GeraldBC.4927 Posted September 8 Share Posted September 8 (edited) Instead of posting in 10 different threads, I decided to post all of my feedback from story to homestead to overworld design to bugs in a single thread. I've finished the mastery achievements of both zones, have enough mastery points to learn every mastery, completed all the story achievements including sitting through the 'vote' instance twice and completed every achievement that has a mastery point attached in Lowland shores. Originally when I tried writing this down, it came out as walls of text. I will instead condense it to bullet points. ___ Story Kept on-point, followed the same design philosophy as SotO with some improvements based on past experiences. Prologue makes for a deceptively bad first impression, embarrassing overuse of dramatic pauses. Insufferable characters being treated as perfect darlings. I sincerely hope the Tyrian Alliance goes the way of the Pact and all its leaders except Skarti, Imann and Dagonet and maybe the Tengu face the same fate as Trahearne did at the end of HoT. Overworld engagement during story is handled a lot better. Weaving it together with the introduction of features like the spear and the homestead makes it feel like you're working towards a goal compared to the 'complete events in the zone' bars of SotO and late EoD The bears are clearly trying to hide the 'Stranger' problem, but you can't walk two steps out of the village without getting overrun with titanspawn, so I'm not sure who they think they're fooling Waiting Sorrow's reveal was expected. Dialogue setting her up to live with Stoic Alder going forward is a positive development. Titans have very awkward dialogue. Unlike the GW1 titans who dont bother talking to people they intend to kill, the new titans never shut up. Also one sounds like a tryhard emo who wants to be a poet and the other like she walked off a set for a power rangers episode. Bloodstone explosion story instance sets it up like the ghosts will give information on what's going on, but they only talk about life in Gavril. I sincerely hope that the awkward dialogue from the titans is on purpose and that the dialogue from the ghosts isn't just meaningless flavor text but directly connected to Decima and Greer While Lowland shores story gracefully danced around soto/eod style torture bars, the second half in Janthir Syntri brought them back. At least there's an actual task and purpose to them this time, this is an improvement. The 'collecting critters and putting them in your homestead' part is silly and makes no sense. There are so many mysterious ruins left behind for the white mantle, that just go unused by the story. This part could have been something way more interesting than uninspired fantasy environmentalism. Overworld Content Lowland shores is universally praised and lauded by some as the best zone ever made. I think this is an exaggeration but it is nonetheless a very good zone Platforming aspects are great. Lots of verticality, use of bouncing mushrooms, updrafts and so on is a good touch, but I think there could be even more of that. Events are a good mix of events. The 'help us with this everyday rural life task' helps shape the comforting atmosphere of the zone, but it also has some attractions aimed at the player and also some generic 'kill some mobs' events for functional purposes Events are awkwardly scaled. Even small events like "kill some titanspawn" require A LOT of titanspawn killing to be completed. The target practise maze for warclaws in the southwest has a 5-6 minute timer instead of the usual 9-10 and an absurd amount of targets. If you have 5-10 people running this from the start, sure it's possible. But when you're one person, maybe joined by one other person 3 minutes in, you'll have a lot of trouble, especially if you're still new to how the warclaw's 4 works. Very frustrating event, would not complete again. Both in Lowland shores and Janthir Syntri, all event objectives and requirements to clear need to be cut down drastically. It may be possible now, but right now everyone's flooding into these zones. It will become a lot less possible in the future. Janthir Syntri is universally reviled. The same people who say Lowland Shores is the best zone, also say Janthir Syntri is the worst. I don't think it's nearly as bad, but I've run into some really bad issues that need to be fixed and probably inform people's dislike of it. In Janthir Syntri, all the bloodstone mobs are a lot tougher than expected. No it's not protection, I mean even when they have no boons. And no, it's not a high toughness value, I tried switching to condi. Also the entire 'volatile bloodstone shard' mechanic is pointless since the defiance breakage from one shard is negligible. It's not worth the time spent picking up the shard and using it over using any skill of yours. Homestead I love the design choice where a lot of furniture makes use of old materials that were worthless and useless previously. I hope it's a sign that more old-content furniture will be added in the future. I wish you could post decorations in chat I wish you could preview decorations before you craft them. If you are at a loss for how this would work, check how ESO does it There is a huge debilitating bug in the homestead system. I'm not sure if I should just reiterate it in the bug section in this post or thread, or if I should make a standalone thread about it too. The F2 skills allow you to make adjustments to a decoration in theory, but they don't allow you to confirm them. If you press the 'confirm changes' button, the decoration will flash back to its previous state before 'confirming' its changes, meaning it always 'confirms' that you made no changes at all, even when you did. While you can adjust decorations AS you place them, you can't adjust them AFTER you placed them, even though there is an entire skill menu specifically for that. This does not seem intentional, this seems like a bug. Also the F2 skills frequently get stuck, as I'll explain below. The scale function, if you drag the vectors once and let go, it will snap back to the original size and then never respond to your attempts to pull them in either directions again until you removed and replaced the decoration. The rotate function, when you just have the circles and not the freeform option selected, the decoration will not budge, the axae/circles don't do anything. I like how you can remove all the grass and the fencing to replace it with other stuff like ice or jade, but when you stand too far away, the grass and fencing 'reappears'. I know this is due to the LoD system, but I still wish there was an option to disable/delete/hide the original furniture. It doesn't even have to be handtailored to each individual configuration, a simple 'all or nothing' option where you either see all of the grass and fencing in the distance or none of it at all would be more than enough. Spear Only played necro spear, so I can only comment on necro spear. I understand what the idea is, it's supposed to be a pvp weapon designed for chasing people and have faster strike damage bursts For PVE it's pretty bad for a new weapon. It's basically just a worse greatsword. Doesn't feel like it adds anything except maybe POTENTIAL RP flavor in the future. As for the flavor part, the animation on spear 5 makes me wish there was a spear skin that's a scythe, as big and edgy as possible. Maybe not game mechanically but style wise, it would be the perfect reaper weapon. As for anyone bringing up staff, you're not swinging around a staff, are you? You're just holding it up while casting spells. You ARE swinging around a spear and you're spinning it at one point too. A scythe spear would make spear 5 look like one of those slow, Dervish style swings. Only other weapon I can comment on is revenant spear. It is too powerful for condi builds. If you bring 2 spear revenants to Fractal 98 CM they end up killing Ai so fast that she bugs out during the Sorrow phases. Who knows what would happen if there were 3. Bugs In the 'Prepare the fish before they rot" event in Autumn Vale, when you interact with most of the stations one cast will attempt to interact with it twice, giving you an error message every time. Also the deboning station's shelves are empty until AFTER you interact with them, this looks like a bug In the 'Competition Culture' Achievement, completing the "Compete with kodan cubs in a spear contest" event will check "Help the kodan cubs defeat the training illusions" In the "Help the kodan gather foraged plants and animal meat" event in janthir syntri, when you turn in vegetables or meat, it will occasionally not count. You lost the item interacting with the box but the bar didn't fill and your contribution didn't go up. The "Collect jars and fill them with lightning then deposit them in drop-off locations" event in Janthir Syntri sometimes freezes on spawn. The timer will be stuck at 10 minutes and turning in filled bottles of lightning won't fill the bar. In the "Gather honey for the kodan" event in northern Bjorn thicket, the collision and models of the branches don't quite line up, causing you to phase through the branches and fall off here and there. In this forum, when you copy text from offsite and paste it here, it will paste it in whatever size the source has. It dials the size of the text, but the forum software on this site doesn't let you change it back to normal size because the posting menu pretends like font size doesn't exist. There's a whole bunch of 'issues' that aren't necessarily bugs in the sense of the software not doing what it's supposed to, but they are glaring problems nonetheless. These issues are more frequent in Janthir Syntri and the primary reason why people criticise the second zone so much. I'm not sure how to post or include those yet. Edited September 8 by GeraldBC.4927 1 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Knighthonor.4061 Posted September 9 Share Posted September 9 more feedback folks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hotride.2187 Posted September 9 Share Posted September 9 It had not occurred to me to wish death to the NPCs for talking so much... but now that you mention it... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeraldBC.4927 Posted September 9 Author Share Posted September 9 (edited) Time to add a few bugs and issues. Bugs When you restart the story chapter "Sorrow in these Halls" of the Janthir Wilds story after you finished the entire story and then close it again (for instance because you wanted to open some texts for the purpose of an achievement), the markers pointing you to the relevant locations stay there even though the story is not active and you already finished it once. I made it a point to not re-finish the chapter but to close the story instead. So every time I log in, I see a green marker pointing me to lowland shore or if I'm there, to Stoic Alder's house, reminding me to post about this bug here. When you mount your warclaw and use your 'Sniff' skill (Warclaw 2), it will cause the third skill to light up in perpetuity as though you were in the process of using it or queuing it up. It will keep lighting up whichever skill is 3. It will do so with your third weapon skill if you dismount. Using your third warclaw skill doesn't fix it either, you have to dismount and use your third weapon skill. In Janthir Syntri's Meta Event "Of Mists and Monsters", if standing in the greens benefits the players in any way, I wouldn't know how and others I asked wouldn't either. Either the mechanic is bugged and does nothing when it is supposed to do something, or the boss does a bad job communicating what it does. Issues (clarification: These are not bugs in the sense that the software is malfunctioning, those are design choices that play out in bad and disruptive ways) The zones are very ambivalent with which non-heart events give heart tokens. Either all the non-heart events were supposed to give tokens or there's some deliberate 'theme' going on that I fail to understand. In the Festering Basin in southwestern Janthir Syntri, there is a 2-part event chain that starts with "Collect affected flora samples for Curious Remedy's research" and ends with "Protect the plant while Curious Remedy's therapeutic cleanses the rot". Both are of course needed to complete an event collection achievement. While the latter does happen after the former, their spawn locations are very far apart from each other and the associated npc and the events themselves make no effort to direct you towards the second event's location. The only way to figure it out is to look up both events on the wiki, reference that for the second one's location and then go there. But now to add to the confusion, not only does the followup event happen in a completely different location with no hint at where the first one could be, it also happens at a random time, tens of minutes apart from the first one. So most people will probably complete the first, think it's over and later scratch their heads wondering why they never noticed the followup event in any of the 5-10 times they completed the first one. Something is either very wrong or very backwards with the spawning behaviour of the "Help the kodan prepare for their expedition by distributing supplies" event. When I tried to complete the event for the purpose of Janthir Syntri achievements, I spent almost an hour hanging around its spawn location, waiting for it to appear. I gave up at XX:10 hour of the meta. At a later point, I was in Janthir Syntri again, and saw it spawning at XX:20. I inferred, because I had been there for every other 10 minute bracket, that it has a timer and spawns at XX:20 of any hour. When I told someone else, they didn't believe me at first because they checked at XX:20 and it wasn't there, only for them to realize 1 hour later that it spawned at XX:20 hour of the meta. As in once every 2 hours. This was about 4-5 days ago. Since then I've seen it spawn at XX:00 hour after the meta and XX:50 hour after the meta. It's always at 10 minute brackets but the exact times seemingly changed. I know it is listed as a dynamic event but there is obviously something very non-dynamic to whether or not it spawns and some kind of indicator or hint on what that is would be very helpful. Also meta event style timers on non-meta 'dynamic' events were never a good idea. It wasn't with the Jade Maw, and it isn't here if this is what's going on. 13 hours ago, Hotride.2187 said: It had not occurred to me to wish death to the NPCs for talking so much... but now that you mention it... Think of it this way, everything that happens is merely part of a story that people wrote and decided on. So every time a character dies or has died, it could not have happened unless at least one person in the narrative team wished death to that npc for long enough and vocally enough that the decision for it to happen could make it through every pass of the dialogue. That includes Trahearne, that includes Smodur, that includes Eir Stegalkin, that includes Minister Caudecus, that includes Faolain, Balthasar, Vlast, Joko, Blish, Ryland, all of them. Someone wished death upon each and every one of them at some point. They would not have died otherwise. It's not uniquely evil or hateful for someone to do that, people do that all the time. Edited September 9 by GeraldBC.4927 grammar 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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