The change effecting speed runs and what SE can do more to help player base.

[Meleoron]

I wanted to make a post so that we could talk without starting a flame war between people who wanted this change and people very upset it. Us yelling at each other is not going to help the community as a whole. It does not help the game that i assume most of us deeply enjoy. i will only make one point to each side.

For the people upset over speed running being gone, what did you expect SE to do? Skipping content was never going to be something a dev was going to be cool with. I would plea with you for patience. If this and the entire relaunch in general has taught us anything its that the staff is watching the game and trying to make it better always.

[Meleoron]

For the people happy about the change and rubbing it in the face of the players that are not please take a step back and really look at yourself. Yes you might love the change however one can not deny that tomb grind is going to take a very long time now. While end game should not be a fast loot fest, if a lot of players feel the grind is simply boring and not worth the time put in that is a problem. a chunk of the player base being upset is not good.

With all that said what can SE do? lets give them ideas that we all can be for. It is obvious that this was a fast fix added into the patch. One can only assume that they seek to add in more changes. lets be advocates here for the player base as whole.

[Meleoron]

I am not at end game so i don't feel i can really put forward many ideas for more changes as i have not experienced it yet. However i will say that maybe they should up the tome rewards. Not but a huge amount but by enough that the players don't feel like its such a up hill grind. maybe 100 tomes per run? Perhaps more ways to collect tomes?

Lets come together here and stop tearing each other down. Lets come up with some ideas as a whole. Thank you for reading. Sorry for poor grammar and see you in game.

[civilpaw]

I agree, they need to up the tome rewards significantly if they want dungeon runs to take 1 hour+. Problem is, they likely wont implement any changes like that for some time, if at all.
Some time from now isnt soon enough to fix this issue. I did enough of a stupid gear grind in WoW, and this one is worse.


The real problem at hand is that they gave us a total lack of content at high levels.
2 level 50 4 man dungeons with crap for gear. I mean, what was the point? The darklight gear should be dropping in there, it shouldnt be a token grind to get it in order to replace the worthless gear that drops from the 2 dungeons they gave us.
3 Primal hard modes. Kill Ifrit get a weapon (maybe)... move on to Garuda and get a weapon again (maybe), and all this on the way to completing your relic quest which is... a weapon. Poorly thought out, IMO.
1 raid that hardly anybody can access, and that the devs expect almost nobody to complete.
And in order to get in to said raid, you have to grind away tokens to get gear to replace the gear that already took forever to get from drops, but is so bad that it isnt worth using.
And in order to grind these tokens, you have to run the same 2 dungeons over and over and over. And they take forever now that they speed run is broken.
I lost interest in each dungeon after the second run. The speed runs were the only thing making that grind bearable. The trash takes forever, the bosses take forever. The trash drops no loot, and gear damage is very hard on the wallet.

Yes, this issue needs to be addressed, but in all likelyhood it wont be before its already too late. They already lost my subscription.

Hell, I should probably thank SE for this blunder. Ive been needing to break my MMO habit.

NB4 "nobody will miss you": read the above to understand why I feel its just not worth playing beyond this patch.

[Meleoron]

I dunno about that man. This game has shown they react to what people are saying. its a simple fix also that can be added to a patch. I would think all they would be worried about is how much of a tomb increase is to much.

[civilpaw]

There isnt too much. It shouldnt be a grind for tokens. If they are going to force us to run those dungeons, they might as well make it rewarding. Im not in there for the gear, im in there for the tokens. That is poor design. The darklight gear should be the loot from those dungeons, not the crap that you do get from the bosses. In fact the tomestone idea itself is entirely horrible.

The second tier tomestones makes sense as a means to help people get gear through raiding. But it should be something people get in raids, as a means to help make up for a total lack drops over the longrun.

That is to say, you should be able to use the tokens (which should only be from raid bosses) to buy gear from the raid. This is in addition to the drops. It would help people to not feel absolutely like crap if they have bad drop luck.

And introductory raiding shouldnt be a wall. From what little Ive seen of the Bahamut raid, they made the first raid a wall. WoW did it right the first time. Molten Core was a faceroll, Onyxia was slightly harder, and then Blackwing Lair actually requied a bit of effort and skill. And then the 20 mans which were just good fun. And AQ and then Naxx...

From what the devs are saying about how hard they want their first raid to be, they skipped straight to Naxx.

[civilpaw]

What they COULD do to fix this is make the trash mobs drop 1-2 tomestones each. This would make players actually WANT to kill these mobs. And it would cut back on the absolutely overboard amount of time involved in this completely arbitrary grind that they put in our way to getting to the actual content in the game.

[Ariyn]

Coil isn't that hard. Watch video's before you say it's a wall. Turns 1-3 are pretty faceroll. Turn 4 is a good bit harder and it seems turn 5 is really hard.

But I do agree that the insanely stupid amount of tomestones you need to farm for darklight is now going to be every persons worst nightmare. I only have about 1k more to farm but thats a minimum of 10 castrum runs. And I say castrum because it's now more efficient to farm that then it is AK for darklight gear. Only time I will be doing AK is at the end of the week to finish capping out myth. But there are still ways to skip trash in AK. Just have to know how and what you can skip and can't skip. Run will still take min 45 mins which is total bs for the amount of tomes needed

[Alise]

Easy fix... they can reskin/ rework on every old dungeon and make a level-50 version of them. Give proper tome to the difficulty scale.

So that players will have choice to run 10x variety of dungeons not only the single one..
Amdapor Keep was really fun, and I love demon wall battle at first time... However, it is not anymore for me. I already clear this dungeon more than 20 bored and I really feel sick to keep doing it. However, I just want to get AF2 too much that I can't stop doing it. So it end up into the situation that I m very bored of this dungeon, but the reward still keep pushing me doing it. Now, this make the game no longer fun or entertaining.

Players don't mind doing content that cost a lot of time if they put some variety on it and make it entertain, and not so easy to get bored of.. the dungeon is totally the same every run they tired, so they feel bored, and want to get task done quickly instead. I personally not support speed run at first, but when thing get bored, I just can't help it but want to make pass this quickly.

[nimuniverse]

I personally like speed run but I don't mind if it's normal run either. But I do hate the token design. Even the lowest token item such as rings or necklace cost 375 tomes. Let's see what WP gives for tome: 50 (I think or was it 55)? So in order to get just a ring, I need to run it 8 times successfully. Having to repeat the same thing day in and day out is really no fun. I don't do AK yet cause I still can't get lvl 50 SMN wpn drop from WP, I don't like to gimp party. And I can't buy GC wpn because in order for me to buy it, I need to finish AK duty. There's no other lvl 50 wpn except if you craft, so I have been crafting. It's very costly to get crafting to lvl 50 and we have no real way of making gil. You ask why not Ifirit hard mode? Well, I do that too but I have never seen a SMN wpn drop yet. But having to grind WP for 100 times to get all darklight = no fun.