Feedback: General: Slotting Enchantments + Interchangeability: To be able to refine enchantments/runestones with pretty much everything with halved RP gain is great. I have tons of shards stuffed right now that I don't need and was actually close to vendoring most of them.
+ Storage: With the new system you can manage your normal non-weapon enchants and runestones in 16 slots: 8 for Rank 4s and 8 for the ones you're currently refining. I currently use 36 or more.
+ Gold to Unslot: Obvious. Great improvement.
- AD cost: Obvious. With the Fey Blessing Enchantment R9 gear finally got within reach for everybody willing to put time and effort in and now you already backpedal in the very next module? I don't want it but: If availability is an issue, why not just nerf the Fey Blessing?
- Additional Component in Catalysts: That's completely uncalled for. I would have accepted the new benefits for the cost of the AD, but why make things more complicated? And I certainly don't hope (but expect) Catalysts will only be available through ZEN.
+/- Refining Slotted: Great feature IF the unslotting would still cost AD. Now that unslotting is dirt cheap it's still convenient though.
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syka08Member, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited October 2013
Feedback: General: Enchantments As many have expressed, I have to add my voice to the volume.
1) The added necessity for bag/bank space is ridiculous for aforementioned reasons of differing RP values. It gives things an even more cluttered feel and a way to keep things "clean" is not readily apparent.
2) You've added multiple steps that have made it more difficult to fuse stones
3) Adding yet ANOTHER item into the mix (catalyst) is annoying, unnecessary, and also fits into #1
4) The AD sink, as though before, is entirely too high and should be done away with entirely, as should this "improved and more fun" system.
Closing statement: I'm sorry, but please leave things the way they are with this system. It's already working just fine, though I really would like to know where the initiative came from that it was thought this needed reworked. Thank you for your efforts, though, for trying something new to make the game more fun.
Feedback: General: Slotting This, I feel, has been done very right. At 60 it is not too terribly difficult to obtain gold any longer and before 60 you shouldn't be worrying too much about unslotting anyway. The prices are on the money, too, so to speak No closing statement here.
Feedback: General: This way of reporting? It feels kind clunky, but I kind of like it. I guess it's to help parse information. Took a slight mental adjustment to be able to report in such a way.
contents to be decided
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katbozejziemiMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 856Arc User
edited October 2013
And the poor get poorer and the people who were rich stay rich.
Quick clarification: Failing to upgrade an Enchantment or Runestone does not consume the AD value of that upgrade. Catalysts are still consumed. We'll look into the tooltip to make sure that is clearer.
Thank you to everyone providing constructive feedback!
Additional clarification: Refinement Points gained past 100% will carry over to the next Upgrade level. We are working on UI improvements to make that clearer.
That eases things up a bit on that front, but the final assessment can't be made until we know how to acquire the Catalysts.
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shunterinoMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited October 2013
Bug: ward window Can't seem to put a ward into this slot even when RP is full.
Feedback: Refinement of Enchants
It should be obvious by now that not only does everyone hate this new approach to fusing, but most people can't even see what improvements you could possibly be referring to here. Seriously, no one has even the slightest clue which part is meant to be 'fun'.
Having said that i do think there are a couple of nice ideas here.
Unslotting for gold, great idea.
Upgrading slotted enchants, also great.
Using lower level enchants of various types to raise your RP count, also nice.
However...
The catalyst idea is an unnecessary complication and added grind without any pay off. Not only that, nobody understands where you get them from (only skill nodes?). Actually a bigger problem with this idea is how you've presented it, with zero user friendliness. You mentioned in an interview somewhere how you felt communication with the playerbase needed a little work, well here would've been a great place to start.
This thread's first post should have been a breakdown of the new system, where each component could be found and the goal of the new stuff. Then we could have given you some real feedback. As it is, we're all wandering around in the dark. Frustrating.
It's also not clear what the percentage chance of fusing is. Even if it's the same as before it would be helpful to have it on the tooltip so youbcan decide whether to use a ward.
The AD cost is ridiculous.
It feels like the same basic process (%chance to upgrade, buy wards for zen to get higher levels) but with a longer more convoluted process with no additional user benefits.
Get rid of the catalysts and lower the AD price and it might not be the most hated change so far (although that would be quite an accomplishment)
Changing the original enchanting system is totaly unnecessary, there was nothing at all wrong with the 'old' system, even that confused many new players to the game,
This proposed new system is going to create even more confusion, and increase the divide between those players who are already geared and enchanted and those that are not, (plus the already huge divide with those that 'pay to play' and those that do not) which is bad for the game.
many new players after reaching lvl 60 will give up as the grind to get into end game content with the already well geared player will become near impossible, you are just creating a huge imbalance between end content players, plus as stated above those that are 'rich' will get richer and those that are 'poor' wil give up.
The whole idea of a 'game' is to play the content either solo or with friends and not spend hours alone in a main city messing around with a complicated time consuming enchanting system
It makes it almost impossible for a new player to get on par with veterans.
I am not against the revamped fusion system, but i want to suggest to combine it
with another/different - F2P upgrading method.
It would be great, if we'd be able to level up enchantments by killing monsters,
aka. enchantment exp. Only one enchantment can be levelled up at a time and
refining a gem, consumes a massive amount of monsters/exp. Each rank, would
require more and more exp, similar to a character's/companion's lvl exp. For example,
a rank 4 enchantment needs ~5000000 exp to become a rank 5, ~8mil to rank 6, so on.
This method of course takes longer than fusing 4 of the same enchantments together
and also requires lots of grinding.
This could be an alternate - free to play refining feature. Along with the intended changes,
this gives free to play gamers aswell as cash shoppers a second way to improve their gear.
Because with the intended changes, the upgrading aspect of the game is becoming more of a
"pay to win" feature and casuals will be affected by it, the most.
At the end of the day why change the 'old' system at all, there was nothing wrong with it, it worked perfectly fine,
There are many many other things in the game that actually need work and fixing most way more important than the enchanting system
when i first saw the announcement that the enchant system was getting some improvements, i assumed you were adding a new tab for enchantments, like there is for professional resources or other currency... opps.
I like the idea of gold to unslot and I like the idea of crunching for refinement points, but my like stops there. For me, the primary pain points of enchantments would be cost of higher upgrades and the sheer amount of storage needed for them. It appears you have increased both.
I am hoping this is not going to model professional resources, in that blue and purple refinement stones (i hope i only need 3 slots to stack these) are only available Z-store (someone posted they found a green so there is hope)
I have to hope this is a 'trial look' that will be greatly improved after feedback, rather than the game breaker it looks to be.
My guess is you developed this system for the new artifacts and soem drunk marketing guy stumbled in the meeting and said 'yuuuse this to fixes enchanments...'
Feedback: General: Slotting Enchantments + Interchangeability: To be able to refine enchantments/runestones with pretty much everything with halved RP gain is great. I have tons of shards stuffed right now that I don't need and was actually close to vendoring most of them.
Agreed, this is the single best part of the new system for me.
The AD cost, whilst trivial for some, is enough to price the system out of my reach as a fairly casual player.
Bug: Minor Mark of potency I am able to refine enchantments with my Minor mark of potency stashed in the bank, not in my bag. The refinement consumed 1 mark each time as per normal. Is this intentional?
Quick clarification: Failing to upgrade an Enchantment or Runestone does not consume the AD value of that upgrade. Catalysts are still consumed. We'll look into the tooltip to make sure that is clearer.
Thank you to everyone providing constructive feedback!
Additional clarification: Refinement Points gained past 100% will carry over to the next Upgrade level. We are working on UI improvements to make that clearer.
Feedback: General Refining Enchantments/Runes
NO NO NO! stop right there! Don't go past GO and don't collect your $200.00!
Don't look into the tooltip, don't continue working on this new system. Are you even paying attention to what players are posting? most if not all hate this new method. It's not more enjoyable as you claim in your original post it's quite the opposite. Most see it for what it really is, a new money making system for PW/Cryptic.
1. It costs AD to refine. Time to pull out the wallet and buy zen.
2. You need more inventory space to carry all kinds of rank runes/enchantments and the required catalysts. Queue the bags in zen market.
3. Still need wards to not lose higher end ranks. more zen/AD costs.
Stop it, just stop it. If you're going to charge AD, then we do not need the catalyst and/or wards to refine higher ranking stones.
Come to thank of it, just scrap this refining method altogether and leave the currently working method in place.
It's not broken, so don't "PW/Cryptic fix it!"
"PW/Cryptic fix it!" - 1. to rework a working and/or non-working system in order to make a new method to charge real life money. 2. To try and "fix" something broken or not, and still find a way to further making it worse.
I like this system and think it is very balanced. The difficulty of upgrading enchantments will make people give up and leave the game, then they will sell their equipment in the AH or their accounts, so that the economy will receive a fresh infusion of enchantments. Whenever the difficulty of upgrading enchantments exceeds the fun tolerance of a player, that player will leave and reduce demand for enchantments thus keeping prices acceptably low for the remaining players. This also has the added benefit of much less rubberbanding in town during halloween events.
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tang56Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 0Arc User
I like this system and think it is very balanced. The difficulty of upgrading enchantments will make people give up and leave the game, then they will sell their equipment in the AH or their accounts, so that the economy will receive a fresh infusion of enchantments. Whenever the difficulty of upgrading enchantments exceeds the fun tolerance of a player, that player will leave and reduce demand for enchantments thus keeping prices acceptably low for the remaining players. This also has the added benefit of much less rubberbanding in town during halloween events.
This is an April fools joke..? Cant began fathom the reasoning behind this. Gotta find a new game soon.
This game is comical,.... all appearance based, and what functionality exists is also being removed..just dont get it.
Just remove the 'Catalyst' requeriment, its really annoying and god knows the rerity of this to be found in skill nodes (or as expected, in the Zen shop).
Leanan Sidhe(not "The Dresde Files" fairy!)- NW Legit Channel Moderator
So I wanted to chime in to talk about a few of the specific issues being brought up.
First, I wanted to say that this is on the Preview shard specifically so that we can get lots of feedback, improve the system, and make sure it's hitting all of our goals. Some players have commented that the current system on Live is "fine" but we disagree - our data shows that many players are not engaging in the current system due to the frustration of using it. If the system was performing well and making everyone happy, we would not have invested all of the time and effort into improving it that we have. We're still looking at and discussing the system constantly, and one of the main areas of discussion is what it takes to Upgrade an item - meaning the AD Cost, Catalysts and Wards part of the system.
Second, we want to say "oops" for not having the Catalysts in the AD store when it went up to Preview. They will be in the build that should be going up tomorrow. The intent is that enough of these will be dropping in the world (from skill nodes and bosses, mostly) that you won't need or want to buy them from the AD store, but we want to have the option there to ensure that you'll always have access to them.
Next, I wanted to talk about bag space. One of the main goals of the new system is to reduce the bag space requirements of engaging in the Refining system. We don't think there will be a reason to carry around a bag full of Enchants/Runestones anymore - you'll have the ones you want slotted in your gear and companions, and you'll use extra ones as you get them to Refine your slotted Enchants. You won't have a full set of all 9 of the basic Enchants/Runes at multiple ranks, as there is no need to try to stack them up to smash them any longer.
Instead, you'll have a handful of Catalyst items in your bag. There are 4 of them for Enchants/Runestones, you will probably only be carrying 1 or 2 of them around at a time, unless you happen to have slotted Enchants ranging from ranks 1-10 in your gear. Most people will have the majority of their slotted Enchants around the same rank, meaning you'll need a handful of the Catalysts that make sense for you current and of Refinement progression. I know that for my character on Live, I have something like 16-20 slots taken up with Enchants and Runestones at pretty much any time. On our test servers, I don't have Enchants or Runestones in my bags at all any more.
Last comment for now - we put the AD cost on Upgrading the items because we removed the (much larger) AD cost required for Unslotting them. We still want AD to play a part in the Refinement/Enchantment process, but it was a big barrier to using the system when slotting an Enchantment was such a huge commitment due to the cost of removing it. We'd rather have smaller, up front costs for Upgrading than the current large recurring costs whenever you get a new item. Having to think "if I start using this sweet new weapon I got, I have to unslot my Enchant, ugh" was a situation we were really not happy with.
Again, we're still looking very closely at this system, so keep posting your feedback!
So I wanted to chime in to talk about a few of the specific issues being brought up.
First, I wanted to say that this is on the Preview shard specifically so that we can get lots of feedback, improve the system, and make sure it's hitting all of our goals. Some players have commented that the current system on Live is "fine" but we disagree - our data shows that many players are not engaging in the current system due to the frustration of using it. If the system was performing well and making everyone happy, we would not have invested all of the time and effort into improving it that we have. We're still looking at and discussing the system constantly, and one of the main areas of discussion is what it takes to Upgrade an item - meaning the AD Cost, Catalysts and Wards part of the system.
Agreed, but the adding of runes/enchants in to "level" up the RP is a cumbersome process. Ideally it needs to be sped up somehow. Perhaps default to add all of the stack you are drag/dropping in?
Second, we want to say "oops" for not having the Catalysts in the AD store when it went up to Preview. They will be in the build that should be going up tomorrow. The intent is that enough of these will be dropping in the world (from skill nodes and bosses, mostly) that you won't need or want to buy them from the AD store, but we want to have the option there to ensure that you'll always have access to them.
Sweet, they are easy to get going forward.
Next, I wanted to talk about bag space. One of the main goals of the new system is to reduce the bag space requirements of engaging in the Refining system. We don't think there will be a reason to carry around a bag full of Enchants/Runestones anymore - you'll have the ones you want slotted in your gear and companions, and you'll use extra ones as you get them to Refine your slotted Enchants. You won't have a full set of all 9 of the basic Enchants/Runes at multiple ranks, as there is no need to try to stack them up to smash them any longer.
Instead, you'll have a handful of Catalyst items in your bag. There are 4 of them for Enchants/Runestones, you will probably only be carrying 1 or 2 of them around at a time, unless you happen to have slotted Enchants ranging from ranks 1-10 in your gear. Most people will have the majority of their slotted Enchants around the same rank, meaning you'll need a handful of the Catalysts that make sense for you current and of Refinement progression. I know that for my character on Live, I have something like 16-20 slots taken up with Enchants and Runestones at pretty much any time. On our test servers, I don't have Enchants or Runestones in my bags at all any more.
Agreed. This was an attractive pro. I used to have ~18 slots dedicated to storing collected enchants. This will drop to just those i plan to level. The others i will throw into the RP furnaces.
Last comment for now - we put the AD cost on Upgrading the items because we removed the (much larger) AD cost required for Unslotting them. We still want AD to play a part in the Refinement/Enchantment process, but it was a big barrier to using the system when slotting an Enchantment was such a huge commitment due to the cost of removing it. We'd rather have smaller, up front costs for Upgrading than the current large recurring costs whenever you get a new item. Having to think "if I start using this sweet new weapon I got, I have to unslot my Enchant, ugh" was a situation we were really not happy with.
The overall cost to rank from say 4 to 8 grinding them out appears to be close to removing an old one a few times. In reality on live if the sell price on the AH of the enchant you were removing was lower than the removal cost it would just get overwritten/destroyed. Often i wouldn't remove these and wouldn't ever have to experience this cost. This is now not avoidable.
I think this cost needs to be reduced as the cumulative costs over ranks makes this unpalatable. If anything increase the removal cost by a factor of about 5-10 to enable a reduction in rank up cost.
Again, we're still looking very closely at this system, so keep posting your feedback!
Last bit of feedback for me and my biggest bugbear:
Why does it cost more enchants to level up RPs for rank 7-9 than lower ranks? 6x R7s to make a R8? 1x R7 original being levelled, 4x R7s to gain the RP needed, 1 as a catalyst. This makes the cost to rank up astronomical. What is the justification for this?
It's confusing, and I don't like that.
I also see a lot of math on the forums but I don't even understand what I am doing in the new system to understand what everyone else is posting.
that's my 2 cent.
Clarification: I went to the preview tried upgrading an R4 to 5, put 3 more R4's in, it refined. However, I needed a catalyst??? to change to R5??? <-confused here.
Edit: Just read Amenar's last post on this thread, I'll try this system again with Catalyst hopefully the system won't remain confusing.
...our data shows that many players are not engaging in the current system due to the frustration of using it.
Interesting, can you elaborate on what people are or aren't doing in the current system? For me at least, the only frustration in the current system is the random chance aspect. The only part of the system I wasn't using was unslotting, primarly related to AD cost, see below.
Having to think "if I start using this sweet new weapon I got, I have to unslot my Enchant, ugh" was a situation we were really not happy with.
Also interesting. Whilst arguably true, I was quite happy with this system simply because it was avoidable. If the cost to unslot was higher than I was prepared to pay (I never unslotted) I could either, not bother slotting an item if I didn't want to lose the enchant or discard it with the item. Having an upfront cost, even if cheaper, is no longer avoidable without avoiding the entire enchant system. It shifts forward the participation decision point.
I think I must play very differently to a lot of people.
Last bit of feedback for me and my biggest bugbear:
Why does it cost more enchants to level up RPs for rank 7-9 than lower ranks? 6x R7s to make a R8? 1x R7 original being levelled, 4x R7s to gain the RP needed, 1 as a catalyst. This makes the cost to rank up astronomical. What is the justification for this?
This is because we removed the compounding of the older system. Up to rank 4/5, you could easily find 4 of the matching lower rank gems to rank it up. After that point, Rank 6+ gems don't really drop in game, so you couldn't just "get" 4 Rank 7 gems to make a Rank 8. You had to get 4 Rank 4s to make a Rank 5. Then do that 3 more times to have 4 Rank 5s so you could make 1 Rank 6. Then do THAT whole process 3 more times so you could have 4 Rank 6s.
And each one of those steps came with an "Upgrade" step where you had a chance to fail - now you just have one Upgrade step, and just one chance to fail. (Well, 2 because one of the Catalysts for higher ranks of Enchants is a second, matching Enchantment. Now you can just throw in Rank 4s instead of needing to match them and rank them up, repeatedly, to be able to get them to Rank 7. All of those dozens of Upgrade steps and chances for failure have been removed.
While the old system made it feel like "I always need 4 Enchants" the reality was that you needed many, many more to be able to get to those 4 Enchants. This was simpler, but the new system takes far fewer total gems to be able to get to max rank, while also removing most of the chances of failure.
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tang56Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 0Arc User
First, I wanted to say that this is on the Preview shard specifically so that we can get lots of feedback, improve the system, and make sure it's hitting all of our goals. Some players have commented that the current system on Live is "fine" but we disagree - our data shows that many players are not engaging in the current system due to the frustration of using it. If the system was performing well and making everyone happy, we would not have invested all of the time and effort into improving it that we have. We're still looking at and discussing the system constantly, and one of the main areas of discussion is what it takes to Upgrade an item - meaning the AD Cost, Catalysts and Wards part of the system.
People weren't using it because it's actually quite time consuming(in this day and age, time is worth a lot) to farm all the enchants you need to fuse an R8 or higher. It was often simpler and quicker for many players to simply farm T2s for items to sell for AD, then exchange the AD for enchants from the people who had already put the effort into fusing the higher level enchants.
I strongly suspect that even if this system is implemented, people will still farm T2->acquire AD->buy high level enchants and maybe...maybe fuse the R8-9 themselves.
What people were not doing was looking at the fusing method and thinking, "I need four of these rank X enchants to fuse to next rank...maybe use a ward if the success % is low? Herpderp...too confusing, accidentally stuck finger in coffee grinder".
RIP Neverwinter 26/06/2014
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dardoveMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 0Arc User
Just remove the 'Catalyst' requeriment, its really annoying and god knows the rerity of this to be found in skill nodes (or as expected, in the Zen shop).
The problem with removing the catalyst is that without it, there is no risk to failure so if it is at 1% you can just try to refine all day until it succeeds.
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tang56Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 0Arc User
So I wanted to chime in to talk about a few of the specific issues being brought up.
-stuff-
Again, we're still looking very closely at this system, so keep posting your feedback!
Additionally, should you decide to transition this system to live...I would advise you strongly consider making a youtube video tutorial(narrated and subtitled) explaining it. Not as a "check it out on the forums" thing either since everyone know the forums is only frequented by at best a small fraction of the playerbase. Make it a mandatory popup, both on the launcher, the home screen and when someone opens the enchantment window for the first time after it's implemented.
Comments
Feedback: General: Slotting Enchantments
+ Interchangeability: To be able to refine enchantments/runestones with pretty much everything with halved RP gain is great. I have tons of shards stuffed right now that I don't need and was actually close to vendoring most of them.
+ Storage: With the new system you can manage your normal non-weapon enchants and runestones in 16 slots: 8 for Rank 4s and 8 for the ones you're currently refining. I currently use 36 or more.
+ Gold to Unslot: Obvious. Great improvement.
- AD cost: Obvious. With the Fey Blessing Enchantment R9 gear finally got within reach for everybody willing to put time and effort in and now you already backpedal in the very next module? I don't want it but: If availability is an issue, why not just nerf the Fey Blessing?
- Additional Component in Catalysts: That's completely uncalled for. I would have accepted the new benefits for the cost of the AD, but why make things more complicated? And I certainly don't hope (but expect) Catalysts will only be available through ZEN.
+/- Refining Slotted: Great feature IF the unslotting would still cost AD. Now that unslotting is dirt cheap it's still convenient though.
As many have expressed, I have to add my voice to the volume.
1) The added necessity for bag/bank space is ridiculous for aforementioned reasons of differing RP values. It gives things an even more cluttered feel and a way to keep things "clean" is not readily apparent.
2) You've added multiple steps that have made it more difficult to fuse stones
3) Adding yet ANOTHER item into the mix (catalyst) is annoying, unnecessary, and also fits into #1
4) The AD sink, as though before, is entirely too high and should be done away with entirely, as should this "improved and more fun" system.
Closing statement: I'm sorry, but please leave things the way they are with this system. It's already working just fine, though I really would like to know where the initiative came from that it was thought this needed reworked. Thank you for your efforts, though, for trying something new to make the game more fun.
Feedback: General: Slotting
This, I feel, has been done very right. At 60 it is not too terribly difficult to obtain gold any longer and before 60 you shouldn't be worrying too much about unslotting anyway. The prices are on the money, too, so to speak No closing statement here.
Feedback: General:
This way of reporting? It feels kind clunky, but I kind of like it. I guess it's to help parse information. Took a slight mental adjustment to be able to report in such a way.
So realistic!
That eases things up a bit on that front, but the final assessment can't be made until we know how to acquire the Catalysts.
Can't seem to put a ward into this slot even when RP is full.
Feedback: Refinement of Enchants
It should be obvious by now that not only does everyone hate this new approach to fusing, but most people can't even see what improvements you could possibly be referring to here. Seriously, no one has even the slightest clue which part is meant to be 'fun'.
Having said that i do think there are a couple of nice ideas here.
Unslotting for gold, great idea.
Upgrading slotted enchants, also great.
Using lower level enchants of various types to raise your RP count, also nice.
However...
The catalyst idea is an unnecessary complication and added grind without any pay off. Not only that, nobody understands where you get them from (only skill nodes?). Actually a bigger problem with this idea is how you've presented it, with zero user friendliness. You mentioned in an interview somewhere how you felt communication with the playerbase needed a little work, well here would've been a great place to start.
This thread's first post should have been a breakdown of the new system, where each component could be found and the goal of the new stuff. Then we could have given you some real feedback. As it is, we're all wandering around in the dark. Frustrating.
It's also not clear what the percentage chance of fusing is. Even if it's the same as before it would be helpful to have it on the tooltip so youbcan decide whether to use a ward.
The AD cost is ridiculous.
It feels like the same basic process (%chance to upgrade, buy wards for zen to get higher levels) but with a longer more convoluted process with no additional user benefits.
Get rid of the catalysts and lower the AD price and it might not be the most hated change so far (although that would be quite an accomplishment)
This proposed new system is going to create even more confusion, and increase the divide between those players who are already geared and enchanted and those that are not, (plus the already huge divide with those that 'pay to play' and those that do not) which is bad for the game.
many new players after reaching lvl 60 will give up as the grind to get into end game content with the already well geared player will become near impossible, you are just creating a huge imbalance between end content players, plus as stated above those that are 'rich' will get richer and those that are 'poor' wil give up.
The whole idea of a 'game' is to play the content either solo or with friends and not spend hours alone in a main city messing around with a complicated time consuming enchanting system
It makes it almost impossible for a new player to get on par with veterans.
I am not against the revamped fusion system, but i want to suggest to combine it
with another/different - F2P upgrading method.
It would be great, if we'd be able to level up enchantments by killing monsters,
aka. enchantment exp. Only one enchantment can be levelled up at a time and
refining a gem, consumes a massive amount of monsters/exp. Each rank, would
require more and more exp, similar to a character's/companion's lvl exp. For example,
a rank 4 enchantment needs ~5000000 exp to become a rank 5, ~8mil to rank 6, so on.
This method of course takes longer than fusing 4 of the same enchantments together
and also requires lots of grinding.
This could be an alternate - free to play refining feature. Along with the intended changes,
this gives free to play gamers aswell as cash shoppers a second way to improve their gear.
Because with the intended changes, the upgrading aspect of the game is becoming more of a
"pay to win" feature and casuals will be affected by it, the most.
Think about it, i bet the people would like it.
There are many many other things in the game that actually need work and fixing most way more important than the enchanting system
I like the idea of gold to unslot and I like the idea of crunching for refinement points, but my like stops there. For me, the primary pain points of enchantments would be cost of higher upgrades and the sheer amount of storage needed for them. It appears you have increased both.
I am hoping this is not going to model professional resources, in that blue and purple refinement stones (i hope i only need 3 slots to stack these) are only available Z-store (someone posted they found a green so there is hope)
I have to hope this is a 'trial look' that will be greatly improved after feedback, rather than the game breaker it looks to be.
My guess is you developed this system for the new artifacts and soem drunk marketing guy stumbled in the meeting and said 'yuuuse this to fixes enchanments...'
Agreed, this is the single best part of the new system for me.
The AD cost, whilst trivial for some, is enough to price the system out of my reach as a fairly casual player.
I am able to refine enchantments with my Minor mark of potency stashed in the bank, not in my bag. The refinement consumed 1 mark each time as per normal. Is this intentional?
Perhaps not the clearest, though!
Feedback: General Refining Enchantments/Runes
NO NO NO! stop right there! Don't go past GO and don't collect your $200.00!
Don't look into the tooltip, don't continue working on this new system. Are you even paying attention to what players are posting? most if not all hate this new method. It's not more enjoyable as you claim in your original post it's quite the opposite. Most see it for what it really is, a new money making system for PW/Cryptic.
1. It costs AD to refine. Time to pull out the wallet and buy zen.
2. You need more inventory space to carry all kinds of rank runes/enchantments and the required catalysts. Queue the bags in zen market.
3. Still need wards to not lose higher end ranks. more zen/AD costs.
Stop it, just stop it. If you're going to charge AD, then we do not need the catalyst and/or wards to refine higher ranking stones.
Come to thank of it, just scrap this refining method altogether and leave the currently working method in place.
It's not broken, so don't "PW/Cryptic fix it!"
"PW/Cryptic fix it!" - 1. to rework a working and/or non-working system in order to make a new method to charge real life money. 2. To try and "fix" something broken or not, and still find a way to further making it worse.
To be more clear an addition: You can use ALL consumeable things from the bank out. Dyes, transmuting items, kits(for nodes), keys and so on.
Using gold to remove enchants is the only good change here. The rest you make NW be an empty server, is that what you want guys?
Danger. Sarcasm detected.
This game is comical,.... all appearance based, and what functionality exists is also being removed..just dont get it.
So I wanted to chime in to talk about a few of the specific issues being brought up.
First, I wanted to say that this is on the Preview shard specifically so that we can get lots of feedback, improve the system, and make sure it's hitting all of our goals. Some players have commented that the current system on Live is "fine" but we disagree - our data shows that many players are not engaging in the current system due to the frustration of using it. If the system was performing well and making everyone happy, we would not have invested all of the time and effort into improving it that we have. We're still looking at and discussing the system constantly, and one of the main areas of discussion is what it takes to Upgrade an item - meaning the AD Cost, Catalysts and Wards part of the system.
Second, we want to say "oops" for not having the Catalysts in the AD store when it went up to Preview. They will be in the build that should be going up tomorrow. The intent is that enough of these will be dropping in the world (from skill nodes and bosses, mostly) that you won't need or want to buy them from the AD store, but we want to have the option there to ensure that you'll always have access to them.
Next, I wanted to talk about bag space. One of the main goals of the new system is to reduce the bag space requirements of engaging in the Refining system. We don't think there will be a reason to carry around a bag full of Enchants/Runestones anymore - you'll have the ones you want slotted in your gear and companions, and you'll use extra ones as you get them to Refine your slotted Enchants. You won't have a full set of all 9 of the basic Enchants/Runes at multiple ranks, as there is no need to try to stack them up to smash them any longer.
Instead, you'll have a handful of Catalyst items in your bag. There are 4 of them for Enchants/Runestones, you will probably only be carrying 1 or 2 of them around at a time, unless you happen to have slotted Enchants ranging from ranks 1-10 in your gear. Most people will have the majority of their slotted Enchants around the same rank, meaning you'll need a handful of the Catalysts that make sense for you current and of Refinement progression. I know that for my character on Live, I have something like 16-20 slots taken up with Enchants and Runestones at pretty much any time. On our test servers, I don't have Enchants or Runestones in my bags at all any more.
Last comment for now - we put the AD cost on Upgrading the items because we removed the (much larger) AD cost required for Unslotting them. We still want AD to play a part in the Refinement/Enchantment process, but it was a big barrier to using the system when slotting an Enchantment was such a huge commitment due to the cost of removing it. We'd rather have smaller, up front costs for Upgrading than the current large recurring costs whenever you get a new item. Having to think "if I start using this sweet new weapon I got, I have to unslot my Enchant, ugh" was a situation we were really not happy with.
Again, we're still looking very closely at this system, so keep posting your feedback!
So, you just swapped where you pay?
Way to go. icyumakethebigbucks
Agreed, but the adding of runes/enchants in to "level" up the RP is a cumbersome process. Ideally it needs to be sped up somehow. Perhaps default to add all of the stack you are drag/dropping in?
Sweet, they are easy to get going forward.
Agreed. This was an attractive pro. I used to have ~18 slots dedicated to storing collected enchants. This will drop to just those i plan to level. The others i will throw into the RP furnaces.
The overall cost to rank from say 4 to 8 grinding them out appears to be close to removing an old one a few times. In reality on live if the sell price on the AH of the enchant you were removing was lower than the removal cost it would just get overwritten/destroyed. Often i wouldn't remove these and wouldn't ever have to experience this cost. This is now not avoidable.
I think this cost needs to be reduced as the cumulative costs over ranks makes this unpalatable. If anything increase the removal cost by a factor of about 5-10 to enable a reduction in rank up cost.
Last bit of feedback for me and my biggest bugbear:
Why does it cost more enchants to level up RPs for rank 7-9 than lower ranks? 6x R7s to make a R8? 1x R7 original being levelled, 4x R7s to gain the RP needed, 1 as a catalyst. This makes the cost to rank up astronomical. What is the justification for this?
I also see a lot of math on the forums but I don't even understand what I am doing in the new system to understand what everyone else is posting.
that's my 2 cent.
Clarification: I went to the preview tried upgrading an R4 to 5, put 3 more R4's in, it refined. However, I needed a catalyst??? to change to R5??? <-confused here.
Edit: Just read Amenar's last post on this thread, I'll try this system again with Catalyst hopefully the system won't remain confusing.
Also interesting. Whilst arguably true, I was quite happy with this system simply because it was avoidable. If the cost to unslot was higher than I was prepared to pay (I never unslotted) I could either, not bother slotting an item if I didn't want to lose the enchant or discard it with the item. Having an upfront cost, even if cheaper, is no longer avoidable without avoiding the entire enchant system. It shifts forward the participation decision point.
I think I must play very differently to a lot of people.
This is because we removed the compounding of the older system. Up to rank 4/5, you could easily find 4 of the matching lower rank gems to rank it up. After that point, Rank 6+ gems don't really drop in game, so you couldn't just "get" 4 Rank 7 gems to make a Rank 8. You had to get 4 Rank 4s to make a Rank 5. Then do that 3 more times to have 4 Rank 5s so you could make 1 Rank 6. Then do THAT whole process 3 more times so you could have 4 Rank 6s.
And each one of those steps came with an "Upgrade" step where you had a chance to fail - now you just have one Upgrade step, and just one chance to fail. (Well, 2 because one of the Catalysts for higher ranks of Enchants is a second, matching Enchantment. Now you can just throw in Rank 4s instead of needing to match them and rank them up, repeatedly, to be able to get them to Rank 7. All of those dozens of Upgrade steps and chances for failure have been removed.
While the old system made it feel like "I always need 4 Enchants" the reality was that you needed many, many more to be able to get to those 4 Enchants. This was simpler, but the new system takes far fewer total gems to be able to get to max rank, while also removing most of the chances of failure.
People weren't using it because it's actually quite time consuming(in this day and age, time is worth a lot) to farm all the enchants you need to fuse an R8 or higher. It was often simpler and quicker for many players to simply farm T2s for items to sell for AD, then exchange the AD for enchants from the people who had already put the effort into fusing the higher level enchants.
I strongly suspect that even if this system is implemented, people will still farm T2->acquire AD->buy high level enchants and maybe...maybe fuse the R8-9 themselves.
What people were not doing was looking at the fusing method and thinking, "I need four of these rank X enchants to fuse to next rank...maybe use a ward if the success % is low? Herpderp...too confusing, accidentally stuck finger in coffee grinder".
The problem with removing the catalyst is that without it, there is no risk to failure so if it is at 1% you can just try to refine all day until it succeeds.
Additionally, should you decide to transition this system to live...I would advise you strongly consider making a youtube video tutorial(narrated and subtitled) explaining it. Not as a "check it out on the forums" thing either since everyone know the forums is only frequented by at best a small fraction of the playerbase. Make it a mandatory popup, both on the launcher, the home screen and when someone opens the enchantment window for the first time after it's implemented.