Patch 1 and monster difficulty.

[jjm152]

Hey,

I just got done doing some fighting tests today and here is the deal.

First off, my character is:

2-handed melee - 73
close combat - 72
offensive affliction - 83
elemental magic - 79

My melee gear consists of:

- Full suit of QL100 choice heavy armor with +50 hp per piece and max dodge modifier.
- Various QL90 weapons with max dmg/speed modifer
- Full set lf QL120 +60 hp/piece jewelry (+600 hp)

My hp in gear is: 1850

All the items with the exception of the jewelry were crafted by me using only choice/excellent mats and exactly the best mats to create the type of equipment in question - atleast to a high degree of certainty.

For fighting I use the following abilities:
Increase Damage 5
Bleed 3 (maybe 4, the highest one i can buy)
Attack after dodge
Self Heal 8

Anyway, this is what I did today:

After getting a full new suit of the best armor I can wear, I headed to Winds of Muse. The reason why I go to Winds of Muse is because that is where I like to harvest, its incredibly insanely difficult to get into, but I have a teleport ticket now so I often go there and harvest and do the crafting quests fro the Silt Sculptors tribe for money. In the area around the lake the monsters *used* to be generally from level 68 to 88. My fight levels (both of them) fall in between there, but with all the extra SP and HP I could defeat pretty much anything within 10-15 levels of me so long as I only had 1 attacking me at a time.

Furthermore, I like to kill *cloppers* I dunno why, I just like to kill them. The thing about that is Blind never has (and still doesn't) work on them. So every single fight I did was just pure melee all the way with these guys. No cheap tactics or exploits involved.

Now, after this latest patch if I draw aggro from >anything< in the area by the Lake I better start running like mad because there is no way I can reasonably defeat anything but the lowest spawning Ragus or Clopper. Everything else completely destroys me in mere seconds. I started from top to bottom today testing cloppers out and this is what happened:

- Dangerous Clopper, These guys used to give me 3k fight experience before the patch but I rarely fought them because they were too hard and if I got an addition while fighting I ran a good chance of dying. Now its complete suicide, I have no idea what level these guys are but I know for a fact that there is no way in hell I can defeat one now. The single lone clopper I tried to fight took me down to less than 1/2 of my 1850 hp's in about 6 seconds. This is wearing a full suit of really good QL100 armor which was blocking about 160 pts of damage from his attacks. Luckily I had speedup 3 available so I was able to run away to the Lake before he massacared me.

- Malicious Clopper, These guys used to give me 2k fight experience before the patch, and I would fight them occasinally. Basically if I was just hunting them and Scary Cloppers I could gain maybe a level of fight XP in an hour, hour and a half. Anyway, I tried to fight one and he killed me dead in about 10 seconds. I couldn't even get away and he didn't even need to critical hit me. I have no idea what level they are right now obviously as I didn't get any xp for dying. o.O

- Scary Clopper, These are the lowest level cloppers and they used to give me about 1k XP. I could pretty much fight them back to back and level that way (albiet slower), still would take a large amount of them (40-60ish) for me to gain a fight level. I was actually able to defeat this clopper, he gave me 1500 xp for fight which is a bit more than prior to patch 1. However, he almost killed me and I had to use self-heal to finish him off.

Anyway, to sum up: I really hate this patch. I am a Tryker and the only place I can go to reliably harvest QL100 mats (which now thanks to this patch I cannot harvest anyway, so I guess its a moot point...) is Winds of Muse. For those of you who do not know, Winds of Muse is guarded heavily by Level 150ish Zerx, Torbaks and Cutes. The Torbaks especially have gigantic aggro radiuses. Getting into this place under the best of circumstances (even with a full team of level 100 players) is dicey at best and most likely you will die several times in the attempt.

Before the patch, once you made it to the lake area you were pretty much ok for the most part because the mobs were about the same level as the ones in dew drops (prior to patch 1). That meant if you were careful you could walk around the zone with a couple of pals and harvest the mats you need to create armor and weapons.

Well now after this patch, its basically like a double kick to the teeth. No one has been able to find QL100 or higher materials in Tryker main lands (yet, maybe they are here) and the ones that are in Winds of Muse have gone from being do-able for characters would require those materials (level 80 to 100ish) to being almost suicidal.

Frankly, I do not understand the logic behind this patch. The reason why people were leveling their Fight up so fast was obviously 100% because blind would case a monster to lose all its defense. IF that wasn't the case, then no one would be able to kill the little buggers before you ran out of sap to cast blind with o.O I am ok with them fixing blind, it obviously was way over powered - however to combine that with a flat out increase in monster difficulty across the board is just completely insane. I have lost all desire to play this game the way it stands right now.

OH also, Magic got an *extreme* nerf this patch that only a few people are starting to realize. For instance, you cannot reliably stick a spell on anything that is more than 4 levels higher than the skill you are using. For instance I like to fight with Fear and Nukes (and used to be blind as well, but just to stop a mob so I could get it to stop tearing me apart with my 0 defense as a caster...) Now I cannot use fear anymore because my defensive magic level is only 50 and I need to fight higher level enemies to get XP for my elemental magic skill (level 79).

So my problem is this: If I fight something that will give me XP for my elemental magic I run into -

1 - My fear spell will not work on it, and I have no other way of keeping them at bay since I cannot root something and still cast spells.
2 - If it does get close to me, it hits me for double or triple the damage it used to prior to the patch.
3 - Dodge has been completely nerfed to high water, even with a full suit of light max dodge modifier armor on I might as well be bending over for the mobs to kick my arse.
4 - Even with the best damage spell I have, the best I can do against an equal level monster is to get it down to about 1/2 life before it runs up to me at mach-5. That means I am stuck trying to melee it to death in light armor. This frankly is not going to happen.

I feel like quite literally I cannot do anything at all in this game anymore. This has got to be one of the most illconcieved patches in the history of the entire MMORPG genre. I mean, I have been playing these games for 6 years and this is the first time where I have actually complained about a patch!

I know there are fanbois out there that will attack my post, that is fine, they are allowed to be brown-nosers if they want to. However, the *rest of us* who actually want to play a good game need to tell the developers that they screwed up and need to put some more thought into this.

Oh and one other thing, even after moving magic amps to close combat skill tree because you couldn't get XP for making them post level 100... YOU STILL CANNOT GET XP FOR MAKING THEM!!!

Seriously, why go through all the trouble of designing a new item, multiple graphics for that item, moving it to its own crafting tree.. and then not bothering to make sure that the original bug is fixed???

The /region channel tonight was a flame circus, that shouldn't happen after a patch. Balance issues are painful usually for people, but there *should* be some silver lining on the cloud - However with this patch I cannot see it. I cannot reliably defeat anything with melee that gives me more than 600ish XP, and Magic is next to impossible to use solo now, I cannot harvest any material below my level except for QL70 (45 levels below me!) and I cannot leave a 500m radius around my main town without putting myself in extreme peril. I cannot craft the magic amps that I wanted to make, because I don't get crafting XP for them... Lets see I think thats all the bases covered, I cannot advance my fight, my magic, my harvest or my chosen craft.

Thanks alot there guys! Great patch!

[amitst]

The worst part about this patch is the people who are trying to remain optimistic. They just sit there trying to harvest because its the only thing that doesnt necessarily immediately kill you. I havent found a single person or group hunting anything all day, but I find lots of people around the spawn points recovering from their latest attempts. Who said it was too easy before? The people who were power leveling were playing a good 10 hours a day, if they play 10 times more than you then they are going to level 10 times faster.

How can nevrax not care? At least 40 or 50 people have unsuscribed in North America alone according to what I have heard. The GMs are arrogant at best, telling me to relog for anything that goes wrong, or insisting that the changes are all for the better, and that we are obviously wrong in thinking otherwise.

So to connect this with the thread it appears that:

Your ability to dodge no longer has anything to do with your abilities, so you get hit all the time by anything.

Yeah the monsters are overpowered and they DIDNT add any content to the game. I unsuscribed earlier today and i encourage everyone else to do so just to make a statement. you can still play til your suscription runs out even if you do so, so you have nothin to worry about regarding losing your character

[kachina]

I totally agree with everything the two posters before me have said about the game as it stands now and I've cancelled my subscription today.

I must say I'm extremely disappointed and very unhappy as this was a game I very much enjoyed playing. But tonight I found that no one was talking, everyone was complaining, and yes, just sitting around recovering from dying from the stupidest little creatures. That's NOT fun.

If the problem is fixed before my subscription time ends, I'll be glad to become a paying customer again. If not, well since non-paying customers can't read these boards, I'll never know if there's been a fix or not so I'm gone for good.

[chrome69]

My sub runs out on the 9th and will not be renewed. unfortunately leveling and travel is the content at the moment.


Instead of building new content on this base, Ryzom has chosen to make exist base content more difficult; to the point of being un playable really.



It was a foolish choice really and it will bite them in the ass since WoW and EQ2 are releasing this month.

[parisg]

Here's another one to swallow... as a Zorai I was making my way through newbieland. I killed a ragus on the way cause he was IN the way... When I picked up the remains the corpus disappeared. And a new Ragus appeared!!! As an elemental Mage this was my death.

Clearing paths became impossible. It's not only hard to kill stuff but they keep coming back the same second. Try to make ur way through those gingos now (

[kachina]

EQ2 ships on the 8th...that's Monday...so not a very long time to wait for something new to play. WoW ships on the 27th? Or have they made it sooner?

[kamagi]

WOW in Australia seems to be now end of December
Oh well plenty of time to study up on it I guess.

[jjm152]

EQ2 ships on the 8th...that's Monday...so not a very long time to wait for something new to play. WoW ships on the 27th? Or have they made it sooner?

Yeah it looks like alot of people are going to be moving onto "The Next New Game" (tm).

I was planning on sticking around with Ryzom for a bit, or atleast seeing how this patch went...

Well now I have seen the patch and I don't like it. Not even a little bit. For every good thing that was introduced, about 5 negative things were added and practically the >only< negative thing that was need was the nerf to the Blind spell.

I just don't understand what the developers were thinking.

[svayvti]

Combat definately needed some adjustment, but this patch threw too much in at once on top of each other. Without paying any attention to tester feedback.

When they determined melee and magic were balanced to each other back last July they should have stopped fiddling with it THEN. They added increased SP costs, which they only just now got around to undoing.

Test server needs to be used more wisely than this.

[digichik]

I was one of those many people at my respawn over and over tonite. Wow, mobs I could once solo can eat me in a few bites now. I am well equipped and am post 50 in fight and a scowling gingo can kill me in less than 10 seconds. I am supposed to kill them for missions to gain fame...hmmm.

Well, can't do missions anymore without a group. I certainly dont want a group for a mob I get 1400 or so xp from solo, or to bore my guildees to death helping me complete much repeated fame missions.

ok I can harvest then. Wrong. Not without someone to pat the ground for me while I harvest or rez me upon death. Anyone wanna help me harvest?

I know, I can try magic. Skills were much cheaper skill point-wise this time around so I have more skills. Alas, my skills are much resisted now and if the mob hits me, heaven forbid, I got 3-4 hits worth of HPs...sigh...anyone want to group so I can lvl magic?

For sure I can craft still. It would be hard to make crafting impossible. Well, nice some of the skills are less sp then they used to be, and I can buy all the higher Q mats from the vendor. Wow! Mats are pricey. Need to make a few dapper. I could do missions or hunt to get dapper.

Oh wait...no I can't. In fact, I can't do anything really. Not for long or without a huge death penalty.

"Ah well, I will check back tomorrow see if anything has gotten better"...

*Logs out*
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Gaia
Elder of Atys