keiotyk

If you're responding to the people commenting about damage and/or numbers, fair enough... However, my posts have consistently referred to the lacklustre nature of the damage mechanics for the druid. Making this a more enjoyable experience has little to do with the effectiveness of specific aspects of their kit, but rather the flow of their kit. Especially on the druid where the cycle of actions is made to be circular; the system of generating and using essence .

The druid is a ranged nuke caster for 50% of her gameplay. She doesn't need to be as powerful as the confessor, or play the same either - She does need to be enjoyable to play in this hybrid fashion. I don't feel that solo vs. team play should affect this 'fun to play' view of an archetype. Druids historically did blood sacrifices. Computer games made them nature loving hippies. Would an essence stealing druid feel like a druid? I don't know, but I don't think it's not a possibility. I wasn't commenting on party vs solo. I specifically lack information on party play partly due to my play hours. My problem is that her damage is gated by healing first. And not her powerful damage, but ALL her damage. For a character who is supposed to be a hybrid of damage and healing, in a game where healing is supposed to be more limited, the druid's damage feels tacked on to the archetype, instead of integral to her playstyle.

My frustration comes from being unable to do any damage without essence. And that building that essence can be tedious. Also, I don't like turning health into damage at the best of times - I like it even less on a relatively frail character, and with rather low efficiency. I'd be better just spamming heals for the amount of essence vs. health burnt. Personally, I find it more logical to build up essence by stealing it first - Vampirically strip the essence from others to heal your team.

Jumped into the game for the first time this weekend, and have mostly spent my time playing a druid, and then a confessor. Confessor was a nice, simple, blow things up character. The Druid however... was kind of tedious to play. Her balls of life, if you can set them up, can one shot stuff - Neat. Could make for some nasty ambushes. I found the essence mechanic interesting... insofar as it prevents excessive heal spam. But it was horribly tedious too. If I wanted to kill anything, I HAD to spend 30 seconds spamming heals to have essence to power my death tray. Any fight verses a mobile foe that you don't get the jump on is just... ugh. Run around spamming heals until you have the essence to fight back for 30 seconds. This just isn't fun. Plain and simple. The mechanics on paper seem interesting, but functionally, they're tedious and frustrating. I imagine that in group play it's less obvious, because more people need healing and there's much less wasted healing, but if you walk around solo, harvest some leather or mess with some of the undead, and it's quickly more annoying than anything else. I believe it's been done in other games already, but a pendulum style interplay of life and death would probably make for more interesting game play, and not require this wasted time preparing for combat. Linking more powerful skills for either life or death to having built up a minimum resource around a 0 point seems logical, with possibly a penalty for extremes in either direction. (I feel this was the mechanic on the Archmage in Warhammer Online, but I can't remember for certain) Or you could make the effectiveness of skills be linked to your attunement along an essence (life force?) scale. But make it a scale from -100 to +100, with 0 as the base. Death spells drain your life force to use as damage - the less essence you have, the weaker your damage. Life spells will restore your life force, but as you build up essence, you can no longer direct it to provide meaningful healing to anybody. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing; medicines become poisons at excessive dosages. You could keep the damage on holding excessive essence, and maybe make too little essence weaken your character, slowing movement, reducing stamina recovery or similar. You could conceivably have excessive essence make you faster and more vigorous... Until you go supernova of course. This would make the druid more of a tight rope walker, and allow more flexibility in her opening play. It would also make the character significantly more challenging to play however. Though I doubt anyone thinking of playing the druid is presuming it would be an easy archetype to play. More importantly, I think it would make her a more enjoyable experience, while maintaining her current playstyle as an option.

Money makes the world go round... A lot of people seem to think that item for item barter would be the common standard. Ergo, here's a sword, give me a shield. While this would and still can occur, what's more likely is that the most functional crafting component would become the defacto in-game currency. All item values would be calculated by people around this. In other words, the ore for crafting would probably be your defacto currency anyway, purely because fulfills all the requirements of being as functional at as many levels as possible. All other ores would be calculated in relation to it. E.g.: Iron is used in nearly every weapon and piece of armour, even if only minimally. This degree of necessity/functionality gives it 'real' value, even if it is also relatively common and easily obtained. So, why use 'coins', instead of 'bars of ore'? When you barter with something of large value, you would need to trade a huge amount of barely valuable items to match the value of your ore. Then you need to find people who want these items AND who have something you want. Now, what if those items are bulky too? This is a serious source of frustration for anybody who is not interested in engaging in any sort of mercantilism. It also slows the movement of resources and goods for those that DO want to focus on crafts and trade. By splitting our bar of metal into smaller pieces we can trade bits of our bar for these various small items that may be worth MUCH less than a whole bar, but are not worthless. And equally important, I can trade with MANY people to get the best prices possible. And we just so happen to call those bits of metal, 'coins'. ------------------ I think the dev's intended method of implentation is good. I look forward to the next update.