I’ve been playing around on testlive with the 2.3 update and here are my impressions so far. Broken up by: Potential Bugs, Likes, Dislikes, Suggestions, and Mysteries.
Server info: Single Player, North America, East
Potential Bugs:
Maelstorm no longer has a red sky when your inside, just darker and windy with lightening. It looks a lot less intimidating without the red tint. Not sure if this is intended, I didn’t see anything in the patch notes, but I may have missed it.
Stygian ‘Priests’ are labeled as Smelters at Siptah’s Ascension, is this intended?
There seems to be a lot of empty tents at Siptah’s Ascenssion, especially in the upper tiers of the camp, are these missing spawn points?
There seems to be significant lag at the Towerwatch Accursed Camp. More so than any other area of the map so far. Not sure if this is just me, has anyone else experienced this?
The new demon Wasps (not sure their real name) are pretty hard to hit. You need to aim just right and swing at the right time. This may be intended, but it does feel like their hit boxes should be slightly adjusted.
Likes:
Love the new sprint attacks (having requested this feature more than once, I am glad to see it implemented).
The Thrall camps make Siptah feel so much more alive. Big fan of this change.
Unstable Essences can now be looted from chest in Thrall camps.
The verticality of the large Thrall camps makes them more compelling to explore.
Generally the difficulty of the Thrall camps and dungeons feels good.
Well placed traps at the large Corsair camp. More stuff like this please.
Nice Kiah on Fire tribute.
New content and recipes are great. Like the new chests, fast elevator, new armor, statues, and trophies.
I enjoy the new hidden things at the thrall camps, like the scout reports, hidden loot, jailor keys to free slaves, and graves to dig. Although these don’t feel fully implemented yet, I look forward to when they are. The Exiled lands could use these too.
Dislikes:
The Human Accursed models are a huge let down. As mentioned in another thread, hopefully these are a stand in for the real models
Some of the 3 skull human bosses seem to have lower health pools than is reasonable for a three skull boss. I am speaking of Nkosi the Ashen in particular (might be others).
Jailors are a little two easy to kill.
Craftsman spawns seem pretty scarce in some of the big camps, including Siptah’s Ascension.
Nordheimer Shelves will not support chests on the seconds shelf. It would be nice to be able to stack chests on the second shelf.
Most Thrall camps seem well placed, but some are in particularly good build spots. Specifically N11, please consider moving the camps to less desirable locations. In the case of N11, there is a whole isalnd to consider.
Dungeons do not feel significantly different. I haven’t run all the vaults on Testlive, but the one’s I have I haven’t noticed the new enemy types and variations mentioned in the notes. I will keep delving.
Suggestions:
With the NPC camps there seems to be a good opportunity for loot and potential thralls so plenty of reasons to revisit them. The undead pirates camps however seem pretty useless. I mean they always were, but no even more so. I am speaking of places like “Haven of the Cursed.” Prehaps they camps could be revisisted adding a three skull boss with a skeleton key, fragement of power of something of that nature.
Since three skull bosses no longer spawn on bases in the maelstorm, perhaps there could be a way to summon them at a leyshrine. For example by placing hearts or eldarium as fuel in an acursed altar during the storm. This would allow people to farm the three skull bosses to get greater essence and would provide another important use for the leyshires.
Add sandbeasts to the maelstorm bosses to provide the bile glands, or give those glands to other monsters in the storm so the poisoned weapons may be crafted.
Small suggestion. With the addition of Nordheimer shelves, how about adding in some fancy shelving variants, like stygian. Preferably sized with the ability to stack large chests on the shelves. On PC I use Mods to accomplish this, but it would be a great addition to the base game especially for console players. Storage is all imporant in survival.
Single player camps take a few to fully spawn do to lower power with out a server to help load the game as single player is both the server and client thus get near and stand still for a few and all should spawn
I will go back to the camp and check again. I was there for quite a while, so I do believe it was fully loaded. There were NPCs, but I noticed quite a few empty tents and think it could be filled in a little more. I appreciate the comment though and will revisit.
So just another point to add. If there are NPC’s in the area, its potential that it takes a short while for them to fully load in. But if your PC is above average, or at least installed on an SSD, it shouldn’t be more then a few seconds at best.
There is a fairly old bug, though I haven’t seen it reported in some time so I’m not sure if it’s still a thing. It’s exclusively in Single Player (and the last time I saw the bug report, Siptah didn’t even exist at the time). You can go to an NPC camp, and there will be nothing there. No amount of waiting will change that either. The only way to fix it would have been to log out and back in, or admin port far away so that the map chunk that the character is on is unloaded from memory, and then port back.
So when you go back for another round of checking things out, if you see absolutely no NPC’s in the area, give that a try.
They’re not new; they used to be specific to certain area in the Maelstrom. And if them being miserable to hit was unintended, it’s been unintended since Siptah was released.
Given that you can find Greater ??? in chests near the tower, I’m not sure this is really necessary.
Hey Zane, thanks for pointing that out. I actually just found them in the storm last night in the current live build and realized I made a mistake there. I still do believe the hit boxes could use a slight rework. But if anything I think it’s a pretty minor issue. You are correct though they are not new.
I think you make a good point here. It is nice that you can now find greater unstables in chests making them way easier to acquire. While my suggested mechanic (using leyshrines to summon 3 skull surge bosses) may not be as necessary, I still argue that it would be cool. In fact, I would personally prefer to have that be the main way to get greater unstable essences, and have them removed from the chest loot pool. At 50 chaos, greater essences are very valuable and I want to feel like I earned them. The problem is, in all my time playing siptah, I have yet to even see a 3 skull boss (even after building a large base in the storm). Not sure what I’m doing wrong (might have to do with the server settings of the main server I’m playing on), but in any case I think it would be cool to remove that aspect of hoping you find one, or hoping it spawns and replace it with a sure fire way to summon them, while still making you earn the greater essence by defeating them. Also, it is logical use of the leyshrine. If you can open a portal to the exile lands, why not the outer void as well. Maybe it could give you corruption everytime you did it too, to make things interesting.
If you want to see 3-stars on live, make a huge base outside the storm and run a tiny little line of T1 foundation or suchlike into the storm and build a sorry little platform there. The bosses will show up to smash it as long as there are fewer than… three, I believe? …other people on the server doing that at the same time. Speculation was that the two guarenteed-spawn dragons that spawn on the long ridgeline in the SE corner of the storm are taking up 2 of the (5 in default server settings) siege monster spawn slots.
(The above mechanic is a big reason why the current surge system is so broken - once people realized they could do that, risk-free ??? farming became possible - and indeed, one player could connect 3 bases to one area close enough inside the storm that they could summon 3 3-stars at once and have the same group of thralls kill them all. You can get A LOT of ??? per storm right now with very little risk if you set it up right.)
