110 réponses à ce sujet

[bleetman]

For what it's worth, AreleX, your dual wield assassin guide convinced me to try out melee assassination/duelist rogues. I had barrels of fun doing that, even if the specifics have changed.

[AreleX]

The best part about this patch is that a lot of these changes stem directly from the things I was doing in my videos, so I essentially ruined the game for myself by being awesome.



I can take some kind of solace in that, right...?

[Foolsfolly]

Sure you can.

May I simply state, your Mach-5 Nightmare guide taught me that playing Warrior can be enjoyable. I found my first warrior boring and much preferred Mage and Rogue to it. However using that Mach-5 guide made me reconsider Warriors.

Kudos for that if nothing else. I wouldn't have ever gone back to warrior without having read that guide and thinking, "that does sound fun."

Modifié par Foolsfolly, 11 juin 2011 - 04:42 .

[AreleX]

You're welcome! Those are some of my favorites, when someone takes another look at a class they initially dismissed because of my guides, and finds it to be a good time.

So long as one person gets something out of the things I write or record, I keep doing it, but this patch is really making it difficult to slog through the game long enough to update my guides.

[Khayness]

Foolsfolly wrote...

Ever play Diablo 2 back in the day?

Yeah, stopped around the Hammerdin madness, 1.11 iirc. Paladins shouldn't Enigma teleport around spamming hammers and wearing caster items lol.

Had a shifter dru aswell, it was made useless by the elemental build buff.

I'm okay with change, but not with the wrecking ball kind of changes.

Modifié par Khayness, 11 juin 2011 - 05:15 .

[bossk-office]

iOnlySignIn wrote...

You'd better find a tall building and jump down from it, OP, because I heard it's going to rain next week. A lot of places that have been dry for so long would become wet. Everything would be ruined.

OH NOOO

[bossk-office]

scyphozoa wrote...
Interesting, I just finished playing DA2 with the new patch and I think the gameplay and balance is significantly improved.

But I would rather have had consistent gameplay over time than gameplay that changes in each patch, even if those changes are improvements.

[AreleX]

If my guides were made obsolete to the benefit of the game as a whole, that I could deal with.

That is not the case.

[bossk-office]

Please don’t twist what I said (even if it makes your own point sound better) – I’m all for fixing errors. Take the haste bug, for example. If they had fixed that without tampering with overall balance, it would just have excited players and spawned another burst of speedrun activity. Ditto for other bugs.

Design choices are not made to accomodate Youtube guides but they should precede the Youtube guides, not come after them. Let’s agree to disagree about this obvious, self-evident truth

[erynnar]

Foolsfolly wrote...

Support for the game was incredibly lax. I don't think they knew they had problems when it went gold otherwise there would have been a hefty patch waiting for players on the release date fixing things like Isabela's terrible friendship bug and all.

I honestly think they only started working on the bugs and tweaks when players started griping about them on the net. Which is a terrible way to do this. It makes it feel like we all paid to be game testers.

This is the second large patch I haven't played. I'm sure the game is very different now and probably a great deal better. I just...I don't have any desire to go back to DA2 at the moment.

This^ And at the moment not really wanting to go back to it. Maybe later. *shrugs* But I hope it helps those who still wat to play it.

[ipgd]

As someone who played MMOs for a decade I read this thread and scratch my head.

New videos will be made. Guides will be rewritten. It is not the end of the world. Is this really the first game patch you've ever experienced?

[Wolf]

panchamkauns wrote...

When a game comes out, a whole culture quickly grows up around it. Youtube fills to the brim with ingenious videos of fun stuff, speed runs, outlandish accomplishments. People toil to master it and invest hours into writing up guides for others to learn from. Some are driven to compete, some to help; many in fact to do both. It brings out the best in people, and even though these cultures don’t last forever, they don’t die out completely: somewhere, today, someone picks up a ten-year-old game and clocks their own speed runs against the best of the best.

Patch 1.03 dealt a death blow to Dragon Age 2 culture! All those hundreds of Youtube clips detailing unreal accomplishments were rendered moot, because the game is different now. Future 1.03 players will enjoy a terrific system, but one that has too little to do with accomplishments of yore. They will get stuck on difficult fights, search for them on Youtube and find videos there that just don’t play like what they’re playing. Guides to effective builds, labours of burning love, are left hanging, only partly meaningful.

Instead of wiping them out, Bioware must have hoped patch 1.03 would further kindle these flames by feeding them more fuel. And for a while, there were signs of this. But in the end it was not to be. Activity in the gameplay forums after 1.03 is pretty much zero.

Or perhaps it was argued that min-maxers, who rely so intimately on every little detail of balance and gameplay, are a small minority that you can afford to alienate; that casual players will not suffer, only benefit from the improvements. But it is the min-maxers’ videos and how-tos that casual players turn to in their hours of need. So yes, it affects casual play.

For my 1.03 playthrough, starting now, there will be no inspiration, nothing to strive for, no one to discuss with. When I get to the Nexus Golem gauntlet, will I even look at those old 1.02 videos? No, it’s too painful – doing so will only make me think of their heroic creators who had the rug pulled out from under their feet and were thrust from celebrity into obscurity. Patch 1.03, for all its commendable bug fixes, and all its arguable improvements to gameplay, has left Dragon Age 2 less fun to play and the world a worse, colder place.

Please consider this, Bioware, when patching future games. Fix bugs by all means, but don’t tinker like this with balance and gameplay mechanics. Even if you think – even if you know you can better them, consider them set in stone. Because gamers will.

Ignoring the wall of text I believe the combat feels better than before and will also argue that previous exploits (apart from level cap stuff etc.) are null and void. Some, if not most of the tactics I've used in the past still work with the new patch.

Modifié par Gaiden96, 11 juin 2011 - 06:39 .

[mr_afk]

I agree with the OP. Changes this drastic should only be made really soon after the release of the game or not made at all.

I'm talking about the changes that nobody asked for, e.g. the massive nerf-age to reavers/warriors on a whole and the huge buffing to shadow.

Fixing bugs is alright and I could live with haste and pinning shot working properly but changing some of the core aspects of the combat seems just silly. Most of the "min-maxers" seemed to find the combat quite bearable and enjoyable so why was there a need to change anything?

I didn't even hear that many combat-related complaints besides that of knockbacks, assassins, (and waves but that doesn't count) - and those were all manageable via certain learnable strategies. Figuring ways around those challenges were what made the game fun. I wrote a whole guide to how-to-deal with assassins and this patch has turned them into a joke.

And the game doesn't even feel more 'balanced'. (Unless making things ridiculously easy counts as balancing)
Oh well, at least I can find solace in how this patch owns Arelex's guides waaaay more 

Modifié par mr_afk, 11 juin 2011 - 06:50 .

[AreleX]

ipgd wrote...

As someone who played MMOs for a decade I read this thread and scratch my head.

New videos will be made. Guides will be rewritten. It is not the end of the world. Is this really the first game patch you've ever experienced?

MMOs are an entirely different ball of wax. That's multiplayer vs single player, apples and oranges.

This is not the first game I've enjoyed that has been made worse in the name of 'balance', not even close to it. This is, however, the first game I have invested so much of my time in to benefit others, so to see it thrown away in favor of something that's not as good is disheartening.

[ipgd]

AreleX wrote...

MMOs are an entirely different ball of wax. That's multiplayer vs single player, apples and oranges.

This is not the first game I've enjoyed that has been made worse in the name of 'balance', not even close to it. This is, however, the first game I have invested so much of my time in to benefit others, so to see it thrown away in favor of something that's not as good is disheartening.

If you don't wish to maintain your guides post-patch, there will be other people who will. It is little different from MMO patches in that respect. The community soldiers on.

[In Exile]

Foolsfolly wrote..
Well, there goes approximately 75% of the reason to get Force Mage.

I wish they mentioned this in the patch notes, but knockback has been completely reworked. +50 is as good as +100; it's much harder to get knocked around now and interrupted, even on nightmare.

ETA:

I don't get the "oh noes, they've changed the mechanics!" complaints. The game was borked on release, they tried to fix it, and now it's borked in different ways, and even easier than before. If there's any group that shouldn't matter in any release, it's the elite min-max crowd, who can deal with any kind of game & find a way to exploit it. A patch is always for the chaff.

There are multiple viable solutions to combat on nightmare now, and the heavy pressure on the one true build ™ with assassins has been lessened. These are positive changes.

Modifié par In Exile, 11 juin 2011 - 07:15 .

[AreleX]

ipgd wrote...

If you don't wish to maintain your guides post-patch, there will be other people who will. It is little different from MMO patches in that respect. The community soldiers on.

In theory, that's how it would work. In practice, who? mr afk? All the other knowledgable players who DID contribute and share and post have stopped playing the game, too.

I am the alpha and omega. I am limitless, you are bacteria.

This hurts you.



But really, people asked for me to do it, so do it I will. This isn't about doing it vs not doing it, or even my work being made useless, it's ultimately about them taking a lot of perfectly good things that people (not just the 'elite min-max' crowd) enjoyed and gutting them, about making a whole bunch of downright ridiculous buffs and nerfs that nobody asked for, instead of just fixing the things that were broken, and beefing up the things that were useless. You don't have to be surprised or shocked or ANYTHING to not be happy with it, the unhappiness comes from its own merits alone.

They say they listen to their fans, and fan response to the patch (at least in the 2 forums I actually go to) seems to be largely negative. Hopefully they'll rethink what they did with this patch going forward.

Modifié par AreleX, 11 juin 2011 - 07:16 .

[upsettingshorts]

This thread has the most hyperbolic title in the history of human discourse.

[ipgd]

AreleX wrote...

In theory, that's how it would work. In practice, who? mr afk? All the other knowledgable players who DID contribute and share and post have stopped playing the game, too.

In theory, you could ask. Someone would probably step up, especially if it were just a matter of reworking an existing guide.

You don't have to be surprised or shocked or ANYTHING to not be happy with it, the unhappiness comes from its own merits alone.

You can be unhappy with it, but "a death blow to Dragon Age II culture" is more than a little dramatic. The sky has not fallen. That you plan to continue working on your guides is even evidence of that. People will make new videos and new guides even if they're kicking and screaming while they do.

Modifié par ipgd, 11 juin 2011 - 07:30 .

[Leonia]

Upsettingshorts wrote...

This thread has the most hyperbolic title in the history of human discourse.

Are you sure Shorts? I mean, we are talking about the DA2 forums here..