lawrence wrote:This thread is meant to provide a platform for all of your feedback on SoR, both positive and negative.
Is there something you would like to let us know? Do you have suggestions for Nevrax on how to improve the game? Do you have feedback on customer service?
Let us know and we'll make sure it gets passed on!
Hope you don't mind a few North Americans are starting to creep into your forums Lawrence.
I'll start with the combat changes. I can't speak for other classes, but as a low to mid level healer (level 72 currently) i'm absolutely loving it. Combat is fast, a little frantic, has a definite feeling of danger to it, but seems very doable. The changes to the spell costs in the magic tree were an excellent decision, and with the boosts in raw healing/nuking power, I finally feel i'm making an equal contribution to melees in combat.
I do have some concerns about the changes to bomb, they've been posted elsewhere in the forums, but it doesn't seem too unbalancing to have a heal hit for close to full on two targets near the mob. May need to be re-examined. One interesting idea might be to limit it to nukes, Stamina and Sap heals excluding HP if this is considered the unbalancing part of the effect. I'd be plenty happy with the ability to mix in a STA bomb heal for two or three tanks then return to direct heals on the main tank.
I haven't really tried out anything in the affliction trees yet, so I can't speak to their effectiveness, but I think everybody knew a nerf to blind was coming and can't imagine that anyone would take it too hard. It was too good in it's current form, no complaints whatsoever about it being limited. Haven't heard too much outcry over the affliction spells so i'd imagine they must be doing ok.
Harvesting is proving to be a much tougher adjustment post patch than magic was. Perhaps there are tricks i'm missing still, but it does appear a second patch will be necessary to tweak it further. Cerest posted in the NA forum that something is coming, so many of these thoughts may be already implemented.
One thing that so far seems to be overlooked (I know I missed it at first glance) is that the quantity of mats per pull appears to be much better. Where i'd typically pull two mats at a time before, i'm getting four or five on average right now. The trouble right now seems to be with getting materials of reasonable quality. I'd like to see mats well below your skill level become a little easier to harvest. At level 162 it shouldn't be so difficult to harvest some q100 mats which grant about 9xp. It's a tricky balancing act trying to keep from flooding the market with supreme mats so I understand this will take some tweaking. Seems the best route to take is to split harvesting into digging for XP (high quality, lower quantity) and digging to supply a crafter. (digging materials below your skill with greater consistancy) I don't mind getting virtually no XP for what should be a trivial harvest at that level, but please make the harvest itself equally trivial.
The XP decrease seems a little bit excessive, I know harvesting was progressing WAY too fast and there was bound to be some overcorrection, now that it's set a bit on the low end the devs have bought a little time to readjust it. Currently at 162 Jungle Forage on a five mat pull solo of q170 mats, I got about 600xp. For a pull like that something in the 1500xp range wouldn't be unreasonable considering it's about the pinnacle of what one would get solo right now. (an admittedly damn lucky pull) With a partner applying a care plan things were notably better, 900xp for a smaller pull of maybe three mats? (don't recall exact numbers right now, can do further research)
The ugly side effect of all this is death penalty. I'd say of all the things that need to be examined the most after this patch (beyond obvious bugs like encumbered packer mules being inaccessable, or no XP on magic amps) it's the ability to clear DP. As a harvester pre-patch I felt the death penalty was pretty close to perfect, it was tough racking up a bunch of it, but I could clear out a maxed out DP in a couple hours. Certainly enough time to put the fear of death into you, but not so much time that I would have second thoughts about careful exploration or trying something new. It's possible with some tweaking to the handling of XP this may be resolved, or perhaps the DP system as a whole needs to be re-examined.
The vendor system seems to be very cool, I had reservations about it before it went live from all i'd heard posted by people on ATS, but i'm finding it quite enjoyable running to vendors searching out bargains on various mats.
One minor tweak i'd suggest is the ability to filter out vendor sold mats/items. Beyond that I quite liked the interface, not knowing what to expect ahead of time it was a nice surprise.
Anyways, that's my two cents on the matter.
It's easy to overlook the good changes and focus on the bad, but i'm sure over the course of the next week or two the negatives will be tweaked and bug fixes will be found.
some tweeking is needed here i feel, this has the potential to be an exelent game if some ballance can be found 