Ryzom

Right now as the game stands, I cannot play my magic user without exploiting creature AI.

My skills are:

Defensive Magic: 50
Offensive Affliction: 82
Elemental Magic: 79

Before the patch I could do the following:

Cast fear at a mob to draw aggression.
Shoot it while it was comming in.
Cast fear again before it got to me.
If I was resisted, I would use either fear or blind in my amp.
If that was resisted, I would take a couple of max damage hits in the rump while I waited to use amp again.
Rinse/repeat.

Now, I don't know how many of you attempt to solo magic above level 50 or so, but its not an easy task even using the combination of fear/blind to keep you from getting pounded in the rear like a prison inmate. I had many deaths doing this because sometimes things just wouldn't go right. Now after this latest patch however, I find that I cannot even come close to soloing within the normal rules of the game.

Every single fear spell I cast is resisted because the mob I am fighitng is generally closer to my elemental magic than my defense. If I try to fight lower level mobs, it won't matter because both skills will level at the same rate, hence my defensive magic will always be lower than my elemental magic. The only way for me to fix this is to group and cast my puny heal spell on people. I'm sure that going to go over well with pickup groups.

Also, because of the changes to blind, I find myself without a spell that gives me the 2-3 seconds I need to either cast another fear, or start running away if something gets too close to me. Blind now only lasts a milisecond it seems if you don't establish a link, and it doesn't really do that much to keep stuff from hitting you when you're casting (they seem to get an insane bonus to hit any caster).

Because of this patch I basically have a character that I built for solo play, being forced to group in order to advance at all.

I don't understand why the developers over-reacted like they did with this patch. There was one problem that was causing people to level really quickly and that was blind. Even then the only *real* problem with blind is that it reduced an enemies defense to 0. Trust me, there is no way an entire group could kill something 30-40 levels higher than it if its defense wasn't set to nill. You would run out of stamina/sap long before you got that creature dead. The "not getting hit" part was nice, but it wasn't the part that allowed people to level so quickly. Not getting hit doesn't kill things faster, doing maximum damage every time and not missing definately does.

Anyway, unless they fix these spell resist rates so that I can atleast use my fear spell again, I'm basically going to either have to resign myself to only being able to play with other people or to being a melee fighter full time. There needs to be some sort of balance between the magic skills because quite frankly you need spells from every line in order to be successful. Now how far up that line you want to go should give you further advantages, but not being able to use a spell that you bought *at all* is completely stupid.

I know about 80% of the people who play this game are melee fighters (probably because its easier, or atleast was...) so maybe they are not aware of how painfully slow it is to solo a magic user. Once u get past the point where you can shoot something dead before it reaches you, you need to have a much wider variety of abilities to survive. I have those abilities... they just aren't working at all anymore and nothing was given to me to replace them. I don't need to be turning mobs 50 levels higher than me into big fat XP cows, but I definately >do< need a way to gain a modest amount of XP using my chosen profession.

Anyway, I mentioned exploiting in the first paragraph... and thats what I've resorted to doing in order to work off death penalty I get from stuff killing me in 2-3 hits. Essentially the new monster AI is complete crap. If you can find a body of water to hide in you can get almost limitless XP with a high degree of safety. The way the mob AI works now they get "non interested" in chasing you alot faster and it resets their aggro. However it happens so fast now that mobs don't heal up very much before you are clear of their aggro and quite ready (and capable) to blast the crap out of them again.

I did this in winds of muse tonight a couple times before I got tired and decided to log, but I was getting 1500xp per kill with practically no risk of dying.

The idea that some developer thinks that this is more balanced than me using my fear/nuke/blind combo and risking death is completely unfathomable to me.

Later

Was hoping there might be some response to this the devs, directly or indirectly. After discovering that WEENIE kipees are now statistically 75% resistant to magic (excluding their immunities), my plans for a caster are in jeopardy.

gatineau wrote:Was hoping there might be some response to this the devs, directly or indirectly. After discovering that WEENIE kipees are now statistically 75% resistant to magic (excluding their immunities), my plans for a caster are in jeopardy.

Agree 100%. I used about 10 Ice casts on a Kipee 1 our of 10 hit =(

As a mathematician and a game player, I know:

1. A double negative equals a positive; and

2. If I do not play, I do not die.

Does not playing and dying, thereby NOT gaining NEGATIVE experience, actually mean that I am gaining experience? Relatively speaking, of course

gatineau wrote:Was hoping there might be some response to this the devs, directly or indirectly. After discovering that WEENIE kipees are now statistically 75% resistant to magic (excluding their immunities), my plans for a caster are in jeopardy.

Currenlty eating hard kipee cakes on the mainland. Killing them in 4 hits, no resists and I'm lvl65 elemental the hard kipees are lvl55. Getting about 1700xp per kill.

gralen wrote:Currenlty eating hard kipee cakes on the mainland. Killing them in 4 hits, no resists and I'm lvl65 elemental the hard kipees are lvl55. Getting about 1700xp per kill.

Resist rates for something within the level range of your highest(s) skills are not what I'm talking about at all.

I'm talking about the resist rates of >lower< skill spells when trying to use them in conjunction with your higher level spells.

For instance as I stated above, My defensive magic is 50 and my elemental magic is 79. I cannot use any of my defensive magic spells on anything that I can defeat with my level 79 elemental magic.

Before the patch I could do this, now I cannot. I could not establish a link to stun/fear something with alot of regularlity, but I could atleast give myself a few seconds to escape from imminent WTFPWND status by blasting off a fear or something and then running away like a sissy.

Now I can't even do that. Essentially over night my character went from a viable solo mage to having to require a group and through no fault of my own. There is no way I can respec myself out of this with the skill point reset, my only recourse is somehow to find enough people that will let me mooch off them to get my defensive magic skill up high enough so that its within parity of my elemental magic skill.

That's going to be a huge, boring arse grind.

Personally I think resist rates should be based off either your intelligence or your highest level skill. That would mean that getting a couple of minor spells from a different line would still be useful. The way the game stands right now, if you want to pick up a spell or two from another tree you need to be prepared to level all your magic abilities in parity or basically have abilities that you can *never use*.

That is the problem I'm talking about.

I would like to see this addressed, but I realize that there aren't enough people who seriously play magic users where they will ***** and moan as much as they did about the monster damages from last night...

I pretty sure I'm going to be screwed on this one.

jjm152 wrote:I pretty sure I'm going to be screwed on this one.

Actually, I and others have noted similar, so devs have to be aware. No way can that be 'as intended'. I am pretty sure you are NOT going to be screwed on this one

gatineau wrote:Actually, I and others have noted similar, so devs have to be aware. No way can that be 'as intended'. I am pretty sure you are NOT going to be screwed on this one

I dunno it seems pretty darn intentional to me. I think even after this last patch fiasco people have way too much faith that these guys actually know what they are doing.

Did you log onto the live servers today? Their response to ironing out combat bugs was to increase everythings hp's and leave the damage they do the same

Seriously, WTF is up with that.

Yes, I have been logged on a few times since the mini patch. I still am not very happy with some things, but other things have been addressed already.

Colour me naive, but all indications are that Nevrax shall fix the problems. Why do I think that? Because some folk in Nevrax have a vision for this game.

jjm152 wrote:Resist rates for something within the level range of your highest(s) skills are not what I'm talking about at all.

I'm talking about the resist rates of >lower< skill spells when trying to use them in conjunction with your higher level spells.

For instance as I stated above, My defensive magic is 50 and my elemental magic is 79. I cannot use any of my defensive magic spells on anything that I can defeat with my level 79 elemental magic.

Before the patch I could do this, now I cannot. I could not establish a link to stun/fear something with alot of regularlity, but I could atleast give myself a few seconds to escape from imminent WTFPWND status by blasting off a fear or something and then running away like a sissy.

Now I can't even do that. Essentially over night my character went from a viable solo mage to having to require a group and through no fault of my own. There is no way I can respec myself out of this with the skill point reset, my only recourse is somehow to find enough people that will let me mooch off them to get my defensive magic skill up high enough so that its within parity of my elemental magic skill.

That's going to be a huge, boring arse grind.

Personally I think resist rates should be based off either your intelligence or your highest level skill. That would mean that getting a couple of minor spells from a different line would still be useful. The way the game stands right now, if you want to pick up a spell or two from another tree you need to be prepared to level all your magic abilities in parity or basically have abilities that you can *never use*.

That is the problem I'm talking about.

I would like to see this addressed, but I realize that there aren't enough people who seriously play magic users where they will ***** and moan as much as they did about the monster damages from last night...

I pretty sure I'm going to be screwed on this one.

This used to not be an issue through most of beta because of the way the exp split between skills was handled differently back then. I am not talking about how EXP was determined, only the way it was split between skills you used. Through most of beta (all the way to the end I thought), when you used a skill, the exp determined for that branch (i.e. fight, advanced elemental, defensive magic, etc) was dependant on the level of that branch. So fighting a level 100 mob with nukes, fear, and root when you had level 250 elemental, 110 defensive affliction, and 95 offensive affliction... the exp would be awarded to each skill based on the actual level of that skill... so zip for elemental, not too bad for def affliction, and pretty nice for offensive affliction. Sadly, this seems to have been removed either by accident, or because someone decided that being able to level vastly lower level skills to 20-40% your main attack skill's level easily was somehow an exploit .