Non-non-item nerf thread
- Thread starter Slaariel
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syduck:
Obscenitor
Dalayan Elder
The proc sword from NZ that goes into making Custodian's Demise is now better, somehow I don't see that full nerf sticking.
sheer1
Dalayan Elder
on a more general note, im sure the others devs have heard and are probably sick of hearing players sing marza's praises, but you have to understand why that is happening. it is not because he makes a of items are real good and we are greedy garden gnomes, but that he makes content and items that are interesting.
making an encounter where you have to pay attention and read emotes and do different things at different times is fun and engaging. often these fights don't work exactly as intended due to their complexity but me and other fwf nerds were more than happy to help test things things as they were fun and interesting once completed. adding more involved quests based off of only raid mobs is also fun and adds other risk/reward options for players without really adding any more raid mobs.
also, the items are interesting and offer more than just, additional stats and maybe a better weapon ratio. adding on useful clicky effects, procs, or useful skill mods at the loss of stats can help change how a class works when those items are being used. this is fun and can offer more of a tradeoff with gear upgrades. at a certain point these tradeoffs are probably even one of the best ways to design new and interesting gear. i don't disagree that some items maybe needed to be toned down, but a lot of the changes that are being made are turning the items into unusable banked goods (which, considering how hard some are to obtain, is disheartening), or just boring vanilla items.
please do not do the same thing with the encounters marza has worked on, they are still fun and doable, don't deprive other guilds of the same interesting and engaging fights.
making an encounter where you have to pay attention and read emotes and do different things at different times is fun and engaging. often these fights don't work exactly as intended due to their complexity but me and other fwf nerds were more than happy to help test things things as they were fun and interesting once completed. adding more involved quests based off of only raid mobs is also fun and adds other risk/reward options for players without really adding any more raid mobs.
also, the items are interesting and offer more than just, additional stats and maybe a better weapon ratio. adding on useful clicky effects, procs, or useful skill mods at the loss of stats can help change how a class works when those items are being used. this is fun and can offer more of a tradeoff with gear upgrades. at a certain point these tradeoffs are probably even one of the best ways to design new and interesting gear. i don't disagree that some items maybe needed to be toned down, but a lot of the changes that are being made are turning the items into unusable banked goods (which, considering how hard some are to obtain, is disheartening), or just boring vanilla items.
please do not do the same thing with the encounters marza has worked on, they are still fun and doable, don't deprive other guilds of the same interesting and engaging fights.
luciferblack
Dalayan Elder
^^^ This. Anyone else complaining about soloing isn't doing it right (except yes... maybe warriors)
Silosobi
Dalayan Pious Diety
Marza content also does not just hand out free upgrades. As far as effort per reward, just look at CW and exodus. They have farmed sooooo much gear from non marza fights because it is easy to get. This is not meant to insult any other dev, marza just made his content more difficult than the rest of the game. His fights are often way way harder to do without 18 real people. Its not always best to just say x fight is what you do after y fight, so x loot should only be slightly better than y loot. If x fight is way harder the loot should be more than slightly better.
Marza's 'good' loot often is in the form of neat effects or clickies rather than raw stats. Look at the massive stat upgrades people get when going from t9/10 loot to tier 11 loot. There is less of a raw stat difference from 11 to 13 than there is from 9 to 11. What players tended to gain instead is unique effects.
Ortananoch requires two loots from a challenging t12 fight. Then it requires an entire raid make an already difficult fight much harder to convert the two swords into one. It is undoubtedly the most difficult to obtain and prestigious weapon in the game other than Jyre. It should be powerful.
Xi Valla Kah is an extremely rare drop off the most complicated and difficult 6 man encounter in the game. It was intended to be very desirable for everyone, and be an item that everyone wants, but very few can actually obtain. FWF got 7 of them, but we actually got very lucky on drops, and we killed the fight the day it spawned for TWO YEARS. I personally spent hundreds of hours on this fight, and 80% of it was in trying to obtain this item alone. To nerf it so hard that it is inferior to common items from two tiers lower is hard to even comprehend.
Verdict is the rare drop from a super difficult T13 fight. This is the fight that exodus has been unable to defeat for (however long they have been in turuj?). There should be some good incentives to beat this fight. He only drops one loot. If giving priests a dps toy was going to break game balance somehow then change the item to something entirely new, but its current state is not viable.
If certain effects are not valid for whatever long term plan you have that is understandable. I think most people realized how powerful and game changing the priest weapons were, and they are still nice as they are, but some of these other changes just dont make sense when you consider the difficulty of obtaining them.
Marza's 'good' loot often is in the form of neat effects or clickies rather than raw stats. Look at the massive stat upgrades people get when going from t9/10 loot to tier 11 loot. There is less of a raw stat difference from 11 to 13 than there is from 9 to 11. What players tended to gain instead is unique effects.
Ortananoch requires two loots from a challenging t12 fight. Then it requires an entire raid make an already difficult fight much harder to convert the two swords into one. It is undoubtedly the most difficult to obtain and prestigious weapon in the game other than Jyre. It should be powerful.
Xi Valla Kah is an extremely rare drop off the most complicated and difficult 6 man encounter in the game. It was intended to be very desirable for everyone, and be an item that everyone wants, but very few can actually obtain. FWF got 7 of them, but we actually got very lucky on drops, and we killed the fight the day it spawned for TWO YEARS. I personally spent hundreds of hours on this fight, and 80% of it was in trying to obtain this item alone. To nerf it so hard that it is inferior to common items from two tiers lower is hard to even comprehend.
Verdict is the rare drop from a super difficult T13 fight. This is the fight that exodus has been unable to defeat for (however long they have been in turuj?). There should be some good incentives to beat this fight. He only drops one loot. If giving priests a dps toy was going to break game balance somehow then change the item to something entirely new, but its current state is not viable.
If certain effects are not valid for whatever long term plan you have that is understandable. I think most people realized how powerful and game changing the priest weapons were, and they are still nice as they are, but some of these other changes just dont make sense when you consider the difficulty of obtaining them.
Please label all raid content marza or non marza in the wiki so we can understand your post. Most of us didnt raid with a dev in the zone or talk to them daily for feedback like no yer doing it wrong or oops its bugged so we have no knowledge who made what.
Also someone said these hard encounters were being rebalanced for the nerfed (priest) items.
Also someone said these hard encounters were being rebalanced for the nerfed (priest) items.
Custo/NZ/ Last 2 tribes in Tur'ruj, 4.3, Rohk, OVergrowth, the shit past custo, the whole jyre quest line including the bird in Pofire, actually i think all of sanctum was either done by marza or redone. All without dev babysitters its honestly night and day the difference between marza encounters and anyone else sept maybe like PE? but hell marza even fixed that.
Marza for VP
Marza for VP
Obscenitor
Dalayan Elder
This is standard practice when it comes to bug testing new content; it is not something unique that Marza does. Zaela did it, Thinkmeats did it, Cyzaine did it, Waldoff did it, hell even Slaariel did it..
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sheer1
Dalayan Elder
yea what draeos/bango said
i wasn't really around help debug anything but newer marza content, but it usually went something like this..
script messes up we all die, marza says: "hahaha yall are bad its not hard but hang on just a second"
we recover/rebuff and wait a bit..
"ok try again"
so its not like this was some special privilege other then getting to try things first. but that was fun enough so we are still bugging marza to help look at newer overgrowth fights that are not working correctly!
i wasn't really around help debug anything but newer marza content, but it usually went something like this..
script messes up we all die, marza says: "hahaha yall are bad its not hard but hang on just a second"
we recover/rebuff and wait a bit..
"ok try again"
so its not like this was some special privilege other then getting to try things first. but that was fun enough so we are still bugging marza to help look at newer overgrowth fights that are not working correctly!
Silosobi
Dalayan Pious Diety
Marza did a lot of fixing/improving on most of sanctum and turuj. The fights that are really his are what Draeos listed plus eyes and forest gloom and I think Animation?(not sure on that one)
"Re Balancing" shouldn't change much. There are a few AEs that could maybe get toned down 5-15%, but a lot of these highend fights don't really allow priests to meele for a variety of reasons. Additionally what makes marza fights hard is not anything that gets toned down. His fights are hard because they require everyone to pay attention and react to things quickly, and as such it becomes much much harder and less viable to be boxing. Eyes is the first good example I think, where random names are called and they have to run out of the raid or they blow everyone up, and there are wisps people have to avoid (oh no strat leaks).
The fights are seriously challenging and difficult and fun and the rewards should be appropriate. Nerfing things simply because players are getting more powerful doesn't work well. As long as there continues to be more difficult and challenging content players will continue to get stronger. If there are certain effects (run speed, significant gheal from procs) that are not acceptable that is understandable, but to make some of the most difficult to obtain items in the game suddenly on par with common loot from tiers lower is super frustrating.
"Re Balancing" shouldn't change much. There are a few AEs that could maybe get toned down 5-15%, but a lot of these highend fights don't really allow priests to meele for a variety of reasons. Additionally what makes marza fights hard is not anything that gets toned down. His fights are hard because they require everyone to pay attention and react to things quickly, and as such it becomes much much harder and less viable to be boxing. Eyes is the first good example I think, where random names are called and they have to run out of the raid or they blow everyone up, and there are wisps people have to avoid (oh no strat leaks).
The fights are seriously challenging and difficult and fun and the rewards should be appropriate. Nerfing things simply because players are getting more powerful doesn't work well. As long as there continues to be more difficult and challenging content players will continue to get stronger. If there are certain effects (run speed, significant gheal from procs) that are not acceptable that is understandable, but to make some of the most difficult to obtain items in the game suddenly on par with common loot from tiers lower is super frustrating.
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mach 5 phase at the least
ynnear
Dalayan Elder
I believe in taking turns on mobs so everyone can have a shot but i seem to be the minority in this area
Tarutao
Staff Emeritus
This conversation about ortananoch really doesn't make sense unless you understand how it's obtained, and quite a bit of it is on the wiki, but some people will probably want a couple of the blanks filled in, so...
There are three items involved in this most recent item adjustment discussion:
(1) Ortaninam, Fall of the Dragonkin
(2) Ortaninim, Rise of the Dragonkin
(3) Ortananoch, Custodian's Demise
Take a moment, look at the three items. Done? Good.
The first two are drops from the loot table of Nylastra'Zara, The Firstborn. This is an encounter in what is considered "Middle Sanctum". The first four encounters in Sanctum are of similar difficulty, but there's a big difficulty jump for the "Middle Sanctum" and then difficulty just for the part surrounding Admyrrza's cell. By "Middle Sanctum", I mean the Nylastra'Zara, The Firstborn encounter as well as the The Custodian encounter.
What isn't visible on the SoD Wiki is the Item Lore for those two swords. Included in them is a sentence: "Fuse them within the belly of The Custodian." It should sound familiar to people that are aware of [The Vah] and Parcelan the Devourer's role in that quest tree.
The encounter for The Custodian is pretty rough 5 phase fight, and the final phase of that fight is a hectic, panic-inducing, and wipe-causing combination of the first 4 phases each toned down a bit. The instructions from the Item Lore of the swords leads you to respond to an emote in the fight to give The Custodian those two swords at the start of that difficult 5th phase. In response, The Custodian increases his health, restarts the 5th phase at that increased health, and the mechanics of that 5th phase are a bit more difficult.
*2 sentences removed before hitting "Submit Reply" so that some things remain unspoiled* Upon successful completion of the encounter including that more difficult 5th phase, the "combined" sword listed as #3 above drops. Pretty cool concept, imo.
Yeah, Ortananoch should be awesome, but it can't be discussed alone. It must be better than the two NZ swords while not being OP. It is, after all, a Middle Sanctum item, and it should reflect approximately that tier, but it warrants "best of tier" stats in some sense. Granted, the staff doesn't recognize tiers, but the meaning behind that statement should ring true.
I leave it to everyone else to discuss specifics, but that's the mindset I think we're in agreement on, so it's the jumping-off point for discussion.
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**********************************************************************************There are three items involved in this most recent item adjustment discussion:
(1) Ortaninam, Fall of the Dragonkin
(2) Ortaninim, Rise of the Dragonkin
(3) Ortananoch, Custodian's Demise
Take a moment, look at the three items. Done? Good.
The first two are drops from the loot table of Nylastra'Zara, The Firstborn. This is an encounter in what is considered "Middle Sanctum". The first four encounters in Sanctum are of similar difficulty, but there's a big difficulty jump for the "Middle Sanctum" and then difficulty just for the part surrounding Admyrrza's cell. By "Middle Sanctum", I mean the Nylastra'Zara, The Firstborn encounter as well as the The Custodian encounter.
What isn't visible on the SoD Wiki is the Item Lore for those two swords. Included in them is a sentence: "Fuse them within the belly of The Custodian." It should sound familiar to people that are aware of [The Vah] and Parcelan the Devourer's role in that quest tree.
The encounter for The Custodian is pretty rough 5 phase fight, and the final phase of that fight is a hectic, panic-inducing, and wipe-causing combination of the first 4 phases each toned down a bit. The instructions from the Item Lore of the swords leads you to respond to an emote in the fight to give The Custodian those two swords at the start of that difficult 5th phase. In response, The Custodian increases his health, restarts the 5th phase at that increased health, and the mechanics of that 5th phase are a bit more difficult.
*2 sentences removed before hitting "Submit Reply" so that some things remain unspoiled* Upon successful completion of the encounter including that more difficult 5th phase, the "combined" sword listed as #3 above drops. Pretty cool concept, imo.
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**********************************************************************************Yeah, Ortananoch should be awesome, but it can't be discussed alone. It must be better than the two NZ swords while not being OP. It is, after all, a Middle Sanctum item, and it should reflect approximately that tier, but it warrants "best of tier" stats in some sense. Granted, the staff doesn't recognize tiers, but the meaning behind that statement should ring true.
I leave it to everyone else to discuss specifics, but that's the mindset I think we're in agreement on, so it's the jumping-off point for discussion.
I don't believe anything I have was nerfed, but I agree with solo. These fights were made to be ridiculous. There are some gear checks in them, but for the most part the fight design is just difficult due to paying complete attention. They fights were all completely different from that of what prior contentent was. They are really more of events then boss kills.
What it took FWF to kill Marza mobs(granted a lot of wipes for tuning and broken mechanics):
-Boss of Spires was a big gear check, but multiphase and was a couple nights of wipes.
-Custo tuning was 70+ wipes over 2.5 straight raid days. (Killed preTuruj loot for FWF.)
-SharnRee was 100ish wipes I believe over weeks. (Killed after maybe 2 months in turruj)
-Turruj boss warchief or whatever was 60ish wipes for tuning over 2 raids (not 100% on this one but I believe after 6-8 Sharnree kills)
-Hell post custo events were god knows how many wipes and a couple days.
-The remnants event was marza and not a huge gear check when organized. I believe this was beaten before I joined, so the retune didn't take as long.
-4.3 was lots of wipes for every new person and it took the first core forever to get in there. I wasn't part of it, but I remember after nights of wiping they would go their and wipe for hours.
After first kills, serveral of these fights were changed some several times to fix "broken" mechanics. I'd say the vast majority of FWF content for 4 months was kill a few important mobs that had a lot of loot that was needed one day, then wipe the next 2 days. Even after some of these mobs were killed a few times, it might take us an entire night to get them down again. They are not too difficult, they just need people who are dedicated and will put in the time. If you bring 2 new people into the fight, expect wipes till they learn the strat. Most of these fights were tuned week after week for months and all fights were retuned for the vah nerf.
These are not go there 1 night wipe and bitch that they are too hard. The AEs and few dps burns tend to be gear checks. If AEs are killing people, you are doing it wrong. If your DPS is insufficient, get more gear and come back. Some of these fights are 10-20 min. If you cant beat it, get more gear or be more efficient and keep trying till you get it. The main problem why most guilds haven't pushed this content is they are of the mindset of we wiped 10-15 times, guess we aren't on tier. We'll lets come back in a month.
The main key to marza fights is pay attention x18. Its not uncommon for several different phases with multiple sets of people doing different things in each phase. This is the reason they are T12+. Its also the reason that loot was creative. Hell a caster bow, cool clickies, and more. Also, the "creative" items tend to be the super rare barely attainable ones. Sure if worn run speed breaks mechanics ok. But I really hope the fights aren't nerfed and that the nerfed items are boosted due to the difficulty and dedication they take to attain.
Also, for reference, I am, was, and continue to be one of the worst tomed people in FWF. I only had 4 tomes done at the time of custo kill and 8 tomes at the time of killing everything on the list, but they kept me around because I paid attention. I wasn't the only one in this boat for a lot of the first kills.
Last note: I have taken a guild from T0-Farhags with a good core; raided new content with Bane; and raided with FWF from Sanctum up. After seeing almost every raid encounter in the game, the most frustrating and fun time I had in SoD was testing and finally succeeding at these mobs due to it really feeling like you achieved something.
What it took FWF to kill Marza mobs(granted a lot of wipes for tuning and broken mechanics):
-Boss of Spires was a big gear check, but multiphase and was a couple nights of wipes.
-Custo tuning was 70+ wipes over 2.5 straight raid days. (Killed preTuruj loot for FWF.)
-SharnRee was 100ish wipes I believe over weeks. (Killed after maybe 2 months in turruj)
-Turruj boss warchief or whatever was 60ish wipes for tuning over 2 raids (not 100% on this one but I believe after 6-8 Sharnree kills)
-Hell post custo events were god knows how many wipes and a couple days.
-The remnants event was marza and not a huge gear check when organized. I believe this was beaten before I joined, so the retune didn't take as long.
-4.3 was lots of wipes for every new person and it took the first core forever to get in there. I wasn't part of it, but I remember after nights of wiping they would go their and wipe for hours.
After first kills, serveral of these fights were changed some several times to fix "broken" mechanics. I'd say the vast majority of FWF content for 4 months was kill a few important mobs that had a lot of loot that was needed one day, then wipe the next 2 days. Even after some of these mobs were killed a few times, it might take us an entire night to get them down again. They are not too difficult, they just need people who are dedicated and will put in the time. If you bring 2 new people into the fight, expect wipes till they learn the strat. Most of these fights were tuned week after week for months and all fights were retuned for the vah nerf.
These are not go there 1 night wipe and bitch that they are too hard. The AEs and few dps burns tend to be gear checks. If AEs are killing people, you are doing it wrong. If your DPS is insufficient, get more gear and come back. Some of these fights are 10-20 min. If you cant beat it, get more gear or be more efficient and keep trying till you get it. The main problem why most guilds haven't pushed this content is they are of the mindset of we wiped 10-15 times, guess we aren't on tier. We'll lets come back in a month.
The main key to marza fights is pay attention x18. Its not uncommon for several different phases with multiple sets of people doing different things in each phase. This is the reason they are T12+. Its also the reason that loot was creative. Hell a caster bow, cool clickies, and more. Also, the "creative" items tend to be the super rare barely attainable ones. Sure if worn run speed breaks mechanics ok. But I really hope the fights aren't nerfed and that the nerfed items are boosted due to the difficulty and dedication they take to attain.
Also, for reference, I am, was, and continue to be one of the worst tomed people in FWF. I only had 4 tomes done at the time of custo kill and 8 tomes at the time of killing everything on the list, but they kept me around because I paid attention. I wasn't the only one in this boat for a lot of the first kills.
Last note: I have taken a guild from T0-Farhags with a good core; raided new content with Bane; and raided with FWF from Sanctum up. After seeing almost every raid encounter in the game, the most frustrating and fun time I had in SoD was testing and finally succeeding at these mobs due to it really feeling like you achieved something.
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Silosobi
Dalayan Pious Diety
Great post, and your sig is really relevant in this thread. Characters are getting better/stronger because there has been a ton of really awesome content added to the game. My character got stronger at a MUCH faster rate when I was going from t9 to t11 than when I went from t11 to t13. Super difficult fights need to have cool/good loot. Maybe some people think that is bad and that we should all just want to play because we like slaying dragons, but good loot inevitably is a big motivator in MMOs, and it already seems like there is a problem with people being motivated to progress into t13.
Tarutao
Staff Emeritus
Best I can tell from the sketchy information I gathered (no staff-based knowledge used for this post):
Sharn`ree, Blood's Justice was first killed around June 28th 2011
Warchief(tain) Rujik Moktar was first killed around August 14th 2011
Taeshlin, the Fallen Guardian was first killed around September 16th 2011
Vylast`zara, the False Savior has not been killed. FWF got it to 50% quite a few times, but FWF never got a handle on the mechanics past that point. It seems entirely beyond Tier 13 (and Tier 14), but that could be explained by us failing to understand a mechanic properly or one not working properly. We don't know. It'll take more attempts to know for sure, and I'm not about to put myself on REDACTED status by looking into myself.
... and there's the encounters put in as part of the Jyre questline
Rohk, Traitorous Hand was first killed around September 7th 2011
Blazewind (normal difficulty) was first killed around October 24th 2011
Jyre was first killed around January 18th 2012
Blazewind (hard difficulty) was only attempted a couple of times, so the tuning of the difficulty of hardmode isn't even done. I believe it to be impossible with current gear (even with gear from April), but as anyone that's done brand-new content knows, sometimes a Dev is watching and goes "wow, that's WAY more damage than I thought it'd be" and changes something to make it closer to how they wanted it to be.
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In some of these cases, there was a lag between the time we completed an encounter and the next was created and implemented. In all cases, there was a period of "oops, that mechanic just broke and wiped you. Buff back up while I adjust something and wait for me to say I'm ready for you to try again". There was also plenty of "nope, it worked fine, I'm not CSR rezzing you, so run back, buff up and try again". The fights were all difficult and wiped us a lot.
Even after we beat it, it certainly wasn't "farm status". Even 6-8 months after beating sharnree, rujik, and blazewind, we'd celebrate beating those bosses first attempts. They are difficult beyond just the gear requirement, and surpassing the gear requirement could do only so much to ease the difficulty.
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Now, back to the point at hand, I don't see any reason why Exodus and/or Chaotic Winds would not have the same experience. The gear they are entering these fights with will be a little different than what FWF had, so there will be some amount of adjusting that must be done if they get in decent attempts and get facestomped anyway. At least the mechanics themselves will work as well as they did for FWF. They'll get difficulty-appropriate fights and the same experience had FWF with a little less frustration.