Treelink

I use the app mainly for:

• Watching ads for FSP and
• Composing, which includes
• Withdrawing money from bank

Unfortunately the latest update made all 3 things worse. (Sorry!! I wanted to like the update   )

When watching ads, I used to be able to watch 5 in a row, before the app would tell me that no more ads were available.

After the update, I can watch an ad. Then wait 20 seconds or so. Then maybe the watch button becomes pressable again, but often not.

The consequence already now, is that I usually just watch the one ad, and not nearly as often. I'm guessing you somehow do want me to watch more ads, so that's unfortunate 

Composing is difficult now. Count the number of actions required for me to discard 4 potions, and brew 4 new ones:

1: Hit the artisan icon

2: Go to composing tab

3: Go to potions in progress

4: Hit the trash-bin icon that discards all potions

5: Hit confirm

6: Go to potion creator tab

7: Hit save/load potion template

8: Choose the relevant template

9: Hit brew

10: Go back to the potion creator tab

11: Hit brew

12: Go back to the potion creator tab

13: Hit brew

14: Go back to the potion creator tab

15: Hit brew

Finally withdrawing money seems bugged. If you enter a number you want to withdraw, the button to withdraw will be greyed out. Using the slider works, but is impractical.

I really love the new visuals.. But just for the old way of composing, I'd revert my app version in a second if I could. Sorry! 

Potion of Divine Knowledge. Loyalty:  750

 

Adept Learner Level : 1000 Duration : 120m

Librarian Level : 900 Duration : 120m

 

 

Rampage Potion. Loyalty:  750

 

Animal Magnetism Level : 500 Duration : 120m

Conserve Level : 1000 Duration : 120m

 

 

Alchemist Prized Potion. Loyalty:  750

 

Distil Level : 250 Duration : 120m

Brewing Master Level :  500 Duration : 120m

Please don't add any of these - At least not at record high levels like proposed. 

• Leveling doesn't have to be faster than it is today (I like that I still have years of content to get through)
• Distil 250 will make some buffs too damn good. You can solve this by capping certain buffs levels, but to be honest it's already super non-transparent which buffs are capped when.

Overall a really cool update.

A note to anyone using FSH, please be aware that if you're using Dark Curse, then the math will be wrong when it is telling you on the world map that you can kill this creature. Be careful. You might die.

I'm not overly enthusiastic about the Dark Curse nerf either - I mostly play FS for PvE, and that definitely becomes more challenging. Especially since attack groups were also nerfed in an earlier patch. Makes it challenging to kill those Elite mobs.

And then I just wish the FS wiki would become editable again. There is so much outdated information in there. Every patch adds to that.

Roadmap! That's awesome, regardless of how it changes over time. You even took the time to make it pretty. I would have settled for bullets 

It's nice that there's stuff in the roadmap that doesn't just add new content, but also revisits old.

Only complaint is, that "Fixing the game menu" should have been in there somewhere. You can't play the browser version without it. And while FS Helper fixes the menu, new players shouldn't need to install FS Helper on day 1 to play the game on their computer 

I joined in January 2007, although that account unfortunately is long lost by now.

The skill tree only went to level 150.

It took me a LONG time to complete the level 5 quest: "Darmov's Fall", because the Elite critter only spawned once every half hour. And back then there were a lot of players at the same level as you, doing the same content. But only one guy would get the kill every half hour.

It was quite hard to always 1-hit mobs. Often I would accept that I would be 2-hitting while leveling.

At my 'peak' I was around level 70 with the best players just hitting level 100.

The auction house was introduced right around the time I joined.

I remember unique items being amazing. In the beginning there were no epics, no crystalline, no super elites and no legendaries. It was hard to kill the elite mobs without fancy pantsy buffs and legendary gear, and you only got to kill one every half hour, unless another player snatched the kill in front of you.

I remember the first legendary event. It was some kind of dragons, don't quite remember which. Frost and leaf dragons maybe. The dragon items felt so powerful, it was a new rarity, and the item-pictures had this cool aura around them. I remember it being near impossible to get any drop from the legendary dragons. I didn't get a drop at all. And only the richest players would be able to afford a full legendary set. These players were so epic at the time.

I remember using the old map. It was hard to navigate, but the world felt much bigger when all you could 'see' were the 8 adjacent fields. Now we can just run across a map in 10 seconds if we want to.

I remember "abusing" that if you could click all the mobs at your location before the whole page (!) would reload, then that would work, and you could kill things much faster, avoiding a lot of page reloads. There was no doubler of course. So a hunt would take a while.

I remember Librarian and Merchant being quite exclusive buffs that only few players had. And they were super (too) expensive to get for me.

I remember the frustrations of PM'ing players for buffs that were active 5 seconds ago only to watch time go by. Last active 1 minute ago. 3 minutes ago. 5 minutes ago. COME ON! Only to then buy buffs from another player. And then have the first player buff you and be like "Pay me, you requested the buffs!!!". Ya dafty, 20 minutes ago. I'm already half way done hunting.

I remember relics were hard to get, because there were only so few, and the big guilds would sit on them.

I remember always having a PvP rating that people would attack each other for.

I remember buying a piece of common gear in a shop, intending to actually use it because it was an improvement over the rare piece of gear that was getting out-leveled.

I remember "The Dark Stalkers" being amazing as guilds goes.

I had just 3 inventory slots for quite a while. The struggle was real. Especially when you needed the third slot for drops and quest items, you really only had 2 slots for storing stuff.

There were no "components".

You could add yourself as an "Enemy"

Something that's not been mentioned yet is the "new player" experience.

I tried to get my wife to play the game half a year ago. And she did for a while, but also needed help, all the time.

The game is hard to get into. And my biggest wish, after most of the bugs are fixed, is for this game to get more players. Here's a few suggestions based on what we ran into.

1. Consider adding more tutorial to the game. Not many questions are answered when you create a new character. How does all your stats work? How does combat work? How do you know that you'll beat a monster? How does stamina work? What uses stamina and how much? What should you do when your inventory is full? What's the goal of the game? What happens if you're carrying 5.000.000 gold while being almost naked and level 7? Little to none of this is explained to new players. They have to figure it out themselves.

2. Consider hiding/locking a lot more content away for new players. It doesn't take many minutes to hit level 2, 3, 4 and 5. But at these levels you have no idea if you should put your stat points to attack, defense or HP. You have no idea which buffs are good, or if you should save your points for level 25. And you don't have a clue about all the options you have in the menu. Crafting? Hell Forge? Blacksmith? Bounties?  Consider hiding these things until level 10, 20, 30 something. (OK don't lock the blacksmith, explain that one instead!)

3. Grinding is how you play this game. Quests give you XP, which is a bonus. But quests are just that. It's a bonus to your XP, but now how you progress in general. Problem is that you added so much stuff in the low level areas that you removed the need to grind entirely. You can get the first many levels by just doing quests. My wife got good at doing these quests. But all of a sudden there were no quests left, and she had no idea what to do. There was no mission and she was "stuck". Grinding hadn't been introduced to her as a concept. It's understandable that you can't quest your way through almost 5.000 levels of content. But with grinding being an essential part of the game, a tutorial should be given, showing that you can and should in fact just kill things until you ding the next level. The concept should be fed in slowly, so that you have to grind just a little already in the beginning of the game, more and more, until it's a regular part of what the player does in between quests. To that extent I would suggest litterally moving some of the low-level quests to higher level areas, or nerfing the XP rewards. It's ok on the lower levels if quests are 75% of the XP. Just as long as there's a little grind necessary between levels.

4. Speaking of low-level areas, they are the most complex areas in the whole game. Think about it. First real area you encounter is Mountain Path. And there's so many places to go, and so many things on the map. Compare that to a random level 1234 map which has two waypoints and a shop. You're throwing new people out on the deep end first. I would suggest that you move some of the fluff out of Mountain Path (And possibly other low-level areas) and put it elsewhere. Furthermore, consider adding a few more tutorial areas before you introduce Mountain Path. You go from a teeny tiny 6x6 map to a huge 18x18 map, and that's overwhelming. How about a 10x10 in between or something like that.

In essence it's all about making sure that you get to explain important concepts to new players while not overwhelming them. Right now, if you start the game from scratch you're thrown out on the deep end and there's not much to help you. It's pretty much just Kate Winslet being fat on a floating door, and it's impossible for you to get up.

Hi everyone.

I've been crunching numbers a bit. It's probably been done before, but I needed it done for myself.

I wrote it all down, so I figured, why not share.

For a while, I've felt that I get too few levels from a hunt; Often just ~7 levels on ~14.5k stamina.

So I wanted to try to calculate optimal buffing setups for my situation to see if I could improve anything. I'm all done. And unfortunately I didn't find a better setup than what I had. But hey, maybe you can punch holes in it, or use some of it yourself. Who knows

Priorities when optimizing

• Maximum XP
• Not wrecking my wallet
• Not wrecking my kill streak unnecessarily

Expense limit per hunt is 10-20 FSP. That means I'm not buying a fancy pantsy christmas box for 100 FSP. I do however have access to gear, and composed potions.

Basic buffs

Regardless of optimization, I find no reason to exclude these buffs, and they will thus be part of any leveling buff setup I'm considering:

• Doubler (Level 750+)
• Adept Learner (Level 345)
• Librarian (Level 345)
• Conserve (Level 345)
• Summon Shield Imp
• Smashing Hammer (There is no good setup without 1-hitting)
• Reckoning (Level 230)

A note on Summon Shield Imp: For pure XP optimization, I'm aware that SSI will cause you to sometimes win a battle in 2 rounds where you could instead have died. Death is the more efficient outcome with the 1 stamina spent and XP loss is easily recouped by the stamina you save from not having to do a 2-round battle. I choose to weigh my gold and my kill-streak higher, which I would otherwise lose on defeat.

Smashing Hammer could in theory be replaced by any other damage-improving buff; It just so happens to be the only buff that is powerful enough to provide all damage necessary for 1-hitting in a single buff.

Base gains

Before playing with buffs, let's establish a baseline to calculate the relative effect of adding a buff.

The baseline will be simple. Assume that you have activated all the basic buffs at the designated levels, I will then assume that 1 kill = 100 XP and 100 gold.

Reckoning or all the buffs in the world?

You've probably seen this debated before, but before piling on buffs, we have to calculate the consequence of doing so. And because of reckoning, there is a cost for each buff added. So out with the calculator.

I'm going to assume we're using Reckoning 230. That equals 46% chance of doubling the level of another skill. Doubler and SSI doesn't count though, so that leaves these buffs that we can activate reckoning on:

• Adept Learner
• Librarian
• Conserve
• Smashing Hammer

With 46% chance to active, and 25% chance to double one of the four buffs, each buff ends up having 11.5% chance of being doubled. So what does that mean for each buff when it is doubled?

• Adept Learner will add 7,935 XP on average (69% extra XP before reckoning)
• Librarian will add 5,197425 XP on average (34,5% chance of double XP before reckoning)
• Conserve will add 3,28310625 XP on average (17,25% chance to use no stamina before reckoning)
• Smashing Hammer already causes us to 1-hit. Reckoning is wasted here.

Adding these numbers together, Reckoning turns 100 XP into 116,41553125 XP. A nice boost.

Now let's try to add a single buff into the mix. Reckoning activates 46% of the time, and when it activates, there's 20% chance that it will activate a given buff, down from 25%.

Let's see what that does for the XP buffs.

• Adept Learner will add 6,348 XP on average
• Librarian will add 4,15794 XP on average
• Conserve will add 0,19876485 XP on average

Here, reckoning is only able to turn 100 XP into 110,70470485 XP. A net loss of 5,7108264 XP for every 100 XP gained. This means that for any single buff to be a viable addition to our setup, it will have to add 5,7% or more XP to the mix. Otherwise it's literally making it all worse.

XP buff candidates

There are other buffs that affect XP, and now we know that a given buff needs to add almost 5,7% XP to be viable - Otherwise you were better off with reckoning. These are the candidates:

• Arterial Strike - At level 175, 17,5% extra XP per extra combat round. 17,5% sounds good, but as long as you can land 3 out of 4 hits, reckoning is still better. Not worth adding.
• Overkill - At level 175 it's 43,75% chance to get 4,375% extra XP. Quite a long way to match the 5,7% that reckoning would have given.
• Sacrifice - At level 175, 7% extra XP. This actually beats reckoning, but also reduces gold gained by 43,75%. I don't find this tradeoff reasonable.
• Stalker - At level 345 adds 3,45% extra XP. Not good enough.
• PvP Prestige - Up to 10% extra XP. This is actually worth it if you have it, but not if you need to grind it for each hunt.

Stamina saving candidates

All the stamina saving buffs have one thing in common; You use them to move less or to not use stamina when moving. These are the candidates:

• Animal Magnetism
• Light Foot
• Gold Foot
• Teleport

Let's make a few assumptions. We're using Doubler 750 distilled to become level 863. This gives us  17x stamina use for 17x XP. In our case we say that 17 stamina = 100 XP to keep using our baseline.

We already know that adding a buff costs us 5,7% xp, so all we have to do here is translate potential stamina savings into extra XP.

Here's a wild assumption. Let's assume that all these buffs work 100% of the time. With Animal Magnetism you never have to move. Light Foot/Gold Foot works every time. Teleport is free and costs no stamina. On the other hand, let's assume that there's only 1 mob/square. This means that without one of these buffs, we have to spend 18 stamina per mob, instead of 17. The XP reduction due to wasted XP would be 5,88% in this very pessimistic scenario. Very close to the 5,7% that reckoning gave us. In other words, there's no reason to consider any of these buffs, although you can pop teleport to get from A to B, then deactivate it again once you're ready to start killing mobs again. No harm done.

All the buffs in the world...

So far there are very few reasons to use anything save for the basic buffs. But we have also been calculating all buffs individually. So what if we ignore reckoning entirely, and pile on all the buffs in the world?

Let's start from the index 100 and see what we can pile on top of the basic hunting buffs:

• Arterial Strike (Level 175) - 0,345% extra XP assuming 2% of all battles have a second round.
• Overkill (Level 175) - 1,9140625% extra XP
• Sacrifice (Level 175) - 7% extra XP. Still ignoring this one.
• Stalker (Level 345) - 3,45% extra XP.
• PvP Prestige - Up to 10% extra XP. Ignoring this one due to having to spend a lot of stamina to get the 10%

Summarized, the XP buffs gets us to 105,709 XP per kill.

• Animal Magnetism (Level 460) - 92% chance of respawn
• Light Foot (Level 175) - 8,75% chance to not use stamina
• Gold Foot - 8,75% chance to not use stamina
• Teleport - ???

The stamina-saving buffs are harder to quantify. But let's keep using the crazy idea from earlier that all of these buffs are 100% effective, and that there is 1 mob per square. This will let us reap the benefit of a 5,88% XP gain here, because we save 1 stamina to move with for every 17 stamina used.

The grand total now becomes 111,589. 4,82653125 XP per 100 XP less than with the reckoning setup.

Conclusion

Reckoning definitely holds it's own, delivering more XP than any other combination of buffs - And this is in spite of me actively skewing the numbers away from reckoning when I can.

• The stamina-saving buffs are not as good as I gave them credit for
• There is usually more than 1 mob per square.

However... We didn't look at other types of buffs. In limiting ourselves to very few buffs, we also skipped out on:

• Treasure Hunter
• Merchant
• Unbreakable

Meaning that we get a lot less income in exchange for the additional 4,8% XP that we lose using a fully buffed setup. Even if the 4,8% turns out to be 6% or 7%, losing half of my income aint cool.

Personally, without better buffs, it seems best all-around to go for the all-in-buff-out.

This does drastically change though, if you have access to high-level buffs such as AL/Lib/Con level 500+

Ok, so I'm not a new player. Far from it. I played this game periodically between 2007 and 2011 and just got back a few weeks ago. I noticed the app that is in beta, and got intrigued that I'd be able to play the game on the toil.. on my mobile.

Here's some observations that I made coming back:

Levels

When I got my account back, I had gained a whooping ~150 levels. I jumped from around level 550 to level 703. While this is pretty damn cool, I also quickly realized the downside. All my gear was useless for my level. I didn't have enough gold to buy any meaningful equipment. My location on the world map (Some level 500-something map) did no longer make sense.

In the end I joined a guild, borrowed their gear, portalled back to Krul Island and found my way. But ironically it wasn't cool to level up 150 times. There's a lot of content that I'll never really get to play, and it took some effort to get back into it. I would not have minded one bit, if there had been a cap, maybe after a month, where I simply couldn't gain any more XP, no matter my XP gain per hour.

Getting started with the app

I absolutely LOVE the app. In many ways it's even better than the browser version. Getting started was not easy though. On my end I needed to recover my old account. That actually went smoothly. Then I helped my wife create an account. She never played before. So she downloaded the app, and was told you couldn't create an account there. OK, it is a beta after all. So we went to a computer and created an account for her. Done. But on the app, she kept being logged in with some kind of guest account. It took us a while to figure out how to actually link her app to her Hunted Cow account and set a player name for her. That experience can become smoother, and you likely know this already.

Finding help

Not having played the game for almost 10 years, I figured I should find some 'getting started' material. I was quite pleased to find the "Guides" section under "Resources". I was however immediately less impressed when many of these pages returned 404 or similar. But at least the essential help still exists: The wiki, which really could use some updates, levelling guides which are essential and the ultimate fallen sword guide which largely works as one could hope for. The "Guides" menu on Fallen Sword could really use a clean-up though.

Using the app

Fallen Sword is a big game. Not just the world, but also in terms of what you can do. I was impressed with how well this was fitted into the app. It's actually easy enough to navigate and works very well. Even in the details, it's a very nice UI. I was impressed that there was a specific layout just for Summon Shield Imp for example. There are also things that I would find natural to have, which doesn't exist, but again the app is in beta. Few examples:

• I'd love to get a notification to remind be to pray to a god, or to remind me that my stamina is maxed.
• I would love if log messages were more interactive. On a message like "Player <playername> sent you <amount> gold for the Buff Package '<packagename>'" I would like to be able to click playername to see the player, or packagename to see the package I'm selling.
• Oh and I miss the game stats. 300 is online. You're in rank 4.500 today. Overall though: I'm very impressed with the app. My wife thought it looked cool as well.

Using the browser

• It took me a while to figure out that the menu was broken, and that I didn't see everything the menu had to show. It might be because I'm using the new Edge (Chromium) browser. I reverted to the old theme for an easy fix. Later i found out that Fallen Sword Helper solved the display issue.

Getting my wife started

She finally managed to link her accounts and was all set up. I was thrilled to see she was put in a tutorial area. That didn't exist the last time I played. To my dismay, she didn't get to mountain path before she had a lot of questions.

• ​She got confused about movement in "Murky Goblin Depths" because the area looks unlike any other.
• She never realized that she received items that she could equip
• She wasn't sure how to proceed with the quests she was given (And to be fair, she's not one to just experiment away until she gets it)
• She didn't know what to do after finishing the last quest in Mountain Ravine (Go to Mountain Path, start exploring!)
• She had no idea where to put skill points and stats after reaching level 2

Later on I realized that she never realized the fundamentals. Namely that:

• You have a pool of stamina, it drains when you move or attack, and you get some back every hour
• When you attack something, you get to go first. Oh, and it's turn based.
• To kill something you at least need ATT > DEF and DMG > ARM
• Your gear breaks over time
• You lose XP and money if you die
• The main purpose of the game (at least at your level) is to level up and do quests
• You might not always have quests to complete, in which case you will need to grind

Why she might give up

One thing left me unimpressed. A thing that is not really specific to the app, nor the browser version. It'll likely be the reason my wife, god forbid, will go back to play some shitty match-3-game.

I'll use my wife as the example here.

After teaching her the fundamentals, she actually did pretty well for herself. We joined a guild together, she geared up, gained some levels, did a few quests, sold stuff in the auction house.

With regular intervals however, she would be stuck or have questions. I realized over time that there was a pattern to it. I realized this, because on every occasion, I would answer the same thing: Let me look that up for you. Let me find that for you. The issue is that the game is not self-contained. You need to look outside the game every so often.

If a quest is not self-explanatory, you will need to look it up on the ultimate fallen sword guide (Where do I get this Quest Item? A shop. OK. Where do I find this shop? Area X. OK. Where do I find area X? Realm Y. OK. How do I get to Realm Y? You need the guide for all of this. It should have been in the game, and my wife will keep asking me until she gets annoyed and drops the game.

In the same vein she will ask about gear. What gear can I get for my level? Is there anything that's better than what I'm wearing? Well, you can search the auction house, but that's half an answer. Instead I resort to leveling guides on the wiki to find what's good. The ultimate guide can serve as lookup as well. But both things are still external to the actual game, be it browser version or app.

I soon started levelling myself, and found that I couldn't really do this on my phone; I needed the extra tabs with external help. The wiki so that I could see where I was going, how to get from A to B. And the guide, mostly to look up quests and items. I don't have that on the phone, and thus I'm back to playing on my laptop, rather than on the t... On my phone.

Why I might keep playing for a while

I definitely still need a laptop to level up and kill mobs. I can't live without the wiki or UFSG in the current game. But I do find that I keep swapping between mobile and laptop. The app makes it incredibly easy to check in once in a while, update your auctions, check your log, chat, pray, monitor your stamina gain and so forth. I definitely want to see this app finished. See if it draws in new players, see if you will add anything that might pull me away from my laptop entirely. The game was always fun. But it did require a lot of open tabs and a computer. If one day it might only require a mobile phone with 1 app installed, then I'm here for a long time.

I hope all of this feedback is useful for something. I loved this game back in the day, and kind of still do. It's unique in so many ways and always was. I love the improvements you've made. The buff market blew me away. The app is a such a cool upgrade to a browser game that I thought would die, but which now again has a chance. I'm really looking forward to see what will happen after the beta. Happy developing!