I realize I QQd about the T10 mini recently without posting any helpful suggestions so I thought I'd pen some of the things I've been thinking regarding EZ and primarily T10.
Akka feel free to ignore this entirely as I expect exactly *zero* of this to happen keeping in mind you are extremely busy and have been sick recently plus you crushed T10 like yesterday and you owe us nada
. For anyone who isn't Akka if you don't like any suggestions here then idgaf (okay maybe a little). Not sure his thoughts, but I think it's *always* better to post suggestions on the public board than to email Akka directly as A.) it's less intrusive and B.) the whole community can and should have a say especially with any meaningful changes:
Okay first T10:
1. T10 is now very playable vs. what was barely playable before (and for me with 18 toons it wasn't playable at all). It's actually pretty fun and still extremely, and even unreasonably challenging. Kudos to Akka and Rent and everyone else for all the hard work getting this zone hashed out.
2. For those who say T10 is easier than before - yes and no, yes because traps have been removed / no lag / some mobs move slower / pb spawn / less mobs / coh etc., but I would also point to the fact that bosses spawned
significantly more in the previous T10. For example, passing through the open portal before would
always spawn Grime, and I often couldn't enter the pub zone without seeing multiple bosses up including Thunder or BoB. In the new T10, Grime doesn't seem to spawn in any circumstance, and the portals seem to do nothing. Additionally, despite tweaks to the spawns by Akka, it still seems very skewy in that some bosses are popping while others are exceedingly rare or not popping at all. For example, I've seen maybe 23 orc boss pops of which 18 were Zug (~80%), 3 were Mother and only two (yes, two) were Thunder. I also haven't seen Mother in weeks and I'm aware some folks can't get her to pop at all. I guess I'm just really lucky one of my Thunders and Mothers each had a soul. At this pace of boss spawns I will have geared one group in Orc gear by the time I complete my faction (if I'm lucky) - which means I will have to do the faction three times over for enough tokens for all 18 toons. Considering the rate at which these mobs can be killed - and I think it's 15k (?) kills for ally faction - that's a brutal task (makes T5 look like a picnic). Not entirely unreasonable, except I intend to do all armor with the new quest which would be 45k kills x3 = 135k kills at 10 kills per minute (yeah right) = 13,500 minutes = 225 hours = not reasonable. In other news, Brunaa mentioned she would see a bandit boss pop every single clear of the bandit camp on the hill, but I've since cleared the camp countless times with no spawns (edit: okay then got three in a row, so odd). Brunaa also mentioned she hasn't had any Orc bosses today in ~600 kills - I've heard of stretches like this multiple times before. It seems the bosses are popping with odd frequency or according to mechanics that don't seem consistent or reasonable. I suggest reworking the boss spawning mechanics so that we don't get 80-90% orc bosses as Zug and weird endless boss gaps, and also please check the bosses which haven't spawned at all (eg. Grime).
2. I echo Orthanos (wtf) in that PB spawns in place are amazing, thank god, but also that the kill count is still too high. Either PBs should spawn about 2x as much as they do now, or kill count should be 500. This is my opinion, but I think most folks agree with something along these lines.
3. Bandit loot should drop much, much more often or they should be worth more for turning in. Right now they aren't even worth handing in.
4. Please remove all the scrolls and other junk loot from the tables. Nothing worse than getting a scroll every time a PB dies, it's worse than no loot
Alternatively, make the scrolls rare, lore, no drop, and unlimited charges.
5. Sometimes bosses drop nothing at all aside from a token, not sure if this is intentional - seems odd as they usually drop quite a bit.
6. Chests / boxes / goods seem like they could spawn a lot more unless I just don't understand the mechanics.
7. Essences are shockingly rare if you're not killing goo or opening a box (which is very rare as I said). Not sure everyone else's thought on this but I've spent a good amount of time in zone and only had a handful drop. It's much, much lower than T9 or T8 in my experience (maybe 5% of T9?)
8. Vampire artifacts are still dropping and should be removed.
9. Instancing T10 is too expensive, I understand we want to remove plat from the server and keep the number of instances low, but it's too high as is. Maybe 1/2?
10. I think shards should be rare, but seems they might be too rare. Maslow is an insane monster who beat the game and has basically finished everything but shards - seems shards are in the PB category of "huh." Others who play a ton have zero or maybe one.
11. I once pulled Zug and he did his pushback thing constantly, maybe every 1-2 seconds. Was extremely difficult to kill but I haven't noticed this since as I usually have a way to stop this. If this is his normal behavior I don't know how other folks are killing him since my method isn't available to everyone. Just an observation.
12. Can we get faction for killing mobs in T10 mini?
13. Killing Ro'kki gives credit towards stolen loot quest but killing Little Jhaughn does not.
General server stuff:
1. Can we do the right thing and solve the GSOA problem? GSOA should be rare in lower tiers and more common as you move up tiers. As it is now, you can kill endless mobs in T3 and get a GSOA, but if you farm OC or you're working T10 you don't see them drop due to slow killing. Right now seems GSOA are so rare on server that lower folks can command basically unlimited amounts of plat for them if they want - getting a GSOA as a lowbie is like hitting the lottery, and it's worse than ever. Solution 1: Have crafter's guild merchant sell GSOA for 10M pp to suck plat out and so end game folks have another option besides paying 15M to toons with T2 armor and zero plat. Solution 2: make GSOA no drop and only drop in T8, T9 and T10 at a rate of 3x or more of what it is now. After all, it's an end game item.
2. Before Hate left I think he nerfed the drop rate in Dranik pretty hard, can this be restored? Seems folks only do MPG now and I think we had a bad habit of nerfing minis into oblivion in the past to where no one does them anymore. If you prefer, make Dranik scale as well to make the rewards reasonable for effort. (If this was already done please ignore, I stopped doing Dranik after the last hardcore loot nerf). Also bring back T5 mini and fix T7 mini b/c it ain't good
3. It's been a while since pofire was a good XP zone let's do it again! haha
4. Server economy is totally dead. Only solution at this point is to put some things like GSOA, SLS and EONs on crafter's merchant. Alternatively open the bazaar back up (this is closed right?).
5. Overthere is back!
6. Please make T11 an old world zone so we can start with zero lag and a working map
7. Bard aggro is a bit insane, I find myself not using his songs at all just b/c I'm tired of rezing him. Have heard similar from other folks. Bard could also use another T10 spell or two. As it is I'm using a lvl 70 and a lvl 76 song along with the good stuff.
8. Probably impossible, but what are the odds we could make our corpses auto-disappear after rez? I can dream.
9. Intentionally left blank for more possible stuff.
10. Awesome job on performance issues and all the other recent changes Akka, very, very good stuff. Thank you for all your hard work.
tl;dr - moar QQ b/c I had too much caffeine tonight.