Oracle note

Hi, my name is Mike. I've been a player since 1998.

In real life, I'm a sysadmin at a web host and also manage the support department. I very frequently have to respond to users who are annoyed at changes we push out to production servers. So -- I am typically on the other end of this situation, and I apologize for being an annoyed user in this case. User's are the worst! I know!

This regards the recent changes to dru-cle and the War Staff of the Elemental Wizard.

I'm trying not to be too annoyed, because as I said, I'm often in your situation and I get it. Sometimes things have to change, and users don't get why and get bitchy, I know how it goes.

The group I run with has been aware of the power of this combo, dru-cle + war staff, for about a year. Personally, I waited to see if this would get 'tuned' at some point before building it. I finally started that process a few months ago. I went for 750 glory so the coin cost was only 1 billion. Still a pretty penny, and overall significant costs in time and effort.

To get the staff took about 20 hours in SMTR tomb. Needless to say - this is a great item, and so requires a substantial amount of time and effort to obtain, between farming the bits to enter the area and doing numerous kills for numerous ebony staff pops, followed by many ebony staff sac pop attempts. It's a very hard to get item, chaining multiple pops, and it was a very good item accordingly.

After finally completing this build last week, lo and behold, both the dru-cle dorn spell and the staff get adjusted. You can of course spot my annoyance at this.

I now have to ask: Is this a developmental play testing issue?

What is the playtesting schedule from dev to implementation? Is there one? Prestige and this specific weapon have been in game for quite some time. Word on the street about the staff is Gonnil made this change and mentioned "it was never meant to be that powerful". Yet, this area and eq went live on the production server 12/26/18 according to news 1101 by Kinux. Was it evaluated prior? What was the delay in assessing its damage output, and why was it further evaluated now? These are of course mostly rhetorical questions now, but, I hope you understand my frustration here. I am old school and don't jump on new things. I wait for bugs to be found and tweaks to be made, I did that here, and still got burned.

If you are looking for play testers on a build port, I'd be glad to help. As it stands now, I feel like my group of friends just unknowingly playtested this dru-cle+staff build on the live production game server, did reveal an issue which you addressed, and got nothing in return but many wasted nights questing, golding, and running to build these characters. We were under the impression this game content was in game because it was tested, approved, and worthwhile to grind for, that appears to not be the case.

I'd like to petition you for a better play testing schedule to production server release. Please test the content you implement, I don't believe it's a fun game to put players through grindingly long effort for these rare pops and then issue roll-backs only after the pop is attained and put to use. Put frankly, that's not how this should work. The game, we all know, is based on rare pops. If those are 'too good' for the game, please don't make us discover that AFTER we players put in the real life time required to get them and start using them.

The adjustment to the war staff leaves a VERY rare weapon relatively mundane. Fire storm went from hitting 4-8 times per rd to mostly 0 and sometimes 1 times per round. Please increase this damage output to more correctly reflect the great difficulty it takes to obtain this item. At present, the entire SMTR tomb area will be dead, which will be a shame. The current damage output of this weapon simply isn't worth the time required in that tomb.

The adjustment to dorn also seems implemented rather late in the prestige implementation schedule. This is now the 2nd class tweaked (first being Dreads), and seems to me to indicate a lack of playtesting of all prestige classes.

I'm now hesitant to build any more prestige chars or grind for rare pops at this point given the time and effort required, and full potential to be nerfed. As it stands now, and I don't mean to sad salty, but to me it would honestly make the most sense for me to stop building chars for 5 years, and then see what still exists and what was playtested out of the server by some other unfortunate players. Respectfully, I do not believe any items or classes implemented in the production game server should require substantial and significant changes, and if they do, that indicates a need for improved testing during the pre-release dev period to reduce such occurrences.

We've heard from Eis that he had to reduce some items in his areas to get others in game, so obviously there is a review process, and obviously the war staff passed that review. I know you can't play test everything, you're all doing this out of your own interest, and are unpaid, and I totally get it. I really do. I would beg you to increase diligence here as much as possible, and if necessary recruit players to a dev server for real testing. I'd be glad to help.

I summation, I would respectfully request two things:

1. Test prestige classes and discover necessary bugs/changes ahead of players, now.
2. Further adjust the War Staff back to a more reasonable strong level that reflects time required to get one.

If our super druids are 'too strong' for the game, please bear in mind it takes minimum 300 glory, 2bil gold, and many hours of farming and running to make this build. If the resulting build is 'too strong' for the game balance itself to withstand, please don't punish our efforts without compensation, we're only putting together the game content we thought worth committing to getting and building out. We're not cheating or trying to be manipulative by making dru-cle's with +dorn eq and war-staffs, it was simply the best content for druid, and we were committed to attaining it. We did, and now, it's been removed?

We love this game, we will commit to hours and hours of grinding to get any gear, prestige any class, build any character build. We will certainly help you test anything you want, we just want to be able to build the coolest builds possible given the items and class options in game. The trust relationship between game devs and players is now degraded, how can we commit to a super grindy game if we have no assurance that the content we're striving for is even deemed acceptable in the game? I hope you understand my concern and desire to improve this situation.

-Mike