Monday Morning with Major Mal

[Deadlock]

Enhancements - peeved at the whole idea that the release date has been fixed at 19th August and that come hell or high water you'll be pushing them out the door ready or not. To fix it all you have to do is:
1) Remove most of the pre-req enhancements and free up the enhancement options that people decide to choose (see Epic Destines for how you've successfully done this before)
2) Remove the Points Spent in Tree pre-req, as a worst case scenario make it Points Spent Per Class, or just bite the bullet and go to Total Points Spent (basically how the current Enhancement work!)
3) Add the racial prestige tree option for others not just Arcane Archer (at a sensible cost) and you have just created much greater build diversity not less.
4) Review all caster and healer trees to ensure they have options to boost devotion and spell power
5) Re-introduce spell critical multiplier options for classes, even if it is a Tier 5 ability or a high level caster core ability
6) Add a combat casting prestige tree for Clerics and FVS

Guild renown decay - just announce it has been removed and be done with it.

Monster manual - have someone fix all of the errors that have been previously bug reports, including fixing 2nd stage spawns to count for both Kill count in quest and Slayer count in Wilderness areas. Here is a list of them.

Casters - "You are not facing" .... just fix this. Either cast the spell infront of the caster or centered on the caster, or don't put it on timer and remove spell points.

Quality of Life Fixes .... some idea that this hasn't been abandoned. Here are a handful of suggestions.

[count_spicoli]

XP IN THE LEVEL 19 to 20 range. Holy **** is it miserable. Most people on trs are forced to run thevale and hold 19 for an ungodly amount of time because amarath iq and cannith xp is horrible. All of the quests should ne triple the xp including the raids. This would make these packs viable again as really i cant recommend anyone buying these at this point. I mean 20000 xp for lord of blades elite. Come on. Hell von 5 at level 12 is 4 times better.

Also what voodoo said about end game. Give us some good stuff at end game to do.

[Bogenbroom]

Hey

Give me your thoughts on the following. Be verbose, but not 'it sucks' I need 'it sucks because of'

Enhancements

I didn't see the 1st pass at the modifications, but my feedback in general is that they are far too easy to change. So much so that people plan their builds around changing them at a certain point. There has to be a middle ground between letting someone fix a mistake and scraping their entire development on a whim.

Guild Decay

It works exactly like it should as far as I can see. Don't touch it.

Whatever your pet peeve is.

character and inventory management. Yeah, I am not the norm, but with the number of characters I have it is painful to do simple character management... like checking a character's mail and identifying who needs to have their inventory worked on, etc.

[starhawk_6699]

Enhancements, I tried the alpha on Lama. I liked the new UI, easier to see the flow of what was needed without scrolling all over the place, still needs some work tho. Unfortunatly thats about all I liked. I spent a long time building my character and it is frustrating to have to redo everything. It might not be so bad if I could have rebuilt it like it was before but with the radical changes I soon realized it would be impossible. I spent many an hour considering which skills to take and even trying different combinations and redoing them, only to find that if this new enhancement system goes thru it will all be wasted time as I will have to go thru the whole process again. I feel that the old system gave me more flexibility than the proposed system. I think that these are probably the top 2 complaints that most people have, the time spent already building their chars only to have to redo from start, and the reduced flexibility of the new build system. I wnoder if it would be feasible to just replace the old UI with the new graphical one without totaly redoing the whole thing. Guild Renown, I am currently in 2 guilds on 2 different worlds, both are small (under 10 members) one of which I am leader. The one that I founded is composed of just family and friends. Although both are slowly progressing, but due to real life concerns we find that sometimes all the work we have done is wiped out because we cannot be on everyday grinding out renown. Its very frustrating to log on the weekend and see that we have regressed because we have jobs, school, families, etc. that perclude us from sometimes playing during the week. Also I feel it unfair that because of Renown decay that eventually both guilds will reach a point where we will only be able to maintain level and be unable to proceed any further. It would be nice to know that eventually we would be able to progress to the point where we can finally get that bigger ship with all the buffs/amenities.Pet Peeve, The "Circle Jerk" phenomenon. I hate it when the mobs decide to endlessly circle at high speed my hire/pet making it difficult, and sometimes near impossible, for me to hit them. It happens every single adventure I have been in lately. Please fix this!EDIT: I ha thi nicely formated into paragraphs but when I submited it somehow it came out as one long wall-o-text. Sorry!

[rjbutchko]

Guild Decay: Eliminate it completely, but make renown a bit less common.

Guild Levels: There are capped guilds everywhere now, still earning renown. How about increasing guild levels? You dont even have to make level rewards much better than what they are, just maybe a few extra hook points on ships or better yet, flexible hook points that allow for a better layout of shrines and altars.

Daily Dice: When you open the UI is says you can save your silver rolls toward a gold. How? I have been out of game for five or more days (thereby not rolling at all) and the shard cost for a gold roll doesnt change.

Cannith Crafting: How about some useful end game recipes? Once upon a time I had crafted a pair of +5 Holy Silver Khopeshs of GEOB and would just beat the heck out of Horoth. While this recipe is still viable (if very specialized) where is the next gen of Cannith Uber? I just use it for my TRs now.

Questing: There should be multiple ways to complete a quest or raid. Every class should have something to contribute and if players find shortcuts they should be left alone. A good example of this sort of nerf is E Big Top. Whoever found the "Jump up here and run straight to the end fight" method should be congratulated. Instead an invisible wall was put up forcing players to go the long way.

Raids: Raiding should be more than a run to an arena with a long, drawn out fight to kill an end boss with unrealistically high hit points. The best raids in the game, IMHO, are Tempest Spine, Von5, and CitW.

DC casting: Bring it back.

Communication: Players ask questions on these forums every day and often they go unanswered or if an answer is given its not a terribly satisfying one. Does the Community Team not have access to the Devs? What is the point of having a "Community Team" if they don't (or arent allowed to) communicate with the community?

GMs: Hire a few more so that response time (especially around updates and patches) is a bit more reasonable. A player should never have ship buffs run out waiting for a GM, let alone the Sovereign Pot I wasted waiting for a GM in Shadow Knight last week. ALSO: Make them able to replace items that are lost when the server hiccoughs and everything a player farms for all day in Mabar, Festivult or Cove disappears.

There is other stuff that concerns me but I would like to end on a positive note and say that in spite of its flaws DDO really is the best MMO out today. No where else do you get the customization available here which is DDOs blessing as well as its curse.

[TFPAQ]

Hey

Give me your thoughts on the following. Be verbose, but not 'it sucks' I need 'it sucks because of'

Enhancements

Guild Decay

Whatever your pet peeve is.

Thanks.

I guess from what was listed ... no pet peeves today ... but Guild Decay strikes me as a huge stick for a game org. desiged around group play (carrot).

There really aren't any OP advantages to guilds (buffs, etc), so make it easy for people to try out guilds (or a new guild) easily - instead of guilds worrying about taking decay "hits" for bringing in some "new blood".

[bbcjoke]

Enhancements

I do not partake in Lammania activities, but I've read a little about the new enhancement pass in the forums. I know there is still a lot of stuff being discussed between you devs, but I'll let you know that the whole "every point spent in this class tree grants you some spellpower" idea in casters trees (and maybe others too) is, at least in my opinion, a bad design. The reason is because this linear gain compels players to completely avoid spending points in the racial tree in order to get the maximum spell power attainale. After all, 10 AP spent in the racial tree means 10 less spell power, which is a big deal for most pure casters or caster classes only multiclasses.
This kind of kills the racial tree for those, so I propose something like making the AP spent in the racial tree (or, more likely, some of it) counts towards the class tree with the highest amount of spent AP to mitigate this difference.

Guild Decay

This should be completely removed, or at least tweaked a bit. Maybe a system where it would only apply if the guild did not get to meet a certain daily quota (an impressive deed's worth for each account sounds about right, considering size bonuses/penalties).

Whatever your pet peeve is.

Please make airship buff timers stop in public places. It's very annoying having to go rebuff before starting the quest because that last spot in the PUG took 40 minutes to fill.

[Gratch]

Enhancements. Was least happy with divine nanny setups. No Warpriest or Divine Avenger was lame only out-lamed by foisting the same protection cleric domain on FVS. Yes I could see benefits of Protect-buffing tanks in EE or raids as useful but not really my playstyle plus they dropped many/most of the melee enhancements that are currently on live for FVS.

Was happy with the new UI and where it's going. Not really sad to lose the current 6/12/18 build schema... new stuff always good and further untying the Enhancement PRE trees from class levels will allow many more builds once the trees are filled out with good/balanced enhancements and prereqs. Much much better than the current All Ap's forced into getting one PRE (Pally, Wiz being the most forced to take prereqs with live and having 0 AP to differentiate).

Most lingering annoying bug to me. The client memory suck that constantly increases as you log-out/log-in new characters. Really causes a ton of client lag on some machines after just 2 character swaps.

[Tarlanon]

Please fix whatever you guys did for the One Ribbon update that craters client framerates on some rigs.

More details can be found here : https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...t-client-patch

and here :

https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...ng-my-poor-cpu

(And please excuse my angst in some of the later posts. I get owly when I can't enjoy something I paid for.)

[Kushiel]

Hey

Give me your thoughts on the following. Be verbose, but not 'it sucks' I need 'it sucks because of'

Enhancements

Guild Decay

Whatever your pet peeve is.

Thanks.

However enhancements get shaken out (I haven't looked at the alpha of the proposed change), please don't let it exist like things are now where 'filling a bubble' (getting a rank) is a meaningless milestone because it requires waiting through a whole level and a half (accumulate 6 ranks) to finally get to see a little bit of your character advance. I'd like every bubble achieved to be a cause for excitement because it would let me make some sort of forward progress on my characters ability to affect the world.

Guild Decay is grim. The little boats a little guild can earn are limited. More hooks, better hooks on the smallest boats would be grand.

Pet Peeve: #1 all the unused doors in Stormreach. Make a bunch more quests that have the mechanism 'Devils Assault' has... it doesn't break BB, it's short-ish, it doesn't require flagging, it has a use to poke at it at levels 6/12/18. Once a month drop us a simple, short quest in Stormreach that opens a new door and spread some quests for xp through levels 8-18.

Pet Peeve: #2 all the staring at splash screen art to zone (and freezie-laggy-load into the new instance) through places I don't want to be just to sometimes as much as 10 minutes later get through to where I want to be. Short version - better/more travel options through the world would be grand!

[sebastianosmith]

Hey M2,

Enhancements:

From what I've read about they appear to be a significant change and, frankly, I'm not qualified to dole out advice on basic game mechanics. However, I would like to register my plea that whatever final form they take at least make internal sense to the class and racial framework as a whole. I'd also like to imagine that some won't be veiled marketing ploys which encourage the purchase of new store items if only not to excite the P2W crowd.

Guild Decay:

To me this is a non-issue. Guild amenities are a perk that none of my characters had once upon a time and may not have again at some future date. I and my guildies enjoyed the game before they came along.

Pet Peeve:

The inconsistent nature of toggleable stances, items, etc. Why do some persist through a logout and not others? Things like DoS stances, which require the expenditure of a renewable charge I might add, will stay on until death while Power Attack can't be bothered to remember its status after a character swap. Nitpicking? Yes, but you asked.

General Thoughts:

I really enjoy this game. I don't get to play as often as I'd like so my take on it is from a more casual perspective than some. I just want to thank you and the QA folks, the Dev team, all the architects, admins and the whole staff there at Turbine for giving me, my family and my friends the opportunity to play around in your virtual world because we frequently cannot in the real one. Sure there are bugs, but we don't let them bother us too much. Being together in a shared activity is more important to us than worrying about bugs. But really, fix the bugs. It just looks bad.

[Charononus]

Enhancement Pass, this is what should be done with it, dissolve it in acid, burn it with fire, irradiate the ashes, load them onto a rocket, then fire it into the heart of a black hole.

Guild decay should probably just go completely, keep guilds as social structures rather than their own meta game.

After that my big peeve is system stability, since motu the client just seems to have problems, hanging on the first log in of the day. People crashing in explorers ext. If you need to raise system reqs do it. But some of it doesn't seem to be req related such as the hanging on load.

[Gram]

Enhancements: Leave the old system in as an option with a warning that it will likely not be a primary focus for updates; maybe have that gaggle of House Deneith trainers be specifically just for that, while every other trainer would use the new enhancement system

Guild Decay: Add stations that reduce decay: a bard crewman who sings about the guild, a guild roster to track membership, and a shelf of books detailing the guild's exploits each reducing renown decay by 30%; trade off the utility of other useful things for slower decay

Pet Peeves:

Mobs that do stat damage in heroic elite quests now do far more than they should. 15+ constitution damage every few seconds from doomspheres, ego whip doing 5+ charisma damage even on a save

Cloudkill constitution damage not reduced by proof against poison +x/venom immunity/diamond body/etc

Trash mobs that are highly resistant to stat damage (Epic Hard/Elite, Reaver's Refuge giants and efreeti)...the days of constitution damage being a winning strategy has been over for YEARS now

Trash mobs with orange names (Mired in Kobolds fighters, New Invasion air elementals, von2 spiders, etc)

Tor and Stormsworn giants and gelatinous cubes randomly immune to negative energy damage for no apparent reason

Some troglodyte stench is a supernatural poison for no apparent reason

Evil Eye/Greater Evil Eye Arcane Zap and Blast unable to be evaded while the PC Wizard Archmage versions can be

Electric floors in elite Spies in the House

Hobbits not receiving balance checks to stand up from some types of knockdown

Scariest enemies in elite Tempest Spine/Invaders!/Threnal/Ghosts of Perdition are now the ice flensers :b

Forced installation of French and German stuff...it's not a completely trivial amount anymore, up over 400 megabytes now

[cru121]

guild decay: I don't care, I am alone in my guild (lvl 46?), and I am not progressing. Then again, I am a casual player so why should I progress?
enhancements: Some builds will be weaker, some stronger, so what. We'll manage.
pet peeve: "Po0p Deck Paolo", NPC in 3BC. I always run into him. Delete him.

[Permian]

Overall I still enjoy DDO immensely and will continue to play for years to come even if some of the forumites doom it every week to shut down in a colossal ball of flames. Your request for input is an ENORMOUS help and I hope that it continues because this is exactly what we need in order to maintain a semblance of admiration and respect between the company and the community who keep the company afloat. That may be an exaggeration but you know what I mean. Lately the forum reading has been reduced to cries of lies and betrayal by scorned lovers mostly due to a lack of input or response from turbine.

Please do anything in your power to make guild ship buff timers go away altogether! The timers on guild ship buffs are absolutely useless, serve zero purpose, and if removed would in no way functionally or technically break the game no matter how you slice it. At a bare minimum make the timers 6 hours or longer.

There are several casting bugs that have already been mentioned: "You are not facing" "Out of range" (even when you are looking right at the target in front of you), and DC casting really needs a re-think for those of us who have invested the time to get the DCs.


*******Here's an idea and I'm not claiming that I invented this: What if there were an AH type interface in the game where we could open a window, just like opening the AH, and we could see a list of all of the toons on that account along with the contents of that accounts' shared bank. If you select a specific character you could browse that character's inventory and bank contents in order to quickly locate items. I would pay a fair amount of cash for this and I feel that others would too.*******

I'm sure there are many more things I could list but most importantly it's great that you are here and willing to receive input from the community as this will hopefully go a long way to cleaning up the trash/speculation threads in the forums granted you provide some feedback on a regular basis. You meaning anyone at Turbine who can speak to any of the issues at hand.

[Ancient]

Hey

Give me your thoughts on the following. Be verbose, but not 'it sucks' I need 'it sucks because of'

Enhancements

Guild Decay

Whatever your pet peeve is.

Thanks.

Monday sucks because the weekend is over...

It was Monday that you wanted feedback on, right?

[LeoLionxxx]

Enhancements

From what I've seen it's a good direction. The neater layout is very attractive. Some concerns about it:

-I think there should be a 'general' tree and then 2 or 3 prestige trees for each class (preferably the same number for every class) and then you get to choose between 3 trees (racial tree will always be there). Multi-classing will unlock that class's set of trees and so you get to choose 3 out of the trees you have available. I noticed on something like the Wizard trees you had to invest in Archmage for all the good wizardly stuff, even if you want to play as a PM.

-Enhancements for every different element of spells just feels right.

Whatever your pet peeve is.

The Epic levels feel sort of useless if you don't have epic destinies (I do have them, i'm just thinking about those who don't). You do get epic feats, but these feats just don't quite feel epic.

Suggestion: Epic feats for character defining abilities.
For example:
-A feat to cast from an epic Arcane or diving spell book - requires a certain level in a class and/or the ability to cast LV 9 spells in that field of magic.

-Epic feat for Druids to shapeshift:
Wild Shape: Owlbear
Requires dire bear wild shape

[Thar]

see below


Give me your thoughts on the following. Be verbose, but not 'it sucks' I need 'it sucks because of'

Enhancements - Ranger changes upcoming looked good, but expensive. Pally changes are still too expensive (as they are today), Barb looks good, Wiz/Sorc was nothing new, nothing better, Bard looked better, but didn't help that class enough to be useful again. Racial pre's could make a lot of excitement if done in a way to be obtainable. (ie 4 pts open that tree and no other cost). Costs and prereqs on much of the alpha were high and prohibited in using much from more than one class/ one race tree. All class trees should have the same amount of points in each and same for race trees. (ie if you spend all options in your race tree that costs 20 points no matter what race you are, and each class tree has a max of 30 pts avaiable to enable spare to go into another class or multiclass tree since much of the core abilities were split between trees. Ie should have been a core class tree and then pre trees specific for that pre.

Guild Decay- why have decay at all, people build up a guild and enjoy the benefits. you have poeple take a break and people want to boot them. it goes against the intent of guild to bring people together.

Whatever your pet peeve is.

Evening star challenges - when are these going to be made BTA as we were promised?

rangers tempest nerf - yes i'm still grouchy that was changed years ago to make them attack slower.

crafting - no new recipes? we can get much of the new prefix/suffix in heroic content but can't craft it? even +6 and +7 to add to armor/shields. in essence we can't craft any end game type gear so why bother. AND it takes way too long. I've crunched 100% of everything for the first year and 50% of items i found after the first year and still am not capped crafting.

Trading codes- not sure why this is allowed or a safe in game option to trade, as high potental for theft and grief.

friends list - why can other games see the account level name so you can find your friend no matter what character he is on. this would be a good upgrade

Titan - the lost raid.. anyway to make this useful again.

crafting instances - the servers the crafting is on have crazy lag when you deconstruct items. This carrys over to those quests that are started on those servers. We can /loc and see that it is the i2050 i2051 servers (i think that is the id's if i recall) How about excluding those servers from having normal quests in them?

no free aug bags??? come on... a small one per character would be appropriate like everything else.

Inventory - we get more stuff, more cosemetics, more bags, more items, but not more space. why don't hireling folders have a slot on the character sheet like quivers. cosmetic goggles, why no slot like helmf/armor? how about perm slots for caster spell components or a bag? another option for a bank slot or inventory slot? we need it.

thanks for being receptive for feedback.

[Systern]

Enhancements
I think you're designing the system backwards. After the work on Epic destinies, you guys fell in love with that grid/tree presentation and are trying to create a system to adapt to it. Form follows function. The only problem with the present system is that it's incomplete and presented poorly. It is functional, elegant, and flexible. Extend, refine, complete the existing instead of creating a new one which needs to be refined and completed as well.

I don't like the trees. you're taking a class and drawing hard lines between aspects of that class. Choose this tree or not. You have 3 trees total. If you want a multi-classed bard warchanter, All the enhancements in the warchanter tree derive around songs, but song duration is in the spellsinger tree; better not want anything both of the other 2 classes you're splashing.

The concept of splashing is now separated from the levelling system. If multiclassing before was a 20-layer cake, the enhancement pass is a slice that's only 1/3rd of that cake.


Guild Decay
It's a crude cudgel to bludgeon your players with. Two-steps-forward-one-step-back is metaphor about futility, frustration, exasperation, and it is universally scorned. I don't understand why anyone would put such a mechanic into a GAME.


Pet Peeve
PERMANENT REPETITION PENALTIES Repetition penalties and multimode(heroic/Epic) mean a player can't just enjoy the game, they have to metagame the XP system. Punishing your players for playing the game is bad, horrid design. Between flagging mechanics and ransack timers you already have better mechanics in place to encourage diversity of play. Make a game that's fun to play. Sell the fun, not a reprieve from the punishment.

Friends want to run heroic Gianthold? Well, I'm close to cap and am concerned about epic bravery bonus and repeat penalties, so no I won't play with my friends on these quests. Does this sound like behavior that you want to foster in your game system? I am not enjoying your game because of the metagame. That's just wrong.

[LeoLionxxx]

Enhancements

From what I've seen it's a good direction. The neater layout is very attractive. Some concerns about it:

-I think there should be a 'general' tree and then 2 or 3 prestige trees for each class (preferably the same number for every class) and then you get to choose between 3 trees (racial tree will always be there). Multi-classing will unlock that class's set of trees and so you get to choose 3 out of the trees you have available. I noticed on something like the Wizard trees you had to invest in Archmage for all the good wizardly stuff, even if you want to play as a PM.

-Enhancements for every different element of spells just feels right.

Whatever your pet peeve is.

The Epic levels feel sort of useless if you don't have epic destinies (I do have them, i'm just thinking about those who don't). You do get epic feats, but these feats just don't quite feel epic.

Suggestion: Epic feats for character defining abilities.
For example:
-A feat to cast from an epic Arcane or diving spell book - requires a certain level in a class and/or the ability to cast LV 9 spells in that field of magic.

-Epic feat for Druids to shapeshift:
Wild Shape: Owlbear
Requires dire bear wild shape

Pet Peeve 2:
Forums are still acting up. Took too long with my post and so it logged me out; lucky I copied this post before it navigated me to the loggin screen.