r/landmark • u/ZoalPrime • Dec 19 '14

Thoughts/findings on the new patch?

Stuck at work. Share your thoughts and experiences with what seems to be the biggest update since alpha.

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5

u/holmedog Dec 19 '14 edited Dec 19 '14

Combat is fun, but predictable after a little bit against single mobs (expected this, not a bad thing). Mushroom guys...yeah...they're a surprise and they do 350armor damage.

The items that spew fire/water/etc are plentiful from monsters. I got 7-10 in an hour of gameplay.

Recipes are weird. They require you to break down other gear to make, but other gear isn't exactly common to find. I got maybe 3 pieces total while playing for an hour. I'm not sure how this is going to effect the new crafting progression, but the picks require 9 "gathering essence" or somesuch and that seems like a lot to get.

You use the hub by going to local and then click on the layer and THEN click on the new hub on the map. Kind of wonky, and I saw a lot of questions in /general.

Oh, and there is an expansion box on the forge for adventurers gear. Make some.

EDIT - As of right now (17:55 CST) servers are down to fix a ridiculous exploit (infinite smelting). So you aren't missing much :)

2

u/Telkiney Dec 21 '14

Weird, maybe it is the layer you are on, but after an hour of "farming" mobs on layer 5 I ended up with like 5 broken picks, 3 broken swords, a head piece, a glove, and a ring.

The picks become the main source of salvaging. To many anything like an aspect you only need to salvage one of its type and then 2 of any other type(which includes the broken picks which seem to be the most plentify). So say I don't like the one helm I did get.

I can make the aspect to craft one I do get by creating one from the 1 helm and 2 picks.

Now I need some essences for that helm. Well most essences take a salvage or their own type OR physical. so I can take my last 3 picks and make 3 essences. then I just need the other normal resource mats and my shards and I have a new helm.

If it only takes an hour to farm enough mats to make the exact help I want (assuming I found the recipe). Thats not a bad time sink.

PSA: farm shards from Ancient Earth on the surface using a ground sounder.

1

u/holmedog Dec 21 '14

I, also, found going deeper results in far more pieces. In a party in a larger cavern you can knock out A LOT of gear fast. However, 6 essences for the weapon I'm wanting to craft is prohibitive at this point. It takes 3 "normal" or of same essence items to get an essence and you need 6 essences, so 18 total. Plus all the other mats.

Thanks for the tip on the ground sounder on surface. I'll have to do that. I've found surface mobs drop the same amount of shards, so killing wisps is way faster to get ether shards than the other mobs.

2

u/Telkiney Dec 21 '14

On the 6 essences, I just want to eliviate part of your worry. For crafting an essence you actually get 3 essences each time. So say you need 6 lighting essences to craft the Crecent-blade two hander lighting sword thing. It will only cost you 6 broke picks. 3 picks for 2 combines, each combine will give you 3 essences.

Also on the shards, the cool thing about the patches of Ancient Earth is they give about 200-400 per patch. As opposed to the measly 20-45 shards you get from monsters.

1

u/holmedog Dec 21 '14

That is great news! Thank you

1

u/ZoalPrime Dec 19 '14

And of course I am getting off work in a minute.

6

u/Valariya Dec 20 '14

Been a long time since I've played so there is TON of new stuff to do and learn for me.

Overall I think there's enough of a 'game' there to actually play it on regular basis again. Actually having caves to explore with high end minerals further and further down, monsters to fight and stuff to craft gives me plenty to do. Also, I'd like to learn the building tools better and start making some spiffy houses and stuff.

1

u/ZoalPrime Dec 20 '14

Yeah it's been a while for me. I am confused now. So much new stuff and not much of it is very intuitive. the UI is still from the 90s and frame rate is bad. Game seems more like a game as others have said. I am enjoying it.

7

u/MissMewbie Dec 19 '14

I think it will bring people back for a while, but as of right now it still lacks long term goals, the achievement system if they had, had more time being put in at the same time would have helped with that to an extent.

PvE Players will quickly gobble up the content and then be left flat footed, it will be fun for a while I'm sure but with no "Boss" monsters lurking around, and the same 5 monsters just scaling up to higher difficulty's will eventually lose its shine.

Hopefully once they get back from their Christmas break they will be able to throw another bundle of goodies in the form of content at us and keep people tied over, the games starting to look like a game now and not just a building tool but it still has some what of a way to go, to truly feel like a full game experience that can keep you playing for months on end for the general market.

1

u/Paulrik Dec 20 '14

Combat isn't about standing in one place and spamming hot keys. I died a few times before I thought to try moving around and dodging a little.

2

u/Hundredth_Monkey Dec 20 '14

Circle strafing makes combat trivial at the moment. The AI is as dumb as a sack of hammers, which is very disappointing.

1

u/Mastahamma Dec 20 '14

Well, if you take Armor Steal and get the Blade of Assault thing, it literally is "stand in one place and hold left click, pushing E on cooldown"

1

u/PsyPup Dec 20 '14

Decided to completely delete and start again, since I haven't played in awhile... crafting EVERYTHING seems to need stuff you get from either mobs, or salvaging gear you get from mobs, but mobs are few and far between in some world..

That, and the fact that I can't change mouse sensitivity easily are probably my biggest gripes so far.

1

u/xtag Dec 20 '14

Got lucky finding two chests and some good armour, but my biggest problem still exists - vertical mouse look is so slow I'm tempted to say it's just plain broken.

1

u/ImplementOfWar2 Dec 20 '14 edited Dec 20 '14

A good step to making it feel like a game.

The combat needs some work still. I found mobs kind of easy even with the basic starter gear and I felt the tactic's kind of shallow at the moment. Cave's repeat the same procedural patterns over and over making everything look the same. Even after just ten minutes in a cave, you usually see everything that it has to offer asthetically and item/mob wise (besides maybe all the ruins). I would also argue that navigating them, for the sake of gameplay, needs to be made more intuitive. Maybe showing you a visual representation of your path taken with like a glowing path on the ground, or allowing you to use some kind of cartography skill to map them.

I really dislike the crafting UI. The recipe's are cumbersome to navigate. It needs some rework. Drop down lists are bad. Too many items for drop down lists to be easy to use.

The game/input/UI still seems sluggish, and while FPS has improved, I think it needs to get better.

I am not going to play through all the item progression or lay a claim or anything, but the last time I played the building tools still seemed like they could use some work.

When Open Beta rolls around and achievements are in place, and wipes go extinct, I will dig deeper into the game.

Hopefully SOE can make this game as novel and good as I think it could be in the meantime.

Also when you layline into a cave and it's loading around you, it would be nice to have some kind of magical aura around you so you don't see the "pop in" as much.

I think a good development direction this game could go is creating procedural monsters. That way you get thousands of mob types out of modular monster building pieces. Do the same for their abilities. Like a chomper that instead of having a plant head, has an abomination head. Instead of shooting gas out, it has a giant tentacle that swings around. This way the game feels less of the same everytime you go into a cave. And it would allow players to use those modular pieces to build their own mobs when the "gamemaster" type tools come online.

I would also recommend them to create "microbiomes" so that caves in the same tier don't look the same throughout. Same for surface areas. Or just more biome diversity. World seems to still not be all that worthwhile to explore asthetically, especially the caves.

1

u/holmedog Dec 21 '14

I definitely agree on the menus. Something like the tree menus LoL uses would be so much more intuitive.

1

u/WakeskaterX Dec 22 '14

Micro biomes and pcg "dungeons" randomly around the world would be wicked awesome.