Server Round Table (Community)

[Jenkem]

I'd like to see a bit of an improvement to the 3.0 quest lines. The camps are very boring and trivial content and then the foraging aspect in the warrior quest is nuts. Most warriors cannot forage, so we're forced to use an alt or army of alts to constantly forage, yet after 6 hours in OOT, I hadn't foraged the item I needed. This is a ton of time to devote for a weapon that is barely an upgrade to the HoH fully evolved weapon. Also, lots of warriors have donor weapons, so it could at least use an extra aug slot or something so that it has more AC than the HoH evolved bow.

Thanks for the updates in PoTactics, gatekeeper, and elemental twins though. Currently those are my three least favorite events on the server. I attempted to farm my bane weapons for Rallos Zek, and Most Angry took me over 30 minutes to kill. It was incredibly tedious. I'd still like to see the threshold for elemental twins increased even if just to 2%, 1% margin is just so incredibly difficult, especially with the AE's.

On the issue of disparity in gear between non-donor and donor items, I understand people's plight here. Some events honestly feel as if they'd be dang near impossible without a squad of toons decked out in donor gear, especially with how bad lag can be in some events (Rallos Zek). But then again, selfishly, I don't want to see the donor items get nerfed. I run a group with 3 pet classes, and the nerf to the non-donor pets really hurt my DPS. I spent a bit of money to get my donor items so that my group would be useful in raid situations. I'd rather not go back to not being able to out DPS some boss's regen.

[Xorp]

Thanks for the updates in PoTactics, gatekeeper, and elemental twins though.

Am I missing something? I didn't see anything regarding changes to gatekeeper?, do you mean Lithluran the Gate Master? or some other gatekeeper?

[Vaion]

Lithluran changes (similar to Elemental Twins) went in late last night. We are working on the updated changelog for the next stuff. A few of them have already trickled into the server (HOH clip plane, Lithluran optimizations, etc).

Also, wanted to make it known that Elemental Twins and Lithluran now have a 3% difference threshold now instead of 1%. The 3% is the new standard for all balance events.

[Vaion]

Next set of balance changes just posted.

Please keep the feedback coming, just because the developers are not posting does not mean that we are not paying attention Many topics here have already sparked discussions on our end.

[Denizen]

Great idea to reduce clip plane. Anything done to make zones like HoH more compatible with several players is great. It does seem to have gotten better.

Thanks

[Jenkem]

Thanks for the alteration there to Lithluran and Elemental twins. Those fights used to take over an hour. After doing the elemental twins, I thought my eyes were going to bleed, and we didn't even win, simply timed out around 30% after two complete heals. I understand the difficulty in the necessity to be perfect, but when it's necessary to have multiple people execute perfectly for over an hour, it's a bit much .

Could you possibly look at adjusting the HP's on the adds in the Maestro fight in DSK 3? Even with 5 donor pets and a full donor rogue doing dps on adds, we were nowhere close to being able to keep up with the adds. I couldn't imagine that event being possible without at least 18-24 solid donor toons, or I guess 40+ non-donor toons. Also, I couldn't keep their agro. The only time Jenkem ever loses agro is to another donor tank like Airion or Rafe. I was spamming donor BP, Hurricane swipe, Hurricane swipe clicky item, my HoH BP clicky, both agro disciplines, and yet the adds would still turn around and agro on my necro's pet. I have never lost agro to a pet before.

Xorp described our guild and raiding habits perfectly. I am only capable of running 6 toons on my current PC / rural internet connection. If I had the capacity, I would definitely run 12 toons and probably 18. It seems as if the more toons you box, the more useful you are in raid situations. Everyone wants to feel useful and needed .

[Sian]

Have you tried with the recent change ? You have 240 seconds now to deal with adds (135 before). You should be able I am sure.

[jkwon84]

[1] How many real people do you typically progression raid with?
---- Typically it was 2, as many as 4-5

[2] If you box, how many characters do you typically box and what is your latest progression tier?
---- Boxed a group of 6, past DSK3

[3] If you box, how many characters would you prefer to box?
----6

Quests should be fun and have a rewarding feeling to them. Doing a quest 18 times is a chore for most people. Developers don't like to develop chores So here is my final question to compare to your answer to question [3]:
---- I've never enjoyed quests haha. Though I dont mind the ones that follow along with the progress (like HOH quests)

[4] If you box, how many times would you be willing to repeat the Epic/Flag/Aura/<insert tough quest here> quests and still have fun doing it?
---- see above.


I feel like my boxing progression has been similar to some of the others here. I started with 1, then it was 2, then it was 4, then a full 6, half characters highly donored, and towards the end I thought about doing 2 groups. I got pretty far with my group of 6 alone. I was able to do all of HOH and some DSK3 bosses with just the 6. Though, I must say that macros have probably a greater impact on progress than the gear alone. Luckily I had someone in the guild to hold my hand through the whole mq2 process. The power and ability of MQ2 was a lot larger than I had thought.

As far as rebalancing the server/content/items etc:
It seems like a continuing theme here is the lack of players and the need to multibox to make up for it. I would suggest possibly revisiting the Hivequeen instance and building more instances/ideas around that. I really really liked it, and I felt really challenged with that instance. It was kind of buggy, but I think if more similar content (more polished?), that it would be beneficial to everyone. Make some 1 group max, 2 group max, 2 player max? Would it be possible to make some Unboxable(IP restrict)?

[Denizen]

Hive queen instance is probably the best one group instance in THF. Very well thought out, nice and challenging.

[Rude]

(I still lurk here and there ) Very glad to see this topic under discussion. I've actually spoken with a few players on live (where I'm currently gaming) who actually played THF for a while, and their #1 complaint was always the need for absurd amount of donor items. I kind of disagree in the number of donors necessary as you can get quite far without a stitch of it, but my beef has been with one (maybe two, if you count rogue weapon augs ) point of contention: the donor BP's. They are pretty darn essential at high tiers due to the amount of DPS/tankage required. The power of the BP's is ridiculously high in that they can multiply your dps by 10x, your ability to hold aggro, and your ability to effectively tank (DPS being the main issue here).

There really needs to be similar effects on T8/9 items to those of the donor BPs (though quite obviously not as powerful, maybe 50-70% as powerful?) I think the issue with non-donors is that no matter what they do or how far they progress, they'll never be but 1/5-1/10th as powerful as someone who has the donor bp/legs/etc. The gap between the two is quite large and is uncrossable.

Nerfing the content so that progression is smoother is ok, but it doesn't eliminate that gap in power. IIRC when the donor items first came out around SSRA, they were just a fraction of the gap between end-game content and donor, which was great because it still provided incentive to give but gave credibility to those who were unable/unwilling to donate. These days if you're a DPS class and you don't have your BP/legs/weapon you're considered a less than adequate DOT that likely requires healing. I haven't personally seen the effects on T9 gear as I haven't raided it yet, but from the things I saw on alla clone, they won't even touch on the ability to close the gap between donor and non donor (as most of those effects add on to the already OP'd effects on BP).

The effects on those donor items are very well thought out, coded, and balanced against each other nicely. It was just a peev of mine that even if I defeated the final tier 20 dozen times, I would never be 1/5 the quality of someone who gave more $$$ than I (primarily from a DPS perspective.)

Just my opinion I would like to one day return to THF and see the gap between the two much smaller. Not by nerfing BPs, but by adding similar but less powerful effects to raidable gear that does not stack with said donor items.