RE: Extra Characters (Full Version)

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RobynJoanne -> RE: Extra Characters (4/26/2021 15:48:51)

Along with the stat trainers, I think it'd be really useful to tell players where the stat untrainer is. It's definitely something players would have trouble finding without resorting to outside guides, and that's a problem for such an essential function.



GwenMay -> RE: Extra Characters (4/27/2021 6:00:06)

I would just like to say THANK YOU for adding the new character slots! Now I can experiment with some more wacky builds.



PD -> RE: Extra Characters (4/28/2021 18:55:23)

So as I continued to play through the early game, a few more irksome things I have experienced:

1. Stat rolls are virtually unusuable for the early game. Often a defiance roll at a high level is not so bad, but at lower levels this usually exceeds your total SP you can even have. I think there should be considerations for the player's level to scale this more appropriately. This is a problem because it discourages you from training classes until much later when you actually have the stat totals to have a reasonable chance at passing with stat and defiance. Not to mention this is also a problem in addition to class quests where often times you fight enemies WAY higher than your own level.

Also in addition, a lot of class quests still use the old stat system, which does not allow for defiance, and even the regular stat system gets rather annoying when you tie the roll, which actually should let you pass. Like what I suggested below with fleeing, I think there should be an additional option to perhaps, play a minigame or paying gold to bypass when your defiance AND stat roll STILL fails you, like with Assassin where the stat rolls are particularly difficult and monotonous.

2. Fleeing is also an impossibility at the lower levels. The 150 flee cost is trivial for high level players, but for new characters, this is virtually your entire SP pool. Perhaps there should be other ways of fleeing? I recently played through Paper Mario again and I found some ingenious mechanics in that game which I think could be applied to AQ:

1. A minigame that you play that conditionally lets you flee.
2. When you flee, you lose gold.

So perhaps to discourage fleeing too much, that AQ would implement one of these things.



ruleandrew -> RE: Extra Characters (4/29/2021 6:33:59)

I will try the new character challenge. I will purchase guardianship for new character when new character reach level 50.

--
I found items that are not in line with modern standards. This is the case with the items that are located in the starting area.



Zacky Vengeance Aloy -> RE: Extra Characters (4/30/2021 5:04:00)

Jumped on the train, my new mage (xguardian) is now lv35... experienced what PD mentioned about stat rolls when trying to level up Vampire subrace
Roll INT? Fine. Roll LUK and CHA.... gosh. Even a nearly full SP bar can't help me, so its back to a few waves of mobs again.

Well, RNG is to be expected in a game, but maybe some help is needed when the experience becomes not that fun.



ruleandrew -> RE: Extra Characters (5/8/2021 1:23:31)

Sight Beyond Sight is the misc you want for the early game (player need to reach level 5). That way your character can use skill points properly. This item is located in The Devourer Saga (Sage Uldor).



Digital X -> RE: Extra Characters (5/8/2021 1:43:33)

Going by what PD mentioned about fleeing and having reperccusions could be a good move if implemented properly. At lower levels your SP amount is quite low, a simple minigame like the "jumping over logs" in one quest (I can't remember which one) could be a possibility.

Failing that, a gold cost that is tied to your level maybe? Just food for thought.



ruleandrew -> RE: Extra Characters (5/29/2021 9:50:35)

The War Between Shadows quests note: monster level is equal to player level.



PD -> RE: Extra Characters (6/9/2021 21:29:51)

Not sure how long ago this was but there's now the ability to leave Granemor by clicking the arrow on the top left of the screen!

It would be nice to be able to do this in Lolosia too instead of the player having to go within Gibet's pub. Ironically, visiting Granemor and then going into Boog's Pub also lets you circumvent the requirement to require a Pass or Guardianship to enter the town.

Also, I admit I haven't been playing in a few months so I haven't been up to pace with my new character experience. I've restarted again and will put down some notes as I continue to discover.



So just a bit into re-playing my warrior, it's been pretty druggy with how lacking it is to play while farming options are limited and class quests are hard due to the abnormal scaling. I did discover however that Backlash seems for warriors at least, to be the best option for handling high level monsters since most battles are attrition based. Also as a little fun fact my warrior (50) was able to defeat the Nerfkitten guard (130) using the full doomlight set, Angra Linnorm and essence of Carnage. Although I would not like to rely too much because it's not the authentic experience.

I've been trying to limit the amount of premium items and shortcuts as a means to get to know how it actually feels like but even with the shortcuts I've taken so far on my warrior (and likely, I will experience this on a ranger) it's pure drudgery.



Also some monsters that have given me a lot of trouble during my playthroughs:

Giant Horror (High Damage + HP)
Lightbringers (High Damage + Regen)
Salamanders (High Damage + HP)
Ruby Golems (High Defenses, Blind attack is very punishing without access to auto-hit which is rare at low levels.)
Cyclops (High Damage + HP)
Trolls (Absurd Damage + HP)
Gogowl (Extremely low resists + Regen)
Fusian (Almost endless blind attack that punishes more early than later. Almost certainly goes off every time because you don't have stats to properly resist plus it usually goes first so you can't avoid it.)
Fire Golem (Extremely Low Resists + Damage)
Knights (stuns are extremely aggravating to deal with early on)
Undead Klubbers (High Damage + HP)
Minotaur Warrior (High Damage + HP)
Cyclone Wyvern (Huge Burst attack + Dodge)
Bruised Lee/Kara Tika/Kung Foe Trio (High Damage + Dodge)
Death Knight (High Damage + HP + Dodgy)
Ratliver (Extremely High Damage)
Nina + Edward and Finn + Jake (Very hard to deal with with regen + HP. I'm aware this a final challenge but this is pretty incredibly difficult if not impossible to do immediately even though the in-game tip says it's level 70 recommended. This is mainly due to the difficult monsters you tend to encounter alongside the quest alongside the duo bosses.)

The recurring theme being that at low levels, players are much less able to defend against SP-empowered attacks, and are less able to deal with regeneration and as such lose the battle of attrition that most battles at this point have become. Perhaps I may not be approaching the battles correctly, but with standard equipment at this point it's rather difficult because the available defensive equipment doesn't catch up with their damage.



Black_Crystal -> RE: Extra Characters (6/10/2021 21:17:17)

I made 2 characters, a warrior and a mage. Playing as a warrior is effectively playing the game on hard mode as a guardian without passing any GGB or any z token packages. I'm slowly grinding my levels (despite owning some ggb and z token package items) and the warrior finally reached level 50 but progression is gonna slow down quite a bit as its impossible for my warrior to farm Nerfkitten Scion. Thanks to PD I now know it's only possible with backlash builds but wow that's totally absurd in my opinion.

Drakath the Undead Dragon is a chore to reach with the amount of dialogue in twilly Vs zorbak. Hopefully something can be done about this, either introduce a place with a good monster with little to no dialogue or break twilly Vs zorbak to 3 parts when you click zorbak hideout. At this point in time, you are force to click through twilly Vs zorbak part 1 to part 2 and zhilo Vs galanoth. Not looking forward to playing warrior at this point despite having bloodzerker set on it. Maybe I will pass it back to main characters.

While playing as a mage, the wizard class training can be frustrating when facing demon creatures (Grakma and another demon) and light bringer due to their high damage, high HP and for light bringer specifically their ability to recover. If you meet them, chances of you getting a wizard class level is gonna drop drastically. Oh boy am I glad I max wizard class but the process sure is frustrating with the monsters above. I'm gonna guess I'm under level while doing wizard class training as the monsters I encounter range between level 60 - 70 while I'm only level 50. Maybe get your levels higher to avoid the frustration.

Something have to be done with SP nuke, it seems pretty badly scaled especially against levels below 70.

Mage is manageable and will be leveling up pretty quickly due to being able to down Nerfkitten Scion reliably. You will still fail if you missed too much, so just keep retrying and you will eventually clear it. You can increase you chances by having a source of celerity (I have strawberry shieldcake). Also, mage staff and wizard robes is pretty good economically and with its efficiency. Highly recommend them

Do remember to train your stats for whatever play style you are playing. Like most RPG, money is a huge issue at the start of the game so do consider carefully before spending them.

I don't play that often at this point due to assignments deadline coming soon. Will update again. Currently warrior is level 51, mage 50



PD -> RE: Extra Characters (6/11/2021 21:52:54)

More short thoughts:

Depending on the feasibility and/or developer bandwidth, I would like to see it that we could upgrade/downgrade our items in-game instead of having go to to the item upgrader on the website. Considering the fact that the games are now played on the launchers and the use of the webpages are not really encouraged these days, perhaps we could have another shop in the battleon town square that lets us do this functionality. It's actually pretty easy to forget to check if your items can be upgraded. Being able to do this in-game would make this much more convenient to check. Alongside being more intuitive to new players.

Bonus to hit nerfs generally are more punishing early game. Earlier today I was fighting a Fusian (the light devourer monster that looks like a small sun) and needless to say without backlash it was almost impossible to fight him because being hit with -30 BTH at level 5 meant almost nothing would hit. You don't have as much stats early on to compensate for the lost BTH. I have a suspect feeling that some monsters don't properly scale their effect strength and so proportionally some effects are way more punishing than others early on.

Added a few more monsters on the list that are hard to fight early on.

Some more suggestions:

1. Battle option to recover HP/MP/SP. You skip your turn to regenerate these. It ideally would not recover much, but it's more of a desperation measure when you're on very low reserves.

2. If possible, to help players understand what is up to date or not, perhaps give an indicator of a date of when an item was created or last updated in the shop. Not sure how feasible this is if at all. New or even just returning players will have the impression that all the items are up to date unless otherwise told. Perhaps a menu we could open up whenever viewing an item just to let us have access to come metadata related to that item, mainly when it was last updated/created and cursory stats.



So I played Beastmaster class quest. One thing I found particularly irritating (Besides the lack of defiance roll which cannot be helped easily) is that the roll difficult rises quite quickly. The first roll has you pass 20. Then the next roll immediately surges to 40. It then ends at level 65 for the last class level, which is far higher than the other class requirements.



ruleandrew -> RE: Extra Characters (7/12/2021 3:29:59)

Game equipment scaling part 1
Offensive gears are melee weapons, magic weapons, range weapons, bow-like ranged weapons, magic spells, call guest spells and pets.

Basic offensive gears should:
- cover 8 standard elements
- be accessible to all players
- be located in locations where player are not required to win a battle
- be available around player levels: 5, 10, 15, 25, 35, 55, 75, 95, 115 and 135

quote:

4. Equipment scaling is rather poor early on with gaps of 15-20 levels being the norm between tiers.

Just adding level 10 tier and level 25 tier for basic offensive gears would make the game difficulty a bit more bearable.



PD -> RE: Extra Characters (7/19/2021 0:26:06)

So I started yet another new character, again a warrior. Playing some of the more recent quests, a couple of observations:

1. The Devourer Saga has level requirements to play the quests. However they aren't displayed. This is a design flaw (and might be a minor oversight) because the updated monsters and rewards are scaled as low as level 5. It doesn't really make sense to lock a quest behind level 30, and then have the quests have rewards for levels 5 and up.

2. On Between The Shadows part 2, the Dark Rhinosaurus monstesr have damage reduction which makes them especially frustrating to play against. The damage reduction of 3 is a lot when they have low resistances except to light (there aren't a lot of good light weapons early).

3. The scalings between the monsters also seems to follow that of the weapon tiers. I tried to see if I could cheese myself through the Wicked King Saga (almost did except the Wicked King challenge mode, will post a low level strat for that!)

@Ruleandrew: Yeah, those are pretty much my thoughts as well. Defense doesn't matter as much early, but damage DEFINITELY can be felt more in the early game.

Now with the new scaling, normally this is fine because you tend to not fight the higher tiers until you hit the next one. But immediately after there's a surge of difficulty to be had. Finding a way to ease us into that new tier would be helpful to say the least.



EDIT: So as for the Wicked King Cheese Strategy:

First be level 29. Equip War's Legacy (This armor is especially easy to get at lower levels). Tempest Power Armor will work here too. This is because of the scaling that lets you face <30 level monsters (so you could be level 29, but still face a level 11 salamander). This should let you breeze through the Wicked King's Spire. Then as for the Wicked king himself, the real doozy being that due to your scaling, you'll be level 29, and the Wicked King only level 15. Spam Mayhem with an Ice Weapon (Or Rockets if you're using Tempest Power Armor). This gets past his soft cap because it's 4 hits, and will do a decent amount of damage. This will allow you to get Underwyrmling very early in the game and forever since you can use the account upgrader to upgrade it as you need as you level up without ever needing to play the quest again.



PD -> RE: Extra Characters (9/12/2021 23:10:29)

Just a few more insights I found regarding the early game:

1. After trying to help a returning player, I actually realized that there's a paucity of right now, non-rare content that is also not premium and not MC-set (IE truly accessible as a F2P equip choice). While this can seem somewhat a selective, and one can argue that MC sets are fine, that because they aren't upgrade-able and the quests are usually much more difficult that they actually cannot be reasonably suggested for a lot of players. In particular armors of this category seem to be really in need of some touching up. Perhaps there's a few items that we could suggest being touched up like we did with the Dark Hunter awhile ago. I'll post in the appropriate UpdateQuest thread about the armors that I think would do a lot to filling in the gaps. While not everything needs a max level version, having consistent tiering across the board is important to be able to handle the gradual increase in monster power as you scale up to the end of the game. Some of the equips I mentioned as prime candidates for updates have non-standard tiers which make the players vulnerable to getting overwhelmed because they can't scale up as fast as the enemies do.

2. Speaking of Compression, it seems that there's very few compression shields in the game that don't have a combination of either Fire or Dark in their switchers, and for weapons Dark and Wind. This can be a problem because it limits the item choices and that F2P's really don't have the ability to customize around slot deficits like Guardians do.

3. I'm not sure that there's a lot of testing around this area, but it might help to test and design around lower levels as well as the endgame. Some recent enemies like Nith (Eigerbuld), Draco Ghost (Void Dragon War) and the Tempest Power Robot Guard (Once upon a Scheme) are actually extremely difficult or near impossible to win against early without cheese strats. I tried to play against Nith on my level 20 warrior and he came out booming with 44 MRM which is quite high for that level. You can't really beat him unless you happen to have an auto-hit of some kind.



RobynJoanne -> RE: Extra Characters (9/14/2021 22:20:49)

@PD
There is a way to cheese the MC sets. Just buy a ton of Shared Vault slots and have your main buy a copy for every single level of the MC set items. You can then transfer them whenever your character hits the level threshold. It's super P2W and depends on already having a max-leveled character, but it is there for players who do not want to do the same quest over and over again for the same items.



PD -> RE: Extra Characters (10/14/2021 2:26:49)

One thing I've been looking at. So I've been playing around Nivp's experimental launcher for AQ, and actually, the Menu for recommended quests is something I think should be incorporated into the main client. And this is actually something that I wanted to concieve of earlier, but it seems that he has gone ahead and made this convenient menu. So Kudos, even if the Launcher can't be explicitly endorsed I think the AQ team should be taking notes because these kinds of accessibility changes are not only good for easing new players into the game, it's also extremely helpful for returning player, and also existing players who haven't played the early game in a while and want to properly enjoy the experience of the early game.

And that is one extension of everything that I have been talking about. The "New Player" isn't just someone who has never played AQ before. New is anyone from that, to returning players, to even people who are veterans and want to try something different. And that really should be a bigger thing to think about design wise. Ideally AQ should be a game where someone unfamiliar or outdated can pick up the pace right again without feeling hopeless or lost.



Lorekeeper -> RE: Extra Characters (10/14/2021 10:28:47)

Quest organization is one of the major quality of life issues we've acknowledged needs significant attention. Rest assured, these are some of the exact concerns any added functionality would have to cover -- Returning players need a more solid reference than stumbling around every part of the map until they stop finding quests that are placed several sagas after the point they last played.



Sapphire -> RE: Extra Characters (10/14/2021 10:49:00)

Cray, I'm sure it's known... But One thing I noticed when I started playing more regularly this time around is the encyclopedia/info subs has become outdated (updates), slow (new content), and sometimes outright forgotten about (other new content)

Perhaps it would be a good idea to have a person or two on these forums who are just here to make sure info subs get done, and they can update old stuff when they have time.

Keep Calm and Adventurequest!



ruleandrew -> RE: Extra Characters (11/6/2021 9:03:00)

These pets need a update to modern standard:
Chiken and Undead puppy



PD -> RE: Extra Characters (9/9/2022 22:59:43)

I know this is a pretty big bump, but regarding the new/returning player experience, especially as a game in a state of flux as it is right now, it may be a good idea to add a shop that you can use if you're new/returning to get items for free without questing so that as a minimum, you'll have equipment that's somewhat up to date. Yes, Yulgar's shop has items that you can buy without questing, but buying an entire set of items is actually quite expensive - the necessary amount of gold that you'd need to cover all your bases would be far more than the gold you could even earn in a reasonable amount of time. Many of the items in the shop are also outdated and not fully scaled in level.

I'm not sure how to do this for "returning" players. Would be be considered unfair for example, to be able to buy something like Torontosaurus/War's Legacy/Axemaster's Burden for free? Granted I'm using these as examples of "stocks" that are already very easy to get but are massively expensive. But these kinds of armors more or less are what a lot of people consider as minimal "baselines" to get started; although not as strong as what's available to get, they should at least allow you to make the game playable instead of getting "washed" by enemies.

Alternatively, at least for new players, there could be a "preset" setting where when you begin playing, you'll automatically be given a full inventory of "stock" items so that you'll be mostly covered for your journey. It also will be a helpful way to tell people how to do proper inventory management and tailoring for many types of battle situations.



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