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DaemionMoadrin

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  1. I tried to do the new flashpoint on my healer, with Rass as dps companion. Let me just say this... it took forever to progress because killing trash took too long. The bosses on the other hand were easy mode, I really didn't have to do much than run in circles, keep comp alive and a dot on the boss. Bask Sunn never used an uppercut, he barely scratched me as I kited him around in circles while Rass shot him. On the 3rd ship I fell into the trap and landed next to the tentacles which didn't attack me (just outside aggro range). Took the elevator up, defeated the guards there and then... nothing. Large empty room, exit still locked down with a force field. I assume the boss would have spawned there? Well, he never did for me and I really didn't feel like doing all this running and fighting again. At least I got Goldie...
  2. That's great... ... did you fix the bug where the Ranked queue isn't canceled when you get a GSF pop? I've had it happen quite a few times that I was in the middle of a GSF match when Ranked popped up... and GSF being what it is, it wasn't possible to accept it. I mean, there are workarounds to get the mouse pointer back in GSF but those take time.
  3. Well, we all know that BioWare will implement this anyway no matter what we say. Has anyone considered what this means longterm? NiM and TR have always been gated activities (as they should be) but you could obtain the necessary requirements before doing them. If those augments go live, then after a while they will become a requirement to join a team for either activitiy. This will prevent new players from joining in and ultimatively kill both game modes. I mean, we won't see those effects until May 2021 because the grind is insane... P.S. I love the fact that all NiM ops except Dxun only drop 7 mats for 8 players. Whoever came up with that is a brilliant sadist. ^^
  4. You do realize you need to play both modes, correct? How many TR players also do NiM raids?
  5. Seriously though, what's the point of this? The people who play TR and NiM are minorities and there's usually very little overlap between both. What's your goal here? Mix them up? Add people who are unable to complete NiM or win team ranked to the groups? I see no reason why this would work. At all. The material requirements are insane, as usual. But, for the sake of argument, let's assume someone actually farmed all those materials and is now using l33t augments. How do you balance that? What do you do if someone 'overgeared' plays unranked warzones now? The people there have no real chance to catch up. And you know what happens once those augments start to become more common? People will ask for them as a requirement for difficult content. Because you can never assume skill in PUGs, so you at least want equipment on your side. I noticed you haven't posted the actual stats of the augments. For all his hassle to be worth it they need to be OP. But if they are OP, then balance breaks down... or you increase bolster in warzones, making the new augments irrelevant again. As I see it, you can't win with this. All you do is that the player base loses. Is this your intention?
  6. I don't mind them nerfing the Gathering Force set bonus ... as long as they don't touch Gathering Storm.
  7. That's true. You would have to add the same cap to player trade though, otherwise it would just kill GTN, turn the trade channel into a constant stream of advertisements and change nothing regarding the economy. TrixxieTriss and Rolodome made some very good points, too. Honestly, I don't see BioWare do more than superficial fixes. It's not like this is unplayable or anything. Quite the opposite actually, I've been spending more time with some alts that are more fun again thanks to the new mechanics from their gear. I could muddle through personally but I'm concerned about the future of this game. The rampant inflation makes it difficult for new players to buy anything and f2p/pref players have a cap. At some point they'll be unable to even buy stims if the prices continue to skyrocket.
  8. My definition of alt friendly would be: I can play whatever char I want and still make progress towards the gear of another alt. That's something Ossus only allowed until you reached the weekly limit and afterwards you had to play another char.
  9. Players always want something and if it's just new content. It's not the player's job to balance the game, that's what the devs are for.
  10. No, really? Please tell me more. I might not have noticed in the decades of gaming in UO, EQ, AO, DAoC, LA2 and so on. This is about balance. How do you think this is going to work out longterm? Oh hey, you might not have read it the past several times I wrote it: This isn't about me. I'm just fine, thank you very much. Yeah? I thought there's always grind in an MMO? How about you do that again and compare results? Would you still make that much money? Despite what you may believe this forum and even this thread aren't specifically created for you. Feel free to skip anything I write in the future and simply ignore anything you don't like. It's a free world. I didn't ask for help and I certainly didn't ask for advice. What I did was point out issues and possible solutions, or at least what consequences we see from certain design decisions. Your input about earning credits wasn't asked for at all. But hey, thanks for the effort. Nope. You can't fix inflation with rising costs. What that does is hinder all casual players while amazing people like yourself simply grind for two weeks, shrug and move on. Do you think the economy is fixed now that you're a billionaire? Rising costs, credit sinks, always hurt the average players first. It's like in real life. The poor suffer and the rich don't care. (Well, in game terms suffer means putting additional time into grinding just to stay solvent but hey.) Money is meant to be spent. It's its only purpose. It's an universal medium of exchange. In a properly working economy the vast amount of money is always moving. Once people start to hoard money the system shows the first cracks because now these people have a disappropriate influence on pricing. Seismic Grenades were worth less than 3k, now you can sell them for 10k+. Did they get any better or more rare? Nope. It's just that some people don't care and pay nearly any price because they can afford it thanks to their hoarded money. That's the reason why you could make 2 billions in 2 weeks. Not because the game gave you the opportunity but because some rich players were impatient and didn't care that they overpaid. And everyone else simply has to follow along because they don't get a say about the price. That's the issue and that's what needs to be fixed. And you won't fix it by making everything else expensive, too. Or by decreasing income. Because guess what? That doesn't affect the hoarded money, not really. What's a few millions to a billionaire? If you really want to remove inflation completely you have to do what real life economies do in such a case: They introduce a new currency. That resets everything. BioWare will never do that though because then all the rich players will be upset, even if they get to convert their credits.
  11. @Tsillah: And where did that super alt friendly Ossus gear leave you? Every char that was using the parts in legacy shells suddenly had no set bonus. Ossus wasn't alt friendly because there was a set limit on how many crystals you could earn per character per week. Which means you had to bring every single alt to Ossus to farm the same boring crap and once you reached the limit you had to switch characters. Don't get me started on the 258 weapons or crafting the gear... You're correct about the speed of gearing though. Even casual players can have 3-4 chars fully geared by now. Well. At 306. Thanks to the many random parts most people run around with the wrong stats which is super fun in PUGs. @SoontirMorillo: Making money is so easy. Simply go into the woods, hunt some deer and then sell steaks. Premium cuts, organic, certified origin... you'll be rich within days! And if you need more money, simply do it again and again. Hey, everyone should do that! What could possibly go wrong? So yeah, making money is not the issue. I am talking about balancing the ingame economy and I specifically wrote this in my post: Of course you can grind, of course you can do repetitive tasks to get money. That's not the issue at all. The issue is that earning money through "play as you want" can't keep up with the expenses. Which means players have to go and do something else to earn money. And that brings us to the next issue... how efficient do you think harvesting nodes will be if everyone does it? Not only will prices fall, people will spend way more time gathering the same amount of resources because of the competition and eventually it will be not profitable anymore. Aside from being a boring task in a game, which you usually play to have fun. The rest of your so called argument boils down to "I have billions of credits, the economy is fine." Which is just as idiotic as "This winter is very cold, there is no climate change." Unless you learn some manners when talking to others I'm done with you. Keep your aggression in check and don't assume you know me. Also, I'm super happy about the cherry picking. It's like I just presented one single opinion and all the rest of the post was just ... packaging or something. Maybe next time I should use colors and pictures or perhaps make a video...
  12. Dear BioWare, this isn't going to be a very nice and supportive post so to be fair I have to say that overall Onslaught is a good change compared to Ossus before it. The story is decent, the planets are great and the new FP and ops look like a lot of work went into them. BUT A lot of things still need to be fixed before we can say this was a success. Gearing The best part about the new system is that everything is legacy bound. Ossus was very alt unfriendly and even the Command System before that only allowed us to exchange armor between alts. Unfortunately most gear sets are ... let's be nice and say they are less useful and special, alright? A set bonus that is only active when you're below 50% health or one centered on Force Slow? Uh. Okay. Sure. Ran out of ideas, didn't you? The names and descriptions of the gear and Tacticals clearly show that the devs were making them for the Imperial side of things. They didn't even bother adjusting the names for Republic/Jedi sensibilities. Minor quibble that, but it's something I noticed. It is also apparent that almost no dev plays tank or healer, otherwise we would have gotten proper sets for them. As sage or sorc you're basically stuck with Revitalized Mystic which isn't even half as good as the old set bonus. Not to mention that the patch notes say it has 2% Alacrity Bonus when ingame it is 2% Mastery. Same for The Victor (2% Shield vs. 2% Mastery) and probably a few others. I have yet to find a good set for PT/Vanguard tanks who really deserve some love by now. You know, like the DPS who have gotten some really really nice stuff that elevates their damage output beyond anything we saw before. And I don't just mean the actual, impressive numbers, I mean in proportion. Speaking of descriptions, are you for real? "Refunds some Force", "Heals more", "Deals energy damage", "Does more damage"... honestly? How about some actual numbers? This is like asking a car dealer about the specs of a car and only getting "It's faster. Consumes less fuel. Has more power" as response. No one sane would buy that without getting some actual information but we are supposed to gamble on vague descriptions? Before the last patch you could at least buy a Tactical, test drive it for <2h and return it. Now you can't return gear at all. You buy it, you keep it. Which is fun for people who make mistakes. Even worse, the entire system is too random. Not only do we have large variations in the gear rating when it comes to drops (and may I just say how utterly stupid the decision was to use the average gear rating of the group to determine what drops? Seriously, after several server merges one would assume that grouping should be easier and more friendly towards more casual players but I guess we add some additional hurdles and see what happens...) we also get like 12 different types of each single armoring, hilt, barrel, mod and enhancement. Plus the tons of unmoddable gear. There is no reason why someone with a gear rating of 306 should get any drops below that. None whatsoever. That stuff is trash at this point. My main is a Seer Sage. When the loot discipline was set to "current spec" or "Seer", I got dozens of Accuracy items. No kidding, one page of my legacy cargo was filled with yellow stuff just from that. And don't think I could easily get a Critical or Alacrity enhancement from the vendor. Haha nope. First he sold me three Accuracy enhancements before giving me what I actually wanted. Awesome. Getting to 306 is not too bad and you basically only have to do it once, afterwards you can instantly gear all your alts in 306 gear as they hit level 75. BUT Even assuming you find a workable set bonus/tactical solution for your character you're going to need 21.000 Tech Fragments at the very minimum just to get the shells and Tactical item. (Getting more than 6 pieces of a set is pointless, better to add one piece of Augmented Champion which drops so often I can outfit all my companions with it by now.) Oh, and probably ~10 million credits to buy it, switch mods/enhancements etc. around and then you haven't even started with the Amplifiers yet. Or augments. If you have a dozen alts then you can easily spend 200-300 million credits just to get them all into a decent outfit. Yes, you can save money because you can share the gear between alts but between my 13 chars I still need 12 complete sets. My Commando is DPS, my Merc is healer... doesn't work out. But that's my problem. This leads us to... The Economy So Onslaught is designed to siphon credits out of the economy because people were hoarding and prices for everything were astronomical. Okay. As usual BioWare went too far and adjusted their game for people who are rich. Income was decreased and several new credit sinks were added. If you play normally, doing what you want (let's say some flashpoints, a few warzones, maybe an operation and some GSF) you do not earn enough credits to offset your expenses. In the time you get 3000 Tech Fragments you do not earn 1 million credits unless you specifically farm money or earn it another way (for example through selling CM items or crafting). I do not want to get into a lecture here but do you know who gets hit the most with these changes? The players who never had much money. The really rich don't care. Tech Fragments are a currency, too. One with a very harsh limit. Your reasoning for that should copy over to credits, too. If people had a cap of 50 million credits per character and 100 million for the legacy cargo, then in combination with the character cap you could have prevented the worst excesses of hoarding. Of course, now it's far too late to introduce these changes. What you should do instead is make credits irrelevant by not using them as currency for anything important. This could be done easily by introducing an actual second currency (like Tech Fragments) but this would also mean players need to able to exchange those freely. I'm not saying I'm for or against such a change, just that something like that would be necessary if you really wanted to combat inflation. Since I've been taking about expensive endeavours already, let's not forget to mention Crafting So first things first: How dare you! Was there a reason why you had to nerf the old 238/242 augments? We had to farm rare materials for those, it was actually quite difficult to craft enough for all characters and then you simply nerf them? Not only did that invalidate our efforts, it screwed over all our characters who suddenly lacked the necessary tertiary stats to function properly. You know what happens to a healer who can't make the 1.3s GCD anymore? So yeah, thanks for that. This heavy handed approach to force players to upgrade to the new augments aside, there was no reason to add a completely new system. You should have kept the old one, just with Tier 11 materials. This craft tons of greens to craft many blues to craft a few purples nonsense is just a time and credit sink. It's not fun, it's not engaging and combined with the buggy UI that isn't updating it's just a huge mess. Crafting changes were announced already but from what I've seen it's not enough. Yes, numbers got reduced but there's no significant difference when compared to the old system. So instead of 500 items I only have to craft 420? Yay... You tried to make crafting relevant for endgame gear with Ossus but dropped the ball when it came to the material requirements. Now we're back to consumables and augments, nothing else is worth crafting except maybe for a few Tacticals... if you can get the schematic. Level Lock / Bolster / Veteran's Edge Speaking of dropping the ball... what the hell, Bioware? Leaving aside the very buggy implementation of your "bolster", why are we progressing backwards with the new gear and levels? It's unacceptable that improving your characters leaves them weaker in almost all content. My Sage for example went from 149k HP to 139k HP after gaining 5 levels and massive amounts of stats through the new gear. And that's 139k after manually triggering the broken "bolster" which usually leaves your lvl75/306 char with 107k HP. Same is true for the other primary stats, which are also hard capped. Oh, but that isn't all. Those pricey augments we somehow acquired? Almost completely useless in all level locked content. You get the Critical/Alacrity/Accuracy/Shield/Absorb but nothing else. Same is true for Mastery/Power procs from relics and basically all stims and adrenals that affect primary stats. (BioWare, do you hate crafters?) Oh, and of course the new and precious gear sets with their 2% Mastery/Endurance do nothing. The Entertainer set? Does nothing. All the new stuff is only really working in PvP and in the new areas. And in PvP you get an actual, working bolster so it doesn't matter much there either. Great job, BioWare. For now we're better off using the old 228 augments which are actually affordable and work almost as well in almost all areas of the game. Conclusion: This can all be fixed. It's just a matter of how far you want to go with it. Level lock... easy. Raise the caps so a level 75/306 is at ~160k HP and equivalent Mastery/Power. Yes, this will make older content easy again but you either do the proper work and adjust everything or you accept the consequences. Making characters weaker despite their progression is a no go though. Also, make sure the new sets and augments are actually working please. Crafting... return crewskill mission time and success rates to what they were before. Do you honestly expect people to wear special crafting gear now or what? That goes directly against years of crafting while you do something else. Upcoming crafting changes are a good first step, you just need to go even further. Economy... it's what it is and I already outlined the necessary changes if you really wanted to start over. I doubt you'll go for it though, it might alienate too many players. Trying to drain credits out of it by decreasing income and adding credit sinks everywhere is not a solution because it will hinder the average player and do little to stop the hoarders. Gearing... first you need to raise the Tech Fragment cap to something like 25k. We should have enough to outfit one character at the very least. Then remove all the RNG nonsense or give us an alternative. You already introduced the tons of different parts, we can't change that anymore without pissing people off. What you can change is splitting the loot pools for DPS, healer and tank. Right now it's one pool for DPS and healer and one for tanks. That's frustrating for healers who get 50% dps stuff they don't need. Change the vendor to actually sell what we want, e.g. an Alacrity enhancement. Lower the credit cost of removing parts by half. Lower the credit cost of set pieces and Tacticals by half. Allow us to directly buy/acquire Amplifiers. The current system is simply gambling and that's not okay. Half the gear sets are useless, rework those to be in line with the "popular" ones. Maybe play a tank or healer once in a while to see what's missing? Fix the descriptions and include actual numbers for everything. No "more" or "less" or "does damage each time" or any other vague crap. Thank you. If you have a no return policy in your store, the very least you could do is make sure we know what we're buying before you take our money. Kai Zykken is a neat idea but give him a larger inventory and make sure everything we buy is a. labeled correctly and b. works properly. He should be the "on sale" alternative, not a random gate to stuff you can't get anywhere else. Those schematics btw? Too expensive to craft. Less RNG is always the better way. Speaking of RNG... increase the reward for renown crates. Getting a single RNG item is a bit... underwhelming. Show us what we get and if we don't want it, give us a proper amount of renown/tech fragments please. Right now the renown rank/crates are pretty much pointless. The only worthwhile part is getting the 100 Tech Fragments with each rank up. Or you know what? Remove the crates completely. Give us 250 Tech Fragments and be done with it. What also needs to be fixed is the cooldown animation/timer for abilities with more than one charge. I want to see the seconds count down again, especially if the ability only has one charge on my char (because sorry, I did not buy the great and powerful Force Slow set). Oh yeah... that blinking icon over the vendors? Please add a toggle to remove that. Thanks. Making characters weaker to increase the difficulty of content is ... not a good approach. Instead you could have added mechanics, like increased aggro range, enemies shouting for help or whatever. There are a lot more options besides harsh hardcaps on stats. Also, fix the bolster please. Veteran's Edge needs to activate automatically on planets, and as mentioned before, needs to be adjusted to be higher in general. It seems you want us running around and harvesting materials over running crew skill missions. Okay... have you considered how that is supposed to work if everyone was actually doing it? It's not like your planets with Tier 11 material nodes are all that big or there were that many nodes to begin with. Even accounting for phases. So maybe consider adding new SH decorations for T9-11 materials? Give us materials from deconstructing gear if we have the matching crafting skill? I mean, if you bury us in all that trash, at least let us get something worthwhile out of it. Have you considered how this is going to work once people are fully geared and don't need ~25 drops per FP anymore? Or is cleaning up the inventory another time sink? There's a lot more to say but my time is limited. (Lucky you.) Thanks for reading.
  13. Duh. Wow, okay, thanks. Why has no one told me about that before? At least I have 139k HP now. Not ideal, but certainly better.
  14. I don't mind the challenge and on my best run I had 28% HP left... but first of all, they never mentioned anything about it in the patch notes and secondly, the turret takes my (probably broken by level lock) HP. As lvl70 with full 258 gear I had ~149k HP on Dantooine (and any other lvl70 area). Now, with lvl75 and fully augmented 306 gear I have 107k HP. That's not progress and I feel a little cheated that after all the effort to improve my character I'm weaker than before.
  15. My Seer Sage has gotten enough accuracy items and Force Lord pieces to outfit my Lightning Sorcerer 30 times. I don't even mind the random drops giving me DPS stuff but I draw the line at the vendor giving me "class specific" items ... like accuracy enhancements for a healer.
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