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Comments
Like thieving could get drops from chests or stealing.
Fishing could get drops in the dungeon.
Parrying could be buffed.
Egg to ingot conversion could cost less so a person doing that method is getting similar rates for effort.
Paragons that get dropped on tamers could have a scaling drop rate depending on how long the paragon was fighting. Similar to the honor mechanic.
Players who put in the time to optimize their template and gear for maximum efficiency shouldn’t be artificially limited by players who aren’t willing to do the same. Yes, you pay the same sub and have the same opportunity to put in the same effort to maximize your characters… if you choose not to that’s fine, but you shouldn’t expect the same reward.
If you don't like the pile you can kill stuff in the rest of the dungeon.
I have seen no tweeks other than removing the pile. We had fun doing the pile, they should bring it back and lower the drop rates. A lot of players had fun there. At least we could kill things.
Our Sampires could target in the pile, I have no idea how they were doing it, I tried multiple templates on it.
This weekend also provides time for broadsword to consider the financial/economic tradeoffs. They'd be able to assess the before/after glorious potion sales, for instance.
One thing seems certain -- the demand for less grind, more spawn and more action seems like clear feedback from this. The start of this event seemed to prove that in spades.
Another thing seems certain -- the scripters are adapting faster than the average player. How many of those are EJ accounts, that are effectively taking away from the paying customers?
The discrepancy has been there since Deceit, that is merely stating a fact. People that work more efficiently or are willing to adapt are rewarded more. Again, a fact, that is how the treasures system has worked since Deceit (except now they added an additional way for people who struggle with Treasures events to get drops). Facts don't invalidate how you feel, they are just the reality of the situation.
During Hythloth many players played differently the first week of the event than they did later on. I saw little to no tamers on levels 3 and 4 at the beginning. They adapted and moved to more lucrative spaces as time progressed. However a tamer was still not pulling in 60-70 an hour (with potion) like a warrior in the same space was.
A lot of the anti-tamer mechanics in the current treasures events are due to how many tamers have played past content: squatting in a spot while invisible with the pet on guard. Now there are anti-squatting mechanics, anti invis mechanics and pets deal halved damage to paragons.
The side effect of the changes made for server stability was less dense spawn.
Despite what you and others may think, I don't think having servers crashing daily or unplayable lag is something they can just ignore for the 2 month duration of this event.
Home of the Pet Intensity Calculator, Pet Planner, Trainable Animal Bestiary, and other Tools, Guides, and Information.
There is no MMO player on the planet (regardless of game) who would say that the game's developers shouldn't fix those issues. But there's a way to do it without overly punishing players. I've done the event on 3 different servers. Of the 3, Atlantic was the worst, by far. Origin only really lagged because of the reapers, which prompted me to comment on it in gen chat.
It's hard to ignore the fact that this event, the dungeon & egg collecting, is a scripters paradise. Is everyone scripting the spam zone? Nope not at all... but those are the same people that were also not scripting on day 1 while getting great amounts of drops and having fun. The changes they made have 100% benefited scripters and been a detriment to all of those who choose not to. Same thing with the eggs which started being scripted like 3 days after it began in March. I didn't get on a soap box much about it because the rewards were purely decorative but now that they are worth turn-in points it's just one more avenue for bots to get easy money.
There were no buttons for me to press, so I have no plans to continue to monitor a game that doesn’t require interaction.
none of this nonsense happens in fel,
we blew up 3 Brittania ships in the process
AND we even stopped the house placement scriptors and placed house legitimately.
who’s idea was it to have this event in trammel?”
To return to the original purpose of this thread, I want to offer some feedback on the event as a whole. This feedback is both for the team for the current non-pile incarnation of the event and also for the players who read this and maybe can be persuaded to see the event a little differently than the last seven pages of Sturm und Drang suggest.
It’s going to be a long read. If the length of this bothers you then I suggest you leave the page and go play Ultima Online.
I’m going to speak about:
Rewards
This is a strong event for rewards. No doubt this is why people reacted so forcibly about the original drop rate potential of the pile. The Treasures of Ice event showed us that if the rewards aren’t super appealing there will be only so much time people devote to these experiences. Their novelty isn’t enough anymore: good rewards make for a good time.
As always the Book of Lore story with new art is my favorite reward. Someone earlier in this thread compared these events to one-off mobile game updates but through this lore you can see the larger connection to the game’s story. These books are such a steal at a drop per page.
I love the hell out of the decorative plinth. It’ll be the reward I claim the most of hands down. Decorative stones and marble counters are always popular items on vendors and these plinths with their slightly reduced footprint are excellent.
The mud doesn’t appeal to me, personally, but I know all the goblins on my shard are super excited about it! That they do the slippy thing is fun.
The three reward title deeds are really fun! I’m all about those titles and I foresee every rares dealer/museum owner wanting that collector of curiosities title.
Love that birdhouse to go with some of the parrots from Easter. That it’s made from the remains of a Treefellow is gruesome/a nice touch.
The Cloak of Light/Wing Armor of Light is, if I’m not mistaken, a fulfilled request from someone here on the forum. They were asking for its return and the dev team came through; thanks for that.
Everyone loves the Serpent’s Jawbone.
The Certificate of Valor gives me some pause. It’s a reuse of the starchart art, which is fine, but it did not appear in the original email newsletter. I assume it replaces the ribbon that was featured in the letter. Why was the ribbon dropped? That’s a really lovely piece of art that is not available to players and seems to be used sporadically by the EMs as lockdowns.
Holy cats I love the Ankh of Devotion. More virtue content is ALWAYS appreciated but it’s so damn useful! That’ll be locked down in basically every house till the end.
Solaria’s Secret Poisons returns. Anything that gives the earring slot a little use is always welcome!
I’m pretty intrigued by the silverbranch bow and silver tipped cyclone. The invasion bane bows don’t fire very fast and have disappointing specials. For an ABC archer I think that bow would be a huge help in the right circumstances.
I can’t speak about the apron too much as I don’t pvp and others have posted about its use already. Lots of pvp folks have posted about their displeasure about the event not being in Felucca; fine, that’s your prerogative. But getting items included in these events for just you all has to feel kinda nice, right? As a roleplayer that virtue ankh and the virtue candles made me feel a bit noticed by the team for this event. Let’s all be thankful that our niches are still part of the plan!
I don’t use whips and don’t play fencers or macers and so I truly can’t speak about whether those are good or bad. The only thing I can say, however, is that it's a weapon with seven mods. That’s pretty good!
The Grimoire of Nature 30% SDI Fey Slayer and Weald Codex 50% SDI spellbooks are too expensive. I like them and may take them even though I don’t need them. But that’s a steep cost. There’s a real bottleneck with magery that our team tries to fix with more SDI. These books have utterly killed the business of crafting spellbooks like the Scrapper. I both want people to have affordable 50% SDI books like how so many of us got them from the Invasions but I also want there to be a meaningful reason to have Inscription. That’s a discussion for later, though.
I have saved the two best items for last. The Serpent Skin Quiver and the Serpent Skin Wing Armor are excellent. SSI, luck, DI, and a little more anatomy for a cost that is doable for most people over the course of the event. These are the two items that are going to be super popular after the event ends, much like the Morphius Epaulets. Getting 45 HCI and 100 DI and even around 200 stamina is fairly cheap and easy. Getting to 60 SSI is not cheap. I’m telling all the returning players in my alliance to not sleep on these.
Location
We’ve had Deceit, Ice, Fire, and Hythloth for these events. And Tokuno, too, of course but that was a bit different. This dungeon presents significant challenges that the others did not have. Fewer choke points, more wide open spaces, and yes, a smaller spawn. I think we were going to get to Destard eventually for these events cause how many dungeons can these things really happen in? Or a better question: when will we start repeating locations? People are upset about the wide open space not being full of spawn, but would they be madder if this was happening in Wind with the terrible, terrible geography, narrow tunnels, and relatively small footprint? I like the Treasures events tremendously, but I worry that the team is boxing themselves in on them always being a dungeon.
Should the event be in Felucca? Sure, just turn off the champion spawn. Let the dungeon spawn tagged monsters like it does in Trammel. If PVPers want to compete for a less cramped space they can do so without the added bonus of champion spawn density. There’s a pretty toxic strain of thought on these forums that “Trammel players shouldn’t comment on PVP/Felucca issues” as if the game was completely bifurcated. Both facets are intermingled and these problems don’t exist in a complete vacuum.
One final thought in this section about ‘the pile.’ Far be it from me to trash a beautiful, spontaneous moment of emergent gameplay but it was clear that the pile was causing server issues. It got fixed during the week after Atlantic was crashing. If the pile went into the weekend where more people across the game could have done it on their servers I think we’d have seen even bigger issues. Yes, we all saw the promised land of the pile and got told we had to go back into the desert; it sucks. Let’s move on.
Mobs
Damn that paragon shadow wyrm is mean, eh? I can handle basically everything else on my archer or my dragoon as bushido and healing are still incredibly useful defense abilities. Time, spacing, slayers, and the right weapon resists make all the difference; until the wyrm hits you with a dump truck of necro spells. That para greater dragon is no slouch, either, with that hard-hitting dragon breath hit, but that can be mitigated. Ultimately, though, I actually think the paragons are a step down in difficulty compared to Hythloth. I’m sure others will disagree here, but I measure this in the utter carnage a para balron could inflict in a narrow tunnel versus the wide open space of Destard. You can escape things pretty well in Destard if you know your way around.
Eggs
Turning eggs in for ingots! Genius! I cannot overstate how good of an idea this is. I am one of these people who think that content in the game should be approachable by every play style. Not every build will be the build for every event, mind you, but there are people who only play thieves, only play crafters, only play tamers, only play janked up characters from the late 1990s that are still only about 40.1 in every skill. They’re not going to min-max these events but they should be included. If I want to RP my treasure hunter mage as a guy out in the wilderness finding these eggs for the Curio Collector so as to earn tangible rewards, then that makes me a hell of a lot happier than being forced into the same old archer/sampire/dragoon strategy for these events. Beyond that, it just gives us some options. I get burnt out on grinding these events in a couple of weeks because I feel compelled to get as many items as I can at the start. Giving us a calmer method of earning the rewards after we get a little burnt out on grinding is super, super welcome.
I would strongly, strongly suggest this design mechanic carry on into other Treasures events somehow.
Lessons for the next:
This is a much bigger event than the previous Treasures events but I honestly believe it’s the best one yet. I think the deco rewards are excellent, the weapons are good, the titles are great, and the gear rewards are great. There are downsides to the event, sure. The pile gave people an incorrect idea of what the event could be, but I’m sorry I believe most of the complaints people have had are borne out of greed. We all want an insane drop rate for minimal effort; it’s just not going to happen. For reasons both technical and philosophical the pile didn’t work. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is a much bigger event when previously a lot of the complaints were “these events are getting too samey! You’re wasting time on NL and not doing anything new!” We got really interesting new rewards, new mechanics to get rewards, challenging new foes to fight, and more.
For our team my advice would be the following:
I would, personally, like to see more spawn in Destard. But as I mentioned earlier, on a non-potion using ABC archer I can get about 18-20 drops in an hour, not even in my luck hour. This is in line with what my dragoon and archer could also do in Hythloth. I don’t really know if that’s on the high-end of what players can do or not but if the team chooses not to increase the spawn then we still have eggs we can gather. I’m personally okay with that.Consider the eventual bottleneck that only having these in dungeons is going to produce. Part of the fun of these events is rediscovering our old dungeons. That will eventually run out.
Keep including items like the quiver/wing armor which reduces the cost of making a fully realized, and competitive character. They and the talisman don’t replace the cameo; that’s great. But they will help more people get useful characters built cheaply; that’s wonderful.
Keep including items like the ankh and lore book which tie the event to the game’s greater narrative. Ultima’s lore is rich and deep. Don’t assume people don’t want to read or don’t want to experience the story. I would love to see an even greater connection to lore in these events.
Keep including mechanisms like the egg turn-in to bring a greater diversity of characters into new content. Everyone can man a cannon on a high seas ship. Everyone can sit at the tavern and roleplay. Everyone can re-experience the game’s map looking for eggs. Not everyone can PVP. Not everyone can min-max a sampire.
About the bow and quiver.
The 2 best quivers we have:
I agree with what you said for an ABC Archer.
The Serpent skin is quite good.
The SSI and a little damage increase are nice. it has luck on a cloak slot.
If you are building a basic archer from scratch it is a nice Quiver.
For my Archers:
I have an Archer tamer and an Archer bard .that wear Despicable.
The Archer/ Bard has 804 points 4 x 120 bard Chiv, Arch, Tact
No Anatomy.
So the new quiver is not an option for him. It would just give SSI and luck.
The Tamer/Bard has Anatomy.
So to serpent skin is an option. I would decrease Anat by 5 and increase Archery by 5.
He also uses the +5 dex, so I would have to either lose str or intel or get more dex on my suit.
He also uses the HCI so I would have to use the ear rings with HCI.
If he switches he would have less str or intel, have 5 more SSI and have 125 luck.
So it would cost me some gold to upgrade his suit by 5 dex.
He is already at 60 SSI with the town buff.
I do have an archer that is put together from soulstones. He has Arch, Tact, Anat, SS, Necro, chiv focus.
I did take him to another shard and did a Shrine Battle with him. I was hoping Animate Dead would help distract foes, but the dead just walked around, they dont work at shrine battles.
I would Have to add Bushido to him and remove some things. He is just using a basic quiver so the new one would be good for him. Except he can not travel with it... So would be dumb for me to build him around shard bound items. He is my traveling Archer. So he will not get one. Kinda bummer since I wasted time building him in my head.
The Weapons:
The Bow
It is a Yumi so it needs Bushido, to do double shot. None of mine have that.
But an ABC archer does, Fast speed and has Double Shot.
It does Fire damage.
I would guess most players imbue their weapons. But is is better than the runed driftwood bow IMO. It has Mana leech.
But it also has Life Leech and no stamina leech. So IMO archers should not be getting hit and if you do with this bow your stamina is going to drop. So you swing slower.
It does have bane so it could be good for peerless groups where you just stand and shoot.
Other than the bane you could imbue better.
I do use Bane bows on Lighthouse on toons that I just set to shoot. Also use them to kill Crazed Mage because I also just set them to shoot while I control other toon.
The Cyclone
Same setup as the bow. No AI.
Same description.
For bows and throwing weapons, I imbue those to fit the stats of the specific character.
I could not use either of these to full benefit.
But if you are making a new toon you could build around them.
The Whips.
The have more stats than you can imbue on.
My basic whip has DI, HML, HSL,HLL Then I can add 1 thing. HLD is a good choice.
Then you have the bonus hit fire area and hit harm.
They are 100% physical damage so they would make a very nice general use whip.
Whip is 1 hand with Whirlwind.
IMO the whips are the best designed of the weapons.
I would like to get a set of those for 300 points.
So to sum up the weapons in my opinion The Cyclone and Yumi are good for a target that you can stand and shoot at. Depending on target resist, usually AI is better. Bane is nice for high HP targets to finish them off.
If the distance weapons had the stats of the whips, they would be spectacular! But the devs are stingy with items.
The whips are well designed to make a general purpose 1 handed WW weapon.
Glad this lasts a long time. I need a lot of points.
why would ANYONE hunt in fel destard where there is even a chance of being PKed if there was no champ spawn??
were you not here for the hythloth event? No champ spawn in fel, no reason to goto fel dungeon. Dungeon did not get visited. There was sometimes 1 guy on Atlantic there (N1ghtmare).
You’re 100% example of part of the problem. This event has been a disaster because someone somewhere up the line has listened to someone like you. Give yourself a pat on the back for job well done”
Want an easy test? Do like I did, cast stone wall between the bot pile and the spawn and watch how the mobs are perfectly safe with nobody actually running through my walls to go kill the target but as soon as the wall drops; boom the target is dead within .01 seconds.
I think the bots have had enough of a leg up on people that actually want to play so it is now time to open up Fel dungeon.
Others who want to complain about Fel being too easy to get drops from the spawn (likely the same ppl who complained about drops being too easy day 1) do not need to go to Fel if they think it's too easy. Those people are free to stay in the safety of the Tram scripter sanctuary and loop the AI/Target Hostile macro in EC.
"So everyone can move their afk char on the altar on tram and get constant supply of 120 powerscrolls?"
Trammel players "need not" comment on Fel if they don't play in Fel. What is so "toxic" about this?
Well, sure, you can ask Trammel players to give Toxic comments about how Fel should be played, even if its none of their business since they don't play there.
Calling all Trammel players, please proceed to talk about Fel.
ESRB warning: Some Blood. LOTS of Alcohol. Some Violence. LOTS of Bugs
P.S- Tram player so I have no feedback on Fel haha
The difference here is that you are asking for something that has never been done before for these events (allow PS in Tram) which we know won't happen and trying to leverage that against my request (and many others) to just turn on Fel which is something that has been done for almost every single treasure event. Ultimately, I'm just asking for the ability to play the event while taking a risk of being pk'ed on top of the paragons that will not has the bot piles to quickly kill. The reward for that risk is PS.
One is realistic and the other is not.
Someone lives in Felucca, but that's not good enough: are they allowed to comment?
Someone runs a thief in VvV to farm the virtue and vice paintings: are they allowed to comment?
Someone farms powerscrolls in Felucca on a shard many of y'all consider dead: are they allowed to comment?
Someone began the game in 1998, but they've left and returned a bunch of times: are they allowed to comment?
Someone gathers resources in Felucca but as reds aren't out roaming around for lumberjacks: are they allowed to comment?
Does a person have to be one of the couple dozen PVPers on Atlantic to qualify for "speaking about Felucca" privileges? How much PVP is the right amount for you?
Turn this around a bit. You say 90% of the game is in Trammel. Are you partaking in literally every aspect of the game in Trammel so as to qualify to speak about its gameplay mechanics? No, because that'd be silly.
Thank you, next.
I was killing stuff for about 20min or so and was able to get 4 drops (admittedly this could be higher if I had more than just a mage on Origin) and there were not any bot / script piles setup at this point. I was looking to do an hour just to compare drop rates without a bot / script pile present but my time was cut short because there was a paragon shadow wyrm / weald protector / crystal lattice floating around which I have no chance at solo'ing so I just packed it up and decided to try to grab eggs. For the next 40minutes I went egg hunting and I was able to pickup 150 eggs by casually recalling around (no real rush). It was pretty laid back and easy but terribly boring... I also did not like needing to have all the eggs in my main pack and targeting each one doing it one at a time.
My takeaway from a very short sample size:
It's going to be tough sledding for anyone not botting/scripting on ATL because it's completely different than Origin is right now. There is the obvious botter piles auto killing everything so even 4 drops in 20min is tough for me with any of my chars (I use CC) but the bots are also running rails and picking up majority of the eggs... there is no way I can pickup more than maybe 20 eggs on ATL in 40min (and that is if I'm lucky). No matter how you slice it, ATL needs some sort of fix.
For a shard that isn't ATL things seem backwards with the current dungeon drop rate versus drop rate using eggs. Admittedly my setup was optimized (assuming sampire would be best) for the dungeon so I might have been able to get more drops in Destard BUT that also kind of proves my point even further. I need an optimized build with fully built suit/ slayers / skills etc to pull let's say 20 or so drops an hour in Destard. I'll even go as far as to say 25-30 drops. I was able to pull 15 drops in about 40min which I could have also optimized if we take that approach. So with a build that could literally be a new char with 100% LRC and 75magery (no other skill needed) just casually recalling around, I would be around 200-250 eggs an hour aka 20-25 drops. That seems very lopsided and like the risk vs reward relationship is broken.
Don't judge my UI. I literally just created a character, bought a horse, and ran two spots on the route I've posted many times.
keven2002 said:
oh, and now you beat me to that farm, hehehe!
I stop my egg gathering so you get a chance at the whole spawn