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Comments
no no no,Bad move achaea. Spending years on and off bashing for end gear.(Dragon) Its rather pointless now. Not the best reward after the best month ever.
That love soon might end You are unbreaking
And be known in its aching Though quaking
Shown in this shaking Though crazy
Lately of my wasteland, baby That's just wasteland, baby
I completely understand bringing classes in line for bashing towards Dragon and such, so you get a lot less newbies pleading to know which class is best and getting shuffled into the Monk life. I like it a lot!. Helps a lot for the newbie experience, feeling less weak and more constant gratification from leveling, alongside letting established players feel as useful as they should. Just not sure why making Dragon weak was a part of their plans at all, it's something only invested players reach and I don't think Dragons clearing bashing spots too fast was ever a big enough issue to almost halve their output.
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We're pretty happy with the way things look at a base level, there may be some tweaks to some of the scaling of things beyond those figures. Time will tell!
Very much agreed. Overall I am definitely behind most of these changes. Dragon just feels like the redheaded stepchild at the moment. I'm hoping that won't remain the case.
That love soon might end You are unbreaking
And be known in its aching Though quaking
Shown in this shaking Though crazy
Lately of my wasteland, baby That's just wasteland, baby
Not all dragons want to be Penwize. I mean... I put in my eye-bleeding hours on end weeks of hunting for xp to GET dragon. I'm personally not interested in XP now other than to have a cushion for raid/skirmish deaths. The joy was a slow and steady pace for getting talisman pieces and gold. And... now I can do that just as well (maybe better, I haven't tested) as a mage. That's ..yeah...meh.
It made sense for dragons to be that big and bad, PvE wise. PvP wise, outside of group combat, they seemed manageable. But not this seems to take away a good portion of the incentive with working towards dragon to begin with. I don't know, not a dragon, might never be, but certainly asking myself if it's even worth it now as anything other than an accolade and higher health pool.
My goal to reach dragon was pretty much solely because of the credits I'd get along the way, and the gold. If I bother to keep pushing to it, Monk will probably be the better bashing option because of how many 'oh shit' buttons it has, and it has comparative tankiness. I do like the general changes, but yeah, I think 95% of dragons were fine with the half xp they got (or would be fine with an even heavier cut) if they kept their raw damage/tankiness combined.
and how would Laurette feel about this?
All I've got to say to that is...
That love soon might end You are unbreaking
And be known in its aching Though quaking
Shown in this shaking Though crazy
Lately of my wasteland, baby That's just wasteland, baby
I find it very amusing that dragons are worse than classless in terms of bashing damage (presumably this is a bug, but it's amusing nonetheless).
why am I not surprised? Stupid change is stupid for Dragons
No way to tell. We'll continue to make adjustments until we're happy with the results.
EDIT: In order to balance out my wordless expression of contempt with some actual feedback: Sure, dragons aren't ripping through shit like crazy now. You're still some of the most ridiculously tanky things to hunt as. Not all changes are bad. My blademaster's hunting is going to be a little slower, but this might actually be motivation to hunt as an Infernal again, knowing that I am more or less as effective as everyone else.
Making things consistants by lowering nearly each class sounds strange to me.
I wonder why the choice has not been to put everyone at the Monk level, and to make bashing less boring....
So, @Sarapis, out of curiosity, what do you consider to be the appeal of dragon nowadays? Like, what reason would you put forth to make dragon an attractive goal with the recent changes?
Dragon PvE was way too overpowered previously. It definitely needed nerfing. The fact that Dragons were able to generate gold and Talisman pieces so easily was completely unbalancing to anyone who wasn't a Dragon. We'll mess around with finding ways to adjust Dragons to have advantages in <X> and <Y> circumstances that normal classes don't have, such that they can be more efficient at bashing if properly used, but we're definitely not going to put Dragons back to the mudflation-inducing levels they were previously at. They were way too overpowered previously.
But that's not what was done, at all. We simply chose an average across classes and brought everyone to within 5% or so of that average. Some classes were brought up, some were brought down.
It is still much easier to bash to Dragon today, in any class whatsoever, than it was in the early days of Dragons.
I think @Orzaansyn's point is that you guys chose an average in the middle somewhere, rather than raised everyone to monk level.
It was the carrot at the end of the stick. While I understand a lot of where you're coming from, I really hope you have some intent to still make it very interesting/rewarding, from all aspects. If you feel dragon is "fine" now, then... yeah, I don't think you're going to find very many people willing to spend the same amount of money to bash as well when the carrot kind of became mostly wilted and grew some funny-looking sprouts on it. "It's still nutritious!" you might say, but it's certainly still much less appealing.
That love soon might end You are unbreaking
And be known in its aching Though quaking
Shown in this shaking Though crazy
Lately of my wasteland, baby That's just wasteland, baby
Seems to be mainly balanced around damage output, so looking at which classes have good defensive abilities will likely become the new 'what's the best bashing class' meta. Ability to take a hit is quite important, but once your ability to survive the incoming damage is relatively assured (varies a lot based on class, level, and amount of artes) things quickly become rather focused on damage output.
As Dragon is a bashing reward and I'm totally on board with it not being a PvP superpower. It should, in my admittedly bias opinion, stay competitive with the top bashing classes in the PvE area though (and a decent amount of utility abilities is nice for flavor) so determining what factors make a class competitive in PvE is worth considering. Defensively Dragons are more or less just very sturdy with no fancy tools like Reflection, Transmute, or the like beyond Dragonheal for the affliction curing super lazy (most PvE doesn't throw out tons of afflictions because waaa, consumable cures cost money, blah blah). So ability to tank something for a Dragon is generally pretty binary.
As above there are times when someone's defensive ability is already sufficient in lesserform or Dragonform and the focus for determining efficiency quickly turns to offensive output. Offensively, Dragons just have fairly standard attacks (akin to KICK, if we're honest) that aren't too fancy. They don't have the sheer number of attacks like Shaman/Monk/Knight (or even a multi-target one like Stormhammer) so they aren't all that suited for a 'fishing for crits' style which scales with level, so low level players of those classes don't feel the benefit of 'many small hits' nearly as much as high level players - Dragon crit rates are fairly uniform, though. Could add a crit multiplier like Alchemist, but I don't know if that's even needed or if it would even feel fitting.
Technically there's also less artefacts to boost Dragon output than there is for other classes (is Incantation still inferior to Gut?), but that's a different matter.
I personally don't feel a need for Dragon to blow everyone else out of the water in PvE, but I certainly don't want them to be lagging behind. If someone has significant incentives to actively avoid Dragonform because it's less effective for them in PvE than staying lesser, it just feels a bit off.
Finally, ditching the mildly irritating exp penalty is nice for those that still care about it post-Dragon (whether rankings, building a buffer, or whatever) - especially if their lesserform isn't overly tanky. I think I heard, long ago, that the penalty also influenced how much was lost on death (aka, lost less exp if in Dragonform) but with the ability to build a huge, multi-level buffer, instead of being locked at 0% into 100, that's probably less of a concern these days (if the penalty influencing exp loss was still accurate).
In what way? How did it effect non-dragons? They should certainly not be able to keep on par with a dragon. It's a dragon! It's a greater form! I'm curious to hear the answer.
I'm not I really understand or appreciate the claims about "balance" in this context.
What is balanced in your mind?
Honestly, this seems less of a "fairness to non-dragons" driven change and more of a curb to mudflation, which you mentioned later in your post. I get that having dragons be so efficient in bashing, combined with the modern landscape of gold potential from the introduction of many new bashing areas over time leads to "mudflation." However, it feels a little raw from a player perspective because it really does just feel like a nerf to earning credits ingame, instead of the claims about balancing.
Because in anything in which there is any economic competition, the party that can generate more wealth has a huge advantage. This isn't a single-player game.
Gotta be honest - I don't know what you're referring to.
You realize that players decide what prices players sell credits to each other, right? I mean, we don't dictate that, at all, ever.