Newbie Wishlist

Jeremy Saunders

Obviously we are working on making the game much easier for newbies to get into. You have probably noticed a slew of changes in that direction, including the new client.

I am looking for simple ideas for things we can change to make the game easier for newbies. Commands, information in skills, etc.

Any ideas?

Lytharose

I am not sure how simple is simple to ask for...

I have only started playing the game in what, the last 6 weeks. And have found everything idealistic for a new player. Ease of learning the commands, player base helpful, interest in the rp and what happens in a greater scale in the realm. 

And I am interested in combat. Hard to get far though as a newbie. I show up at shardfalls, stumbling over my feet, and hard to learn anything from the fast pace combat that is there. The sparring has helped some, and I need to do it more often. What I would wish for, to help develop combat skills, is a space in city or guild, where I can test skills, defenses, timing, without the gold cost of sparring, or the time limit it might impose. To have a room, where more than two people can spar and learn would help a lot of newcomers get over the edge of not wanting to combat. 

I do not know if this was something implemented in the past, and abolished for one reason or another. But as a new citizen to the realm, it is the only thing I could wish for.

Just the thoughts of a Bardic Elf

Lyth

Khizan

Talk to your city about that; the cities set the arena fees, and I know several of them have dropped the cost of the arena down to nothing or near nothing to encourage precisely that.

Gurn

It'd still be nice for arenas to be automatic 0 fee for people levels X and below, automatically.


And I know it's been said to death, but testing dummies would help tremendously with learning combat, both newbie and more veteran players.

Erludi

I would love a testing dummy. Maybe since there is the autocuring system, how difficult would it be to have dummy characters in each city that would report what they are hit with/how much damage/what cured/etc?

Iniar

I can code that, stand there all day and be your dummy, Erludi

Aulani

Dummies was discussed, and it was said they would be a huge time and coding investment on another thread. Having to rework every skill in the game as well as (I assume, though can't recall exactly) the way mobs work.

I would like to see a simple, Help (profession) that gives basic knowledge. Example:

Help Druid

Druid is a profession of the Magick Circle and has three skill sets, Evocation, Naturebinding and Pioneering.

Evocation is the primary skill set and the higher your skill the more damage is done while hunting.
Pioneering is mainly a utility skill set and allows you to imprint a home grove.
Naturebinding is mainly a combat skill set.

Druids can wear chainmail and chain limb armour. They wield a two handed staff and thus do not take advantage of a shield.

etc. (It's late and I can't think of more concise and relevant information to put here.)

Svorai

Aulani said:

Dummies was discussed, and it was said they would be a huge time and coding investment on another thread. Having to rework every skill in the game as well as (I assume, though can't recall exactly) the way mobs work.

I would like to see a simple, Help (profession) that gives basic knowledge. Example:

Help Druid

Druid is a profession of the Magick Circle and has three skill sets, Evocation, Naturebinding and Pioneering.

Evocation is the primary skill set and the higher your skill the more damage is done while hunting.
Pioneering is mainly a utility skill set and allows you to imprint a home grove.
Naturebinding is mainly a combat skill set.

Druids can wear chainmail and chain limb armour. They wield a two handed staff and thus do not take advantage of a shield.

etc. (It's late and I can't think of more concise and relevant information to put here.)

The HELP Profession was requested before. If players are willing to assist me in gathering good information for them I will put them in. Pm me her/in game or e-mail me at Svorai@Imperian.com if you want to help.

Khizan

Here's my biggest newbie wish.

Please assign newbies a statpack that goes well with their profession, not the old default associated with the race. I've lost count of the amount of newbies I've seen as things like "Intelligent Runeguard" because they chose Sidhe as a race and didn't know better. 

And, off the top of my head, this is the kind of thing I would like to see for HELP DRUID:   

HELP DRUID
----------

Armor: Chainmail

Main stat: Strength

Balance type: Balance/Equilibrium combos

Skillsets: Evocation - Evocation is the druid's primary offensive skillset, and it primarily consists of balance-based quarterstaff attacks whose damage is based on your strength. This is the skillset used for PvE.

Naturebinding - Naturebinding is the druid's secondary offensive skillset, and it consists of equilibrium-based root attacks that can be used while off balance, so that the druid's primary offense consists of staff/root combos. The skillset is almost entirely PvP-only; only Regeneration has a use in PvE.

Pioneering - Pioneering is the druid's defensive skillset; it has no active offensive abilities. It contains passive defenses used in both PvE and PvP, active healing methods, and utility skills for travel and exploration.


Combat Focus: Damage/Mana - The druid's primary kill method is straightforward damage dealing. Druids also possess the ability to instantly kill an opponent whose mana is below 25% of their maximum, and they can pressure both health and mana to move to a kill.

-------------------------------------

That aside, I'd also like to see some classes get a note like "Hey, this is an advanced class and you can expect to be completely freaking useless with it unless you put a ton of work into your offense and learn affliction queues and timing backwards and frontwards and also trans all your guildskills. Seriously, you might want to look at one of the knight classes and just hit people with a big sword. It's way easier and you'll be a lot more effective."

Garryn

I'll just note that HELP PROFESSION <X>, while rather brief, already exists.

Khizan

That syntax is horrible, though. Nobody's going to think of that.

Aulani

Khizan said:

That syntax is horrible, though. Nobody's going to think of that.

I have to agree, I -just- stumbled across HELP PROFESSION LIST which I had no idea existed either.

Basically what Khizan and I are saying is something with a short list of concise information that helps newbies(and older players swapping) pick a profession on what type they may actually want to play. You'll fit your roleplay around a profession you actually enjoy the mechanics of.

Also having information about them using balance, eq or both would be good, as you can only swap statpacks to level 31(Thank you for raising the newbie level, by the way) The profession RP is centered in the Guilds. So making it informative of profession mechanics as opposed to flowery RP and not much else, as exists in the current HELP PROFESSION DRUID, would be nice.

Jeremy Saunders

Yeah, we need to change that.

Aleutia

Can my defiler novices get a shadowveil coming out of the intro? Give them the comms and have one of their tasks be to place it somewhere outside of a novice area, with an explanation of 'this needs to be somewhere you can access later'?

 The price on them is a ridiculous buy-in to start.

Lionas

Aleutia said:

Can my defiler novices get a shadowveil coming out of the intro? Give them the comms and have one of their tasks be to place it somewhere outside of a novice area, with an explanation of 'this needs to be somewhere you can access later'?

 The price on them is a ridiculous buy-in to start.

As long as they don't abuse this by making a ton of newbies for the OMG 1 FREE CRYSTEHL EACH. That seems like a clear seconds violation, though.

Jeremy Saunders

@Aleutia Hrm. That is a good idea. I do want to start doing profession specific quests like this. I will have newbies come with a free veil. However, doing the quest will probably take a while as we are working on a million other quests right now.

Jeremy Saunders

@lionas Yeah, we just talked about that. We will just have them created initially with the shadowveil. It is set loyal to them so they cannot just give it to another player.

Lionas

Jeremy said:

@lionas Yeah, we just talked about that. We will just have them created initially with the shadowveil. It is set loyal to them so they cannot just give it to another player.

You'll need to do something like check if it's dropped in a newbie area or indoors and have it reset to them. Otherwise, sounds like a good solution.

Menoch

Currently, you can do AB skillset FULL and see individual AB's within every skillset when you don't actually have that skillset... however, you cannot do AB skillset RANKS for any skillset you do not currently bear.

Fix this, makes having a guild with multiple professions and the questions that come with it, so much easier when I don't have to relearn dk to figure out how many lessons they are going to need to get to putre.