Faster faith leveling tweak for EPIC

[Deathangel 427]

Soooo, I'll be the one to bring this up. PPL are interesting in shorter term servers on epic, kinda. Like, maybe 4 months at a time, or something regularly reset map/item wise.

 

What about faith? Faith is probably the lagging mechanic for this fast-paced and short-term play-style we are pioneering. Like, how can we make the average new player reach a useful faith level before the next reset so that he can enjoy pvp ? Personally, I can make an alt army to get it done in a week or two, perhaps 70 faith from sermons and stuff, but GL with player retention if that is the only viable way to become a useful priest on the epic cluster, the way it is being run / tweaked now.

 

Ways to make Faith faster for EPIC...

 

Remove the daily faith tick cap?

 

Double skill gains?

 

Reduce the faith cooldown for ticks?

 

Personally I think meditation and faith need some looking into regarding their "pace of progression" for the EPIC servers/ Elevation. I already may have channeling skill, but its gonna take me several days to even be able to priest here and a lot can happen between now and then on this server. Additionally, a week to priest + several weeks to reach 80 or so faith is a significant chunk of the server life. Even at 80 meditation, it will take me a long time to get to the more interesting path abilities (lvl 9).

 

Basically, I'm just trying to say that the faith and mediation progression on Epic does not mesh well with the pace of everything else. I can make a full set of gear in 2 hrs, but I have to wait a month to be a useful priest unless I go very hardcore on it, which means its probably beyond the reach of starting players and more casual players - out of their reach on a server meant to cater more to a casual, easier but fun playstyle.

[Deathangel 427]

It takes me at least 10 faith divided by 3 prayer/hr * 1 faith/prayer = 3+ hours of waiting to reach 10 faith skill as a follower. Give me 3 hrs in any other skill on EPIC and i would be able to make a useful set of items by the end of it. But with faith, after 3 hrs, even a 90 channeling toon is useless. I think removing the prayer cap and shortening the cooldown would be a good short term approach, if there is enough merit to the suggestion and ppl actually think it would benefit the server / pvp.

 

edit: however, the above example must be done over 3 days to reach 10 faith as a follower, due to 5/day cap. this is kinda silly imo.

Edited July 14, 2019 by Deathangel

[Angelklaine 4,266]

The best change to this mechanic I have ever seen was on WU at the Revenant server. If I remember correctly, the mechanic was changed there so when you pray once, you get the resulting prayers alloted by a single day to your character, instead of having to pray 5 times. This allows for faster prayer and less time spending tied up to an altar.  Then you sermon once every 3 hours like usual and pray again. Most people don't think this is any faster, but if you calculate the time you'd spent either tied to an altar or finding an altar to get your pray in, its a good deal. In the long run its faster.

[Ekcin 2,407]

Still I fail to see the need to spread out Freedom-Epic differences further (and then demanding Epic-Freedom skill transfer would be self-contradictory). With sermon groups, I leveled my priest to faith 100 in less than 6 weeks (in fact the first 3 or 4 days of prem were spent to level up body control and ML for riding and sailing). It may be bit harder to organize sermons on Epic, but not that hard, given the newly grown population on Elevation.

Edited July 14, 2019 by Ekcin
addendum

[Angelklaine 4,266]

4 minutes ago, Ekcin said:

Still I fail to see the need to spread out Freedom-Epic differences further (and then demanding Epic-Freedom skill transfer would be self-contradictory). With sermon groups, I leveled my priest to faith 100 in less than 6 weeks (in fact the first 3 or 4 days of prem were spent to level up body control and ML for riding and sailing). It may be bit harder to organize sermons on Epic, but not that hard, given the newly grown population on Elevation.

Yes, but the problem is how hard it is to get all people together at the same time. 

 

Imagine for a second Epic has a similar population from freedom. Now divide that population into equal shares of 3 (the 3 factions.) If say we have 100 characters total and divide it by 3, that's 33 characters per kingdom. Now split that into 3 dinstinct time zones. That's 11 characters per time zone. This means you'd have to herd those 11 characters together for a sermon, assuming they are in your same group/alliance and that they are willing to stand there for you for hours on end without any activity. Even a single raid can throw off your sermon group as people go chasing down content which is more fun than standing idly doing nothing.

 

If you had 11 accounts in the entirety of freedom playing at the same time you play, could you say the same? That its easy to arrange for sermons? The truth of the matter is if people on PVP servers dont prem up an army of alts, semoning is not as reliable as you may think. I personally don't think premming alts should be the solution and I am sure thats not what the devs intended when they created the sytem.

 

Legitimately sermoning is not as easy as people make it out to be. 

[Ekcin 2,407]

Sure, some of your points are valid, especially the split over the kingdoms. As to alts, that is done on Freedom too in order to boost number of participants. The risk of raids may be high on the new Elevation, but the number of players is high there as well (and hopefully will stay for a while). On the home servers, that risk is fairly low. Generally, sermoning is indeed somewhat boring.

 

In fact, server population inertia creates factual splits not so much better than kingdom splits, though priests tend to be somewhat more mobile. But even on small Freedom servers like Pristine or Exodus, Sermon groups have been set up and worked in the past. The kingdoms have the advantage of much closer relations than between e.g. Xanadu and Deliverance etc.

 

While I am not generally against code splitting to some extent, one cannot much further split skill progress and request bidirectional skill transfer at the same time. Such tends to become impossible to balance.

[Deathangel 427]

As it is, faith does not transfer freedom --> epic. so making faith work differently on epic would not affect freedom, thankfully.

 

Edit: Another half-decent solution is to place no daily tick caps or cooldowns on follower faith gains. Also, reduce the 1 week faith conversion cooldown.

Edited July 15, 2019 by Deathangel