Feedback on patch 1.114

[Rob]

I sent this feedback to Mythic this morning. I also sent a copy to Rob Frazier, the former Mythic developer who (I think) created the affected encounters.

The new 10% cap on spell damage bonus (patch 1.114) is having an unintended effect on Gaheris.

At least I assume it's unintended.

The effects go beyond spell damage. As strange as it may sound, the new cap has destroyed three of the major, large scale Gaheris-specific encounters.

Here's why this has happened.

Three of these encounters (the old power relic keeps) are done by players to obtain Gaheris-specific items called fragments.

The new cap makes these fragments worthless. Until patch 1.114 the fragments were valuable because they contain a 20% spell damage bonus charge. That charge no longer has any effect with normal templates.

http://www.gaheris.net/p/frags_magic.html

Therefore the cap has removed the incentive to do these encounters and players will stop doing them.

When you remove the incentive to do a PvE encounter, for practical purposes you remove the encounter from the game.

The cap has done this to the three power relic encounters. There is no longer any reason for people to do them because the loot no longer works. For practical purposes the encounters have now been removed from Gaheris.

These are large scripted encounters with many dozens of mobs and bosses with elaborate abilities and behavior.

In addition to ordinary keeps, there are only eight Gaheris-specific encounters. These encounters are extremely important because incentives to do most end-game PvE content have been removed from the overall game in previous years to help Ywain. Incentives to do ML encounters were removed by glass and BP merchants. Incentives to do artifact encounters were removed in the same way. Incentives to do epic dungeons were removed by souls, ice, and roots. Incentives to farm ML9 were removed by afrits and better items. And now in patch 1.114 incentives to do epic quests took a hit because most people will probably prefer the new free epic armor to the older stuff.

These encounters used to be a substantial part of the end game on Gaheris. When you remove incentives to do PvE encounters, in a practical sense you remove the encounters themselves.

So what does Gaheris have left for an end game? It has keeps and the eight magnificent large-scale encounters created painstakingly by your predecessors at Mythic over the years.

The cap in patch 1.114 just destroyed a substantial chunk of that work.

I hope you will put that work back into the Gaheris ruleset by removing the new 10% cap on spell damge bonus from Gaheris.

Sincerely,

Robert Sacks

Former PvE Server Teamlead
Publisher of Gaheris.net
Publisher of Daoc-toa.net
Publisher of Daoc-trophy-mobs.com
Author of Mojo (http://www.mojoware.org)

[Taxie]

A very reasonable response.

[Rob]

I forgot to include the fact that incentives to do dragon raids have been largely removed by scale.

It's not an exaggeration to say that most of Gaheris's end-game content has been removed over the last few years as a side effect of making it easier for players to equip themselves for RVR.

[Pentegarn]

While I applaud the effort, I am sure it will fall on deaf ears. But if anyone does actually bother to read feedback I imagine their reaction will be this:

We have a pve server?

[keltoy]

Great feedback Rob, I hope they actually read it and consider it for changes for the good of Gaheris.