Some suggestions for Isle of Siptah

After spending a lot of time within IoS, I have found a few things that could create a better improvement to the game as a whole. Given, I understand while in early access there is a lot of changes over time that will be looked at. Yet here is some feedback to some of the current concepts and processes that are in IoS.

  1. The maelstrom and building within it: It’s a decent concept to make the maelstrom a mysterious process which you have to farm creatures that you need to kill and use ??? in addition to getting eladrium to eventually farm for higher tier thralls. However, you literally destroy 1/3rd of the whole map. Allow people to build into at least the outskirts of the maelstrom to not take damage and those that want to build into the middle of it will be hit with Purge like mechanics where creatures will take out their base as well as the building itself slowly taking damage during the maelstrom. Only allow the closest made bases be hit with instantaneous destruction. This will allow a little more building room for people as 40 people per server doesn’t mean just 40 people and it gets very crowded quickly since this map is 11% smaller than the Exile Lands.

1a) Maelstrom creation for higher tier thralls: This grind is not necessarily needed to the degree that it has been designed to be. Your game design should address the least common denominator not setup for the largest grandeur possible. Your initial chaos of 200 and 400 can make sense. If you want people to grind that is fine but 1000 for the final tier is ridiculous and many people will not grind that out. As a matter of fact, I know at least 8-10 people that I converse with have stated to me that they refuse to grind 1000 just because the reward is too poor and they can then make due without the extra effort to just live off T1 crafters. So to combat this, I think that the chaos to make the process should follow the overall initial chaos numbers…200 for T1, 400 for a T2, and 600 for max tier. This would be inline with people who still want to try and makes the number makes the progression make sense. Another thing is that the max tier should at least allow 1 RNG T4 crafter out of the mix…a guarantee to allow people to keep coming back and WANT to farm the maelstrom and create their own surges for farming.

  1. Wild surges: There isn’t really anything necessarily wrong with these. My suggestion would be to allow people to not just get T3 fighting types in here but up to T2 crafters. This will give a nice compromise for people who don’t want to work toward the surge mechanic but likes the Siptah map over the Exiled Lands. Why do this? This gives some incentive for players to continue playing as T1 and T2 crafters don’t help THAT much but they help some to enough…and being at that stage could possibly motivate players to work towards max tier surges to upgrade to the T4s. This also gives a little more motivation to stay in Siptah versus the Exiled Lands where thralls can drop like candy.

  2. Limiting baby spawns/acquisition of babies: In Siptah, there seems to be a limitation of babies which for the most part is fine, but again, if someone wants to say…get a baby elephant…perhaps outfit and add more merchants to give someone all the possible babies in the game but there would be obviously a notable amount of gold/silver to purchase them. This will give access to players to get them if they are struggling with the snagging a baby at one of the random spawns. While I know this for the sake of limiting the amount of animations on the server…there should be accessibility because you want the game to be enjoyable not severely flustering. In addition, this will allow people to still access whatever baby to grow an adult even if the spawn point is built over.

  3. Caves: The current caves in Siptah are nice and a neat addition. However, when the maelstrom hits, everything goes dull. Swimming in The Depths, the Maelstrom came, it virtually went pitch black and the crazy bright plants even went dull…if there is a way to keep them lit during that time would help in general as it seems to break the immersion of the game when literally even brightly lit stuff goes so dull in color that it turns the area so dark you can’t necessarily get out. We notice this with the other cave too that is south of the map. However, they are wonderful additions.

  4. Unstable ???: The acquisition of them is very strange in the sense it is either 1, 2 or 50. This acquisition from the creatures in the maelstrom somewhat doesn’t make sense. To give more motivation for this process, it should be 10, 25, and 50 or some distribution that doesn’t punish your players to run the maelstrom content. The purpose is that you want to keep people playing either map and this process doesn’t help give players motivation at this point to continue to play Siptah. Again, make it a proportional gain for the effort exceeded.

These are some of the things that I have noticed and have suggestions for. Hopefully these will allow you all at Funcom look closer and improve the game. I like the map and the things within it but I think it needs enough tweaking to allow it to motivate players if things are more graspable.

You all take care, have fun, and stay safe.

-Icyhell1979

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I agree with almost everything you said. My one nitpick is that it is, in fact, already possible to build right up to the edge of the maelstrom zone. I know: all week now, I’ve had a base in G11, along one of those washed-out gullies – the top of the shallow cliff is out of the maelstrom, the bottom is inside. Very convenient for farming ???. But yeah, given what it costs in ??? to start a surge, wow is it grindy as heck. I’ve ground something like three or four maelstroms and I still don’t have enough ??? to trigger a tier 2 surge.

Let alone the eldarium. OMG, the eldarium grind. I’ve run one vault all the way through. I got barely over a dozen decaying eldarium. At this rate, I’d have to farm ever vault on the map just to build a single surge altar.

Seeing on somebody’s video that the only surges that spawn named crafters also spawn a 3-skull boss and 2-3 one-skull bosses on the same platform – seriously? They can’t possibly expect us to solo that, can they?

I farm 250+ green unstable ??? in a storm alone (without any players), with pre placed thralls. So the greatest tier summoning is just 2 storm far to me.
So, whom are lazy to farm the ammount are laughable.

BUT

The T4 spawning RNG needs to be balanced.

Hold up. I think you might be missing something, because I myself average 60 decaying eldarium per vault. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. The chest at the end usually has a nice pile of it in there.

Having said that, I still agree, The drop rates for this stuff and the ???- (hey Funcom, does it feel silly having named an item ??? yet?) -should be scaled to the players level or adjustable in the server settings imo.
Or maybe having sigils active would provide an eldarium loot multiplier, could be an interesting dynamic.

There is a difference between gameplay loop and GRIND.

There’s a known issue with vaults where the vault unlocks and resets but the chest at the end doesn’t refill. Sounds like that poster had some particularly bad luck.

I also think the drop rate of decaying eldarium needs to be increased a bit.

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If you do a speed run, that is, run past most monsters to take out the end boss and grab the final chest, then yes, you usually only get about 12 or so decaying eldarium.

But if you do the vault as it was intended – killing as many monsters as you can, grabbing the side chests as you go, and then kill the final boss to grab the chest at the end, you’ll end up with about 50-60 decaying eldarium.

The vaults are purposely set up to discourage speed running (which I thought was a clever way of rewarding).

Having said that, its still a grind to have to do them over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over… especially when you consider that you need the stuff for surges and delving bench discoveries.

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