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Bashing After Crits

This has been discussed before on Discord and in passing on the forums, but I think it's an involved enough issue to warrant its own thread. The introduction of talents - critical hits in particular - has had a negative effect on endgame bashing because the legacy endgame areas were designed without the sort of DPS players now achieve. With max crits each area can support one basher, leading to a total of seven concurrent players bashing if I'm being generous. In practice, though, only Ixsei, Usum Usutti and New Dikamazi are regularly cleared by anyone, as the others are widely considered not worth the effort due to increased risk and/or low mob counts.

One solution I've seen suggested is to have new areas be high risk because of wandering aggro mobs. We already have these (Jelle, Gnomon) and it's easy to see that this isn't a solution at all because, as I said, they aren't regularly cleared. Adding new areas that present the same challenge people are already avoiding would be a waste of time. Changes can't be made to existing 'worthwhile' areas without negatively impacting pre-75 players, though, because Ixsei and ND are where most people go for their last 10 levels.

In my opinion, I think the best way to move forward with new areas taking into account the higher DPS we achieve would be to lower the TTK. If mob HP and XP gain were scaled up to match the TTK and XP/M of pre-criticals bashing, the area would both be a viable alternative to the overhunted areas we currently have and probably be able to support more than one person at a time.

Also, none of this is intended to be me saying 'this is what you should work on' so much as 'these are things that should be taken into consideration if/when any work is done on new areas.'

Comments

  • Id say a good fix for this would be to scale crit damage/chance per class, then in future zones have mobs a little more beefy to make the ttk roughly average for all classes. With those changes scale the xp given up a little bit so youd still be getting slightly more xp/m than current max zones but the fights are longer meaning the areas can handle 2-3 people bashing in them.
  • Whatever change is decided I just don't want it to hurt my xp/hour because the talent grind is already real enough.
    Hi, I'm Ata. Oh and maybe some other people, too. o:) Check out my various packages for Nexus: Vuu combat system, Global Pathfinder, Slicer Tools, Ship compass, JS from command line, Vitals Tracker, and Equipment Manager.
  • Right, I definitely recognize that a slower XP/M is going to lead to the same problem we have with current high-risk areas, which is no one going there.

    A side benefit to longer fights would be that it would allow for more options in terms of bashing route. A few of us have talked about our preference for more complex rotations to freeze/flaw routes that are just one ability on repeat - and while there's a whole other conversation to be had there - the short fights we have now make complicated setups even worse. Longer fights would give us room to experiment and readdress that whole issue.
  • The bashing areas have already had buffs to mob counts and respawn rates. Ixsei can support 2 full crit talented people if you include the Selassians.

    I do wish that other areas were reworked to be made worth visiting, however. Places like Deisk that are a pain to get to and are cleared in minutes with ridiculously long respawn times are no good, same with places like Jelle that are far too hazardous to even consider hunting there.
  • Oh, okay. So if we count Selassians, we can currently support a total of four players with max criticals bashing at once. My mistake.

    That doesn't get us anywhere near where we need to be. Increased spawn rates and slightly higher mob counts in existing areas are as helpful as a bandaid on a gunshot wound.

    For reasons I already stated, we can't make the sort of changes necessary to places like Ixsei and ND without fucking over the sub-75 population. Jelle and Deisk could be tweaked to what I'm suggesting though. Side note regarding Jelle, it's almost not bad once you have 20 crit, I bash it regularly and there's one other person who does, judging by the piles of corpses I occasionally find. The issue is that the vines' windup is still 4s or less and does 7k+ damage, making any lag instant death where it isn't in other areas.
  • I would like to point out that pve is a defining aspect of starmourn, even though it isn't what it could have been. Out of respect for Zoe's intentions with this thread, I'm leaving out arguments in favour of removing crits.

    Increased TTK plus experience to match would somewhat help the phenomenon where crit bashing has homogenised bashing rotations, and certainly get endgamers out of the levelling areas. So I support this.

    BUT

    Zoe's also pointed out that various areas exist but aren't really worthwhile. Only one class really has a tool to make jelle and northern usum worthwhile. But even beasts with smash are risking more to hunt these areas, and it's slower XP because of the need to be cautious,  use smash and still retreat at times.

    Proposal 1:
    Increase XP of mobs that are more dangerous in groups.

    Proposal 2:
    Designate some existing unused areas to be scaled up to endgame status as per Zoe's proposal 

    Proposal 3:
    Consider, over time, giving all classes some form of crowd control for pve. I don't mean smash. It could take different flavours without homogenising classes.

    This doesn't need to mean Jelle and Usum. If the xp was just a little bit better, and more classes could handle groups, these would be balanced for 70+ as is.

    There are a number of very cool areas that are just not worthwhile these days if trying to level fast, which the newbie challenge has encouraged (Anemoi anyone?) They've been eclipsed by better, safer places.

    That's a shame and why not take areas like this and upgrade them to endgame status?

    Bots also... these are slower to kill despite having lower HP and hitting harder. If that's the bot status quo now, maybe bump the exp?
  • The GCEPS foil changes some zones completely. Jelle is amazing for questing with it, without I never bothered after I explored.
  • Valincora said:
    The GCEPS foil changes some zones completely. Jelle is amazing for questing with it, without I never bothered after I explored.
    I'd go as far as to say that GCEPS foil trivializes pve.

    Hi, I'm Ata. Oh and maybe some other people, too. o:) Check out my various packages for Nexus: Vuu combat system, Global Pathfinder, Slicer Tools, Ship compass, JS from command line, Vitals Tracker, and Equipment Manager.
  • I am fine with mobs that are intended to be bashed thousands of times to be considered trivial, especially when GCEPs foil is such an expensive set to complete. If you want hard PvE content, you need to come up with something new for people to do. If you make general bashing hard, then coders have a much higher advantage that simplifies it all back down to a one button process regardless, except those who can't write fancy scripts are suddenly out of the competition.
  • Indi said:
    I would like to point out that pve is a defining aspect of starmourn, even though it isn't what it could have been. Out of respect for Zoe's intentions with this thread, I'm leaving out arguments in favour of removing crits.

    For the record, my reason for not discussing removing crits isn't because I'm opposed to the idea - I would actually consider that the best solution. I don't see that as anywhere near plausible though, given that I think you and I are in the minority wanting that. So the idea was 'if crits are here to stay, which I think it's safe to say they are, how can things be made manageable?' 
  • I very much enjoy seeing


    that aside, I think we could easily continue to have crits as a part of the game, if we would just scale the crits talent to classes to level the endgame pve damage as it should be. then create areas specific to crit bashing in which the mobs give more xp but also assume you are bashing with crits so their health is higher to account. (in the end it would be close to similar to what current zones give in xp)

    One such of these zones could be DEISK as it is currently majorly underused. the mobs there are super aggressive and take quite a while to kill, these areas are off grid and should reward you for going out of your way to kill mobs that are -harder- and not easy to access.

    as well as just in general as the game goes on and on, we will ofc have more and more new players hitting 75, so we will need new bashing areas and not just upped spawn rates.
  • Zoe said:
    Indi said:
    I would like to point out that pve is a defining aspect of starmourn, even though it isn't what it could have been. Out of respect for Zoe's intentions with this thread, I'm leaving out arguments in favour of removing crits.

    For the record, my reason for not discussing removing crits isn't because I'm opposed to the idea - I would actually consider that the best solution. I don't see that as anywhere near plausible though, given that I think you and I are in the minority wanting that. So the idea was 'if crits are here to stay, which I think it's safe to say they are, how can things be made manageable?' 
    They could just be toned down massively. Why 2.5% per point? Why not 0.5%?
    And/or the effect of the crits could be much less. Why not +25%  and +50% damage, for example? And why 20 points instead of 10? They're extremely strong as is.

    I think more people are open to the arguments against crits BUT the counter argument is that the grind is real and without crits it'd be unmanageable. So to get those people on board the "delete crits" argument needs to be accompanied with better PvE opportunities at the same time.

    Which is kind of what your thread is about: more challenging AND rewarding endgame PvE. Yes, it is also working with crits as they currently are, but maybe the idea could also encompass rebalancing/tweaking of crits a bit also.

    That's not me saying you could/should include it in your idea. I'm just putting the idea here in the thread in case it gets dev attention at some point.
  • The damage increase (x2/x4) is IRE-wide afaik. There's further ranks in other IRE games (x8, x16, etc) but at least in Achaea things are desined to accommodate that.

    A massive down-tuning like you suggest would also be a good work around, if not outright improving them. Really the entire thread comes down to - 'Critical hits have had a terrible effect on the PvE environment in their current implementation (I don't consider that debatable, I consider that factual), so here's one suggestion on how to fix that but I'm open to others.'
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