs. Also- When I'm stunned my skills are only greyed out not chained up like normal. Please look into this.
this happens to my cw on epic demogorgon, i thought i was too far from tragrt but no i wasent just simply was full stacked with demogorgon "debuff"
Typos and grammar: Fish Description of Queen's Knife "...The ineffectual nature of such an assault has leadled some, including clergy of the Queen of the Depths herselfincluding clergy of the Queen of the Depths, -or- including the Queen of the Depths herself, to dispute such a claim."
Description of Valkur's Fish "...Some believe the spot to a mark left by Valkur's thumb..." "...Some believe the spot to be a mark left by Valkur's thumb...""
Post edited by blackjackwidow on
0
beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
Erasing the weird doubling neck effect on male clerics also appears to have removed patches of beard texture from their necks. I haven't gone into character creation to see if this affects characters with new faces. I just noticed it on a male DC with a stubbly old face. Looks... well, fairly awful as one might expect.
More feedback about khyek'ing around and fighting in the Sea of Moving Ice as a support class. I have realized that OPs and DCs are landing at a severe disadvantage, more than most classes. Being in the khyek drains your AP in all cases, but it also drains the OP of Divine Call and the DC of Divinity. The OP can just hang out and chill until Divine Call fills, but a DC can't fill Divinity out of combat. So... the zone is designed around throwing these characters into challenging combat scenarios with some of their tools unavailable. A soloing OP tends to rely on their daily as a damage source, and no matter how quickly a DC is set up to fill Divinity, nobody likes starting a fight from empty. No AP for defensive or offensive casts is just another layer of hindrance. I wouldn't expect the limitations of khyek travel to be nearly so noticeable on DPS classes. I have only started the zone with my DC, and while *my* character is mostly built for solo play while being able to fill a support role in a pinch, players with more dedicated support builds are definitely finding it a struggle. And part of that is that every time they travel to a different ice floe, they're arriving not combat-ready, to a greater degree than other classes.
Seconding the lack of regen while boating, though I have had some insignia regen effects proc on a few occasions after long falls into the drink while treasure hunting.
Not sure if my AP has gone down, but niw5 I'm doubly glad my DC isn't running anything in Mod10.
"We have always been at war with Dread Vault" ~ Little Brother
Erasing the weird doubling neck effect on male clerics also appears to have removed patches of beard texture from their necks. I haven't gone into character creation to see if this affects characters with new faces. I just noticed it on a male DC with a stubbly old face. Looks... well, fairly awful as one might expect.
More feedback about khyek'ing around and fighting in the Sea of Moving Ice as a support class. I have realized that OPs and DCs are landing at a severe disadvantage, more than most classes. Being in the khyek drains your AP in all cases, but it also drains the OP of Divine Call and the DC of Divinity. The OP can just hang out and chill until Divine Call fills, but a DC can't fill Divinity out of combat. So... the zone is designed around throwing these characters into challenging combat scenarios with some of their tools unavailable. A soloing OP tends to rely on their daily as a damage source, and no matter how quickly a DC is set up to fill Divinity, nobody likes starting a fight from empty. No AP for defensive or offensive casts is just another layer of hindrance. I wouldn't expect the limitations of khyek travel to be nearly so noticeable on DPS classes. I have only started the zone with my DC, and while *my* character is mostly built for solo play while being able to fill a support role in a pinch, players with more dedicated support builds are definitely finding it a struggle. And part of that is that every time they travel to a different ice floe, they're arriving not combat-ready, to a greater degree than other classes.
I have a heal/buff main DC and I second this sentiment. If I wasn't near-BiS, the whole zone would be _impossible_ for me to solo. It's telling that my relatively decked DC takes significantly longer to contend with the dailies here than any of my other characters, which are far less geared.
It's also offputting that in addition to the dps checks inherent in the tough mobs and especially the exploding trolls, we are punished with drained divinity and AP, which you accurately pointed out we often have to rely on in order to solo at any reasonable pace.
I wouldn't mind it so much if there were ways to complete quests by sneaking around or being clever, but most of these (repetitive, uninspired) are genocide-inspired murderquests. Lodestones are the only one that I've found which be accomplished partially avoiding combat, if you get lucky.
0
obsiddiaMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,025Arc User
edited November 2016
Wrong or messed up photo used for treasure hunt?
I spent hours looking to match the map. Eventually used coordinates given to me on the image pictured below. My screen cap shows the ACTUAL location. I don't see any realistic relation between the two. Getting to the real location requires climbing to the tip of the mountain from the back, and jumping off to the 2nd area pictured.
The bottom portion of the treasure map makes it appear the entire area is hanging above the sea, or has rock in front of it, giving it the 'upside-down mountain' look. That doesn't actually exist.
Post edited by obsiddia on
Did you really think anyone could steal the power of the god of thieves?
0
beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
I wouldn't mind it so much if there were ways to complete quests by sneaking around or being clever, but most of these (repetitive, uninspired) are genocide-inspired murderquests. Lodestones are the only one that I've found which be accomplished partially avoiding combat, if you get lucky.
This is also true. Many mandatory quest objectives have had giants basically right on top of them, no way to approach without aggro. And I am hella sneaky and usually the first person to have an explanation for players how to manage various quest interacts without fighting anything, through cunning use of pathfinding and sightlines. Here, you might manage to catch an objective after someone else has cleared around it.
An example of good quest design for non-combatants is "Know Your Foe" in Cold Run. Some plans are guarded, but there are enough places to take them from that you can finish it without having to fight any giants at all, simply by taking care in your approach.
The quests to collect runic fragments in Cold Run, on the other hand, are BRUTAL (a major reason why several of my alts got as far as the rep to unlock Cold Run and screeched to a halt... I just don't want to do this quest, at all, ever). Mob density is unforgiving, few nodes yield more than one fragment at a time, and the first time I did it, I didn't even realize that mobs could also drop the fragments until I picked up the final one from a kill, because the drop rate was bad enough that I looted 19 (I think) fragments from nodes, and didn't get any drops from the stuff I had to kill to get to them. The last time I was there, it also seemed like the number of available rune nodes had been reduced by half or more, and I have no idea if this was intended. And let's call out atrocious drop rates from the Cloud Giants in Spinward Rise too, ok? There's no reason why you should have to kill more giants than the number of macguffins required to drop. All this endless mindless busywork isn't making players happier or more engaged than simply being able to finish a bloody quest before you feel like throwing your keyboard across the room. The reason why your numbers say we all do those things? Because we tell ourselves that once we do finish, *then* we'll actually get to the good stuff.
Which reminds me of another bug in SKT. When partied for "Scuppered Skipper" (take horns from giant captains), my partner received two horns and I received none. We left our party and each received a horn after fighting together, so we remained ungrouped long enough to finish the quest to work around it.
Erasing the weird doubling neck effect on male clerics also appears to have removed patches of beard texture from their necks. I haven't gone into character creation to see if this affects characters with new faces. I just noticed it on a male DC with a stubbly old face. Looks... well, fairly awful as one might expect.
More feedback about khyek'ing around and fighting in the Sea of Moving Ice as a support class. I have realized that OPs and DCs are landing at a severe disadvantage, more than most classes. Being in the khyek drains your AP in all cases, but it also drains the OP of Divine Call and the DC of Divinity. The OP can just hang out and chill until Divine Call fills, but a DC can't fill Divinity out of combat. So... the zone is designed around throwing these characters into challenging combat scenarios with some of their tools unavailable. A soloing OP tends to rely on their daily as a damage source, and no matter how quickly a DC is set up to fill Divinity, nobody likes starting a fight from empty. No AP for defensive or offensive casts is just another layer of hindrance. I wouldn't expect the limitations of khyek travel to be nearly so noticeable on DPS classes. I have only started the zone with my DC, and while *my* character is mostly built for solo play while being able to fill a support role in a pinch, players with more dedicated support builds are definitely finding it a struggle. And part of that is that every time they travel to a different ice floe, they're arriving not combat-ready, to a greater degree than other classes.
I am STILL trying to complete that stupid runechanged troll intro quest on my DC. Admittedly, I could have completed by now if I asked for help in zone and wandered around with a dps, but I am stubborn and see no apparent reason why I should have to do this in order to finish this stupid quest. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't holding up my intro, as I can't progress on to dailies until this one is completed.
Anyway, your point about draining AP and divinity is relevant to my predicament as well, because in order to have a chance of killing one of these things before they explode, I first have to go find a group of enemies that I can fight, activate my DC artifact to start filling my AP - and either NOT use divinity, or time it so I can finish with a full amount of divinity. Then, hope that the artifact is off cool-down. I have found that about the only chance I have is to go up close without aggroing the group, hit my companion and myself with dDG, quickly run in and hit the runechanged troll with dDG, dChains, eDL, then the daily Flame Strike, hit the DC artifact again, BoTS and/or LoF to refill divinity, Flame Strike, try to get another 3 divinity rounds in there and eDL. He usually explodes somewhere right around the second Flame Strike, have tried just hitting DL (that cast is soooo slow).
I manage to kill 1 out of every 4 or 5 I attempt. Unless someone runs in and kills it right before. It's maddening.
Update to the issue of not being able to bait the hook for HR, TR and DC with remapped Tab key.
I found out today we can bind two keys to a power by mousing to the right side in the key bind menu until the blank space highlights. I was able to reset Tab to it's original setting, and set Insert for my specific layout.
(For killing trolls on my DC, I was finally able to by killing the other trolls first, then concentrating on the Runechanged. When he is about to explode I use my daily (any stunning, proning, etc. power would work) to interupt the explosion and buy myself an extra few seconds to lay more damage on him and kill him).
Comments
I don't feel like I spent a huge amount of time fishing once I abandoned that abomination of a misbegotten HE. I fished up two bottles, but only had time to track down one map, and that scored me an epic fishing pole right off the bat, which actually does please me.
On the subject of "getting into the update", I had the same feeling from SKT, but I don't think I've really gone off on it thus far. So these are some feelings on how these campaigns have been introduced and how the progression feels as you go.
NW's earliest campaigns have had introductory bits that take... oh let's call it 20 minutes or so to play through even if you're quite slow. Anywhere that there's more first-day content to it than that, you are earning the campaign currency that will allow you to start seeing some progression. Weekly missions add a substantial boost to some area of currency shortfall, which builds in a lot of flexibility for taking a slower or casual approach to each campaign. More recent campaigns have been structured quite differently, but the deeper story portions have been very well-received. And in most cases, players wanting even more depth could turn to the lore entries added to their journals.
Starting Storm King's Thunder, you begin with a brief and amusing instanced quest. So far, so good. You reach Bryn Shander, except... you have to do one bullhamster quest after another before you actually get anywhere with it. The material rewards for the quests aren't bad, but it takes forever while you get dragged all over the map, tripping over relics you can't dig up because you can't get a trowel yet (unless you got the epic one, but... yeah... no), and fending off seemingly endless waves of mobs, and every time you think you might be done, you get told to go fight a ton of hamsters again except over somewhere else now. The biggest chunk of background story is buried in the voiceovers from the pseudo-HE at the town gates (this is incredibly easy to miss, incidentally). You finally get into town and have to do a whole bunch more bullhamsters and the entire process probably takes several hours, give or take depending on personal DPS, whether you've done it before, whether anything gets bugged, and whether there are other players around doing bits like the pseudo-HE.
Finally, you get dailies, many of which are buggy and/or time-consuming. You get a weekly, which is disappointingly underwhelming in payoff, particularly for the length and difficulty for many players (these modules include far too many DPS checks when their ultimate grouped content is meant to require the participation of support classes). When you reach a certain reputation threshold, you get sent to Lonelywood, then latherrinserepeat for Cold Run later. And going to a new zone each time requires yet another sequence of what are primarily time-consuming quests with very little story and no lore. Most of the quests are just a non-repeatable version of something that will be offered as a repeatable quest for all eternity once you get access to it. But if you get burned out or bogged down on the zone intro, your reputation progress grinds to a halt, because you're locked out of dailies for the duration. The weekly quests don't offer enough to make up lost time. The idea of alts is just... basically, I don't want to have to do this again. And again. It's numbing. If we're looking at the module and going "well thank goodness the boons suck so I don't have to feel bad if I don't do it"... something's not right at all.
And the Sea of Moving Ice does the same thing over again with the volume turned up to 11. I spent between 2 and 3 hours on it, allowing a lot of sidetracking for fishing and treasure-hunting, and I think I might be half done the introduction on a single character. I'm a slow player. I read dialogues. I wander around and gawk at the scenery. These optional activities actually are right up my alley, which is why I didn't skip them for now to focus on the quests. So I'm letting myself get set back by more days yet again.
It's impossible not to notice that "kill 10 minions" quests have ballooned into "kill 40 minions" and what used to be "kill 3-5 champions" are now "kill 10 champions plus their very powerful unavoidable friends". Environmental doohickeys we're asked to go fiddle with have gotten farther and farther apart, and you can't just tap them, but have to sit there while a progress bar fills. Collecting macguffins, instead of them dropping from the majority of mobs killed so that you can finish quickly, drop rates are typically set low so you have to kill a ton of excess mobs to gather enough macguffins. And none of this is engaging. It doesn't matter if any individual quest takes 2 minutes or 5 minutes or 20 minutes to complete, because all those quests are doing is standing in the way. They are an obstacle to be overcome before players will let themselves free to do what they want in the game, whatever that might be. If you burn us out on a bunch of tedious and exhausting grind, we never get to do what we like. Keep the "mandatory" stuff short and sweet, so we can knock it out quickly and then go have fun. As long as there is something fun to do, we'll keep doing that, of our own free will. You never needed to put us in grinding jail if you'd been able to keep producing content that we wanted to play a lot just because it was so fun.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
"Found" quests in general - I suppose the rewards are balanced based on them being daily as opposed to the Hammerstone Queen's weekly, but they're sad even in comparison to the scheduled zone dailies. The Bryn Shander ones have to be turned in very far away from everything else, so they're not worth the trip. Lonelywood and Cold Run are better since you turn them in at the same hub as everything else. Relatively better since some may still not be worth the trouble or the inventory spaces. Sea of Moving Ice seems like basically more of the same. Would it kill you to stick 200AD and a minor resonance stone on these?
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
My experience in SKT and now in SMI on a heal/buff DC has been awful and depressing. Provided I'm high enough geared to comfortably solo at some pace (as opposed to not being able to solo at all), but the quests all feel so tedious and long, and the rewards are frustrating. It's also difficult to partner with friends, as some of the quests aren't too conducive to party play (although to be fair some are, alarm spells count for the party so you can send one person to each corner of the globe).
At least SMI lets you do them in sets of 3 rather than 1 at a time, but it's still WAYYY too long and WAYYY too repetitive. And the rewards are WAYYY too underwhelming. Each time you turn in quests it's like a slap in the face. And then you see 3 new yellow exclamation points show up and you sigh, depressed you haven't reached the end yet, rather than excited to continue your questing.
2. This drives me crazy - Why in the world are you forcing us to land only on a tiny sliver of a spot with a big group of unnecessary enemies spawned right in the middle?
3. What? I didn't know that there is a quest somewhere else for this ungodly place. I also didn't know that I still have to do all the dailies in all the other areas in order to get campaign currency, that SOMI doesn't grant any. I haven't finished the beginning quests in SOMI yet, I was getting frustrated enough that I have to get through those before getting campaign currency. After 2 days on my DC with more than 2 hours each day, I still haven't gotten past the STUPID EXPLODING RUNECLAD TROLLS! I thought I'd killed several, then through asking in zone chat, I find out that I need to kill them before they disappear. Great - my DC is 4k+, but she is not dps. By the time I can get through the surrounding buddy trolls to try to take the runeclad one out, he explodes and kills my companion. Obviously, have to move powers and companions around yet again just to get through one daily.
4. I read in the blog that our fishing rods from Winter festival would not be usable in this area. It is just another grab for bag space and grind. +1000 to everything Becky has said in this entire thread. I'm in approximately the same place as she is as far as completion, and just as frustrated. And I am another "slow" quester, especially with new content. I like to go wander around, I read all the dialog, I'm trying to figure out what the big picture is, and really - you guys have disappointed me so much.
And one more thing - As usual, RNG hates me. Always. I don't care if someone out there says "well, I get drops, so there's nothing wrong with it" - I just don't. I have actually taken time to fish - those 2 he's, trying out all the various areas, spawn circles of jumping fish, whatever. Not one bottle or treasure map. Pretty sure this is how it will be for my main. Doesn't really give me the warm fuzzies thinking that I have to rely on rng for every piece of equipment PLUS the upgrade components.
Got 2 pieces of food. Killed every giant on the island. None had any more food.
Returned there hours later... Still no food. Abandon quest?
Bait puzzle:
The fish monger doesn't sell bait. The tribesman sells worms for 40 [special hard to collect stuff]
each, and a third person sells worms for gold... (I bought 999). Why these people weren't combined,
I don't know. The price for ONE WORM from the tribe is nutters.
House Miliskeera in exile (NW)
Sereska Miliskeera, Lvl 70 OP - Devotion (Just.)/Protection (Just.)
Shizlee Miliskeera, Lvl 70 DC - Divine Oracle (Right.)/Anoited Champion (Faith.)
Finithey Miliskeera, Lvl 70 HR - Stormwarden (Combat)/Pathfinder (Trapper)
Maya Sik-Miliskeera, Lvl 70 CW - Spellstorm
Irae Sik-Miliskeera, Lvl 70 TR - Master Inflitrator
Member - Houseclan t'Charvon (STO)
Shiarrael e'Tal'Aura t'Charvon, LvL 60, Rom Sci
S'aana ir'Virinat t'Charvon, Lvl 60, Rom Eng
T'Lyra, LvL 60, Fed, Vul Sci
Ta'el, Lvl 60, Rom Tac
I doubt this is a bug and it's probably working as intended, but it's pretty much impossible to run past aggroed ranged attackers in any SKT content, as the double hit of regular and EF damage counts as two blows per mob and will add up to enough to dismount you, no matter how little damage it actually is. I just wanted to express that it's pretty annoying if an orc warband respawns around you and you're in a hurry to leave.
Edit: Having had more time to digest the cape "fix"... all I can do is facepalm. For one thing, NPCs viewed from a distance are still affected, since you didn't disable neck items on their costumes. If you use one of the cloaks with a hood visual, you look especially ridiculous while mounted since the hood remains while the cloak vanishes. Basically, you've attempted to make other players look a little better to us while we're adventuring, but your solution has spoiled our own appearance for us as great deal of the time. We don't play dress-up-dolly in order to have the game ruin it for us as soon as we try to go anywhere. Even if you're using a choker or other small necklace, it vanishes. I can't begin to say how stupid this was to do.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
The most important thing in life is to be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.
It's been hard enough to push myself to go much past opening the new area up to the daily grind on one character. I find it hard to imagine, particuarly with the RNG nature of the drops, to unlock the new weapon set for this one character, and impossible to imagine grinding all over again for another.
And why the complete disregard for support classes? I just don't understand it. Why is the majority of the content based on doing as much dps in as little time as possible? You build fun content requiring a balance of dps and support, but then make progression for that support so arduous, painful and frustrating that it approaches not worth doing. And why, if it takes support classes so much longer to hammer out daily tasks, is there not some extra reward built into the system acknowledging the extra effort it takes, like perhaps an increase percentage chance in drops, or requiring fewer things to meet a goal, etc.
A lot about this game feels punitive. Just about all of my friends have quit after the release of SKT. They saw nothing fun anymore. Drops are so rare there was little point in running anything - we hardly ever used our keys on chests. I, myself, am hanging on by a thread. I want to like the new stuff. I want to keep playing and having fun. But progression seems so far out of reach now that it's just not worth it.
Please fix it, it's horrible.
Oltreverso guild leader
Maga Othelma - DC | Svalvolo - SW | Dente Avvelenato- GWF
As far as the questline goes, I've gotten part of the way through it. Mostly I went to the new zone to mess with the treasure maps and I started doing the quests because I wanted the better boat. After that, it was just to see what they were about. I really don't have interest in taking more of the awful 5th tier boons. But after several hours and much sailing around, it doesn't seem like there is any end to this. I feel like I'm doing a week's worth of dailies at once, and judging from previous modules, probably am.
That said, much like the previous three zones, the art team is greatly to be commended. It's a shame their efforts were paired with the campaign design and the numerous bugs. Chains of Blazing Light seems to be purely visual in it's buggyness, but Impossible To Catch isn't worth slotting at all now. The Queue bug is really obnoxious. The vendor bug is annoying. The cape fix (bug) is grating. The SH HE bug is mostly bad if there are multiple people or if you get SNR while loading the SH map (frequent) I also experienced the unending camera shake bug, though ramming an ice floe stopped it.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
Frost enchantment changes - not enough technical tracking to be sure, but seem to need to un-slot and re-slot enchantment in order to get it working. I was doing so little damage, I un-slotted all enchantments on my main weapon and re-slotted (2 rank12 darks & transcendent frost) and seemed to kick-start the damage.
In my case:
- wrong roll
- wrong HP
- wrong class armor
- wrong stats
Oltreverso guild leader
Maga Othelma - DC | Svalvolo - SW | Dente Avvelenato- GWF
Fish Description of Queen's Knife "...The ineffectual nature of such an assault has
leadled some,including clergy of the Queen of the Depths herselfincluding clergy of the Queen of the Depths, -or- including the Queen of the Depths herself, to dispute such a claim."Description of Valkur's Fish "...Some believe the spot to a mark left by Valkur's thumb..."
"...Some believe the spot to be a mark left by Valkur's thumb...""
More feedback about khyek'ing around and fighting in the Sea of Moving Ice as a support class. I have realized that OPs and DCs are landing at a severe disadvantage, more than most classes. Being in the khyek drains your AP in all cases, but it also drains the OP of Divine Call and the DC of Divinity. The OP can just hang out and chill until Divine Call fills, but a DC can't fill Divinity out of combat. So... the zone is designed around throwing these characters into challenging combat scenarios with some of their tools unavailable. A soloing OP tends to rely on their daily as a damage source, and no matter how quickly a DC is set up to fill Divinity, nobody likes starting a fight from empty. No AP for defensive or offensive casts is just another layer of hindrance. I wouldn't expect the limitations of khyek travel to be nearly so noticeable on DPS classes. I have only started the zone with my DC, and while *my* character is mostly built for solo play while being able to fill a support role in a pinch, players with more dedicated support builds are definitely finding it a struggle. And part of that is that every time they travel to a different ice floe, they're arriving not combat-ready, to a greater degree than other classes.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
Not sure if my AP has gone down, but niw5 I'm doubly glad my DC isn't running anything in Mod10.
Why so many time to fix?
It's also offputting that in addition to the dps checks inherent in the tough mobs and especially the exploding trolls, we are punished with drained divinity and AP, which you accurately pointed out we often have to rely on in order to solo at any reasonable pace.
I wouldn't mind it so much if there were ways to complete quests by sneaking around or being clever, but most of these (repetitive, uninspired) are genocide-inspired murderquests. Lodestones are the only one that I've found which be accomplished partially avoiding combat, if you get lucky.
I spent hours looking to match the map. Eventually used coordinates given to me
on the image pictured below. My screen cap shows the ACTUAL location.
I don't see any realistic relation between the two. Getting to the real location requires climbing
to the tip of the mountain from the back, and jumping off to the 2nd area pictured.
The bottom portion of the treasure map makes it appear the entire area is
hanging above the sea, or has rock in front of it, giving it the 'upside-down mountain' look.
That doesn't actually exist.
An example of good quest design for non-combatants is "Know Your Foe" in Cold Run. Some plans are guarded, but there are enough places to take them from that you can finish it without having to fight any giants at all, simply by taking care in your approach.
The quests to collect runic fragments in Cold Run, on the other hand, are BRUTAL (a major reason why several of my alts got as far as the rep to unlock Cold Run and screeched to a halt... I just don't want to do this quest, at all, ever). Mob density is unforgiving, few nodes yield more than one fragment at a time, and the first time I did it, I didn't even realize that mobs could also drop the fragments until I picked up the final one from a kill, because the drop rate was bad enough that I looted 19 (I think) fragments from nodes, and didn't get any drops from the stuff I had to kill to get to them. The last time I was there, it also seemed like the number of available rune nodes had been reduced by half or more, and I have no idea if this was intended. And let's call out atrocious drop rates from the Cloud Giants in Spinward Rise too, ok? There's no reason why you should have to kill more giants than the number of macguffins required to drop. All this endless mindless busywork isn't making players happier or more engaged than simply being able to finish a bloody quest before you feel like throwing your keyboard across the room. The reason why your numbers say we all do those things? Because we tell ourselves that once we do finish, *then* we'll actually get to the good stuff.
Which reminds me of another bug in SKT. When partied for "Scuppered Skipper" (take horns from giant captains), my partner received two horns and I received none. We left our party and each received a horn after fighting together, so we remained ungrouped long enough to finish the quest to work around it.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
Anyway, your point about draining AP and divinity is relevant to my predicament as well, because in order to have a chance of killing one of these things before they explode, I first have to go find a group of enemies that I can fight, activate my DC artifact to start filling my AP - and either NOT use divinity, or time it so I can finish with a full amount of divinity. Then, hope that the artifact is off cool-down. I have found that about the only chance I have is to go up close without aggroing the group, hit my companion and myself with dDG, quickly run in and hit the runechanged troll with dDG, dChains, eDL, then the daily Flame Strike, hit the DC artifact again, BoTS and/or LoF to refill divinity, Flame Strike, try to get another 3 divinity rounds in there and eDL. He usually explodes somewhere right around the second Flame Strike, have tried just hitting DL (that cast is soooo slow).
I manage to kill 1 out of every 4 or 5 I attempt. Unless someone runs in and kills it right before. It's maddening.
I found out today we can bind two keys to a power by mousing to the right side in the key bind menu until the blank space highlights. I was able to reset Tab to it's original setting, and set Insert for my specific layout.
(For killing trolls on my DC, I was finally able to by killing the other trolls first, then concentrating on the Runechanged. When he is about to explode I use my daily (any stunning, proning, etc. power would work) to interupt the explosion and buy myself an extra few seconds to lay more damage on him and kill him).