I’m rob. You probably don’t know me, but I’m just a lowly taco truck employee. This patch has stirred a lot of discussion in our kingdoms and so I thought I’d share some thoughts here.
First things first:
Mana generation was broken and needed to be fixed. Multiple people in our kingdom could t0 every PvP tournament. As well as do lvl 100 dungeons with minimal effort.
Secondly, to be successful on 100 you needed to stun lock or barrier lock. This lead to homogenized builds as those were the only tactics that were available. To move towards a gear score rather than one or two spells, this necessitated the nerfing.
It feels like our high end players will be farming around level 70 dungeons. The only benefit the older players will have completed higher skirmishes and dungeons so they can use their tickets to get lvl 100 chests still.
For those of you on the fence about quitting, I would recommend holding off until after the release in a few weeks. Seasons should be coming that may accelerate shards/relics/glyphs so we aren’t stuck at level 50 with level 35 gear score.
Personally I am going to focus on one class, not sure which one just yet. I’ve spread myself out a bit thin with how many classes i’ve been playing and gearing up, so I will likely want to focus. Will be looking at a build with Savior’s pants / Serpentine Pants + Guard shield + Royal bonus. Not sure on the rest just yet. Leaning towards shaman, but want to give the rest a shot to see what works well.
Biggest suggestion, though, is to join an active kingdom with a discord where thoughts and ideas can be exchanged more efficiently and you can work together to come up with optimal builds. The game is changing, drastically, but we’re still going to be able to min/max. Best to do it with some nice people
Wise words indeed, rob. What we definitely need is a lot of constructive interaction between us, the players, and the PQ3 people. No doubt, there had to be some nerfing of the game to make it more competitive. But the somewhat ‘massive’ across the board nerfing is really too much. The FUN element should be there. The game must not become a chore. I really hope someone somewhere IS listening and takes some quick action, and keeps this beautiful, somewhat unique game alive.
I respect your opinion about the patch and pretty much vehemently disagree with most of it.
That is a great summation as to why I disagree. What do I mean? The “problems” you mentioned are not solved. I used quotation marks on purpose because they were not even problems. They were solutions, found by players, to deal with problems.
Now we get an entirely new set of problems that require new solutions and someone will figure that out. Then we will be right back with some people doing what others can’t… until they can. Then they will.
The only real change is that months of opening chest after chest after (omg!) chest, of dryer lint and dust bunnies to get specific pieces of gear, with specific perks, in specific colors has just been unceremoniously flushed down a proverbial toilet. Do it all over again. No thanks, I’d rather be water boarded.
What is ironic (maybe I mean idiotic) is that this would actually be ok if we haven’t been dealing with draconian gear inventory limits the entire time. I could actually handle having to level new gear to adjust to a different meta. But I do not want to have to go hunt up the 10 mos + worth of salvaged stuff, AGAIN. That’s not even almost fun.
I don’t mind a gear reset. I really don’t. I played WoW in its heyday, and when the nerf bat swings, it’s inevitable that a class or playstyle gets hit. And when it is truly OP’d, nerfing OP’d gear is ok. The trouble comes when there are no other viable paths for advancement.
Stun/barrier locking is dead, so can we now replace it with:
mob debuffs, lowering their damage significantly to allow us to survive
damage mitigation buffs, capping the amount a single hit can deliver
full heals/full rearmor, allowing us to recover after a huge crit
life drains that scale
mana drains that prevent
significant damage shields
reflection (all damage dealt to the player is dealt to the mob)
100% shield block (once in a fight, triggered, not proc’d)
AFAIK, none of these avenues are available to us as players. Am I wrong? If not, what spell/class combos allow any of these capabilities at scale, so we don’t own lower level mobs, and get owned by higher level ones? Make the scaling dependent on our level/citadel level, but it needs to scale.
As for the gear, it’d be one thing if the epic-to-legendary evolve items were actually accessible in reasonable order, say 2-4 per week, and the Eveline crystal for transmuting them gets dropped. Otherwise, we’re spending 500 gems per week for one chance to transmute 1 evolve item if you’re not lucky enough to get the one you need to evolve to drop. This means weeks to evolve one item…and if it gets nerfed, you’ve evolved for nothing. If I was guaranteed the reagents returned upon salvaging an epic (or better) item, I might not mind keeping some extras in storage. As it is though, I’m looking a roll of the dice, or months to level replacements. For a mobile game, that’s simply too much effort.
you’re allowed to be angry over the changes, i’m sure it hurts. It hurts me too. But the mana gen changes HAD to happen. The stun/barrier change HAD to happen. You can’t design around these limitations. I was beating level 100 dungeons at lvl 35. Without those changes, it really restricted design space for this game. If they left things as is, what would be the point of progression?
These changes open up the design space for them to work. It lets us focus on on gear score rather than making sure we can win on turn zero or never take damage from a mob that will one shot us because we are undergeared but exploiting a poorly implemented game mechanic.
With all of that said, I’m holding out hope that release makes all of these changes worthwhile and it’s a fun game to play. We are all here complaining about changes when we haven’t seen the bigger picture (which is definitely on the developer and their communication to their now invested player).
Uhhh I played too and there was never a patch that literally nerfed everyone and everything across the board all at once.
I also don’t mind a changed meta. But I DO kinda mind having to trash 98% of my drops for months (especially with how infrequent those drops were) only to now need some of that stuff. I won’t even get into all of the Eveline crystals, shards, relics and glyphs that will take the better part of forever to replace.
there was never a patch that literally nerfed everyone and everything across the board all at once.
Eh, there were some pretty massive nerfs that rendered entire classes non-viable overnight, but it was WoW. Many already had an alt class ready when their main was knocked down. When there’s only one viable playstyle (alternating barrier/stun locks), nerfing that one nerfs all. The nerf should absolutely been paired with buffs to other methods of viable play as I’d mentioned. I’ve not yet been upgraded, so I’ve taken screenshots of all my gear and will compare it after post-upgrade. Anyone else done so?
But that’s not the game we are playing though. I’ve been saying this for MONTHS! You can’t just nerf what we are doing and completely and totally ignore WHY we are doing it. They need design… not design space.
I want to pause, and apologize if I am coming across surly to you. I understand and agree with the spirit of your thoughts here. Even if I didn’t, my frustration is not at all with you.
Anyway… There are several problems. One: Each nerfopalooza attacks several different facets of the game at the same time, without much thought to how those facets impact each other. Bad design choice on any planet. It leads to an unending cycle of mega-buff mega-nerf.
Two: The process of obtaining, leveling, evolving gear is either not that big a deal, an outrageously tedious, long chore or somewhere in the middle. Because it’s rng. You can’t achieve anything near balance with this much random.
Three: Related to that… we have been inventory starved the entire EA. AND the game pretty much requires all 5 heros. So a good many people now have a vault full of useless gear. That’s not good for any game.
But… you are, in fact, correct that the barrier/stun/turn 0 metas were not good for the game either. No argument, there. They should have been making small changes to steer away from this. At the very least, they should have dramatically increased inventory, months ago.
That was my point. lol Thanks, for rephrasing it. They took a game problem (only one way to do anything) and just nerfed it all. I don’t like having to basically play Stun-lock 3 with a barriershute every single day. It’s boring. But… as you said, an alternative please?
