My feedback after 4000 hours of gameplay.

emuriann · October 2018

Hey all, thank your time for reading this topic. This has been burning on the back of my mind for some time and thus I decided to throw it out here in the hope someone of the Dev team takes positive criticism as a way to improve the game.

I started typing out some stuff in word, then noticed I quickly started filling whole pages, to avoid making a post that long that none reads, I decided to pick out the main subject that bothers ME most.

some overall information, I played this game without guild boons up to 13.5k IL, then got myself into a lvl 20 guild, swapped over to another guild, made myself up to 18k+ IL, I now have my own level 9 guild that I am working on in an alliance with mixed levels. (on average guild lvls are 14+)

Allot of what I am writing has been done form the perspective of a Guild Leader. So please bear this in mind, as I know allot of players that play just for their own progression will have other priorities.

#1:Update loot in Dragonflight
The loot of Dragon Flight needs to be updated badly, we run the event in the weekend for those interested but notice overall that there is not much interest from the normal players in our guilds. The lack of rewards makes people stay clear of the event. In comparison, Marauders will always get between 15-25 people showing up, no matter how often we launch it on a single day. The only thing worth it in the dragon flight are the strongboxes of influences IF you have the strongbox key which are going for 10-20k AD a piece. (Which regular members won't buy) You cannot even turn in the Dragonfangs for gear, as you need these in conjunction with guild marks which makes it so your better off buying Explorer cases then actually burning up your dragon fangs.

#2: We need more activities that stimulate cooperation
We need something to keep us occupied inside the alliance as a common activity. We have such a huge stronghold map, but it feels like a glorified Heroic Encounter spawning point with nothing much else to add. The rewards feel underwhelming, thus making it so that new players just avoid the map.

I would like to see the map to have more added value, add an HE like the big one in Barovia that actually requires a couple of people to show up and kill it. Have a spot on the map that has mobs with the difficulty of FBI giants. Give people RP/Guild marks/shards/Campaign currency as rewards for completing this.

Now for the wishfull thinking, imo it doesn't even has to be: kill X. I would love to see some Mario Cart variant on the stronghold, where you hop on mounts, run circles, hit boxes that give you a 1/use ability to take out the person in front of you. Just something that is FUN to do that at the same time wouldn't be entirely gear dependent. The Sasha ball event from the Summer festival has the same idea behind it, its a game meant more for fun and laughs then competitive: how fast can I speedrun this?

#3: New players burn themselves out
This is something I see repeating itself within my guild. Allot of new players will go on full grind mode in this game at start, taking every daily, weekly, event and whatever comes there way. They are spending hours grinding out their initial campaigns. Overall though it feels like most hit a wall around 13k item level. The point where it starts coming down to dumping Refinement points to upgrade artifacts, enchantments, focus on getting those companions up to legendary etc. This ''wall'' makes people feel like they are hardly progressing at all, and most feel burning out on the game at this stage. Its something I can't seem to mend, I do not have the resources to push them past this point solo (Thanks for that AD cap) neither can I force them to do extremely repetitive tasks to generate AD once they are capped out for the day (aka Hunts)

What are these people doing overall? If they are playing support, they have a chance to get taken along in the endgame content. If they play DPS, they are confined to running Tier 1/2 dungeons and maybe some TonG's if their lucky. Allot of new players pick DPS as their first class only to find out later in the game that they have no real shot of entering late game dungeons without the help of their Alliance/guildies. Just make a shoutout on PE for 16k HDPS and you will have 4-7 people pmming you within a minute, a sign that DPS players are competing heavily amongst themselves to obtain spots in dungeons.

Castle never is run to death in our alliance, mostly for the newer players, but I can't imagine it will hold their attention for months until they can do some Tier 3 content.

As a sidenote: I do not understand why the game keeps assigning random zone quests to both players in the same group. If I team up with my mate, and I go to Chult/Barovia/whatever, then both should get the same quest so we can work together on it. The way it works now your simply better off soloing all the content then both players helping eachother out. -Which is boring as F really-

Its super frustrating as a guild leader to spend hours into guiding people, helping them with lower tier content that I don't need to run at all and is sortoff a waste of time for me personally, only to have those players quit the game once they are getting around the 13k IL mark.

#4: Fix the Shards chest in the zen store / rebalance how to obtain guild shards.
Since the barracks no longer requires conquerer shards, and since all randoms now give 15 shards vs the 10 in the past, there are 2 types of shards that are ''obsolete''. Every guild in our alliance is capped out on the Random reward shards.

Much fewer do the 3 heroic encounters on the stronghold to get the shards from the ranger -which seemed to be used the most overall for boon structures and 1/2 your production structures-. I cannot force new players to run these objectives, as I do not wish to oblige them in the game to grind for the guild.

You sell a chest in the zen store that contains 100 shards of each type, with the latest changes, 1/2 the chest is useless. And thus theres no use either of buying said chest from the Zen store. I purchased around 14k shards of each type before the latest change as it still felt somewhat worth it, then the conquerer shard / barracks change kicked in and I had to re evaluate how to upgrade things again. As things stand now, theres no way I would buy the chest from the store again.

As a sidenote, I know you Dev's don't play the game, but hardly anyone picks up the quests: Run 3 quests in sharandar or X area to get 10 shards just like the Ranger 3 HE/day on the stronghold. New players are not bothering to pickup these quests, or actively go after them. It is hard to make people realize that generating Guild Marks is a way to generate AD. (more so since the prices collapsed with these crafting mats. Where are the days where bronzewood logs where selling for 36k AD a piece =()

-non guild related stuff-

#5: Make masterwork ingredients relevant again.

Please re implement the need of Manticore manes, hides, fartouched residuum into the crafting recipes. In the past these items held value, it gave people a better reason to run these dungeons as there was a prospect that they could find mats to sell. By removing these materials from MW III, you completely destroyed the value of these materials. The game needs to have some chase items. Right now all we have are:Shard of orcus, Fragmented key of stars, UES aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand. .well that's kinda it really. This lack of diversity in ''sought after gear'' can't be healthy.

#6: Not really feedback, but I would like to point out that this whole 100k AD cap a day is demotivating people to keep playing once they hit that cap. It doesn't solve the problem in the game, that some players have hundreds of millions AD. The thing is, these people make money by flipping it on the auction house, and thus are not affected by the limit in whatever way. Pres wards / Marks are being bought and sold in stacks at certain times.

Take pres wards as example: Lets say I buy 100 pres wards for 500 000 AD (1000 zen). We wait until the winter/summer 40% discount.
500 000*0.6= 300 000 AD per stack.

Stacks tend to be sold around 520 000 AD during a large backlog. This nets players 520 000 - 300 000 = 220 000 - AH tax 52k = 168k AD per stack profit.

Same is being done with marks during the Wondrous Bazaar.

This is why I think that the AD cap is not helping the game in any way. The ones that get hit the most are the (new) active players. I understand the reasoning behind the Cap, I am just not seeing this as a solution, or even steering towards a solution in the game.

Guess il keep it at this for now otherwise I might as well copy paste the word document. I hope you guys are willing to listen to the feedback, if the above is coming across as complaining, I apologize as English is not my native tongue. I just hope you guys see Im trying to provide feedback which in my eyes will improve the game.

plasticbat · October 2018

Our alliance has Dragonflight same time every night. Always 2 runs (people provides bell) and it is almost always filled up. More are run in other time of day here and there. Why do people still playing it? No, not because of SH gear. It is because of the seal. People also get fangs because of seal. You can exchange seal using fangs. People stocks up fangs and wait for 2xseal and that is today. Seal means salvage which means rAD. In next mod, seal can be converted to rAD directly.

I am not saying Dragonflight reward should not be updated. I am saying there is an incentive. May be not a big one (especially those are already flooded with rAD in their wallet) but there is a reasonable one.

callumf · October 2018

Good post

Hitting the Wall is a very good point.

But its also endemic in MMOs - grinding out the same content [instances/dungeons/events] over and over again is what MMOs do to encourage you to pay some money to cut out the grind, or to cut it down. It also "ensures" the BiS/End Game players stay "ahead" of the rest of us [casual] players. And that is fair enough.

At that point it is best to find the content you do enjoy and stick to that and think that realistically you are going to get an item level rise very slowly - maybe someone can do the maths but something like 1 day per 5 iL rise once you get past iL 15k?

100k AD per day = how much iL?

But yes - when they hit the wall tell them to just do the fun stuff - Barovian Hunts are a hoot, Dread Ring lairs, Dragon Runs, SHE Runs in Barovia just enjoy playing a free game and don't worry about BiS.

Also I have been showing new players how to do the Barovian hunts recently that has been fun.

In fact teaching new players nearly anything is fun!

nunya · October 2018

emuriann said:
Much fewer do the 3 heroic encounters on the stronghold to get the shards from the ranger -which seemed to be used the most overall for boon structures and 1/2 your production structures-. I cannot force new players to run these objectives, as I do not wish to oblige them in the game to grind for the guild.

That's kind of sad that you can't get people to do three HE's for the adventurer shards. It's not like it adds a lot of time, unless you're trying to do these daily. Personally (and I lead a L8 guild myself), I collect the quests from the Builder and the Master of Coin every day. Builder quests I run as a batch on the weekend, and I pick up three HE's when I do this. Typically, at least one HE dovetails with one of the Builder quests. Example: Kill 10 Beasts gets taken care of when I do the Beast Attack HE. I tend to stick with the small HE's because they're fast, they align with Builder quests, and the mobs drop lots of goodies for RP or coffer donation.

emuriann said:
As a sidenote, I know you Dev's don't play the game, but hardly anyone picks up the quests: Run 3 quests in sharandar or X area to get 10 shards just like the Ranger 3 HE/day on the stronghold. New players are not bothering to pickup these quests, or actively go after them.

In my alliance, many people also do not bother to pick up the Builder quests for the heroic shards. I think for new players (in particular) it's that they don't realize the power of many people getting 10 shards. If I can do the Support quests (Sharandar Support, Dread Ring Support, etc) twice each during the week, I will. Most of the time I just don't have time for this and so I get them done once per character per week. Between my and my wife's characters, I have 17 characters that I run through these and also do the Builder quests for heroic shards on every week. Just our two accounts generate around 1100 heroic shards and 550 adventurer shards per week. That's doing three HE's once per week per character, Sharandar Support & Dread Ring Support on 17 characters, and IWD Support & WoD Support on 4 characters.

In fact, during the 2x shards event from just a few weeks ago, we generated almost 5k heroic shards and 4k adventurer shards just during that event. Granted, I ran Support quests on more guys (many of which hadn't even started IWD and WoD zones, which made it easy) than normal. I saved up the Builder quests for 12 days (which is the current number of shard-awarding quests the Builder makes available to us) on all these characters, banged them out in a night, and kept up on the Builder quests the rest of the event.

Doing the Support quests is a nice way to slowly work an alt through a campaign, too. Most of the 17 characters my wife and I have are yet to complete Sharandar and the Dread Ring. They're slowly getting the boons from these campaigns now. I figure once they've got those boons, they will probably be able to start tackling IWD. At that point, I'll slowly work them through that campaign, too.

emuriann · October 2018

@ Seals: Seals is not a driving factor for ppl considering they can farm them quicker by running Hunts or ETOS. DF require to much coordination overall to be worth it for seals.

@ Other MMO: This might be an unfair comparison but Dungeons and Dragons online hit the nail with this one by letting people Reincarnate back to lvl 1 once they hit lvl 20+, meaning every dungeon in the game stayed relevant. It also has multiple difficulty levels per dungeon, and they converted a large part of their dungeons into Epic ones too, meaning the players are not stuck to 5 quests at endgame but hundreds of other options. This game its endgame is way to limited. The handful of quests is not enough to keep the attention of -regular/casual/new- players for a long period of time. It takes 3 month for new content to show up whereas people tend to be done with the content within a month, and the only thing really holding them back to complete it faster is the campaign currency cap / week.

I understand that to some degree endgame boils down to X dungeons that are legit to run for loot, but in this game there are to little items worth chasing after. There are also to little dungeons to diversify.

Ive seen allot of people move away from this game once they became BiS 18k monsters that tackled every content with ease. They get bored of grinding out the same dungeons over and over and to be honest, if it weren't me being a guild leader, I would have pulled out the plug of this game myself as I have the same issue with my maxed out OP.

Stuff like weapons (primal, vistani, whatever your using) is just way to easy to obtain in this game. There is also hardly any use for Twink gear (specific circumstance gear that trumps your standard setup) in this game because the monsters don't have specific Damage reductions. Zombies should have DR/Slashing, Skeletons DR/Bludgeoning, Vampires DR/Silver. Devils / Demons require Cold Steel/Silver (cant remember out of my head what applies to who).

Weapons are to simplistic in this game and are all the same. Players have no choice to customize their weapons.
An example of what I would like to see are Endgame dungeons dropping S M L ingredients of 5-7 types. Each S M L stands for a Tier, whereas the combination of ingredients determine the property/ability/stats of a weapon you make.

Rough example:
Tier 1: Determine base stats (power/AP/crit) distribution
Tier 2: Determine ability that can be slotted on 4-6 bar. (example:activate to add X% of damage vs enemy creature type X)
Tier 3: Determine weapon set ability

Twink gear is what kept me going in other games once I was capped out on regular items. This game offers none. I also think the above system would implement multiple items at once that would hold some value for trading away.

I can foresee the comment coming: Why don't you make an alt. ( I have 2 more geared alts btw) Let me ask you this beforehand: Look at your alliance, look at the better players amongst them. Most have 1-3 characters max. It takes to long to gear up an alt, and even if you gear up another alt, what is the use? Randoms determine your Rad income for 80% orso, having another character offers nothing to improve this. Also look at the most common alts made by the people in your alliance, I dare to bet most are going DC/OP as a secondary character ''just in case the alliance needs one when none of them are online.'' How many have 3-4 DPS characters geared up?

@ Nunya: The main thing I used to be able to motivate people for are Marauders, and Sieges. One of those 2 has been killed off with their ''fix''.

I do not push people to farm shards, new players are getting overwhelmed with activities and information to start with. I cannot expect them to do the 3/he every day on top of that. Most are busy with their campaigns, which is fair, I do not wish to distract them from that. I run marauders 15x a week, I do the HE on the SH 7-14/week on my characters. Your post itself points out how much effort you and your wife are putting into it, can you expect a non guild leader to have the same motivation to grind out those shards? How many of your regular members are even coming close to your commitment to farming those materials?

Last little note with you pointing out alts working on the support quests, overall its better to get yourself a campaign completion bundle at discount then grinding out all the campaigns. There is no way I would redo the campaigns AGAIN on MULTIPLE alts that contribute very little in the end for the effort put into them.

plasticbat · October 2018

emuriann said:
@ Seals: Seals is not a driving factor for ppl considering they can farm them quicker by running Hunts or ETOS. DF require to much coordination overall to be worth it for seals.

If it is organized properly, it gets more seal than running HE, hunts or etos in the same amount of time. And, not everyone needs their best character to participate. The organizer may need to spend extra time but the participants do not. If two DF are done in a roll and 8 dragons were killed (it should be done in 15 minutes), in non-2xseal time, it will yield 586.6 seals (the fang will be stocked up to exchange for seal when 2xseal arrives). The guilds will get ton of contribution too. More if people runs around to complete SH quests and SH HE when they are waiting for the wizard to come in between. If the alliance organize to switch SH for the 2nd DF, you don't even need to provide a bell.

If it is organized as a fixed daily event, the management effort becomes less and less.

After the event, you can also arrange big HE raid in the SH. You can do 5 big HE in record time. i.e. everyone get the shard without doing much.

nunya · October 2018

emuriann said:

@ Nunya: The main thing I used to be able to motivate people for are Marauders, and Sieges. One of those 2 has been killed off with their ''fix''.

I do not push people to farm shards, new players are getting overwhelmed with activities and information to start with. I cannot expect them to do the 3/he every day on top of that. Most are busy with their campaigns, which is fair, I do not wish to distract them from that. I run marauders 15x a week, I do the HE on the SH 7-14/week on my characters. Your post itself points out how much effort you and your wife are putting into it, can you expect a non guild leader to have the same motivation to grind out those shards? How many of your regular members are even coming close to your commitment to farming those materials?

Last little note with you pointing out alts working on the support quests, overall its better to get yourself a campaign completion bundle at discount then grinding out all the campaigns. There is no way I would redo the campaigns AGAIN on MULTIPLE alts that contribute very little in the end for the effort put into them.

I completely understand and agree with not pushing members to farm shards or anything else. I don't have any requirements around it. More an attitude of "While you're there doing X, if you can make a point to pick up Y and do it at the same time, that'd be great." Personally, I can only manage to run influence once per week per character. I have no expectations that anyone else in the guild will put in anywhere near the time and effort to generate resources for the guild that I am putting in. I hope they'll do it on one character, and I accept it if they don't do even that. Character progress is more important than guild progress.

I would buy a campaign completion bundle if completing the campaigns were important to me. I'm just working these alts through Sharandar and the Dread Ring because they're already there running quests anyway. Just getting the third boon in Sharandar will take about 9 weeks with the way I'm running that campaign on these alts. I'm not stressed about them actually completing these.

nitocris83 · October 2018

At the risk of sounding cliche, your feedback is appreciated! I'll make sure it gets across the right ~~eyestalks~~ eyeballs

minotaur2857 · October 2018

@nitocris83 if you have your eye on this thread, realise also that the changes coming down the line next month will make a lot of this worse. Has much consideration been given to how strongholds will work in the new mod ?

nitocris83 · October 2018

minotaur2857 said:
@nitocris83 if you have your eye on this thread, realise also that the changes coming down the line next month will make a lot of this worse. Has much consideration been given to how strongholds will work in the new mod ?

I don't know the full scope of considerations that went into how upcoming changes will impact existing content and features but I do know that keeping all those "links" in mind is a key component to any systems design. We can create models and test things internally to make a determination but once it's in the wild we still keep an eye on it to see if it's behaving differently or its impact is stronger than initially estimated.

caldochaud · October 2018

May I offer a suggestion?

Implement a "Shepherding Rewards System" or a "Shepherding Boons System".

Essentially, high leveled players receive a bonus reward (or earn points toward gaining a unique boon tier) for helping lower leveled players level up and/or complete missions. Its not so much like "hand-holding with benefits" as it is giving high leveled players a reasonable incentive to slow down, chill out, and give the little guy a helping hand. Even the Kung-Fu Master gets paid to teach the Grasshoppers!

It might even help to get high leveled players to slow down in dungeons... not running past trash mobs while the lowbies are still a map's length behind the party getting a beat-down from said trash mobs.

Just a thought.

nunya · October 2018

caldochaud#4880 said:

It might even help to get high leveled players to slow down in dungeons... not running past trash mobs while the lowbies are still a map's length behind the party getting a beat-down from said trash mobs.

It would have to be a really great boon to make it worth my while to stand back and let the low level clear the dungeon. When I can run through the dungeon, clear all the mobs, and be done in 10 minutes or less, Cryptic's going to have really reward me for wasting an additional 20 minutes or more. Furthermore, what metrics could they possibly use to determine whether I'm "helping" the low level player(s) or not? I can't think of anything they could actually use that couldn't be gamed by determined players and which would require the players to engage in some kind of exploit.

mebengalsfan · October 2018

I agree with the AD issues you point out as well as new players getting burned out around 13K IL.

As for AD and RAD, that should be by account, like zen, and not by character. The max AD we can have on our account should cap out at 50,000,000. This definitely would drive up some price early on in the AH due to players with AD spending it and buying stuff they forsee as future profitable items. And players who do not use their excessive AD would simply lose it freeing up more AD.

As for the 100K daily it is easy now but once gear is removed from the equation, we will have to run dungeons to get the AD and on top of that, the reroll keys will make the two or three sought after pieces hit the market more reducing their value further making it cheaper for a newer player to acquire UES, Orcus Shard or Key of Stars.

I'm all for changes as long as it levels out the playing field more. As for crafting, IMO everything should be acquired through professions either gathering and not using some type of map to acquire said material. As for master crafting, it should be easier to achieve and not require a guild. This way all players would have the ability to become a master crafter.

As for dragon flight, the gear should be updated to 540 with unique ability for each piece. I would target DC/OP with one piece, melee dps with another piece and range DPS with other pieces. I would create a full artifact set that gets better the more other players use it. For instance, you have the 3 piece set from the guild and the set bonus provides you a 3% damage increase but if another players has the same set you get 50% more damage increase. If a third player has the set you get another 25% increase, etc...

There is so much the devs can do for the guild it is not even funny. The failure with the guild is that they never continued to improve the strong hold gear consistently. The blue gear from the strong hold should be 490 and when you have 2 pieces based on your role it should benefit the player and the role they play. Dragon Flight as I mentioned above would be a 1 piece bonus similar to hunt gear.

I just hope the devs do something to improve the strong hold and give newer players and vets alike something to work towards as a guild.

dionchi · October 2018

nunya#5309 said:

caldochaud#4880 said:

It might even help to get high leveled players to slow down in dungeons... not running past trash mobs while the lowbies are still a map's length behind the party getting a beat-down from said trash mobs.
It would have to be a really great boon to make it worth my while to stand back and let the low level clear the dungeon. When I can run through the dungeon, clear all the mobs, and be done in 10 minutes or less, Cryptic's going to have really reward me for wasting an additional 20 minutes or more. Furthermore, what metrics could they possibly use to determine whether I'm "helping" the low level player(s) or not? I can't think of anything they could actually use that couldn't be gamed by determined players and which would require the players to engage in some kind of exploit.

There is nothing wrong with some players being able to take advantage of guild boons that others don't have access to... in regular game play, but considering most random queue runs are set as PARTY functions, what sense does it make to allow some players to so drastically out run other members of said party?

The reward Cryptic may give people who decide not to abandon the rest of their party and attempt to solo content designed for a party is not to nerf your movement ability in those instances.

I have always been of the opinion that once a party forms for a random queue, all movement abilities should move at a pace relative to the slowest participant - period. Primarily this is and always has been a player's choice decision, every player with movement enhancements CAN always slow down and keep pace with other, slower members of the party. Players without movement enhancements CANNOT speed up to keep pace with faster players, so ultimately it us up to the player to run the queue as a member of the party or as a solo player... that is unless or until the complaints become so numerous that player's choice decision is taken away from us.

I highly doubt speed runner will decide to completely abandon random queues since it appears that will remain the best way to accumulate quantities of AD's easily. But with even more players in random we could see more people complaining about some players being too fast or too slow and with enough complaining we could see the option for people to move through random content at their own pace revoked and everyone forced to move at a pace imposed by Neverwinter designers and programmers.

Again at this point it is still 'player's choice' we can either choose to play cooperatively with the players having better abilities helping out players with lesser abilities, or (with sufficient complaining) have the prospect of individual player abilities pre-set by programmers.

Consider... and choose wisely.

wintersmoke · October 2018

nunya#5309 said:

caldochaud#4880 said:

It might even help to get high leveled players to slow down in dungeons... not running past trash mobs while the lowbies are still a map's length behind the party getting a beat-down from said trash mobs.
It would have to be a really great boon to make it worth my while to stand back and let the low level clear the dungeon. When I can run through the dungeon, clear all the mobs, and be done in 10 minutes or less, Cryptic's going to have really reward me for wasting an additional 20 minutes or more. Furthermore, what metrics could they possibly use to determine whether I'm "helping" the low level player(s) or not? I can't think of anything they could actually use that couldn't be gamed by determined players and which would require the players to engage in some kind of exploit.

In which case, those players will be banned, & we won't have to worry about them ruining our experience anymore...

xrawcarnage · October 2018

The only thing the new 100k ad from rad a day did was hinder the mid to low end players. You have essentially pushed these players to either spend countless hours trying to grind and still fall way short or break out the CC and spend their hard earned cash or parents cash to obtain things to speed up the process. The already rich players did not feel this changes and have remained well off. It actually hurt the economy and player progression even more then before. Players are stripping enchants off their toons to make ad and selling items they would typically keep.

This is no way to have things right now in the state of the game as it stands. Player count is at its lowest since I started playing back on day 1. The community as a whole is beyond negative towards everything that has been done lately. I am a guild leader of one of the original guilds made and in the most active alliance on server and its bad right now. SO many veteran players have up and quit the game for good. You know, those players who have made this game and kept it running for all these years? new players wont keep this going. They get burned out fast and quit. Plus they see/ hear all the negativity from the remaining veteran players it turns them off big time.

Releasing mediocre mods with very limited content is another bad move. I know you all work very hard on each mod and have to change and altar things to appease us very entitled players, I get that but it doesn't seem you guys change or add what the player base really wants. New stronghold upgrades, unbound item tokens ( make items account bound and only able to unbind one time), class( I know, not happening anytime soon until current classes are balanced, we know), Dungeons!! How many times do we have to say we need more content!?!? , well it looks like this has finally been done in m15+( kudos), quit completely nerfing classes, it gets very expensive gearing another class every mod, better reward drops from dungeons. It is said the loot is being adjusted every mod in dungeon chests but lets be real here, the drop rate is HAMSTER, absolutely garbage and the loot that does drop is obsolete for most players. Give better loot drops to high end dungeons, make these dungeons worth running. Make all end game content viable not just the latest dungeon released with said mod. Yes I know UES drop from 3 dungeons so I guess that is a start. Make a specific items that is viable to everyone only drop from certain dungeons.

Basically I can go all day but I wont. The original poster made some very good suggestions and points. I decided to add my two cents to everything overall. Basically m15 looks like it will kill the economy and all profitable items that DO drop from chest wont be worth anything with chest rerolls. yes its a good idea but it will destroy any value that ultimate enchanting stones, orcus wand, key of fragmented , etc etc have in the game.

I am very optimistic the devs have looked into this and have other "ways" we will find that will make us ad or give certain items more value cause at the end of the day, we run content for the loot, loot we can sell and use said ad for upgrading our characters and buying things off the zen market ( there is enough cash grabs in the game, no reason to make EVERYTHING a cash grab). Thanks

ragnarz2 · October 2018

Some great commentary in this thread!

Some of my concerns center around building community and camaraderie within the guild but especially within the alliance.

One of the great strengths of this game is the 5-man group. It makes it relatively easy to put a team together and do stuff fast.

It is also a significant weakness! The lack of meaningful large group events hurt large guild and alliances. I strongly favor updating DragonFlight. Give Tiamat multiple difficulty settings and scale the rewards. Make more 10-person and 25-person scenarios. And for g-ds sake, update the Q interface with drag/drop so you don;t have to kick people to organize groups.

xrawcarnage · October 2018

Absolutely agree @ragnarz2 Tiamat did wonders for this game and so did dragon flight for guilds. It brought large amounts of players together and gave us all a purpose! Mod 6 even though many quit that started the game, was hands down the best mod yet! Well of Dragons was amazing. Inside that zone you all gave us so much to do. Killing all 5 dragons, heroics everywhere, Tiamat , good dailies/ weeklies, good gear etc etc. SO much content that the game did not see that neverwinter "slow" time we get between each mod drops. This kind of content is what is needed in each mod. Increasing Guild hall level would bring back some large group play again as long as the end goal is worth it. might even bring some players back to the game....

As of now there is nothing that brings the community together besides 5 man groups which is easy to get and does not give us that feeling of "purpose".

ecrana · October 2018

tigercatgirl said:
Example: Chult hunt..Polaris armor...gives 3% more melee damage when wearing. Item level 480. This means item level 600 equipment bonuses will make that useless and it just becomes a cosmetic piece of equipment.
SO ITEM LEVEL IS DESTORYING THE GAME!
IT IS ALSO DESTROYING BUILDS FOR CLASSES!

Item level isn't destroying a thing. If an IL 480 piece has a better equip bonus than an IL 520 piece then you're just silly if you pick IL over stats/bonuses.

How is IL destroying builds? Players might destroy their builds in a chase for higher IL but really that's an exaggeration. Maybe they're not as efficient but destroyed...nah.

And the game does have numerous builds. It's the players that chase after what others say is the best build. Are some paths buggy? Sure. Powers buggy? sure. But IL isn't destroying this either. There is absolutely no correlation between IL and the build a player uses.

The years long chase for class balance, now that's killing the game more than item level is.

tigercatgirl said:

BIGGEST GAME PROBLEM YOU DIDN'T MENTION IS TEAMWORK/TEAMPLAY
There is nothing in the game to promote working as a team.
Easy way I see it is to make team buffs become patterns players use in combat. This way you can add bonus group damage, defense, control, etc. based on where the pattern is relevent to the boss.

Far from the biggest problem in the game. Can they do a better job of introducing players to teamwork? Sure. But a players going to play the way they want to play. You want teamwork? I get plenty of teamwork when I run with my guildies. You go running in random queues and you're at the mercy of whatever spectacular players you end up with.

And your patterns idea sounds like nothing more than a convoluted version of combat advantage...which is in the game already. You're entire premise for the patterns idea is that people just do dungeons one way....what do you think they'll do if this idea was implemented? Run dungeons the same with in the same pattern. All you've done is change the method.

And again, still does nothing to fix the issues with teamwork with random people. So now you get thrown in to random queue with 3 GWFs and they take a penalty because the game put them in a dungeon together randomly? How's that make any sense? And that's not to say I don't like the pattern idea...in a strategy game not an action oriented mmorpg.

plasticbat · October 2018

tigercatgirl said:

Example: Chult hunt..Polaris armor...gives 3% more melee damage when wearing. Item level 480. This means item level 600 equipment bonuses will make that useless and it just becomes a cosmetic piece of equipment. This problem is also repeated in artifact weapons as well.

Why does a IL 600 equipment make a IL 480 useless if a IL 600 is not better than the IL 480?
I have been salvaging 540 and keeping certain 480.

silverkelt · October 2018

I honestly havent run a dragonflight since my former guild hit maxed out and yes I bought dozens of keys , I contributed millions of ad in AD and Gems worth of items, did influence on 5 toons a day (did them up to the 300, as that was the quickest and turned it in) and even gave guildies thousands of gold at one point when they ran out . it was ok while it was going on, but its not like I want to redo that right now..

But that was a time in the game, this is how all mmos work, at some other point it may come back. I had fun while it lasted, but who would want to do just dragonflight after 3-4 years of it being out? I guess if they put better reasons for running it people would do it, because that is how its done,

In regards to dps vs support that is every mmo Ive ever played. Support can have a role without gearing up as much, dps has to have pretty decent stuff on to pay end game stuff.. sorry , not much different here.

Ive come back with a year off, my old dps toons cant run RAQ even, even though they have alot of r12 stuff, because I have nothign else updated and I will have 20-20% less direct damage then even r12 current people with chult tiger, heels of fury , shadowstalker rings and such. I will work on it so I can run with them again. But I just took my DC into RAQ instead.. again by todays stands wouldnt be a great dc, but still have a ok power pool to share, enough to get RAQ stuff done.

At some point I will have to upgrade to run anything else, but right now just working on campaigns and stuff.

hustin1 · October 2018

ragnarz2 said:
Some great commentary in this thread!

Some of my concerns center around building community and camaraderie within the guild but especially within the alliance.

One of the great strengths of this game is the 5-man group. It makes it relatively easy to put a team together and do stuff fast.

It is also a significant weakness! The lack of meaningful large group events hurt large guild and alliances. I strongly favor updating DragonFlight. Give Tiamat multiple difficulty settings and scale the rewards. Make more 10-person and 25-person scenarios. And for g-ds sake, update the Q interface with drag/drop so you don;t have to kick people to organize groups.

One of the things I never liked about changing leveling dungeons to require only 3 people is that the group becomes superfluous. They removed half of the enemies so that a three-person team could "work", but in doing so they also trivialized the content such that a well-geared person could run ahead and ignore the rest of the team. People wind up going through the leveling process without having to learn party roles and dynamics, which hurts everyone in the long run.

evoemoirea · October 2018

This is an excellent post. As a newer player, some of the things i have experienced in dungeon is that when seperated from my group i face many enemies i cannot kill alone. I dont think a shepherd system is necessarily needed, but maybe a dungeon completion system that increases the ad per end chests or possibly unlocks a secend chest per dungeon. A completion system that includes both findable chests and killed mosters. I also like the idea of a system of monster vulnerabilities that provide monsters with resistances and vulnerabilities to certain damage types. This woukd allow for a rework of many of weapons already existing in the game that have lost all usefulness. In the river district there are 4 bows that i would love to unlock for my hr, but i have little incentive to do so. Maybe also a system that rewards completed sets. So that i have incentive for unlocking all possible river district bows, fkr example.

evoemoirea · October 2018

Just to explain why i think creating a system of monster vulnerabilities has relevance to this post, by doing this you create a system of incentives that helps players move beyond this wall where we as players have something more to work towards than higher item levels. There are many item sets in the game that have lost relevance. Beyond the boons and keys of existing campaigns, there is nothing else within these areas of interest. Basically i grind as much and as fadt asbi can to get through these campaigns. Adding these vulnerabilities to monsters gives further reason to play these areas.

dionchi · October 2018

evoemoirea said:
This is an excellent post. As a newer player, some of the things i have experienced in dungeon is that when separated from my group i face many enemies i cannot kill alone. I dont think a shepherd system is necessarily needed, but maybe a dungeon completion system that increases the ad per end chests or possibly unlocks a secend chest per dungeon. A completion system that includes both findable chests and killed mosters. I also like the idea of a system of monster vulnerabilities that provide monsters with resistances and vulnerabilities to certain damage types. This woukd allow for a rework of many of weapons already existing in the game that have lost all usefulness. In the river district there are 4 bows that i would love to unlock for my hr, but i have little incentive to do so. Maybe also a system that rewards completed sets. So that i have incentive for unlocking all possible river district bows, fkr example.

Seems to me what you're talking about in the beginning of your post is "player attitude".

As I understand it Neverwinter dungeons and skirmishes were designed to be run by a "PARTY" of players acting in a team or cooperative mode, to help each other out and lend or learn experience. This being the case no player should ever get separated from the group to be left to wade through mobs of monsters on their own, but obviously not everyone cares to play as a cooperative team member... so again it all appears to boil down to individual player attitude, not how the game was designed.

With the availability of "skill kits" (Arcane, Religious, Dungeoneering, Nature and Thievery) adventurers can open every kind of skill chest available, but during random queue runs some players leave certain chests for the class of character who can open them without using a skill kit, some players try to get all the chests they find and other players just ignore all chests.

In D&D it had always thought certain kinds of monsters more vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks. For instance fire based monsters more vulnerable to earth, water and ice attacks, water based monsters more vulnerable to earth fire attacks and trolls needing fire to finish them off after being sufficiently injured, but Neverwinter has simplified the process quite a bit. It appears all monsters, regardless of their makeup, are equally susceptible to all kinds of attacks. Instead of fire monsters being empowered by fire based attacks, they wind up being as susceptible to a fire attack as an ice or water attack. But since Neverwinter has precluded, for the most part, players changing attack modes or weapons while in battle, that's probably for the best.

Neverwinter had at one time more "gear sets" with additional attributes and to some extent still does with artifact sets and some other gear sets, but this has been toned down significantly in my opinion.

My feedback after 4000 hours of gameplay.

Comments

SO ITEM LEVEL IS DESTORYING THE GAME!

BIGGEST GAME PROBLEM YOU DIDN'T MENTION IS TEAMWORK/TEAMPLAY