Feedback after playing 3 weekends

quickblade

I spent the first weekend mostly grinding my character, second weekend I made a guild from scratch and recruited numbers of players and spent time doing content more in depth, this last weekend was my third weekend (couldn't play first one) the shard was starting to hit the top gear by the end of it, and our guild was doing all the high-end content available so far.

I played a mage tamer bard and focused on the PvM aspect mostly. I am more of a pvper by nature but I do not dislike pvm when it involes fun mechanics.

Our guild are currently sitting at 30k guild experience out of 102k to reach guild level 2, despite the fact we couldn't queue for dungeon outpost due to numbers of groups restriction and also because of the champion spawns respwns restrictions.

PvM : 

1. Pets : some pets might need adjusment stats-wise, emberwing requiring  lure+ book of knowledge could get some +hit points love , ossein ram are good tanks and lack a bit of dps but they feel a bit overtuned, I am not sure what the ideal nerf could be.. maybe 2 --> 3 slots, as long as there is a good ridable 2 slots pet to come.

Cu-sidhe pet feels a bit underwhelming, making him canine pack instinct maybe could be great.

2. Bosses : I loved the titanweave spider boss mechanics, really cool  we need more of this. We need bosses with multiple combat phases : at 50% health, the boss introduce a mechanic, at 25% a new harder mechanic, bring that new mmo feeling in UO.

3. Quests & overland : daily quests feel very repetitive quickly as they always ask you the same objectives, I feel like all daily boards should at least offer quests for all the cities randomly, I understand the roleplay aspect of offering you quests for the city that you chose your path to, but something could be done here im sure.

4. Gear and character stats :  I gotta say I loved the slow sense of progression gear-wise coming from the crafters & congiarium system. Assuming there is going to be a ton more players at the release this might need to be slowed down honestly because I wouldn't want everyone dropping vanquishing weapons by the first weekend. 

Most bosses drop gear with special names of the same kind, would love to see maybe these pieces part of a set that offers extra buffs maybe, this would really make these items sought after.

Bosses also drop some artifacts that feels underwhelming as they do not scale like other items from the congiarium, I'm thinking of the glacial signet from icemancer exemple, why some artifacts do not scale as the congiarium raise up ? Make them scalable or make them part of a future set ( sets of 2 pieces, sets of 3 pieces etc )

PvP : 

1. Dungeon outposts : I really like the idea even tho I have no clue of the mechanics inside since we haven't been able to get a queue to pop with 3 groups queuing

Apparantly on beta it takes 4 or 5 groups minimum of 2 to start a dungeon outpost, this really needs to be reduced to 2 groups minimum if the queue finds no more groups after 2 minutes.

If the dungeon outpost is meant to be a 3 way fight for design reasons, well 3 groups minimum then, but not 4 or 5. Even prime time atlantic I believe would be rare to have 5 or 6 different groups of enemies online.

I could see this being used by players to create tournaments or just have a fair fights against your arch-enemies, where everyone stands equal. 

Will probably input more whenever I get a chance to test this

2. champion spawns : when a champion spawn is finished, it need to reset a new one within the next 15 minutes, not wait the full timer of 3 hours.

quickblade

I forgot ton of stuff while editing accidently erased everything I had drafted, so I will be adding more feedback to this thread soon

Pawain

@quickblade ; The Drops drop with the current shard armor level.  I got an invulnerable Arctic chest.
That name will mean somethin special.

They made it very easy for a  new player to jump right in.  As we saw, we could complete the quests with our level 0 armor. The players who join get the shard level armor pieces from the quests.

The boss mechanics match UO.  A player from UO can come into the game and be full skilled with full armor and stats in a week.  They know what the event bosses are, they are permanent in NL.

I was more fun starting over and building a template then I thought it would be.

The Ram is a defensive pet. I do not think they are OP, but they are very good if you know how to use them.  I think we have good low level pets, good mid level pets, good rare pets.
There are Undead haters who want to nerf the Ram. 

Kel

Pawain said:

@ quickblade  The Drops drop with the current shard armor level.  I got an invulnerable Arctic chest.
That name will mean somethin special.

They made it very easy for a  new player to jump right in.  As we saw, we could complete the quests with our level 0 armor. The players who join get the shard level armor pieces from the quests.

I think the main problem here is that, this past weekend, instead of spending a day or so farming for vanq/invul gear, which I have yet to get a full set of or perfect weapons, I could have hopped on a EJ account and spedrun the questline and had full invul gear from the "class" questline.

Yes it catches you up, but then there's no real progression path for base gear once you've finished. You've already got the best stuff. I think the thing to consider is where is the line between a good catch up mechanic and something that just invalidates a large progression path. 

A tier down from current tier dropping from quests? That makes sense. You're strong, but not too strong. There's still a reason to buy from players or kill mobs yourself for the best gear.

Pawain said:
The Ram is a defensive pet. I do not think they are OP, but they are very good if you know how to use them.  I think we have good low level pets, good mid level pets, good rare pets.
There are Undead haters who want to nerf the Ram. 

As someone who has rams, well... our entire guild has rams at this point. I think they're overtuned. As a warrior tamer with those on guard things get a bit silly. I take no damage, they take no damage, we both deal a ton of damage. Compared to the same setup with drakes (another 2 slotter by the way), I'd say it was in the range of 2x improvement.

I don't want to go as far as saying the rams trivialized the content, but healing is more of an afterthought now.

Victim_Of_Siege

Kel said:

Pawain said:

@ quickblade  The Drops drop with the current shard armor level.  I got an invulnerable Arctic chest.
That name will mean somethin special.

They made it very easy for a  new player to jump right in.  As we saw, we could complete the quests with our level 0 armor. The players who join get the shard level armor pieces from the quests.

I think the main problem here is that, this past weekend, instead of spending a day or so farming for vanq/invul gear, which I have yet to get a full set of or perfect weapons, I could have hopped on a EJ account and spedrun the questline and had full invul gear from the "class" questline.

Yes it catches you up, but then there's no real progression path for base gear once you've finished. You've already got the best stuff. I think the thing to consider is where is the line between a good catch up mechanic and something that just invalidates a large progression path. 

A tier down from current tier dropping from quests? That makes sense. You're strong, but not too strong. There's still a reason to buy from players or kill mobs yourself for the best gear.

The Thing with the gear you get from completing your story line quest is, it cannot be enhanced. so you Have to farm that Perfect weapon to add enhancements to it. (such as slayer) There were no armor enhancements at the end of the weekend for me to test this, but my suspicion is the armor will not be enhancable either, so you will have to farm for the Perfect armor to enchance it as well. Then you have Artifact drops that will be sought after. There will be good reason to farm drops, if for no other reason than having a full invulnerable suit in the type you prefer. 

Garret

I'v done divergent path like in 10 hrs by just beating Ettins and got like 6 full different sets of invul armor and like 5-6 good vanquish weapons, so problem is not with gear itself, at now it is pretty easy to get, but problem is that we have no content to use it for instead of pvp, we beat all contend in guarding/might  gear and invul/vanq gear is not feeling like real improvement so my guess even if progression will be locked like 4 month per phase even then gear will be a bit irrelevant without any higher difficulty content.

manbearpig

I really don't feel the the new server those who want to play it have fun but I really don't think it's was needed and I really don't think it's going to make the game better. I think it was a complete waste of time and resources where they could have done something else. Is that going to bring in millions of people or even hundreds of thousands. They should have done something that was going to bring in a huge number of players not this

Garret

manbearpig said:

I really don't feel the the new server those who want to play it have fun but I really don't think it's was needed and I really don't think it's going to make the game better. I think it was a complete waste of time and resources where they could have done something else. Is that going to bring in millions of people or even hundreds of thousands. They should have done something that was going to bring in a huge number of players not this

You can live in the past and continue to lament, or you can adequately perceive the situation that the developers want to concentrate on NL, do you understand? nothing can be changed, you can only help test everything and while the developers listen to us in the context of NL development, get the long-awaited improvements for the client and possibly for the retail version of the game through feedback and suggestions for improvements.

quickblade

Pawain said:

@ quickblade  The Drops drop with the current shard armor level.  I got an invulnerable Arctic chest.
That name will mean somethin special.

Not all items scale with the shard level : robes, quivers, cloaks, totems and maybe some off-hands artifacts drops don't seem to scale with congiarium.
Give them some cool buffs like :
-the Flea Infested Drape cloak artifact drop from Piper champion spawn in despise is nice with the fleas animation but it give very little stats, maybe make the cloak do a small aoe damage around you during the fleas animation nothing crazy maybe just 15-20/sec for 2 sec physical dmg before resistances . This animation happen very rarely like every 30 seconds so it wouldnt be game changing but enought to want to farm the cloak.
-If serpent coil bracelet doesnt scale up in stats (which i think it doesn't) make it part of some set of 2-3 pieces or make an activate button and it turns 40% of your damage from physical to poison, so if you are running a 100% physical weapon, it becomes 60% phys and 40% poison with the bracelet activated (can toggle on/off activate)
-Totems are not that good other than offering little stats, make them do an effect when double clicked.
-Web woven quiver doesnt scale, make it throw a web when shooting archery with a 20sec cooldown, it immobilizes the target for 3sec (paralized target is still able to perform all actions and maybe 1 sec duration in pvp). 
- Reagents belt suggestion : have an option when one-clicking to auto-refill reagent, like quivers have auto-refill ammo
-Winter's light lantern could be also part of set and maybe give it nightsight to the wearer