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Official Feedback Thread: Bonding Runestone Changes

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  • araneaxaraneax Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 639 Arc User
    edited August 2017


    Maybe there is some hope.
    The main concern is the uptime of the bondings.
    When Cryptic did the changes to the weapon enchants, there were some last minute adjustments: hopefully they will go backwards on the decrease of the uptime.
    Our voice can count if we all shout together.

    Hey, hope dies last.

    I will hope that this will not go through, as originally intended, to the last moment before i log into NW after changes.
    I will not quit.
    And will in the end adapt to the situation.
    Humans are creatures of habits. We will all adapt if we have to no matter how hard it is.

    But if it does not happen, if they really leave 100 % up-time , then my faith in the humanity is going to be restored.

    We are really not asking for much.

    Everything else i will be fine with and will make sure to contribute as much as possible.
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  • dukeguard#8158 dukeguard Member Posts: 106 Arc User
    edited August 2017
    PS4 player here chiming in.

    This is really really really sickening and exactly the main reason why people stop spending on your game. Why would they? Only to have what's fun taken away at the very end and you actually expect them to spend even more with your "rebalancing" antics every few months in a year?! You guys are hilarious.

    What people spent months building up you take away in a few hours via an update. This isn't fun at all. No.

    People will quit and leave while those who stay they won't be spending a single dime.

    Know what happens when you throw an old and frail chicken into a cesspool full of hungry crocodiles? Yeah you get the idea.

  • jumpingmorksjumpingmorks Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 876 Arc User

    <

    araneax said:

    It is like all the other nerfs and stuff before ...

    Why do i even get surprised any more.

    I wonder if we will get any reply .
    And if there is going to be one i already know what it is going to be .

    " We are looking into your concerns "

    Then that will last for a few weeks. People will rage in here, post on the forum, until the silence before the storm.

    And the solution is going to be :

    " We decided our approach is right for the current model of the game. You may not see it but we are improving over all experience of the game and adding more fun into the mix, it is good for you ! "

    Bam, the change will go as written in here.

    Just like with AA , bubble , key change, coalwards and all other beautiful changes that so helped with our experience of the game.
    I sell that kind of speeches to my customers all the time.

    But usually the truth is , it is already a done deal.

    I agreed with your post but I couldn't bring myself to like it, mostly because we know it's happened before and that it'll happen again.

    I do also disagree that they won't listen, I think those who are going to have the most impact with this change rollout will be very interested in this thread. How they address our concerns is another matter.

    I also do think that some of the changes they introduced, like the mount system, the revamped journal to name but a couple of some very good changes have had little to no input from us from the beginning. They are very good at coming up with improvements that we all enjoy immensely.

    they'll listen but they won't actually do anything to change anything other than extreme superficial items.

    coal wards.. we all got some free coal wards then things went forward as planned.
    keys change they changed the drop rate for like a week adn then it silently reverted back.


    being thrown a itsy bitsy tiny bone isn't really enough though.

    the problem is it isn't the devs making these decisions. it's coming from much higher up the food chain. from people who have already sold it to the ceo or whatever as the next big money maker since sliced bread. they're in a corner.




    As @araneax has said, and many of us believe already, this change is a done deal. Whoever is responsible for making changes that cannot be stopped like this are also the ones that happen to HAMSTER us off the most.

    Also, a good point @araneax also made (amongst others I may have missed) was with the OP Divine Protector Daily. Am sure the devs had a lot of good reasons for nerfing the HAMSTER out of bubbledins, but who uses Divine Protector now on a regular basis. I tried maxing my OP's Recovery, with Artificiers Persuasion I could get (with current Bondings) 24k Recovery, add to that 3xHeart of the Dragon Artifacts, the active one being Heart of the Black Dragon for the Debuff/Recovery/ArP and AP, which gives me a 45 second cooldown at Mythic. It wasn't possible to spam DP at all.

    What's the point of this ability now? It got over nerfed (duration is enough to prevent it's return to common usage) and now pretty much nobody uses it.

    With the changes to bondings, it's too big of a nerf and if they aren't effective in runs, people will stop using them.

    And when I say it's too big of a nerf, yes, I also believe that compared to Augemnts, we were left pretty much no choice but to choose Bondings. I'd like to see both remain relevant so while I agree something needed to be done, I do believe this isn't the the right way to go about it, unless you want to see every person chasing the dream of a Bulette Pup and 3xEldritch 14's at which point you have created exactly the same situation with Augments as you have with Bondings now.

    I don't know why folks are so angry with the Rank 12 Bonding users, Greater Bondings were cheaper that Rank 12 Runestones, you got more stats back from the gear you placed on companion over that of an Augment. If they think wow nice, I no longer have to chase the R12 Bonding cash cow, they now have to chase the more expensive Runestone/Augment avenue this will create. Bondings won't even be a possibilty for many, not because their prices won't tank, they've already started to, but because like the singular Divine Protector Daily example above, they just won't be worth using.
  • fizgigtiznalkie#4436 fizgigtiznalkie Member Posts: 372 Arc User
    This bonding change is terrible, I'd say scrap the whole thing and make the content to the players, not the players to the content.

    Another thing people haven't mentioned is we'll lose all the debuffs from con artists, dancing shields, ambush drakes, etc.

    Unbalances AC DCs and Pallys completely, no one will want to take a pally instead of a GF. Will make existing content take 3-4x as long, if FBI took me an hour again after spending the time, $, and AD to get it under 20 minutes, it's not going to be worth my gaming time. We'll have to completely rebalance our toons.

    Scrap this change entirely. I almost wonder if the uptime is a red herring and they'll scrap that and people will just be happy with a stat loss. I'm not happy with any of it, boost augments and other runestones.
  • lordaeoloslordaeolos Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 167 Arc User
    I agree that Bondings are over-powered, and produce a single path to success for the majority of players (very un-D&D). But with the announced changes the up-time on the Bonding is the biggest concern to me... I can see that they are trying to give us more options, yet what they are doing with the currently proposed changes is making an augment a better solution for nearly all players (I've done the theory crafting math with the announced changes: with the power loss there isn't a time where an augment isn't a better solution), it's right back to the old days, were only newbies and clueless players ran anything but augments.

    This is what I think should have been announced: "3x Rank 14 bondings will give the same core stat share as an augment companion with the same 100% up-time. By doing this you now have the option of running your favorite standard companion with any debuffs/buffs/aesthetics it may provide, and the tiny amount of extra DPS/healing, or you can run an augment which can pass hit points and some gears stats to your character." <- something like this would have successfully nerfed bondings, while not completely invalidating peoples investments, while also opening up options for other summoned companions, creating a greater variety of valid builds that could change with time (creating a reason to reinvest and therefore spend money without complaining as you improve).

    I'm one of those "power" players with multiple 16k+ IL characters in game, max bank slots, invested in Master Crafting, and a hoarder of RP who has spent thousands in real world money over the course of 5 years on this game. I will be able to respond to this change due to my hoarding ways / spreadsheets of theory crafting / lots of testing and be up and running inside a week of the change. However, even to me this change is a big deal, and it goes too far in the wrong direction... Honestly my knee jerk reaction reading this yesterday was "it's time to leave the game", and that may yet happen if the changes go in as announced. The only thing that "may" keep me in the game (and by proxy my cash flow in Cryptic's direction) is the majority of my guild-mates who are not BiS that struggle to complete end game content as it is (without high IL players sticking around that content will now be impossible for them, and seeing gearing up requires multiple runs of that content...). I've already witnessed ToNG runs taking over 3 hours before being given up (having most of the players with 14k -15k, with bondings), I've also been in 16k+ all (good) players groups for ToNG that took over an hour, which included several wipes.

    I sincerely hope that the devs and decision makers are paying attention to the backlash and in response tweak some of the decisions they have made. Sadly, I'm not holding out too much hope, generally when announcements are worded the way this one was it's not a topic for discussion.
    "Lord Willow"
    Guild Leader: Mistaken Identity (formerly Midnight Express)
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    "Don't ever become a pessimist... a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events."
  • time2011time2011 Member Posts: 125 Arc User
    dam this just killed any hope of me saving up for bondings after reading this...it wasn't enough to make them expensive but basically make them practically worthless to even get is just bad business, if this ever goes live as it is or they somehow make this worse and they have proven that they have a talent for proving you wrong that they can make it worse, alot and i mean alot of people who play will quit this game.
  • kelsiepanda87kelsiepanda87 Member Posts: 1 Arc User
    So what your saying is we grind our butts off to rank our bondings and then you basically say "haha all that for nothing" if you nerf the bondings I will gladly end playing this game you have gone to far with this one
  • ericthethund#2099 ericthethund Member Posts: 1 Arc User
    Something doesn't seem to add up here because the change in this form makes no sense. As it stands you need rank 14 bondings to match augments. Why would you invest millions of ADs for that? Because you want the companion's abilities?

    I can also only second the uptime issue of bondings. Making it unreliable means you can't stack certain stats on companions any longer.
  • phat320phat320 Member Posts: 15 Arc User
    Instead of massive nerf bonding runestone, they should just boost the other runestones more to make them up to par with bonding. You can make new content/dungeon harder to match the players, but you can't just massive nerf something that's this big. Especially when when most players have invested so much getting them.
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]

    Use this Induction I.D for free stuffs :D

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  • mamalion1234mamalion1234 Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 3,415 Arc User
    Nice now we can have diversity compare to previous were all had the same power the same critical the same thing everyone.
  • masterogamasteroga Member Posts: 474 Arc User
    Ok developer's, bondings were originally 95% stats with an uptime of 20/30 seconds at worst. Now that we've all come to rely on smooth stats of the bad rebalance (constant stats are waaaay better, you just left the % too high) this will destroy everyone's characters.

    Just fix them to 100% uptime and 95×(20/30) for 63.33% stats, and they will be exactly as powerful as initially intended
  • caspur33caspur33 Member Posts: 27 Arc User

    On a consumer level I'd also like to reiterate the conerns @thefiresidecat made.

    What is our incentive to purchase something from your company when you can decide to make the value of that transaction worthless at any given time.

    If we lose the confidence to buy the things you spend time and money to make what have you got left to sell?

    I couldn't agree more. Between my 6 level 12 Bondings I spent almost 3 million on just SMoP not to mention the countless ZEN wards and upgrade materials.

    They really need to give other runes a boost instead of nerfing what 90% of the player base utilizes currently.
  • lardesonlardeson Member Posts: 374 Arc User
    lololol this is not a good idea cryptics, even if you nerf the stats how can you nerf the uptime on an enchantment? that makes no sense lol, its not even gnna compete with other runestones then, its just worthless xd. this is exactly the same thing you did with dread, everyone invested so much on dread enchants getting them for 10m AD and then you put the nerf hammer on it by putting a 4s cooldown on it, even vorpal is better now. and now after spending over 20m AD to get gear for sellsword you are nerfing bondings. nerfing the stats to balance it with other runestones, no prob, but the uptime?????? like who dahel even came up with this?
    Lardeson CW not Mage. Where's my fireball and my thunderbolt?
  • jumpingmorksjumpingmorks Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 876 Arc User
    ravenskya said:

    I'm not even sure why I'm writing this... I mean I expressed my opinion before. And I want to apologize to everyone - this nerf of bondings is my fault... I upgraded two last night and within the hour Cryptic heard that I made progress and swiftly put out their announcement.

    I mean they nerfed my TR (the original main) they nerfed my pally (my replacement main) the are about to nerd my Combat HR (the char I'm currently building) they are threatening to nerf my guild's stronghold boons. They stopped me from opening half of the chests in the game because I won't pay for keys for junk. They lied to me about increasing the drop rates of things (ninja nerf), and now I have been working on taking companions that I'm rather fond of (I never did the archon thing) to legendary and your telling me that they no longer have the value

    But how freakin idiotic are you to say that something is OP and that you want people to use a variety of options....

    And then choose a path that leads to a single augment. Seriously? You guys really can't be that stupid... are you going to change the other stones so that the def/off slots actually work for all of the stones or are you some how buying stock in the bullette pup market? Do you plan on handing my pally an augment to replace my legendary hawk with rank 12 bondings? She and I have become very close. I spent a LOT of time on her, I spent a lot of time and AD on both her and her bondings. I spent a lot of time getting legendarys on many of my characters, and getting each of them their own set of bonding.

    You gutted my healadin

    Now everyone with any sense knows how this game works

    1) make announcement - it will have good first, then extreme bad, then some more good.
    2) let players rant
    3) claim to have listened to the player base and implement a slightly less harsh version of what you stated - but it is what you planned all along
    4) player base says "yeay you listened to us" and happlily accepts the nerf because it's not as bad as the fake nerf you put out at first.

    My prediction - stats nerf will stay as is, they will back down on uptime.

    My other prediction. Some will scream and yell about quitting. Those generally wont.

    The pain will be when you log in a few weeks in and see no one online in your guild. They will start trying out other games and maybe in a group or maybe one by one they just drift off. I'm not sure how well they know the PS4 playerbase but it's a fickle crew.

    My inner pessimist is cheering this post, I doubt I am the only one. It's completely tin foil in tone but I think that was the intention. To the small child inside me bemused by this change and others of it's kind, this answers a very basic question many of us have or at least I have at the very least.
  • jumpingmorksjumpingmorks Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 876 Arc User
    etelgrin said:

    Everybody will adjust, or like before when mod 6 hit with level increase and plenty uneasy to deal with changes, some of the endgame players will not agree to chase the BiS-Carrot again and simply quit. it already happened, although I wished these changes would be implemented later I would been much more ready but I guess its always bad time for changes.

    Agree completely. Very few are going to quit over this but still if Cryptic considers losing a few players worth such a change that would be downright criminal.

    Like you said, we'll adjust, the most successful builds, loadouts will be determined and we'll find our places again.
  • jumpingmorksjumpingmorks Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 876 Arc User

    ravenskya said:

    Nice now we can have diversity compare to previous were all had the same power the same critical the same thing everyone.

    By diversity you mean everyone running a bullette pup?
    You made my day.
    Mine too xD

  • smegman#1430 smegman Member Posts: 29 Arc User
    I think the reduction in stats multiplication is fine however, dont mess with the uptime, leave it at nearly 100%.... 50% is total <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> and will just make boss fights in tong way worse
  • frozenfirevrfrozenfirevr Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 1,475 Community Moderator

    FFS stop crying, with the new enchantments you'll barely feel the difference, in fact if the bondings are up 50% of the time and those 50% are in the beggining, most fights bondings wont even go down, which makes them even more powerful then now, and even more speed runs will appear =S. My opinion is, don't make them 50% chance, 100% is good, lower companion gift is good as well, but make something like "When you or your companion use a power" instead of being only 1 sided.

    We ain't getting those upgrades for free :expressionless:

    50% uptime doesn't mean 50% effectiveness... You don't get 97.5% stats transferred!
    FrozenFire
  • araneaxaraneax Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 639 Arc User
    Hey where are the pitchforks ????? I leave from work to get home and you all give up ! Come on where is the spirit ...
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  • treesclimbertreesclimber Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 1,161 Arc User
    edited August 2017
    What about: R14 Bonding - When you or your companion use a power you have 50% chance to get 50% of your companion stats and your companion to get 5% of your stats, this buff will last 20 seconds and has a cooldown of 20 seconds. (meaning full time 150% and no stats loop obviously)


  • crippled#2684 crippled Member Posts: 7 Arc User
    So GF could not be hybrid anymore? My 15k GF with 3 r12 bondings (so much time and ad wasted on it) was good tank and did decent damage. I'm not interesting in being full tank or full dps. And I don't want to play another class. Should I just leave the game?
  • treesclimbertreesclimber Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 1,161 Arc User

    So GF could not be hybrid anymore? My 15k GF with 3 r12 bondings (so much time and ad wasted on it) was good tank and did decent damage. I'm not interesting in being full tank or full dps. And I don't want to play another class. Should I just leave the game?

    Should you just build offencive and expect to be tanky? Answer given.


  • crizpynutzcrizpynutz Member Posts: 349 Arc User
    This is a shake up we haven't seen since Mod6 and that was epically awful, so forgive some people for freaking out if they aren't taking this very well. I don't want to write a book, so I'll bullet some thoughts:

    - This does more than simply change and make bondings and augments competetive. Even if we want to believe they are, currently, augments win.
    - Impacts include ArmPen for many who invested in having their ArmPen come from companions, that will be a difficult now causing cascading gear and enchantment changes across the toons.
    - Mounts are not unaffected, Protector's Comradarie/Friendship become useless when shifting to augments
    - Has anyone considered the impact on the ability to complete content now that we are losing an immense amount of stats, debuffs, etc. based on the direct and indirect changes this brings with it
    - What are the weapon and armor enchant impacts going to be; that could cause a further shakeup and when looking at debuffs, will they persist in some form as desirable or since the high % likely won't be reached do we begin to ignore them in favor of "something else"

    It may not all be bad, but these changes are going to reek havoc by implementing them all at once. If that is a good thing, then so be it. I'm going to quietly sit tight and see what happens first but I'd be lying if I said I was optimistic....
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