First and foremost, i am aiming this to be a wall of text, final result may differ.
The first issue i want to discuss, are the possible exploints of auto-looting; within last week, it came to our attention that a simple paperweight was enought to net you some silver while you sleep, how does that work, you may ask, you can’t possible farm without actively pressing the atack button while scouting certain area for mobs. Unforntunately, with the present system, you can simply pick a very predictable spawn area, leave a weight on your atack button and have all the possible loot plus silvers drops automatically being granted to you, and the best part is, you were not even there actively playing.
This is no botting by definition, but still harmful for the game, and what IMC games did recently in a attempt to thwart this behavior, actually, backfired, and players who were actively grinding, tanking mobs for their party are now discouraged to engage in said endeavors by a humongous pay wall.
Now, seeing that the whole community have been affected by this change in prices and effort to gain ratio, i can presume that the community is quite unhappy; actually, i just need to search briefly the forums to get the needed foundation for my presumption. The community is displeased with the recent changes, for it has added a very hard to go through silver wall.
To be brief here, i do believe, in my humble opinion, that simply removing silver drops from monsters, and making drops not auto-lootable, will enforce a need to actively click/press key to collect your spoils, thus hindering the paperweight users progress. Also, by removing the silver drops, the silver income will be entirely reliant on NPC trading for lesser materials, and market auctioning for the more exquisite drops, this may work in short terms, but as we have seem on RO, the long term effect may not be desirable.
Those were my two cents on the AFK farm issue and its relation with the silver pay wall increase.
There is this second issue that have been bothering me since day 1, Stats; More precisely, the lack of then.
So… i don’t know what was the thought process behind those stats, but removing quintessential stats like Agility and Luck, were bound to make things go awry; Full Spirit Archer? REALLY!?
At the moment, there is no class that does not benefit from full Spirit builds, and that is telling us somenthing, let us not jump to conclusion here, i’m not saying that SPR is giving to much, but you might consider SPR to be the only viable option in the stats category in the long run. So, what to do? How to diversify?!
This is a beta, its time to test, if its too hard to bring back Agility and Luck, lets give more love to the existing stats.
Join me in this brief, very brief brainrain, as a storm would require more time; Right now, the role playing teme behind Spirit is quite right, enlarges mana pool and increases its regen, okay there, but… why it is giving magick and block penetration will remain a mystery untill the devs give us some insight on it.
Next in line, we have Dexterity, gives crit chance, hit ratio and dodge ; Quite alright, but, could be better if it receives the block penetration from Spirit, a dextrous one can easily go through the enemy defenses.
As i started from Spirit and moved on to Dexterity, the next on this " line " would be Strenght, not so strong statwise tho; Has very poor scaling, ads a bit of carryweight and a litle bit health with certain amount of points; Abilities shold have a lower base dmg, and scale of certain stats, with disclosed percentages. A strong one shold be feared in close combat.
Next would be Constitution, Con is alright from the role playing POV, Con does what it shold, gets you beefier.
Intellect, to be quick, i believe it needs the magick pen from Spirit plus scaling on spells.
All in all, our present stats are lackluster, they work at niche roles, aside from Spirit, no other stats are worth on certain classes; So… bring back Agility and Luck, you may ask why, and here is some points worth mentioning:
Agility can govern the dodge and atack speed, having an atack speed system in place can cap the swordsman power output, requiring wiser point management, instead of going full STR early on, and resetting later in game for full DEX.
Luck is our jack of all trades stat, improves everything slightly, and directly governs our crits.
By bringing back those quintessential stats, we must readjust what we have.
Dexterity will govern our hit ratio and armor penetration, yes, armor pen, not block pen, with this in mind, hitting high block rate targets will need positioning. the numbers on armor pen are not to be of concern right now, as this is mere a suggestion.
Agility will govern atack speed and dodge, implementing atack speed would be a step in the right direction to bridge the collosal gap that exists between the swordsman damage output in relation to other classes.
And last, but certainly not least, Classes; classes right now, feel gimmicky, they all play exactly the same.
Here, all they follow this pattern:
Aggro mobs> AoE>Pot>AoE>Profit. some classes have a " wait for cooldown " in their pattern, but no different aproach to combat.
i Will use RO as an example, the class system there was quite nice, every class had this unique feeling to it, and what gave then this uniqueness, were the passives associated with every class; a thief, even with base CON, could face a tanky threat thanks to his passive dodge, his damage output was also nice, even if it had low STR, thanks to his passive, that let him atack twice with daggers.
All in All, classes are in the right path, but they need passives and different aproaches to combat, as AoEing all will get tedious within a set period of time.Also, simply by adding
more stats will be enought to diversify builds, Ex: Atck Speed Barbarian for Frenzy stacks.
Well, i shold have had this wall of text divided into different topics, and even though i admit it to be a bigger than average post, i cannot stress enought, how important it is to me and our community that YOU reader, go through this humble post, and lets us have a healthy discussion about what can be done.
Also Tl;DR
AGY and Luck Shold Come Back, Classes need passives and AFK farmers can be thwarted by deactivating autoloot e silver income redirectioned to mob drops.