Initial Reckoning Feeling for Mage: Disappointment

Slarti Bartfast

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Mar 6, 2022
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This is not a doomer post. I'm not full out quitting. But I do want to communicate how absolutely disappointing it was as a mage to open up the game on patch day and find that the adrenaline system was sooooooooo poorly designed from the mage perspective. I realize that the system is primarily about melee, but I saw those shared abilities and got a little excited! Then I start hearing from PTR (since I can't PTR being a GFN user, it's own problem for a different post) that we have to have our hands out to use these. No one would confirm when I asked if this included shared abilities on Discord, so I just waited and hoped. What I got was worse than my lowest expectations for it.

As you already know, it turned out that you have to pull your hands out to be able to use even the shared adrenaline skills. Not only that, you have to have your hands out to EVEN SEE THE DAMNED ADRENLINE METER. That was the real kicker that pissed me off, because I did not learn that magic damage built adrenaline until someone told me. If I can build the meter with magic damage, why the hell can't I see it while I'm building points using spells?!

I'll tell you what I think happened and hope SV takes another approach with a patch sometime soon. They tunnel-visioned this for melee despite having the enticing shared skills that mages could use, despite having mages talk about how awful this system feels to them on the PTR. They didn't want to fix it, however, because it is clearly deeply connected to pulling the hands out (possibly some connection to trying to avoid prebuilding adreline, too). I'm no designer, but that's just bonehead to leave out the mage audience completely b/c you tunnel-visioned on how cool chickaboom the spear pull was. Can't even add the new skills to hotbar afaik. You MUST use the 5 slot setup through the skill window. Then that five slot setup ONLY appears with fists out. Can't see how much adrenaline I'm building with magic. Can't visually think about which button I want to press ahead of time if my hands are down b/c I can't frickin' see it.

After fiddling with it, I finally just got so disappointed with it that I logged off and went to play something else for the evening. Par for the course on MO2 patches most of the time I suppose. It just gets old. You could have taken this through another PTR and spent the time fixing your bonehead mistake of making the hotbar, meter, and skills only available with hands out. Instead, you pushed it forward like always.

All that said, I'm grateful that at least the feedback about not making EVERY skill interrupt casting was heard. The fact that this wasn't even considered until the feedback is again just more proof how melee tunnel-visioned this was from a development angle. I'm also happy about the outlaw change so that I won't get three groups popping on me within 100 yards once pop goes back down (I hope... time will tell). The new TC stuff looks neat as well, though I still need to learn more about it as I don't do much of that being a solo. The zergies seem to be happy about it and say outposts are fun.

Last change to discuss is the rep thing, which I liked at least from my perspective in the sandbox as a blueberry solo merchant. It will encourage folks to either go full red identity or be more careful about how many people they murder hobo. Unfortunately, this also applies to non-murder-hobos is what I'm hearing with group fighting each other, for example in dungeons or sieging SHs, grief each other with murder counts. Apparently there's even folks that hang out nekkid in dungeons and gather npcs with leashing and npc bomb others forcing you to attack and take the MC or die and give up your shit to a nekkid that can outrun npcs with bad leashing. This should have been thought about with the rep change.

I agree with these folks that dungeons should count as wilderness. I agree that more of the map should be wilderness. The new TC map section system could help with this. Make any section with a blue npc town/city have MC penalty. Everywhere else should be free game. I don't understand the roads between towns being included in the MC area, for example Western Coastlands... why does the Tindremic Empire give a damn about murderers out there that far from the city. Great change on making MCs hit rep harder... now make sure that you can only get MCd in the proper places... this should have happened in tandem with the rep change. If there are dungeons near cities, section the dungeon off separately in it's own little block so it can be made wilderness.

Now that I'm over the standard patch day disappointment, I'm going to go try to clean up the adrenaline mess as best I can for my mage (probably mostly just ignoring it in it's current state tbh) and try to explore to see some of the other changes out there in the world. I'm curious if when I cross the new TC zones if it will let me know with a tiny splash or something. If it does, that'd be nice. Time to go see the rest and hopefully less disappointing part of the Reckoning.
 
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Slarti Bartfast

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Mar 6, 2022
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Didn't realize it reset the rep. Kinda bummed as I had ground everything to max before. Figured they would scale what we had before to the new system. Oh well.

I think this is part of why reds were saying things like they had a few MCs and then went red. They didn't realize it reset maybe? Now that I've looked at the new scale, it seems like it is not as bad as they were making it out. If you get max rep for Tindremic for example, you've got 16 MCs you can get before you get close to being kicked out of town? Am I understanding the new math right? Sounds like they were lenient in consideration of weird MCs from battles and stuff. Probably still some wilderness increasing could be good, but maybe not as much as I was thinking earlier.

One thing I heard floated that would be kind of neat to make the main roads with signs and guard posts MC channels. Encourages trade and transport along roads due to the MC possibility and guard towers, but also allows full reds a good place to hunt. Makes sense RP as well... the empires and such would probably care about murders on their main roads, but back in the forest and away from the towers, bodies would probably be left to rot oh well too bad so sad.

Dungeons should definitely be wilderness. And there should be some expansion of the wilderness in general... but it doesn't seem like the whole house is on fire like I heard folks that like to fight complaining about earlier. Get your rep maxed first then go fighting/murdering... just like before. Just slightly more penalty to the murder since rep rewards are still small for packages (again if I'm not misunderstanding the math).
 

Jackdstripper

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Jan 8, 2021
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The whole patch was rushed, not thoroughly tested or thought out. Multiple abilities dont work (like the mana giving one of course). At least one ability has an animation that you cant even see and therefore parry. More stuff will come out soon im sure.

Same as always for SV. Rush rush and fix it later, or maybe never.

Yes mages got fucked again, especially Elementalists with the new rep system. Now you have to be so careful in fights that one blue guy in the enemy group and you cant use any Ely spells. It’s ridiculous. Rep gain is atrociously slow now when compared to how easy it is to lose. Blue blocking and blue bombing is back in a big way.

The rep change is very harsh especially after being so soft on reds for so long. SV always overcompensating for prior bad decisions.

A perfect, and frankly hilarious, example of how poorly thought out this patch was is the how just by casting shadow on the door of the new outposts, you make them impossible to destroy, and therefore invulnerable. How ridiculous is this? How did not a single dev or tester bring this up? A laughable oversight that basically renders the whole new outposts siege mechanic useless until it get fixed.

All i can say is: typical SV.
 
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Sally

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Dec 2, 2023
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I also made a bug report regarding pulling out hands to use adrenaline.

Having hands out also bugs some of the cast bars, so you have to choose between either using adrenaline, or seeing when your spells will fire; which completely throws off the aim of certain spells.

Other than that, obviously the patch was focused on melee users (which I think was sorely needed, because countless people have probably quit over spinning).
 
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