AOC - General Discussion II

[TwiNCannoN]

Originally Posted by Bristlebane

Gah...I always get into these games too late to exploit all the good leveling abilities that aren't nerfed yet.

This makes me itch to download one of those MacroQuest type programs they've already developed for AoC.

Don't feel too bad, you already missed the biggest one a few weeks back. :P

fond memories of duo'ing kheshatta with a necromancer at level 64... heh

[Inconsiderable]

Originally Posted by Bristlebane

"Storm Field is now limited to affection 3 targets at a time. "

My ToS is only level 37, but that's a huge change, isn't it?

It means that a mediocre (at best) spell that was shining at solo ae grinding is now a complete failure and mediocre (at best) for solo ae grinding.

Originally Posted by Flight

roflmao @ the first reply to that post.

Quote : Should not it be "bring back the AoE to our only real AoE spell"? Now even the demo has A LOT more AoE spells than us.



Fuck me, a Wizzie AE class doing more AE than a Priest; surely they've got this wrong ?


MY 80 Demo tool tips are unchanged as far as damage is concerned; not had a chance to test it yet. I can't comment on ToS, I don't know them well enough, but Necro was stupidly OP, especially PSS.

Right now Necromancer is unplayable. Pretty much everything from pets to spells had its damage nerfed hardcore and DTS doesnt work (+900 magical damage and your ae ticks for 200 every 2 seconds?). Overall necro wasnt that broken, a slight change to damage and animations could have fixed that problem.

Tempest is "the ae class", not demonologist. It is kinda class defining for us. Or it was class defining. They simply buffed our single target damage and nerfed our AE. Now if you keep in mind that we were slightly too strong in 1v1 and perfectly balanced in group vs group pvp situations... it doesnt make any sense.
Not to mention that AE nerfs are stupid: Go zerg! More people more win! Before that patch it was possible to take down large zergs if they had bad coordination. Now? Maybe if you can bring 4 Demonologists.

[Rythonn]

Still no word about Alchemy, there has to be some sort of behind the current reason they aren't fixing it.

[Gilgamel]

Do you really think being able to fulfill the healing role perfectly fine and being the best AE class was remotely balanced? I duo with a TOS and have since day one and they were clearly overpowered, and probably still are. Why do you think tempests make up half the lfg list at level 80 at any given moment?

[Gaige]

Originally Posted by Flight

Rolled a DT alt; I know very little about their Feats. Is this is an okay solo levelling spec :

http://feats.goonheim.com/darktempla...i1k1o2p3v2t2a5


I'd appreciate advice on where to throw first 30 Feat Points and links to any good threads on solo levelling, as well as any general DT advice.

This:

http://feats.goonheim.com/darktempla... e1f5i3j1m1o3

Is my current feat spec at lvl 68, mostly desecration/general as you can see. I have no problems solo'ing with this spec and can take multiple mobs at once easily. The problem with DTs, or so I've read, is that the lifetaps and such do not scale well at all against epic mobs and especially raid mobs, but I'll worry about that when I see for myself.

The DT forums have people crying about everything and I've had a blast with mine so far. The survivability is insane to me after soloing my ranger most of the way to 80.

[Flight]

Originally Posted by Inconsiderable

Overall necro wasnt that broken, a slight change to damage and animations could have fixed that problem.

Like I said I can't comment at all on ToS, I know very little about them. Necro was in need of a lot of work, though I am in no way claiming knowledge of what they've done or how it has changed. Watching necros constantly pull 16 mobs at a time, which are all at 20% life by the time the mobs get to them, then they blow and AE fear and clean up the remains in Kheshatta was nuts. From the lowest levels PSS was OP.


Part of the problem here is they are trying to balance for both PvP and PvE at the same time.


I'm guessing a big part of todays download is extra cutscenes for tortage. Just doing it now and got a whole level of extra quests and cutscenes just for the lvl 5 series. Awakening 1 got me to nearly 11, where it normally finishes at just into 9.

[spronk]

Originally Posted by Rythonn

Still no word about Alchemy, there has to be some sort of behind the current reason they aren't fixing it.

they fixed alchemy by having it crash the client if you open the tradeskill book.

[Rythonn]

Originally Posted by spronk

they fixed alchemy by having it crash the client if you open the tradeskill book.

Here is the current rumor today, the guy posting it said it was only on the forums for a minute. No idea if true or not, but all things sound good.

Crafting News - Age of Conan Forums

This was posted in the Crafting forum for all of 1 minute before disappearing. Posting it since it's some good news. However, take all this with a grain of salt as the fact that they deleted it right away implies that either there was/were mistakes in the post or it was posted too early.

Greetings, fellow craftsmen and -women!

I know many of you are concerned about what is happening to the Tradeskills/RnB (resource and building) - I am writing this to inform you more about what we are doing and what is happening to tradeskills soon. I am also writing this in order to explain what has happened to the alchemy crash since todays patch.

Let me start with the bad stuff first.

First off - if you are an Alchemist, opening the tradeskill book by any means will crash your client since last patch. This will be fixed with thursdays patch.

This happened when we were re-arranging some of the potions for tradeskills - If you are an alchemist I'm sure you remember some of the potions would not do anything when created. These potions have been removed from the inventory and will make it back into the game at a later stage. Removing these had an unexpected effect and was unfortunately overlooked by us when patching out the latest patch. We are sorry about this.

Let me assure you - if you are getting the crash, you are not bugged. The recipe book is simply trying to find objects that are no longer available and we have programmers looking into a safeguard for the future so that this type of thing does not happen again.

That's quite enough of the bad stuff. Now I'll detail what we plan on doing with Tradeskills and Resource and Building. Unfortunately, I am unable to give you a timeframe for the fixes and changes below, but we hope to get them done very soon. "Very soon" in this case means expect a few of the changes below to come in as early as thursday. Most of these changes we aim to have ready within a few weeks.

Tradeskills
* We will soon have a system where you can unlearn tradeskills.

Alchemy
* We have added an item called "Alchemists Cache" to Mage/priest mobs. This item, when right-clicked, spawns a few random tradeskill resources for alchemists. These resources will include the 'missing' resources (for example Hyena meat and Icy Crocodile tears) so that alchemists are able to progress further than Tier1.
* As soon as possible we will patch out a new Resource and Building population consisting of spiders, hyenas, etc, that will drop the resource "proper". These mobs will be put into Lacheish Plains, Poitain and Purple Lotus Swamp. These mobs will have a typical droprate of between 10-50% droprate of these items.
* At a later stage (still to be determined), we are patching in vendor-bought recipes - these vendor-bought recipes will increase your magic damage. We are also looking into creating various other potions, but thats more hush-hush.

Architect
* Architects are undergoing a design-revamp - what exactly is included in this revamp I won't say, but it will allow architects to use their abilities for combat purposes as well as for building the cities.

Weaponsmithing
* Weaponsmiths will get a number of blue recipes in the future. These recipes can be obtained through vendors, world-drops and/or boss-kills. These recipes will be spread throughout the tiers of weaponsmithing and will cover all different weapons (but not ammo).

Armorsmithing
* As with Weaponsmiths, Armorsmiths will get a number of blue recipes that can be obtained through vendors, world-drops and/or boss-kills. These recipes will provide a more diverse look than what the game currently offers and at level 80, it will be possible to craft an entire set of armor (provided of course that you find the recipes for them).

Resource and Building Regions
* Traders and Trainers will spawn in the guild-cities. These traders and trainers will spawn depending on what building is built (for instance, a Trader will spawn at the Tradepost).
* City-life will start appearing in cities. The more buildings you build, the more NPC's will immigrate to your city.
* We are removing the randomly spawning mobs from the playfields. Instead, we are creating encampments that will dynamically spawn content on the attackers level.
* Quests - we are adding quests to the Resource and Building regions (Lacheish Plains, Poitain, Purple Lotus Swamp). These quests will not be repeatable.

Various other fixes are also being looked at, amongst others the socketing-bugs and the droprate of leather.

[Pyros]

Necros were definitely broken, after 65, and especially since last monday's patch where they buffed, for no reason whatsoever, Parasitic Soul Swarm, our channeled pbae. Due to that buff, they were arguably broken before 65 too. The big 16mobs pulls were on 40secs cooldown(unholy hands), but yeah it was insane.

Now, if you've read some of my posts, you know I've already said I thought AEs were too strong in this game. This nerf, I saw it coming(along with LS "nerf"). The issue here is the total lack of insight in the way they nerfed it, or the results of the nerf. Hell, their whole necro fixing process shows a total lack of direction or intention. They have no idea what they're doing, just pushing buttons randomly and check if it works(on live servers because they can't be bothered to have a decent test server, but that's another issue).

One week they buff the AE to insane levels, the next week they nerf all AEs and revert the buffed AE to its initial level. Why? Another good question is, let's say you consider one class is too weak. You decide it should have priority in being looked at. Then you spend 2(or is it 3 by now) weeks tweaking things. Shouldn't the class have improved? In fact, there's still plenty of broken feats, one core spell not working properly, and the necro isn't any better, and arguably worse, than it was when they started tweaking. How do you end up there? Shouldn't you buff bit by bit until you reach the right level, or just wait until you have the whole thing done before changing the class role greatly? Shouldn't you START byt he huge nerf THEN buff, instead of buff then nerf then buff again(hopefully).

They've nerfed AEing heavily, good for the final balance. However they haven't improved survivability or single target dps, at all. In fact, they did buff a lot of things this patch, as most people can see in the notes. The issue is, what they buffed were spells I didn't even have on my bars(pretty much the whole frost damage line), so it's now remotely equal to the unholy line. Which would be a good thing, if they actually took the time to fix the unholy line FIRST so it's balanced compared to other classes. Frost spells are now better than before, but still useless, because they don't provide a dps boost, they only have different side effects. And you still need the Archmage feat to actually use frost for anything.


Mind you, necros are still viable in one thing. Single target dps on raid mobs. They're tanked so they're not on you, and for them it seems the best pets were the lvl 4 pets anyway, mutilators(because of corruptor aura not hitting big models), along with all the pet buffing feats. All this is mostly untouched, and actually buffed slightly since mutilator dot does more dmg/can crit.


However, they're now terrible for a lot of things. They're terrible for solo leveling. Not impossible, but they're definitely worse than most classes. You can solo 2mobs at once, maybe 3. Since single target dps isn't higher and AE dps is lower, taking more mobs due to natural mage squishiness will result in a really dead necro.

They're terrible for PvP. Necros shined due to their good AEs(mostly unholy hands though, since PSS was hard enough to use efficiently, unless exploiting a bug to cast it while moving around, which proved to be quite fun with despoilx8 ^^) and their insane pets. The pets did too much damage, that's a given, mostly due to feats stacking. What made them insane though, was the whole pet mechanics. They never stopped following, they were running faster than people, they were tough to kill due to high base hp, high hp regen, high evade, high resist. They would often stay well out of the fight while shooting due to long range. They could attack while the necro was hidden, or not even in range.

However instead of fixing all this crap, which can still happen, they decided to heavily nerf the damage. Not to an expected point, but really really low. Currently AE pets do less damage than single target pets. You might say, yeah that's normal, they're AE. Yes, but they cost twice the amount of pet points(4vs2 for the single target caster pets), and you need a Shackled Heart to summon them, or the feat deep in reanimation. You obtain shackled heart through using a 2mins cd spell on a minion. You need to resummon pets everytime you zone or die, meaning, they're totally unusable unless you're speced for pets. Yet they're also now worthless in power. But they will still attack people with the necro hidden, and follow you forever, forcing you to kill them, and while they do much less damage, they can still kill you.

The result?


Necros are now pretty much terrible at everything, and excel at nothing but griefing people(mark of the devourer is still a 3mins dot, and pets still attack while the necro is hidden).


I understand this might be part of the buffing cycle, but honestly, why bother releasing this kind of patch without getting the buffing part done first. They could have just released all the frost buffs, and not nerfed AE until they had the single target adjustments ready. Then people would have cried necros were too OP, and they probably would be. They could have nerfed the AEs on the necro and kept the pets as they were, to have them a bit more balanced. Instead they chose to heavily nerf everything at once, but not right from the getgo to get a nice even ground to start buffing on, but instead after they already tweaked various stuff.


My personal guess? They were going fine with their necro buffs, seeing how people started playing necros and stuff. But then, the leveling/content team came to the conclusion that powerleveling was being too powerful, that people were leveling too fast, and that the main cause of this were AEs. The team bitched, and the head devs decided they should nerf AEs so classes are more balanced in leveling. And so the class balance guys had to nerf the AE classes, and revert their changes to the necro. They're now going to restart the whole process, and the last 2-3weeks were wasted.

[Templor]

Is anyone able to patch at all? I've been Downloading Patch Information for 20 min and havent seen anythng.

[Inconsiderable]

Originally Posted by Gilgamel

Do you really think being able to fulfill the healing role perfectly fine and being the best AE class was remotely balanced? I duo with a TOS and have since day one and they were clearly overpowered, and probably still are. Why do you think tempests make up half the lfg list at level 80 at any given moment?

First we can only "fulfill" the "healing role" in PvE; and even then we are no even supporter to a PoM or BS. If you mean keeping 2 hots up by recasting them every 20 seconds, yes ToS could do that.
It is different in PvP (and thats all I care about). In PvP you are the glass cannon. You have the lowest defense of all classes in Group Combat. Solo you have a HP buff and selfheals, but in Group Combat everybody has the HP buff and everybody gets healed. I would never ever PvP without a PoM in my group. Their survivability is very high because of buffs, crowdcontrol and other abilities. You attack a ToS. What will he do? Right, die a quick death. Thats the reason our (unbeaten) group goes for every ToS first. PoM for example has 20% more invuls, 1.5 invulnerability spells and instant ae stun. He will survive that focus with a pretty good chance.

Yes, we were "the ae" class; yet ToS has/had low DPS. Even AE-DPS. One nuke (3s casttime), 2 seconds of waiting or filler spells, another nuke, ...
Our DPS was sometimes ("damage range") so bad that we couldnt outdamage healing potions. All we had was burst damage. Pretty good for Group PvP, I might add. But never that great was DD. Demos (and Necros) had ways of dealing more AE damage, higher burst and higher DPS. As well as defensive stuff that kept them alive in group vs group when tempests would have died.

Anyway, ToS was easy to level because of Storm Field and strong in solo PvP. That fix just made us stronger at solo pvp and destroyed our well designed class concept and took away our area effect ability which was never an issue to begin with.

And who cares how many 80s are ToS? 50% on my wow server was rogue in the beginning until they realized nobody wants rogues in their group. Should have nerfed rogues because many people played that class. Good way of balancing. Not.

In group pvp the classes were kinda balanced.
PoM / ToS were even in their strength
Demo / Necro were even beside that necro did slightly too much damage (mainly related to unholy hands bug imo)
Conq / Barb / HoX were also in line beside their instakill abilities.

Originally Posted by Flight

Like I said I can't comment at all on ToS, I know very little about them. Necro was in need of a lot of work, though I am in no way claiming knowledge of what they've done or how it has changed. Watching necros constantly pull 16 mobs at a time, which are all at 20% life by the time the mobs get to them, then they blow and AE fear and clean up the remains in Kheshatta was nuts. From the lowest levels PSS was OP.

Necromancer was always strong, but overnerfing is no way of balancing. I hope it is just DTS being bugged.

[Templor]

g

[Steamrice]

Damn necros got hit HAAARRD.

I'm pretty glad I cancelled after my free month now. It's not just AoE spells that were nerfed but Despoil the Soul which sacrifices pet for spell damage is now doing 60% less damage than before across the board. OUCH.

[Gilgamel]

I'm not buying it Inconsiderable. You cannot combine healing with the ability to deal relatively high area of effect damage and not expect a nerf. You also may be slightly below the PoM on the pvp group necessity charts, but that still leaves you in the top third and well above the vast majority of the classes. Tempests are STILL probably overpowered when compared to every class but one or two in both pve and pvp. Pardon me if I'm not overly sympathetic.

[Golbez]

They need to condense Necro pets at level 80 into one behemoth melee pet instead of 8 wailing shit rags that take up your entire screen. Ever group with a Necromancer in Onyx Chambers or most of the non-raid instances for that matter? If you do, make sure they use their Arch Magus pets because the melee pets are annoying as shit!

I've been 80 for awhile now and the group content is fun as hell (Especially Aztel Fortress which kinda reminds me a little bit of Karazhan), but the itemization is batshit insane. Why would anyone in the right mind do any of the 80 instances when you can trio the level 82 boss mobs in Heroic Keshetta for the exact same quality of loot NOT to mention 10 times faster loot?

Has anyone ever tried to do that level 81 Undead Golem Boss in Onyx Chambers? Why the hell does he hit my level 80 100% defense spec Guardian with full level 75-80 blue gear for 2.5-4k a hit? I have to active block and evade him the entire fight or it was game over. Challanges are fun and all but some of that shit needs to be toned down.

Also why are humanoids the only social mobs in any of the instances? Everything in Onyx Chambers except the Humanoids are single pullable.