I’ve been thinking that making explosive jars use the carry-in-arms mechanic introduced for treasures (and make placement a matter of dropping the jar at your feet rather than a long range placeable) would make raiding a lot more interesting. You’d still have people crafting bunches of explosives as they go and only ‘equipping’ them when they’re ready to place, unless you changed the crafting mechanism in some way. You’d need to increase the power of the explosives, though, but that would probably feel good from a physics-y perspective. All would hopefully make the explosives good for “last mile” raiding - blowing into a vault, blowing down an interior door, etc - while making some room for trebuchets and newer siege weapons for blowing through outer walls and the like. This wouldn’t quite fix the dominance of offline raiding, though. (I agree with @erjoh that the ‘players’ - a minority, but a dominant playstyle and its associated toxicity - have done a lot to drive me out of official PvP after about a year of holding out.) Not that I’m sure how to fix that without breaking the sense that player-built structures are part of the sandbox.

All of that said, I’m personally happy with the new content (though Chapter 1 AoW was a little sparse compared to prior Chapters, it seems 2 and 3 will make up for it) and I’m happy to see that Funcom has decided to make AI less flighty again. I think making the AI smarter and better at fighting in groups, as well as making purges/raiding against AI camps/random encounters more of a part of the game goes a LONG way to extending the replayability of PvE, and matters much more than going back to massive health bars: sponges didn’t really make the game feel more difficult tactically, it just made fights last far longer than they needed to IMO. I haven’t tried enough of the beta to tell, but if they make dodging less dominant, too, then I’m pretty much satisfied with the direction.

PS: FWIW, and I think this goes to @stelagel 's point about what ‘winning’ in PvP is, I stuck with PvP as long as I could get a sense of ‘winning’ from maintaining a nice pvp coliseum and stowing away things I liked; buildings would get bombed and need to be rebuilt, but if I rebuilt well, played diplomatically, got good loot, etc., I would be able to maintain a nice home for extended periods and save nice thralls, customized outfits, special items, and a character with maxed out knowledge. Maintaining this against offliners was never particularly fun compared to engaging in online pvp, and the mechanics of raiding kinda sucked - and honestly the pvp combat hasn’t been quite right at any point in the past year, either - but as toxicity drove away friendly players and Real Life got a bit busier I was less able to keep things up. The constant fighting in the chat made online time draining, not fun. Finally, an update broke my ability to maintain the coliseum (I remain optimistic that Funcom will fix the ‘can’t place gates next to each other on corners’ issue, but it doesn’t seem that the beta has it fixed…) and, of course, it had been offlined, so I let things decay. Wasn’t ultimately worth logging on to maintain things until a patch with the friendlier players drifting away.

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