Letter From the Producer Live Part LXXVII - Summary - 12 May 2023

[Shougun]

Neat, thank you! I appreciate the time adding pictures particularly.

Quick quips:

• Island Sanctuary change is heading towards a dream of mine, while I wouldn't riot if the ride ends here.. I am hopeful that it's heading to the station lol. Excited for the new content as i'm now at the wall. I've enjoyed it thus far but would enjoy seeing some earlier gameplay shifting concepts, like upgrade trinkets that might change your pattern to collecting, harbor system for expending tokens, maybe mammet builder placement like mechanics (made thread on it already tho).
• They can explain Comedy as much as they want, and I have read Dante's Inferno, but it's still going to read as a genre no matter what
• Fashion Accessory change is interesting, adding even more types could be nice- for example capes (while some gear comes with capes, what if you wanted to add one?). Additional ideas like belts, dangling trinkets, backpacks, etc.
• I hope the top 100 / diamond aspect might mutate later, thought they learned from win trading. It's okay to be temporarily as such, but I don't really think that is a very good system given that whatever they do they'll be dealing with people. It's just a people problem that, imo, cannot be solved and should not be relied on as a sole system. If you make a leaderboard for example, any leaderboard, for anything, someone is going to either no-life it like you cannot fathom or cheat it. It's just not a scale that I believe is good to use, at least in the end.. if they want to give those people content for a short while to spread out the target audience confection then that's fine, but I hope they intend to expand the targets later.
• Really hope blue mage continues to see development at the earlier side, it's a shame that so many skills early on are not interesting, valuable in the moment, or even valuable later.. I'd /LOVE/ to see the early gameplay improve with new interesting skills and better balance (for example the voice skills and 1k needle absolutely destroy your gameplay early on, and I don't mean to create a vacuum at improving the balance of those skills.. just change them up so they are still fun yet also improve other skills to be similarly fun). On top of that changing gameplay stunting skills like self pacification or self stun, which are imo terrible when you can only control one character (they're fine when you have a team of 4... but this is one character.. a skill that essentially says 'stop playing and watch' and it's not even exciting to watch like a big cool summon cutscene), meanwhile also adding some more interconnectivity of abilities so you get more excited at new skills. For the most part new skills are still obvious upgrades and not any thoughtful "oh my god I need to look at all my skills again cause this changes everything". I'd really like to see that more often. I reference Diablo, Hades, and like stuff for examples of how builds can change as new things are introduced / obtained.
• Tank buff, warrior now changes other healers into warriors because there is no reason to have a healer. Paladin cover costs 100 oath and has no changes... lol. I actually enjoy Paladin, I just find warrior funny how unkillable it is, and Paladin while steady often gets beat with the "but it has hallowed ground!1!1 / Ranged attacks" stick.. even though skilled groups know that Holmgang is superior and a lot of content these days have huge hitboxes.
• Change to jump is a little sad since it was a sort of flavor... personally I would have liked to see a passive at some level that gives them a short duration shield instead. The idea they actually jumped to location was thematic, and I feel removing it while not end of the world is just one more step to the homogenization that people are mentioning.

[RyuDragnier]

Tank buff, warrior now changes other healers into warriors because there is no reason to have a healer. Paladin cover costs 100 oath and has no changes... lol. I actually enjoy Paladin, I just find warrior funny how unkillable it is, and Paladin while steady often gets beat with the "but it has hallowed ground!1!1 / Ranged attacks" stick.. even though skilled groups know that Holmgang is superior and a lot of content these days have huge hitboxes.

I'm fairly certain that was why Abyssos had long vulns/bleeds on every tankbuster, since that means Holmgang can't negate a mechanic completely by itself.

[Shougun]

I'm fairly certain that was why Abyssos had long vulns/bleeds on every tankbuster, since that means Holmgang can't negate a mechanic completely by itself.

That sounds like a logical reason as to why!

[Iscah]

[*]They can explain Comedy as much as they want, and I have read Dante's Inferno, but it's still going to read as a genre no matter what
[*]Fashion Accessory change is interesting, adding even more types could be nice- for example capes (while some gear comes with capes, what if you wanted to add one?). Additional ideas like belts, dangling trinkets, backpacks, etc.

I saw someone suggest recently that it should have been tomestones of eschatology ("the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind"). As much as the Divine Comedy reference is fairly relevant, that would have worked better and come off less ambiguously. It seems like a missed opportunity to have not used it for any of the four tomestone types over the course of the expansion.

And the changes to support fashion accessories in more places will be great for Gpose, though for me personally that's also dependant on them bringing out the right variety of glasses that I need for my alt.