Undo "fixes"

[Seriously]

Well you had fixed the maggots in Doom and all the maggot piles across Istaria..... So they re-spawn at like 10 min apart, and they all agro at the same time so a biped killing them is not going to happen. Lets see how else we can get the bipeds to leave the game? was that the goal here? If it was broken for 10 years, and now its "fixed" I would love to see what a real fix would do... How about we help the bipeds considering they have 2,800 levels to gain in comparison to the 100 dragon levels, rather then hinder them. This game has been great for the last 10 years, but these "fixes" are killing every leveling/grind spot in Istaria for bipeds. Perhaps if you listened to the community you may get more people to join the game. For now though when I tell friends about how fun Istaria is, I have to mention that it will take them another 7 years to just get 10 schools leveled. That is unless its 2x exp during a holiday where bipeds hopefully have saved up 30k trophies to level 3 schools.

[meepsa]

I highly doubt "fixing" one type of enemy...would ruin the game...it also wouldn't hinder your leveling at all because hunting maggots has 0 use when it comes to leveling (no trophies, nearly no town marshall quests as far as I know, you'd only get raw XP and maybe crystals I guess? but that's chump change at high levels, not to mention that at high rating, you wouldn't even get raw XP anymore)

Also...what's up with people making forum accounts with redundant names just to whine on a subject. kinda hard to listen to a community that will only go on the forums when something goes bad, instead of, I dunno, actively giving feedback through support and the forums.

[Seriously]

OK so the ONLY way bipeds can level now is via trophies and town quests, thanks for the clarification. As a returning player, its always nice to come back and have every grind spot removed. No more New Brommel Zombies/spiders, no maggot grind, and no more ED easy mobs. When you have a mid/high level rating, grinding trophies is almost 10x longer then grinding those maggots. Trophies are not a guaranteed drop, they also have a diminishing return on exp given, so if you played the game for a while and used your turn-ins, you are now making even less exp, and not getting any exp for the trophy mobs due to high rating.

As far as the things going right with active feedback, congrats, biped crafting is still fun, and unless you are a dragon, that is about it.

[meepsa]

OK so the ONLY way bipeds can level now is via trophies, thanks for the clarification. As a returning player, its always nice to come back and have every grind spot removed. No more New Brommel Zombies/spiders, no maggot grind, and no more ED easy mobs. When you have a mid/high level rating, grinding trophies is almost 10x longer then grinding those maggots. Trophies are not a guaranteed drop, they also have a diminishing return on exp given, so if you played the game for a while and used your turn-ins, you are now making even less exp, and not getting any exp for the trophy mobs due to high rating.

I thought it was pretty well established that as a high level ped, trophies and town marshall quests simply are the way to go.

also, on "removal" of grind spots, there's still plenty in the game. and "ED easy mobs"? that clearly shows the mentality you have going into istaria...and it should be obvious that that simply won't work, istaria isn't an "easy" game so don't expect "easy" ways out, at best they're exploits.

Istaria is grindy, no way around it.

Either way, this shouldn't be in suggestions, it's a rant more than anything. But I'll leave those as my last words in this thread.

[Seriously]

I'm not expecting an easy way out, the ED easy mobs were an exploit, the maggot were not, nor were the mobs in New Brommel. Grinding alone on mobs to gain a 100 schools was relaxing to me that is what grinding is. Now its 2-4 months to get a school to 100 unless its a holiday 2x exp time., and forget it if you have 4-5 schools left to max.

[Dracillion]

Wow, that sounds brutal.

I mean 278 was no easy feet. Doable whilst keeping your sanity if you did so during double exp, which was RARE until recently.

But wowowowow, I think this may be the nail in the coffin for biped leveling. Ouch.

Edit: Seriously, be prepared for non stop crits and flaming from DRAGON players. They're the lulz for bipeds. Few did ROP back in the day when it was a true feat. I feel for ya man, I do, and I hope you got as close do that 230 mark as possible before trophy time.

[Machaeon]

OK so the ONLY way bipeds can level now is via trophies and town quests, thanks for the clarification. As a returning player, its always nice to come back and have every grind spot removed. No more New Brommel Zombies/spiders, no maggot grind, and no more ED easy mobs. When you have a mid/high level rating, grinding trophies is almost 10x longer then grinding those maggots. Trophies are not a guaranteed drop, they also have a diminishing return on exp given, so if you played the game for a while and used your turn-ins, you are now making even less exp, and not getting any exp for the trophy mobs due to high rating.

As far as the things going right with active feedback, congrats, biped crafting is still fun, and unless you are a dragon, that is about it.

Before your biped's rating screws you over, it's entirely possible to grind levels via kills only. However, when your rating is so high that you get MAYBE 200 xp per kill of anything in Doom, yeah... trophies and town marshall quests are the way to keep your hair and your sanity. I haven't reached that point with my bipeds yet, I can still grind fairly easily on various things in the ED and in Doom- none of which are "easy" and they shouldn't be! If my biped is getting around 12k xp per kill (with multiple enemy bonus) with 5 schools to 100 already then the mobs should be challenging.

There's still plenty of spots to grind every mob that exists across the entirety of the map. I'm sorry you're shocked that things change when you return after being gone for who knows how long but things do change sometimes. There are still zombies and spiders on New Brommel by the way, wouldn't recommend grinding anything other than candies with them as they're very low-level. You can absolutely grind the maggots in the first left turn in Doom by the way, no 4 maggot limit on their spawn and they don't all aggro at once like dung pile maggots so have fun grinding those. The fix on dung pile maggots has not impacted me in the slightest with getting my Sslik leveled since I know enough to realize that maggots are chump change for xp. I can tackle groups of more challenging things and get more xp faster, or I can pick up all the town marshall quests and make a run through them all, pick up trophies while doing so, then run back to Aughundell and turn all that in at once for a huge xp spike.

[Tilithia]

I don't see bipeds lvling in Dralnoks Doom since the change. that's a fact.

[Riaken]

No matter what nerfs my biped gets, and I've fought to undue them in the past to no avail, I'd rather play him than my dragon. The trend I'm seeing is that nerfs have changed this game to the point people primarily play dragons. I rarely see peds running around, and player search shows peds out numbered 2 to 1 or more. Maybe it's just easier to level a dragon for end game content. Some people ingame said the epic weapon nerf really hurt the game with the removal of those forms for epic tokens. I love the current changes to the game and that's why I came back. But to be honest I wonder why this game is even live anymore. I log on at 5am central time to do dailys with about 9 people in MP on chaos server. During what is called peak times, the population is abysmal. And to get my digs in, I still think Velea and the Amon bully changes to game were caustic to population. Those two didn't listen to feedback, they forced their views of how this game should be changed.

[Cegaiel]

Devs are still tweaking some settings on test server, for optimal desired behavior. But this issue will be fixed and work correctly on next delta, for sure. Thanks for clarifying how they were behaving undesireably; devs weren't aware that this was happening.

On test server: Maggots are wandering normally and you can pull maggots without aggro'ing the others or the dung pile. Of course attacking the dung pile will 'anger' them all.

[ghostwriter]

I was thinking along the same lines but not just for adventure but craft as well.

[Alisto]

So they re-spawn at like 10 min apart

Just checked a maggot pile in Dralnok's Doom, the respawn time is a little under 2 minutes.

they all agro at the same time so a biped killing them is not going to happen

In past experiences, I've been able to easily pull 1-3 maggots at a time with a weak ranged ability and survived alone with appropriately techniqued armor (t5 cloth stuff via lv100 crafting school, slash resistance, etc). I've noticed that the aggro seems to be different for dragons and bipeds...I've never failed to pull less than all of the maggots on my biped, but the dragon is having trouble. Maybe its butt is too big. Anyway.

How about we help the bipeds considering they have 2,800 levels to gain in comparison to the 100 dragon levels

Unless you've leveled your biped specifically to get to 278 in the most efficient manner, the last chunk of schools to level will gain you a minuscule amount of character power. My biped is 242, and after looking at all the schools he doesn't have leveled, there's nothing in any of them that would inspire me to finish off those schools. I have a biped who is just below 160 rating who does everything I need him to do. Also, your comparison is extremely flawed, there is more to it than just the amount of levels gained stacked up against one another.

I don't see bipeds lvling in Dralnoks Doom since the change. that's a fact.

And it could be due to any number of factors. I don't see anyone in Dralnok's Doom either, but that's because I tend to log in at different times than I used to, it's summer, etc...

and forget it if you have 4-5 schools left to max.

If you have 4-5 schools left to max, then unless you've majorly screwed up how you leveled your biped (I don't even know if it's possible to mess up that bad, actually, you had to have leveled SOMETHING to get to the point where you've only 4-5 schools left) then you'll gain effectively nothing from those schools. I don't know about anyone else, but I thought that being a completionist was supposed to actually take a significant amount of time, especially in this game.

Maybe you could try constructive criticism next time?

[meepsa]

I whole-heartedly agree with Lov here (I had a relatively lenghty post written before, but with my unstable connection at that time it seems it didn't post it.)
Either way, Velea and Amon are 2 of the best devs I've seen in a long time when it comes to community relations, they listened when we complained, and compromised if neccisary, they were also willing to join in on a cross-server istaria skype for direct feedback with players.

Also, please give examples of "bully" changes, as the only thing that comes to mind might be the dragon "Nerf" which wasn't a nerf or buff, it was much-needed balance.
Yes Gold Rage is still a 1hKO for most enemies, but so is PC+flame burst, yet no-one talks about the AoE insta-kill as much as people did about GR, the main reason being GR insanely low cooldown, and the relatively low hoard-cost.
now yes, I guess you could count the buffing of general mobs (which I can't really see anywhere patch-note wise, feel free to point me in the right direction), but do you know why the game has become so dragon-centered? it's because the biped community almost never speaks up about something when it gets changed.

Also, a lot more was changed during that time period than just GR, Bite and drain strike got some changes, galewind got a hoard cost, and several other refresh related changes.

[Teto Frum]

I never hunted maggots in my toons life to level and levelled fine. Hunt something else.

[Tilithia]

I never hunted maggots in my toons life to level and levelled fine. Hunt something else.

Yes you can hunt something else,theres always another way but if you never hunted them you don't know what was lost. it may be hard for somebody else to just switch to another monster when they were used to fighting maggots for long time. (thinking of others,im done lvling)

[awdz]

Yes you can hunt something else,theres always another way but if you never hunted them you don't know what was lost. it may be hard for somebody else to just switch to another monster when they were used to fighting maggots for long time. (thinking of others,im done lvling)

You are right, it is a challenge to switch. That is part of what keeps the game interesting. :-)

[Slimey]

I am afraid I totally agree with Seriously. It's why you never see many bi-peds in the game. A game can become not fun to play when they make everything too hard. Its not worth it anymore. Slimey on Order

[Cegaiel]

I don't quite understand what the complaint is. Previously they spawned 10, at the same time (which was never intended, that was a bug in itself). The only change that occured was it was decreased to 4 max instead of 10 max. Then the max was bumped up to 5, due to complaints about too few of them. The timer wasn't ever changed. They spawn every 3 mins.

They've always aggro'd when you pulled one that was close to others. Before and after, I can pull one at a time, no problems. You've just got to wait for one to wander a couple more meters away from the others.

The common method (and I'm guilty as charged) that bipeds would level with 10 maggots at a time, was to either dual log with an Ancient or have an Ancient with them. Pull all 10 maggots and Ancient performs Primal Cast + Breath of Fire (all dead). Not much of a challenge there and fast exp. Everyone loves fast and easy experience, but is that really the best route for a MMO? I think that's why the spawns were decreased from 10 to 5. But they do respawn every 3 mins, that's plenty fast. A biped by himself should take minimum 3 mins to kill all 5 of those maggots anyways.

http://community.istaria.com/forum/s...les-in-General discussed a little bit about the maggots and loot timer (which can increase the spawn timer, indirectly).

And now that the Geleon's master scroll is back on the menu (now a craftable scroll), handling 5 maggots at a time shouldn't be much of a problem. You get one full minute of 0 damage from the maggots and it recycles 1:30. I recall back in the old days, when the old Geleons' Master scroll didn't consume itself, this was the common technique in Doom:

1) Use Master Scroll
2) Run up and agro all maggots, run back to the Ancient (no damage to the puller for 1m while they're biting your ankles)
3) Ancient performs Primal Cast + BoF
4) All dead instantly, rinse and repeat.

If I recall, it is this scenario that caused the 10 maggots to be decreased.

[Seriously]

I don't quite understand what the complaint is. Previously they spawned 10, at the same time (which was never intended, that was a bug in itself). The only change that occured was it was decreased to 4 max instead of 10 max. Then the max was bumped up to 5, due to complaints about too few of them. The timer wasn't ever changed. They spawn every 3 mins.

They've always aggro'd when you pulled one that was close to others. Before and after, I can pull one at a time, no problems. You've just got to wait for one to wander a couple more meters away from the others.

The common method (and I'm guilty as charged) that bipeds would level with 10 maggots at a time, was to either dual log with an Ancient or have an Ancient with them. Pull all 10 maggots and Ancient performs Primal Cast + Breath of Fire (all dead). Not much of a challenge there and fast exp. Everyone loves fast and easy experience, but is that really the best route for a MMO? I think that's why the spawns were decreased from 10 to 5. But they do respawn every 3 mins, that's plenty fast. A biped by himself should take minimum 3 mins to kill all 5 of those maggots anyways.

http://community.istaria.com/forum/s...les-in-General discussed a little bit about the maggots and loot timer (which can increase the spawn timer, indirectly).

And now that the Geleon's master scroll is back on the menu (now a craftable scroll), handling 5 maggots at a time shouldn't be much of a problem. You get one full minute of 0 damage from the maggots and it recycles 1:30. I recall back in the old days, when the old Geleons' Master scroll didn't consume itself, this was the common technique in Doom:

1) Use Master Scroll
2) Run up and agro all maggots, run back to the Ancient (no damage to the puller for 1m while they're biting your ankles)
3) Ancient performs Primal Cast + BoF
4) All dead instantly, rinse and repeat.

If I recall, it is this scenario that caused the 10 maggots to be decreased.

So before 10 would spawn, but you could single pull them as a biped and solo one after another. Now all 5 come at you regardless of where you are at due to the fact the entire dung pile agros off of a single pull now. Before you could solo them as a biped, now you cannot, you need a dragon. It was a great way to level and earn hoard for young hachies in NT. Now that's gone. Well unless you are an ancient. As you said, Needing a dragon to do it...

[Cegaiel]

Hmm, you should be able to pull them one a time, carefully. I'll head down there and test that out when I get some free time. I haven't been down to the maggots since those updates. Maybe devs can fine tune it a bit if they can't be pulled individually. Will update post when I see whats going on.