After testing the changes for a few hours and also taking a look at nearly every legendary weapon from the admin menu, I’m really disappointed with this update.
The stamina changes are ridiculously bad and do not achieve the goal of making PvE content any better, in fact it makes it more annoying and the changes to enemy health make every enemy all the way up to the hardest of bosses so easy its a joke (I solo’d red mother in about 5 minutes with a greatsword and only 10 strength, using non upgraded epic gear).
The extremely high cost of attacks make nearly half of the weapons useless unless you put 20 points into Grit, and even then 20 points in Grit you still cannot even complete a hammer heavy attack chain, you will run out of stamina before you can do the final slam. Nearly all weapons you can basically do one combo and dodge and then repeat. The only thing offsetting how annoying it is for the vast majority of builds to not even be able to complete a heavy combo is that stamina regens faster, but this is not a good thing, because now enemies are so easy you basically will never get hit unless you’re swarmed. The AI in this game is much too slow and clunky that with the super fast regen you dance around them.
Then on to the legendaries: the vast majority of which are simply just number changes and that’s it. Some of the weapons ended up getting already existing perks added to them but that’s the farthest it goes, which is very disappointing. Not to mention a lot of weapons took a massive hit in durability that some of them may only last a few fights before breaking. I spotted even some legendaries with like 450 max durability, and most crafted daggers and short swords are 800 or less base.
I was pretty disappointed in the Age of Sorcery because of the monetization changes and Funcom set the expectation we’d get new content every 3 months, but to be completely honest, there’s almost no new content in the game. Encounters were all but removed, and the only new thing we have that’s stayed was Kurak’s dungeon. Golems are simply just another form of followers we already have, but worse. The building hammer is just a QOL update and didn’t add anything to the gameplay, the attributes again just a rework and don’t add any content.
I was withholding judgement until the next Age hoping for something big, and here we are with the first chapter adding absolutely no content and making some very poor decisions. Chapter 2 is simply just another rework of an already existing system, and will likely be just as scuffed if not more buggy than now, and chapter 3 will hopefully have a fun mechanic but based on the track record I doubt it.
Oh but the battle pass and the Bazaar are pushing constant updates, while the actual content being introduced is bare bones and not any better than the release schedule prior to the shift in development.
