Decline Sword Coast Legends Pre-Release Thread

[ArchAngel]

It's like 4e.

Not even like 4e. PoE is like 4e, does SCL look like PoE?

 

[Space Insect]

Not even like 4e. PoE is like 4e, does SCL look like PoE?

I guess it looks even worse than 4e. What madness is this WOTC?

 

[Bubbles]

Here's some level 20 solo gameplay on the hardest difficulty, fighting a series of elite dungeon bosses. I think it nicely demonstrates the epic feel of max level gameplay.

 

[Neanderthal]

Well...Nope.

I know this sounds like talking decline but i'm thinking they ought to have just made this a strictly group multiplayer game, from what Bubbles has said and what we've all experienced, playing wi a group can be just pure fun for all of the players whereas this just reminds me of first Dungeon Siege.

If it's a reflection o single player campaign then game's fucked royally.

 

[Roguey]

I'D RUN IF I WERE YOU
I'D RUN IF I WERE YOU
IMPRESSIVE
IMPRESSIVE
IMPRESSIVE
A PERFECT STRIKE
A PERFECT STRIKE

How did they not think that'd be annoying?

I thought this thing used rounds, so why is it just a continuous stream of attacks from the player character?

The first suggestion I can think of is to make it so that Vorpal weapons cannot one-shot bosses with their effect.

 

[Lhynn]

Better itemization than PoE at least.

 

[Old Hans]

Here's some level 20 solo gameplay on the hardest difficulty, fighting a series of elite dungeon bosses. I think it nicely demonstrates the epic feel of max level gameplay.

Jesus Christ this looks awful. The shitty fonts, the animations. Static monsters. It doesn't even have the nice Neverwinter dynamic shadows to hide the boring shit cave tilesets.

 

[Night Goat]

Knowledge, Abilities and Characteristics of the Ideal Wizard:
- Understanding of fantasy gaming properties, such as World of Warcraft, Dragon Age, Marvel, and Elder Scrolls, and the role that art plays in making them successful.

Spoiler

Morrowind had great art

 

[pippin]

Dragon Age Origins had acceptable concept art. I'm pretty sure they mean Skyrim or Oblivion when they mention TES. Shit, it's hard to believe Oblivion is almost 10 years old now. But yeah, that shit's like asking if you have a Deviantart and/or a hentai foundry account.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

There remains widespread dismay at the delay to the most hyped title of the year, holidays are rescheduled while arguments rage over whether this is the "new FRUA", the "new NWN" or the "new Ruins of Myth Drannor". A few level-headed types chime in to highlight the minor bugs which the extra weeks of polishing will surely resolve:

Me and my friends tried it on head-start weekend this saturday. Dungeon begins, we are instantly attacked by a bunch of super strong enemies that rushed the room, somehow pulled through a closed door. Shitload of confusion and many deaths later the enemies were dead... but the thing is, some of them just dropped dead. Then I see one of my teammates running through closed doors and fighting enemies alone, and looking around, I see two other guys of our four man group just twitching on the floor where we had spawned into the dungeon.
"What the hell is going on!?" I say in much of confusion: "Why are you guys twitching on the floor?".
"What? We ain't! It's you who's just twitching on the floor at the beginning!"
That just added to confusion.
Meanwhile, I followed the ghost dude who went off to fight the enemies alone and saw enemies just drop dead around him. I tried to follow him but the door he had just walked through didn't open and it wasn't even interactable. I stared at this mess in confusion just before all of us got kicked out of the game for no reason. Popup message said "Connection error" and that was it. We tried again and were greeted by a mess just like the previous one. Cue collective ragequit.

 

[DavidBVal]

This title is a lock for the Codex Top 50 CRPGs

 

[Infinitron]

Here's some level 20 solo gameplay on the hardest difficulty, fighting a series of elite dungeon bosses. I think it nicely demonstrates the epic feel of max level gameplay.

Here's the accompanying forum post: https://forums.swordcoast.com/index.php?/topic/4577-wow-are-some-people-flipping-out/

Wow Are Some People Flipping Out.

The thread was titled "Hard mode is too easy" or something of that nature. But the forums are ablaze with people's ideas which will do nothing but shatter any semblance of balance this game has. So lets start slow. See what's causing the issues in the video and go from there.

Problem 1: I'm one-shotting enemies. No surprise. I have vorpal stuff. Vorpal weapons are SUPPOSED to be that POTENTIALLY powerful. Here's the thing. Vorpal requires two things to happen. First, I need to land a crit. Second, that crit has a 1 in 20 chance (5%) to instantly kill whatever it is I just hit. This applies to all weapon damage, so this can come off ripostes and other abilities as well from what I have seen. The issue arises when I one-shot a boss in like 2 seconds, negating any sort of difficulty (you can see this on the demonic shadow), and whatever lackeys he/she has or he/she summons. What everyone has to keep in mind is that Ranger I made is built purely for the purpose of Vorpal weapons. Notice how I'm critting pretty much every attack and attacking really fast? That's because every piece of gear I have on except like 1 piece has added critical hit range. Why am I attacking so fast? Action speed. My build is literally based on auto-attack power and getting the vorpal effect. The sad thing? I don't even like this build. I think there's stronger stuff in the game people just aren't seeing. The min/maxer in me can see the potential. All you guys are saying how abilities are useless? Ha. Wait until this game is fully released and I really start digging in with my experimentation. This is just the beginning. This is just the first thing I noticed and decided to give it a try. And I must say, I'm unimpressed by it in relation to what I know is possible in the game. All that gear I found on the way to getting my vorpal/vampire auto-attack crit-build done? I didn't forget about the effects and stuff I saw. I know just how powerful a character can become. Won't lie. The character in that video is a joke to me.

In the video you can even see me fail to get a SINGLE VORPAL PROC on an entire boss! It's total RNG. And I don't like inconsistent things.

Step to a solution: First thing I'd recommend is making it so that bosses are immune to the effects of vorpal. Will that stop the soloing by itself? No, but it's a good step in the right direction. Make that change and then take it from there. Don't knee-jerk the effect and then you're left with the more powerful things I'm personally most certainly going to find. It's just gonna create a cycle of literally everything in the game needing to be nerfed until we do next to no damage and that's what creates a "challenge". But that's not really a challenge. That just creates the feeling of a challenge because it takes more of your time. That is not the route to go.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Problem 2: Vampire effects! Oh boy, do I not even need a healer. You can watch the video. Any time I get to even like half life I switch to my vampire weapons and auto-attack myself back to full in 1 or 2 hits. If I really wanted to, I could just keep those on at all times and just fuel myself nonstop. And I'm sure you all noticed that the necromancer boss actually killed me. Was it a lapse of me paying attention? You bet. But it shows that my character (undergeared as he may be) is in fact, able to die. This is important to note and I left it in the video on purpose.

Here's what can kill my character:

-Chain CC (prone, etc etc)

-Being unable to attack for any reason outside of cc (I circumvent a lot of these effects by having an "Immune to restrain and paralyze." item on).

Steps to a solution: Lets start by having vampire effects have diminishing returns. Now allow me to explain that since a lot of you D&D fans don't even know what that term means, because as far as I'm aware that little RPG term is borderline absent (if not totally nonexistent) in the D&D franchise.

So, what are diminishing returns? Well, it's basically a term used for when your character does an effect, the more you do that effect over and over, the less powerful it is. Then, in order for the effect to go back to normal you typically have to wait a bit of time. Like half a minute, maybe a whole minute, and so on. The amount of diminishing returns on vampire effects on weapons is currently none. There aren't any. You can have vampire weapons out 24/7 and they'll fuel you. Therefore, I think the proper step to take is not to remove the vampire effect from the game (oh god that thread was a joke, couldn't even read it all the way through), but to make vampire effects HAVE diminishing returns. Like your weapon effect has a self-replenishing battery that can only be used so much before you're getting nothing out of it other than your standard hit damage.



I'll just toss out some numbers to get the idea fully across. Lets say you haven't used your vampire weapons a single time yet. They have 100% effectiveness (level 20 stuff) when full. When using them, each time you hit something with your vampire effect, it goes down by 25% before finally hitting 0. (100%->75%->50%-25%-0% hp returned). Then, once you've started those diminishing returns, you have to wait like a minute before you can steal more life. Like you've sated your weapon's thirst for blood/life essence and now you have to wait a bit before it can drink again and help sustain you to get more and more.

This makes it so that you can pull out vampire weapons and quick get yourself to full like once every minute. Like having a healing potion and a weapon combined. But you can only really do it once or twice before you have to wait out that DR (diminishing returns); thus meaning in the effect's downtime your healer is suddenly important again.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

But putting all of that stuff aside, y'know what has to be fixed in this game? The enemy scaling. Said it in the original thread, and I'll say it here. The enemies don't scale enough at end game. What is soul-crushingly difficult at level 1 is now a joke in comparison at level 20; since it's just a +2 to level offset. How would I fix that? Make it a +2 offset (as it is now) until level 10, at which point it turns into a "20% of the average character level" offset, rounded up always of course. So at 10 it'd be 2 still, 11/12 it would be +3, and so on. And at 20 it'd be a +4 to all enemies by default. That's literally double the current offset while feeling like a slow ramp-up to that point (assuming you're playing legitimately).

The fixes I proposed up there are in regards to the video itself. But I know if I wall of text too hard, nobody will read this thread. Of all the people who I hope to read it though, I hope the game's developers read it. I've seen games crumble because developers knee-jerk nerf things in the game too quickly before it's allowed to play out.

One thing I really liked hearing on the stream though.

"I'm glad people are liking the headstart so much. Because it's basically like 'baby Sword Coast legends'." (or something super, super close to that)

That quote, that singular quote gives me hope that all our little ranting and raving won't mean anything when the real enemies show up, and my proposed fixes here aren't even needed.

Kind of cocky, this guy.

 

[ArchAngel]

Yea, reminds me of Sensuki during PoE days :D

 

[Neanderthal]

What kind of fucking stupid GM gives their players both Vorpal swords and swords of Life Stealing? I mean you only got one of each in all of BG's if I remember correctly.

Also shouldn't a Demonic Shadow be immune to a Vorpal sword, that works on chopping heads off and some creatures like various Undead, Golems, Slimes and such were immune back in old days.

 

[ArchAngel]

What kind of fucking stupid GM gives their players both Vorpal swords and swords of Life Stealing? I mean you only got one of each in all of BG's if I remember correctly.

Also shouldn't a Demonic Shadow be immune to a Vorpal sword, that works on chopping heads off and some creatures like various Undead, Golems, Slimes and such were immune back in old days.

Items are all randomly generated, DMs cannot place specific loot. So players can grind until they get exact gear they want.

 

[Neanderthal]

Of course, should have known, cheers.

 

[Lhynn]

This is more of a travesty because its 5e, the edition that kinda does away with most magic items.

 

[Morblot]

Awesome how little power they give the DMs. Gygax would have a brain aneurysm.

 

[JasonNH]

That looks more like a brutally bad Gauntlet clone than a D&D game. Oye.

 

[DavidBVal]

DMs cannot place specific loot

If someone had told me 10 years ago, this was going to happen in an official DnD game, I wouldn't have believed it.

 

[pippin]

It actually reminds me of Drakensang Online. Went to check on youtube and even this has more life to it than SCL.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

The more I hear about this, the more I'm looking forward to the Bubbles review:

I had a shortsword +5 vorpal (5% chance on crit to kill mob) and Healing 100% of damage done!

I was soloing hard mode lvl 20 dungeon, and it was great fun for one hour! In particular when bosses went "pouf" at 3/4 HP bar, me still full

 

[DavidBVal]

Looking back, the Aurora Toolset wasn't that bad, was it

You need a certain degree of intelligence to build a game as big as this one. Talent too. So why al the big decisions seem like if were made by a chimpanzee on crack withdrawal?

You don't need to be a genius to understand that, if they needed to put fixed level stuff in the OC, it's a terrible idea to remove that ability from all the modded content. Or else, all the content will be essentially the same. Scaled and comfortably balanced risk, scaled and comfortably balanced rewards. Hey look, monsters are orange, I must be fighting kobolds, I'll keep killing them for 1 year until they drop a vorpal. Makes me sick.

 

[getter77]

Perhaps this is a bold new gambit by the license holders---make the games so lacking and terrible that it encourage folks to deflect onto the P&P offerings. Those dark times of the Baldur's Gate era shall trouble them no more~

Otherwise, why spend so much effort to so blatantly come up short and miss the plot entirely? When you already have so many other successful and well-acclaimed approaches to draw from?

 

[Space Insect]

Perhaps this is a bold new gambit by the license holders---make the games so lacking and terrible that it encourage folks to deflect onto the P&P offerings. Those dark times of the Baldur's Gate era shall trouble them no more~

Otherwise, why spend so much effort to so blatantly come up short and miss the plot entirely? When you already have so many other successful and well-acclaimed approaches to draw from?

Please WOTC. Pease do not rape my dreams to get even more money.