Even this seems a bit much - I’ve sunk almost as many hours into the dark sea as it took to beat the main story, and I don’t have a full set of new enchants - certainly not a full set of good ones.
Boosting a friend to max jewelcrafting was also a similar time investment. Can’t imagine solo grinding to Grand+ gems just to get the “necessary” stats.
Hell, going through the main story I didn’t even have a full set of gear upgraded to my level, “new loot” be damned, I didn’t have the old loot yet.
If the postgame dark-sea builds of this update are expected of players going into the nimbus sea, that seems like it would be an absurd difficulty spike for new players going through the story naturally.
So you’re saying the bosses in nimbus are going to be MUCH harder than calvus or the atlanteans now, especially for people who go straight to nimbus. Not AA levels of fairness, but they’re difficult… and fair while maybe being a little fun.
Even if the first range is gentle enough for weak boats, i still wish the brig wasn’t mandatory for insanity range one. Beggars can’t be choosers, i suppose.
Don’t worry, it’ll be adjusted several times over I’m sure. I say this with a very weighty grain of salt.
It’s already neigh unbearable to deal with open PVP- Elysium was certainly not a very good excuse for the current horrid optimization nor state of things, but at least the thought of everyone becoming twitchy caffeine addicts in order to combat some Very Tall German Guys who I can only assume are Kjartan-sized nerds with a few more axes between them makes me chuckle a bit.
On one part this is mildly relieving as it means everything in theory should balance out. On another, stats seem really massive for the first sea (even accounting for dark seas).
I mean the fishing alone for 200 bones is about an hour of fishing, and that’s with a good rod.
Then if you’re a new slot and don’t have literally 40+ unused gems in your inventory, you need to go out and get those, which is more hours - especially if you’re a new slot and don’t have a good boat yet for ship farming.
And this is enough XP for Fair gems, which are extremely substandard and only give +1 power and +4 sub-stats. You’d need to spend twice as much material for Grand, and about 4 times as much material for Perfect.
And then you’re not even done because you did all that to unlock the ability to craft the gems you actually wanted, so now you go out and gather even more material.
I agree that jewelcrafting is super fast to level if you have the material already, but we’re talking about new players with a few hours of playtime, who have just made it to Wind-Row following the main questline. That slot won’t have “all those random rare gems lying around untouched”, and won’t have hundreds of fish bones leftover from grinding sunkens.
Expecting remotely high jewelcrafting at that point in the story is unreasonable IMO.
There should prob be more encouragement mid story or in level gaps to grind dark sea before/during Nimbus if the sea is gonna be balanced with Dark Sea builds in mind then. Enizor is already one encouragement
For the original topic, powercreep is weird on a MMORPG because it’s kinda meant to have powercreep progression until you get to the very end (which AO isn’t at). At the same time, we can pretty much match our 250 level counterpart atp while still being half the level with the armor we have
I’m fine with what we have rn honestly, but my only concern is the new players/new files going through the whole story again + Nimbus, where Nimbus is specifically scaled from Dark Sea Gear like vetex said said here. I think we should be able to do the story without grinding too much between gaps
Personally I feel like Enizor’s quest is enough; we get it at level 125, right at the midpoint between the bronze sea and nimbus sea. The amount of dark crystals Enizor asks for can take multiple runs to acquire, giving the player a decent amount of time to familiarize themselves with how the dark sea functions, it’s content, and its rewards.
nah in aa we had like 2100+ health doing 530ish with a q with a good set, compared to ao having around 1800 health with 210 per attack with a stat check build
(i think i had 2500 health with 560 q damage, i based the numbers off that)
fair, I was thinking about the specific peaks we can reach with 125 in comparison to 250 in AA, we could already reach 4k health in AO at 125 while in AA you need to be level 250 to reach it + deal a lot more damage at AO 125 in comparison to AA 250 with a full power set
though this was mainly because armor + enchants was a bitch to get in AA but yea fair enough
I’m just kinda wondering how we’re gonna bridge the power gap between people who have dark sea loot vs people who just follow the story straight to Nimbus. You know? Like, what do you scale for? How much prep is the average player expected to have done
not what I meant. I’m saying that the story missions shouldn’t be scaled to a minmaxed player’s stats. Minmaxed players deserve to steamroll through the story or whatever, sure. But players who are just following quest markers shouldn’t be experiencing a huge difficulty spike because of it
It’s natural to fall off behind from others if you don’t grind in an RPG game, that’s just the norm with these games and the one thing they all have in common is that grinding is a necessity to be on par with others.
