Difficulty/Economy/Group play

[deep grail]

Everything up to Bonemass is relatively fine, with Bonemass being the first real hurdle. This is mainly because of the assassins. However, immediately after Bonemass I felt like a god. Just face roll my way through the game. I did not enchant anything until after Moder and used iron-tier gear well into the plains, yet I had no issues with anything (except poison dots, but this is class dependent). While it is fun to feel immortal, the novelty wears off quickly when I can jump into the middle of fuling villages and facetank everything or solo 7 Moder's at once.

Demigods mod may be enabling this type of gameplay. However, this mod is also incredibly fun. To the point where I'd consider it one of the best mods on the list (Not that the others are bad, there's plenty of great and impactful mods in the pack). So I would like to see this mod stay, but I could understand it getting nerfed or removed altogether.

So how can we increase the difficulty while keeping the fun things intact and promoting meaningful gameplay?

I propose some buffs across the board to a few things. Initially, TTK increased. Mild buffs to enemy hp (excluding bosses) per *. This change is more of a scaling buff to later mobs. This change should be felt the most when taking on multiple mobs, as the extra hit or two it may take to kill something will add up. This should promote a more strategic approach to handling groups of enemies while slightly reigning in on dps'ing your way out of what should be an undesirable engagement.

I don't recommend a damage buff initially, but it should be kept in mind. I do however, if possible, suggest tightening the *'s the mobs spawn with the further out you go. When I'm cruising around the deep north/ashlands in blackmetal/carapace gear and coming across low * mobs I do not feel threatened in the slightest. Only when a couple specific mobs are high * do I feel the need to play carefully. If this isn't possible then naturally a damage buff to enemies would be the next step.

In your (Atlas) video you mentioned cutting the hp and stamina obtained with the mmo levels. I agree with this and fully support this. While the change isn't huge, it will make getting hit more meaningful (another reason to hold off on a damage buff) and make stamina feel less like you have infinite. This change also promotes using stam based foods. Currently I feel 0 need to ever use stam based food when I can just stack hp and rely on whatever else to provide stam/ stam regen.

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Target buffing the "tough" mobs of each biome. Such as trolls, aboms, brutes, lox, soldiers etc or adding in more new strong/overtuned enemies. The strong mobs should feel tough, scary and seen as an obstacle. They do not. Just dps them down like any other mob because you're a god and basically immortal. You don't have to fight them, running away is an option. This also promotes more group play. Taking down a suped up troll is easier with multiple people, but it's also still possible for a solo player if they kite/play well. This should serve to slow down progress a little in some areas and should feel somewhat rewarding.

This also serves as an indirect buff to miners. Black forest gear, as an example, revolves around troll hide and bronze gear. Troll hide will be harder to obtain, therefore more people will want bronze based gear. More people using bronze can create short-term bottlenecks requiring people to explore to find more caves. Group play incentives.

Next map you have stated you will be locking professions. This is an interesting change and I do support it. However a couple of things may be necessary to get the most value out of trying this. Aside from the no xp gain on profession bug which has the ability to negatively impact testing this. Solo play also gets gutted, but it is what it is.

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Firstly, all forms of infinite gold exploits would have to be patched. There's at least 3 I know of and I would encourage players to report any they find. Secondly, there may be too much gold available, particularly burial chambers, crypts and riches enchants. After all, what's the point of gold if it's plentiful. Early on this shouldn't be too much of a problem, later on unless there's gold sinks it'll barely be a currency (Guild halls aside). This also would indirectly buff foraging. If nerfing available sources of gold isn't possible then jack up the prices of the trades/merchants.

Setting min prices for the trade market for every item. This could quite easily birth a healthy economy. But there's almost no way the effort put in will be worth it. Unless something that makes this super easy/ straightforward already exists, but I wouldn't know about it. So almost wholly disregard this.

Going forward the decision to limit the first 3 weeks of a server to subs is very understandable. I believe the best results and insights from locking professions and economic development would come from a high initial player count. Unless the sub count is high then we may not see the best results we possibly could. Perhaps having the server open early and locking later may be worth considering? Although this could be kind of predatory, get people invested, then charge money and I could imagine it would be annoying to set up compared to locking initially. Just some thoughts about it.

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Also when locking professions what's stopping people from grouping up and not charging each other for services? This kind of makes fully supporting an economy difficult. Unless you tell people to only use the player market and everyone stays honest?

Regarding tombstone lock. The locking of tombstones is good. However with the amount of server crashes we experience and the large boot up time (30 minutes). If you die and a crash happens, 30 minutes is enough time that you may run into real world obligations. This kind of guarantees a grave wipe if you get a little bit unlucky. Either the time it takes to wipe would have to be greatly extended or the lock would have to be removed so someone else can grab your corpse? Unless you just ask a mod to do a retrieval or ask for a player rollback as this should be a somewhat rare occurrence. Unless the server magically starts booting up in 5 minutes this could be pretty brutal when it happens.

Aside from the above. Most things do seem fine. I've enjoyed my time playing so far.

[pearl wraith]

Aristide - Well thought out comments!

I was curious - which class/demigod combination were you using while feeling overpowered? Maybe that one needs to be tuned.. or more testing needs to happen on the others.

One minor potential side effect of buffing TTK via mild buffs to enemy hp per * - Frejya can only briefly tame enemies up to a certain HP per * - so that might need to be adjusted.

I like the idea of buffed "tough" mobs per biome and it could sort of "lock down" certain areas of that biome. "Don't build there.. or the X will come and absolutely wreck you anytime you leave base (assuming you're warded)."

In regards to the massive amounts of stam.. I'm still running a stam food to drop my class skills whenever I need to.. (shrug)

And for the gold amounts.. I don't know about you, but I routinely put down gold piles all around my base. 😄

[thick eagle]

• Most of the bosses thus far are just me testing out mechanics
• true but i also have attempted to balance demigods yet
• i dont intend to for the current map
• hp buffs makes things spongy. CLLC already handles this well enough
• yes i'll be cutting effect of levels overall
• profession skills and such will be locked and everything will be made to level much slower than normal skills. As these are professions and not skills they should be one of the main ways of earning money for people
• what infinite gold exploits?
• yes eventually i'll balance where who and what is with gold sinks
  "high player count, high player count, high player count" and yet no one is using the marketplace, trading etc. again you keep saying high player count high player count, drop it. it's dead. THe fault lies in the users not wanting to roleplay the game and the direction of the game as is
• nothing, and i genuinely dont care enough to stress over it anymore.
• git gud. modertorss are not there to play support. they're strictly there to ban. i also wont be doing player rollbacks. You died. Suck it up.

[pearl wraith]

I check the marketplace everytime I'm at the Hub.
I think part of my challenge on the current map (without waystones) ... it's a challenge to get to the hub. It isn't as accessible to use without a slower voyage on a Longship or a taxi-ride (if a sailor is on and available).