First of all let me say the general patch level of the server feels like it is the right one for the current state of the game and its community.
Servers that went deep into TOA territory and beyond have never been a great success in the Freeshard scene. Classic servers on the other hand have seen thousands of players at their peak on several different Feeshards. Clearly the preferance of the average DAoC Freeshard player tilts toward Classic.
Over time however, flaws of a fully classic server have been exposed mainly in regards to balancing. So what happened was, devs of other Freeshards tried to customise the game in many ways, creating dissatisfaction and confusion throughout the playerbase, not necessarily because their attempts to balance certain things were wrong but more because it is generally not very liked to have changes/nerfs to your characters or style of playing the game when you have been doing it for months or years. There for try to get the balancing done during an i50/full cap template phase, no need to rush anything without any other Freeshard at the horizon.
I personally believe someones opinion on „balance“ is usually very subjective and „balance“ is something that often times contradicts the concept of DAoC itself with its unique classes and abilitys that every realm has, I do however feel like Edens approach of allowing TOA bonuses, without the weapons and active abilitys (ML's and such) is a good and a fresh approach in the freeshard scene, which to me has been proven by the amount of people playing a Beta.
One thing I personally would have preferred to be left out of the game are the CL levels and the abilitys that come with it but then again I don't know the reason/thought process of including those.
If you are a dev/gm of Eden and read up to this point please note that from here on it will mostly be suggestions and critique. There is so much positive things to say about what you have done but in this post I want to be constructive and not put honey around your mouth (german saying that probably sounds stupid in english, but you get the jist of it
).Lets start brainstorming what comes into mind.
- I've noticed you can hand in dungeon quest rewards for a full level whenever you want, aslong as you accepted and did the quest at a certain level range. So it is possible to just safe up on dungeon quests and get from 46 or 47 to 50 just by handing in the quests which makes those levels 46-50 a dead area for pve/grouping. The concept of the Dungeon quest is amazing, don't let it be abused like that.
- Increase the social bonus for inviting a stealther to your pve group from 5% to 20% (saying this as someone who never plays stealther and would probably vote for deleting them from the game if there would be a voting) But if they are there, let everyone benefit from them.
- Darkness Falls was the most fun I have ever had compared to any other server. Reason for it was the fact it was open to all realms at all times and had a few items that were good in templates. By removing the chest pieces from DF it will hurt the action alot. One solution could be to have Diamond Seals be an equivalent to Eden Shards and offer Sidi/TG/Galla items at the Diamond vendors. I don't think those 2 will be in competition with eachother. Most people will still follow the safe route and grind Eden Shards by doing Raids and such (assuming thats the system you will run with anyway). But it will also create incentive to go to DF and compete with other realms.
- Improve placement of NPCs. Go through every location that you can port to via channeler and bring healer, hastener, channeler and bindstone closer together
) Having a ACC Vault only in capitol city is a good thing imo. Generated some life in the capitols.- BD pets seem awfully hard to kill under certain circumstances. I had one time spamming blizzard blade on a bd pet and i barely got it under 80% at any given time. Unfortunately I can't recreate this and since I haven't encountered such an unkillable pet anymore. Just throwing it out there.
- Surely you are aware of pet pathing issues.
- This is probably a flaw of NF design but if something could be done about slowing down to walking speed when running at slopes in certain angles that would be a blessing.
- Consider voting on allowing diving in water. I truely believe the vast majority would vote against it. Until today there are barely any games that have enjoyable water combat, DAoC is definately not in that category either.
- Consider a low chance of very high utility ROGs (100-150Utility) on high level frontier mobs (DF and SH especially)
- Consider drastically decreasing the amount of mobs in new frontiers, especially along common roads/pathes people take. Leave the Boss encounters in and make their loot equal to Llyn Barfog, Cursed Forest, and the Mid equivalent which name escapes me right now). 70-120 Utility ROGs in my opinion.
- One thing that is very important to me is a staff that monitors themselves. I don't expect any statement regarding this but if the slightest suspecion/incident of power abuse by a GM becomes public it could destructively hurt the server and always leaves a bad taste in peoples mouths. This is a FREEshard after all so I appreciate all the work people do for FREE so we can still enjoy this game.
Thats about it for now. Will add more in the future if things come to mind. Thanks to the staff for the great work!
