Well, by definition good and bad are subjective. But what makes an idea good or bad doesnt have to be. And AV has listend to bad ideas, loads of them, but because they have no clue what they are doing they simply follow what is being suggested/supported. The difficulty is obviously getting the playerbase to know that you are taking idea's seriously, even if you dont implement anything they suggest. Sometimes finding a solution to a problem is so difficult that it may seem there is none, but the players keep making suggestions to get something done. When will the players get angry enough at you that a simple "we understand the problem and are trying to find a solution, but this suggestion isnt it" wont satisfy them anymore?
yep, very important. But i dont think Big Picture will do the same mistakes as AV in terms of communication
That sounds great, but also a huge headache in terms of balancing if the strengths and weaknesses of the titles would be significant. But still, it would encourage actual diversity so i'm all for it. That would probably be pretty overpowered. The tradeoff to carrying a transmute was of course the increased casting time, so I would usually carry a blackbolt to switch to for transfers or utility spells like wall of force with long cast times. The great thing about transmuted staves that a lot of people didn't realize is they ate through armor. When people tested them on nakeds, they wouldn't notice any difference in damage based on a .60 damage earth staff, and a .60 damage cobra staff, for example. However if they tested on a heavily armored target there was a -significant- difference. Not to mention your school debuff would hit harder with a transmute as well. Just to give you a quick idea of the power of transmuted staves if you aren't too familiar with them, let me give you a quick example. With a good staff ( >.70 magnitude ) against a decently armored opponent ( let's say your usual bone/infernal mix) I could easily be hitting near surging damage, if not surging damage with direct hit r50's and r90's (corrosive blast and disintegrate, respectively) after landing my debuff. If I landed my debuff to their back, even my bolts (acid arrow) were hitting close to 60. The DPS on transmutes was insane and not many people utilized them because they thought cobras were better simply because they cast faster. Increasing the cast time for all other spells wouldn't really work as a tradeoff because people would just carry around a secondary staff (blackbolt or cobra) like I did, and that just ate up another bind slot. What i'd like to see is a way to drastically increase the durability of transmutes if you craft them to allow players to feel more comfortable with only having a transmute for all their spells (a good transmute was expensive as hell thanks to the double enchant of magnitude and the initial transmute), and perhaps another small incentive to use them like reduced mana costs to the respective school like I mentioned previously. I might be totally off on this, but I feel like if I had 300ish durability on my transmutes I wouldn't even bother carrying around a blackbolt for transfers and other spells. One possible solution would be to have different types of transmutes depending on what initial staff you use the transmute enchant on. For example, if you transmuted a blackbolt originally it would be the exact same result as using a r80, so you may as well use r80's since only the damage modifier carried over. However, you could have 'fast casting' transmutes that have the same speed as a blackbolt, but reduced power (ability to eat through armor, reduced mana costs for the school, etc.). And if you just wanted as much power as possible, transmute a slow casting staff like the darkscepter or corpsecall.
You can add roles to the game, the game needs them. Roles in the vein of the existing ones, like destro or indy. This can easily be done and not effect combat one iota. This was ALWAYS the plan and direction of DFO. Some roles I would like to see added: Champion = same as indy/destro but gives you the damage on a mount from launch. Essentially, sacrifice magic to be deadly on a horse. Air/Fire/Earth/Water focus - makes your focus school more powerful, eliminates the opposite school.
In my opinion a rider specialization would actually be cool, but I think that elemental focus shit is stupid. Also I really don't think Darkfall NEEDS these roles to be added to the game. I also don't really care if that was the plan and direction. Aventurine tends to have pretty fucking awful plans and directions.
We have a mounted spec in our spec list right now, as well as a magic specialist giving bonuses to 2 schools of your choice but blocking the rest. We'll be going over the specialisation system in more detail soon and outlining some of the mechanics planned. -Andrew PS: Ubergames isn't posting here anymore so they cannot reply but you can post comments to their reddit or website to get an answer from them.
If it were up to me, id make it so a maxed out char from 1.0 is what every player strives to obtain. But because the power gap between a new player and such a character was so huge, having roles that boost your effectiveness in one roll to become viable in it is something that would help new players out a lot. The problem is ofcourse that veteran players can still use these aswell to still exceed what new players can do. Which will change the combat 1.0 had. Im not saying its always going to be bad, but its going to make balancing even more tricky.
You shouldn't change gear at all. Gear was fine previously, lowering the grind will fix the skill gap between Vet and Noob. Stick to the sandbox features of your ideas first then test out the other stuff gradually taking player input very seriously. We don't another UW combat system. There needs to be more roles, but they need to be fine tuned before going into the game. I am an advocator for a skillcap, but even I can see if not done precisly right will limit the game so one shouldn't be added. Thus worry about non combat related stuff first. Shit like racial wars and blue apartments and the such is a great start for sandbox elements.
My opinion on gear is also that it does not need to be changed. I was surprised to read that people think there was a huge gap between high end and low end gear. I remember people complaining about dying in an infernal set to someone in purple robes rather frequently. I have won outnumbered fights as destroyer in robes, I have a clan mate who I witnessed win a 1v2 in robes against people in dragon siege bags carrying rank 80 racial weapons. Staff balance tho... lol....
Lol. R40 and anything below that was useless. R70 and everything above that were rarely seen and you still think we don't need any type of adjustment on gear viability? 2 Years of DFO and we never saw one Racial weapon being used.
Gear below r40 wasn't useless, it was used to skill-up and being able to salvage it would fix it anyways. If we change gear, we start changing fundemental aspects of the game.
Besides, r40 weapons were fine to use in PvE if you used debuffs. If you made them more effective, people would "never" use high ranked weapons. Most used weapon (not staffs) is 2h sword. Most used version of it, justice bringer. Thats a r60, obviously the fucking racial weapon isnt going to be common. So, how exactly is this something we dont want? Because you had to spend time to get one? Oh no, people are playing your game! I understand that if the hard core players are using racial weapons while the average player is struggling to get a r20 there's a balance issue. But a r40 or r50 wasnt completely useless at all. Its just that eventually (you know, after 3+ years) veteran players became rich enough to where the monetairy gap between a r40 and 50 wasnt significant. And the 10% added damage COULD be meaningfull. So why not use a higher ranked weapon. And for the extremely rich im sure the same logic applied for r50 and r60, but there were only a few clans (on eu) that wouldnt wear anything lower then r60 and infernal...and those had questionable ways of earning money. and actually... most used weapon is staff. most used version of it, fucking blackbolt. Now we could go into the balancing of staffs, with cast speed and magnitude... But blackbolts are like a r10? (i dont even know) But the more expensive counterpart was the cobra staff. Very much used in sieges, tournaments and you know...rich players... But by no means was the gap between them so huge that it made blackbolts useless.
