Soundmaniac
Legacy Supporter 5
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2011
Here's my thoughts on HC in it's current state, and how I'd like to see things changed. Please excuse my shitty writing. English is not my mother language.
Gear
The item system itself works great and I love it. However, many of the weapons added to HC don't make much sense to me. There's a lot of different weapon types that pretty much do the same thing. Why add lutes, straight swords and whips when in the end they behave exactly or almost exactly like normal swords? It's like a lot of these items were added just to make it feel like we have a lot of different "content" and "class specific gear", while in reality it's just a bunch of fodder.
I think a good step would be to reduce the amount of weapon types, and change how certain classes use those weapon types. Give different classes a unique twist on how they use a weapon, and how it integrates with that class' playstyle. This would also encourage more trading between players because there would be less shit nobody needs.
Another thing I want to point out is that the weapon balance is all over the place right now. two-handed weapons will always outclass one-handed weapons, and off-hands pretty much seem useless to me except for shields. As I haven't really looked much into the balance subject, I can't really say anything else about it. I do think this is something that'll sort itself out in time though.
Crafting
There's nothing good I can say about the crafting system right now, which is really sad because it has so much potential. Aside from the menu being a fucking nightmare, I think the biggest problem is the amount of different materials there are. Again, it feels like they were just added to make it feel like there's a lot of content, while in reality there's not.
Say I want to create a full armor set for my level. I'm going to need 24 of a certain crafting material. I head to the dungeon only to find out there's only a handful of elite spawners, and aside from the item I need, they will constantly drop stuff I don't want. If I want that armor set (which isn't even any good) I'm going to have to grind there for HOURS. Nobody wants to do this, especially in how dungeons are right now, which I'll get into later.
Especially when it comes to crafting, people like convenience. I want to know exactly how many mobs I'm gonna have to kill in order to be able to craft the item I want. Forcing RNG into this only makes the process ridiculously tedious and not worth it at all. If it were up to me, I'd do away with all the current crafting materials and replace them with a single, or small amount of different crafting tokens you can use to craft basic gear. The recipes should only get more complicated when we're crafting special items and max level gear. Make t6 dungeon bosses have a chance to drop a special token you need alongside the normal tokens to craft gear. To tie into this, being able to deconstruct gear to get crafting tokens/dust would be a good addition too.
Dungeons & Leveling
Let's be honest here guys. Minecraft is not the best game for combat, and I dont think the current dungeons were designed with that in mind. When fighting normal sized melee enemies, if you play well you can take them down without taking much damage. However, fighting archer enemies is an absolute nightmare. Because of the way they behave it is near impossible to kill them without taking a significant amount of damage yourself. On top of that their balancing is all over the place too. Even though they are the hardest to hit due to their movement, they don't deal any less damage than melee enemies, and they will be hitting you a lot more too. I'd say ranged and small enemies need a HP and damage nerf, melee enemies need a buff, and mages are fine where they are right now because even though they fight at a distance their movement doesn't make them hard to hit.
If you're playing a class without self sustain, or without a healer in the party, your leveling experience is going to be horrible. It doesn't help that leveling feels extremely slow. I'm not saying that we should get more EXP, but I do think we need some alternate leveling methods to fresh things up, like mobarena. Mobarena was a really overpowered way to level, but this is easily countered by limiting it to a few times per day (include mobarena tickets in the vote crates).
The dungeon quests are OK right now. I don't understand why rather than just being at the dungeon entrance, the quest NPCs are all hidden around spawn. This isn't WoW where there's minimap markers for every quest. It's just a pain in the ass to go looking for them. Honestly I think we need either a single board with all quests on it, or have the NPCs be placed at their respective dungeons.
Oh and we either need the dynmap back, or a better way to explain to people where the dungeons are located. "Where are the dungeons" is one of the most asked questions by new players.
Endgame
Aside from PVPing, there's currently little to no motivation to actually do the grind and get to level 50. There's just nothing to do. A lot of the stuff Bonnie talks about seems fine to me (faction rep, township intergration, endgames for each dungeon).
Personally what I want to see the most is either a mobarena or instanced dungeon that gets harder the more you beat it, but the rewards also increase. Having the rewards tie into the crafting system would be great. This stuff would easily work together with what Bonnie is planning.
PVP
Castle pvp is all right. Diamond needs an entry timer though. How are we supposed to capture this when the people you kill will come back after a minute anyway? I do think we need some good PVP rewards tied into the gear/crafting system like crafting PVP gems, but it shouldn't be a big priority at the moment.
I also think it might be worth it to consider turning world PVP back on. Just have new players be immune to it until they either get combat level 10, or crafter level 10-20. This is plenty of time to find a town to join for protection.
Townships
Unlike when world PVP was still turned on, there's absolutely no gameplay reason to join or create a town right now. If we want players to band together and start a town, it's important to heavily intergrate townships into the rest of the MMO aspects. Like having a town member party EXP bonus. It would also be great if we could add NPCs to our towns. For example, we could add a vendor that sells certain advanced crafting materials depending on the current town level, we could add the auction NPC, we could add quest NPCs, we could even add a guard spawner to deal with the world mobs spawning all over the place.
There's a lot of stuff you could add to towns based on their town level progression. Think WoW guild perks.
World Mobs
I don't see the point of them. It feels like they exist purely to piss you off while you're building or trying to get from A to B. The only use I can think for them is having rare mob spawns similar to WoW, and having those mobs drop of a rare crafting material and give crazy good EXP.
Gear
The item system itself works great and I love it. However, many of the weapons added to HC don't make much sense to me. There's a lot of different weapon types that pretty much do the same thing. Why add lutes, straight swords and whips when in the end they behave exactly or almost exactly like normal swords? It's like a lot of these items were added just to make it feel like we have a lot of different "content" and "class specific gear", while in reality it's just a bunch of fodder.
I think a good step would be to reduce the amount of weapon types, and change how certain classes use those weapon types. Give different classes a unique twist on how they use a weapon, and how it integrates with that class' playstyle. This would also encourage more trading between players because there would be less shit nobody needs.
Another thing I want to point out is that the weapon balance is all over the place right now. two-handed weapons will always outclass one-handed weapons, and off-hands pretty much seem useless to me except for shields. As I haven't really looked much into the balance subject, I can't really say anything else about it. I do think this is something that'll sort itself out in time though.
Crafting
There's nothing good I can say about the crafting system right now, which is really sad because it has so much potential. Aside from the menu being a fucking nightmare, I think the biggest problem is the amount of different materials there are. Again, it feels like they were just added to make it feel like there's a lot of content, while in reality there's not.
Say I want to create a full armor set for my level. I'm going to need 24 of a certain crafting material. I head to the dungeon only to find out there's only a handful of elite spawners, and aside from the item I need, they will constantly drop stuff I don't want. If I want that armor set (which isn't even any good) I'm going to have to grind there for HOURS. Nobody wants to do this, especially in how dungeons are right now, which I'll get into later.
Especially when it comes to crafting, people like convenience. I want to know exactly how many mobs I'm gonna have to kill in order to be able to craft the item I want. Forcing RNG into this only makes the process ridiculously tedious and not worth it at all. If it were up to me, I'd do away with all the current crafting materials and replace them with a single, or small amount of different crafting tokens you can use to craft basic gear. The recipes should only get more complicated when we're crafting special items and max level gear. Make t6 dungeon bosses have a chance to drop a special token you need alongside the normal tokens to craft gear. To tie into this, being able to deconstruct gear to get crafting tokens/dust would be a good addition too.
Dungeons & Leveling
Let's be honest here guys. Minecraft is not the best game for combat, and I dont think the current dungeons were designed with that in mind. When fighting normal sized melee enemies, if you play well you can take them down without taking much damage. However, fighting archer enemies is an absolute nightmare. Because of the way they behave it is near impossible to kill them without taking a significant amount of damage yourself. On top of that their balancing is all over the place too. Even though they are the hardest to hit due to their movement, they don't deal any less damage than melee enemies, and they will be hitting you a lot more too. I'd say ranged and small enemies need a HP and damage nerf, melee enemies need a buff, and mages are fine where they are right now because even though they fight at a distance their movement doesn't make them hard to hit.
If you're playing a class without self sustain, or without a healer in the party, your leveling experience is going to be horrible. It doesn't help that leveling feels extremely slow. I'm not saying that we should get more EXP, but I do think we need some alternate leveling methods to fresh things up, like mobarena. Mobarena was a really overpowered way to level, but this is easily countered by limiting it to a few times per day (include mobarena tickets in the vote crates).
The dungeon quests are OK right now. I don't understand why rather than just being at the dungeon entrance, the quest NPCs are all hidden around spawn. This isn't WoW where there's minimap markers for every quest. It's just a pain in the ass to go looking for them. Honestly I think we need either a single board with all quests on it, or have the NPCs be placed at their respective dungeons.
Oh and we either need the dynmap back, or a better way to explain to people where the dungeons are located. "Where are the dungeons" is one of the most asked questions by new players.
Endgame
Aside from PVPing, there's currently little to no motivation to actually do the grind and get to level 50. There's just nothing to do. A lot of the stuff Bonnie talks about seems fine to me (faction rep, township intergration, endgames for each dungeon).
Personally what I want to see the most is either a mobarena or instanced dungeon that gets harder the more you beat it, but the rewards also increase. Having the rewards tie into the crafting system would be great. This stuff would easily work together with what Bonnie is planning.
PVP
Castle pvp is all right. Diamond needs an entry timer though. How are we supposed to capture this when the people you kill will come back after a minute anyway? I do think we need some good PVP rewards tied into the gear/crafting system like crafting PVP gems, but it shouldn't be a big priority at the moment.
I also think it might be worth it to consider turning world PVP back on. Just have new players be immune to it until they either get combat level 10, or crafter level 10-20. This is plenty of time to find a town to join for protection.
Townships
Unlike when world PVP was still turned on, there's absolutely no gameplay reason to join or create a town right now. If we want players to band together and start a town, it's important to heavily intergrate townships into the rest of the MMO aspects. Like having a town member party EXP bonus. It would also be great if we could add NPCs to our towns. For example, we could add a vendor that sells certain advanced crafting materials depending on the current town level, we could add the auction NPC, we could add quest NPCs, we could even add a guard spawner to deal with the world mobs spawning all over the place.
There's a lot of stuff you could add to towns based on their town level progression. Think WoW guild perks.
World Mobs
I don't see the point of them. It feels like they exist purely to piss you off while you're building or trying to get from A to B. The only use I can think for them is having rare mob spawns similar to WoW, and having those mobs drop of a rare crafting material and give crazy good EXP.
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