Vunak

Is that actually confirmed or is that just speculation

So its the last class and it has been a LONG !@# time for them to make this class. Any word, or are they just gonna put retired next to its name like the other classes? Seems kinda counter-intuitive to be working so much with the classes/talent trees when you don't even have all the classes in to do any sort of balance work and how that one class could affect the entire games atmosphere. Just seems odd to me.

Harvesting and Crafting have to be integral and very big parts of Crowfall especially in the grand scheme of the game. Passive Training isn't bad and it is rather fluid. What I do think they should do is move around some of the crafting recipes to be more available earlier to be equal across all the classes. I think they should augment the Passive Skill training with an active component as well that adds to the Passive Training to give people and incentive to continue logging in regularly. The Vessel leveling system doesn't really do it since it is also technically locked behind the crafting system and necromancy. What they do need to do soon is release the last class and do a balance pass on the classes and disciplines. The reason a lot of people aren't playing is because of the wipes obviously, but another is because of how strong certain classes are in the current game making it meaningless to play or experiment/test anything else. Constantly seeing in general chat from new/returning players if a certain class is viable and what disciplines to choose.

The skilling system is going to be a large problem for the first campaigns, new players later on and returning players. Also as others have said its almost more convenient just to login to spend your training points until you have a decently fleshed out character and THEN play the game. Yes, I have changed my opinion on it in the past few days. A simple idea I had was to allow the passive training to persist as it does, but to add to it more. Allow players to slot one or one of each tree (Profession, Race, Class) into an active roll. Every action they take in game whether it be a PvP victory, harvesting nodes or crafting; allow it to add to those passive trees selected to speed up training with actual player activity. With passive training only, people are going to get very tired of waiting for their points to accumulate to spend them. But if you add an active component to it, it will help players have the feeling that they are actually contributing towards their advancement. So for example, I have Combat Basics, Mankind and Mage selected as my passive training. I then get an additional option(s) and slot Mage into an active role as well. All my in game activity will boost the passive training gain in that tree by x amount based on my level of activity in game. The vessel leveling system doesn't fulfill this very well at all in comparison to how much passive training impacts characters power/development. Especially when vessels have their own tier system and early game you are largely wasting your time leveling your vessel up until you have that legendary crafted vessel, which again is time gated by the passive skills system.

Skills Time based leveling is fine. You got to remember that the patches now are doing FULL wipes. Meaning your skills, time bank, spirit bank etc are all being wiped just about every time they do a major update and sometimes in between to squash bugs. There is only going to be ONE campaign where you are going to be time gated and that is going to be the very first campaign that launches as everyone's skills will carry over into successive campaigns from then on. A month is really not that long of a time, I suppose it is for todays standards where everyone wants everything now, but that isn't how Crowfall is being built. It could very easily be a case of Artcraft leaving in the 3x skill gain for the first month of release to speed up progress for the first real campaigns. I completely disagree with your assumption that stockpiling resources is not worthwhile. Simply put whoever does stockpile resources in the first days of the first campaigns are going to have a major leg up on the people who don't. Guilds and large groups of players are going to need to stockpile materials for their guild/group. Not to mention there are going to be other things to keep materials for. Keeps, walls, towns, homes, vendors etc. The RNG component of getting legendary/epic gear is there as well and wanting materials in excess to do well on experimenting to min/max as much as you can at the start. Actually. You know if you don't want to stockpile you go ahead that will just leave more room for my guild and me... Harvesting Harvesting causing PvP is already happening, but it will only get more and more as time goes on and as people start laying claim to quarries and mines and have to use Caravans to transport boulders and lumber for supplying keep walls and buildings. Also this is not a game being built around the solo player. Setting up groups of gatherers being protected by groups of PvPers is going to be a very crucial part of the game. If you go out and lose everything in the first few skirmishes you get into, while it is unfortunate, it is a part of the more hardcore aspect of Crowfall. Crowfall is also going to have different campaigns with different rulesets, so for the people that can't handle that, there will be a place for them. Group Size Completely agree with this. Groups need to be larger. 5 man groups work fine in less sophisticated games where the only rolls to fill are DPS/TANK/HEALER. In Crowfall however there are tons of rolls to fill in many different ways. The support is a very necessary roll in CF and in a 5 man group it is to small to fit. Even 6 man seems to small. I think 8-10 is a good number for a full group for a game like Crowfall. They would need to readjust AoE skills to match the higher group sizes, but I think its necessary. Crowd Control I think it is a little hard to gauge this right now. We have a ton of skill training that directly interacts with CC. It could be a case of them putting in diminishing returns more aggressively affects the later game when skills are more fleshed out. I agree however that if, when people are skilled decently, skills don't take care of the issues that it needs to be addressed. There is nothing more frustrating in a PvP game than being completely locked out of being able to do anything to defend yourself. This needs to be done very intelligently though and have a lot of thought behind it. Retaliate is a good mechanic and is how TERA handled knockdowns, but even TERA realized it wasn't enough and allowed players to obtain the Cleansing Brooch which broke any CC outside of KD on a 3minute CD. So it might not be a case of hard diminishing returns but a case of adding in more options outside of disciplines to handle CC. Food I agree very much with food. It diminishes to quickly and affects certain classes more negatively than others and should be looked into. This is more of a personal grievance. But I don't like the meat bar either. With all the very clean UI elements it looks out of place. I think a bar with a number attached to it so we can tell how much food is being applied when we use an apple or whatever would fit better. Class/Discipline/Race Balance Balance is always a heated discussion in any game. It is definitely more pronounced in a PvP game when players are directly competing with each other. That said Crowfall is a game in Pre-Alpha and while I think it is important to smash them with feedback on balance we still have to remember that they are testing tech and seeing how things can work. Increasing the range on bows could very well just be a test to see how projectiles work over much larger distances. We don't know, there could be alternative motives to changes just to test tech and how it works in a live environment. I think the main thing here is they need to get all the classes out. Without the last class being released it is hard to really give feedback on overall class balance until it is implemented. It could be a hard counter to a lot of the stronger builds out there now. Or it could be a potato, we just don't know how a large chunk missing is going to affect the game. For example imagine Crowfall now without Cleric and Druid. We just don't know how much Frostweaver is going to impact. So out of all my feedback I say that is something they really need to focus on getting out.

If Promotion classes are still a thing they are considering perhaps its for that.

Really think they need to push out the last classes and then start diving into how to differentiate them more. I don't think crutching on disciplines is a good idea. I think each class should have its own identity and strength/weakness and build upon that with disciplines. Then another combat pass, because as it stands now with hitbox issues and things its not going to end well for ArtCraft. I think shooting for a low skill ceiling is a horrible idea.

This wouldn't be a problem if they went with a more active avoidance system instead of the stupid long i-frames we have. Melee could dodge CC with shorter I-frames and get in range by keeping themselves from ever getting hit by a CC. Making it more skill oriented, and ranged characters having to bait the I-frames with skillfull play themselves. But I suppose ArtCraft wants a very low skill ceiling for whatever reason.

If they can't get hitboxes and projectiles correct, this game is dead in the water before it even releases. Having a PvP MMO where you can't determine what target you're attacking is ridiculous. Something else I noticed along with the hitboxes is how horrible range is on melee. Unequip a weapon and just do a punching contest. The range on the melee swings are around 7-8m, that's crazy big for a melee.

Hope to see Frostweaver sooner rather than later as well. Hoping it gives me that magey mage feel I so desperately want. Confessor just didnt do it for me.

I'm partial to the way TERA and BDO allow custom crests and things. It allows guilds to have their own identity rather than a preset that will be used over and over by multiple guilds and also gives the community a flag to identify certain groups of people easier. They could always add a toggle to it for people that don't want to see crests next to other peoples names and have it only display the guild tag or guild name underneath the name. Or an option for all of them. But custom crests I think is a must for a game that is about players creating large settlements and contesting other player guilds/factions etc.

GW2 everyone was their own healer, not to mention the down mechanic, so you cant really argue that GW2 is similar to CF there. Everyone was self sufficient on their own because of everyone having their own heals. Or Ele dropping healing rains and things on the raid. Now GW2 even has more baseline healing specs like Druid and Tempest so you cant even argue that. CF follows more the traditional with Druid and Legionnaire. The only thing CF promised us was not having firehose healers which was/is a healing class that just sits back looking at HP all day. But they never said anything about not having a more role specific traditional healer, they just said they were going to put different mechanics behind it which is what they did its a much more active role.

TERA has a higher skill ceiling than Wildstar or GW2. GW2 and Wildstar are spammy combat styles. Look at mass PvP in Wildstar or GW2. It really has no tactic to it aside from Stand in your teams big circles and try and lure the enemy team into them while hitting all your AoE abilities and your defensives whenever you take big damage, I'd argue that Wildstar is more tactical than GW2 even in large and small scale PvP. TERA on the other hand is very coordinated. Focusing healers, taking down priority targets, Putting CC on certain players to push them out of the fight, Area of denial skills to move your opponents in the direction you want even in massive fights that are 40v40 or 50v50. Even in small scale TERA is vastly superior to a spammy combat style like Wildstar or GW2. I've played both games at high end. I was the top rated Stalker in the game in 3v3, 5v5 and RBGs when the game released. I've been rank 1 multiple times in TERA on my Sorcerer in 3v3 and FWC. The skill ceiling in TERA is higher because your decisions have more consequence than a game like Wildstar or GW2 that is less punishing on using abilities at the wrong time. Crowfall did not implement a TERA style combat system. It was vastly inferior to TERA. TERA utilizes I-Frames less sparingly than Crowfall does. Its much faster paced and the TTK is super low. CF didnt do any of those things. TTKs were high, I-frames are pretty nonexistant and not utilized to actually dodge attacks and stay away from your opponent rather than escape utilities in "oh poorly made socks" moments that you end up dying anyway because "oh poorly made socks". CF was slow, very slow it felt like TERA at level 1 when you first started. Not TERA at level 65 where you have attack speed in abundance. Every ability in TERA moved your character a decent distance as a melee, you were never standing still. In crowfall all the abilities were and are very stationary. There is no real movement attached to them outside of actual movement abilities. Which created a stale experience. Had CF actually taken the core of TERAs combat and improved on it, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Lets be honest. TERA is a terrible game. The content is lackluster, the dev team cares nothing for their playerbase, balance has never been anything they cared about and the game runs like poorly made socks. But it still has a lot of players and still turns a massive profit. Why? Because its combat is just that good. No other game could survive on its combat alone. TERA does that. If GW2 was content deprived like TERA, it would be dead. If Wildstar... well yeah.

I agree. Animations have been sped up and the client controller did absolute wonders. I still have my misgivings about the limited action set and combo system tied into that to create more actions with less button binding. But we shall see as it improves.

Combat is my number one concern. Crowfall has the potential, the ground work is in place to be an extremely skill dependent game. But the execution so far has been extremely far off. I'm not sure how, but they have turned a high skill sub-genre (action combat) into nothing but a button zerg. Its only Combat Alpha so its not so far into development that changes cant be made. I just hope the Crowfall team makes the changes it needs to be a real contender for being a skill based game. I am optimistic they will make the necessary changes.