Full patch notes in advance of the patch would be nice. I know the devs have repeatedly said they want to publish full patch notes for each patch, but then end up apologizing for not actually doing so and promising to do it next time, last patch was the third time. It’d be nice if I could believe them, but being lied to 3 times make that not possible.
Remove time gates. Time gating is killing the casual players. If I have maybe 1 to 2 hours to login each night, I want to do something that is fun or progresses me, not spend all that time to do some of my “chores” like gypsum/refining/orbs/etc. They are not fun to do after then 30th time, let alone the 100th or more. As others have said already here, people want to do what they find fun, and time gating prevents that. If you want people to stick around, you MUST fix it.
Azoth really just feels like a system added in to force people to do some specific content. Once again you’re forcing players to do specific content if they want to teleport around the map, instead of running for half an hour or more. I think the Azoth system for travel should be removed entirely. Just let us teleport around as we want, I see no good reason for this to exist.
Instead of doing lazy difficulty by just adjusting numbers via gear score to make expeditions harder, make them harder skill wise as it should be. The Dynasty boss is good for it’s base level expedition, but most of the others are either meh or BAD. Want some tips?
- Remake Lazarus boss entirely, it is a BAD boss, the worst I’ve seen in any game EVER. Every single time I ran that dungeon with my company, we stopped running expeditions after, it kills all motivation, every single time, it’s a 5-10 minute RSI inducing left click fest. For inspiration for a similar style boss, look at Kitava from Path of Exile. It has many very large and telegraphed attacks, a lot of movement required and smart usage of some cooldowns.
- Add many stages of bosses that involve periods of invulnerability, that maybe spawn a puzzle to solve, or mobs to fight, or something else you need to do.
- For higher difficulties add in new attacks for bosses as well as boosting their exising attacks/abilities. For example, the Genesis boss, have them drop less rocks (1 at max difficulty) for each stage, also shorten the time between channelling the instant kill ability and it triggering, forcing players to time things and plan ahead. Slightly increase damage per difficulty, as well as resistance and health, but do not just go mega scaling it. Increase difficulty in other areas that relate to skill.
Crafting is one of the things that broke this game for me. I enjoyed crafting to a degree, but there was always issues with it, and now it’s dead due to the mutations and 625GS. You have named really good pieces of gear in the expeditions and mutations, often BiS. I feel like crafters should have full control over the stats/perks that end up on an item they craft, but have the costs and resources required be expensive and time consuming. Some things you could change:
- Crafting could make use of recipes as a resource, one use. The recipe is for a specific type of item and skin. To craft the item you need required resources and craft mods. If you want to craft legendary tier, you must meet requirements (full crafting gear set, 200 in the crafting, etc) and have legendary materials that are required. Each recipe would require different ones. For the perks, I’d say make them rarer then now and required a certain amount based on gear score of the item being crafted, or a higher tier craft mod for that gear score.
- Crafted items have a scaling that isn’t hard set based on gear score, but instead a range, like other games sometimes have. Instead of an armour having 25 in a stat, it could have 23-27 at that gear score. The same would go for resistance/damage/etc. It would mean that while we can craft a BiS perk wise, the damage/resistance/etc might be worse/better then someone else’s version or a named item.
- Add more ways to boost crafting skill/luck for all the above. Stuff like tools that go in your weapon/shield slots, that have different traits and ranks. These would help you focus on something specific or be more generalized when crafting.
House taxes need to get removed or be changed. The casual players are expected to do their chores and somehow make a bunch of money for their taxes every week, in the limited time they have, it isn’t really fair. Their taxes then go to a PvP company who then just use it for themselves most of the time. Either make the taxes dramatically lower (equal or less then the discounted level before), or change the system. Maybe players need to do town board quests to contribute and prevent stations downgrading?
New content is required now, not soon, not in 3 months time, now. I’m talking about things like new OPR maps, new game modes within the game, PvP arenas for smaller groups, new zones/expansions. None of it time gated or restricted. Let people be able to login and just go play something, not all having to run for 10 minutes to get somewhere to start something.
And OMG fix OPR. OPR is a disaster, whoever came up with it had zero ability to think how it’d play out. How there wasn’t even some kind of rough balancing setup put in, I’ll never know. See below:
- Have an algorithm to balance teams based on weapons equipped. Prevent changing of gear loadouts once queued and while in OPR. Have 6 WH’s queued? Put 3 on each team, easy. If there are groups queued then it just does the best it can while keeping the group on the same team.
- Balance gear score while doing weapon balance. Need to split players up, figure it out based on overall gear score for both teams, get them as even as possible.
- Minimum counts for specific classes. Do you think it’s a good idea to start OPR with one healer on one team and no others? Nope bad idea. So have set in the code somewhere that you need at least two healers queued for example or 0, for it to start.
After that fix the scoring in OPR. Look at any other game ever that does capture the point style gameplay. Give points for capping, contesting a cap, and defending. It should be the main focus of the game, but somehow you get no points, no rewards for doing it. It baffles me.
Fix healers. This isn’t a “nerf the healer” thing, but a “healing is boring” thing. AGS has somehow made healing a routine. Heavy attack three times, light attack all the time (CDR), heavy attack every 10 seconds at least (30% healing boost), dodge before casting heals. That is all a healer does, and it is BORING. Just rip out the whole system and replace it fresh.
- The Life Staff should consist of a healing tree and a protection tree. The healing side has a strong group heal, a strong single target heal, and a strong heal over time. The protection side would have shields and debuff removal.
- The group/single target heals should be on long cooldowns.
- The shields would be for preventing damage in the first place. Make it short duration, but enough to say block an attack or two from Myrkgard Thorpe for example. If used at the wrong time, it’d do nothing, at the right time, it would potentially save a player for getting burst down in a second or two.
- None of the passive or upgrades for the abilities will force you to do something special to increase healing. I’m fine with a passive making attacks cost no mana, as well as maybe giving a small heal by shooting through an ally, but like a 20% healing buff shouldn’t require me to dodge, or 30% require me to heavy attack 3 times within a specific period of time. With no circles to cast, everyone is free to move around doing what they do.
Overall this game has trended towards giving the super hardcore 16 hours a day sweaty players everything, and everyone else gets pushed further behind, even locked out of some content. This is bad unless you want your game to actually drop to an unsustainable population size. You need to change things to get casual players back, and any non-hardcore types. Let them do things when they want to, stop putting things in the way. Let them have fun the way they want to have fun.
