Jump to content

  3. Viewing Profile: Topics: Malthrus

Malthrus

Member Since 24 Nov 2013
Offline Last Active May 07 2014 14:46

Topics I've Started

Camera mouse movement is still erratic with WASD

03 March 2014 - 09:01

Left click to move anywhere, then try to move the camera with right click while moving. Smooth as a baby's bottom right?

 

Now try holding W, then move the camera by holding down the right mouse button. I ended up spinning in circles!

 

The camera is impossible to control whilst using WASD movement, I think the camera turn speed should be the same as my first example (when you're standing still or using click to move).

 

Bonus: Add an option that lets you adjust camera turn speed.


Spell DPS display bug

03 March 2014 - 05:51

Spell DPS is not correctly displayed when your essence breaks, it shows a tiny decrease from your normal DPS, however your damage is roughly cut in half as your stats should indicate.


The state of end game Crafting & The Economy

27 February 2014 - 10:39

My thoughts on the current end game crafting and economy situation are that it is extremely poor. I have reached level 40 in many gathering/crafting skills now and there is absolutely no reason to craft for anything other than grinding xp. Maybe you get to help the odd player with a craft and get a tiny fee in return, which doesn't come anywhere close to paying back the time investment spent on crafting. 
 
With no reason to craft outside of leveling up, the demand for crafting resources will run dry very quickly. This will only get worse when more people reach the maximum crafting levels and the demand for resources plummets. This essentially means there is no economy. The amount of gold you can farm by killing monsters/world bosses for the amount of resources you can buy at the moment is completely out of proportion (ie. 1 hour of AoE grinding for 3300 bronze ore or 5000 coal). Why is this? Because the demand is so low, crafting is not rewarding enough.
 
In general I feel crafting is too quick to reach the maximum level, which is mainly due to how the tier system works ie. lvl 16 and lvl 32 crafting becomes way faster. It should scale upwards, the early levels (1-15) should be easier and the later levels should take much much longer.
 
Despite that, I feel there are many ways that you could make crafting at maximum level well worth your time, by adding additional incentives and by embedding it into regular gear progression, whether crafting it yourself or paying someone to craft for you.
 
Here are a few of my ideas:
____________________________________________________________________________________
 
Gear Upgrading
 
One idea I have to give crafting a purpose once you reach the maximum level, but could also be another form of progression at the lower levels (at a reduced cost), is the ability to upgrade pieces of gear with rare crafting materials and elemental flakes. This could also be done with any piece of gear in the game not just crafted items, items would need a set cost based on their level and rarity, for example:
 
Level 40 items
Green Boots = 8 Iron bars
Rare Boots = 8 Iron Bars, 3 Pure Iron
Rare Helmet = 10 Iron Bars, 3 Pure Iron
Heroic Chest = 16 Iron Bars, 4 Pure Iron, 2 Elemental Flakes
Heroic 2H Weapon = 20 Iron Bars, 5 Pure Iron, 4 Elemental Flakes
 
To upgrade an item, you require the profession that corresponds with that armor type with the same or higher level than the item requires to equip.
 
There would be 5 tiers of upgrades which increase in cost per upgrade, could add more levels later perhaps.
 
+1 2H Weapon upgrade = 20 Iron Bars, 5 Pure Iron, 4 Elemental Flakes
+2 2H Weapon upgrade = 30 Iron Bars, 10 Pure Iron, 6 Elemental Flakes
+3 2H Weapon upgrade = 40 Iron Bars, 15 Pure Iron, 8 Elemental Flakes
+4 2H Weapon upgrade = 50 Iron Bars, 20 Pure Iron, 10 Elemental Flakes
+5 2H Weapon upgrade = 60 Iron Bars, 25 Pure Iron, 12 Elemental Flakes
 
Upgrading an item once would increase all of its stats & DPS or armour by 5% and give the crafter some xp.
 
The pure iron goes up in cost by slightly more to make them more desirable, increasing their value more. To make it so that normal iron doesn't inflate from the higher requirement of pure iron, you should add pure iron bars which require 3-4 iron ore, 1 pure iron ore, 1 coal & flux. I always thought it was strange to be crafting with ore instead of bars anyway, this addition makes more sense.
 
Currently rare materials don't have much of a use, but with my idea there would be a constant demand for them.
 
There would also be a constant demand for crafting, as every time you get a new piece of gear you will want to upgrade it. If you do not like crafting yourself you can buy the mats and get someone to upgrade it for you, which forces some social interaction to progress your gear. To make this work with bound items, make it like a trade window where the crafter can assist you with upgrading your armour or weapon. Both players have to be standing at the same crafting workstation and you can offer gold for trade in the same window for their service.
 
The costs may seem excessive or tedious but it adds an additional form of progression to the game which we desperately need. We need a reason for crafting materials other than just leveling up or they will never have any real value at end game. We also need an economy that relies on crafting for it to not be a waste of time.
 
You might ask what happens when most people have everything upgraded, well that's when you add new harder content dungeons that drop better gear. The upgrade process repeats and crafting is once again in heavy demand.
____________________________________________________________________________________
 
Salvaging
 
Equipment should be salvageable by their corresponding profession ie. leatherworking for medium, tailoring for light, armorsmithing for heavy and weaponsmithing for weapons. This wouldn't just be limited to stuff you make from crafting, you could do this for all equipment drops in the game. You require the same crafting level as the level requirement of the item to salvage it.
 
Salvaging an item will give you a small amount of crafting experience and raw materials (ie. iron ore) which can be used to process and reforged into something else. The quality of the item (green, blue etc) will determine how many resources you salvage from the item. The amount will be around 30%~ of what the item would have needed to craft, so for an item that needs 10 iron bars you get 6~ iron ore back. 
 
This might need adjusting at first until gold inflates more because it would be better currently to just vendor the item instead of salvaging it, but you get the basic idea. You could also nerf the amount that items vendor for to make salvaging more attractive. As for non-crafted gear you could just make the amount salvaged similar to what a same level item of that quality would have taken to craft. You could also add some grey (trash items) that are broken versions of gear that drop off monsters. They will be high-yield salvage items, that give you many resources when salvaged.
 
With this change instead of making 100 belts to skill up and vendoring them, adding 50g to the economy, the materials are removed from the economy as you get less and less with each craft. On top of that you will need to purchase the vendor materials again which removes a little more gold from the system. This is mostly a suggestion to fix the massive inflation of gold. With this addition and the removal of repair kits the value of gold will stop rising so rapidly.
____________________________________________________________________________________
 
Other Crafting Ideas
 
On top of this idea it would be good if we could have a chance to roll random stats on every item that requires flakes (like the TR boss loot), so you have a reason to craft many of the same rare item to try and get a perfect roll.
 
There should be better gathering tools that you can buy from a vendor for gold that are bind on pickup. This works as a gold sink and makes gold useful for improving your gathering efficiency. There are 7 of these tools (one for each gathering profession). These various tools increase the rate at which you gather resources, they are all 2 handed so you can't dual-wield them.
 
10% Increased gathering speed, requires level 10 in skill. Cost: 10G
20% Increased gathering speed, requires level 20 in skill. Cost: 50G
30% Increased gathering speed, requires level 30 in skill. Cost: 200G
40% Increased gathering speed, requires level 40 in skill. Cost: 600G
50% Increased gathering speed, requires level 50 in skill. Cost: 1500G
 
As for Cooking and Alchemy, you should simply buff the stat increasing potions & food so their effect is more noticeable, making potion and food buffs a requirement for grinding mobs and running hard mode dungeons. For example the 25 sorcery food should become 50 sorcery and the 10% primary stat potions should become 15%, with even higher stat boosting food & potions for level 45 and beyond. I also think the higher tier health/mana potions should cost 1 or 2 more berries, they are far too cheap to produce in bulk. It takes no time at all to farm several 100 of them. Otherwise when the trade system is in place you will be able to buy tons of them for next to nothing.
 
There needs to be more non-combat related items that you can make with crafting also. Some stuff for the roleplayers or perhaps some items that boost your crafting levels on use/equip. Stuff such as a chef's hat which boosts your cooking level by 1 when worn, or perhaps just a cosmetic item. Maybe a special Alchemy potion that turns you into a goblin or some other creature in the game for a set duration on use. Maybe in the very distant future some recipes for player housing which require many different skills to create furniture. I also saw a really good idea in another thread about camping tents & sleeping bags for camps for rested xp. The entire game shouldn't just revolve around combat, sometimes people like to take a break and do other things.
____________________________________________________________________________________
 
The Wilderness
 
I'm going to add a few ideas to revamp the wilderness. Trappers Atoll is currently a dead zone and there is no reason you should ever go there. Nobody will go there to gather because you can just gather lvl 48 materials from areas like cronnoch mountain where there are no monsters and the nodes sit there uncontested.
 
My idea to incorporate my crafting ideas with the wilderness is to make it so that gathering nodes in the wilderness are high-yield. This means they have more resources in them per node and they have twice the chance to contain rare resources such as pure iron. They should give you more resources per cast as well as containing more resources because they should be faster than a regular node. This gives players an incentive to risk going into a pvp zone to gather materials at a faster and more profitable rate. All gathering materials are obtainable outside the wilderness so you don't have to go there if you don't like pvp, but there is a higher reward in doing so for those who are feeling brave.
 
For this to be feasible however the wilderness needs to be massively expanded. Trappers Atoll is far too small of an area for this idea to work, because otherwise a small group of players could completely control the whole area and all of the resources. This is due to the small size of the island and the large number of choke points created by all the slopes. Trapper Atoll should be but a small island in a large open pvp area, the size of the entire wilderness should at least match the size of Eldevin East. This gives gatherers a choice of different spots to gather in as opposed to running into a concentrated area where certain death awaits them.
 
On top of this there should be monster spawns in the wilderness, which drop a lot more gold than normal monsters (5-10s per mob, AoE pulls of 10+ mobs possible), however they don't drop any green/blue items to vendor or salvage. There should be camps which have lots of monsters for AoE grinding and there should be camps which have only champion monsters, which are spread out, have a lot of health and deal more damage. These champion monsters yield much more experience and drop a lot more gold (10 times the xp yield of AoE mob and 50s-1g each). They are designed to be farmed in a small group or solo by well geared builds that do not have the capability of AoE grinding.
 
The reason I say they should drop gold is because there needs to be a risk associated with dying in the wilderness. The penalty for death should be heavy durability loss (20-30%), you drop all of your gold on you (note: you can deposit gold in your vault), any gathering materials you farmed in the wilderness and any gems or heroic equipment drops that you found in the wilderness. You will only lose those items if they are in your bags, items in your bank or vault are safe.
 
Heroic equipment drops will have a tiny chance to drop off normal monsters (AoE camps), a much larger chance to drop off champion monsters (Single target camps). There should also be a world boss in the centre of the wilderness, who has a set loot table with a bunch of unique heroic items and gems.
 
These heroic items will be unique to the wilderness and have a very low drop chance. However they should have potential to be some of the best items in the game for at least 2 out of your 13 equipment slots. They do not roll random stats, they have a chance to roll 1 or 2 sockets depending on the slot. They are bind on equip, so you can sell them to players who don't want to go into the wilderness themselves, giving pvpers an option to make money.
 
This creates a situation where you have to determine the risk factor of farming in the wilderness, that you could be killed at any moment with all the gold & items you farmed in there. You could choose to make frequent bank journeys, there could be a couple of pvp enabled banks & vaults in there that create pvp hot spots (as well as the mob camps, high yield resources & world boss).
 
All in all I think this makes for a fairly complete and dynamic open world pvp area which would be well worth the risk venturing out to. I tried to avoid suggestions such as full loot because I realise the game will probably not get rid of bound items and I know a lot of people would hate it if the death penalty was too harsh (such as losing a bunch of your 10k gold worth gems), but these penalties and rewards seem fair to me.
____________________________________________________________________________________
 
Conclusion
 
I purposely left out more dungeons, harder bosses, larger group sized dungeons (raiding), multiple tiers of end game gear, rated pvp & pvp rankings/titles etc. Because I know some of that is well on its way to being complete. I wanted to focus mainly on crafting, its impact on the economy and open world pvp.
 
I would love to hear in this thread what other people have to say and their thoughts on the state of the end game. I know HCS is working hard on it currently and most likely have lined up many activities for us to do at the intended maximum level of 50. But while us, the players can't see what is going on behind the scenes it would be nice to hear what the community thinks and what could be done to improve the game. Maybe some of our ideas will make it into the final product.
 
tl;dr version - there isn't one, read it all or don't bother posting.

Damage over time spells in pvp ignore the 30% damage penalty

27 February 2014 - 08:32

Dots should ignore armour and damage reduction effects as they currently do. However they aren't receiving the recently added 30% reduced damage penalty. I suppose this also applies to heal over time spells too.

 

I started to wonder why dots were hitting so much harder than everything else and targets under benediction were immortal, the answer has been found. :)


Font:
Arial | Calibri | Lucida Console | Verdana
 
Font Size:
9px | 10px | 11px | 12px | 10pt | 12pt
 
Color: