Stop making stealth changes. If you want your playerbase to trust you then note ALL of the changes you are making. The only thing that hiding changes shows us is that you know they changes are bad and you just hope we don’t notice.
Some examples:
Changes elite scaling in outdoor dungeon areas like myrkguard and reekwater. If you mouse over these areas it says “group of 5 recommended”. That means that a group of 5 appropriate level players should have a relatively smooth time of clearing the area. They should not have to be super geared because these zones are for them to grind watermark. However, now if these players are not geared to the teeth and in multiple groups then they might as well not even try. In your attempt you thwart “zergs” you have instead made them necessary. You have also hurt the people who try to do weapon mastery quests. Best of all these changes were NOT listed, because you knew they sucked.
Another example is the change to bows with the inability to ADS into penetrating shot. This change was listed on PTR and you were given TONS of feedback. Patchnotes we’re released and the change was not listed, but it still went live. What’s the point of a PTR if you’re not going to listen to the feedback and the make stealth changes on top of it?
This game is already a grind and you as AGS are making it even more of one. You are hurting the people who are going to keep your game alive and you need to step back, take a look at how you’re handling things and then do better.
Not for much longer, at this rate. AGS strategy hasn’t changed despite all the feedback. Their game systems designers have never seen a game system and when they first heard the word “balance”, they had to look it up in a dictionary.
The way things are going, NW is hemorrhaging players and the community’s trust is at an all-time low. I loved New World from the early alphas (before the whole stagger fiasco), and there was no other game I was hyped for as much as New World. Which makes watching the current burning dumpsterfire even more painful.
As a healer from level 5 and over 700 hours of game play the nerfs are far too bad, this game was build clearly for aoe heals thats why most mini boss/boss mobs have cleave damage and there is no way for you to single target heal everyone with the cooldown and mana cost. The easy and correct change for healing was implementing more debuffs that reduce healing maybe 10% per debuff or bleed something along those lines so every non healing class can take down healing for pvp where it was the only problem for people. I play on a very low pop server most people aren’t 60 or have very low watermark there is only 2 active player myself and a company member that have maxed wm so trying to keep new 60s alive in any end game pve content atm is impossible. The bonus to light armor with a healing staff only applies to base healing and not even my bonus healing output i have on all my pieces so im still healing for 300-400 less per hot in light armor while getting 1-2 shot in every end game pve zone.
I find it hard to believe you are actually a healer if you dont think this is currently busted or all you do is pvp content because it has clearly been a n over nerf for a problem that only affected 10-15% of the population (ie the idiots who think dueling is pvp in this game)
I posted this as its own thread, but I’ll be happy to repeat it here.
Stealth nerfs are almost always a bad idea.
Stealth taking away items is ALWAYS a bad idea.
Your game needs more content to be fun, making current content artificially difficult and not worth the effort is not an answer.
The grind to high watermark was already hundreds of hours. That’s already too much. The reason people were doing the content the way they were doing it is because it was not fun to do any of their other content/it was broken/it was not rewarding enough.
In short you made a patch intending to give the players more content, (I think) in reality, a lot of people feel robbed blind. One of the most fitting uses of one step forward two steps back I’ve ever seen.
Please do not introduce another content patch untill you fix the game you have. Playing the game needs to be fun and rewarding. You will keep losing players untill it is. If you need help with the definition of those words, I would love a job.
Fire Staff is useless now. Worst experience to try and play it. Have to stand still to cast most abilities. Weak dmg. Fireball bugged and doesn’t seem to exist sometimes after casting it.
The Great Axe World devs want you to play with the 10m lunging great Axe and just spam left click.
Adding a global cooldown between actions on the bow has drastically changed gameplay with bow in a negative way. Very clunky, slow, predictable. Feels awful and near unusable IMO in any competitive sense.
If global cooldowns is the direction yall want combat to go then it needs to be across the board. Not 1 or 2 weapons.
U nerfed mages to death who where skill based.
U buffed Great Axes which even were annoying as fuck already since its like just left clicking with about no escape chance.
U destroyed healers in PVE. they cant even heal tanks against the new elites.
U destroyed elite farming by giving mobs a HP and dmg Boost of x10.
U destroyed crafting by making it like impossible (for some jobs at least) to get it up. (i mean i need about 15-20k gold for ONE level in jewelcrafting… and i am just lvl 170).
Problem with the elite and crafting thing:
there are people out with highest gearscore now. others will take months to get from 550 to 600 the way it is now.
there are people out with highest craft level now. others will take months to get to max level.
every1 will feel like “i missed my chance”.
How to fix all of this:
redo mages, nerf them SLIGHTLY
redo the heal nerf. just nerf it slightly and nerf the selfheal like it is now (that is absolutely okay!)
remove the gapcloser-leftclick from greataxes (no other nerfs needed)
redo the mob hp and dmg values
redo the crafting exp
!! and the most important thing to keep your goal:
(i guess your goal is to make highest crafting level and highest gearscore something special and really hard to get… which is a great idea. should be like that)
crafting level 200-300 with those high exp values.
new area with new mobs (you already have those implemented… why in low level areas?!) which drops up to gearscore 700 and is hard like u did myrk right now.
would be fair to keep it a struggle to achieve max (700 then) but 600 should be achieveable like it was. its simply unfair to players who didnt achieve it the easy way and now have to struggle months with groups of 15+ people and repair everything like 10 times per run for a total of 2k gold.
same with crafting levels … people who are at level 200 now can sell highlevel stuff and make a shitton of money now while others dont even wanna try this anymore cause until they reach 200 the half of the server will have bought the stuff already.
Don’t increase resources needed, don’t make us run at half speed to double the time spent on the road, don’t make elites so strong that they can’t even be killed easily by someone that is 15 levels above theirs. These are failed recipes from other games. Learn from their mistakes.
Although this will extend short term playing, this will only lead (has led) to people quitting. The problem with this is, New World is less likely to see those players return because they have formed a negative opinion of the game.
Also, the “wash, rinse, repeat” quests are okay for content filler but, “run here, get/kill this, return” is not going to get you player retention nor will extending the grind. More elaborate chain quests would go a long way to helping with retention.
BTW, Company donation pits would be extraordinary!
You should have nerfed healing while wearing heavy armor directly by applying a direct debuff to the heavy armor status of -30% outgoing healing or even -50%.
You have instead nerfed all healing to the point that even light armor PvE healing is a shadow of its former self. You have in fact nerfed light armor solo questing healing the most since heavy armor still gets its godly damage reduction compared to light armor.
It’s a real head scratcher that you didn’t opt for the simple solution of nerfing heavy armor outgoing healing directly when that was what needed the nerf.
Stealth nerfs - please stop it. It’s beyond the point of where it’s funny. Those 60 elite area changes, if they were in the PTR, would’ve saved a lot of headache.
Weapon balance - I’m mostly hearing this second hand, but why on earth did you nerf the already weak weapons (bow and ice gauntlet) and then buffed the already strong ones? (Hammer and Great Axe.) That makes absolutely zero sense.
PTR - Why bother with it if you’re going to push updates as-is anyway? No wait, it wasn’t as-is you stealth changed so much stuff on top of changing elite zones.
End game- feels absolutely not worth the effort anymore. Grinding elite zones? Not worth it. Grinding crafting? Not worth it. Wars and invasions? Lol. Doing dungeons? Not even possible in some cases due to the difficulty change. (Again, never stated anywhere. Why?)
Guess I’ll just go play “grass touching simulator” until something changes.
gonna start by saying how much i do(did?) love playing New World, from a solo PvE/Profession grind perspective, have 500 hours into this game as Bow/Spear. 200 armoring, full 600 gs armor/weapons, avg water mark was about 580, with multiple at 591 and several orbs waiting for when i hit 591 on all. used my transfer to join a server with my friends, who have since quit the game, along with 90% of the other players on the server. haven’t had a OPR game on our server in over a week. spent 12 hours a day on the game, soloing stockpile runs between elite chests. i now can no longer farm watermark, because i cant find a group for any of the zones due to lack of players and lack of being able to even buy a transfer to a populated server, and can no longer solo any zone besides Mines, which i get mostly t2 gems and refining supplies from with 0 armor and weapons. i can now hardly solo stockpiles in Shattered Mountains anymore because bow has been made to have 0 mobility and can no longer burst down mobs when 9 mobs aggro at once in the villages. Sadly last night after being unable to do a Malevolance, Myrk and Imperial run, i uninstalled the game, i hope you revert the nerf to bow and either fix the solo chest stealth-nerf or offer people who transferred already, another transfer or rush the server merges.
Your point summurized is:
“I have bad people on my server and now I heal less, so I can’t keep low geared and non experienced people alive in most hard endgame content of the game and this why the changes are bad!”
Don’t you think that people with low gear score should have to improve, so they don’t die in endgame content? Do you think, this was good, that you could heal lvl60 dungeons with 500 gear score easily? I mean if you think so, than we have just different opinions here - I would like this game to be more challenging.
Regarding pve:
I dont have issues with healing pve content - for sure it’s depends on what your tank/dps wear. I would say most people I’m running with have 550+ gear score. If people wear light and can’t dodge/block - for sure, you will have problems, but this doesn’t mean your heal output is not enough, but that people should learn to dodge/block or get better gear.
Regarding healing amount:
For sure we heal less now, but since every %-perks are also nerved, the increased +30% on basic heal are more valuable. If I compare current state, to how it was before with the same heavy gear as before, I healed 1000-1100 pre sec with sacred ground, now it’s 600-700 per sec (still with heavy gear). For sure that is a way less, but didn’t you felt it was a way to much before? The change makes also good tanks more valuable same as dps who can dodge and not just “leftclick” by the way. I think in one of the next patches the devs will slightly increase the amount of healing, since it’s probably a bit too much nerved right now. But we should keep in mind - the game should be challenging, at least the end game, or it will fast gets boring.
Regarding pvp:
I often saw how 10 people in heavy gear could just stand in stacked sacred grounds from both sides for minutes and just hit each other without the necessety to dodge or block, and the decission, which side won the fight was depending on which zerg gets larger after some time. This is boring and not how gameplay should be. In my opinion the most people don’t understand, that nerv heal output doesn’t just affect healers - everyone will need to learn not to get this much damege by dodging/blocking and using skills in proper way.
After the patch I have seen a consistent decline in server responsiveness to the point where after your stability downtime it is actually worse, 200-500ms WHEN NOTHING IS HAPPENING.
This makes wars presently unplayable, I absolutely love this game despite the glaring flaws however the unplayability in the wake of 1.1 is beyond unacceptable. I appreciate all that you have done but you have to fix the servers now or this game won’t survive this issue, let’s be honest.
Please keep up the good work though, the patch is good. I do appreciate it.
And your point summarized is my neck beard buddies and I got the East ride for 3 months and we are now bored make it harder for the casuals and late starters
Disgusting changes apart from void gauntlet and keys to laz/genesis.
The PVP added luck is questionable because of the variances and unknown bugs that could be potentially adding negative effects. This is a likely case because of amateur hour of deleting
players harvesting gear/ failure to correct duping bugs/
Stop adding shit in and fix the crap you already have first.
Unplayable, Unenjoyable and CBF playing.
Fully expect a mass exodus of this game!
Btw making undocumented changes isn’t good comms cheers
These “behind the scenes” updates that never made it to the patch notes are extremely unacceptable in my honest opinion. the player base should have a very solid idea of what is changing in the most recent patch in advance. surprising us with skins is one thing but with buffed enemies and lower rewards from elite chests, probably something we want to hear about. im sure a lot of us want to see percentages (or some form of more in depth info) with changes, just how much of a decrease or increase of health should we expect? “elites are getting a health boost” okay are we talking 1% higher? 100%? transparency transparency transparency. we just want to know whats happening to the game we love to play. i dont want to be worries when an update is announced, “what are they going to change without telling us this time?”
Agreed. Not only is the new crafting situation unfair. I mean we are literally leveling in two different systems which is appalling. There is also the storage issue. We have to make these high tier items, which are not worth all that much exp… but in addition to that, where they could hold like, not real numbers here, 10000 iron to craft the low level garbage items, if we try now, you have the 10000 iron, which then becomes 2500 steel, then 625 starmetal, then 157 orichalcum. Again, not necessarily true numbers, just for a point. They could have made tons of weapons with this storage compared to what we could now do. We literally have to spend days getting the stuff to make… 10 items.
