The current cycle and how it can be improved

[Supvolcom-DN]

I've realized theres a cycle that I and any other player trying to enchant their gear is most likely going through during this patch. There are only a couple of items in the game that are important, and they are used to acquire way too much of the content.

• Ancient Guiding Stones
• Ancient Kibrium
• Fighting Spirit Fragments
• AP
• Kinah

Whatever part of gear progression you're doing, you need to use a combination of these mats.

1. Morphing a Legendary PvP stone costs fragments which cost kibrium, guiding stones, kinah and AP.
2. Then you use your PvP stones to enchant your gear.
3. To be safe, most people will use Ultimate PvP stones to get +14 or +15 on their legendary pieces. These cost 25 frags each along with 5 legendary stones, so 50 frags total
4. Eventually your gear is +15 and its ready to upgrade.
5. To upgrade you again need fragments and AP.
6. By now you've already spent hundreds of fragments and millions and millions of kinah for just one piece. Now you need hundreds more for the upgrade. This means more kibrium, more guiding stones, kinah, and AP.

This is the process for just 1 piece getting to Ultimate+0

Adding the morphs was a great improvement, but its not quite there.

My suggestions:

• Create more ways to receive fighting spirit fragments. An easy and effective way could be adding them to the PvP daily quests around the map. Even 5 fragments per quest will result in the map booming with PvP and incentivize players to venture onto each other's sides of Lakrum for more than just camp weeklies.
• Add fragments to the rewards for pvp instances & sieges. Same reasoning as above. This will be another incentive for players to participate in these parts of the game. PvP content should reward mats used for PvP gear.
• Fixing the dredge meta while we're at it. Currently dredge is not pvp or pve. Its just training, killing the 2 or 3 bosses you get while the enemy gets the other 2 or 3. MAYBE you end up pvping for 1 or 2 fights. A way to help dredge could be adding a chance for each room's boss to drop stone bags, not just the set ones that currently drop them. This is force teams to go throughout the level to maximize their drops. Adding fighting spirit fragments to the winning team would also incentivize teams to continue fighting for the victory after the important bosses have died.
• Give normal mobs a small (10%) chance to drop Ancient Kibrium. Currently the standard for Kib farming dual boxing 2 accounts and running back and forth from mob to mob. This results in 4 kibrium every 4-5 minutes and the most dull MMO experience you can think of. If normal mobs could drop kibrium, players could have some flexibility.
• FFS please buff the amount of kinah we receive from white drops. Considering the only real way to make money is selling mats or crafted items, and we all those mats as stated above, the playerbase is slowly running out of kinah. Giving white drops an actual value like that used to have will help with this issue and allow us to buy those crafting mats a little easier.

@Cyan I'm really Interested in your thoughts on these and if you think its possible to see any of them in the future. These suggestions shouldn't be too intense for the development team and the results would be phenomenal for the community.

[Capa-KT]

6 minutes ago, Supvolcom-DN said:

• players could have some flexibility.

*bots

otherwise good ideas

[Squid]

While your ideas are nice i can not see people actually participating if any of these changes came in. In-fact i think all you would get is people going full baby rage about people getting more free shit for trading with alts or bots getting more kinah than they can farm from instances.

[Lapis-DN]

every line of this thread is valuable and valid! 
But... guys... NcWest can do nothing about quality of life improvements in this game. The game comes patched for overseas clients from Korea, so they're basically doing what korea asks and want. This is the way this game is designed, spend LOTS of money or stay/stuck with your lesser gear. 
Sometimes there are exceptions, this is the case of crafting enchantment stones and 6.5 enchantment rates. But most of time they wont do anything because they cant. 

 

 

[Supvolcom-DN]

7 hours ago, HealingSquid-KT said:

While your ideas are nice i can not see people actually participating if any of these changes came in. In-fact i think all you would get is people going full baby rage about people getting more free shit for trading with alts or bots getting more kinah than they can farm from instances.

Why couldn't you see players participating? When the game was at its best you needed medals and AP for gear and xforms. The only way to get them was through pvp instances and open world pvp. There was open world pvp ALL over Gelk, Inggison, Reshanta, Silentera Canyon. People perma-kisked, pugs grouped up to make things a little easier if they weren't as good or geared. The game was full of action even when siege or dredge weren't up.

If we implemented even 1 of my suggestions, the fragments from pvp dailies idea, the player base would react the same way they did in 2.X. They would start forming groups, roaming around the map, trying to get each area's daily complete. If they really don't want pvp that bad, then they dont deserve or need pvp gear.

[Supvolcom-DN]

2 hours ago, Lapis-DN said:

every line of this thread is valuable and valid! 
But... guys... NcWest can do nothing about quality of life improvements in this game. The game comes patched for overseas clients from Korea, so they're basically doing what korea asks and want. This is the way this game is designed, spend LOTS of money or stay/stuck with your lesser gear. 
Sometimes there are exceptions, this is the case of crafting enchantment stones and 6.5 enchantment rates. But most of time they wont do anything because they cant. 

 

 

The fact that the 6.5 enchant changes came through is proof that its possible for other QoL changes. I know this is NCSoft but I think even some confirmation that they've seen these suggestions or ones like it, and if they agree with them they'll suggest them to Korea... that'd look great for NCWest and would make a lot of players feel a bit better knowing they're on our side in a way.

[Vantheria-DN]

8 hours ago, Supvolcom-DN said:

• Create more ways to receive fighting spirit fragments. An easy and effective way could be adding them to the PvP daily quests around the map. Even 5 fragments per quest will result in the map booming with PvP and incentivize players to venture onto each other's sides of Lakrum for more than just camp weeklies.

A+. I always do my weekly camps and a lot of the daily kill quests already. I'd do even more kill quests if I got fragments from them. Even with the 40 fragments Prestige quest, it's not enough since we need a lot to morph ultimate stones, as you said.

[StaNooblaitK-KT]

Yea you tell em! 3sk them like hpc days if they don't dude, take they lunch money. We want stuff and things!!!

[Squid]

5 hours ago, Supvolcom-DN said:

Why couldn't you see players participating? When the game was at its best you needed medals and AP for gear and xforms. The only way to get them was through pvp instances and open world pvp. There was open world pvp ALL over Gelk, Inggison, Reshanta, Silentera Canyon. People perma-kisked, pugs grouped up to make things a little easier if they weren't as good or geared. The game was full of action even when siege or dredge weren't up.

If we implemented even 1 of my suggestions, the fragments from pvp dailies idea, the player base would react the same way they did in 2.X. They would start forming groups, roaming around the map, trying to get each area's daily complete. If they really don't want pvp that bad, then they dont deserve or need pvp gear.

2.X it was a necessity to group up you needed to if you did not want to go backwards in AP for the day because 10 deaths was your AP you earned from instances. The play style was different now you just keep progressing even if you lose while back in 2.X days you could actually go backwards in progression.

5 hours ago, Supvolcom-DN said:

The fact that the 6.5 enchant changes came through is proof that its possible for other QoL changes. I know this is NCSoft but I think even some confirmation that they've seen these suggestions or ones like it, and if they agree with them they'll suggest them to Korea... that'd look great for NCWest and would make a lot of players feel a bit better knowing they're on our side in a way.

This explains my point perfectly actually. What happened after the QoL changes to the enchant rates.

Did you see an improvement in participation in Dredge? It does not seem like it as your discussing 

Are factions that were losing participating as a faction in siege and being able to capture the fort at lower buff levels?

Are evergale better with participation?

 

To me i have seen 0 improvement in-fact i have seen the opposite now instead of people complaining about how impossible it is to get legendary gear they are just complaining about how hard it is to get ultimate.

 

Again tho i actually agree with what your suggesting as your suggestions would be great QoL changes however it still would not see an improvement in participation. We are in a situation where its cool to steal from your faction rather then work with your faction. Legendary kibrium + Genesis camp quests and so on. People would rather get them done solo because they can be done solo. Not because its more efficient to do them solo.

This means if you run in to the enemy faction and you have white names around you they will more then likely decline. It is sad to see people would rather die alone then attempt player interaction. Especially those with yellow/low enchanted purple PvP GEAR.

[Bastikan-DN]

3 hours ago, HealingSquid-KT said:

2.X it was a necessity to group up you needed to if you did not want to go backwards in AP for the day because 10 deaths was your AP you earned from instances. The play style was different now you just keep progressing even if you lose while back in 2.X days you could actually go backwards in progression.

This explains my point perfectly actually. What happened after the QoL changes to the enchant rates.

Did you see an improvement in participation in Dredge? It does not seem like it as your discussing 

Are factions that were losing participating as a faction in siege and being able to capture the fort at lower buff levels?

Are evergale better with participation?

 

To me i have seen 0 improvement in-fact i have seen the opposite now instead of people complaining about how impossible it is to get legendary gear they are just complaining about how hard it is to get ultimate.

 

Again tho i actually agree with what your suggesting as your suggestions would be great QoL changes however it still would not see an improvement in participation. We are in a situation where its cool to steal from your faction rather then work with your faction. Legendary kibrium + Genesis camp quests and so on. People would rather get them done solo because they can be done solo. Not because its more efficient to do them solo.

This means if you run in to the enemy faction and you have white names around you they will more then likely decline. It is sad to see people would rather die alone then attempt player interaction. Especially those with yellow/low enchanted purple PvP GEAR.

Without due respect, you are not playing the same game as everyone else.

[Squid]

20 minutes ago, Gensb-DN said:

Without due respect, you are not playing the same game as everyone else.

Well maybe everyone should be playing Aion then not w/e it is they are talking about on the Aion forums.

However if you want a serious response it would be at least 15 pages. The issue is my english not so good you see so um... no one would read it all.

[Bastikan-DN]

1 minute ago, HealingSquid-KT said:

Well maybe everyone should be playing Aion then not w/e it is they are talking about on the Aion forums.

Let me break it down for you.  

With increased kinah from vendoring, people will be out farming more.  Yes, bots will prosper from it, but so will everyone else.

With Fighting Spirit Fragments as a pvp daily quest reward, people will want to complete that daily EVERY day.  It is such a vital material that people will be out fighting for these mats.

With Fighting Spirit Fragments coming as possible rewards in PvP instances, people will have more reason to pay luna to reset it.  That's more revenue for the game as well as more rewards for players.

You are agreeing with Quality of Life IMPROVEMENTS, yet are in denial that these IMPROVEMENTS will IMPROVE player activity.

[Squid]

Just now, Gensb-DN said:

Let me break it down for you.  

With increased kinah from vendoring, people will be out farming more.  Yes, bots will prosper from it, but so will everyone else.

Its mind boggling how you can think such a thing when players quit farming because of the bots. It was impossible to compete for locations when 10+ ranger bots are teleporting to the mobs moving faster then you and zerging regions. Currently you are better off farming in the other factions side because you can control those bots by killing them. 

With Fighting Spirit Fragments as a pvp daily quest reward, people will want to complete that daily EVERY day.  It is such a vital material that people will be out fighting for these mats.

People will do exactly what they do in arena/evergale/dredge/ID and that is use their alts to get this done. They will move their alts in a group log out at said location then log back in when they run there on their mains.

With Fighting Spirit Fragments coming as possible rewards in PvP instances, people will have more reason to pay luna to reset it.  That's more revenue for the game as well as more rewards for players.

This again does not help promote participation.

You are agreeing with Quality of Life IMPROVEMENTS, yet are in denial that these IMPROVEMENTS will IMPROVE player activity.

Pretty sure i was using the word participation. There is a difference.

You can actively obtain anything you want in this game with out actually participating in any of the content. Again refer to the second blue text for a great example of people who actively obtain victories by avoiding participation against members of the other factions/other players in general.

[Ele-DN]

Don't need any more pve instance camping.... just increase the yield from deing pvp gear.

[Matsukamy-KT]

13 minutes ago, Ele-DN said:

Don't need any more pve instance camping.... just increase the yield from deing pvp gear.

Yeah, I believe this is a good solution, but never will be implemented. No need for all these mambo jambo.

Also, very few ppl in this game are interested in any sort of  pvp that don't have the afk option.

[Lucimon-DN]

On ‎2‎/‎4‎/‎2019 at 11:51 PM, Supvolcom-DN said:

I've realized theres a cycle that I and any other player trying to enchant their gear is most likely going through during this patch. There are only a couple of items in the game that are important, and they are used to acquire way too much of the content.

• Ancient Guiding Stones
• Ancient Kibrium
• Fighting Spirit Fragments
• AP
• Kinah

Whatever part of gear progression you're doing, you need to use a combination of these mats.

1. Morphing a Legendary PvP stone costs fragments which cost kibrium, guiding stones, kinah and AP.
2. Then you use your PvP stones to enchant your gear.
3. To be safe, most people will use Ultimate PvP stones to get +14 or +15 on their legendary pieces. These cost 25 frags each along with 5 legendary stones, so 50 frags total
4. Eventually your gear is +15 and its ready to upgrade.
5. To upgrade you again need fragments and AP.
6. By now you've already spent hundreds of fragments and millions and millions of kinah for just one piece. Now you need hundreds more for the upgrade. This means more kibrium, more guiding stones, kinah, and AP.

This is the process for just 1 piece getting to Ultimate+0

Adding the morphs was a great improvement, but its not quite there.

My suggestions:

• Create more ways to receive fighting spirit fragments. An easy and effective way could be adding them to the PvP daily quests around the map. Even 5 fragments per quest will result in the map booming with PvP and incentivize players to venture onto each other's sides of Lakrum for more than just camp weeklies.
• Add fragments to the rewards for pvp instances & sieges. Same reasoning as above. This will be another incentive for players to participate in these parts of the game. PvP content should reward mats used for PvP gear.
• Fixing the dredge meta while we're at it. Currently dredge is not pvp or pve. Its just training, killing the 2 or 3 bosses you get while the enemy gets the other 2 or 3. MAYBE you end up pvping for 1 or 2 fights. A way to help dredge could be adding a chance for each room's boss to drop stone bags, not just the set ones that currently drop them. This is force teams to go throughout the level to maximize their drops. Adding fighting spirit fragments to the winning team would also incentivize teams to continue fighting for the victory after the important bosses have died.
• Give normal mobs a small (10%) chance to drop Ancient Kibrium. Currently the standard for Kib farming dual boxing 2 accounts and running back and forth from mob to mob. This results in 4 kibrium every 4-5 minutes and the most dull MMO experience you can think of. If normal mobs could drop kibrium, players could have some flexibility.
• FFS please buff the amount of kinah we receive from white drops. Considering the only real way to make money is selling mats or crafted items, and we all those mats as stated above, the playerbase is slowly running out of kinah. Giving white drops an actual value like that used to have will help with this issue and allow us to buy those crafting mats a little easier.

@Cyan I'm really Interested in your thoughts on these and if you think its possible to see any of them in the future. These suggestions shouldn't be too intense for the development team and the results would be phenomenal for the community.

They could make the dredge mobs a lot harder to kill / take dmg from that way training becomes difficult  as far as it going to be pvp everyone knows when their team loses so they usually just afk so theres no fix there really >.<

[Aftershocktwo-DN]

22 hours ago, HealingSquid-KT said:

2.X it was a necessity to group up you needed to if you did not want to go backwards in AP for the day because 10 deaths was your AP you earned from instances. The play style was different now you just keep progressing even if you lose while back in 2.X days you could actually go backwards in progression.

This explains my point perfectly actually. What happened after the QoL changes to the enchant rates.

Did you see an improvement in participation in Dredge? It does not seem like it as your discussing 

Are factions that were losing participating as a faction in siege and being able to capture the fort at lower buff levels?

Are evergale better with participation?

 

To me i have seen 0 improvement in-fact i have seen the opposite now instead of people complaining about how impossible it is to get legendary gear they are just complaining about how hard it is to get ultimate.

 

Again tho i actually agree with what your suggesting as your suggestions would be great QoL changes however it still would not see an improvement in participation. We are in a situation where its cool to steal from your faction rather then work with your faction. Legendary kibrium + Genesis camp quests and so on. People would rather get them done solo because they can be done solo. Not because its more efficient to do them solo.

This means if you run in to the enemy faction and you have white names around you they will more then likely decline. It is sad to see people would rather die alone then attempt player interaction. Especially those with yellow/low enchanted purple PvP GEAR.

Trying to recall when guard farming solo/duo for massive amounts of AP and resources became a thing. Late 2.x or 3.x?

[Timmain-KT]

3 minutes ago, 2s30B77F-DN said:

Trying to recall when guard farming solo/duo for massive amounts of AP and resources became a thing. Late 2.x or 3.x?

OG fortress guard farming was pretty much at launch.

The super rifted to guards with the fat loot was sometime in 3.0 patches, iirc.

[Aftershocktwo-DN]

Right. There were definitely various ways to collect AP solo/duo/trio, outside of Dredge and other group methods.

 

I remember when Dredge launched.... What a time to be alive.

[Timmain-KT]

AP loss on death was still awful, lol. I deranked from R2 to R3 during a siege because I died so many times. q_q Back when getting the APz was still hard!

[Squid]

19 minutes ago, 2s30B77F-DN said:

Trying to recall when guard farming solo/duo for massive amounts of AP and resources became a thing. Late 2.x or 3.x?

As far as i re-call 2.X you had the group/alliance legendary mob farming at the walls in Gelk/IGG. As to guard farming are we talking about the guards that spawned at the gates?

[DevilNest-KT]

39 minutes ago, 2s30B77F-DN said:

Trying to recall when guard farming solo/duo for massive amounts of AP and resources became a thing. Late 2.x or 3.x?

at  3.5  Barricades guards that spawned at certain times and locations in Gelk/inggi  droped huge ammounts of AP.  ( Major Crowns & Mithril Medals ) i think they still exist but i dont think high lvl toons can get any drop, rifts are Lvl locked but i guess we can still travel tru silentera canyon?

[Aftershocktwo-DN]

I'm not sure on the specifics on the 2.x guards or what their worth was. 3.5 and pre 2.9 (if that's an accurate time frame) are fairly far apart so the original statement is likely still valid, assuming the previous guards didn't dump as much as the barricade guards did.

 

 

 

[Capa-KT]

3 hours ago, DevilNest-KT said:

at  3.5  Barricades guards that spawned at certain times and locations in Gelk/inggi  droped huge ammounts of AP.  ( Major Crowns & Mithril Medals ) i think they still exist but i dont think high lvl toons can get any drop, rifts are Lvl locked but i guess we can still travel tru silentera canyon?

Silentera Canyon is level locked, can't go through at level 56 or higher. But the guards still spawn and old macros still work.

Anyways, it wasn't meant for lvl 80s to go AP farm there. The whole point of keeping that area + Gelk/Inggi + BT dropping legendaries (+ the soft level cap at lvl 55, the last campaign) was for the Korean servers' lvl 55s twinks, there's a few streamers that still play at that level on the older servers, last I checked.

[Bryos-DN]

Well, being technical, Silentera Canyon doesnt even exist as an area anymore. Nowadays its just an instance.