New char

So im a returning player i stopped playing back at lvl 50 and ive seen that my gear will probably be trash and im thinking of playing a new char. Is the game still p2w are gems farmable nowadays what is the state of the game etc

 

If your account is fairly old, I would say you can create a new character on the same account, so you'll benefit from the Veteran bonus the moment you hit level 100 (press C and look through the Veteran bonus tab to see what it is).

DSO is still pretty p2w in a sense, although I've been advocating for them to sell cosmetics instead for a while now. Almost everything is farmable to some degree nowadays, it's just a question of whether or not you can withstand the level of grinding needed to produce whatever result you're looking for.

 

I recommend you read the feedback threads from Dark Legacy forward, though a lot a has been tweaked since that thread.

Your old gear will most likely be automatically converted to Glyphs of Power (i.e., your toon may be naked), which are now primarily used to transfer enchantments from any item to any other item.

• Consumable crafting changed (for the worst, and is more time-consuming & expensive than in the past)
• Equipment no longer has levels / cannot be upgraded (other than enchantment transfers)
• Gems drop readily, but drop tables are heavily weighted toward the two weakest levels of gems (until you progress to the highest few difficulty levels)
• Runes can drop on difficulties as low as Painful (but BP continues to "refine" drop tables to the point I average 1 or 2 runes dropped per week [I'm focused on Painful, for now] … your luck may vary)
• Wisdom drops are less frequent (but were even worse at the initial release of Dark Legacy)
• Daily Challenges were nerfed:
  • Wisdom quantity lowered drastically
  • Wisdom frequency in reward lists lowered drastically
  • List of possible challenges increased dramatically, meaning the likelihood of you being offered the challenge you hoped for was lowered drastically
  • Difficulty level for a given challenge is not properly calibrated for your toon's strength (e.g., experience level 35 toon being asked to complete a challenge in Fatal or even Infernal difficulty ... impossible unless you're a twink with equipment "farmed" with the help of a buddy at a level 20, 30, or more above your solo capability)
  • Time required to complete challenges increased dramatically
    1. For example, a common 1st level challenge in column 1 is to harvest 25 leaves … I leveled up one of my alt-toons from 26 to 31 yesterday and only dropped a total of 12 leaves over 4 hours … imagine getting the 3rd level challenge of 100 leaves
    2. Another common 1st level challenge is to craft 5 consumables … but for basic potions you need 20 leaves or 20 plant resins … meaning 4 times as many as the challenge which would have taken me ~8 hours complete yesterday … or … if you aren't an insane harvester and/or pay tons of andermant/cash for special harvesting tools, you can possibly satisfy that level 1 challenge once a week … forget about ever completing the level 2 challenge of crafting 10 consumables
  • Overall quality of rewards lowered drastically
• Initial Dark Legacy release had dozens of significant bugs in both processes and quest lines ... many have been patched, but some remain
• Bosses now have a "shield" (essentially, an additional pool of health points) you have to break through before any of your debuffs have any effect on the monster ... and if you're slow to kill a particular boss, its shield will regenerate after a certain amount of time
• Boss AI did not improve ... they just take longer to kill
• Boss drop tables, especially at the highest difficulty levels, are worse
  • I am paraphrasing from what I've read from other users, but don't know this from experience; we all got instantaneously weaker when Dark Legacy was released, so I went from easily farming on Fatal and fairly comfortable on Infernal I in the Parallel Worlds pre-release to not able to get through even Map 1 in the Qs post-release)
  • Normal World / scaling dungeon bosses also have shiields
• New content isn't especially extensive or interesting ... and some of it is dependent on you participating in a new Sargon-starring event that runs ~once a month
• Uniques and sets were nerfed, especially Parallel World items
• Skills were nerfed ... with bad new designs which BP is trying to remediate 6 months after release
• The skill bar was reduced from the old 7 key deisng to only 5 keys (plus both mouse buttons) ... initially it was worse, with only 3 keys available per skill bar (presumably in an attempt to get us to buy more skill bars)
• PVP went back on the previous gearless design and now takes into account gear, gems, etc. ... meaning twinks are back in play

I could go on, but you get the idea. Almost everything changed, virtually none for the better. (No updates to guilds and interpersonal communication, however, for which many players have been asking for years on end.) Grind went up, while playability and enjoyment declined.

As a result, many, many players left. Just look at the player list in any town. Another clue: Forum messages have dwindled to 2-5 per day on average. The fan wiki is barely maintained ( @trakilaki has essentially left the game). If you have an account on Tegan, check out the News on the thin client: "They" (I don't know who's responsible to maintain it) haven't updated the message since early last November, before Dark Legacy was released ... what kind of a signal does that send to prospective new (or returning) players?

 

Gems are improved with dust that you get from melting gems. In general, yes. In particular, prices are a bit unthought, but still the system is quite good.

Have you counted how much you have to pay to count it as a "win"? It's ludicrous, P2W is not really a problem here. If you can't get it without paying, in most cases you can't get it.

As you said, a lot has changed, and even more is going to change in the next update, which is probably coming live this week. Also, your post is more confusing than anything.

Not may be, but is surely... unless he did play after lvl50, unlike what's he's saying.

Firstly, who even crafted those consumables before CE? Secondly, there was no consumable crafting back at lvl50.

Equipment has levels, only doesn't have tiers... which it didn't back at lvl50. But yeah, level can't be raised.

Highest few... among the 7 we have... is like what, half?

If you're running painful only, don't speak about it. Also, either you only run what you can one-hit or you can't build your char, because you do play quite regularly, and you gain strength suspiciously slowly... feel free to correct me, if I'm wrong.

Wisdom drops are quite good. Also, "less frequent" than when? Back at lvl50 it was dropping in like stacks of 1 and like 1 time per map on average. Dailies were the only source of it, and now they're but an addition - as it should be.

Sure, go on, compare it to early lvl50 and before.

Kill one random boss and take a look at stack of wisdom that drops from it.

Well, I suppose it was 100% and isn't anymore... but as I said, now it's not supposed to be the main source of wisdom.

This shouldn't be a problem... but it is, read on.

This is one problem - challange can be imposing too hard a mode on too weak a character. This goes for all levels.

These consumable challanges are pure cashgrab, attempt to force people to re-shuffle them.

That said, it's doable with multi-tools... but you don't have them from free sources on low levels, and you are quickly going to run out of them, were you to do such "challanges" a few days in a row.

Those consumable crafting challanges on the other hand are doable as long as you're somehow doing the collection challanges the other days... but yeah, that's it.

The consumable crafting challanges should be just removed and collection challanges should have the amount required decreased like 5 times (so cap at 20 on the 3rd tier). They're just ridiculously stupid. Unless the multitools start dropping from every miniboss, but that ain't happening.

Yeah, those "reward chests" for example are laughable... as is the sphere amount from the second category. The rewards should be merged, as someone already suggested somewhere (so, for example, in the first category every challange should give gold, wisdom and materi at once).

This game has had bugs for literally all the time it exists, so ridiculous sometimes that they should have never existed, but yeah, right after CE live servers looked like some early-stage alpha/beta of a game.

To add to it, the shield is less than the HP that comes after and the boss is resistant to all debuffs during this time. After the shield is broken, you can stun the boss (stuns last shorter on bosses), armor break them, taunt them - whatever you want... but after a time, the shield will reappear (HP won't regenerate though), and you have to break it again. The shield regeneration time seems to vary between bosses.

Moreover, now all monsters, bosses and players have a stun immunity for some time after being stunned, to prevent chainstun. The time of this immunity buff may vary between monsters and bosses, not sure.

Again, compare it to lvl50, lol.

Also, many bosses have improved since then in terms of skill variety. For example, PW Khalys, PW M'Edusa and PW Gorga have some interesting mechanics that they didn't at lvl50 (two of them didn't exist back then).

Than when and in what aspect? In my opinion they're better and more balanced than they used to be... or have ever been in this game.

Content being connected with an event isn't the problem... the problem is, they had been working on the CE for a very long time, and introduced disappointingly little content for that long a time of work. We didn't get a new boss really, only two updated ones. Also, many interesting mechanics they did make were wasted... For example, the Twisted Woods, which are a very interesting concept, but have no rewards unique to it. If they added a "memory labyrinth", so something with mechanics of Twisted Woods in terms of being endless and having maps changing, and of lingering memories in terms of theme changing, it would be interesting to run with generic rewards and nothing specific, but as it is... it requires something special (also, a memory labyrinth could be added too, and it could have some special rewards, because why not lol).

Many deserved the nerf, they were breaking the game. Many set mechanics introduced after R155 (lvl50, Rise of Balor) shouldn't have happened... but many were interesting too, and were removed needlessly. Many are still useful, and some even interesting. Also, looking at PW Gorga items, there's hope they look into the other items and make them more interesting.

Theoretical design was great, execution not so much. I'm slightly disappointed with some things not being rebalanced properly on the current TS release, but a lot has already been fixed, and let's hope for the best.

Also, I guess a few months were needed to be able to judge most things properly (a lot could have been already fixed in January though).

8 keys allow for the most combinations of skills chosen from the pool (yes, confirmed mathematically). Also, next bars now give 8 keys as opposed to 7 pre-CE (they also change the mouse buttons). Also, there used to be one skillbar only back at lvl50.
And keep in mind that, firstly, most people used to play with a few skill only (not using all the slots in the bar), and many still do... and secondly, second bar isn't that expensive, and you really don't need more than that just for skills.

Firstly, there had been no gearless design back on lvl50... so let's say there had been a crazy period and it's back to normal. Secondly, the biggest problem with PvP is not-that-large game population in general, they chased many people away with the initial buggy release and unclear mechanics they didn't explain, also with suddenly creating a design which requires using one's brain, while having pushed a brainless design in times before. Thirdly, twinks had been in play and well at lvl50... then, at a point during lvl55 they got finally fixed and only legacy ones stayed... with the last CE those legacy twinks got rather destroyed in terms of breaking their equipment... but in the same time, new possibilities of xp-blocking were added as a byproduct of some changes (or maybe intentionally), so twinks made a return... but now it seems there is no possibility of twinking, with only gold dropping (afaik) when no XP drops... but we again have a bunch of legacy twinks destroying below-cap-lvl PvP.

Such things are harder than you think, I can understand why they aren't making those lol. It's not RTS. On the other hand, there are lots of stuff that is more needed, and let's hope they do what's right.

Grind has never really gone down. If anything, now it got more balanced and at least not that random anymore. I'd say it went down for most of us, honestly.

As I said, they didn't leave because of your imaginary problems... but because of not understanding WTH is happening in the game after the CE... and they didn't understand because

1. there was an unusually large (even for this game) amount of bugs
2. lots of things got changed without explaination or introduction
3. the CE was rushed and there were many balance problems
4. majority of players right before CE was used to braindead grind and nothing more, they enjoyed doing that with their OP cookie-cutter meta builds... the community was rotten... and those players left when the game started requiring a thought again

Afaik Trak left forums only and still does play regularly, and posts every new code and new events on wiki. And the wiki isn't up-to-date with the last changes because the CE was clearly unfinished when it went live and everything could change, nobody likes to waste their time. There were of course other reasons too, but that's another topic.

Client news are a joke for a time already... which does surprise me, because it would be no problem at all to update them regularly. Just like many other things in this game that would be virtually effortless to improve, but still aren't being improved.

 

@ΣMiwel I can't disagree with much of the factual points you provided ... I don't have a clear memory of the differences between the game at lvl50 max vs. lvl55 max.

However, I was answering more from the perspective of a Dark Legacy new player / new toon, as @steveng77 is contemplating. He's not going to be doing scaling dungeon Excruciating let alone Parallel World Infernal any time soon (unless he's got a solid guild to help him, running PW is 1 year away? 2?).

Let's say he can farm Painful scaling dungeon bosses, slowly; they drop ~150 wisdom (or 0 ... drops aren't guaranteed). And let's say he wants to max out crit (60/60) and weapon damage (60/60) Wisdom options, plus toss in ~20 levels of increased primary resource ... he gets to that minimal Wisdom setup ~Wisdom Level 80, which requires more than 310,000 Ancient Wisdom drops ... round down to 300K --> he needs 2,000+ Painful boss kills. At ~5 minutes per kill, that's 167 hours ... at 10 hours per week, that's 4 months to get his toon to glass cannon, no, glass pea-shooter status, because he'll be increasing in experience levels (especially if he's also playing the normal storyline quests), which means he's fighting stronger bosses at that same Painful level while his toon's strength isn't keeping up.

Remember, his Wisdom is low this entire time, only slowly building up Crit & Damage from that tree, while still farming mainly Painful scaling dungeons and dropping mainly flawed and splintered gems, which means his gem strength is still low as well. And he's only got a handful of runes at common or improved status.

Feels to me that Dark Legacy was designed from the perspective of squeezing the last few $$$ from hard-core end-game toons, not welcoming to new toons.

Admittedly, I'm coming from the bias of playing only solo.

 

hello again guys thanks for the time for the replies, i eventually started a new ranger.And i want to do a quick playthrough should i just do the main quests and skip all the side ones or will that affect me too much

 

Indeed there are many things that are better than in the past, much better, what bugs me is still the unfair drop system that existed already in the past and has no business existing now.

Most of those who left were casuals, they weren't playing with their heads, they were simply copying builds they heard were powerful, they didn't bother actually understanding why they were powerful.
This is why we see many players whining about them not being powerful, while they would be powerful again if they though out their builds.
And the fact that BP didn't bother explaining and releasing a buggy expansion put gasoline in the fire.

Do every quest, they rewards experience and andermants.

 

Consider doing all quests, main and side, until you reach Experience level 55 so that you have access to all your Experience tree options.

At that point, stop questing, start grinding, focusing on special mobs (Guardians [Improved/Green level], Champions [Magic/Blue level]), Leaders and Sentinels [Extraordinary/Purple level]), and Bosses. The Great Dessert is your friend .

It's ok to kill some regular mobs in passing, but your intentions should be to kill the special mobs which have a higher chance of dropping something useful, and to avoid gaining experience points needlessly. @sargon234 may disagree, but I must remind him that you're a new toon with low wisdom, weak gems, and few runes.

As you grind up wisdom and gems (and possibly runes), you can test yourself periodically against the Parallel Worlds (you gain access to the PW hub, Cardhun, at level 50), but don't expect to have success initially.

Yes, if you continued on with the Dark Legacy content (which first becomes accessible at level 56[?]), you might drop some of the new Real World unique gear and sets, but even if you do, there's no guarantee that what you drop will have stats and special attributes good enough to replace your current gear.

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Events are up to you, but for the most part, I don't think that they provide rewards worth the efforts to complete them, especially for a new, weak toon such as yourself. You'll grind up Experience levels (getting weaker) while only getting a few mediocre gems and useless gear …

… unless BP follows through on the apparent new trend (see the upcoming iteration of the Infested Sewers of Kingshill event currently running on the test server) of replacing specific progress bar rewards with draken which you can then spend on rewards of your choice at a new special vendor. I haven't done the math yet to see if the prices are in line with the draken you earn.

None of the monthly events are worth the effort (again, that may change if the progress bars are updated with reasonable amounts of draken).

• Full moon -- the only useful rewards there used to be speed runes, but those were removed as of Dark Legacy
• New moon -- even worse as the primary progress bar rewards are entrance passes to the Queen boss rooms, but their loot includes event set gear which isn't particularly interesting any longer
• Dessert of Essence -- could be interesting as the rewards include ingredients to craft elemental essences which can be game changers when fighting bosses, but the sandstorms on the first map are really tough against weak toons, and the mini-bosses on the second maps are OP, one-shotting even experienced players
• Terrifying Shadows (Sargon) -- you may get bored before you grind your way up to any useful rewards

Other periodic events include the Dragan event, which has one useful reward, a 90-day smelter, which you can probably get from one of the chests from the 4 side-quest dungeons. Other rewards from those side-quest chests might include some runes, but most of the drops from those chests are crap. The chest in the Great Hall might have some runes in it, but you have to either get lucky and drop a side-quest item to get entrance, or grind through a ton of Dragan kills to get the entrance pass from a progress bar, but the red pearls that serve as entrances to Dragan's side-dungeon are difficult to obtain (i.e., BP expects you to buy them with cash). I tend to grind the side-quest dungeons until I drop the smelter (which might drop in the 1st or the 12th chest), then quit the event.