To devs/comreps: Trusts and the negative side-effects they cause

[Mirage]

Hello, developers and community representatives!

In this post I will attempt to outline the issues I see with how trusts currently work. The points I will bring up have to some extent already been brought up in other sub-forums, but I thought it would be a good idea to gather them all in one post in the now dedicated trust subforum.

I think trusts are a great idea. They are just what we need to get around the issues that sometimes occur when we want to venture out and slay baddies, such as "there are no bards around", for example. I am happy that we now can summon these magical replicas and make them help us.

The problem, however, is that you in many situations have made trusts too desirable compared to actual players. There are several reasons to this, and while you might be aware of some of them, I'll list them all anyway just for the sake of completionism (is that a word? It is now!).

First off, using trusts in normal parties is impossible. This means if you meet another player that you want to play with, you have to give up (usually) three relatively powerful characters that are *always* of the exact role you want/need, and in return you get one single character that might not even be able to perform even one of the roles that your now dismissed trusts performed.

Example: You are on war/sam and use a healer trust, a buffer trust and a melee trust. You meet a sam/war who also uses some trusts to keep herself alive. You two happen to be after the same enemies for whatever reason (records of eminence, trials, or something like that). What happens if you join forces? Suddenly, you are left without any form of support of healing power.

Now, I know you guys have told us that we will eventually be able to use trusts in parties, but there has been two version updates since you told us that, and there hasn't been any word about this since then. Personally, I think it is much more important to focus on solving this issue, rather than adding more and more different trusts for us to use. I hope we can be given an approximate time frame for when you plan on solving this issue.

Second problem: Human party members split exp, trusts do not.

It is to be expected that trusts do not reduce the exp you gain per kill, because this is how pets commonly work. However, because trusts in many situations bring a lot more to the table than most other pets can, and many of the trusts perform close to the level of what an actual player does, depending on what their job is. This leads to an issue where even if a two or three players that make up a very good combination of jobs still will struggle to reach the same levels of exp gain as if they were alone and using trusts.

Good players generally perform better than trusts, especially damage dealing trusts are far behind human players. However, human players will struggle to be so much better than trusts that they make up for the massive amounts of exp they lose compared to using trusts. Additionally, the increased kill-speed will deplete an area for suitable monsters a lot faster than a single person with trusts would, leading to a much more limited selection of areas to fight in.

Sorting out this issue is a bit tricky, I'll admit. I can guarantee you that the player base will not be happy with trusts starting to steal some of your exp, but at the same time, removing exp sharing entirely will lead to some enormous boosts in exp gain, especially in Adoulin areas. I suggest a middle path, where parties with 2 and 3 players don't split exp at all, and that party members 4-6 only reduce the exp gain per character by 10% per person (If you gain 200 exp per person with 3 people, adding a 4th will drop this to 180 exp per kill per person, while filling up the party to a total of 6 people will drop the gain per person to 140 exp per kill per person). In the case of multiple parties in an alliance I think that exp should still be split evenly between each alliance,and then distributed to each member of that party as suggested earlier.

Of course, these are just suggestions, and the specifics would probably need revisions later, based on how it works out in the actual game. The main point however, is that players can't be penaltized for making parties between themselves when they aren't penaltized for using trusts. This directly discourages teamwork and makes people instead try to out-camp other players to make them leave, rather than play together with them. Player-parties consisting of no more members than a trust party shouldn't lose significantly more exp than the trust party.

That should be all! Thanks for reading.

[Kuvo]

I'm with you for the most part. It's obvious we need to be able to party with other humans and cast out trusts to fill in the blanks. Me and my best friend duo a lot, he is always a Mage job for support and I'm always the tank or DD. I would love to be able to dual blackmage with him and nuke like crazy. Also I think in today's game that instead of exp penalties for parties even with trusts we should be give boosts to exp. so if you have 2 ppl in the party you get more per kill and then it scales up with more people in the party. Also I think they should add exp, Gil, or drop bonuses to completing skillchains in a party. It's not much of ideas but it may give incentive to party again and work together.

A reason I live trust is I get to level up my skills again. I just started thf and the leveling is smooth and even enough that I am able cap my dagger and evasion skills for each level I gain. Yes it's much slower then leeching in aby but I'll tell you the ends justifies the means.

[Karbuncle]

Could just make it so the Party leader is the only one who can summon trusts when partied up.

You could appoint the person with the highest I.lv gear as leader, they summon trusts to fill in the blanks, and boom, continue fighting. Keep party size 6 of course.

(Hell, would be fun if you could alliance 3 people into a trust alliance but we'll save that for later.

[Mirage]

Actually, making it so that party leaders deal with trusts sounds like a decent idea

[bungiefanNA]

Another imbalance, Trusts heal much faster than players, so carrying around a WHM trust is better than playing 2 characters, one as a WHM, or having a friend be a WHM helping you. When out of battle, Trust heals a huge percentage of MP every tic, without resting, and without the long timer to the first healing tic. You have much less downtime bringing Trust healers along than real people.

[Karbuncle]

In a solo situation, your argument does in fact hold merit, I agree.

For a party situation, it changes a bit. The WHM trusts, while quick on the curing and such, have some significant flaws.

1) Always in melee range, so suceptible to TP moves, including their debuffs like para or silence
2) Timers attached to each action (I.E can only cast (1) -na/erase/debuff every (5?~) Seconds)
3) Limited spells options, no real intelligence behind them.
4) Slow erasing of Debuffs. I.E they can only erase (x) debuffs per (time), and its random who they target. This is assuming they aren't slept, paralyzed, silenced, or etc themselves from being in Melee range.
5) No versatility. A RDM healer can keep up his MP, enfeeble, nuke and cure easily. Same for a SCH. a WHM can also keep a haste rotation, -na, erase and such much quicker due to the timers on a Trust.
6) only one WHM Trust can haste, and its not reliable for more than 1 person.
7) No ability to recovers large HP to multiple people at once. They don't curaga, and they, again, have a wait timer on their cures, meaning if you take a lot of aoe damage, someone could die, especially if they decide to cure themselves first.
8) Person summoning them has to be engaged to a monster, and if the monster dies or so forth, the trust completely stops casting.

These are all very very significant flaws that make a real human healer 10x better, and some of these examples even apply to your situation... Any WHM worth an invitation won't have any MP problems keeping one person alive if you're speaking about soloing.

While soloing, they're life savers, toss 3-4 more bodies in the mix all needing cures, -na's, hastes, and so forth, and their uses vastly diminish.

[Mirage]

Some trusts do not move into melee range, so you can position yourself in a way that keeps them out of AoEs, although it is certainly not as easy as a real player just walking out of range.

Of course, as you are saying, trust NPCs are no good in content that is actually hard, where monsters have the capacity to repeatedly blast you with powerful AoEs. However, I would argue that this does not describe a typical exp situation, or RoE grind situation, or maybe even a Job point grind session, which is where I personally encounter the issues I described most often

[Wincy]

Well first of all Mirage, we have been talking some in my other thread so you know I agree wholeheartedly with your OP.

Now, as for the solution. I guess everyone is going to hate me for saying this, but I think the thing that makes the most logical sense is for Trust NPCs to share exp just like normal party members. Also obviously we need to be able to use them in parties with other human players.

I don't think of them as pets so much as, if you've played either Everquest game, Mercenaries. They are a critical mechanic often used in older MMOs to help fill up party slots when it is harder to find real people. Which is exactly our situation here. Again, they are party members, not pets.

To me the way they behave right now just seems like a coding issue that is yet to be resolved. I suspect that SE will fix this eventually (they have even said so themselves).

[machini]

I find it extremely frustrating to be out trying to do a RoE, or otherwise soloing in a given area, to have three other people show up, each with 3 Trust NPCs in tow. Instead of the 4 of us teaming up, they're usually content to just have four parties fighting over the same spawns, because F@$^ having to interact with other people in a MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER online RPG, right?

[Mirage]

It doesn't help that the game is rewarding people for doing it that way.