My 5.6 feedback thread

[Magikarp-DN]

oh hey i can log into the forums
This patch solves a lot of the outstanding issues that the 5.X path introduced, but also introduces a new problem with enchanting, and leaves some things to be desired. My post will cover my views on the availability, and/or lack thereof, of those all important purple consumables to free players such as myself, my gripes with changes to enchanting and game systems, and also my overall experience playing during the 5.X patches.

Omegas, temperings, manastones, and mythic supplements Galore!  (and plenty of lesser consumables)
These important consumables were all made more available through Luna and archdaeva dungeons. As seen by the recent ranking changes on the Daily Contaminated Underpath Luna dungeon, getting these consumables does still require a bit work on the player end. Starting with manastones, the weekly Luna manastone bundle is a great addition as it allows a free player who puts some time into playing the game (7x weekly Lunas) to realistically have access to relevant manastones and gear in the 5.X patch. (Seriously, what was I supposed to do with all of those +1+2+3 manastones that somehow STILL drop from mobs in open world and especially in instances?).... is what I would like to say but since the Abyss landing vendor now sells the spirit stone of eterniy bundles, and archhdaeva instance bosses drop a lot of gear to break down for ancient crafting and chronos stones, it may be finally be feasible to upgrade those blue inventory cluttering manastones that I've been holding onto for a year!

 

...on second thought, maybe not.

Thanks to the new availability of these manastones I was able to complete socketing my arena set with full +7 manastones, something that was too daunting of a task for me before this update. I had always predicted that as the game progresses, these manastones will become much more available but this exceeds my expectations. This change was much needed so that not only the richest of the rich can afford these 'standard' manastone builds. My definition of 'standard' here is that you need at least +7 manastones to be on par or better than the old composite manastones. (Press F to pay respects to those who built their manastone sets before this update).

Mythic supplements are now more available from Luna and archdaeva dungeons (primarily Archives and Cradle of Eternity which drop the Greater supps). This is a great change that allows players who can run these instances to better socket their manastones, enchant their gear, AND also make some kinah on the side. A related issue as old as time that has been brought up again is the weekly kinah limit. A vast majority of us are not bots and play the game fairly, but the weekly kinah limit gets in the way of selling these supplements to the vendor. These supplements can be used for gear enhancement, and for making kinah, both of which are good options.

Guaranteeing an enchantment is something that has been requested since the launch of 5.0. It is great that we can now do so with omegas + greater supplements up to +15, and it was one of the most anticipated changes of patch 5.6. With mythic supplements made available through dungeons combined with the omegas from the Luna daily, safely enchanting gear has been made easier to those who put the time into running these dungeons. The Luna omegas are untradeable and should stay that way but, they are primarily used to enchant tradeable soul bind archdaeva gear. As such, I believe the omegas you get from Luna should at least be account tradeable to make enchanting your own gear simpler. This shouldn't be too much to ask for since these omegas from Luna are already being used in this way, AND they even have a separate item ID from the other <[Event] Omegas>.

Safe enchanting is great and all, (moment of silence for the twenty arena shoulders I broke with omegas+supps before this change) but with this update the enchanting rate was greatly reduced in general, forcing the use of these supplements. Prior to our patch 5.6, enchanting archdaeva gear was safe up to +2 using the black enchantment stones (DO hold me to this. I'm thoroughly convinced this was the case™). However, 'enchanting was adjusted' since the 5.6 update, I wish I could quote this but the patch notes had little to no mention of how bad things were going to be with the enchantment stones. Archdaeva gear can now break from the first enchant using enchantment stones, and I have never gotten a piece of gear above +5 with the black stones even with Mythic Greater Supps (my personal experience). It is also no longer possible to enchant lv65 and mythic gear with these stones. I can bet anyone 100 enchantment stones that you won't be able to +10 a lv65 mythic using solely 100 enchantment stones. Go ahead, the offer's on the table provided you show some documentation.

This also poses a problem to new players who don't yet have access to the guaranteed enchantments from omegas and greater supplements. In addition to lowered enchanting rates, omegas on archdaeva gear have lost their critical enchantments and can only get +1 and very rarely +2. While I know this change was to offset safely enchanting, it can get very costly when you end up using 15 omegas per piece of gear.

The newly reworked Apollon gear IS GREAT, especially the accessories which are 2nd best in slot for PvE. This tradeable gear drops quite handily from Cradle of Eternity which allows anyone to have access to high end PvE gear (for the right price nyerk nyerk). Not only are the new golden wing marks much easier to farm than the old starlight particles, the new Apollon gear is leagues better than the garbage old Apollon gear that NCSoft tried to make us use before. In particular, the old Archives and Cradle of Eternity armors were very lackluster for physical classes. A problem with archdaeva gear is that the magic boost on armors scale with level. There is no equivalent scaling for physical attack classes and that leaves far fewer options for those classes. Physical classes had to ask themselves: do I use the shiny lv80 Apollon Jerkin with +2 attack on it? or do I continue to use the Drakenspire Depths set with a set bonus that has 60+ attack on it? During the early parts of 5.X the answer was quite clear, it left a lot of 2handed physical weapon classes not wanting to break their set bonus in favor of higher level weapons. This problem was somewhat alleviated by this update because the new Apollon armor has conditioning stats on it which add a tidy amount of attack/crit/accuracy to the armor to make up for physical armors not having any sort of offensive stat scaling.
Back to the topic of Apollon accessories: they all have random skill boosts on them which, while it encourages trading, there are better ways around getting the skills you want on them. Remember these?

These little sweeties are liquid gold for the players building the Apollon accessories. You can use skill boost scrolls to 'randomly' reroll the skill on your item to any of the skills available in that item's skill pool. Speaking of random, anyone that knows me in-game probably heard me complain at some point about the 98 scrolls I used on a single necklace to get the skill I wanted. This is something that needs to change. Given the availability of these scrolls limited to events, and random Luna gacha, there aren't enough of these to go around. These skill boost scrolls SHOULD give you a skill from the class that uses the scroll. If this can't be done, then sticking them on the general merchant would be nice too, there should be another way to acquire them in game rather than waiting for the next Kromede's Temple event. This will make hunting down those elusive skill boosts easier and make it so I'm not stuck with this. Terrible luck huh?

There's my rant feedback on my experience in 5.6, and so far, I believe it is the best patch in the 5.X series from my PvE centered playstyle. The consumables made available to players in this update allow us to better survive in this sink or swim () 5.X pay to win environment. The gap between normal players and power spending players is better bridged with more players having access to +15 gear through safe enchants and S I K K +7 manastone sets (lets be real +7 manastones is nothing lol. Don't laugh at my arena set ). 

How are you all enjoying the gear progression and enchanting systems change brought by this patch?

[GenericUser563]

Great post. I greatly agree on all points mentioned here and the jokes lol.

Though its a shame we lost the easy critical proc on omegas which basically meant 3-5 omegas for +15 (with the risk of breaking) I think given the greater availability on the supplements, its a fair trade for 100% success  

I just feel sorry for all the people spending huge kinah on the +7 stones when the new patch basically came and sunk the prices down. At least more people will be able to reach a good grade of gear and pvp will be more skill oriented than gear oriented.   

[Andregark-DN]

The Skill Reassignment Scroll pic it's just on point hahaha

+1  on the whole post, great patch indeed.

[Aly-DN]

Agreed. Good post and rather entertaining!

[Ursa-KT]

Yeah, I have to admit that 5.6 is one of the better patches in quite a bit!

Also it's worth noting that leveling has been made a bit easier with XP being boosted on lots of stuff - Luna, which now gives me more XP than Fissure so I can stop feeling bad about skipping it, quests you can get in Norsvold and Illuma (the gather 20 things ones, which have also been made into dailies, as well as the regular killing quests - not in all locations tho), quests in CoE (probs AoE too, but I don't really remember how much they gave before 5.6) and XP on mobs in instances. Papa bless for that because I don't wanna look at Fissure anymore

[Vantheria-DN]

44 minutes ago, Hourglass-SL said:

Luna, which now gives me more XP than Fissure so I can stop feeling bad about skipping it, 

I've honestly had the same thought lol. I absolutely hate FoO. I don't think it's fun at all. I'll do it maybe once a week.

[Cheesecake-DN]

Hahaha, accurate.

I have mixed feelings on the enchantment change, but I think it was a worthwhile trade-off.

5.6 is the best patch we've had in 5.X definitely. I hope 5.8 is better! : x

[NathyPelusa]

+6 Manastones on Luna weekly was a nice addition, too bad they nerfed drop rates in easy instances like Adma/Theo, and completely removed archdaeva mythic gear world drop, resulting on a shortage of the Chronos Stones that we need to upgrade those +6s to an actual useful level, like +9 or +10.

So let's say I, as a free player, want 22 +9 HP manastones for my block set, I would need to spend around 12 billion kinah in Chronos Stones only to achieve my goal, let alone the 300 million kinah per Major Feli. I really don't see it happening.

[Rubyvulpa-KT]

I love the luna changes  it's the one thing that i can really keep up,
fissure is just too much of a good thing with all my alts  

[Andregark-DN]

AoE is quiet accessible now (second time it's nerfed) and you can get a loooot of disenchanting material in there.

(I won't even mention if you do Cradle of Eternity run while triggering all double-loot events: hoo boy.)

[NathyPelusa]

6 minutes ago, Andregark-IS said:

AoE is quiet accessible now (second time it's nerfed) and you can get a loooot of disenchanting material in there.

(I won't even mention if you do Cradle of Eternity run while triggering all double-loot events: hoo boy.)

Been running both and while DEs are nice, I would still need to farm 56 Chronos Stones for each +9. Being a Cleric I absolutely need at least two sets of different +9s, and there's no way I can farm 3000 Chronos Stones by the time the next patch hits and my gear is render useless  

Maybe when merge comes and there's more people running these instances, chronos stones' prices might go down. At least here in Tiamat Asmo the only thing that can be pugged is AoE. Very few people bother to run PVE instances. Would still be nice they revert Adma/Theo to the way it was, that's the only thing I see pugs running in LFG all day, which would bring down chronos stones prices again.

[WinRawr]

Nothing they do will ever bring back how fun 3.0 and 4.0 was.

[Arhangelos]

On 10/8/2017 at 10:05 AM, Magikarp-TM said:

since the Abyss landing vendor now sells the spirit stone of eterniy bundles, and archhdaeva instance bosses drop a lot of gear to break down for ancient crafting and chronos stones, it may be finally be feasible to upgrade those blue inventory cluttering manastones that I've been holding onto for a year!

 

 

...on second thought, maybe not.

can I get some light here, which is that Abyss vendor that sells spirit stone of eternity bundles? I an Asmodian.

[Andregark-DN]

When our landing reaches level 5 a vendor appears which for 11m you can buy a bundle with 100, Spirit Stones of Eternity.

This is the Asmodian vendor:

https://aionpowerbook.com/powerbook/NPC:805679

And this is the Elyos vendor:

https://aionpowerbook.com/powerbook/NPC:805649

 

[Arhangelos]

Thanks Andregark, that kinda makes the Spirit Stones of Eternity have a fixed price at least, it is 110k per one and it used to be so much more expensive in early 5.6 (it went up to 350k in my server)

But I wish there was something similar for Ancient Crafting stones (I wouldn't even wish for chronos stones :D)

[Aly-DN]

On 8/10/2017 at 10:54 AM, Andregark-IS said:

AoE is quiet accessible now (second time it's nerfed) and you can get a loooot of disenchanting material in there.

(I won't even mention if you do Cradle of Eternity run while triggering all double-loot events: hoo boy.)

^ This. Just did two pug AOEs and survived! As long as you have a couple of decent dps and a good cleric, you can skate through this even if several of the group members lose half their health if the mobs so much as glance their way. It's good to have something that gives things every needs that is totally pugable.

 

Cradle's first two bosses are also totally pugable. Easy peasy for one person to heal and as long as the tissue paper pugs have half a brain, another great way to get the things we all need.