Let us know what you think of the September Letter to the Players

[Ibn]

Please use this thread to give us your feedback on the September Letter to the Players (http://ac.turbinegames.com/index.php?page_id=268).

[Astral_Dominae]

I cant wait to see the missile changes in effect :D

[Ghent]

No mention of the melee defense wand problem which is rendering melees even more useless against mages, plus...

Introduction of archer love that, while much needed in archer v. mage combat, will further imbalance the archer against melees, equals:

deeper nerfs to melees.

[The Darkness]

The 'introduce something one month and then reduce its effectiveness the next' is getting a bit tedious now to be honest.

I'm not going to quit and moan over all the backtreading you are doing every month, but its a shame when a significent portion of the Letter to the Players is dealing/correcting issues introduced in the previous Letter.

The singularity wand is just an example. The teeth. The Biaka exp increase. Its becoming a regular thing.

Dont get me wrong - I'm pleased your listening to players overall, but sometimes I wish you tested new stuff properly before putting it in the game.

EDIT: thinking more about it, I just dont get the sense that the Devs have a vision for where this game is going. Too much reacting to players gripes/backtreading imho.

Cheers anyways

D

[Myk]

IBN, was the missile weapon speed fix was tested against a live player that was zxc twitching at half radar or more distance? Some idea on how much the speed fix will help archers against twitchers would be most welcome.

[Lost_Link]

Will the developers be reviewing monsters for balance changes?

Some monsters will effectively doubled their damage capacity against a player with these proposed bolt changes.

Will the monsters cast lower level spells now or yield more experience?


For instance, take the Tumerok banner dungeons. The monsters in those dungeons cast level III and IV war spells. They are going to be doing almost double the damage against players when using spells.

[Synnah]

it's good to see something is being done about the sing wands - watching them in use and hearing about how powerful they currently are sends a chill down my spine. Not only against virindi but against everything.

Thank you for taking the extra look at these - ya know there's something off when even mages say they're over powered :)

No mention of tradeskill stuff - look forward to seeing if anything new is coming out! My "li'l" tradesgal is enjoying the little quests. Hopefully someday maybe we'll see something similar to the oolutanga rewards too!

[Mildly amused]

Hooray for salvaging skill and Ust improvements. My last rerolls were Aluvian and I was really really waiting for this.

[zathros]

Lost_Link makes a good point about monster balance with the new war spells.

The salvaging multiple materials in one usting sounds good, but I'd like it to be an option rather than a paradigm change. I like to drag my main pack into the ust, and if it looks like I have more than a full bag of something take stuff out. Also, if I pick up some pyreal armor with good spells or something, I don't want it going into my ust. When only one material is salvaged at a time, I'll notice this; with multiple materials, I won't.

On the whole, things sound good. As a mage, I see the Ultimate Singularity Scepter as being powerful now instead of ludicrous. :)

[Ibn]

Will the developers be reviewing monsters for balance changes?

Some monsters will effectively doubled their damage capacity against a player with these proposed bolt changes.

Will the monsters cast lower level spells now or yield more experience?


For instance, take the Tumerok banner dungeons. The monsters in those dungeons cast level III and IV war spells. They are going to be doing almost double the damage against players when using spells.

Yes, we're aware of this. We weren't able to rebalance the creatures this month, but we plan to at some point in the future.

[Nightstarr SC]

everything looks good and I just one of the gromie tooths and I got the weapon which is good for my UA. But was wondering what biting strike and crushing blow do? I haven't seen a difference between it and my Blud Render UA weapon witha 250 req with a bag or iron and granite added to it.

Also were can I find out more about these tinker quests I know it sounds stupid but I'm just now getting into doing my own tinks. An would like the extra help in getting the xp.

[Ibn]

IBN, was the missile weapon speed fix was tested against a live player that was zxc twitching at half radar or more distance? Some idea on how much the speed fix will help archers against twitchers would be most welcome.

It was tested at multiple distances, and in duel situations in which the distance changed rapidly.

Obviously, no amount of missile speed will help you hit your target if the Ayan lifestone is between you and him. :)

[Ibn]

The 'introduce something one month and then reduce its effectiveness the next' is getting a bit tedious now to be honest.

Honestly? We agree with you. We're not happy with how frequently we've had to do this recently, and we're trying harder to avoid this in the future.

[Zestryl]

With the addition of the new Tinker Skill, can it be made so that Gharu can sellback their Item Tinker?

[Myk]

It was tested at multiple distances, and in duel situations in which the distance changed rapidly.

Obviously, no amount of missile speed will help you hit your target if the Ayan lifestone is between you and him. :)

Thanks for the reply and the info. Hitting the Ayan LS is easy.....as long as it doesn't twitch


Zest,
That would only work with Aluvians could sell back assess person and dagger and Gharu could sell back UA

[Mana_Temptation]

In October we are working on a new skill for all characters – Salvaging.

I hope that you will be adding the option to sell ITEM Tinkering back. This change onces again makes Sho the favorite race and Gharu/Aluv's are kicked to the curb.

[Zestryl]

Zest,
That would only work with Aluvians could sell back assess person and dagger and Gharu could sell back UA


Issue is though, the new salvage ability is making Item Tinker redundant. Everyone knows that the ONLY reason to go Gharu is for Item Tinker. How many Staffers are out there? Granted, there are fewer Dagger toons then UA, but there are still some out there.

Now they are taking away the one reason to have a Gharu toon. Perhaps give them something that is NOT redundant?

[iRoK]

PvP Missile Speed Increase

Maybe it's just me but why increase the speed of this, when you guys haven't fixed the glitch? when archers jump on a wall, they shoot like 100 arrows in a sec. it's been in the game for a long time and nothing has been done. archers use that glitch in PvP all the time and i believe something should be done, instead of letting it ride and makeing it even easier for archers to kill in PvP. i understand most of the player base are on whitedot servers, but also have paying customers on DT.

Nerfing of the sing wand, not going to even comment on it. i think it's fine as it is. PvP and PvM. CB does more dmg then the sing wand. PvP it doesn't do much more dmg then weeping wand except on crits, but isn't that what crits are for?

i can understand you guys are trying to make it easier/better for the ppl, but sometimes you have to draw the line between doing everything the playerbase says cause not everyone agrees. i don't know where you expect the game to be going, but for my point of view it's heading down even more. since everything is basically been giving to what the playerbase wants, cry, whines about 24/7.

[wussy_woy]

Anything for Gharu's to make up for the fact they are once again a pointless race?

[God Slayer]

how are Gharu's a pointless race?

they have a tinkering skill

to add value to weapons, decrease value ot weapons and so on and so forth

all they're doing is adding a Slag skill so everybody can benifit from collecting it doesn't help with tinkering.

so honestly it doesn't make Gharu any better or worse for players

[Shen-Mara]

"We are working on improvements to the Ust to allow players to salvage items of different material types all at once. For example if you put an Ivory Tankard, a Brass Breastplate, and a Fire Opal Ring into the ust and hit the Salvage button, you would receive an Ivory bag, a Brass bag, and a Fire Opal bag."

No thank you! The easiest way to mix all your steel items, for example, is to put a bag of steel in the UST and drag in your pack. Only steel will appear. This is useful! Now there will be no easy way to drag multiple bags in, as you will have to remove a dozen items.



"One other aspect of usts that we are working to change is the advantage to salvaging items one at a time. Currently, due to the way the salvaging calculations work, it is often possible to get more salvage by salvaging items one at a time; rather than all at once. This is a time-consuming process, but many players salvage this way to maximize their return. Once we’ve made these changes, you will get the larger amount even if you salvage all the items at once."

I *knew* I was right on this. Appreciated to get this done easier, but see above!

Please, while you are making changes, please keep FULL bags out of the ust. There is no reason to have a full bag in the ust, ever, since it cannot be salvaged.

Thanks!

[Gilligan]

The Sing Wand nerf is a bit much, dont you think? I can see decreasing the Slayer property. However, decreasing the CS, AND removing the CB? that sounds more of a destruction, then a nerf. It will turn into just another housing item.

Decreasing the Slayer is fine, decrease the CB/CS a bit, but please, keep them both there. Otherwise, it will be just another quest item taking up mule/wall space.


edit -

God Slayer, They are saying Gharu will becoming 'worthless' because the main reason people go Gharu is for the bonus to salvaging, not so they can use Item Tinkering for tinkering.

[Ryori]

Sing Wand : While it certainly could have stood for some reduction, by my math, I'll be putting it on the wall. Unless I missed something, my CS wand makes it a worse choice vs virindi. Now that is balanced - it's a wall item for all of us... but again.. my math might be off.

Teeth: Ranted about this on the main boards already. % rewards help those who already have XP, not those who need it. Please take some time to think outside of the box on this one otherwise it will be a useless quest. 33% of a low number is a lower number.

I see basing the change on the landering issue as a poor excuse. If my trade is 30th, then the teeth do not help. If my trade is 100+ then the reward might be in the triple digits. It is bad for lowbies, and killer for the high end.

IBN : I have no idea how the devs plan these things. But it seems like the players get these numbers from in-game research and in a short time compare the DoT and rewards against other things. How are the people who have the numbers in the first place not comparing these things? I know you said Turbine is looking into it, but seems like a check for DoT at various levels and % rewards vs skill levels would be the FIRST thing they do. Sorry - I'm just annoyed...

[Shaolin]

I welcome the day when turbine goes back to hot fixing issues rather than waiting months at a time before attempting to resolve them.

It's all very well implementing something, but without proper back up plans such as say....removing it if it does not work then things get a bit tedious,
as well turbine knows.

This is the first time ive seen ibn reply to a statement in such an honest way,
i.e. 'we are tired of the trend in nerfing things also' (not a quote)
players respect this kind of converse rather than the usual 'suck it up' attitude.

i would simply like to ask of turbine to hot fix things that go wrong rather than letting bad publicity fester for a month or two....
Exploit early, Exploit often.
that still stands true unless you take away the dynamic after finding it is faulty.

also please make quests harder (by way of randomizing or along the lines of aerlinthe).

quests for questers rather than fedex.

[KPD157]

I been trying to figure out if I want to keep Armor Tinkering or not on my guy but now I am planning on Removing it since his Focus is horrible ;)

I especially like the fact that the API and other more distance and life changing Concepts are still in on the Table for more discussion :)

Keep up the good Work Turbine I love it so far :)

Edit for the Salvaging skill I would think the most fair way to figure what stats effect it is to take (Str, Coord, End, and Focus) add them up and divide them by 4. That way your total Salvage skill is based on all the factors that allow you to salvage the various Tinkerable Items :)

[Zalliun]

Thanks for ruining my prefect new wand and "talking" about new stuff months from now.

But hey i love doing 400 in damage vs monsters with 5k health it amazing how much fun that is, and the 300ish in VoD really makes my day.

How about adding a few more 12k monstere there so you can assure that no mages will ever step foot in VoD again.

[Heideggar]

1) Bolts, Arcs, and Streaks:
Challenge is good, but...All ya need is creatures casting double damage war spells to lowbie melees and they'll hate your game : /

2) PvP Missle Speed Increase:
I don't see this helping at long ranges, but in the "medium" range at which archers and mages fight it could be very helpful when coupled with your previous frequency-of-shooting increase. But, I'm considering mainly mage vs archer in this. As already said, archer vs melee will be even worse. Shooting 80-100% faster arrows, and shooting ... 50% more often!? That's a lot of arrows a melee'er has to eat when up close like that. I'd _almost_ suggest allowing for specific shields to protect the melee'er from the missle attacks. As an example: Jaleh's Protector (crafted by from his wife's blood and an NPC) - AL 100, No protects, unbuffable, Spell: Bloodshield (Bloodshield allows the wielder a 10-20% AL to their shield). So, 10-20% of AL 100 is 10-20 AL. Basicly it'd allow a slight bit of protection against an overbalanced machinegun missle weapon. This is for melee guys in place of their aegis/normal shield. Just a quick suggestion in case you find that these changes are great for mage vs missle, but not quite so for missle vs melee.

3) Lifestone sending spell:
Another item put in, and then resources being used again to take it out. It has to be done, just wish there were fewer occurances of this.

4) Content Revision: Three Crystals:
Sounds great. I used to go on this pretty often back when it first came out.

5) Content Revision: Al-Jalima
I've said this before: Tufa, build up Tufa. Arwic was rebuilt. Candeth Keep was built. Other towns are getting redone. It's time! hehe

6) Gromnie Weapons:
Another item put in, and then resources being used again to take it out. It has to be done, just wish there were fewer occurances of this. (You'll notice I copied and pasted)

7) Singularity Scepters and Quest Weapons
I could have told you they were overpowered. Oh, that's right... nearly EVERYONE told you that lol. Amazing how little you guys actually test stuff. It boggles me Ibn, it really does. I don't think you Devs have the same mentality as the players when testing your new stuff. But, again, you're spending more time and resources taking something OUT than putting something IN.

In Development:

8) Salvaging Skill:
Slapping in the salvaging skill will only give a temporary solution to the problem with the starting abilites of the heritage groups. When you add in the salvaging skill, Sho will be the best, and that's fine, we all could really use this salvaging skill. However, having balanced heritage groups is something you guys want, right? As a result of this, Sho will get a salvaging skill and the UA skill which is unarguably the strongest heritage weapon. Aluvians will have the salvaging skill, dagger (not good), and deception (useless). They'll at least get the salvaging skill, finally. Gharu'ndim will have TWO salvaging skills basicly lol, and staff. What if you guys would take out deception and item tinkering from the aluvian and gharu'ndim classes when you put in the salvaging skill. Then, increase the abilites of dagger and staff to be on par with Sho's UA weapon. I'm just throwing this out there may be a lot more behind this in trying to rebalance weapons again, the GUI, skill credits back, costs, etc. Just saying I think it'd get closer to finally making the heritage groups on more even grounds, but then again, this could have an impact on the Viamontians.

9) Ust Improvements:
Is Zyrca still planning on doing that decal API kinda thing!? Just wondering if you'll end up developing new tech for what is already around in Decal form as "U.S.T.". In any event, I'd just like to point out that I'd probably still put in one item at a time to ust even if you allowed for someone to get max salvage from multiple items of the same kind. Ya wanna know why Ibn? : ) It's because I break up my salvage into different categories 1-7, 8, 9, and 10 quality bags. When I put them in 1 by 1 I can then see which bags to combine together, thus giving me the best bags I can for the salvage I get. If I put into your "new" ust all my salvage, it sounds like it will spit out combined bags of whatever is in there. It's easier for me to ID the usted bags of salvage than each un-usted item. Now, if you could set it up so that I can put in... lets say... 40 items, all various stuff ranging from brass to steel to mahogany to ivory, and then have the ust spit out uncombined bags into my main pack, I think that'd be closer, but still not as good, as U.S.T. for decal. I don't use decal Ibn, I know this stuff. I have to do it _all_ the time.

10) Faster Missile Projectiles:
Fine and dandy if it's for PvP only. But then again, you have to consider that loot generated weapons work much differently than PvP type weapons. How's any melee/missle person ever going to kill me if I pull out my AL 352 base shield (920p 600bu, avg to all) when they use a loot generated weapon!? Then, ya gotta understand that those loot generated items drop on death! Not to mention they don't do more damage than the PvP weapons. So, just don't waste your time with something that isn't going to improve anything. The aegis on missle weapons was done wrong. Ibn, I know what you're gonna say, but it was done wrong. It was a waste of Dev. Time. Just try not to keep doing that : /

11) Gromnie Teeth Rewards:
I don't see how you guys could NOT have seen this one coming. You nerf Caul but do this!? You nerf Isparialanua but do this!? Alex, when you do stuff like this you only encourage people to go by what many consider the AC moto: "Exploit Early, Exlpoit Often". You give people candy, then take it away. When they see candy again, they're gonna take as much of it as they can because they're gonna be scared you're gonna take it away as soon as they get a taste. There are quite a few that try not to live AC like this, but it's hard for people to resist when you keep doing it, and as a result, those who don't, fall behind because of _not_ doing it. You guys really need to get your heads on straight. There are some good suggestions posted by the players to resolve this without doing what you guys are wanting to do. I dunno, maybe one's easier than the other. I just want you to know that sometime downt he line there's gonna be crafting that requires higher skills than your "cap" and you'll have to again go back through and change that back around. If you'd make it so only people with all 3 skills could use the teeth, AND that they have to complete certain tasks before being able to use a tooth again, you'd nearly solve the problem right there. If someone levels out a trades mule and then changes them to a hunting character, fine. That's at least 6 weeks of time for that, not to mention that's what players have to do in reverse to make trades mules. Level up a character, then pick up the tinker skills. In any event, you'd have an active crafter doing tasks for the populace. Requiring them to do 4 HQ diamond ingots to use a brass tooth isn't a bad idea. They'll have to get the tooth, 4 powders, decanter, etc. That fits a lot with the roll of tinker mules. I dunno, maybe I'm the only one that sees this working. Maybe you Dev guys can pick some holes into this idea!?


In Concept

12) Siraluun Trophy Rewards:
Sounds good, but should be done like I said above in the gromnie teeth rewards part. Tinker mules usually have many tinker skills. Mine has MIT, WT, and AT. He's gharu'ndim so he has IT, but it's very low, and is rarely used. If you're gonna make rewards for mules, then find out what constitutes one of these mules, restrict the rewards to those criteria, and make it happen.

13) Starter towns, and blah blah blah
Sounds ok, but at the same time isn't too informative, so it kinda sounds like you guys aren't sure what to do about it. You mentioned improving the amount that people are in towns. That's great, but you've been working on this for a very long time. Maybe us players could help with what ideas you guys already have? It means as much to us as it does to you guys.



Extras:
I would like to see more info on mansions, monarch/allegiance xp passing, and all the things that haven't been touched on with your General Discussion message board. As a Community Relations person, I'd think you'd try to communicate with the community on a more frequent basis. And I'm not talking one thread every other day, which seems a lot like what's been going on in the past week or so. Btw, look up what communication is. There's several aspects to communicating that I think Turbine is failing in.

Question: Why do major banes 5 u c k so much!?

Question: Why are there many useless majors!?

Question: Lockpick Love!? How about at least the description of the quality of the pick like you have with healing kits!?

Question: 11% to magic school bracelets and rings. They're ok for really high level people who are usually mages, but it doesn't benefit a lot of your players. Are there plans to include these kinds of functionability for melee/missle characters as well!?

Question: Bikinis!? Is this a go or what!?

Question: What are Turbine's plans for the revisioning of wilderness area structures!? Will they be redone sooner than later? Are they on the development schedule? Will they be redone to reflect the lore and level of the surrounding area and current story arc? The reason I ask this is because almost every wilderness structure I come across has creatures way below the surrounding area's level range. Banderling Guards in 80+ dires for example. Really detracts from the exploring part when you come to a place that has a chest with 80 diff and apples inside, if ya know what I mean.

[Xeon]

Yes, we're aware of this. We weren't able to rebalance the creatures this month, but we plan to at some point in the future.

OMG! This is going to turn a gaggle of somewhat difficult drudges (cabies, bloodletters, etc) into a sure death for even 100+ level mages.

Please, please, please rethink this change for monsters!!!!!

[Zestryl]

You know, with the USW I would crit well against Virindi in VoD, but most of the time crits were under 1000 against other critters.

Yes, it was VERY powerful against Virindi.

The Assault Orb is powerful against Tummies
The g-man staves are powerful against Olthoi

Was the USW too powerful? I still saw people using fully tinked wands instead when they were in VoD.

I could see lowering the rates, but eliminating them and reducing the value of the slayer, that sucks.

The USW will be less powerful against Virindi then the Assault Orb is against Tummies. The Assault Orb does not have any CB or CS.

That is messed up.

[-Vlaid-]

When the vanguard team happens, hopefully it will help the nerfing that we are seeing.

[Sprawl]

The 'introduce something one month and then reduce its effectiveness the next' is getting a bit tedious now to be honest.

Would you prefer the introduction of crap that may later get some love? :p

[Ibn]

With the addition of the new Tinker Skill, can it be made so that Gharu can sellback their Item Tinker?

Like any racial skill, you can use an Gem of Forgetfulness with it, and you'll get the XP, but not the skill credits.

Depending on what attributes we use for Salvaging, some Gharu'n characters may find that their Item Tinkering skill base is higher than their Salvaging skill base.

[Silik]

Would you prefer the introduction of crap that may later get some love? :p

If it actually got love, yeah. I'm /still/ waiting for my +1magicD armor to get some love. Or do you still expect me to believe that at 300+, 1 point really makes enough difference to notice?

[fashtas]

Was the USW too powerful? I still saw people using fully tinked wands instead when they were in VoD.The changes done to the Sing wand are correct and should have been done months ago

In fact, sing wands should have never been added to the game, they were so obviously unbalanced

If you saw people using fully tinked wands in VoD instead of sings then they either didn't have a Sing wand, or didn't understand how wand maths worked and were under the mistaken impression that doing half damage their possible damage output was a good idea.

The Sing wand had a Higher DoT over every single other wand in the game, against ALL mobs, not just Virindi, for ALL characters, even Maxed War level 200's using fully tinkd CS or CB wands

The DoT was basically DOUBLE! Can you understand that, The best CS wand you could make, with a War mage who was capped War/Focus/Will, did almost DOUBLE DAMAGE if they used a Sing wand instead

For lower levels, the damage increase was 5 times that. This is because a level 50 and a level 200 got the *SAME* benefit from the Sing wand, yet they would not get the same from a CS wand

Yes, I am a mage. I havn't used a single other wand except the Sing since they put it in. Why would I?
And no, don't be melodramatic, it isn't a wall item. It iis still better, even nerfed, vs Virindi, than any other wand for anyone who isn't capped war. At level 200 you can think about using a CS if you want against virindi...

[Ibn]

No thank you! The easiest way to mix all your steel items, for example, is to put a bag of steel in the UST and drag in your pack. Only steel will appear. This is useful! Now there will be no easy way to drag multiple bags in, as you will have to remove a dozen items.

Hmm... I wonder if it'd be possible to have it auto-select a material type if you have a bag in there already? For example, if my Ust is empty and I drag a pack of multiple items in, I get multiple bags of varied salvage. But if there's one bag of Steel already in there, I only get Steel and none of the non-Steel items get salvaged.

That'd be pretty cool, I think... I'll ask Zyrca if that can be done. No promises, obviously.

[krack]

The slayer nerf for mages is not needed. And thanks for ruining my only reason to hunt anymore. Why is that a mage is NOT allowed to hit as hard as a sword or bow character? :mad: Anyways, I am not looking forward to this.

Krack, super pissed Monarch of The Mage Academy.

[Ibn]

I'm a little confused about some of your comments...


3) Lifestone sending spell:
Another item put in, and then resources being used again to take it out. It has to be done, just wish there were fewer occurances of this.


But... we're not taking it out. We're leaving it in and making it target correctly.


6) Gromnie Weapons:
Another item put in, and then resources being used again to take it out. It has to be done, just wish there were fewer occurances of this. (You'll notice I copied and pasted)

We're not taking these out either. The requirements were never intended to be based off of buffed skill, this is a bug. We're simply fixing the bug, the items are staying in the game.


Slapping in the salvaging skill will only give a temporary solution to the problem with the starting abilites of the heritage groups.


This is true. There are cool new options in the future, but I can't provide any details yet.

[Shen-Mara]

"Hmm... I wonder if it'd be possible to have it auto-select a material type if you have a bag in there already? For example, if my Ust is empty and I drag a pack of multiple items in, I get multiple bags of varied salvage. But if there's one bag of Steel already in there, I only get Steel and none of the non-Steel items get salvaged.

That'd be pretty cool, I think... I'll ask Zyrca if that can be done. No promises, obviously."

Rock on, thank you! Appreciate the looking into of it.

[Abdul]

Just an interesting idea to throw out for the salvaging skill. Make it like leadership and loyalty and not base if off any attributes.

This way, the characters that have spent the skill credits on the skill do not have to pour as much xp into their skills in order to reach the skill required to get max salvage from an item.

This also allows you to not have to deal with whines from various classes that other classes are set up better for the free salvage skill.

[Uber_Rain_Man]

The Ust ideas are really cool, and the addition of the salvaging skill is a great idea.

Edit: I answered my own question by re reading the section. :)

[Signalerror]

Okay lets run down the list here.

Rollback Recompense - Bravo. Im glad to see that your rewarding the playbase like this.

War Damage Improvements - now I play and LOVE mages, but im pretty shure this is just twisting the daggers already in melee and archer hearts'. Also, NOT being able to balance the monsters is going to tick off quite a few people. But then agian, spec magic defence has its uses.

PvP Missile Speed Increase - unless you give arrows a friggin homing device, I know this "fix" will do . people will still twich and arrows will still miss. couple that + missile D = no chance for a archer. But then agian it might work, we will need to wait and see.

Lifestone Sending Spell - you make a mistake, players whine, you apease them. Im seeing a cycle here. Overall a good call.

Content Revision: Three Crystals - okay... PLEASE... for heavens sake... MAKE THE WEAPONS USEFUL! I sware, if I run the quest and get another item like last months eyeball I sware you wont hear the end of it ;). (you COULD have at least given it a feeble cantrip). Give it a slayer, or a few minors or mods, a special fellow spell, or a neeto attack. but for all that is still good dont make it this...

NEW Shendolain orb... um.. ITS NEW!
Casts Item Mastery VI - Woh... im shure every mage in dereth will bow before the might of a VI.
Casts life giver!!!!!1 - enough is enough with the life givers... unless it will stack with the current 3 catagories of health spells, then go right ahead :D
Casts Creature mastery VI - See Item Mastery VI.
Special properties: Nothing! - Unless its a slayer *cough* SHADOW *cough*, or its biting strike + that other one, its prolly not going to be touched.

Also, maybe alt reward of something like the Homunculus head might be nice.
Core of the Shendolain Crystal - +2 to something for (insert number here) hours.

Al-Jalima - HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA....

...

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

ok im finished.


Gromnie Weapons - ok, change the reqs. good idea.

Singularity Scepters and Quest Weapons- Fun while it lasted, but the nerf was needed.

Salvaging Skill - ooooooook... please hand me back 2 creds for item tinker and whats done is done. Or dont do a thing and have every Garu reroll into sho. I mean, UA + a salvage skill? Staff....? WTH is staff?! give me a cestus baby!

Ust Improvements - Sound good. anything to help wheen players off of 3rd party plugins is a good thing.

Gromnie Teeth Rewards - wow... just wow. You FINALY add something to help every dang trade mule in the game and you snatch it away. I say, FIX it so that it can only be used if the skill is speced and keep it as it is.

Siraluun Trophy Rewards - if they are going to receive the same "fix" as Gromine teeth, then im predicting a welcome about as warm as fargo on a winter morning.

Starter Town Portals - Wake up turbine, YOUR DREAMING AGIAN! *shakes the devs* there wont be a influx of people with the new expansion pack! people that dont know or like AC now, wont care with EQ2 and WoW already close to open betas or release.

Overall, this months Lttp's isnt really looking up.



hey at least I didnt threaten to pull my acc's or anything :D

[Dallimar]

Guess mages get FUBARED again.

[Ibn]

Just an interesting idea to throw out for the salvaging skill. Make it like leadership and loyalty and not base if off any attributes.

Up until about an hour before I posted the LttP, that was actually the route we were going to take. Then Zyrca pointed out that without the benefit of the attributes, Salvaging would cap out MUCH lower than Item Tinkering. They'd be pretty even at low levels, but at high levels Item Tinkering would be better. So we're taking another look at it. We may still go that route and find some way to balance it, we're just not ready to make the final decision yet.

[God Slayer]

some body tell me how doing 500+ points of dammage to a monster (or even critting for 1k) is any where neir what a sword char can do?

the sing wand needs to be nerfed,


i'd rather not see a reballence in monsters that cast whatever spells they cast now

so what if they go from doing 12 points to 30

just means you'll have to not get hit at a low level.

however it raises the quest as to now a mage does signifigantly more damage at level one

while i get a sword that does 5-10 or something lame like that? eh.. im happy

[Silifi Of Death]

Salvaging Skill
In October we are working on a new skill for all characters – Salvaging. All existing characters would have this skill as soon as they log in after the October event, and all new characters would start with it.

When using an Ust to salvage items, the Salvaging skill would be considered along with the Tinkering skills when determining how much salvage the player receives. If Salvaging were higher than all the player’s Tinkering skills, it would be used for the skill check; otherwise the highest Tinkering skill would be used.

Other aspects of the skill – such as which attributes, if any, it will be tied to – are still being worked on.

Wonderful. How about I just reroll all my toons as Sho now? There's no reason for anyone to be anything BUT sho. Best racial, and they can salvage anything just as good? And I can't uninvest those 2 credits that are now useless? Oh, I see, I get slightly higher skill than any Sho or Aluvian toon. I don't care! That doesn't help me at all.

And to whoever suggested that my ability to tink items is my advantage, hell, that's what a TRADE MULE is for. I tink my own DIs, but that's not a significant advantage.

So it's official, Gharu'dim is only a mule race now?

Seriously, do any of the devs PLAY this game?

With Maxed out, or even near maxed out skill, a UA can do more damage, and do it faster, than any character other than a Sword, a Bow or a Mage, and still gets countless other bonuses. Quick weapon change, High Melee Defense modifers, low burden, just to name a few. This is a RACIAL WEAPON. If you wanted to count UA as a 6 credit skill, why the hell should anyone bother using anything other than a racial weapon? And why is UA the ONLY racial weapon that's good?

I understand that maybe UA used to have it's drawbacks back when level 50 was considered a high level character, but now? It's the only weapon other than War Magic worth using.

Thanks for ruining AC.

[Vlad Morbius]

Quoted by IBN
"What's funny is that what you're describing -- talented people with little gaming experience -- describes a big chunk of the current Live Team. Me, Orion, Zyrca, Scenario, Mirin... Turbine was our first job in the industry."

This is the problem and this is the reason you people have to keep backtracking. If you want to fix this, start listening and co-operating with your player base and all these stupid fixes will become the exception and not the rule! Why not hire on some experienced AC players in contract positions that can properly test out the in-concept changes before they hit the final product so more time can be better spent enhancing the game and not backtracking :confused:

Oh and here is another heads up for you guys, if you think there is a need to improve those spells without adjusting the monsters in the same patch you're sadly mistaken. There will be hundreds of complaints from the people suffering multiple deaths from the usual hunt spawns. This will also drive even more players into the already very limited non casting melee friendly dungeons which are overcrowded and crippled by macroers.
You need to fire the person in charge and get a real grip on things before you kill this game off entirely.

[Signalerror]

Up until about an hour before I posted the LttP, that was actually the route we were going to take. Then Zyrca pointed out that without the benefit of the attributes, Salvaging would cap out MUCH lower than Item Tinkering. They'd be pretty even at low levels, but at high levels Item Tinkering would be better. So we're taking another look at it. We may still go that route and find some way to balance it, we're just not ready to make the final decision yet.

Here, instead of it being (This + that)/2(4?) And thus favoring a peticular template.

How about (Strength + Enderance + coord + quick + Focus + will)/6(8?)


That way, you wont have mages whining... OMG ITS Str + coord? WAHHH WAHH wAHHH!!!! :mad: :mad: :mad: !!!! :mad: ! 1

And so pure melee's wont ramble on about... WTH ITS MAGE LOVE AGIAN!!! FOCUS + WILL !! :mad: :mad: :mad: MELEE NEED LOVE NOW!!

[Astral_Dominae]

some body tell me how doing 500+ points of dammage to a monster (or even critting for 1k) is any where neir what a sword char can do?

the sing wand needs to be nerfed,


Just comparing crits doesnt really help... example :

In a best case Situation I can do 10 000 Damage with one wall shot of a CB orb on a vulned Obliberator ... the chance is only 0.0000000000390625% , but its there :D

[KsBabe]

First off I am an archer and the USW is ok in my book for mages against Vs at VoD, I hunt there with several different mages and believe it or not, us archers or melee'ers still get the kills on the Vs, and dont say it is because the mage has problems, it is because once he starts casting spells on the Vs he has to heal more than he has time to shoot at the critter. Three Vs chain casting on Mages is nearly sure death for them which gives us other players time to take the kills.
I just started using my blackmire bow and if anything is overpowered it is, I can one shot a VoD gromnie with it after it is vulned. Never before with any of my fully tinked out rendered bow could I crit for over 2400k on anything, but with that bow, one arrow downing a vulned gromnie now happens alot.
So in my opinion, leave the wand alone, let the mages have something that can at least let them stand a chance getting a kill from other classes once in a while. I hunt VoD with friends and I will be the first to say that and will stick to this opinion until the end.
I think the problem dont lie with the wand, I think it stands with the fact that everyone knows Paradoxes do drop majors and most mages (with good reasons) turn off their loot sharing option and they can loot their own kills and others cant.
As for the salvaging skill to come in Oct, please explain how it works again, because I understand it is to be based on your other tinkering skills and as an archer I dont have any so does this mean to get the best salvage, I have to recall home each time, unload all my salvage into my chests, log onto my mule and let him salvage it? If so then picking up salvage is going to be a thing of the past for me because I like staying out hunting and only recall back when I run out of tapers which is several hours after I start hunting.
Until the speed of arrows is added for no pk'ers I wont comment on it because I dont pkl so it really dont effect me.
I would like to see lockpick love or even healing love. Something that seems to be overlooked more than any of skills.
In closing I will have to say, this letter to the players dont impress me at all, only thing that I see that is worth anything now is the free xp for our downtime. Maybe when the patch comes out and I see the new quests and new things added, I may change my opinion but until then I will keep a thumbs down for it.

[Zyrca]

Here, instead of it being (This + that)/2(4?) And thus favoring a peticular template.
How about (Strength + Enderance + coord + quick + Focus + will)/6(8?)


Unfortunately, our engine doesn't support a skill with more then 2 attributes, and making the engine support it would be a very large task.

[Darklord_Famine]

As “laundering” experience through these quests is most effective for characters who have maxed or nearly maxed one or more skills, we can set the cap at a point where it does not harm true tradeskill characters. These characters will still be able to get their skills up to a point where they have a high degree of success at even the most difficult crafting interactions, but those who only use the tradeskills as a means to move experience into other skills will find that it is no longer as worthwhile.

If by this you mean you are going to penalize people with a high tradeskill from being able to fully maxmize the reward from trophies just because some people are exploiting the system then SHAME ON YOU!

My tradeskill char has been continuously NERFED by your short-sighted, knee-jerk reactions. She no longer gains XP from her allegiance that she serves because of the elimination of passup XP. She can no longer sell items she creates as a source of income and now your going to eliminate her only decent source of XP?

In case you forgot the RP in this MMORPG is for ROLE PLAYING and some of us, albeit a small number actually do that. My tradeskill chars only fighting skill is her native dagger, and she'd drop it if she could. She hasn't killed so much as a rabbit and never will. She exists solely to support her guild..although they can no longer repay her for this.

Why don't you people pull your heads out of your and stop reacting to the minority whiners?

[Fire Reaper]

"[Allegiance] Ilumini says, "It's got to the point where each patch isn't about something new. It's about finding out what all has been nerfed."

It's a sad state of affairs but the Nightmare Prince of Wintersebb is right. For the past few months Turbine has been putting out garbage. War paint? Honestly what were you all thinking? It's more about learning what has been nerfed than learning what exciting new quest has come out.

Now call me a pessimist, but I have this incredible feeling that the missile weapons changes are going to be completely unbalanced and alot of people will be upset. Do you know why I have this feeling? Because 9 times out of ten when Turbine makes changes it hopes will improve PK it actually kills PK a little more. The good news is that there is a 90% chance that the missile changes will be nerfed come November, so we'll only have to put up with a month of them.

I've got a great idea! Instead of nerfing PK even more, and making it less fun to PK, why not add something that makes it worthwhile to PK?

Here is my suggestion IBN.
Why not make a hunting dungeon with VERY good xp per hour which you must be a RED PK to hunt in? If the xp was VERY good, then it would be worth it to risk it, what's more is people would go red just to get the xp, if the xp were high enough.

Then of course you would have players and monarchies who would go red to try to take over such a lucrative hunting spot. Why not an addition like that which would make something you killed, aka RED PK, come back to life?

Furthermore, make this RED PK dungeon fairly difficult, like Tusker Lacuna so that everyone and their dog couldn't just wear GSA and no drop items and get by. That way they would have to use their decent items to survive to get the uber xp of the place.

Furthermore, that idea kills UCM! Holy cow, two creatures with one stone!
Why not just add something to the game worthwhile, instead of killing everything worthwhile.

Fur

[God Slayer]

why is it people have to play as the "best" class

what do you do that requires you to be the best?

i can hunt out on the world all day and probably run into 1 person,

frist off UA is junk, i've ALWAYS out killed ua chars, of course i always play a sword charecter so eh..

mage spends a lot of skill credits and deserves to be one of the "best" classes (i personaly would like to see a huge LIFE magic nerf)


UA should've been taken out of the racial skill class 4 years ago after they found out that there was a bug in it or just fix the bug

but this would be nerfing and you'd all complain and quit or whatever it is you do.


this slavaging skill they're adding is just a way for people without tinkering skills to collect salvage.

personaly i don't have tink mules or trade skill mules if i want the skill i put it on the char the needs it.

personaly i'd like to see mules die already i'm sick of people having a second char to do all the stuff they need for their main chars to be good.

if you are an archer you should have alec/fletching



the best locpick love would be 700 diff doors in the subway :P

[Logan Conrad]

From September's LttP:

"Content Revision: Three Crystals
In September we’ll be revising the Fenmalain, Caulnalain and Shendolain Crystal quests. Fenmalain is being revised for characters around level 20, Caulnalain for level 40, and Shendolain for level 60. The creatures and quest rewards are being revised accordingly, as has been done with other older quests of late."

Will you be able to add ivory to all of the pre-existing crystal bows, shields and orbs? The reason I ask this is because I'm working on a collection of bows on MT and I'd like to be able to add the existing crystal bows to my "Wall of Bows."

See this thread for my collection so far:

http://vnboards.ign.com/AC_Archers_Stop/b5147/42443863/?76

"Salvaging Skill
In October we are working on a new skill for all characters – Salvaging. All existing characters would have this skill as soon as they log in after the October event, and all new characters would start with it.

When using an Ust to salvage items, the Salvaging skill would be considered along with the Tinkering skills when determining how much salvage the player receives. If Salvaging were higher than all the player’s Tinkering skills, it would be used for the skill check; otherwise the highest Tinkering skill would be used.

Other aspects of the skill – such as which attributes, if any, it will be tied to – are still being worked on."

I think that the salvaging skill should be based off of a characters Strength, Endurance, Coordination & Focus. Maybe like this: (Str+End+Coord+Focus)/4.

[cstanleytech]

Ibn about the Singularity Scepters I have to say I am extremely disappointed in the devs for this decision but I am not suprised because of from my point of view certain devs just do not like the mages.
Sure the wand let mages do better but ibn what role do you and the devs want mages to play in a fellowship in AC ?
I mean do you want us just to be healers and vulners in groups ?
If so just tell us.
As for me I will be picking up an EQ gamecard and try EQ again and see if its any good as its pretty clear some of the devs do not care for mages.

[Fire Reaper]

I agree with Stanley. The Wand nerf is crap IBN. It's still better to use a rending while hunting to save on comps, and for those of us with low life skills that can't vuln. This is just one more mistake Turbine is making.

[Frank The Knife]

No word or reason why UA in PK does more damage than my sword.

Why? :confused:

Any ideas? Is anything even on your minds about the melee pk problems?

Should the melee swords that stuck it out these months just cancel accounts? I guess thats all you do listen to. (note- the BP debuff patch where mages posted they would cancel accounts.)

My friends,clan and I are extremely disapointed with how you handled the Melee PK problem. :mad:

[God Slayer]

eh.. this is the same response turbine got when they nerfed hitled weapons by putting the reqs too high or whatever and not allowing them to be tinkered.

so whatever, in less than a years time you'll forget about the wand and focus on something else you can't stand that they put in the game/or take out.

haha dont' care for mages..

lets see.. the just increased the dammage they do at lower levels.. hmm. so now a level one char can do 30 dammage+crits

so how exactly do they hate mages? they put +'s that you can tinker on your wand so you can have not only a + to mana c , but to melee, missle, and magic D and put in lower cost "non spell having' wands for pk'ers

but yea they hate you mages.. the past half of this year has catered to you but they hate you all!


Ua has had a bug.. since the begining of the game which gives them a higher attack based on both strength and their UA skill

which basicaly means they do more damage and crit more often than another char would with equal skills

which is really the only advantage they have

however sword chars do more damage and crit for higher and at high levels can out kill most classes/or on par with mages/archers

and honestly in PK your skill as a player is the most important thing.

[Silifi Of Death]

As a melee who has fought to get melee improvements, I must also say that the sing wand nerf is a bad idea...

Why?

Because the problem has NOTHING to do with the wand.

It has NOTHING to do with the current mechanics of combat.

The PROBLEM is Armor Levels. That's THE problem, nothing else needs to be changed. The problem specifically is that the highest XP monsters are the Monsters who are Shield Hollow, or have high armor. This makes them Mage food, making mages the best of all.

Problems these days have nothing to do with War Magic. War Magic is fine, Life Magic is fine, Wands are fine. Stop screwing around with it.

I have a quote, said on these boards before.

The problem is not that mages do too much damage, it's that melees don't.

The problem is not that mages do too much damage, it's that melees don't.

The problem is not that mages do too much damage, it's that melees don't.

The problem is not that mages do too much damage, it's that melees don't.

The problem is not that mages do too much damage, it's that melees don't.
---Darid

[Magik Brute of]

Up until about an hour before I posted the LttP, that was actually the route we were going to take. Then Zyrca pointed out that without the benefit of the attributes, Salvaging would cap out MUCH lower than Item Tinkering. They'd be pretty even at low levels, but at high levels Item Tinkering would be better. So we're taking another look at it. We may still go that route and find some way to balance it, we're just not ready to make the final decision yet.


While I think this is a great idea I do have a suggestion.

make the "salvage" skill bassed off all attributes ie (Str+End+Cord+Quick+Focus+Self)/4

I don't think that this would "over" kill the skill as we start out 270+60 For base attributes wich would = 83 (rounded up). We could easily up the skill to get "max" salvage and it would make the "charter type" a moot point for ANYONE out there.

[AC_Guy]

Ibn:

Any chance we will ever see an AC2 style Tradeskill system where the skills have nothing to do with Earned Exp from Combat and would actually come from using your skills ?

I think the AC2 system works alot better then what we have in AC1.

[Myk]

ok to get full value for salave you need a 400+ buffed skill

If you make it a skill thats based off NO attributes then getting to 400+ buffed will cost a way to much for this to be useful as people whill just use item tink due to it being cheap to raise as I cant think of one class that doesnt startout with 100 focus or coord.

PLease dont put in a skill that will be darn near useless. That doesnt help anyone and just wastes DEVs time.

[Elistra]

What do I think?

I think whoever decided to nerf the sing wand should be torn to pieces by a pack of rabid badgers. :mad:

For ONCE we're doing decent damage, and now you want to take that away? GOD FORBID we be something other than a servant class.

I don't even know why I bother being nice to the little mages. Why, so they can be set up for an in-game lifetime of just being used, like the rest of us?

Why do I even bother....

[cstanleytech]

That is exactly how I feel Elistra ,
I have struck with this game sense alpha and I now have had it with the treatment .
They give us a nice usefull item after years and they then nerf it while still letting melee and achers hit mobs for 7000max crit hit.
Well I restarted my eq account but I will prob still stop on here from time to time to check on the status.

[Winter]

For the first time in a couple months, I actually like the LTTP. Looks like good things are coming.

**Make sure you update new and existing Siralunn dress/headress as well**

While you're at it, could you please send a toon of yours to a world with no other purpose than to find Aun Ralirea. When you are done, open a discussion with us to make the quest viable agian? The mechanic in this quest is bad. Some of the lucky few to find him may disagree, but many concur.

I generally dont have a problem with the war magic increaces other than the fact that the monsters will not be balanced. I think this is generally a bad idea, as the either need to scale down the level of spells that the creature casts, or scale the XP up to make them a viable hunting resource. The only other thing you could possibly do is lower casting mobs defensive vaulues across the board.

I think the salvaging skill and ust improvments are a much needed utility. I realise that my opinion is very different than most here, but instead of being on the soap box claiming that I was 'disenfranchised' because every race will have a tradeskill, I think its great that I will be able to roll sho and aluvian again without a handicap, as I really enjoy the looks of these races better. I honestly could care less about racial skills, but for those who use them, I say add a skill based damage bonus like UA has (maybe scaled down because of skill credit balance) and call it done. I would say base the salvage skill off one stat : Endurance. I think most of us can agree this is one stat all of us are constantly pumping up.

Missile changes rule and I hope to see this on lootgen bows sooner rather than later for PVM purposes.

[Reska]

Only have 2 comments

1) Lifestone Sending - Whether it stays in, or not, is none of my concern. But, will you be fixing the missing spell that the quest DOESN'T give? (In case you're wondering, that's Blade Lure, aka Anti-defender)

2) Starter Town Portals - PLease, for Asheron's Sake, don't just make portals going from Holtburg to Shoushi to Yaraq. They're alreayd there. It's called the Newbie Portal Route. So you have to go through one more town to get there, so what? If you just put those 3 portals in, I can almost guarantee that anyone who doesn't know of the other towns, won't go to them.

--Reska

[Meel]

When will you stop ignoring the HUGE prob of sword being less powerfull then ua in pvp and mages being the gods they where in the first 3 years of ac ?
Meel.

[iRoK]

the sing wand is a little overpowered but not too much. considering CB wands do crits of 2500+ dmg 1/5 hits, CS wands crit 600-700+ 3/5 hits. Sing wands do crits of 600-1000 dmg. so how is it really overpowered? i don't see it, can someone expalin this to me? it crits just as much as a CS. ppl are just probably crying about it cause they CB/CS wands aren't selling or something.

Why does it also seem the PvP problems are just ignored like they don't matter? haven't seen one answer. Are the whitedots the only people you listen too? First fix the damn glitch that i presented before. Maybe we need some people from whitedot servers to bring this up and you'll actually probably read this.

Also, why is sword weaker then UA? when it costs more credits. Maybe something should be done about this also.

[krack]

Oh well, a final *sigh* from me.
Where my faith in Turbine was recently restored with the whole envoy situation on darktide; they just did a rollback on me as to how I feel now. :mad:

[Parkstool]

I didn't read the other replies but.


IF YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE BOW SHOOT TWICE AS FAST NERF BOW BUG.


k other than that its good :)

[Copper06]

Turbine FINALLY gets it right with damage dealing on mages with spec'd war in VoD using the new Singularity Wand. Playing a mage is FUN again!!! So what do they do? Bam, here comes the nerf bat right away. Once again my mage is forced to take a back seat to archers/melee's (yes, I play all three) as the person who does the least amount of damage................

28 points, let me repeat that, TWENTY-EIGHT skill points, to spec. war. And the reward isn't to have a very cool toon that does lots of damage with nice big numbers (aka sword/xbow/bow), nope, it's to take a back seat.

Am I disappointed? You bet I am. I've been playing since retail release and I feel so strongly about this that I registered and all JUST to respond to this LTTP. No single other item has made my play time more fun than that wand. I was finally able to say, "Wow, those 28 points ARE well spent, I'm NOT gimped!"

Well I was able to for a month at least.........................big mistake Turbine, very big mistake.

[YekYai]

80-160 war 6s is going to HURT. How many mages in game cast 6s? Perhaps 5%. How many monsters in game cast 6s? I'd bet 30% of the creatures in game, and over 60% of 80+ content mobs cast War 6s...which are about to get a 33% damage boost.

Now Hellions are going to hit nearly as hard as Biaka for half the XP. Now high drudges are going to HURT. Now Banderlings...you get the idea.

This change is going to kill a lot of people. It ramps up level-6-war casting mobs almost to the danger level of level 7-war casting mobs. I hope you look at the XP for level 6 casting mobs SOON.

-- Yek.

[Hopeslayer]

"IF YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE BOW SHOOT TWICE AS FAST NERF BOW BUG"


um the bow isnt going to shoot faster the arrows are only going to go trough the air faster. the # of arrows being fired will be the same.


As for giving all people a salvaging skill.... ok fine But make Dagger/Staff just as good as UA.

I knew id pk a ton but i took Gharu for tinking. Even without the change i really wish i was sho.

Deadly hollow staff........20 - 40 Bludgeoning
Deadly hollow Dagger.....20-40 Slashing/Piercing
Deadly hollow UA ..........17 - 34 Slash / Piercing

But UA does TONS! more damage because of the Str bonus. Please addjust the base stats of staff and make the 2 at least equal. and give Staff a str bonus too.

Use Cord for dagger if need be..

But please fix this. SOmetomes we need to use our Hollows to. (or for people that decide to get it up to 325 we can do decent damage for monsters)



AND TYTYTYTY very much for the bow improvments. its annoying geting a 400 hp person to 15 hp and having them twitch right next to you and heal back to full

[God Slayer]

what if they just made war cost less

would that solve the complaining?

probably not

so.. since when is UA better than sword? i was unaware of this.. and further more.. who really cares what's better..

play what you want.

maybe in PVP this matters but that's maybe 10% of the players

[_b0o]

bleh i dont like theses notes as a melee =P


mages get higher damage lvl 7 streak to finish me off...

archers now chain gun even faster in my face...

sing wand getting nerfed =/ it was so fun owning VoD virindi with lifebolts... but nay =(




though i am glad u left lifestone sending in and hope the new crystal quests are fun , but 'eh' is my overall response, doesnt touch on any issues i was interested... sword/ua pvp balance or tank mages heh

[Logan]

I dislike some of the changes.

The constant nerf of things that can be "abused", the nerf of items people invested time in. The introduction of new weapons (which is basicaly a nerf for older ones). leads to "rebalancing", harder monsters and this goes on and on and on. NO and I Say it again NO different way to gain xp then to spend countless hours in "hunting" in VoD or Caul fellows. With a bit of math the effect of the Gromniequest could have been checked before. No it goes the way of a lot of quests that have been made useless because they were "exploited". (Olthoi Chasm)

This game becomes the playground of simpleminded, greedy boardcampers. They are to stupid to use DIFFERENT dynamics and before they think about it, they come to THIS board and complain. I understand the change of the singwand in PvP. Any further changes are simply not needed. Its motivated by greedy players, who stand aside and complain that others can do things better, faster, more effective.

I havent seen soooo many people in GW using the teeth. Has there be a queue on other worlds? I dont think so. You dont think BEFORE it is put ingame and then you dont think AFTERWARDS. Why do we leave the controls to the "loud" group here on the board?

The constant changes to the lowbie areas is nice if we can find the Newbies that play there. For a new player it is like beeing the only teenager in an retirement home.

I hope i can leave this forum for good, because it makes me sick.

The fed up Logan

[jordvik]

Ibn I realize why you think this is needed but let me tell you that most of the players of this game dont care that some guy trained cooking to get an extra few million xp from the teeth. If you are worried about it find a way to lessen the exploit without harming our trade chars.

Cooking, Fletching and Alchemy are pretty damn near useless skills. By level 50 you have all the skill you need in all 3 of them to do everything you need to in the game. To put a cap on them really makes the teeth useless and I mean completely useless. If you made the skill more useful, then maybe. How about we try and make some low burden high yield items that can only be made with things like monouget and brown beans, so that they cant be macroed but would be worth raising cooking to the highest skills to gather and make. By placing a cap on the teeth, (and I assume the Tinking items will have the same exact caps) trade characters have no way of raising their skills any significant amount once they reach higher levels. That was what this was supposed to do anyway wasnt it? It wasnt created for low level cooks to benefit, it was meant for higher level ones that need a significant amount of xp per point. A level 50 cook can go fellow with another character for 1 hour and get enough to raise their skills by probably 10-20 points per round of buffs. A high level character if you could hide them in a cubby on caul could get enough to gain them half a point in something if they are lucky. Low level cooks is not where the problem is, its the higher end.

I know you guys have the best of intentions and this will sound a bit harsh, but you have become very predictable in your rulings. If alot of people come here and complain, even rational good, well thoughtout ideas will get modified or changed so that they are completely useless or backwards from the way they should be. Just because 20 people come here and complain that Joe is getting a free 100 million xp per 2 weeks and they are upset about it....doesnt mean the rest of us want to take the hit on our characters so Joe doesnt get "ahead".


For the War bump, I think that is a long time in the coming and a good move, however you are going to create a lot of havoc when we start getting mowed down by casting monsters with level 5 and 6 spells. I think you need to take a look SOON at these. If you cant possibly get this squeezed in this patch I understand, but by helping out the low level mages you are going to hurt alot of our hunting areas for a solid month. That could have a serious effect on the desire for people to continue playing. I would suggest holding off the War increase until you can balance the monsters who use these. It would make a lot of people much happier. We dont want to all crawl back into the dungeons to fight the non casting monsters. Please throw us a bone here.

[YekYai]

Wow, I hadn't even looked at the level 1-5 spell damages.

Spell Level Old Damage New Damage
1 8 – 15 15 – 30 <-- 100% increase!
2 13 – 25 25 – 50 <-- 100% increase!
3 18 – 35 40 – 80 <-- 128% increase!
4 31 – 60 50 – 100 <-- 67% increase!
5 46 – 90 65 – 130 <-- 44% increase
6 61 – 120 80 – 160 <-- 33% increase

While low level mages will certainly appreciate the love, what about all the low levels that will be struck stone dead by low level spells? Lots of critters cast war 3-4, and lower level players don't usually have high level protects. Isn't a 100+% damage increase a bit much for the little toons to endure?

The simplest fix I see for this is to reduce every single non-7 casting critter 1 level in War spell use. Level 6s become 5, 5s become 4s, etc. Otherwise you bump monster War DoT (which is most of a monster's damage at high levels, in many areas) by anywhere from 33 to 128% with no compensation to the players for the increased difficulty. This should be done at the same time as the spell damages are changed! Not the next patch, unless you want to spend the whole patch reading about how toons are being struck dead by suddenly godly spellcasting mobs.

-- Yek.

[Korrigan]

It's always bad when a quest weapon becomes a must have better than everything else. This nerf on the sing wands is needed, case closed.

And for those who cry that their poor mage is so badly nerfed once again : the critical strike and crippling blow imbues work better than the sing wand, and you can further tink them with brass and/or opal.

The war damage rework for low levels is just great. Some monsters will become fun to fight again too ... challenge is always welcome :)

Archer love in PvP ... it's time !!!

Gromnie weapons corrected. Fine.

For the quest revisions, I will post my thoughts once I tried the new versions ;)

As usually, I like the changes and can't wait for patch day :)

[Mr_Fred]

I'll keep this short and sweet and easy to read.


This is another patch full of nerfs...at least, thats what it feels like.

Am I going to quit? Nope. Am I going to start a petition? Nope.


Am I going to play one of the other templates on my account that hasn't been nerfed this patch? Yup.



Just for the record....Just because I can play any character I want and feel love on all types...doesn't mean I like nerfs in the least.


Nerfs are bad for morale. Over powering one class is bad for morale.


AC Good.

Nerfs bad.

[otama]

i am so very disappointed at the war damage changes for monsters..

i can only see the very highest characters not minding this change, or those who are able to spec magicD

if there is no way to fix this, then please consider an across the board change for monsters to cast a lower lvl war spell than they do now.

i do not understand how this kind of dramatic change is good for the game.. nor do i understand how, if you know and admit that the job is only half done, then why on earth would you give it to us? I would be fired from my job if i pulled this.


in addition, all this nerfing puts me in a place of not trusting you guys to keep this game FUN.. mistakes happen, i get that.. but still...

that being said... do you guys have someone who's job it is to make sure this game is fun?

[Awake33]

Regarding Sing wands:
While Using some marble keys in VoD the other day, I was standing alongside an archer equal in level to me at 122. As the critters would respawn we would kill them, or I should say HE would kill them. Because I, while using the sing wand after vulning them, would still be working on the first adolescent gromnie as he was looting the 3 corpses of the others!

And yet I was very happy to have an USW to use in VoD. I thought,"Well, I still don't hit nearly as hard as sword or archers, but I'm happy they finally gave us something. The DOT for everything else a mage uses was rediculously low compared to swords/archers. Now it is still low, but at least hunting is fun again."

I have yet to EVER hit anything with a sing wand, assault orb, or anything else for 2000 or better, near 2k, but not quite. I see people quoting the crits archers/swords get all the time in vod, and they range from the low end of a sing wand's damage to over 3000!

Add in the fact that these guys get the benefit of evading the melee attacks of VoD monsters. We all have to fear the war spells, mage or not. So they kill faster and have to heal less often. And people complain about sing wands!?!

Zathros wrote:
"On the whole, things sound good. As a mage, I see the Ultimate Singularity Scepter as being powerful now instead of ludicrous. "

Synnah wrote:
"it's good to see something is being done about the sing wands - watching them in use and hearing about how powerful they currently are sends a chill down my spine. Not only against virindi but against everything.

Thank you for taking the extra look at these - ya know there's something off when even mages say they're over powered "

Heideggar wrote:
"7) Singularity Scepters and Quest Weapons
I could have told you they were overpowered. Oh, that's right... nearly EVERYONE told you that lol. Amazing how little you guys actually test stuff. It boggles me Ibn, it really does. I don't think you Devs have the same mentality as the players when testing your new stuff. But, again, you're spending more time and resources taking something OUT than putting something IN."

I strongly disagree with these people and several others with similar sentiments. Seriously, I don't get how these people see it!

It has been pointed out many times, War spec'd costs 28 points! A full 12 points or more over any other weapon type.

And yet the melee/archer can devastate things compared to a mage.

I could go on but it seems it's useless.....this is exactly the kind of thing Turbine did in the past that made me take a 2 year break from AC.

If you insist on doing things as proposed, PLEASE justify to me the insane damage that archers do and lie to me and tell me why I should be happy to sit there and listen to,"slash pls", "imp pls", "fire pls", "blah blah blah", while in a VoD fellow. It's great being a servant to them and watching them loot everything. Like the genie in Aladin,"Poof! Whadda ya need...Poof Whadds ya need.."

Like someone else said...BIG MISTAKE TURBINE A seriously pissed off mage. :mad:

[Mildly amused]

Starting an Aluvian macer on VT (aka Gharutine or Battlemagetine) I was quite regularly greeted with reactions ranging from surprise to pity. Adding salvaging will finally end the 90% Gharu and 9% Sho UA imbalance.

On the other hand bringing the sing wand back in line will do nothing to change the high end balance one bit away from mages. So to everybody coming here and complaining about these two corrections: please get a clue what character types are played in the high levels and what items are used.

Suggestion: If the engine doesnt support skills to be based on more than two attributes, would it be possible to add three free salvaging skills to chose among:
#1 based on (str + coord)/2
#2 based on (coord + focus)/2
#3 based on focus

[Korrigan]

Macers are amazing characters, Midly. Best olthois hunters too.

People just don't have a clue and are faster to laugh at others than to think just a bit ;)

[Hugo Rune]

It's interesting to note that the sing wand is considered too powerful. Perhaps they will nerf missile weapons next? After all, my xbower hits a load harder on most VoD stuff than my mage can, sing wand or not. I doubt you'll ever see a mage dealing out 3000+ damage in a single shot to Drudge Seraphs, Dillos and Gromnies like my life xbower does with his +186 CS.

I agree the Virindi slayer is a little ott, but it makes up for lower damage on other stuff. Considering war is more than double the cost to spec of xbow, you would expect a balance to mean that war does more damage.

But hey, this is AC. We need to have plenty of nerfs and no quest item should actually be useful to people.

Aside from the crits which were broken anyway, what mage loving have Turbine given since level 7s came out over 3 years ago? Nothing I can think of that didn't benefit other classes as much/more. All the damage increases etc in the other classes over the years, while mages have stood still and watched missile hybrids take over. Upping the damage on levels 1-6 will do nothing for mages over level 50. We don't even have the edge on buffs like we used to because of all the bots giving out 7s to all the lazies who can't learn to play off their own power.

Way to finally give us something good then take it away again.

[Frieze]

Salvaging Skill
In October we are working on a new skill for all characters – Salvaging. All existing characters would have this skill as soon as they log in after the October event, and all new characters would start with it.

Thanks for ruining AC. LOL, yes, the salvage skill is going to ruin AC.

I think the letter looks good, except for a few things, most of which have already been brought up:

1. Salvage issue brought up by Shen
I'm very happy you're looking into easing the tedium of salvaging. I would also like to see a "move item to UST" shortcut similar to the "move to main pack" shortcut which has the F key default. Click & drag gets old.

If I might suggest, working on tradeskill tedium would be a nice next step once salvaging is settled. One of the best suggestions I'd seen for that was an UST-like apparatus: drop in arrow making components and transmute to create large batches of arrowheads, etc. Perhaps it could have a higher skill check to provide some more incentive to raise tradeskills. What I'm not sure is how the skill check would work.

2. Monsters casting I-VI wars with the new damage increase
While this won't affect me very much, I definitely think it's an issue that should be dealt with ASAP. Just wanted to reiterate it.

3. Gromnie Teeth Changes
This worries me slightly. Obviously it needed to be toned down, but the vague "good chance of success on interactions" has me thinking that this means we're not getting any new crafting interactions, and worse, fletching is doomed to have its cap at an incredibly low level.

I'm sure there are other ways, and I think another way would be better.

[Hugo Rune]

The changes on the gromnie teeth are definitely needed. As far as the trade skills go, you don't need them anywhere near maxed to craft sucessfully. I have a level 65 trade mule with skills around 390 buffed and can craft anything I need. The toughest thing I can think of is a perfect diamond ingot and I have never had a fail on them. I'd guess that putting the cap for gromnie teeth at around 350 base skill would be about right.

[cstanleytech]

Well Hugo Rune I agree with you to.
I have had it.
All it seems now is if the devs hear the hybrid missle/melee players whine they nerf the mages at the drop of the hat in pvm.
Lets review some of the devs decisions that effect mages.
1. Nerf Sing wand in pvm
2. Nerf life drain ( needed I admit but still it WAS a nerf. )
3. Refuse to lower the mana consumption of the upgraded mage armor or even alter it in any way even though the new faster item buffing makes it worthless not to mention compared to the ancient vestment armor the mage armor is a sick twisted joke. ( Plus its the ONLY real quesst meant for mages ingame after 4 years though it does look good for parties and weddings )

Lets not forget the fact no mage there is no attack % or base dmg on a wand that a mage can tinker and the melee bonus was NOT added for mages it was added for hybrids so they do not lose melee protection when they switch to wand to portal.
I have become fed up with the overall mage treatment by the devs for the most part its been nerf after nerf in one way or another so I do not know why they do not just remove war magic all together as thats what it feels like they want to do to me.
Before anyone brings up ( but they added level 7s for mages ) guess what level 7s are not limited to mages so thats makes no sense to use as an example.
Unless there is a radical change to mages that makes them able to deal out near equal dmg to what sword or bow hybrids can do on high end content I doubt I shall be back nor will I recommend AC to people wanting to play a mage.
Oh well Everquest here I come. Thank god EQ has gamecards unlike AC.


P.S. this does not mean I shall stop reading or posting here and if things change and they stop nerfing the mages I may be back.

[The Darkness]

It's interesting to note that the sing wand is considered too powerful. Perhaps they will nerf missile weapons next? After all, my xbower hits a load harder on most VoD stuff than my mage can, sing wand or not. I doubt you'll ever see a mage dealing out 3000+ damage in a single shot to Drudge Seraphs, Dillos and Gromnies like my life xbower does with his +186 CS.

I really hope they didnt nerf it for this reason because as you have pointed out there is absolutely no justification for it (damage wise) other than a few folk bleating on the message boards.

My one hope is they have nerfed it because it is a quest item that is more powerful than a loot item, which goes against the grain in AC these days. The hint that more powerful loot casters may appear in December kind of backs that up a little. If people can be bothered to wait until then of course.

However, nothing takes away from the fact that it was introduced two months ago, presumably with the rigorous testing we are assured goes on every month and it was found to be OK. Two months later all that has changed and its now too powerful to stay in game.

My question to the Devs is simple: what has changed in those two months?

[Todoshi]

Now with all the changes to mages, can we try and see some balance to other classes ?
Finally, please ?
There had been some posts last patch already, a melee and missile guy can't compete and some people up there are right, don't tune the mage anymore, try to compensate for lacking vulns or the lightweight, specialised and highly effective wands and the damage they do (later on they don't even vuln) or for some high AL some monsters appartently have.

Then good on the sing wand nerf, was needed, but also as stated above, think and plan this when a new item comes into the game. Now people used it for a while (while others maybe never did or could), will use it for then next couple days, have fun in VoD now btw :) and then its gone. This needs better planning, the guys who missed this now (or did not have much time this summer) are the losers.

And where is the mansion love, I thought its coming, and again nothing ? On the interim, lower rent, can always go up when ready and when you announce this right at the start.

[cstanleytech]

Well The Darkness if the devs make an honest effort to add tinker wands that a mage can get to tinker and say modifiy chance to hit in pvp or a % to improve spell tracking tinker or something similar then I might be back.
AS for now though EQ is the better game ( though zoning all over and losing all items in EQ and xp when you die DOES suck ) I might be back as I do like AC just not the devs near constant nerfage.

[Korrigan]

People completely forget that mages can heal on the fly by draining or using heal spells, while melees and archers have to exit combat mode to use healing or sip potions like drunken trolls. Mages can do damage while healing.

That greatly participates to the global DoT.

I play a mage too. I think he does just fine. The cost of war+life magic is greatly justified by the following facts :
- I can heal without ever exiting combat mode.
- I can do damage while healing.
- I can also recharge stam and mana without ever exiting combat mode
- I can deal all damage types efficiently without exiting combat mode or changing weapon.
- I have ring spells, allowing me to kill packs of "xp" creatures at once. No other offensive skill in AC1 can do that. Nothing compares to a mage with a rend wand and the corresponding ring spell to chain kill those damned xp givers.

No need for some uber carbon copy trinket to kill stuff. A quest weapon should never become a must have which makes it so that all chars of a class use it exclusively over tinkered weapons.

EDIT : cstanleytech, you made me laugh with your "I went back to EQ" posts. They really need to tie the board accounts to active AC1 accounts as soon as possible.

[cstanleytech]

Korrigan from reports the healing skill does better then magic and takes no mana so even some mages are switching to it.
The thing that gets me is it seems the devs want to force mages to be vulners and healers in a group and keep war as only useful for solo fighting for the most part.

Edit: Changes to mages Todoshi ?
Are you talking pvm or pvp ?
If pvp the only way to really balance it I can see is to add in new pvm casting spells for pvm only and then after say a month or two they could alter the old spells at will to balance pvp without hurting pvm.

[Vlad Morbius]

Lord, if i hear one more mage complain about the credits im gonna snap! You have plenty of advantages, I know i play a mage now that my melee has become next to useless without one tagging along.
The issue of the nerf should have been obvious the first time you hit something for 1700 plus damage. I do however completely agree that Turbine needs to go beyond testing the programming of new items and do more thorough testing of the mechanics of these items. To do this they need to hire some gamers who know how to run the items through their paces properly before implementation!

[Hugo Rune]

Korrigan, you make it sound like it takes a lot to heal a melee/missile toon in mid combat. You have to press 2 buttons - 1 and 2 if you set the hotkeys up right, and you can do it while in combat mode. Don't tell me you click to peace mode before healing on a melee? Add in the fact that they take less damage because of their evasion skills and I really don't see it making much of a difference. In fact I have healing trained on my mage because I find it more effective at times in the heat of battle. The DoT effect of a few 60 point drains is minimal on monsters with 5-10k health when hybrids are dealing out 2-3 times as much damage with a skill that cost half the credits.

As for ring spells, they don't do a lot in VoD....and other classes have rending weapons that allow them to take out the standard fodder easy enough. My melees can clear through spawns nearly as fast as a mage because of good weapons and faster attacks - no need to wait for the spell to wind up.

The argument that they're going for balance just doesn't hold water. If they make a melee/missile skill that costs 28 points then fair enough, but less damage than a 12 point skill just takes the Michael.

[Akawa]

Rollback recompense - Good call.

War dmg improvments - Needed. Lvl 1 wars aren't even worth using. Now the little magelings might not get pwned as much. Glad you didn't touch lvl 7s, only the lower lvls needed help here. Worried about the mobs, but then again thats what Magic D is for.

PvP missile speed increase - Not a PvPer, but this change *might* make me give it a whirl.

Lifestone Sending spell - Yeah!

Content Revision: Three Crystals - Great idea. What if we have the gems already, but haven't gone to the brothers in Uziz? Can we still use them? What about unused Portal gems too? Will they work after patch or do I have to start at the beginning again?

Content Revision: Al-jalima - Sounds fine, but keep in mind not every lvl 20 out there has access to a buff bot with 7s. Some still play under their own power (ie lvl 4 spells)

Gromnie Weapons - Sounds reasonable.

Singularity Scepters and Quest Weapons - Sounds reasonable.

Salvaging Skill - I sure as heck hope this makes the October patch! I really like the suggestion of (S+E+C+Q+F+S)/6, too bad the engine won't support it.

Ust Improvements - Love the salvage many types at once option!

Faster Missile Projectiles - So we're going to need to add this via a tinker?

Gromnie Teeth Rewards - Long time coming, guys. People have been doing this for months! Same with Tessera. EE,EO

Siraluun Trophy Rewards - Gives me a reason to hunt Big Bird aside from a Sesame Street fixation.

Starter Town Portals - Awesome idea! Maybe then you could revisit the remaining 6 nexus towns and make them lvl 10-20 areas while leaving the big three as lvl 1-10.

[Deven-Kenyon]

We are continuing our work on making towns more worthwhile for players to congregate in

Yet anyone that can will do the tree top quest. If you want to make towns people wish to spend their time in, then do away with the treetop and make every vendor buy at 100% Until then, the only server that will have *for the time being* busy towns is VT.

Perhaps do something like New York City: NPC's on the street singing for items, maybe if you drop them off some pyreals they give you xp, or quest hints/items or new special portal gems, treated kits etc. Perhaps some monuments, or as suggested a while back, some type of museum where players can go see all of the older content that is no longer available to obtain other than trading for it. Maybe a Dereth Wax Museum, where all of the baddies past will be immortalized for all to see.

Also, revamping starter quests isn't doing a darn thing for your current player base--you know, those people who've been faithful followers of this game for many years now? In your pursuit to please those to come, don't forget those who still walk the worlds

[Todoshi]

Healing for melees and missiles makes me cry. You can't rely on it and in VoD or other places a missed heal kills (or can very likely), especially with drains and war in the 3 digit range, a mage does not have that.

Now I don't know but even in high level tuskers dungeons, ring spells help, or in bug places, a melee or archer has a hard time doing that.

Then if we take tuskers as example, compare how long a melee needs for a big tusker, or a mage. Same in Dires for bandies, drudges or golems. Same in cauln where at certain times some fellows did not even take melees, I wonder why ?

Then in VoD, my melee or missile guy can't compare to a mage, and when healing in melee, does it officially not even take you out of combat mode to do this (or use the reduced skill if you remain in fighting position, which just makes it more fun to heal) and a sticky melee which is really annoying lately too when fighting mobs or relying on not killing the whole fellow by bringing more monsters on accident (not to mention when lag pulls you all over).

This game needs serious balance, and this coming patch does not help it, and I know the topic is old, but only complaints can change things.

[mishop]

Absolutely love the salvage and ust improvements slated for October =)))))).

[cstanleytech]

I am with Hugo Rune here.
At times like this when it comes the subject of mages it seems the devs would not know balance if it stood right in front of them and danced the macerana while juggling flaming torches.
Mind you I could very well be wrong but thats how it seems to me at times.

[KsBabe]

I still say the nerf to the USW is a bad move on Turbine's part. It doesnt give mages the upper hand killing VoD V's just a chance at getting the kill, but nine out of ten times an archer or melee hunting with the mage will get the kill. If you dont believe me, I think a few mages will let you tag along with them out to VoD and you use a missle or melee weapon you too will see that you will outkill that mage. How do I know? As I said previously, I play an archer, I hunt with several different mages and yes I get the kills on most of the Vs. Why? Could it be because once a mage tries to land a spell on a V the whole group attacks at once which only leaves the mage healing himself while the others kill? If anyone dont agree, find a mage and go out hunting with him and you can prove it to yourself!
I can and do cast my own vulns on critters, thanks to having to spec life so I could, but I prefer a mage to hunt with, gives me a faster way to kill and dont usually die as I do when I have to try and take on three Vs at once which gives me a very good understanding of how a mage feels when he has to keep healing instead of killing.
Turbine the wand was at least a useful quest item, but now I can see it becoming just another wall decoration. I hope you will not nerf it, the patch isnt due out for two weeks so just pull that one out, or I am afraid you will lose some of your loyal players who have stayed with you for a long time.

As for the new war spells, I agree with one who posted earlier, dont put them in until you can just give them to the players instead of the monsters, that way you can make sure it is right before it is added in and the dungeons once again get packed.

[Hugo Rune]

Todoshi, I know a few people who have problems healing and found they stopped spending xp in it long ago. Aim to have your base healing skill equal to the buffed health you have and you shouldn't have so many problems. Heals may fail, drains can be resisted too.

I don't know why your missile guy struggles in Vod, maybe you're using the wrong ammo or bow, because I know for a fact that when you get the right combo (x)bow does insane amounts of damage. I'm also aware that many mages in VoD fellows only look after themselves, not imping or casting the right vuln for the melees which could be the problem. I lost count of the number of times I'd ask for pierce vuln on Seraphs and all I saw was fire, and ended up getting the wand out myself. Thats why I just solo with my xbower there now - I do the imps and vulns I need and fire away.

For melees, Dires stuff goes down fast enough once you throw an imp on to back up the rend weapon - I even do that with my gimp 10/10 focus/self start sworder with only trained life. Not as good as my mage on them sure, but then my mage can't do anywhere near as well on hollows, mutilators, juggernaut raiders etc. You mention tuskers, I find little difference between any of my toons on them - any that I can one shot with my mage I can do the same with my xbower and my sworder takes like 2-3 swings (same time as 1 war spell).

As for the Caul fellows being mage only...you can blame that on the myth that mages are better than all other classes. If it gets said often enough people believe it. I bet a gang of life archers would do better.

[Silifi Of Death]

The problem with mages is that they are the best of BOTH worlds. They are by far the most efficient at support (healing and debuffing) and now they do lots of damage. They are more effective in both of these areas than any Hybrid. Why? Because you don't have to switch wands. You can do every single thing without getting out of combat.

As for doing 7000+ damage, that's a joke. Maybe if they have a 10x tinkered CB weapon and have imped and vulned a Titanium Armoredillo. I have NEVER seen anyone do that much damage. Best crit I ever hit for was 1k. Perhaps your refering to UA, which is already painfully unbalancing to every class.

I've seen level 84 mages do fine in VoD, he got more kills than me, a 100+ axe. He wasn't even using a sing wand. Don't complain that a mage can't do good enough. You say now mages are only useful for Soloing now? Welcome to my world. I pretty much suck in any group that I'm in, I've found that I do the group far more good if I'm healing people than if I'm attacking. There's nothing wrong with mages. I disagree with the Sing Wand being nerfed, but to say that everything is being catered towards melees is a joke. The last update a melee got was when? Never. They've been focusing on mages for the past few months, so don't complain that they don't care about you.

Frieze, your sarcasitic comment about it ruining the game is very mis-educated. There is no reason to go anything but Sho now. Why? Because Aluvians are missing a worthwhile skill, and Gharu have two skills that do the exact same thing. This makes Sho even better than it was before. UA toons have lost the only con that they ever had, and that wasn't a very big one either. They are one of the highest damage weapons to begin with, and they are also the cheapest weapon. Where's the balance here? Two 100+ melees, one is Axe, or is UA, the UA have a far better DoT. Better DoT on everything, and they get peirce, high melee d mods, and more skill credits. This means that a UA can pick up a skill 30 levels lower than me. While I have to wait until 126 to have all the skills I need, a UA has all these skills, and can afford to get extras.

I'd dare any one of you to give me ONE good reason why I should make a Gharu'dim character that I want to play, and not tinker with. Give me one good reason why I should make an Aluvian toon, other than for RPing.

[Winter]

Deadly hollow staff........20 - 40 Bludgeoning
Deadly hollow Dagger.....20-40 Slashing/Piercing
Deadly hollow UA ..........17 - 34 Slash / Piercing

But UA does TONS! more damage because of the Str bonus. Please addjust the base stats of staff and make the 2 at least equal. and give Staff a str bonus too.

Use Cord for dagger if need be..



Dagger has a damage bonus based on coord, and Staff has a damage bonus based off Strength. The problem is UA gets a damage bonus for both Strength and ANOTHER damage modifier for skill. I generally dont have a problem with the base damage of racials, but why not bring all the weapons into line, including racials, and give them all skill based damage bonuses?

[Ashida Kim]

Ibn,

In suggestion for the issue of people using trade skills to fund other combat type skills, might I offer another, slightly more difficult, but more useful way to implement a fix. If the fix you have proposed, trade toons will eventually suffer from an exp cap, which is ssomewhat self defeating to the purpose of the crafting quests. Might there be a way to PERMENANTLY assign the exp to the crafting skill, so that, if the crafting skill is untrained, you do NOT get that experience back. IF there is a way to do this, it could then be applied to terresas, harb quest et cetera, and may open the door for you to do more experience based quests geared towards specific skills.

Just my 2 pyreal. As always, thanks for a fantastic addiction...I mean...uh...game.

[Silifi Of Death]

Winter, that idea wouldn't work too well... the UA Bonuses are too good. If all melees got the skill bonus, War Magic would be horrible, and so would bows. If they balance everything around UA as it is, then all the monsters will be too easy at the high end.

[Kachina]

:mad: Why must all quest weapons be worthless? 99% of all the quest weapons in the game are worthless. They do not measure up in fighting much of any monsters in the game. All Singularity Scepters will have their Virindi Slayer quality reduced by 22% and their Crushing Blow ability will be removed. The Biting Strike ability on the Ultimate Singularity Scepters will be reduced by 6%. They will be useless, good only to give town criers. You might as well sell them at the local merchants along with the rest if the useless items they sell. :( Why don't you actually find out what the MAJORITY of players feel about issues before doing silly out of line nerfs?

[Swift-Jake]

I will agree, TO AN EXTENT, that the USW should be tweaked a little, but to the extent you're saying Ibn, is a little ironic.

People (on my server anyway), wonder why people don't use the quest weapons. Well, here's a good reason why. People start using them, and now they're being nerfed. So, yet again, no quest wepaons will be used.

My main point here, is that compare the Archer's DoT with that of a mage without the USW. The archer is going to get the kill the majority of the time. Archers can say what they want, but it's obviously true. Archers make the mages vuln for them while in a fellow, plus they get to loot. What do the mages get out of this? A debt they have to pay by going to see the mage to buy more comps is what I see. The USW was a way for many mages to finally risk going out and hunting on their own. This nerf is too much in my opinion. Lowering the Crushing Blow part is fine, but leave the CS part alone.

[KriegPfeil]

No mention of the melee defense wand problem which is rendering melees even more useless against mages, plus...

Introduction of archer love that, while much needed in archer v. mage combat, will further imbalance the archer against melees, equals:

deeper nerfs to melees.
How does this hurt melees when fighting archers? The arrows travel faster, up to twice as fast, last time I checked melee's attack from point blank range. This isn't a change to how many arrows you can get off in x amount of time just the time it takes the arrow to hit its target once it is fired. It will make it a little harder for a melee to disengage and heal without being hit at all, this is what is needed btw. Archers cannot get kills atm because as soon as you want to dodge an archer you can, if you didn't know you could strafe and use heal kits at the same time then you have other issues that prevent you from competing.

If someone is using a melee defense wand, use an AR sword that should have a much higher buffed attack mod than the 18% found on the weeping let alone the ones found on the phantom or hollow. Melee defense is an expensive skill, people who have it should get something. You want imbalance look at missile defense, I don't think anyone who has missile defense has ever died to an archer, ever. People with melee defense die to melees all the time.

[sursun]

Hmm... I wonder if it'd be possible to have it auto-select a material type if you have a bag in there already? For example, if my Ust is empty and I drag a pack of multiple items in, I get multiple bags of varied salvage. But if there's one bag of Steel already in there, I only get Steel and none of the non-Steel items get salvaged.

That'd be pretty cool, I think... I'll ask Zyrca if that can be done. No promises, obviously.

That would be a great idea. If you can not do it though please leave out the ability to add different kinds of salvage to the ust all at once. Without the ability you mention above the new feature will make things worse not better. The ability to salvage a lot of things at once and get the same amount back will be a nice change.

Everything else sounds good.

[sharpy-sc]

Yes, we're aware of this. We weren't able to rebalance the creatures this month, but we plan to at some point in the future.

If you are aware of this....then why make these changes now...?

That doesnt make sense...

You are basically making every monster in Dereth that casts war spells twice as deadly!!!!

HELLO!!!!!???

Thats a big deal! "Yes we are aware of this"? OMG you guys are insane!!!

[God Slayer]

Quest weapons are never supose to be better than whatyou can create from loot or find in loot

there was a few times this wasn't the case and in all those instances this was fixed.

pre patch GSA too powerfull they nerfed it but left the old armor in the game... eh..

Old Mattie Robes sorta a one time event .. then realized maybe robes with al and 2 unparl isnt' such a good idea.. nerfed

just be happy you got to use your wand for as long as you did and then go back to you normal rutine.

It's sorta funny how most of you people complaining about the wand being nerfed keep saying

"it doesn't do that much dammage"

so then why complain? if it's not as good as turbine says it is then, why complain that they're nerfing it

how how your logic doesn't work here?

personaly the mages have gotten more love this year than any other class, and don't even try to tell me other wise.

[Zestryl]

It's always bad when a quest weapon becomes a must have better than everything else. This nerf on the sing wands is needed, case closed.

And for those who cry that their poor mage is so badly nerfed once again : the critical strike and crippling blow imbues work better than the sing wand, and you can further tink them with brass and/or opal.

This is amazing statement. In the first paragraph you say that the USW is a "must have" and in the second you say that Crit Strike and Crip Blow are better. Korrigan, you can not have it both ways.


The issue of the nerf should have been obvious the first time you hit something for 1700 plus damage.

With the USW I have hit Exactly Two Critter types for 1500+ and that is the VoD Virindi. Everything else crits for about 800-1000. While I would still not be thrilled, how about just lowering the % on bonus crits?

[sharpy-sc]

If you are aware of this....then why make these changes now...?

That doesnt make sense...

You are basically making every monster in Dereth that casts war spells twice as deadly!!!!

HELLO!!!!!???

Thats a big deal! "Yes we are aware of this"? OMG you guys are insane!!!

IBN???? What were you thinking????

[zathros]

How about basing the new salvage skill on just quickness? It is currently the least needed skill. If this was done, some people would still choose to play Gharu characters instead of Sho so they could salvage better.

Monster spells NEED to be lowered in damage soon. Magic is currently the number one killer, and with the increase in damage it just gets worse. If you hurry, would it be possible to reduce all level 1-6 monster war spells by one level for the September patch? This would still be an INCREASE in damage. It seems like a fairly easy change, and can be done with a script rather than having a dev change each one by hand. If this can be done by the September patch, people won't be screaming for a hotfix. :) Later, you can tweak individual monsters.

The USS nerf was needed. CS wands are now useful again, and do almost as much damage with 360 skill. I will still carry my USS, but it won't be my weapon of choice against most monsters. If you had waited 6 months to make this change, the screaming would have been worse. :)

[Winter]

Winter, that idea wouldn't work too well... the UA Bonuses are too good. If all melees got the skill bonus, War Magic would be horrible, and so would bows. If they balance everything around UA as it is, then all the monsters will be too easy at the high end.

The other option is to remove the skill based damage bonus completely, and Im sure that would go over about as well as a whore at a wedding.
People are sick of the nerfs, of which I can sympathize, but whats the other option here? New higher wield weapons arent going to help, because everyone will be getting them. Another option would be increasing the bonus from your primary stat. I would be for adding these to missile as well as melee. I would disagree that this will somehow unbalance relative to war magic, as non magic classes have to deal with natural armor/armor levels.

[KriegPfeil]

I will agree, TO AN EXTENT, that the USW should be tweaked a little, but to the extent you're saying Ibn, is a little ironic.

People (on my server anyway), wonder why people don't use the quest weapons. Well, here's a good reason why. People start using them, and now they're being nerfed. So, yet again, no quest wepaons will be used.

My main point here, is that compare the Archer's DoT with that of a mage without the USW. The archer is going to get the kill the majority of the time. Archers can say what they want, but it's obviously true. Archers make the mages vuln for them while in a fellow, plus they get to loot. What do the mages get out of this? A debt they have to pay by going to see the mage to buy more comps is what I see. The USW was a way for many mages to finally risk going out and hunting on their own. This nerf is too much in my opinion. Lowering the Crushing Blow part is fine, but leave the CS part alone.
Why should a quest weapon be the best wand to use on 100% of content that you are going to vuln yourself to kill? It made the improvements of CS/CB wands a moot point because USW were better on the mobs that you used these on anyway. Archer DOT is not better, mage DOT was already the highest before they got a boost of 25%(CS wands)-35%(USW wands).

There are a few mobs that non mages do more damage on than mages. The exact total is 8, of the 8 only one of them is worth hunting for exp, that mob is Obliterators which are an uncommon spawn. Non mages have no mob that they can kill at the exp/hour rate that mages can kill Vod/Caul virindi. Its not like it is even close either.

Problems that you may have when in fellowships that you imperil and vuln for while others are killing are problems with those individuals, not with AC. I would never hunt with people who didn't share loot rights. To assume that the person who gets the kill is the person who is helping the fellowship the most is idiotic at best. You are not fixing the game by letting someone who debuffs a mob while others are already attacking it then do enough damage to outdamage those who have been attacking the whole time.

Recently when fighting in a fellow at caul the mages wouldn't even imperil virindi, that is because the damage they did with their USW made the damage done by non mages(which there were more of than mages btw) of no consequence. How is that not grossly overpowered. I have personally killed a Virindi Paradox on my mage with a vuln and 3 wars. While the average is a vuln and 5 wars that is still a very, very fast way to get 1.3 million exp.

[DraconisUmbra]

Umm ouch. Bad enough that 7's hit as hard as they do. Getting tougher and tougher every day to be a Melee.

[Tan-Ghil]

It may be time again for adjusting the Magic Defence formula.

That'll benefit all classes without taking it over the top regarding to dev. work and lack of monster balance for Sept.
Just lower the F/S divide by 1 point for a month would be a way to test things, since you already are testing way many things ATM.

Tan-Ghil of Frostfell

[Zestryl]

Kreig, you can not have it both ways. TWO Mobs (as opposed to your 8) can be killed as fast as you say.

So, let's remove the Virindi Slayer aspect.

I will not disagree that killing the VoD Virindi is now fast, however, use an assault orb on VoD Tummies - Use a G-Man staff on VoD Olthoi. I kill them almost as fast as the Virindi now.

OMG! NERF THOSE TOO! QUICK!

[Bob_Jones_LC]

RE: Recompense - Huzzah. I'd have settled for an apology, but whatever.

RE: War Magic changes - Can't say I see the reason for this, but whatever.

RE: PvP Missile changes - Suppose this counts as a bonus, but then I don't think missile speed will really make a whole lot of difference. Maybe it will, but whatever.

RE: Lifestone sending spell - Whatever.

RE: Crystal revisions - /e braces for Post-Patch Crystal Weapon nerfage...

RE: Al-Jalima - Whatever.

RE: Gromnie Weapons / Sing Wand nerfs - Can't complain about either, can't say I favor either.

RE: Gromnie Teeth rewards - What exactly is the plan for trade skills? If the plan is to make them totally worthless, just do it already and get it over with. I liked the old paradigm where you thought that they should be used on mains, not muled-off skills. How am I supposed to level my Staff mule now?

RE: Salvaging / Usts - Lipstick on a pig. The salvaging / tinkering dynamic is such a mess, I can't get happy about slight improvement. Whatever.


In summary: Whatever. I remember reading the LttP and thinking "Yay" at some point in time, but the memory gets foggier and foggier every day.

[krack]

100 sings says you nerf the projectile speed inside 3 months.

[Jinnsman]

My only AC regret is rerolling my main as Gharu when i came back (post deletion) rather than Sho as I had always played previously. The only reason I chose Gharu was for the item tink which is now meaningless. *cries*

Alas regrets....

Nevertheless, I continue to hope for the future since you never know what will happen in this game! I am very excited about the Archer love and really hope that the ability to accelerate all projectiles becomes a reality!

[God Slayer]

the thing you guys forget is that

Turbine makes you a patch every month

no other games does this..

with every month they try to get as much as they can for you

so they dont' have tons of time to test every aspect of every weapon

and you can ever test for everything it's just impossible if that was the case there'd be no pirating of video games/dvd/music/programs

so just be happy you get anything at all

[LugianWarlord]

Character Option:

[ ] Allow different salvage types to be used in the Ust simultaneously

[Tesarra-TD]

Personally, the novelty of the sing wand wore off after about a week. I still use it on virindi, don't get me wrong, but the crappy bonus to mana c was driving me up the wall. So I switched back to my CS major life wand for vod hunting. And when I forget to re-equip the sing wand to kill virindi and use my CS it doesn't kill me.

I also noticed, on TD at least, fewer and fewer mages using this wand exclusively and in turn using better tinked casting items. And whenever I felllowed with someone using the sing wand, if it was just me and that mage, kill counts were split pretty much down the middle.

When my husband and I were talking about the sing wand nerf that was comming, I told him "They're probably going to remove one of the properties". Seemed to make the most sense to me. But nerfing the v-slayer property itself by 22% was something I didn't see comming. Now I have even more of a reason to use my CS :p

However, I'll be much less likely to cast an Imp on a virindi when I'm hunting with melee's :cool:

[Heideggar]

When the USW first came out I didn't think too much of it as it's beent he staple of non PvP weapons to be not as good as loot generated (eventually tinkered too) items. I figured it'd be just like the assault orb and Gaerlan Wand (Taulandoi!? whatever). Since the quests to get all three were pretty easy I figured it'd be the same slayer property, just for virindi. I said,... eh, ok, I'll get it and put it with my "VoD killing wands" pile. I smoke tumeroks with my assault orb, as well as olthoi with my Gaerlan wand. I don't see why you guys don't revert the USW to a 8/8 mod, virindi slayer caster with a 10% increase in crits. Thing is, you guys are taking away the meaning of the wands, which are the ability to do better against virindi vs a regular weapon.

Now, if you could actually get assault weapons, gaerlan weapons, and singularity weapons for melee/missle people to do better against virindi, then you'd have a more balanced situation.

The benefit of these weapons, from my point of view, is that they are much better than normal weapons, but are very limited to a certain type of creature. They're not universal, and if you carry many, they can take up pack space and give burden.

I think you guys are missing the underlying intentions of these types of weapons with their flaws and boons.

[LugianWarlord]

Just make it coordination and quickness - lol... although logically it would follow the coordination/focus combination - but a lot of gharu's would be pretty ticked at it matching the same attributes as item tinkering... (and with coord/quick, aluvian dagger toons finally get some kind of advantage after being stuck with the insult of dagger and assess person)

[Awake33]

Maybe I should have mentioned I play a sword toon as well a mage.

You don't have to exit combat to heal. Healing is much faster than a level 7 heal spell. Healing restores alot more health on avg than a heal spell, assuming you don't wait too long to do it.

If you fail a heal 2 times and heal the 3rd time, that's how long it takes to cast 1 level 7 heal spell.

For the guy who included health drains in DOT for a mage. Be serious. A mob with 5-10k health loses .4% health, which is gained back by way of regen 4 or 5 seconds later.

Who are these people playing archers/melee who get beat by mages anywhere? You obviously don't know what your doing.

When going on quests, at any level, for 50% of the war spells I cast, the target is already dead to melees before done winding up for the spell!
Even if there are 5 mages and 5 melee.

If archers didn't do far more damage than anyone else, then fully tinkered bows/xbows would not sell for 4 times as many sings as a tinked mage wand.

I'm not asking to be equal or better than any other class, never have been one of the whiners talking about balance. Turbine has a tough job overall, it is a very complex game with alot of variables. As such, I've always been happy to either leave the game for awhile, or just let them work things out over time while playing.

Ok, so even with the USW, mages cannot out kill in VoD. That's ok with me. I don't need to.

But how dare you finally give us something that does decent damage only to take it away! Mages still do less DOT, so what is the damned problem?!?

Keep it that way, keep the archers/melee happy by letting them do 2x the damage. I don't care, but don't turn the mage back into a friggin wuss!

[God Slayer]

i thought the wand wasn't over powered? and it didn't do that much dammage against Virindi

then you say it does..

so many conflicting views..

it's 1 weapon mages are fine get over it

[Mildly amused]

However, I'll be much less likely to cast an Imp on a virindi when I'm hunting with melee's :cool:

Finally a mage that speaks the truth. Mages can screw all melees in a fellow every time they chose to. Mages can control by casting -or not casting- one spell who gets the loot rights. When again will a skill for melees be implemented to screw all mages in the same fellow. It is f-ing overdue for at least two years now.

[Zalliun]

Finally a mage that speaks the truth. Mages can screw all melees in a fellow every time they chose to. Mages can control by casting -or not casting- one spell who gets the loot rights. When again will a skill for melees be implemented to screw all mages in the same fellow. It is f-ing overdue for at least two years now.

so you really belive that all mages are out to get all the loot and on top of that outkills a whole fellow every single time.

try hunting with friends or get new ones.

[Mildly amused]

a) reading comprehension is your friend
b) I do not need tips on my choice of friends

All I said is, mages have the ability to control who gets the loot rights and thats plain wrong.

[KriegPfeil]

Kreig, you can not have it both ways. TWO Mobs (as opposed to your 8) can be killed as fast as you say.

So, let's remove the Virindi Slayer aspect.

I will not disagree that killing the VoD Virindi is now fast, however, use an assault orb on VoD Tummies - Use a G-Man staff on VoD Olthoi. I kill them almost as fast as the Virindi now.

OMG! NERF THOSE TOO! QUICK!
mages do better on all mobs except those 8 and I didn't say they should nerf gman wands or assault orbs. I use all of these on my mage. 22% less means that mages will still kill these faster than anyone else. I guess I need to point out the obvious since it escaped your attention. The Singularity Wand is overpowered because it lets you earn 1.3 million exp in an average of 6 spells(1 vuln and 5 wars). I have killed Virindi Paradox in as few as 3 wars even. There is NOTHING that non mages can kill for similar exp/hour.

[Stith]

1. Thanks for nerfing the USW. It was disgustingly overpowered.

2. Raising War damage for monsters is a Bad Idea(tm). This is going to hit melees hardest as they have the most difficulty dodging spells, but this is really, really going to hurt any character that doesn't have 300+ magic d. It would be wise to leave this change out until you can implement the spellcasting monster nerf simultaneously. It's not going to make the game unplayable, but it's going to make low level characters, especially melees, a royal pain to play.

3. The new salvaging skill should be based on Endurance and Coordination. (Generally speaking) Endurance is a mage only stat, Coord is a Melee/Archer only stat. If you need to use an integer for the divisor, I recommend using 2 - the skill will be lower to start with than a salvaging skill on an ideall built character, but it's still managable to get it to the 440+ necessary for consistant salvaging.

[Copper06]

As I said before in my last post, I play all 3 classes, mage/archer/melee. The USW did not make mages uber, it gave them a chance to feel needed again. I proved it again this morning. I went out to VoD with my melee, I was whackin' Luggies for 4400+ and Groms I can't even GET the damage because if I crit them, they die. And that's solo, sure I had to sacrifice melee skill (10 start quick) to do that, but it's more than worth it.

Can I now hit Virindi with 1700 pts. of damage with my mage? Yep, you bet I can. Do I STILL use my Blud Rend and Fire Rend orbs a lot of the time in other places? Yep, you bet I do. The USW is NOT a replacement for other wands, quest or tinked. It's a tool to be used in 2 locations, Caul and VoD.

When I'm in a fellow with non-mages do I still imperil the V's? Of course I do, it would be silly not to. One poster said it was the Players fault for hunting in a fellow with people who didn't share loot, but he then went on to say that mages weren't imp'ing for the non-mages............Double standard here? Is that not the Players fault for hunting in a fellow like that also?

The USW made playing a mage FUN, that's all I'm saying. It's FUN to go out there solo and kick a little more butt. Just in my very small guild on WE 2 mages started PLAYING their mages again with this nifty item. Is it a must have? Certainly not, not for me anyways. Will I continue to play no matter what they do to it? Of course. Will it end up on my wall as a "sparkly" like so many other Quest Items? I hope not.......................

You can say what you want about skill points and such. But the fact is 28 points is 28 points. My melee can go out to VoD solo now at a whopping level 90 and do tons more damage to monsters and he spent...........14 points(6 for UA, another 8 to spec life, this is to get an apples to apples comparison as my mage does not have spec life either).

Sit back, watch a while, look at balancing out what melee/archers do in PvM and leave the mages alone. I hear a LOT more people griping that their class, be it archer or melee, isn't receiving the attention that mages are. So SPEND some attention on THEM.

[rascal]

Great :( Mages get a little love with the sing wand so it gets nerfed back to the stone age. It will be nothing more than TC fodder or a house decoration :mad:

Couple that with double the damage for mob war spells and it sounds like the worst patch ever. :(

[Nemis]

I would say base the salvage skill off one stat : Endurance. I think most of us can agree this is one stat all of us are constantly pumping up.

Ack! If you start at 100 endurance then raise it to 200, each point costs about 3.2 MILLION XP. If you start at 10 endurance then rasie it to 200, each point costs around 4 BILLION xp.

I am on the side of those who want it to raise in concert with your level, and everyone stays on an equal footing as far as salvage is concerned. I have always thought it should have been this way from the start, but the devs at that time wanted us to have to make "choices" -- which I also agree with :)

However, I feel that such a basic skill, which virtually everyone uses, should be implemented in an unbiased manner... I would say let everyone have it and make it (S+E+C+Q+F+S)/8 something like that... (In this scenario the "typical" Salvage skill around level 70-75 would, if my calculations are correct, probably be about 350. It seems reasonable to me that someone of that level should be pretty proficient at salvaging. With a divisor of 8, a character with creature magic buffs would still get a boost to the skill -- up to 70 points if casting 7's).

Regards,
Nemis

[Hugo Rune]

Silifi, you are kidding when you say melees never get anything aren't you? Either that or you're fairly new to the game. Let me see, 3 years ago since level 7s came in and nothing significant in high end mage damage since that hasn't also involved a bigger improvement in melee/missile damage (other than fixing the broken crits which hardly counts).

In those 3 years melees & missiles have had the addition of deadly arrows & quarrels and wield req weapons with higher damage - 24-40 swords would have been the stuff of dreams those 3 years ago, a 7-13 bandit was as uber as it got. Remember those awesome 2-7 daggers, you know the kind that drop on Drudge Prowlers these days?

Then tinkering came in to create even better weapons so non-mages could get the benefit of a vuln effect without needing any kind of magical ability. Sure mages benefitted a little in DoT with rend and cs/cb wands but nowhere near as much as the other classes. A while back xbow and the racial weapons all got a further upgrade. The Blackmire quests recently brought in some nice weapons like the Falchion and Bladed Bow and the upgrades to the Living Weapons are nice for 250 wields - I never ever thought I'd kill Tusker Guards in 1 double-strike at level 40 with a dagger!

Now don't get me wrong, other classes needed improvements and I don't begrudge them, I play all types of toons myself. Mages were by far the most powerful class for a long time. But gradually over the past few years the others have caught up and in the case of (x)bow overtaken the mage. What irks me is that because people are stuck in the old mindset that mages are the most powerful, when something comes along that benefits mages people complain about how the other classed don't get enough and the Devs go along with it. Where was the outcry when +155% xbows came in? I mean like they needed that extra 5% on top of the already increased mod, rends, mahogany tinking, deadly quarrels etc.

[Albar II]

What should the Salvaging Skill be based on?

Current Tinkering skills:
Armor (E + F) / 2
Item (C + F) / 2
Magic Item (F + F) / 2 (Or F)
Weapon (S + F) / 2.

All Tinkering skill use focus as a component. The new Salvage skill should do the same. The difficultly is the second component. I do not believe the new Salvaging skill should duplicate another Tinkering Skill. That leaves the second component as either Willpower or Quickness.

My mage characters would prefer Willpower.
My Melee/missile characters would prefer Quickness.

Either would be fine.

With that said, its time to allow sellback of NONWEAPON Racial skills. Assess Person has been useless for a long time, but with the addition of the Tinkering skill you have gotten rid of a MAJOR use of Item Tinkering. Essentially, giving Aluvian and Gharu player’s two extra skill credits would balance out their less useful racial weapon skills.

[Silifi Of Death]

I will agree, TO AN EXTENT, that the USW should be tweaked a little, but to the extent you're saying Ibn, is a little ironic.

People (on my server anyway), wonder why people don't use the quest weapons. Well, here's a good reason why. People start using them, and now they're being nerfed. So, yet again, no quest wepaons will be used.

My main point here, is that compare the Archer's DoT with that of a mage without the USW. The archer is going to get the kill the majority of the time. Archers can say what they want, but it's obviously true. Archers make the mages vuln for them while in a fellow, plus they get to loot. What do the mages get out of this? A debt they have to pay by going to see the mage to buy more comps is what I see. The USW was a way for many mages to finally risk going out and hunting on their own. This nerf is too much in my opinion. Lowering the Crushing Blow part is fine, but leave the CS part alone.

Ehm... If the archer is fellowing with you and constantly looting stuff, just un-fellow him. Better yet, don't imp for him. Without that imp he won't be able to get those insane crits, and he's prolly not powerful enough to imp for himself. And, even if he's a life archer, by the time he pulls out his wand and cast, then pull out his bow and shoot you'll have been able to get 3 spells in. Mages get the ability to control looting dynamics if they want. If that archer is being a jackass, just leave him on his own. He'll die and you'll be happy.

Mages can hunt on their own without the USW. I know a level 84 mage who hunts in VoD by himself. I'd say he does fine. As I melee, there's no way for me to run around in VoD by myself, I tried a couple days ago. And I'm 20 levels higher. I'm sure it's not easy for him, I'm sure he has to be smart and know what he's doing. But he can still do it, can't he? As opposed to me, who can't do it unless I have a friend.

[Newbie]

Salvage skill:

Yay! Timing should be right for when my main UA hits 125 to get his last cred and complete his temp and has to drop item tink. As for what attribs to base it on, do like loyalty/leadership - nothing. But then just alter the "salvage check" to use a different scale for the new skill. If you can have different scales for CS % for melees (topped at 400) and missle (topped at 360), surely you can do the same for this new salvage skill.

Mage stuff:

I'd rather see you wait to increase spell dmg until the monsters can be balanced at the same time.

I play a UA, a mage and an archer, so I get a taste of all play styles regularly. For all you mages that complain "whaa I'm relegated to support now, I never get the kill, whaaaa", I say PFFFFFFFFT. I agree with Krieg (EDIT: and Silifi) - don't hunt with selfish people who don't share loot. If you're just in it for the xp then loot is just a nice bonus. If you're loot hunting, then hunt with trusted friends. I hunt the toughest content with friends and clan-mates and we share what we find. If one of us finds a nice item that's not necessarily ideal for the toon we're currently playing, we ask who else can use it. If you're that concerned about not getting kills or being asked repeatedly for imps by melees and archers that proceed to get the kill then don't cast 'em. Tell the archers and melees to cast their own imps and see how well that goes. Sheesh.

With all this whining about getting kills or not, maybe the fellow leader should have a global option: share loot/not share loot, and it applies to ALL in the fellow. If you don't like the current setting, leave or don't join. Only problem then is the melees would still always get the loot because they're at the corpse first being close-range fighters. So that brings us back to... hunt solo or with friends, not selfish fools.

Request: more multi-item buffs

How about some work on buffing multiple weapons at once like currently worn armor? I LOVE the shorter self critter/life spells and item banes (I confess that I complained before you put it in about what if toons need to wear certain items to cast spells. But 6's aren't that much less effective than 7's, and putting in the time to hunt up the xp to increase my casting skills enough for the toons that previously needed help was soooo worth it.) That said, I can cast all buffs and banes on my mage manually in like 2mins (not even) and be gtg for wilderness hunting. But it's a major pain to have to cast 4 buffs on say 5 or 6 melee weaps (not to mention baning the shield separately) or 3 buffs on 3 or 4 bows at the full lvl 7 cast speed after the rest goes so quick.

So, can you try to put in some way to bane your shield at the same time as your worn armor? Maybe if it's in your very first inventory slot in your main pack, it gets lumped in with the other worn items in the list, and the same extra mana cost formula, etc. applies. Seems like that would be easy enough to implement.

For buffing multiple weapons, use the same multi-item mana cost formula as for banes. Then you just need a way to flag the weapons to buff at once. I suggested earlier a trade-window-like panel to drag them into to flag for buffing. Another suggestion by someone else, although it would be bothersome to change every buff cycle, was to buff whatever weapons are hotkeyed. If those are too hard to implement, then make weapon buffs apply to all the items at the start of your main backpack if they are the same type as the currently selected item. For example, I put 5 UA weaps or bows at the start of my backpack, then have a portal gem, a healing kit, whatever. I select one of the weaps and cast my 4 weapon buffs. The buffs apply to all the weaps from space 1 through to the space before the non-simlar item (shield, healing kit, whatever). That would ROCK.

Keep up the good work Turbine. Don't let the loud minority disuade you from what you think is best for the game.

[Silifi Of Death]

Korrigan, you make it sound like it takes a lot to heal a melee/missile toon in mid combat. You have to press 2 buttons - 1 and 2 if you set the hotkeys up right, and you can do it while in combat mode. Don't tell me you click to peace mode before healing on a melee?

Uh, it's a known fact that if you heal while in Combat, you get a healing penalty. If you use blue kits and have spec healing, then sure, you can heal while in combat. But, whenever you do something while in combat other than attack, you'll end up taking much longer than getting out of combat anyway. Especially on archers.

[Hugo Rune]

Silifi, take that level 84 mage and put him on his own in the 80+ matron hive and see how well he does. He'll be spending so much time healing he'll hardly get a chance to kill. Then compare it to your axer. VoD is one place in the game, the USW powerful on one type of monster. But hey, the melees cry foul and the Devs lap it up.


Sure you get a penalty from combat mode with healing, but then heal spells and drains dont give back as much health and in the case of heal spells take longer.

[Liaya]

Regarding the salvaging skill: How about making it's attributes Coord and Self? Coord would work for melee/missile templates while Self is pretty exclusively mage.




Regarding the USW change: I'm concerned about your reducing the Virindi Slayer property on the USW.

I'm mostly hoping that you don't go too far in pushing the USW in the other direction. If you make it so it's as useful on VoD/Caul Virindi as my Assault Orb is on VoD Tummies, and my Gman wand is on VoD olthoi, I'll be ok with that. That's where I use those quest casters anyway, exclusively on those 'slayer' critters in VoD, or the occasional high-health critters in quests (Elemental slayer wand on Harbinger comes to mind). For the rest of the critters in Vod/Caul, it's back to my CS or CB orbs once September comes around. Any place else, I use rend casters anyway.

If the USW ends up having a worse average DoT on VoD Virindi than my CS or CB orbs, that's when I'll be shouting NERF.

...taking a 'wait and see' appoach to this and crossing fingers...

[Heideggar]

IMO, (str + end)/2 should be the calculator for the salvage skill. The salvage skill will be "trained" in regards to how much it costs per point to raise.

I don't think there are too many people who don't at least have 110 (100/10, 10/100, 40/70, etc.) in starting str + endurance. Sure, there will be some with higher strength and endurance than others because they started 100 in one thing and maybe 40 in another. Where's that 30 points coming from to help in the salvaging skill? focus!? focus is real important. Coord? Probably not. Just saying if they have higher than 110 starting str+end, they're already down in something else, so for them to have a 45 point higher ((200 - 110)/2 = salvage skill difference) is no biggie to me.

My Item Tinkering skill buffs to 445 and costs like 3-4 mill. xp to raise. I think that would be a good curve for people to base the skill upon. It's not too hard to raise up to a descent level, yet it won't be super easy either.

This will, in effect, make item tinkering useless on all of my mages, since I have a tinker mule that does _all_ my tinkering anyways. However, Ibn said they had plans to resolve this known imbalance. I'm just hoping it's going to happen within the next couple months. But... I don't see that happening. I see it getting balanced with the X-pack and the viamontian racial weapon/skill.


Hey Ibn, what's the possibility of having amongst a group of creatures the possibility of one being stronger than the rest!? You fight a group of Peerless Drudges and Cabalists out in West dires. You're killing them descently enough for a buff, then there's one that's like RAWR GONNA EAT YOUR BAYBAY< GET IN MAH BELLAY!! IT's harder, yes, but not by a whole lot and thus making them impossible, but at the same time allowing that creature to have more items drop, or a combination of that and a higher wealth rating? Ya know, something to spice up the redundancy you can find in killing creatures?

[me swat]

Nice to see the lower level war mage spells being revamped even though I don't play that class.

When are the higher end life mage spells going to be tweaked?

[Silifi Of Death]

You're right, he would die in the 80+ Matron Hive. Just like I die in VoD. I don't exactly see your point here. Difference is, He can get more xp while soloing in VoD. I could beat him, but that's only if he was alone and I had a fellow in 80+. If we both had fellows of like characters, he'd be making more xp than me.

Basically, mages get the advantage of being able to control group dynamics in places like VoD and Caul, and melees NEED them. Mages don't really NEED melees. That's the unbalance here. A melee could outkill a mage, easy. But he needs the mage's help to do it.

See, we wouldn't be having this discussion is Turbine made a melee/archer oriented skill that helped with groups. Why not just remove the Imperil spells and put it under a new skill, that is MOSTLY melee/archer oriented, but mages can do fine with it too. Endurance/Quickness, perhaps? It can be cast without a wand, and doesn't cost much, (4 credits) How does that sound?

[KriegPfeil]

As I said before in my last post, I play all 3 classes, mage/archer/melee. The USW did not make mages uber, it gave them a chance to feel needed again. I proved it again this morning. I went out to VoD with my melee, I was whackin' Luggies for 4400+ and Groms I can't even GET the damage because if I crit them, they die. And that's solo, sure I had to sacrifice melee skill (10 start quick) to do that, but it's more than worth it.

Can I now hit Virindi with 1700 pts. of damage with my mage? Yep, you bet I can. Do I STILL use my Blud Rend and Fire Rend orbs a lot of the time in other places? Yep, you bet I do. The USW is NOT a replacement for other wands, quest or tinked. It's a tool to be used in 2 locations, Caul and VoD.

When I'm in a fellow with non-mages do I still imperil the V's? Of course I do, it would be silly not to. One poster said it was the Players fault for hunting in a fellow with people who didn't share loot, but he then went on to say that mages weren't imp'ing for the non-mages............Double standard here? Is that not the Players fault for hunting in a fellow like that also?

The USW made playing a mage FUN, that's all I'm saying. It's FUN to go out there solo and kick a little more butt. Just in my very small guild on WE 2 mages started PLAYING their mages again with this nifty item. Is it a must have? Certainly not, not for me anyways. Will I continue to play no matter what they do to it? Of course. Will it end up on my wall as a "sparkly" like so many other Quest Items? I hope not.......................

You can say what you want about skill points and such. But the fact is 28 points is 28 points. My melee can go out to VoD solo now at a whopping level 90 and do tons more damage to monsters and he spent...........14 points(6 for UA, another 8 to spec life, this is to get an apples to apples comparison as my mage does not have spec life either).

Sit back, watch a while, look at balancing out what melee/archers do in PvM and leave the mages alone. I hear a LOT more people griping that their class, be it archer or melee, isn't receiving the attention that mages are. So SPEND some attention on THEM.
I have a archer, a melee, and a mage. The lowest level is in the 160s while the highest is in the 180s. All the characters are 3 years old or more, and have seen quite alot of action over the years. Out of my characters my mage was able to effectively hunt at Vod at a much lower level than the others. A crit for 4400 on a lugian is a CB crit, so 1/10 hits your melee will do that. Somehow I don't think at level 90 that he is easily imp/vulning them since they have over 400 magic defense. Even if he was, lets compare what is actually important here.

The fact that non mages can hit lugians, gromnies, etc.. (total of 8 mobs) for 2k on 50% of their hits(using CS which is usually more effective because of consistency over CB) isn't of much consequence if you look at how much exp those mobs give vs the time it takes to kill them. Vod/Caul virindi give 1.3 million exp per pop. I have killed them with a vuln and 3 wars on my mage before. The average is a vuln and 5 wars though. 6 spells for 1.3 million exp is much higher exp/time than a non mage can earn on anything. Who cares how much damage a non mage can do on mobs that a mage would consider a waste of time to kill anyway?


When I stated that recently mages weren't imperil'ing for non mages on Virindi it was because mages killed the virindi so fast that imperiling them would slow the fellow down. I was on my sword character but didn't have a problem with it. And its not like mages were the only ones to loot the virindi. Mages share the loot on their kills the same as non mages, it pretty much goes on a need basis, if someone needs DI's we let them loot alot.


edit: Forgot about the "its fun" rationale. You see this alot when mages have no real way of justifying something. Being able to do more damage than my other characters on my mage has made my mage fun to play. But, it takes away from enjoying my other characters. My other characters are just flat out not as good as my mage now. Usually it is a mix of good at this, but worse at that. This keeps them all enjoyable to play, since the sing wands have come out though I have struggled to be able to play my non mage characters for any length of time. I am just always thinking, well, I could be killing more on my mage, this despite my mage being the lowest level of my 3 characters.

[Shadow Esper]

lol man im gonna get 1 hit by lvl 6 arcs now LOL!!!! gonna take only 2 spells max to drop me in pk...other than that man i dont think you should balance the monsters i think tis about time they fight back!

before i always said its so easy to resist now days with the lvl 7 buff bots and what not so when they do actually hit you it should be for more damage I LOVE THIS CHANGE!

[Hugo Rune]

Funny, my xbower doesn't need any mage to help him what with having spec life. Theres plenty more room for speccing life if you're a melee or archer as you aren't spending 28 credits on your attack skill.

I doubt your mage friend does more than 15m/hr solo in VoD at that level. I know plenty of places a melee or missile could earn that on their own at the same level. Of the 2 toons I hunt VoD with my xbower generally earns more per hour than my mage (unless I happen to find a LOT of Virindis) despite 25 points less life magic, having to switch between wand and bow, healing with a kit and all the other things that are supposed to make a mage better. Sure my mage kills virindis and tumies faster, but my xbower steams through everything else in a third of the time it takes my mage. Someone said earlier about killing a Paradox with 6 spells being too much. Take the situation with 3 Seraphs (500k each) and my xbower - the same 6 spells for imp & vulns then 6 shots for kiilling them - 1.5m xp. Hardly much of a difference when you factor in extra heals on the mage. Then add in the xbows extra speed of killing on the other types of monsters (Gromnies, Dillos, Grievers, Lugies, Oblits) and those quick kills on the Virindi for the mage just make up for some of the difference.

My point all along here is that the reason given for the nerf is that mages are too powerful, but that is simply not the case in my experience. Its not like I need the wand - I'll get by fine without it - but for them to add something nice for mages then to nerf it for a reason that simply isn't true is annoying.

Anyways, I've had my say here....time to go have some fun before they find something else to nerf!

[Ophar Kabitaki]

Well, hell. Mages finally get to see near 2k crits on the ONE critter the sing wand was designed to SLAY!! and now getting nerfed. That is typical. Not sure HOW you figured it as overpowered. Sword, Bow, Xbow..all get to do crits that put any mage to shame, but screw it..lets smack mages down to maxxing a crit at 1k anyhow.

One thing, (namecalling)..DO THE SAME THING ACROSS THE BOARDS!!! Nerf ALL sing weapons..not just the wands. Don't target mages only. Sing bow sure rocks the hell out of Virindi..I don't hear a word about nerfing those. Let's just all be damn good and sure mages can't crit for over 1k damage like any of the other main weapon types. Pfft..stupidity.

[Nemis]

we will be slightly increasing the damage on some War Magic spells

Hopefully you'll still read this and take it VERY seriously even though I'm not cursing, screaming, and calling you names :)

This will be incredibly bad for non-mages at mid levels. Magic defense is virtually useless for most non-mages at those levels. Isn't War cast by monsters pretty much the overall-leading killer of melee and archer characters? You are drastically increasing the War Spell power.

What about the months of monster balancing Orion did a while back? You're tossing all that out the door. That seems like an extremely rash move.

If you do this, I think I can safely predict a HUGE backlash. Terrible publicity. Hotfix correction soon after patch, still not getting it right. Then another hotfix to completely revert the damage numbers to pre-patch. Further erosion of faith in developers. Etc...

Please do not do this until you get the monsters balanced to it.

I love the terminology, but I hate the concept.

You are increasing War damage anywhere from 33-128% depending on level.

Slight increase == 33-128% more damage?!??

Again, please do not do this until you get the monsters balanced to it.

Regards,
Nemis

[Frieze]

you make it sound like it takes a lot to heal a melee/missile toon in mid combat. You have to press 2 buttons - 1 and 2 if you set the hotkeys up right, and you can do it while in combat mode. Don't tell me you click to peace mode before healing on a melee? Don't tell me you don't click to peace mode! That's suicide.

Healing is slow. Very slow. If you fail, or heal for a small amount, the time it would take you to get another heal off could kill you, especially if you didn't go into peace mode first. If you're in peace mode, and you fail, or heal for a small amount, you're probably fine.

Personally, soloing in VoD I can go through 5-6 blue healing kits (100 uses!) per day. My health is 330 buffed so I need the skill bonus for now rather than the health-per-heal bonus that treateds give. This means my heals can be small. And soloing in the VoD on an archer means I'm getting drained and warred a lot. Bow archers can't spec life and magic defense, so I'm doubly screwed. Fighting Virindi I need to heal a lot. If I didn't go to peace mode, I would die a lot. And I don't die very often, so... I know.

At least with a wand out I can drain V my health to full in the VoD, and stam to health can take me from three health to a full 330; that's something I can never do with a plentiful healing kit. I use stam to health, probably at least three times per buff - and I only use it when I'm below 75 health.

[Ophar Kabitaki]

Frieze, look into the renegade healing kits if you want skill bonus..200..double that of the blue kits.

[KriegPfeil]

Well, hell. Mages finally get to see near 2k crits on the ONE critter the sing wand was designed to SLAY!! and now getting nerfed. That is typical. Not sure HOW you figured it as overpowered. Sword, Bow, Xbow..all get to do crits that put any mage to shame, but screw it..lets smack mages down to maxxing a crit at 1k anyhow.

One thing, (namecalling)..DO THE SAME THING ACROSS THE BOARDS!!! Nerf ALL sing weapons..not just the wands. Don't target mages only. Sing bow sure rocks the hell out of Virindi..I don't hear a word about nerfing those. Let's just all be damn good and sure mages can't crit for over 1k damage like any of the other main weapon types. Pfft..stupidity.
yeah, nerf the other sing weapons even though mages will still kill Virindi faster than non mages. Please read some other posts before you post such inaccurate information. Non mages may do a higher number of damage on a couple mobs. Those mobs really aren't worth killing though if you compare how much exp you get killing those to how much a mage gets killing Virindi.

I don't see why they don't keep the singularity wand as the highest DOT wand against mobs that you vuln yourself. I mean we should have an easy to obtain quest wand make CS/CB wands useless right? You just make so much sense to me.

[Ophar Kabitaki]

Inaccurate? Pfft. I regularly hunt with an archer as a partner, and we split Virindi kills evenly even with me using sing wand. There is no justifiable reason for nerfing the wand and not the other sing weapons.

Comparing base damage of weapons and spells..arrows do 20-30+22 for bd, crit for 1200 or so..thats 20x the damage +.

War spell does 110-180, crit for max of 2k....thats 10x the damage.

And that is only on Virindi. Mages don't crit all critters like that, unless using a CB, and then it's only 10% crits.

Assault orb let's mages outkill every other class on tumeroks, but guess what? Tumeroks are crap xp, and don't drop majors. Noone complains about the Assault orbs slayer property, because noone wants to hunt the tumeroks.

I don't even hunt rindi with the USW. I liked it as a decent all around wand on any of the high health mobs, so the Slayer I could care less about. Now that they remove one of the imbues that made it worthwhile to actually use, it becomes a wasted slot in my pack.

Quest items SHOULD be worthwhile, if they are not worthwhile, why would anyone run the quest? I am tired of "XP" quests. The upgrade to the sing wand was fun, and the reward was worth it. I guess everyone has run it once or twice now, so Turbine feels safe retiring it by nerfing the reward. Tinkering shouldn't be the end-all be-all of items you use, not everyone has chained or macroed maxxed out tinkering mules. Quest items should be worth having and using, not just for decorative value.

[Dark Malignus]

Yeah, not looking too forward to getting hit with the 'almost 7's' spells all over the place. I can see those 45th level guys going over to Aerlinthe and getting smoked in one shot.

I currently have to get a bit of a wild hair up my butt in order to do much hunting in the AB area. Those 199 damage icy torments are a little too much for me. But, I like that there are monsters with that kind of power. I know I don't want ALL decent XP casting monsters to be dealing out slightly lower hits than that. I'll still die in two spells if they get me before a heal, so whether its a VI or a VII doesn't matter much.

This is just a small suggestion, take it or leave it, but how about just buffing the Arc spells for now until the monsters can be rebalanced? Seems like a good way to save a lot of aggravation to me, and the mages get every bit of their damage increase.

[Dark Malignus]

I forgot the rest of the feedback

-Crystal Quests sound like a good idea to me. I'm looking forward to that.

-The speed increase on projectiles sounds like a great change, I am really looking forward to this. I don't PK in Asheron's Call, but the weeping bow should be fun even pvm.

-Can you come a little closer with the weapon damages? The newly upgraded Overlord sword which was just updated still has a long way to go. My regular AR sword does more damage to lightning vulnerable creatures, never mind the lightning rending one.

[Silifi Of Death]

Funny, my xbower doesn't need any mage to help him what with having spec life. Theres plenty more room for speccing life if you're a melee or archer as you aren't spending 28 credits on your attack skill.

I also have to spend credits elsewhere. You keep saying that melees/archers get evasion. You have to train melee d to get that. I need healing too. And archers need fletching. Now, if I spend 10 credits on melee d, and 6 on healing... that's +16... And It costs 16 for sword.. Uhm.. Hey. That's 32 credits. Who pays more now? Even axe pays 12, that's up to 28 also. Not to mention the fact that I will have to give up my attribute synergy to use this. Archer do get a slight bonus here, as they don't have to continually raise strength. So, I need Life Magic, which is Focus/Self, and Axe, with is Strength/Coord. That's 4 attribute dependencies. A mage has two. And as a melee, I have more skills that I have to put xp into. Which obviously means that a mage can get to a comfortable casting level quicker, because they really only have to raise Seven things. A melee has to raise Eleven different things. I have to spend more xp to get the same results.


I doubt your mage friend does more than 15m/hr solo in VoD at that level. I know plenty of places a melee or missile could earn that on their own at the same level. Of the 2 toons I hunt VoD with my xbower generally earns more per hour than my mage (unless I happen to find a LOT of Virindis) despite 25 points less life magic, having to switch between wand and bow, healing with a kit and all the other things that are supposed to make a mage better. Sure my mage kills virindis and tumies faster, but my xbower steams through everything else in a third of the time it takes my mage. Someone said earlier about killing a Paradox with 6 spells being too much. Take the situation with 3 Seraphs (500k each) and my xbower - the same 6 spells for imp & vulns then 6 shots for kiilling them - 1.5m xp. Hardly much of a difference when you factor in extra heals on the mage. Then add in the xbows extra speed of killing on the other types of monsters (Gromnies, Dillos, Grievers, Lugies, Oblits) and those quick kills on the Virindi for the mage just make up for some of the difference.

Ok, 15 mil. That's ok, but can a melee do anything that gets that much xp? Not unless it's a Life Spec melee. Now, wait a second. Doesn't that sound unbalancing to you? I mean you keep talking about life MAGIC. Why does a melee need to have magic to succeed at higher levels? There should be multiple ways to achieve the same goal. The fact that life magic is a required skill is unbalancing.

[DadgaSilverhand]

let me add my post of questions to 11th pages.

ok, i am bit just relieved of monster's warspells wont be touch until few run of live server tests to make right gauge of damages, i for one didnt want to see 160 pts of damages from war spells and those creatures are spell-chaining or several of them casting at once on you. it just make me sick wondering why that we have very limited health bases. it look like it is gearing for those have grief templates in spec'ed defenses.

unless there is new concept on expansion to get "extra" health points to layered over the original health base similair to Ac 2's basic and epic health bases.

i will look forward to revised crystal vaults, updating to +20 lvl for Fen, +40 for Caul, and +60 for Shendo.

but what will happen to shadow childs? they seem to be dying out, gone from Tatter Dungeon, Lost Garden ruins, Fortress Mountian, Shade Stronghold, and other smaller dungeon replaced by larger shadows.

i doubt this question would be answered.

[Weary One]

Hmmm... I'd say that raising the damage of the spells as you've listed, will be very very bad for new players. Level 1 spells doing 15-30 damage? Many new characters don't even have 30 health in the beginning. Monsters would be one-shotting everyone continuously, and people would get fed up and quit. As it is, there are very few places that low characters can safely hunt and enjoy with all the upgrades done in recent months. There is no need to make life harder for new characters.

As for the ust changes, I personally don't see the need for anything to change. I don't use any of the decal programs for salvaging. I don't mind the tediousness of the current methods because it gives me the chance to be cautious about what I'm salvaging or keeping, and which workmanships of salvage that I decide to combine. Whatever you do, please allow us the opportunity to continue the way we are currently if we so choose. I liked the one person's suggestion on a previous page of this post, to make it a character option for using the changed ust interface or the one we've been using all along.

On the point of adding an actual salvaging skill...why? I think it's fair the way it is. And no, I don't have some high level tinker character who can get maxed units from stuff. We all make our own choices depending on how important it is to us to get the extra units that training a tinker skill will provide. Life isn't always fair, and there's no reason the game has to be equal for everyone either. We all make our choices knowing the pro's and con's of those choices. Suppose a school teacher decides his life isn't fair because he doesn't make as much money as a heart surgeon? No one is going to pay him the difference between their 2 salaries just because he complained. They both went to school and chose to study different things. That's just the way it goes sometimes. There's my opinion on the salvage skill, but it won't really bother me either way much if you go ahead and implement the skill as proposed or cancel it. I guess some people like it and some don't.

[Heideggar]

Frieze, I get drained a lot too, and I'm a mage lol. Everyone deals with that. Is it odd that the "debuffer" usually gets targetted and drained a lot, and they're usually mages!? hehe. Anyways, I use healing kits too with a 330'ish health as well. Not sure what yours is, but I do pretty good healing with "Gifted Kits : 30 uses, +100 bonus to healing skill, 186p in tou tou", and I've got a 375'ish healing skill. I start healing when I'm about 1/3 down (130'ish). I do double heals because I don't get the restoration bonus, but also, how high your healing skill is will help determine how much you'll heal for as well. I heal between 60 and 120 health with each use of a gifted kit, and with a double heal (less time than casting heal self and fewer resources than stam to hp) that's 120-240 health. I'm almost always topped off after I do a double heal. I crit-heal for 199 (all the way) sometimes. I also heal in peace mode, which helps. oh, where you may switch to a wand and do stam-to-health because you're so low on hp, I carry a handfull of meats, philtres, THEs, or what have you. I find them as I'm hunting and just collect them for when I go out to VoD, Caul, or whatever. Also, what was previously stated, those renegade healing kits... oh man, I was testing those out and I think I was healing from around 40-50 hp out of 330 a lot of the time. I think I've got some left, gonna see what that is again if I can get ingame this evening. Hope that helps some for ya.

For Hugo Rune and/or Frieze:

Not sure exactly who this should go to, but I thought it may help.
clicking to peace mode is not suicide for several reason:

1) In peace mode you can heal faster
2) In peace mode you can heal over and over much faster
3) In peace mode you can drink faster
4) In peace mode you can drink over and over much faster
5) In peace mode you get a bonus, or rather, you don't get a negative bonus, to healing skill.
6) You can drink health items or use your healing kits while sliding. So, drink or heal and slide INTO your attacker. NOT away from them. By going into them, you cut down the area they require to do a successfull attack. They then must move to create the necessary area, and _then_ attack you. Doing this can buy you time to get off heals and drinks as well as dodging incoming war spells, missle attacks, etc.


Hope that helps, it helps me at least : )



Silifi, just a couple of things:

1) You don't necessarily have to have melee D on any template to do a lot of stuff. I made an UA guy who's UA, Life, Magic D, Healing, and like... Missle D spec'd!? It's a lot of stuff, I can log in to look at him for exact stats if you want. He's in his early 60s atm. Being a monarch doesn't allow me much, if any, time to level him up. Just saying, you don't really require melee D on any character. If those 10 credits go to magic D, and you've got a descent life skill, you can reduce magic damage imperil 3-4 creatures from afar, and knock them down when they close in. It's definetly a different playstyle, but I thought I'd bring that part up. extreme hybrid characters, mmmmm hehe.

2) Melee/Missle people require a bit more xp because of more attributes to raise, but lets not forget that melee/missle people dont' have to have extremely reliable skills like a mage would. 1-2 vulns, and that's it. A mage will have 1-2 debuffs, and then have to consistantly try to land spells.

3) There are areas that melee/missle people can use rending weapons to make 15+ mill per hour, and that aren't Lacuna, Matron Hive, and things like that. Definetly better for groups, but isn't matron hive designed for fellows too?

Chance to get majors in this place too : )


Can anyone name the place(s)?

You can PM me with your question if you feel that I'd "give it away".


Man, I sooo wanna get my reroll high enough for these places : )

[Frieze]

Frieze, I get drained a lot too, and I'm a mage lol. Everyone deals with that. Is it odd that the "debuffer" usually gets targetted and drained a lot, and they're usually mages!? Drain resistance is based on Endurance/Strength. That's something archers don't (usually) have, but melees usually have 100 strength and mages usually have 100 innate (total) split in Str/End (or just in End).

[Ibn]

Ibn about the Singularity Scepters I have to say I am extremely disappointed in the devs for this decision but I am not suprised because of from my point of view certain devs just do not like the mages.
Sure the wand let mages do better but ibn what role do you and the devs want mages to play in a fellowship in AC ?

The Singularity Scepters, like all Slayer weapons, are intended to be niche weapons. Very good against Virindi, but not better than loot weapons against standard monsters.

Right now for, say, your average level 120 war mage, the USS is about as effective as a CS or CB caster against non-Virindi. Against Virindi its damage over time is about 75% higher than the same CS or CB weapon. So you've got a quest weapon that's as good as an imbued loot weapon against most creatures, and MUCH better against Virindi. So why bother with loot weapons ever again?

With the changes, the USS is about 23% less effective than an imbued wand for that average level 120 war mage. But it's still 19% more effective than that imbued wand against Virindi. That's the goal. It's also more effective than an unimbued loot wand.

It is interesting to see all the posts about how the Devs obviously hate mages, considering that in recent months with the addition of better war crits and the first talks about improving war damage at low levels, many people posted how it was obvious that the Devs love mages and hate everyone else.

Is that we think Mages should never do more damage? No... higher-damage weapons, including casters, are in the works.

[Ibn]

I didn't read the other replies but.


IF YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE BOW SHOOT TWICE AS FAST NERF BOW BUG.


k other than that its good :)

The bow doesn't shoot twice as fast. The missile flies twice as fast, but shots over time doesn't change.

[Ibn]

You are basically making every monster in Dereth that casts war spells twice as deadly!!!!

Where are you getting "twice as deadly" on every war-casting monster? Level 1 and 2 spells are increasing 100%, but the number of creatures that cast those war spells is very small.

[Ibn]

Character Option:

[ ] Allow different salvage types to be used in the Ust simultaneously

Also a possibility.

[zathros]

With the changes, the USS is about 23% less effective than an imbued wand for that average level 120 war mage. But it's still 19% more effective than that imbued wand against Virindi. That's the goal. It's also more effective than an unimbued loot wand.

Not critically important, but are you sure of those numbers? The old USS crit 30-31% of the time. Basing the new one on critting 25% of the time, it will do 11-13% less damage than a CS wand (depending upon the spell) critting 50% of the time. That's not including the skill based bonuses which would bring the numbers closer together.

Your numbers also indicate the virindi slayer bonus is about 55%. That doesn't match with my observations of the current bonus combined with the 22% decrease, but if the new bonus is 55%, the USS will be about 36% better against Virindi.

[cstanleytech]

The Singularity Scepters, like all Slayer weapons, are intended to be niche weapons. Very good against Virindi, but not better than loot weapons against standard monsters.

Right now for, say, your average level 120 war mage, the USS is about as effective as a CS or CB caster against non-Virindi. Against Virindi its damage over time is about 75% higher than the same CS or CB weapon. So you've got a quest weapon that's as good as an imbued loot weapon against most creatures, and MUCH better against Virindi. So why bother with loot weapons ever again?

With the changes, the USS is about 23% less effective than an imbued wand for that average level 120 war mage. But it's still 19% more effective than that imbued wand against Virindi. That's the goal. It's also more effective than an unimbued loot wand.

It is interesting to see all the posts about how the Devs obviously hate mages, considering that in recent months with the addition of better war crits and the first talks about improving war damage at low levels, many people posted how it was obvious that the Devs love mages and hate everyone else.

Is that we think Mages should never do more damage? No... higher-damage weapons, including casters, are in the works.


So if the devs dont hate mages (though when I look at the upgraded mage armor that has lousy stats but looks very nice and when I see a melee crit hit for 7k in the vod its hard to see that they do not hate mages ) what do you mean about adding better wands ?
What exactly are you considering doing for wands to help mages in pvm and have you found a way to limit its impact to pvm only and not effect pvp as currently wands only have mana C, melee d and a small magic d bonus. ( IMHO training melee d on a mage is a waste of time and xp unless of course you have a chain, ucm or are a really good powerleveler )

Mind you I understand not wanting to say anything as it might not make it ingame because of a tech reason or balance but knowing some of the possable solutions would be nice.

[corbin420]

First I must say in reguads to the Lowest populace levels in AC history:

KILL VERDANTINE

Yall want to talk about nerfing things, creating a new server that has torn apart the fact that this game is supposed to be an MMorpg?!? C'mon like we really needed another one. (IMHO, it should have been a DARKTIDE2, and i dont even pk at all)

Now on to the current things:

THE USW:

By the way The Lttp is misleading in the fact that you dont restate that the Crushing blow is/is not being removed from the rest of the USing weapons as well as the USW.

Very good against Virindi, but not better than loot weapons against standard monsters. --IBN

Exactly

Right now for, say, your average level 120 war mage, the USS is about as effective as a CS or CB caster against non-Virindi. Against Virindi its damage over time is about 75% higher than the same CS or CB weapon. So you've got a quest weapon that's as good as an imbued loot weapon against most creatures, and MUCH better against Virindi. So why bother with loot weapons ever again? --IBN

Because a loot generated item may be tinked to have the melee d and mana c bonus higher than the USW. Also, I have the proof available for anyone to ask, that CS casters do more DoT than the USW against the average critter. Funny how you can make a plugin that records the percentages on the weapons REAL PERFORMANCE then what the dev's think they do due to the feedback of the slightly uninformed folk out there.

With the changes, the USS is about 23% less effective than an imbued wand for that average level 120 war mage. But it's still 19% more effective than that imbued wand against Virindi. That's the goal. It's also more effective than an unimbued loot wand. --IBN

I've never seen a more BS line in my life. "23%" less effective?!? How bout 100% less effective!! Drop the V slayer quality, drop the biting strike quality, REMOVING THE CRUSHING BLOW?!? Please for the love of the game, remove the thumbs from your arses because you are getting brain-damaged.

Since you guys are so great as to the testing and nerfing of so many things, (I dont know if this can be done without screwing the CS quality but...) try lowering the mulitplier of the CB before removing it completely.

As far as to the hotbed of issues that people want to bring up in response to others posts:

First off, if you solo this game, make your toon the way you want, play your toon the way you want, and get outta my face bout it. Secondly, if you fellow hunt most of the game, then let your toons morales and ethics reflect the way you want to be treated by others and how you want to treat the rest of the player base. Socialize, it's what this game is about. Tell someone ur a battle mage not a supposrt mage. Tell them "hey i got an AR bow, dont imp, just vuln and war". It's about cooperating with each other not "F that dude he's looting my kills", or "their not a mage so no go on joining our fellow". IMHO, yall are a bunch of mindless kids whining,"I'm taking my ball and goin home", when your egos get in the way of contructive critisism of changes made to the game that supposedly we all know and love.

As to Turbine itself:

I've said it before, and i'll say it again, either yall are purposefully trying to burn this game to the ground,(You say expansion, I say More money until Turbine drops the game to make way for AC2, MEO and DnD) or yall are Morons.

The funny thing is that I personally believe that it's begining to look like both.

[Zestryl]

While I don't agree with the tone, I agree fully with the sentiment.

Please, try LOWERING the CB rather then just removing it.

[-Slyzer-]

One question, why not chance the missle speed of all missle weapons? It would barely affect PvM much at all and would allow archers to not have to choose between an Aegis effect and missle speed.

[AC_Guy]

Come on get over it Quest Items are NEVER supose to better then loot/tinked.

You got to play with a nice toy and now its going away .

[Zyrca]

One question, why not chance the missle speed of all missle weapons? It would barely affect PvM much at all and would allow archers to not have to choose between an Aegis effect and missle speed.

The increased missile speed has a side effect of making the arrow arc closer to a straight line, so it doesn't go over terrain as well. (Somewhat like the difference between arcs and bolts in war magic.) That's why we don't want to just change all bows to shoot faster missiles.

[-Slyzer-]

Ah ok. Didn't realize that, thanks for the reply

[fashtas]

The increased missile speed has a side effect of making the arrow arc closer to a straight line, so it doesn't go over terrain as well. (Somewhat like the difference between arcs and bolts in war magic.) That's why we don't want to just change all bows to shoot faster missiles.
Errrrrrr......

So the faster the arrow goes, the more in a straight line it goes, the less it arcs?

This is *DIRECTLY* opposite to how spells work isnt it?

Arc spells are faster, yet curve
Bolt spells are slower, yet go in a straight line
Streaks are faster skill, and ALSO go in a straight line

So if its possible to speed up spells yet *GIVE* them an arc they didn't have before, shouldn't it be possible to speed up all arrows yet keep the arc? :)

[Zyrca]

So if its possible to speed up spells yet *GIVE* them an arc they didn't have before, shouldn't it be possible to speed up all arrows yet keep the arc? :)

The magic and missile systems are compleatly separate. In order to change the missiles so they have an arc and shoot faster, we would have to change the laws of physics in our game ... which would take more resources then we have to devote to it :D

[Gal i leo]

:mad: Well I am not suprised that turbine has decided to ram it to the mages yet again. We get a wand that actually lets us compete against melee's for the V's killed in VoD and now it is gone :mad: Why the heck can you not just leave it alone????????? i mean oh goodness i have managed a record high crit of 1780 on a Para my assault orb hist Tummies for 1k and crits close to 2k so when do you plan to nerf that also :mad: Mad you bet I am it seems that whether i play my melee toon or archer or mage you continually find ways to nerf it :mad: when i was an active programmer if i continually produced upgrades that infact created more problems then it fixed i would have been FIRED!!!!!!!! If i had as much negative feedback from my customer base as i continue to see not only on your boards but on all the AC related boards i visit I would have been FIREDDDDD, :mad: You bet i am mad! I have played this game since Jan. 2001 and i gaurentee that if i could(and i am working on it)convince even most ie 51% of my friends to try out a new game we would be GONE as my monarch of old one of the oldest toons on HG is now gone.

You folks seem hell bent on doing nerf after nerf on deciding this is too good for our customers on makeing it obvious that mages shouold only vuln and heal in fellow and heaven forbid a mage would be able to solo anywhere in VoD...

I have stopped and untrained my trade mules since they no longer can make a living as such

i am seriously thinking of taking all of my accounts and seeing if i can sucker someone into trading straight across for say EQ(it sux's too but at least it would be different)

Rant about the changes you bet i am :(

[cstanleytech]

Beat you to it Gal i leo I already picked up a EQ gamecard today.

[Scout X]

gharu need to not speak. people saying "omg omg the only reason im a gharu is for tink now everyone has omg cry&!@!#44". s t f u. For as long as you've HAD something, as an aluvian archer, i've been crying that i DIDN'T HAVE something. Now we will all have the same salvaging, and the same USELESS racial weapon together... minus sho ua ;) But even some people who play sho, arent playing as a UA. Like for instance, my sho mage. At the time, there was no salvage.. thats right... none. So i had a choice of... staff (i use war), dagger (i use war), or UA (btw.. i use war). I just chose sho because i liked a certain hair style they had, that was it. Turbine keeps getting into this cycle of 1 race always being better... which usually ends the cycle with sho at the top somehow. UA needs fixed, everyone post i see mentioning this gets no reply, gets 0 interest. I don't think i've ever seen ibn say anything about fixing the whole staff/dagger/ua ordeal... At least, not in a serious fixing manner... Its always suggested that UA will always win, and aluv/gharu will always be carpped on.



---*something i feel like mentioning


Beleive it or not, some archers dont have melee defense like i see every so often being mentioned... Like every archer in the damned planet has melee d or something *boggle*. Just like how theres no such thing as mages WITH melee d? :) ppl, don't stereo type. Thnx


I'd like to make a shout-out for magic defense, a skill that needs to have the same benefits of melee defense, that when you get to a certain point, you become impervious to all forms of that attack. Might give mages or some creatures a run for their money, kind of like how people with melee def give melees a run for their money indefinately?


*proceeds to watch post get ignored*

[Astral_Dominae]

I mean oh goodness i have managed a record high crit of 1780 on a Para


You realize that a CB wand will probably do ~ 3K damage per crit on paras ?

[Ophar Kabitaki]

CB wands only LET you crit 10% of the time...sing wand maxxes around 33% crits. The only reason to even use a sing wand was the dual imbues. Nerfing that makes it useless unless you only hunt Virindi exclusively. Even considering that the slayer quality is just being reduced by 22%, the removal of the imbue turns it into a weak wep, either a 10% chance hard critting wep, or a 33% chance weak critting wep. Makes CB more useful than the sing wand once again. Not entirely sure WHICH imbue is getting removed, but either way the crits will max at 1k-1500 now instead of near 2k crits. The only problem I have noticed with them is that base war magic seems to not effect the damage, and lower level mages got the full use of the imbues combined with the slayer. Not sure if quest imbues are designed along the same lines as player imbues, but the wands looked to do same range for someone with 300 base skill as for someone with 360.

[Hopeslayer]

some of us that like to melee and mage when its best suited for the time.(one thing i Love about the game is oyu can mess with your attributes so you can be a Hybrid.)

ANd mainly pk is the time.. however i think if i put the 100 str on my mage i shoudl be able to do that its not asking to much.

I like to Kill Crystal golems and Lords to, heck sometimes i like to melee just so i dotn ahve to cast all the time.

so the Dagger/UA/Staff needs to be leveled out. Frankly i think its cause of the Str bonus.

Because agin..why are they doing alot more damage yet have a lower base on the weapon.

PS: i dont care they they hit faster .. but the damage is jsut way to off

[Winter]

The magic and missile systems are compleatly separate. In order to change the missiles so they have an arc and shoot faster, we would have to change the laws of physics in our game ... which would take more resources then we have to devote to it :D

Is it possible to use the combat interface to balance this?
Low and Medium Attacks could be straight line, while High Attacks are the slower arc attack.
Since the speed of an arrow only really matters at range, this shouldn't affect the attack height as it relates to monster defense when you are toe to toe with a monster.
While I think this is an excellent idea to add to lootgen missile weapons, I'll also add that I think adding this quality as salvage is a silly idea.

Take the rav gut icons, give them a different palette/name and stick them on some other monster.(please no peerless drudges) I collect a few, have a tradeskiller assist me make a high tension bowstring.

In this, you give a little more love to tradeskills. I would suggest making the string be a cook/alchy/fletch check. I would recommend either a flat or %xp rate for the tradeskiller in question. When all is said and done, I apply it to my lootgen bow.

I really liked the way the archer aegis worked and I think it would be excellent to have more of that in the game.

[Churin]

So making all melee weapons in PVP as powerful as UA has not been addressed? this was one of the main issues i saw on the forums

also the melee mage wands. oh well

[Nergal]

Bah, all this talk abou the USW and all the melee/mage/archer bashing makes me want to puke. I play mage, sword, UA and Xbow. I enjoy playing my mage the most, as mages are what I play in every other RPG type of game.

I have a USW, but I don't use it anywhere except for the Caul (I don't travel to VoD very often). Do I think it is especially overpowered? Maybe just a tad, but I don't see the reason for taking Crushing Blow off of it when there are other weapons (non casters) with both qualities on them. I'd rather see the Crushing Blow reduced as to having it taken off completely. If they are gonna take it off of a caster then why don't they take it off of all the other weapons that have both Crushing Blow and Biting Strike. Are they not overpowered in the sense that they too have the best of both worlds unlike tinked up weapons that can only have one or the other (Palenquals living weapons is one example)?

Why can't there be good usuable quest items instead of so many of the "do the quest and throw it away items" quests? I've done a plethora of quests in AC and have yet to really understand why there are so few quest items that are really useful to any player. If the Devs want to make niche quest items (items that are more effective against certain critters) then that is fine, but make those niche items better than the average item that have say 5 tinks or less. For that matter why not have regular quest items that are better than an average item with 5 tinks or less? That would certainly make them effective for someone who doesn't like blowing up countless items in the search of that all mighty 10 tinker, but certainly would not deter one from trying to make that 10 tink item as it would ultimately be better than the quest item.

I would say that about 9 in 10 quests are absolutely worthless for my characters. I can name all the quest items that my character's use right now. Diamond shield (non-life melees), Ancient armored vestment (looking to get the other pieces as it is way better than any armor I will ever have tinkered), bracelet of dark essence, Buadren, Focus Stone, Nuhmudira's bestowment, sunstone gaunts and asheron's supreme raiment. That's it, as all of the other quest items that I have gotten over the last 4+ years have either become fodder for TC's or are housing decorations :(.

Oh and Silifi as to your "Basically, mages get the advantage of being able to control group dynamics in places like VoD and Caul, and melees NEED them. Mages don't really NEED melees." statment. Mages need melee more than you think. When I play my mage I would much rather have the monster beating on the "meatshield" than me, as melees are much more effective at tanking critters than mages are. Besides I always make sure to dish out the vulns and healing that is required to make the group as effective as possible. To make a fellow work you have to be more "Team" oriented than "I" oriented. Because if you aren't doing your part in the fellow then the only thing you are doing is sucking xp.

Anywho, all this talk about loot and xp mongering is making my head hurt, so I'll just be on my merry way.

Oh and to the Dev team, kudos to you all on a game that has kept my attention since Dec 4th 1999 :). Keep up the good work and see if you all can't implement some nice quest items.

[Frieze]

Frieze, look into the renegade healing kits if you want skill bonus..200..double that of the blue kits. I have a pack of them... usually I have one or two on my main for when I get low. They're nice... but I'm not going to use them as a main healing kit until I decide I like healing for 23 repeatedly (and I'd go through them too quickly to replenish) :p

[Myk]

The magic and missile systems are compleatly separate. In order to change the missiles so they have an arc and shoot faster, we would have to change the laws of physics in our game ... which would take more resources then we have to devote to it :D


So fixing 3 entire classes of toons is worth it?

[Silifi Of Death]

Oh and Silifi as to your "Basically, mages get the advantage of being able to control group dynamics in places like VoD and Caul, and melees NEED them. Mages don't really NEED melees." statment. Mages need melee more than you think. When I play my mage I would much rather have the monster beating on the "meatshield" than me, as melees are much more effective at tanking critters than mages are. Besides I always make sure to dish out the vulns and healing that is required to make the group as effective as possible. To make a fellow work you have to be more "Team" oriented than "I" oriented. Because if you aren't doing your part in the fellow then the only thing you are doing is sucking xp.


So melees are better meatshields? I suppose they are most of the time, like say, against an Olthoi Primordial, or a Raider Prefect, or anything else than does high amounts of Physical damage. I'm fine with that, if these monsters had better xp, and people actually wanted to kill them, then I'll be happy to be the punching bag. Problem is that any good melee monster is horrible xp and won't hit you very hard. I suppose maybe if you've been vulned and imped by a Virindi they do hit kinda hard.

See, if these high-damage melee creatures were worth the time it takes to bring them down, then you'll have a very good point. But, as it stands, most VoD fellows going after huge xp will be selective and skip these monsters.

Maybe if I could use my shield to protect someone? Like say, the shield creates this little invisible wall. Anyone standing within that wall would get at least part of the protection of my shield.

[Mayleth]

"In October, we are looking at setting a cap for each of the percentage-based rewards. If your skill is greater than this cap, you will receive a flat reward for the crafted item instead of a percentage-based reward. "

:eek: Bad Turbine. Better to let a few people abuse the system than to screw over all the trade toons.

"In September we will be making the following changes: All Singularity Scepters will have their Virindi Slayer quality reduced by 22% and their Crushing Blow ability will be removed."

:mad: Ah... so all that time spent this patch getting the wand was a complete and utter waste of time, cause after this the wand isn't going to be worth the pack space to keep it.

"We are working on improvements to the Ust to allow players to salvage items of different material types all at once. For example if you put an Ivory Tankard, a Brass Breastplate, and a Fire Opal Ring into the ust and hit the Salvage button, you would receive an Ivory bag, a Brass bag, and a Fire Opal bag."
:rolleyes: Good plan, but not good enough to counter the above mentioned bad stuff. Nothing else in the letter really got me excited one way or the other.

[Heideggar]

Zyrca: With the tradeoffs between a flat-fast shot and an arced-slower shot, are you guys able to allow the option to switch between these two in combat, whether PvP or PvM for the missle weapon characters?

I think it'd be a great option like how mages have arcs and bolts to time hits.

Slow bolt timed with fast arc = double hit

Can you guys do this? Like... allow that option to be hotkeyed to some keyboard button for quick changing?

Dunno how unbalancing that would be, but doesn't sound bad off the top of my head.

Only thing would be getting first hits in on creatures to get the kills over someone. *shrug*


Frieze: My mages are....resilient? The one below Indominable. My lowbie melee is resilient, and he's 60 (started 100/100 str/end hehe), and my lvl 117 archer/melee is resilient. All get drained for like 90!? ugh. It's not _just_ melee/missle people having probs with that. Chain drains suck.

Oh, what are you saying, "only healing for 23" lol. You _know_ it's not 23 *shakes finger*. Lowest I heal with gifted kits is 55-60. I was healing for 80-120 non-stop when I was running around solo in that dungeon to get the Mosswart Statue last night.

Here's what I do sometimes:
Hotkey main pack in 9, hotkey renegade kit (+200hp) in 8, hotkey a treated kit or plentiful kit in 7. Hit 8 then 9, then 7 and 9. That way you don't burn your good kits, but they heal reliably to a point where you can use other "more use" kits that possibly have higher health bonuses.

Again, just a suggestion.

[Vlad Morbius]

Good idea, not sure i'd be willing to give up a hotkey tho ;)

[ShaRhee]

I don't care much for the higher damage that will be dealt by monsters without rebalancing them at the same time. Other than that, everything else is good. My main issue is the nerfs you will be making to trade characters.

I have two trade characters, a level 94 Alchemist, Fletcher, Cook and Item Tinkerer, and a level 157 Armor, Magic Item, Item and Weapon Tinkerer.

I ran my level 94 through the new trade character quest last night. It took me two hours to collect all the items I needed (including the gems to get to the towns) to make the foods, arrowheads and alchemy stuff, and netted 135K. While I enjoy questing, and did have a good time doing this, I would have done better xp-wise by taking one of my other characters out hunting to pass up xp to her. At level 94, those skills are as high as they need to be to hit at least 99% success on anything, and I see no reason to repeat this quest at level 94, although I can see where it would be very worthwhile doing it at much lower levels.

I would prefer to see more "interesting" trade mule quests, where the xp earned is spendable, and doesn't go to a specific skill, so that I can increase my attributes with it. By more interesting, I mean...similar to a "real" quest, where you might need to get flagged, collect some items (possibly rare) to give to a specific NPC to get a dungeon gem, enter a dungeon for your level range or skill, talk to NPCs who give you something to craft and turn in to someone else. Keep in mind, however, that most trade mules are extremely burdened, so running around the countryside isn't feasible, but getting a portal gem where we could possibly take a group of trade mules in would be really cool.

My pure tinkerer has no way to earn her own xp except through passup. Any Siraluun claws that could be turned in, if they are done the same way the teeth are currently done, would be useless to me at level 157 unless the cap you are talking about gives a great deal of xp. It would seem reasonable to give a % of all xp earned so far rather than a set amount, because as your level gets higher, the value of that turnin will diminish. Again, I would really like to see it be spendable xp, rather than going to the skill, so that I can increase my attributes with it. While I realize that exploiters would use the train/untrain quest to get this spendable xp, perhaps you could make it so they could only train/untrain perhaps once or twice a year for the true trades, i.e., linking alchemy/fletching/cooking together to count as one, and all the tinkers to count as one.

One thing I would really like to see is a huge bonus for landing an imbue...something like 10% of the current level or a percentage of all xp earned so far (spendable, of course).

I would also like to suggest that you give lockpick some love. I am seriously considering dropping it on all but one of my characters, since sings are pretty much useless now, and sings can always be turned into blue kits, which are much more valuable these days.

[jordvik]

Where are you getting "twice as deadly" on every war-casting monster? Level 1 and 2 spells are increasing 100%, but the number of creatures that cast those war spells is very small.

Ibn He may be over-sensationalizing things, but his basic idea is right.

Level ones have doubled. Level twos have doubled, Level threes have more than doubled (128% increase), Level fours have incrased by 2/3's damage, Level fives up by 40% and Level sixes up by 30%.


1's and 2's arent going to have that big of an impact I wouldnt think. Not much casts them or fights things that use them. 3+ will be huge.

For a solid month you are going to mow down level 30-40 range people as the spells cast at them are going to be at 60-130% more deadly. They will be forced to use buffbots or go camp lower level dungeons and be miserable. Around those levels you have about 120 health or so (less if you are a melee) and that increase is going to result in alot of one shots for a month. Those players are going to be pissed.

5's might not have a huge impact, but I can tell you that 6's will. You will turn the higher level monsters that cast 6's and 7's to the point where they might as well be using 7's because the 20 point spread is only about 10% less damage. I can speak for alot of people that if you get vulned with a 7 and hit with the new level 6 spells it will kill people just as fast as a 7, or very close to it.

I beg you that if it is too late to remove that increase from the patch, do a hotfix to lower the casting levels across the boards of any monster casting 1-6's or you are going to have a very unhappy playerbase.

[Nemis]

Still no reply on the 'slight increase in war magic' +33% to +128% issues hmmm...?

I don't have major issues with you raising it for players, but if you are increasing the monsters across the board to be this incredibly powerful I think we need something done to balance things a bit.

How about this then:
'Slightly' increase the damage of all loot weapons by +33% to +128% to counterbalance the HUGE increase in monster power.

Even if we use the LEAST (+33%) increase you did to War, how about:
'slightly' increasing loot Swords to 29-53 base.
'slightly' increasing loot Bows 172% base.
'slightly' increasing loot UAs to 9-21 base.

Or just be honest and in the LttP change the word 'slightly' to 'drastically'

It seems to me that all the people concentrating on the Singularity Scepters are missing a far more detrimental change. Increase in monster power of at least 33%

Regards,
Nemis

I'm being somewhat facetious here, but Ibn, et. al. do you not see a major issue with the increased monster power? :eek:

(p.s.) I'd like you to call my boss and tell him to give me a 'slight' wage increase too LOL.

[Nemis]

I beg you that if it is too late to remove that increase from the patch, do a hotfix to lower the casting levels across the boards of any monster casting 1-6's or you are going to have a very unhappy playerbase.

Actually I'd really like to see something like this implemented.

Ibn, et. al. do you not see a major issue with the increased monster power? :eek:

Regards,
Nemis

[Onetooth]

I am with Meel.

You haven't addressed the melee inbalances at all. How many posts are on the PvP boards about this atm? Well...a lot. Please Ibn, address our issues:
1.) Sword and non-ua melees have been nerfed too much. We simply can't compete without a group.
2.) The most expensive melee skill credit-wise melee weapon is out-classed by a racial weapon.
3.) There are only 2 viable pvp weapons in game at the moment---phantom ua and hollow ua.

Why can't you address this? Should we have to put characters on the shelf for a half a year, until you recognize the mistake? Again go to the PvP boards, we are not just whinning here.

-Onetooth

[Vlad Morbius]

Hey do melees a favor and don't have them squash the ua weapon, or there won't be anyone to challenge the @#$#@ mages!

[jordvik]

Could you do us all a favor and post this sword vs ua stuff on a thread that is at least remotely related. It seems to me that there is an entire section of these forums that are there for PvP issues. That sounds like a better place for this content. This thread was made by Ibn to discuss the content that is planned for the coming month(s). We are trying to get feeback into and from the devs about the september letter to the players. (Hence the reason this thread is labeled "Let us know what you think of the september letter to the players") Nowhere in the entire letter to the players for september are the words sword, unarmed or UA mentioned. Thanks.

[Onetooth]

Our lack of a response to 15 or 20 different message board threads on the PvP boards regarding the "melee issue" has met with little, if any response. Thus, I bring the problem to a message thread that I know turbine will read.
-onetooth

[Scout X]

something else i wanted to post previously and forgot to.


What is the point of questing? Turbine has made it obvious and clear that quest items should never be better than what random loot can provide. Why do we bother getting "rewards" if they aren't rewarding. Almost everyone hangs them up because they look pretty and is the only use for the item.

Loot generated items are so bland looking, yet have great stats. While quest items usually look awsome, but have bland stats. Stop giving us there useless items and get off the "quest items should suck" treadmill. OR, how about making random loot have random cool graphics? Finding a really large overlord looking sword thats random generated. The quest overlord sword sucks, but looks cool.




I just think either that quest items should be useful or that random loot should look cooler than sticks for staves, bent sticks for bows, a handle with a typical blade for a sword. Its rather boring if you ask me.

[jordvik]

But the Devs dont reply to it here either. All it does is make long pointless arguments for the rest of us to sift through that arent related to the subjects at hand.

[Onetooth]

Now, because the argument is not "pointless," we can hope that the dev's do respond.

[Mal the Mad]

Ok trying to smooth things... bear with i suck at it...

PVP melee vs mage was not in LTTP. Posted issue w/ PVP melee vs mage because it was a topic wanted it in LTTP. If the pvp melee v mage issues are addressed in some public fashion then for a short time those concerned would stop posting it everywhere. but tell ya what melee v mage is not just a pvp issue as there is the issue of mage dot, vice melee dot. that we all get to read too. So now I'm just waiting for the official yes there is a problem or its as designed post so that everyone can hush and play the darn game.

[jordvik]

I understand what you guys mean and I understand it is important to quite a few people, but it still has nothing to do with this letter to the players. My pointless comment wasnt to say that the argument doesnt have validity. It was to say it doesnt have a place on this thread.

The devs dont seem to post about off topic comments so it seems rather pointless other than to make this entire thread so unwieldy so that the devs probably just end up scanning through the posts the way I do to see if there is anything said that is on topic. This hurts the input we get back from Ibn regarding the issue at hand because he is liable to miss something or give up reading them all together.

[Floydlax16]

Personally I really like the sing wand and seriously dont think the crushing blow property should be removed. Though I would gladly settle for both the rate of CS and CB to be reduced. And the removal of the V property is also fine...

[Stith]

So melees are better meatshields? I suppose they are most of the time, like say, against an Olthoi Primordial, or a Raider Prefect, or anything else than does high amounts of Physical damage.

Actually melees are worthless as meat shields against anything that can be evaded.

Archers and in some cases even mages make far, far superior meat shields.

Why? Sticky melee. The most buggy and annoying mechanic in the game, and one that needs to be fixed like 3 YEARS ago.

[feynslowblade]

IBN,

Here is an idea to consider regarding salvaging skill. Set up the formula for salvaging so that it is weaker than the other tinkering skills to reflect its lower cost. But still better than untrained.

Maxed out untrained magic item tinker with just level 7 spells is 370=290+40+40.

Maxed out trained item tinker is 578= (290+40)*2/2+208+40

salvage based on focus/2 is 363 413 = (290+40)/2 +208+40
salvage based on focus+coord/3 is 468 = (290+40)*2/3+208+40

Possible reactions to weak salvage:

Gharu will feel good. The 2 skill points in item tinker are not wasted since it is a more powerful skill. Most if not all Gharu will take item tinker instead of salvage.

Sho will have a free salvage skill. They should not complain since they have the best racial weapon and saved a couple of skill points.

Aluvians will still complain about assess person but that will have to wait for another patch, eh?


If salvage is equal to tinker in skill, then select stats other than Coord and Focus so that gharu toons can have a choice and in some cases will get higher skills than before.

my 2p

feyn

[Pwn'nBow]

"As we mentioned above, based on the feedback from the PvP Missile Weapon changes we are considering creating some method for players to apply this improvement to loot weapons"

I only hope these "applications" could maybe be a quest timer, with a set limit of times done per weapon and not count as a tinker. In recent articles , there was discussion about making loot missle weapons better for pvp and it currently does not do better than weeping, hollow, or phantom and to take the chance of affecting the efficiency of a loot missle weapon for PvM or PvP. And to count more things as a tinker, seeing a max of 10 tinkers are capable of being done on craft 5 or lower items, this would cause the effeciency to drop resulting in lower Damage Modifier %s.

[Suvar]

[QUOTE=The Darkness]My one hope is they have nerfed it (it being the usw) because it is a quest item that is more powerful than a loot item, which goes against the grain in AC these days.





I can keep silent no longer :)

After playing AC for 4+ years my silence on the boards has come to an end. I am burdened with the weight of the recent tendency to put in untested items only to find them "unbalanced" in the eyes of a few vocal players, then remove/balance them to appease the unsilent few. The Darkness has a good point in his post but I have to point out one or two things because if it isn't brought up, it may be accepted as accurate, and that would be a pity.

He states above that the Dev's "grain" dictates quest items shouldn't exceed the ability of loot items. In a comparison I would like to call the Bladed Bow of Impailing to the stand (quest bow for those who don't know). With it's humble +190 damage mod it towers over the base/tinked mod of any loot generated bow. Then the bow receives a base damage to boot.. and I'm sure to keep things in line they picked the lucky number 9 because it's only 225% actual damage bonus of having Major Blooddrinker on a loot gen bow.. And because no self respecting archer would ever use a bow regardless of the mod and bonuses if it didn't have an imbue, we'll not only put on one imbue.. let's do 2! Then the cherry on top is that this baby will also give ya that extra 10 pts to bow that will throw ya over the top and get ya popping those mobs with startling regularity.

I could site the Fist of Massacre or that beautiful set of sub-loot gen quality armor you receive from that same quest but I think the point is made. You might say "But those are all from the same quest".. and, and, and.. mages get a neato wand from that quest that brings things back into balance.. you know the wand that like makes you regen health for the whole fellow, and really fast too ..

You're probably right that I shouldn't beat that quest up.. Instead let's talk about that nifty Quintessence Sickle. It's that 34.5-69 base slashing (axe) weapon with CB that you get from the Sing Bore. Not that this weapon unbalances anything, it's just that you won't.. and I repeat, you won't find any axes out there that will tink that high even with 25 bags of iron. The list of Quest Melee/Missle weapons that exceed the best tinked weapons goes on and on. I only site these examples so no one accidentially swallows the "quest items aren't as good as loot gen items" pill without a little milk to wash it down.



On a different note. I'd like to take this chance to expound on the child like whining that goes on with every perceived unbalancing item/change that's introduced into the game.

First off, let's analize why anyone would complain when someone else is getting a new or better item introduced for his/her class to enjoy. It seems to me we ought to rejoice with them that things are changing for the better and it's only a matter of time before that group cheers with us when our "break" comes. But rather than applaud for them, we would rather hit these boards and cry till Ibn breaks out his nerfing mastery other X wand and gives it a wave. Come on people.. This game has been out for around 5 years. Now doing a little math that means that the average person who was old enough to know how to type and navigate a keyboard to play AC when it was released was probably around 16. 16+5=21 if I'm not way off.. So what we really have here is this, people old enough to purchase beer without fear of handcuffs fussing and bickering cause, OMG its mage <3 or *gasp* that sword toon is pwning my @$$.

Secondly, all this debate about who spent what skill credits to get what skill and why that skill should do phat damage vs. your lacking skill. There will never be balance on this level ever. Not unless all life magic is done away with.. all war scrolls/melee/missle weapons read 10-20 damage, slashing, and all armor is tweaked to a beefy 10 al, exchanging of all those random spawns with some jello and let us free lascerate to tune of equality, the blight of g'nath. Now in this euphoric utopia we could all run around DV waving our swords and orbs doing the same damage shouting "yee haw" and in the end... isn't that what we're all after anyway. So Ibn, take note. "We want to be clones, down with diversity!" :) Actually I do think credits spent should = potency of the character.. Alas, I'm sorry to report that we the pro-mage representatives are alone in this view. It's obvious Turbine doesn't share the dream.


Much love for ya's all!
And thanks for lending me an ear.

[Frieze]

the Bladed Bow of Impailing to the stand (quest bow for those who don't know). With it's humble +190 damage mod it towers over the base/tinked mod of any loot generated bow. Then the bow receives a base damage to boot.. and I'm sure to keep things in line they picked the lucky number 9 because it's only 225% actual damage bonus of having Major Blooddrinker on a loot gen bow.. And because no self respecting archer would ever use a bow regardless of the mod and bonuses if it didn't have an imbue, we'll not only put on one imbue.. let's do 2! Then the cherry on top is that this baby will also give ya that extra 10 pts to bow that will throw ya over the top and get ya popping those mobs with startling regularity. Just for the record, that bow sucks compared to a CS ;)

While we're on the record, the Sing wand was definitely beating out a CS in some situations. Oops.

*shrug* I think it needed to be toned down... maybe not as much as it got toned down, but I'm just a player :p

[Frieze]

Here's what I do sometimes:
Hotkey main pack in 9, hotkey renegade kit (+200hp) in 8, hotkey a treated kit or plentiful kit in 7. Hit 8 then 9, then 7 and 9. That way you don't burn your good kits, but they heal reliably to a point where you can use other "more use" kits that possibly have higher health bonuses.

Again, just a suggestion. Yes. That's what I do. I use them when I get low. Like I said =)

[Electronic Sign]

Personally I think the changes to the sing scepter a little overboard, I wouldn't mind it so much if they were just lowering the cb instead of removing it. However I wouldn't mind the removal at all if you were to do something that would give mages the ability to compete damage wise with the other class's on vod. Remember that due to vuln's and Imperil many melee's, and archers are critting for 2k+ on high health mobs, while mages are stuck between 300-800. Do to the luxury of an imperil you have the chance to do an insane amount of damage in a short period of time. With the combination of a CS item that is amplified.

So if the only issue as you say is a quest item being better then a loot/tinkered item then how about a game dynamic change to give mages a benefit in casting that extra spell on the creatures. Give Imperil or something of the like a %cap on war damage so mages have the ability to deal damage just as well as melee's and archers on high health creatures. Any mage who can tell time, do math, and has an IQ above that of a rock wouldn’t consider using this on average creatures. Since using a rend wand will take equal or less time, and consume less mana as long as the spell is done right. (aka test it till your eyes bleed and you get it just right… even if it takes a few months or more.)

The reason I say this is before the high health mob's imperil was a balancing tool between melee's/archers and mages. When creatures were rolling around with under or a little above 1000 health melee/missile class's needed the spell to keep in line with the damage a mage would do with nothing but a vuln. Now in ac with the high health mob's imperil is giving melee/missile char's a tool that while still needed at the lower/mid levels is unbalancing at higher levels. So personally the only decent path I can see besides not removing the usw's features is to add a new version of the imperil spell (while keeping the old.. which will be explained in a moment) that will function the same as the current spell while also adding a percentage of damage to war spells. The reason I say keep the old spell is the new spell should only be a pvm spell since it would unbalance pvp, and by keeping the old spell you are still insuring it's use in pvp combat. The only thing I can see that would need to be worked on is the percentage. Making sure that mages are competitive with damage, but not overpowering in the fight. That's just my 2 cents on the subject.

One more suggestion on a different subject though. Add more creatures in all the different critter types (IE: Drudges, Tummies, Shadows etc etc) that are like mutilators. All of them doing an insane amount of melee damage even through tinkered/buffed armor, while having no magic skills. Creatures that give mages a run for their money fighting in groups due to lack of melee defense and shield, while melee's can fight them with ease do to melee defense and a shield. I'm tired of seeing the melee's in my monarchy feeling limited to only olthoi, tuskers, and lugians. They deserve more classes of creatures they can hunt effectively. A creature doesn’t need to cast magic to be dangerous, you've proven that with mutilators. By doing this you give melee's many more options when hunting. Yet again, just my 2 cents.

[cstanleytech]

Just for the record, that bow sucks compared to a CS ;)

While we're on the record, the Sing wand was definitely beating out a CS in some situations. Oops.

*shrug* I think it needed to be toned down... maybe not as much as it got toned down, but I'm just a player :p

Yes but for the fact Frieze that even with the sing wand as it was mages still did not max crit as high as melee players can max crit.
Max I got with the wand on a non virindi mob was 1090 or so but the average crit was about 850 and thats on a vulned mob.
A melee on the other hand can hit for 1000+ far more often then my mage plus they can get max crits of 7k on a vulned and imperiled mob and in a fellowship who do you want attacking the monster in Vod ? The mage that caps at 800 or so with a CS wand or the archer and the melee players that can crit for 1000 - 2000+ ?
Granted Ibn made a reference to better loot gen wands being added but until more data is forthcoming on that its just smoke and mirrors and yet another nerf the mages right now.

[cstanleytech]

The Singularity Scepters, like all Slayer weapons, are intended to be niche weapons. Very good against Virindi, but not better than loot weapons against standard monsters.

Right now for, say, your average level 120 war mage, the USS is about as effective as a CS or CB caster against non-Virindi. Against Virindi its damage over time is about 75% higher than the same CS or CB weapon. So you've got a quest weapon that's as good as an imbued loot weapon against most creatures, and MUCH better against Virindi. So why bother with loot weapons ever again?

With the changes, the USS is about 23% less effective than an imbued wand for that average level 120 war mage. But it's still 19% more effective than that imbued wand against Virindi. That's the goal. It's also more effective than an unimbued loot wand.

It is interesting to see all the posts about how the Devs obviously hate mages, considering that in recent months with the addition of better war crits and the first talks about improving war damage at low levels, many people posted how it was obvious that the Devs love mages and hate everyone else.

Is that we think Mages should never do more damage? No... higher-damage weapons, including casters, are in the works.

One lil nit pick more ibn :)
Using the recent alterations to war magic might not exactly be a good example to use seeing as it DID kinda take about 2 years more or less for them to get around it :) hehe

[KsBabe]

I beg to differ about the impaling bladed bow not being as good as a CS. I can use a CS bow all day and not do half the damage I can using the Impaling bow. I can use it to one shot a vulned gromnie, 2k crits on Obilts, and the list goes on and on.
It is better than all the rendering bows I have and if you dont believe the power of that bow, ask a few melee'ers that hunt with archers carrying this bow.
Yes that bow is better than any loot generated bow I have and I have one of each.
I always thought though quest loot should be better than generated loot, as do most people in AC.

[Darkerknight_sc]

I would like to comment on the proposed cap on gromnie teeth rewards for the October patch.

First, let me say I was MORE than thrilled when I saw in last patch new types of teeth with even more ability for lvling a tradesmule.

While the teeth are able to used to "farm" exp there are some pts that I think need to be addressed. The first is that a TRUE tradesmule has more skills than JUST alchemy, cooking, and fletching - such as lockpick, healing, tinkerings. Just because the exp is cycled out of the three skills does not mean the exp isn't spent to further tradesmules.

Next the time investment needed to "farm" the exp is quite large. First there is the fact of running the sellback gem quest every 2 weeks with a mule (not DIFFICULT but still it takes time). Nest, is the time to gather the teeth, while some are not to difficult to get others take HOURS to get a set of three and I do mean HOURS. I spent about 3 hours getting a single Sable tooth and there were other that were looking at the same time. The exp while getting the teeth the exp is MINIMAL at best. So while the amount of exp is quite large for the mule, the trade off for that experience is hours of non-exp gain hunting with other chars. By the time to factor in all the time to collect and prepare the exp gained isn't much more than one could get hunting a high exp yield area, it's just put into a different character. Also, the exp does NOT pass-up so there is no problem with MASSSSS exp being created through pass-up which would IMO make the process worth far too much.

In closing, I know there are characters that are not tradesmules that farm the exp but I think they are in the minority and they are really just trading the hours of exp hunting for the teeth for the few minutes it takes to turn them in, but the over all exp yield is very close to the same. Please don't hurt the majority who use the teeth as the only viable way to lvl a TRUE tradesmule because of a few who take advantage of it.

This all assumes (by lack of statement of it) that by placing a cap on the teeth reward you do not intend to replace it with quests for higher lvl trademules who wish to advance their other skills as well.

Thanks for your time, I hope my response makes sense and at least makes you take some time to think about the change before you make it.[/QUOTE]

[Mildly amused]

I always thought though quest loot should be better than generated loot, as do most people in AC.

Most people in AC, eh?

If quest items are better than loot items, it kills any incentive to loot.
If quest items are better than loot items, it kills any incentive to tinker.
If quest items are better than loot items, it kills almost any incentive to trade.
If quest items are better than loot items, we will all look like clones.

[Silifi Of Death]

You're probably right that I shouldn't beat that quest up.. Instead let's talk about that nifty Quintessence Sickle. It's that 34.5-69 base slashing (axe) weapon with CB that you get from the Sing Bore. Not that this weapon unbalances anything, it's just that you won't.. and I repeat, you won't find any axes out there that will tink that high even with 25 bags of iron. The list of Quest Melee/Missle weapons that exceed the best tinked weapons goes on and on. I only site these examples so no one accidentially swallows the "quest items aren't as good as loot gen items" pill without a little milk to wash it down.


Uhh... It;s not that high. The weapon buffs to 37-74 with 7s and the Minor Bloodthirst.

As for the sing wand nerf, although I don't agree with the sentiments on this board that mages are underpowered, I am AGAINST the nerf. This weapon isn't unbalancing, it's just a fundamental flaw in the way these large "Group" areas work. It's not all the Dev's fault either, believe it or not. It's that people are so touchy about who's kill it is, and then the groups aren't even working together. Worse, the monsters don't drop nearly enough loot to support the size of fellowships that they require to take it down.

[shidenkai]

Up until about an hour before I posted the LttP, that was actually the route we were going to take. Then Zyrca pointed out that without the benefit of the attributes, Salvaging would cap out MUCH lower than Item Tinkering. They'd be pretty even at low levels, but at high levels Item Tinkering would be better. So we're taking another look at it. We may still go that route and find some way to balance it, we're just not ready to make the final decision yet.

Why not just take the sum of all their attributes and divide it by like 14 or 21 (or some number that makes sense, I haven't yet done the math)? That way you give a bump to a new skill for all classes without really favoring one over the other, and can use it to raise the cap a little?

SK of FF

[Khael]

Since I dont care about anything not pvp related, let me just state that the missile speed increase sounds really good.

Next 2 pvp things to fix would be to increase weeping melee damage again, to make sword/axe/mace usefull for pvp again.

And of course lower the base meleeD bonus on wands to like 5% or something like that. A mage starting 10/10 coord/quick should NOT be able to evade a fully maxed melee like 95%+ of the time.

Thanks :)

[MisatoX]

Nerf this
Nerf that
Touch up some noob towns
Slightly alter some super old quest
Fix bugs from last patch


*yawn*

[MachineOfMt]

Ibn,

I hope Turbine takes a close look at Darkknights post above because there are some very good points made there. I've been turning in the teeth on several of my characters and I do see it as an xp trade off. You spend time on your main hunter looking for the teeth and make almost no xp but the trade off is you can then get that xp on your tradeskill character. With as much xp as can be made by hunting in a good fellow this seems more than fair. It would take a lot of time to hunt all the teeth to do this.

I know you guys are worried about the extreme case of someone turning in teeth and harvesting the xp over and over, but in all honesty, you'd need like 12 billion xp dedicated to this before you could optimally harvest the xp in the first place. That's no easy task. To get that 12 billion xp, you'd have to have done a ton of hunting. With that 12 billion xp in skills other than the tradeskills pretty much any character could be near maximum effectiveness already. If they are tired of hunting at this point, is it really that bad to provide an alternate way for them to continue that character's development? Why force characters to hunt to make big xp? If someone wants to do that I don't see what the big deal is really.

You really do need to compare what xp can be made doing this versus what you can earn by hunting in a good fellowship during the same period of time. In all but the most extreme cases I think the hunting fellowship is always going to win out.

[Ibn]

What is the point of questing? Turbine has made it obvious and clear that quest items should never be better than what random loot can provide.

Quest items are intended to be better than loot weapons, but not as good as max-tinkered imbued weapons. So a player who tinkers and imbues his weapon should have one that is better than a quest weapon of the appropriate level. A player who doesn't want to deal with tinkering should be able to acquire quest weapons that are better than loot weapons, but not as good as the tinkered weapon.

[Zestryl]

Quest items are intended to be better than loot weapons, but not as good as max-tinkered imbued weapons. So a player who tinkers and imbues his weapon should have one that is better than a quest weapon of the appropriate level. A player who doesn't want to deal with tinkering should be able to acquire quest weapons that are better than loot weapons, but not as good as the tinkered weapon.

And the USW is not as good as a Max Tinked Wand, except against Virindi. So why the nerf?

[Bob Down]

I'm just curious...

How is it that there is a big hoo-hah over Sing wands, but noone has complained about the fact that Palenqual Buadrens have NO imbue effect, while ALL OTHER Palenqual weapons do? In fact all others have TWO! Surely they should have at least a CS effect, or something?

Come on guys, there are sod all (if any?) questable Foci with any kind of imbue effect. If you're going to wreck Sing Wands (and the value of doing that to appease a minority of PK players is questionable at best) what about at least evening up the playing field for the more mundane lower-level items?

[Kaluna]

I am very happy about the usting improvements. It will be nice to load a ton of stuff in and get neat little bags out. Now if you could just make it less cumbersome to manufacture arrowheads. I don't use decal, so that means I make 'em one bundle at a time.

[Newbie]

Bob, complete the Invoker quest (lvl 70+) to add Biting Strike to your Baudren and bump the manaC mod to +12. Very nice general-purpose quest castor with the +20 self. Need a good-size group to complete the quest, but well worth it.

[Bob Down]

How about at level 30 I do a much simpler quest wit hmy Axer for a Palenqual that does BS and CB?

Not much comparison is there.

[simpleton87]

well ive read 4 pages of this and am sick.

heres a good point.

MOST CHANGES ARE MADE AROUND PvP

not all of us PK, nerfs hurt the Pv"M"'s

why dont you just take out PKL, back when PK was actually a RISK people didnt go around sporting their best armor and all that nonsense.

Why not put the sence of loss back in PK?

Edit: Also i think that with the loss of CB on my Sing wand.... It will really add some Light to my apartment :D

[Frieze]

MOST CHANGES ARE MADE AROUND PvP

not all of us PK, nerfs hurt the Pv"M"'s

Edit: Also i think that with the loss of CB on my Sing wand.... It will really add some Light to my apartment :D You know the sing wand was already balanced for PvP last patch (PvM was left out of it). This time it was done specifically with PvM in mind...

[simpleton87]

non the less it'll prolly be junk after the patch

[Yung Kin]

non the less it'll prolly be junk after the patch

Quest items are intended to be better than loot weapons, but not as good as max-tinkered imbued weapons. So a player who tinkers and imbues his weapon should have one that is better than a quest weapon of the appropriate level. A player who doesn't want to deal with tinkering should be able to acquire quest weapons that are better than loot weapons, but not as good as the tinkered weapon.

Simpleton really makes sense sometimes. It just took 'em a while to get what Ibn really meant.

I'll put it in plain language for the masses of Dudes...

Quest items pwn l00t junk, but are nowhere near as pwnage as your 10x. So you gonna be da b0mb again after da patch. Sides' pwnage belongs to tinkerd00ds not questd00ds. Peace.

[Seishin_HG]

Cooking, Fletching and Alchemy are pretty damn near useless skills. By level 50 you have all the skill you need in all 3 of them to do everything you need to in the game.

Wow, I'm really gimped then in Alchemy. Alchemy currently buffs to about 425. My character is level 72 and is a fairly weak dagger character. He started with 100 inate focus and coordination. At over 20 million per point and 40 million if he tries to raise i via focus and coord how did you get alchemy to above 500 by level 50?

For my character it looks like he will be around level 100 before Alchemy reaches the skill needed to make perfect diamond ingots.

[jordvik]

I was referring to stuff that peple make on a regular basis, not things you may make once every once in a blue moon. How many weepings do you need after all?

As for 500 skill, that was changed ages ago. Here is a link from CoD about Isparian weapons. Looks like the skill check got lowered to 375 for a 50/50 chance. With 7's, A focusing stone and someone Brilling you. All you need is 284 Skill for a 50% chance.

Edit: Oops forgot the link:

http://ac.warcry.com/compendium/quests/index.php?action=display&id=150

[Erudine]

I agree with many of the changes, even though most of them are nerfs. Nerfing people doesn't make them feel good, tho. With each nerf, I think a new benefit needs to be presented at the same time, or people lose heart.

Also, what is being done for Melee vs Archer pvp? Wasn't there some discussion, a while back, about making weeping bows partially sheild-hollow, instead of fully? Or maybe there's a way to make missile defense useful in this matchup? Can the weeping weapons (not wands) have a +25% missile d modifier? My missile d is pretty high, and I still get my butt handed to me by archers 50 levels lower than me.

I agree that Archer-vs-Mage pvp should be addressed first, since mages make up the vast majority of PVP players, and therefor a player's barrier to entering the PVP domain is mostly based on how they perform vs mages. However, as a result of the phantom and hollow buffs, melees and archers are turning to PVP in increasing numbers, and the Melee-vs-Melee, Archer-vs-Archer, and Melee-vs-Archer matchups are becoming much more important.

Thanks for maintaning dialog with the players.

[Cuttler]

My concern is the changes to the tooth rewards. I understand the reason is to stop the exploit by huntable characters, but my concern is how you are deciding what is "a mule" for the reward calculations. My craft mule is 102, has never killed a creature, and never will. The xp for this character has occured via vassal passup and the teeth rewards and that is after 3 years of existance. Despite the nice reward the teeth can bring, it is a pain to spend the time to collect what is now 5 viable teeth, and I require 2 of each a week. I am hoping you have a significiant way to determining what is a mule rather than off the level of the character so true high level mules can continue to obtain decient xp and contine to craft and tinker, which is their purpose.

[ElronOfDarktide]

This is not good.

You made melees totally unable to compete at all last patch by nerfing us

now you are making mages and archers both stronger......

How is this reasonable???

Post a video of some DEV pvping on darktide on a melee PLEASE

Elron

[simpleton87]

how are mages getting stronger this patch?

they're only increasing Bolts/Arcs from level 1-6, 7s are remaining the same.
and archers are only firing a little faster, nottin to worry aboot

[Jet-eye-nite]

I had hoped to hear " good-bye zone" .
I wish pvm had as much dev time as pvp , but alas :rolleyes:
I wish more could be done for tinkers,but the exploiters strike again :eek:
I guess I am the only one with the complaint of ;
/lifestone , /allegiance hometown ( I will for the life of me not understand why it can't just be simple /L or /BS
On the topic of the 3 starter towns , please consider upgrading selling points( an example a simple pyreal pea can't be sold in any of those towns),available standard items such as peas,arrowheads,potions to name just a few.
Here is an idea ,want to increase those towns exposure ? Then add + 10 to a tinker skill for each town .Such as While in Holtburg you are in the Bronze Statue and receive + 10 to your weapon,MiT tinkering skills or while in Shoushi you are in Bronze Statue you receive +10 to your Armor,Item tinkering skills and lastly same as above but to Flecthing,Alc,Cooking skills.

[Sabresiberian]

Nerfing the Ultimate Singularity War wand is not a good thing! this is the first and only quest weapon that is worth anything. Rather than nerf this fun weapon, mebbe we could have some similarly fun melee weapons too!

The biggest problem I have with AC is the worthless quests. A few quests are worthwhile in terms of providing majors or moderates. but no quest weapon is worth the effort. Make more fun quests by allowing us to get weapons comparable or better than imbued weapons! Make these quests harder yes, but make them :)

Missile weapons are lumped with melee weapons for reasons I don't fathom, as they are higher damage and really in a class all their own. If you are going to lump them with something, lump them with mages!

There are cool melee weapons in concept, they are just worthless compared to imbued weapons. I love the Sickles and the Renegade Axe, but only on my cottage wall :/

Thanks,
Primarily a melee character (Axer)
Sabresiberian (Calte of HG)

[Dj_Viper]

I have not read anyone elses posts, nor am I going to read what is written after my post.

As far as the changes go, they all look great. I have no complaints about what was introduced. However, I still have a major problem with pvp, and it has been unbalanced for far too long. This is my 3rd month of complaining, and it now I'm sick of it.

The phantom katar is overpowered! I don't understand how you don't see that. It does just as much damage as a sword over time, if not more! UA's get to train/spec more, do more damage than any other class AND stick to running people better. I am canceling my asheron's call account until this is fixed. I refuse to play against UA's 30 lvls below me and still get destroyed. Also, archers hit way too hard in melee vs archer. Melees cannot kill an archer.

Fix overpowered ua....It costs the least, and is the best weapon class by far. I canceled my subscription, and will no longer play until it is fixed. Thank you, goodbye.

Sorry if I came off as disrespectful, I am not usually like this. I'm just tired of overpowered ua and will deal with it no longer.

Viper Nex (Level 130 Sword/Darktide)

[Zenra_Icewind]

Nitpick Nitpick.

So you can crit higher with something than something else. Woo!
So your Virindi Slayer will slay more Virindi, fast and without mercy. Yay!

I think the PK advancement should stay where they belong. On DT. DT is where the PKs live, and there is where all the PK related material should stay. I'm annoyed with all the pink dots on WE. P-Gays as we refer to them. They talk all tough and big, and call you names when you recall home because you were trying your new imbue on a buddy without killing him. You want to impress me, go red, and pick a real fight, lose your DIs, and have yourself ganked at the Sanctuary. Then you'll impress me. And the guy that did it to you is a jackazz. But that's what you were red for! For the thrill of dying, getting your stuff ganked, and being laughed at. Right on.

"oooooo I'm pink! I can kick your azz! WoO! I can strafe better than anyone!"
No one cares! Least no one on a "carebear" server cares! If PK is your life, then by all means, go PK on DT! I'm sure no one will argue with you there, since PKing is what they do!

And if it's over powered, by all means nerf it. Give this game a challenge. So you can crit a V for 2000 with your USW! WooHOO. You're the life of VoD. Come on, there's more to it than how hard you can hit. It's how long you can suvived while you're being ganked by raiders and paradoxes at the same time. Kill them all, then by all means, you have every right to be the one that whines, because you didn't kill them fast enough.

I'm not all held up on leveling. Shieze, since the level cap is going to be raised with the expansion, my dreams of leaving AC when I hit 126 are all dashed. What a shame. I'm heart broken. *insert sarcasm here*

Everyone who has played since AC began? Kudos, you're more patient than most. I've been playing since three months after Dark Majesty came out. When you still learned spells by trial and error, and you only had one portal and one lifestone. And buffing yourself was the highlight of your day! I buffed with a level 4 and lived! Kudos to me. Now? Buff bots galore. SiKs are pretty much useless now except for the chibi mages that can't kill tusker guards. Since, even tuskers redemers drop level 7s now and then. Come on people, if you're kiling redeemers, you don't need to be meddling in 7s.

The 190 mod bladed bow? It's a wonderful wall item. It hits pretty hard too. It kills the same amount of creatures in and same amount of time. Imp+Vuln on any creature and you're almost, but not always, guarnteed a one hit. Provided you can -hit- it. My bow skill is 327, and I can't hit a freeking Lugian Juggernaut to save my life with an arrow, but a melee that's 20 levels under me can kick it's azz.

Is it too much to ask that the Missile Defence -not- equal the Melee Defence? I mean, Bow skill does not max as high as any melee skill, and if you want to talk about anything being unbalanced, it's that. It's rediculous. I understand that missile D was needed on these monsters, but to a point that I can't hit them at all? that's just pitiful. Even creatures that are missile inepted I have trouble hitting.

Still needs a bit of tweeking.

Sure when I hit 126 I can kill everything, but how can I get to 126 without being able to -hit- anything to kill it for the xp? Since I don't chain, as that's just cheating.

I've heard stories of making 100k in a fellow was uber xp, back in the day. Now you can make 100K off an adolescent olthoi brood queen! 25 mill is uber. and higher still in fellows in like, Lacuna and VoD.

Anyway, I'm rambling now, and I've gone off topic completely.

YES to the September Event! Looking foreward to it, -just- to hear the whining commence. Muwah!

[MerbidVT]

Posted by Ibn

""Like any racial skill, you can use an Gem of Forgetfulness with it, and you'll get the XP, but not the skill credits.

Depending on what attributes we use for Salvaging, some Gharu'n characters may find that their Item Tinkering skill base is higher than their Salvaging skill base.""


I see you have ignored to answer on this issue since that reply Ibn.
Is that the only response we will get on the salvage skill issue?

Is there a reason to ever make a character that is NOT Sho again? The only reason me and the other 99% that made Gharu chars as their MAIN characters was willing to sacrifice the AWESOME racial skill that Sho has, was because we got a "salvage skill" for free, and yes its a SALVAGE skill nothing else!

Item Tinker as a tinker skill is what we use trade/tinker mules for like someone posted before me.

But atleast now we dont have to worry about that choice anymore do we?

Would be great if we could get a more detailed answer about this issue and if you guys are happy that all the new "main" characters that are made from now on will be Sho, since theres no reason at all to make another race as it is now.

Or do you guys have plans to improve or atleast give us Gharu/Aluv a choice what to do with our racial skills in the future? like remove the item tink/assess person and make our racial weapons equal to the Sho race?

I really hope hope you can answer some of the above questions about this BIG issue for us, Ibn.

[Depraflame]

Im gonna miss my nice sign wand, was my favorite quest item, but now it will just end up on my "locker" mule, the one that has all the other quest stuff i have gotten on him, and stuff that is never used. Yeah I know they where overpowered, but why nerf? why not just give the melee and missle sing weapons some love? RIP my beloved wand RIP

[Dj_Viper]

Posted by Ibn

""Like any racial skill, you can use an Gem of Forgetfulness with it, and you'll get the XP, but not the skill credits.

Depending on what attributes we use for Salvaging, some Gharu'n characters may find that their Item Tinkering skill base is higher than their Salvaging skill base.""


I see you have ignored to answer on this issue since that reply Ibn.
Is that the only response we will get on the salvage skill issue?

Is there a reason to ever make a character that is NOT Sho again? The only reason me and the other 99% that made Gharu chars as their MAIN characters was willing to sacrifice the AWESOME racial skill that Sho has, was because we got a "salvage skill" for free, and yes its a SALVAGE skill nothing else!

Item Tinker as a tinker skill is what we use trade/tinker mules for like someone posted before me.

But atleast now we dont have to worry about that choice anymore do we?

Would be great if we could get a more detailed answer about this issue and if you guys are happy that all the new "main" characters that are made from now on will be Sho, since theres no reason at all to make another race as it is now.

Or do you guys have plans to improve or atleast give us Gharu/Aluv a choice what to do with our racial skills in the future? like remove the item tink/assess person and make our racial weapons equal to the Sho race?

I really hope hope you can answer some of the above questions about this BIG issue for us, Ibn.


I COMPLETELY agree. That is why I picked Gharu. Now that everyone has the skill, it is completely worthless. Right now my racial skill is staff. I would MUCH rather trade staff AND item tinkering for UA. I would drop sword completely and be a UA character. ALL this is doing is making UA 10x more overpowered than they already were. Some sort of conversion needs to be made so racial skills can be changed, otherwise this salvaging skill is going to cause all kinds of problems, I'm telling you right now.

I am 126+ and my staff skill still costs 172 to raise, I havn't raised it once. This skill is completely worthless, I sacrificed this skill so I could have a tinkering skill....just so I could salvage my item. Now I will have 2 worthless racial skills? How is this fair? Something needs to be done about racial skills.

[Strider]

"The only reason me and the other 99% that made Gharu chars as their MAIN characters was willing to sacrifice the AWESOME racial skill that Sho has, was because we got a "salvage skill" for free"

So reroll and go sho if feel that way. You went after Gharu for no reason but the AWESOME racial skill it had it seems and now your unhappy being Gharu. Its about time ones that didn't chase the Flavor of the Month and stuck with Aluvians and Shos got a little love.

I have all three classes, my sword is Aluvian, my mage is Gharu and my Ua of course is Sho. Ive played my Sho more then any since I made him. I sacraficed not being able to salvage as much as Gharus because I enjoy Ua fighting. You it sounds like just went after whatever was "best free one" at the moment.

Why whine I'm not getting over the other classes anymore with my free tink skill? Now all of a sudden you got to HAVE free salvage skill AND what you consider the best weapon skill. This won't change your Gharu ability to salvage one bit so keep playing him/her since salvaging seemed to be more important to you then the AWESOME racial weapon at the time. OR chase after the uber Sho now til the next change makes Aluvians more desireable and you can chase after that one.



Strider

[Cyrus Damongrav]

I am going to say several things. I am a meleer, and I do hit hard. I admit that. I also know that mages hit really hard too, having fought a few, and having had to deal with some monsters that chucked spells.

I also know, that armor does exactly -nothing- to stop magic from putting a hurt on me, no matter how thick my armor is, when I am faced with monsters that are chucking spells at me, I may as well be naked.

Then you guys increase the power of the spells, monsterously, without lowering the spell levels monsters cast in the same fell swoop, instead, you're too bloody worried about how the mages are owning the virindi with a sing wand. You're too worried about PVP issues.

You're so worried about PVP, that you screwed with PVM, but didn't bother to balance out the problem that would cause. Whats in your heads?

Simple fact is, there are very few dungeons where monsters do not chuck spells, and favorites such as metos? will now be as good as off limits to people who wanna hunt there. Lets face it, its no fun when a monster tosses ONE spell at you, and chops half your life off.... and oh look! there is a whole bunch of these monsters that can chuck said spell! HOW WONDERFUL!!!!

Damage dealt by a sword is cool, I love it, but it is subject to armor. Magic is not subject to armor. There is your balance. Mages are meant to take on heavily armored enemies, while melees are meant to take on the lightly armored enemies.

Next gripe.

Archers. I feel bad for Archers, they lack the benefit of the shield, and don't hit as well as melees anymore, in fact, archers don't hit well at all. Oh sure, they do extraordinary damage IF they hit. But archers need more xp to raise the bow skill for example and missile defense is ridiculously high on most creatures when you consider this. I do not play an archer. I was very much discouraged from playing an archer by a friend of mine who plays an archer and told me "Archers can't hit anything anymore" when I first began.

Tell me, is it fun, for an archer to have to fight much lower level creatures, and literally level grind? Is it fun for the archer to have to sponge off the high level mage in VoD, just so she can make level?

The answer is no, and thats all there is to it. Lower the missile defense a bit on the critters, for criminy's sake, rather than allowing archers to remain screwed for player vs. monster. Its unrealistic for missile defense to be so high anyhow, have you looked at the coord/quickness/5 requirement to raise missileD 1 point?

My advice/request:

Mages. Quit whining how yer a buncha servants. Although I rarely do PvP, I get owned by mages many levels lower than myself. You can cut past armor with no problems, and I have watched you guys take down critters at lower levels, that I still can't. And you have devastating ring spells. All meleers are to you guys, are a buncha meatshields.

Melees: for the time being, stay out of all dungeons involving the following: Undead, Tumeroks, Drudges, Mosswarts, Banderlings, Golems, Humans, Simulacra, Virindi. Until the Devs fix this issue, these dungeons will take on a whole new lethality for you guys.

Archers: Pray the devs wake up and make it possible for you to actually hit stuff again. I really feel bad for you guys. Also, follow the advice used for Meleers if you didn't pump hella xp into focus.

Devs: FOR CRIMINY'S SAKE: think about the PvM before PvP, most play is PvM! PvM should be your priority, when you increase war magic's effectiveness, yeah, thats cool, but lower level characters need places to fight where they won't get murdered hideously. My level 20 meleer has about 65 hp, before spells. Thats doable, but it is not cool for me to walk into subway, and get nearly dead on one shot from a lich's spell. Thats just unreasonable. You guys must get a sadistic kick out of screwing the low levels, or the newbies. Play the game a little, have people beta test your patches or something! This game is gonna get impossible if you keep going the way you are.

Increasing experience on the monsters? bad, because where will the melees and archers and the like level then? Get your priorities straight, and remember the low level charas that have to deal with subway, etc.

[Dj_Viper]

"The only reason me and the other 99% that made Gharu chars as their MAIN characters was willing to sacrifice the AWESOME racial skill that Sho has, was because we got a "salvage skill" for free"

So reroll and go sho if feel that way. You went after Gharu for no reason but the AWESOME racial skill it had it seems and now your unhappy being Gharu. Its about time ones that didn't chase the Flavor of the Month and stuck with Aluvians and Shos got a little love.

I have all three classes, my sword is Aluvian, my mage is Gharu and my Ua of course is Sho. Ive played my Sho more then any since I made him. I sacraficed not being able to salvage as much as Gharus because I enjoy Ua fighting. You it sounds like just went after whatever was "best free one" at the moment.

Why whine I'm not getting over the other classes anymore with my free tink skill? Now all of a sudden you got to HAVE free salvage skill AND what you consider the best weapon skill. This won't change your Gharu ability to salvage one bit so keep playing him/her since salvaging seemed to be more important to you then the AWESOME racial weapon at the time. OR chase after the uber Sho now til the next change makes Aluvians more desireable and you can chase after that one.



Strider


Strider, about you're whole flavor of the month thing...that is the worst analogy I have ever heard. I go with the template that is best to fit my needs. I decided I wanted to be able to salvage better than the other classes, so I picked gharu. It wasn't flavor of the month, that's how it's always been since it came out. Staff is completely worthless, and so is item tinkering. What's the point in being gharu???? There is none?

The fact that turbine is changing a skill that you GET AT LEVEL ONE is ridiculous. All of the people who worked their butts off to get to where they are now are worthless. UA's overpowered, can now salvage just as good as I can if not better. This makes their racial skills awesome, along with aluvians. Gharu is left worthless. Give Gharu UA as well, and I won't complain.

Turbine, please respond on this issue.