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mirage

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Posts posted by mirage

  6. Kamaloka Bug

    in Bug reports

    Posted

    I'm no admin but I'm 100% sure you're not getting exp for something you haven't killed. Even if the boss were at 1%, tough luck, try again.

    And make sure that after you die, you rebuff and start hitting the boss again quickly. If you don't hit it for a while (3 or 5 minutes, don't remember exactly), it just gives up and leaves.

  10. Soul Harmony enchant recycle (inspector)

    in Bug reports

    Posted

    Soul Harmony +0 has reuse delay 600s (10 minutes).

    When enchanting for reuse (Recycle route), description says each enchant level reduces reuse by 10s, which is in accordance with Freya scripts.

    But the actual reuse delay is like it was on Gracia Final, e.g. Recycle +6 has reuse delay approx. 490s (8min 10s).

    So which one is correct?

     

  11. Discussion for Falling Star Event

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Now my impressions of this event. I'll start with the positives, but it will go downhill. You've been warned.

     

    The basic idea of the event is great. Using mechanics that are in the game and combining them in a way that's never been done by NCsoft... brilliant. You're even using their mechanics better than they do. Just compare gathering star shards above Aden to collecting star stones over Gracia (also known as "Vast Dumpbin of Unfinished and Glitchy Mechanics" area). In Aurabird form you have huge collision cylinder, most of the time you can't extract the stone from below, you need to be right on top of it; some stones spawn too close to the floating seeds that you cannot approach at all. It's a mess. Collecting on a wyvern over Aden is way smoother. Although it looks pretty bad when it plunges its head (or the rider!) right into the star shard, given the limitations of the game engine, I think it's better to favor playability over visuals (stuff clipping into other stuff is just so common in L2 that it's not worth trying to avoid).

     

    Extraction Tool crafting is good. A clever way of pulling some crap mats out of warehouses. Sure, varnish and iron ore are not exactly crap mats, but they're still very easy to get (you can snatch literally thousands of those from low-level manor each day). But to shut the complaints about this next time, maybe you can make the crafting a bit more involved, with more event-only mats. Make mobs drop star dust, sulfur, apple pie pieces, whatever. Combine these with small amounts of regular mats to make tools. I know it's more difficult to balance, but look at other events and quests involving multiple item kinds -- NCsoft also didn't bother balancing those, there's always one under-supplied and the rest abundant. Next, I think recipes dropping from mobs don't work well -- the drop rate must not be too low because that'd be a participation barrier, but also not too high because you only need one -- it'd be better if you could either buy a recipe for some mats (c.f. Summer Squash event), or the tools were crafted by the town's Blacksmith NPC (because such specialized tools should only be crafted by experts).

     

    A note regarding mid-event drop rate increase. In my opinion that actually hurt the event you created. It was like pouring more water into a leaky bucket; it didn't address the reward system's issues. Before the increase, there was a bit of a market, people could choose whether they wanted to try their luck or sell the pieces to others. After the increase they're just too abundant. Whoever wants to spend hours collecting shards can do that with just the tools they farm themselves, and the rest throws them away because they're unsellable.

     

    Now I'm getting to the reward system, and that's something I'd completely overhaul.

    Remember that event in which you play rock-paper-scissors with a cat, and get rewards depending on how many consecutive wins you get? One of the dumbest events. You talk to an NPC and click through the same dialogue over and over and over.

    I've gathered roughly 600 low, 100 mid, 30 high star shards over the past week (I didn't keep records so take those as coarse estimates). Clicking through that was such a pain that if I had the option to sell the low shards to shop for adena, I'd do that (the scrolls they yielded were worth a few million to shop). I got 2 A-grade weapons and 2 A-grade jewels from mid, so I shouldn't be complaining about the rewards themselves, but I will. Potions: Why can't I use them on a character I'll start next month? Why can't I trade blue cocktails for red, or give/sell them to someone who needs warrior buffs? Enchants: D/C-grade enchants, really? Don't even start with newcomers; at best they'll be able to sell EWD/EWC to someone who wants a red-glowing walking stick, the rest is either easily obtainable from solo kamaloka (EAD/EAC) or garbage nobody would use (blessed D/C enchants). More tool pieces: just no. When a tool breaks upon use and you get some pieces back, that's fine. It's a clever (or wicked, depending on how you look at it) trick to keep people in the game. But getting a not-so-small amount of pieces as the final reward feels too much like there's no end to it.

     

    As others have mentioned, getting the same junk from high-grade shards is stupid. I understand that you didn't want to overshoot with the rewards, or that you wanted to keep them in the spirit of L2 (c.f. Life Stones, Summer Squash etc. where so-called high-grades give the same junk low-grades do). But I think it'd be better to abandon NCsoft standards in this regard. You could make higher grades yield better rewards, and tweak the low:mid:high ratio accordingly.

    Which leads me back to the crafting system. When I spoke about making it more involved, I actually had two parts in mind. The first part is crafting the extraction tool. The second would follow star shard extraction. I'd make the shards mere materials -- only the 3 colors, no grades. After gathering a bunch you'd combine them with some Varnish and Suede and get a few low/mid/high-grade star crystals. There'd be fewer reward-items in total, so each could be more rewarding. And make them capsule items, click to unwrap.

     

    You could also make the extraction phase a little bit more attractive. (In addition to somehow avoiding multiple shards spawning in one place. I know NCsoft didn't bother to fix this, but they don't have different colors in one place). Imagine if there was a chance to extract something more valuable directly from the shard, a firework would go off so others would see and ask what it was? Soul crystal? Attribute crystal? S80 recipe? (I'm not a fan of full weapons/armors as event rewards)

     

    Alright, that was a bit longer than I anticipated, so to sum it up: hats off for the guts to serve a custom event. Looking forward to the next.

     

  12. Discussion for Falling Star Event

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Two minor bugs I found (last week, haven't checked since today's restart):

    - if you use the extraction tool while having over 80% full inventory, casting goes off as usual but nothing happens afterwards. No item extracted, no message telling you what's wrong

    - extraction tool piece tooltip says its weight is 0, but it's actually 20

     

  22. Discussion for Falling Star Event

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by mirage

    @Emca all update archives are missing important parts, npcname and npcgrp. Last night I thought the two npcs in Aden were invisible by design (ran into one of them accidentally). There was nothing in the sky. Now I found some rabbits floating around. Neither of them red, green, or blue. They're all white!

     

    edit: oh nvm, I had update from saturday, thought that because it already had items and skills it was 100% ready. fixed

  25. Paladin is a weak class ...

    in Solved

    Posted · Edited by mirage

    44 minutes ago, Eldax said:

    So after next update shrine paladins will stack icons, and become the weaknest class?

    I don't think so. It's difficult to find reliable GE-specific sources, we can at best guess what happened between GF and Freya. Icons haven't changed, and Boost Morale was added.

    The only mention of these in patch notes is from High Five: Flame Icon - No longer overlaps with Totem skills.

    Here we can again guess whether Boost Morale and/or Angelic Icon qualify as Totem skills. Personally I'd say Boost Morale does, the buff is very similar in nature, while Angelic Icon is more like Zealot. But that's just my opinion which in the end doesn't matter. In Freya scripts both BM and AI are of the same type as totems, so it seems they haven't touched these skills until H5. Maybe the information was just lost in translation -- Icon and Totem are related concepts.