Topics created by Yalah

Currently, your damage and DPS are only shown in the tooltip of the weapon you're using. If you are unarmed, there's no way to see what your "weapon" damage and or DPS are. Please add this feature somewhere to the character sheet.

TLDR: Even with max possible investment in Health Regeneration (which is not realistic, see below), you get ~25 health Regen from 4x Enduring II. In anything realistic, you get 3-5 health regen from 4x Enduring II. Please improve Enduring II. END TLDR Available Health Regen: Base: 5 Iridra: 5 STR: (25) 0.5/STR Enduring I: (4) 2 per point T3 Health Regen Imbue: (4) 4.5 Arboreal Dragon Leather (set): 10 Potion of Vitality: 3 Verdant Regrowth: 60 (I don't know if Endrance II even effects this) Iridra Primal Bonus: 200 (I don't know if Endrance II even effects this) Enduring II: (4) 2% per point If you combined all of those at once (which you can't), you would have ~320 Health Regen and 4x Enduring II would give you ~25 health regen. If you dropped Iridra Primal Bonus you would have ~120 health regen and 4x Enduring II would give you 9.6 health regen. If you then dropped Verdant Regrowth you would have ~60 health regen and 4x Enduring II would give you 4.8 health regen. If you were a basic Human with 20 STR, 4x T3 imbues, 4x Enduring, and a Poition of Vitality you would have ~39 Health Regen and 4x Enduring II would give you ~3 health regen. Realistically, a single point in Enduring II gives you 0.5 to 1 health regen. That is 50% to 75% worse than what you get from Enduring I. I don't know if the fix would be to up the % or just make them a flat bonus, but currently they're pretty terrible. Even for a build that is maxing out STR, this talent is very bad. (I mention this specifically because the usual pattern of the 2nd tier of talents is meant to be more effective if you'd actually invested into the base stat.)

I've been working with Spoletta on possible bugs related to using Touches and Strikes at the same time while in Primal Form. I think they're handling the bug report (if not I'll post it separately). Today I found out some new info that makes me think that when the "Primal Form claws count as any 1h weapon" part was added to the game, no one considered whether or not it was ok for Touches and Strikes to be used at the same time while in Primal Form. (Because it was actually impossible for them to be used together before.) So yea, maybe this isn't a buff request, but rather, "please decide whether or not Primal Forms should be allowed to use a Touch ability as the same time as a Strike ability." (My opinion is still that it should be allowed. It's a good buff for unarmed and Primal Forms.)

The idea that I have is to give every summon a short cooldown, but increase that cooldown based on how much health the summon is missing at the time it's unsummoned or dies. For example, lets use the Bear and say it's base cooldown is 1.5 seconds: It gets unsummoned (dies) at 0%. The cooldown is 1.5x10 = 15 seconds. It gets unsummoned at 50% (you wanted to resummon to get one at full health). The cooldown is 1.5x5 = 7.5 seconds. It gets unsummoned at 100% (because you ran away from it). The cooldown is 1.5x1 = 1.5 seconds. In this system you could still set the different tiers of summons to have different cooldowns, but not as harshly punish people that are having them unsummoned for non-combat reasons. (I.e. running from pack to pack)

Not a Guide: Melee Fighter - Conclusion TLDR: Axes are not only viable, they are very strong for reaching rank 50. It would have taken me about 30 hours to hit rank 50 and that wasn't trying to speed run, just buying gear and being focused on what I was doing. END TLDR A lot of people feel like melee is lacking when compared to mages in this game and I'm one of those people. However, melee can be very strong for PvE and are able to take down virtually all of the monsters in the game with relatively low investment (for a melee). You could quickly improve on what I did just by throwing on a Rogue set for that stacking damage buff. Because of the fundamental difference in melee versus ranged, melee will always need more investment than mages, but you can still get by with relatively low investment as I did. Hopefully, we'll get some improvements to melee sometime in the near future, but until then we can make do. It's worth pointing out that some of the decisions I made will not be the most powerful option. I would encourage people to try other stat combinations and find what works best for them. Different Weapon Choices I think Axes are either the best melee weapon or at least in the top 1 or 2, but I don't have a ton of experience with the others since the Combat Endgame Changer (EGC) patch about 6 months ago. I'll talk a little about the others below. Fencing is the one I have the least experience with, but I know pre EGC, people were showing off some impressive single target damage with the spear and the rapier is a popular sword and board option because it has spell channeling. My primary problem with the school is that the Spear's AoE is a line and that makes it hard to effectively use against groups of monsters. Additionally, their skills are single target or a line. If/when the Halberd is reintroduced, that might make the school more appealing to me. (Assuming that it will use Fencing.) Knife Fighting used to be my favorite melee weapon. I, and others, were quietly using it to take down every non legendary monster in the game. EGC changed some of the skills, specifically nerfing Strike Wounds, and it's not as strong as it used to be - at least not in the same builds. I'm not saying they're weak, just that they took a hit (from what I would have considered to be the strongest option). Daggers have spell channeling so you can work in some magic with them and even use the Battlemage set to buff their damage even more. The Assassination tree has some obvious skills that might interest you and I would specifically look at Death Mark in combination with all the debuffs that are available to Daggers (including weapon poison). One last thing I will say about Knife Fighting is that you can only have one active strike at a time, but there is nothing stopping you from having multiple on your hotbar and rotating through them, keeping each on cooldown. I would argue that Mace Fighting is probably the weakest weapon school. I did a Not a Guide (Druid Background) right before the EGC patch that used Maces and I did not enjoy my time. The big draw of Mace Fighting is that the weapons all have the Bashing property which is a on hit stun. In my Not a Guide the gameplay where my Quarterstaff really shined was when farming fairly big groups of lower level monsters. It was basically a looting simulator. I think Maces need some adjustments, but to be fair to them, The Quarterstaff is probably the weakest 2h option and so it wont excel with weapon skills (but it is the only 2h option that allows spell channeling). Also, with the advent of summons allowing reliable back attacks, Spine Breaker Blow might be significantly stronger than it was for me. I would probably argue that Swordmanship is the more defensive and versatile option when compared to Axes, but overall very similar. I have not used them post EGC, but I would expect very similar results as what I got from this Not a Guide and axes. The one notable difference is that swords have a 1h option that allows spell channeling (and that's a big part of why I think they're more versatile. Not too much more to add. Non Weapon Options for Melee Note: The following comments are made under the assumption of having no Proficency in their respective schools. Orbs are a long term goal and by the time you're able to use imbues to max one school and start getting respectable levels in a second school, you should have figured out what works best for you and your style. The first thing to point out is that Poisons are a great way to add damage to any weapon that has the "Poisonable" tag. The tree has talents that help with poisons and I would try to work them into any build using poisons. Familiarize yourself with the different poison crafts and keep an eye out for those materials. Warfare has some good skills. Shockwave, Battle Jump, and Bloodlust are probably the top 3. The big problem I have with most of the others is that they have pretty low uptime and long cooldowns (due to PvP balancing). For example, Second Wind sound good, but you get a 15 second 50% penalty to healing which includes health on hit imbues and Bloodlust if you are using them. It's pretty easy to math out how many attacks you'd make in 15 seconds to figure out if it's worth using. Frenzy sounds good, but even if you have the talent for two sustained abilities, you can still only have a single Battle Stance at a time. You have to choose between Bloodlust, Frenzy, Strike Wounds, and Viciious Attacks. And that's if you have the two sustained talent, if not then you have a lot more options you have to put it up against. You'll notice I stuck with Aura of Oppression at the end of this Not a Guide. Hunting has some options. Hunter's Mark is a good way to make sure that your auto attacks always land, but if you're skipping real accuracy, your debuff stacking will suffer. Most of the traps are new, post EGC, so I don't have a lot of experience with them. At first glance, they might be worth testing to see if any are worth the debuff stacking. With the exception of Strike Wounds (which is solid) Assassination only works with Light Armor and one handed weapons (and not when you have a shield). These are fairly restrictive and I'd argue most useful for PvP. I will throw out there that Death Mark would make debuff stacking much better. Leadership has some good options, some good options with terrible uptime, and some options that are more PvP focused. I really like Aura of Oppression as a "generically good" toggle ability that is useful for many different situations. This is when compared to something like Bloodlust which is only useful when you can apply bleeds and your target isn't immune to them. (Which is to say this Aura is not "the best.") I like Challenge a lot, but arguments can be made for other link abilities. Everything else in here gets kinda Iffy. Inspire and Shields up? 33% uptime by default and with 40% CDR they're still up less than half of the time. Everything else is situational or balanced for PvP. Concluding the Conclusion: You're going to need to invest in a Melee build for it to feel good. At a minimum, you need a T2 (metal) weapon ASAP. Buy your first one and try to avoid Copper, Tin, Iron, Silver, and Gold versions unless they are very cheap or very easy to get. You can invest in Medium and Heavy Armors, but be aware of what encumbrance does (it's in the lower left of the Character Window). You don't need the special set armors to progress, but several of them will help depending on how you choose to play. Don't be afraid of starting by using axes and then switching to your preferred weapon after you get some of the skills. The Tutorial gives some great Axe skills.

The mechanic for recharging Primal Energy when resting feels tedious when you have to recharge large portions of your energy. Forcing you to either use incredibly inefficient shards/crystals or sit there and right click every 5 seconds for 1-2 minutes. You can help reduce the need to sit and recharge large chunks of your Primal Energy if, while you're playing, you rest with Q and pop a residue or two every so often. However, I don't always need rest so I'm actually spending even more time to Q rest when I don't need to, and then use several residue. Maybe if you rested at a fire, it would automatically use Residue from your inventory to recharge your Primal Energy. (I'd be fine if the overall rate was the same and I just didn't have to actively click every 5 seconds.) That way you could at least go afk for a couple of minutes while it was recharging. (This "problem" happens more on Syndesia since Wildfolk do not get any passive regen there. On Arboreus, you get back a fair amount running/riding to locations.)

Update as of August 5th: I'm just short of hitting rank 50 now and I just wanted to update my thoughts on Summoning. Basically, they are much more viable than I had worried from my initial testing. They are many times weaker to magic and elemental damage than they are to physical, but outside of magic heavy monsters, they do well enough that I don't think they're objectively too weak. In terms of farming speed, they do not match pure DPS builds that can blow stuff up and quick rest. Cooldowns with them are not fun (and I'm saying this as someone that has 40% CDR). Please consider a base movement speed of 400 or 450 for all summons either by default or by some kind of buff we could choose. It's incredibly not fun to kill a camp and have your pets despawn while you run to the next one 2-3 screens away (and then usually have to wait for the cooldown to reset). I would like to see some pets that handle magic better. I have mixed feelings about the elemental Primelings. They do not heal from, are not immune to, and do not at least take greatly reduced damage from their matching element. This means they don't serve as very good magic tanks for that specific element and because they only deal their matching damage type, you cannot even use them to counter their matching elementals. They do have some nice debuff resistances, but their primary use seems to be stacking their elemental debuffs on enemies and I'm not sure they're good enough at that for you to want to swap them out for another option. (i.e. if you are heavily specced into fire, you should be stacking fire buffs very well on your own and would rather have a pet that does more damage or tanks better rather than more warm debuff stacks that you don't really need.)

Today, 31 AUG, I finally got around (remembered) to check to see if the original set of summons got any changes when the new ones were added. They did. Almost all of the original set got 50 to 150 buffs to various resistances (a few did get minor nerfs to resistances). These were mostly in the various magic resistances making them all a bit tankier than they were when this Not a Guide was first written. The most notable buffs were probably given to the various Primelings which should tank a lot better than before - especially magical damage. (These also got a big HP buff.) I'm not going to go back through and update this Not a Guide with these new stats because these kinds of rebalancing changes can happen often and it's a lot of work to retest and the update all of the posts. The big thing to know is that most of the summons I talked about will be tankier.

I started up a new bowman and the first 5-6 camps I ran into (both POI and not POI) were all ghosts. In contrast, I've seen no ghosts in the highest level areas when I've been running around on my higher level characters. The weapons needed to damage ghosts are not newbie weapons. Ghosts spawns and POI should not be showing up until somewhere around medium level difficulty areas or whenever you think it's reasonable for players to have obtained those weapons. Right now, I don't think they are a positive factor in the newbie experience.

@Yalah I completely agree to your conclusions! With rank 17 i can bring down a Wolf with 4 cast/hits. All fights take long. very long and boring. Still not met any monster that gives me a selfheal. Gameplay is like playing a tank and not druid. I wish i had chosen another background. But now i'm too tired to start again. In the meantime i reset base values and abilities to be more melee and mace. But with the staff it is a joke. And as you wrote i had the idea to knife with bleeds and poisons, but i only created the talent set and did not realy play it. For sure, your advice is correct: do not druid your first char, maybe do it as a challenge when you have other chars ranked 50 and you have fun with more suffer than the game brings by design

@Yalah thank you so much for your builds, I wanted to know if you had tried the build using str with win and if you found much difference on the damage

@stkmro said in Arborean PvE loot rules: @spoletta said in Arborean PvE loot rules: The current system is that there is a damage threshold you have to reach in order to be eligible to loot. What's the damage threshold? Sucks to be a healer?

We can use system like heat and cold to generated energy for transform and in night mode it can get x2 faster (night is time for animal hunting) Primal Form should be like when animal get crazy Frenzy buff plus : cooldown, attack speed, move speed, crit, hit to health recovered, cant use weapon abilities and after Primal form out of time, you should add cooldown for 10s or get debuff confused like a punishment for balance.

I totally agree. Extracts are so baseline, that they should be available with the ressources on all worlds. Please fix it!

The good "mathematical " solution is to make them lose durability based on time spent in combat, but it is not intuitive so it isn't an overall good approach.

@Yalah said in "Spell Unicity Group" errors: Counter Strike has no Spell Unicity Group tag. The tag that most makes sense for it would be "Ready Strike" but since the skill requires a block to occur before the usage of the skill, it might need a new category of tag like "Counter" or "Block" Spell Ready Trigger: On Attack Received

Would like to see an option to block invites/trades. Just had someone spamming me with popup windows and kinda made the game unplayable until they got bored and stopped.

very nice not a guide

Although I never put it in these terms, I've been suggesting being able to bundle using tge packing stations to diversify tge various regional markets