"Rise" update - first impressions

SirRFI · June 21, 2017

The update has been judged before it arrived live to our region by patch notes and what we have been able to see in Korean server.
Putting that aside - now that Rise is live here, what are your thoughts/feels/experience on it so far?

SirRFI · June 21, 2017

The "spoiler" contains my point of view. I might edit/add up stuff with time though, as more time is spent in the game.

Visuals:

New User Interface parts - better usability/quality and the looks looks okay.
Colhen looks better, but unpolished. It looks mostly reworked, the textures are higher resolution (more details), but You can see how repetitive they are. It could use more grassy textures in corners, where people don't walk.
Colhen docks are way better, but also unpolished. They should have been one map since beginning. Much like the town itself though - textures are better and stuff, but also repetitive and not enough grass in unused areas. It doesn't have the be the "standing out" grass, which costs extra performance - just flat one, as if it was moss.
Colhen performance feels worse. This is expected after merging maps, using higher quality textures and details though. However, I haven't done any comparison to confirm that. It's just the feeling, which isn't really important since it's just a town, not actual battle.
Perilous Ruins looks fantastic! It's the best looking area in the entire game. I just wish there were more usable objects and destructible pillars dropped more pieces - they mostly just disappear upon destruction now. Ps. Attacking the chains on the gate in main area (like boss stage of "Gnoll Assembly Area") may drastically kill your FPS for a moment due to chain collision.

Combat:

Amount of additional damage is too high. I understand adding this stat to armor, trying to make enhancing armor more significant, which is somewhat okay. However, the values on both weapon and armor are simply too high - I deal over twice as much damage I did before patch, which is also more than XE 150% combo but permanently and on all attacks. This simply makes this stat be top priority, rather than end-game addition.
Raids don't feel like raids any more. They are basically another up to 4 man battle with higher stats, that grant Seal of Bravery and can drop scroll. While filling team to 8 or handling that many as host can be problematic for some, 6 should be fine middle ground.
Entire content is easier due to enforcing normal mode. I know they wanted to unify the difficulty and stuff, so current "normal" and "hero" are different to what we had before. However, in result we do have the old "normal" difficulty enemy speed on pretty much everything, making the entire content easier gameplay/difficulty wise.
All pre-S3 content is overnerfed, even for newbies. There are multiple footage of people playing with random weapon and no gear at all, and yet cleaning everything without a sweat. Personally it takes me 1-3 smashes to kill S1 normal boss, or just Spear of Stigma for instagib. "But hey, there's hero!" - yeah, but 50k HP is low even for a solo person who just unlocked the battle, let alone a party.
Hero does not seem particularly useful aside from difficulty/fun bonus.
HP potion animation removal is lame. I don' know what is the goal for this change, maybe to make people use them more, because myself I don't. Either way it's another difficulty element removal, leading towards generic online game Vindictus wasn't meant to be.
Kick damage is bigger. I deal about the same damage with kick as normal attack now, which is nice for title and gold-objective farming. Future update boosts kick with Combat Mastery bonus, so it should be even stronger.

Gameplay:

Direct departure and in-battle replay is wonderful. Going back to town and next to boat/carriage was a great waste of time during farming, or even daily activities. I am really happy with this change. Repair button addition is nice as well. Keep in mind sometimes there's a daily to repair gear at NPC though.
Faster way to picking up loot is nice. This been always taking too long, picking up cores should have been as fats as picking up ergs/powders. They should have left the possibility of picking up items along with this change though, so things that You can't walk over can be still picked.

Progression:

Changes to enhancement, enchant and runes system - very nice. It rewards fails and progressing through fails, so ridiculous 10 scroll fails and rune waste will be no more. Removal of obsolete scrolls and rework of existing/adding new, along with new drop locations and rules is pretty nice as well.
New enhancement rank - not a fan of it. Idea and stats wise i's money bait for overpowered stats, but I don't expect to see many of them, unless further changes are made.
Purple scrolls drop too frequently. Not all of them, but most of them are worthless after few days of the update.
Cheaper infusion - I like it. I am not fan of equipment dropping all around, especially enhanced for no reason, but since they can be dismantled - element stone material prices are effectively dropping, which is good because they were too expensive. In speak of which - why there is no shortcut for that in Inventory, while for Enhancing and Enchanting is? Either all or none, what's the point? Want to give people reason to go Rocheste and Malina, but not walk around Colhen, because they are likely to stay there anyway?
Crafting materials - sad old junk removed, but it's completely valid decision. They were taking too much space and expertise progressing was too expensive, time consuming and expensive at times.
AP gain is too high. I have farmed roughly 20k AP in few days, not even grinding anything. Along with less skills to put AP at, I imagine maxing everything is significantly faster as well, which leads too meeting end-game/end-of-content aka "nothing to do" for a lot of players.
Leveling is too fast. I haven't leveled any character since Rise, but it was already too fast in previous early content reworks. This pushes players to end-game content before they fully learn their characters, and meeting end of the content is game over for a lot of players, since the game gets repetitive. That being said it would be better to keep players on older content a bit longer, so they can enjoy the game longer.

Others:

Functional set presets are finally here. After removal of the placeholder that was there for years in one of recent patchs, I thought it's gone for good. Glad to have the sets here, although currently I just switch between weapons and artifacts. Back in PvP days it would be more useful with PvP preset. Where is one for avatar sets, along with view/hide settings?
What's the point of paying listening fee at market and return it when expired, if a portion of profit is taken away anyway?

Summary: I voted for "Good, with some exceptions", which for me are:
• Additional damage is too strong - needs a nerf.
• Content is too easy. Buff pre-S3 HP and increase everything's attack speed to match old "hard" (current is like old "normal", or similar).
• Raid party size is too small. Expand it to 6.
• Add "hero" to all raids/ex-raid and make it worth bothering aside from fun
• Maybe return of S1 (excluding pre-60lv) and S2 raids

Details on these thoughts in the spoiler above.

Loadsamoney · June 21, 2017

Still have 3gb to go. I'll let you know then.

But I'm a bit worried. I had huge problems with stuttering and frame dips prior to this patch. If RISE doesn't rectify them then I won't be able to play. If I have to disable my UI just to have an acceptable performance level then it's not worth it to me.

Donryu · June 21, 2017

The fact that S3 raid are now 4 man.....is a huge let down for me.

Question2 · June 21, 2017

QOL changes are okay.
Ein lacher bosses being slower with less hp is great.
Loading times are much shorter.

Whats retarded :

Harder to get seals
Normal mode muir doesnt drop para stones anymore + breakoff doesnt give an extra core
Hero mode missing from most s1 battles, Ahglan has hero mode, but not Ingkells for some reason
Normal mode = 3 cores = harder to get drops
Trans being nerfed
Attack limit removal being made less valuable
AP restore nerf
New enhancement system
HP inflation
Old mats not converted to new ones
Removal of many useful features like teh mission board, gauntlets, etc
Massive amount of UI bugs, party info window is stuck and cannot be moved now for example
s2 battles missing story info if you have already completed s2
There is nothing ingame that tells you where to get scrolls like valor now because derpcat was too lazy to include that info

And tons more...

F0l2saken · June 21, 2017

My first impressions were it made an excellent uninstall simulator.

Loadsamoney · June 21, 2017

Still have 3gb to go. I'll let you know then.

But I'm a bit worried. I had huge problems with stuttering and frame dips prior to this patch. If RISE doesn't rectify them then I won't be able to play. I'm not gonna disable my

F0l2saken wrote: »

My first impressions were it made an excellent uninstall simulator.

No, that's TF2. Vindictus is Outfit Simulator.

MarronGlaces · June 21, 2017

Not at all a stand-out Arisha, but I'm easily hitting ~40% just because I have a 15.
Also, enhancing to 8 doesn't seem as aids now (but enhancing is still aids)
QB, with everything unflagged as a raid, is a giant mess to sort through now.

Order5 · June 21, 2017

I expected 90% of the update to still be full of beneficial or quality changes despite the shadow of the enhancement changes. However, now that I've seen exactly what they've done in detail, almost all of the changes have some sort of let down. The best feedback I can come up with is that they simply over-extended and did too much. A fine example that I can talk about in detail is crafting changes.

Good news is that a lot of things can be crafted with fewer materials and by using standardized materials. Furthermore, all NPC equipment recipes and purchasable vendor items have been added to respective talents. For example, Quisia can now be crafted by Expertise, but it can no longer be purchased at Turhan's. Lorica has also been added to Armorsmithing, so the title associated with it is still obtainable and even easier to obtain. Since NPCs can no longer craft items for characters, Expertise is now more relevant and even more so now that previously uncraftable accessories like Emerald Belt, Erg Core Brooch, and even Fugitive Brooch have been added to Goldsmithing. However, it seems like overkill when it is so easy it is to obtain the items in ex-raids already.

MrGatto · June 21, 2017

Eh,really not sure what to think yet but its not pretty..

Old raids are trashed,S2 is good for some quick old scrolls I guess so thats fine but nothing else. 'did not expect such scrolls from a ~1 minute run'
S3 is the only raiding 'zone' left,not a fan of S3 in general.
Damage is off the scale,this is even crazier than what we had back in XE with full combo bonus,+5 armor set and a +13 lvl 90 with 8% awaken stone and I'm doing 32k bloody thread crits on a capped boss.
4 ppl party is not my thing,it just feels weird and a chaos if you are the only one 'geared' in the pt:P

I like the auto pickup cores/ergs and the faster run speed.
Can't really see the performance improvement on my pc,since 4 is the max I can't really test it,never had issues with only 4 anyway.

And the feeling I get from this update is that it gives me nothing to do actually,even less than before.
I can't even do an old school Ship run anymore

ReasonablyBored · June 21, 2017

I like it so far it's so easy to level up my Karok now and the hp pot helps so much, I don't spend real cash so this helps so much.

Prototypemind · June 21, 2017

I'm with Order5. It's very clear that they had good intentions but they tried to do far, far too much at once and worst of all, they did it with very little actual testing and player feedback before implementation.

Someone above mentioned Quick Battle being better; it's not. It's more difficult than ever to find what you want because only about 5% of content is a Raid now. 19/20 pages are non-raid, meaning that if you want to find Krakers, or Havan, or Giant you have to have them as favorites, and you only have a limited number of favorites to cover all raids.

It's very clear that change was made to push VIP and to push players to do Ein Lacher, etc. Forcing your players into content instead of leaving options is not the way to keep people around. I also agree with MrGatto: I feel like there's less for me to do because it's more difficult than ever to hop into raids or runs with others because of the searching involved. Worse still, if you do find a raid it can only take four people and I promise you, people are going to get tired of clicking join only to get the message that that last spot isn't available anymore; that will be happening more than ever before.

Quick Battles need to be adjusted, and the game needs to feel like something where we're all involved with one another. So, so many great things like not having loading screens between areas of town are great changes that make you wonder why the time wasn't taken to implement them years ago. The changes that went in the wrong direction, however, make the game less enjoyable than ever. If I were a new player who'd never known the game before I'd feel like Vindi's in a pretty good place and wouldn't notice all the unpolished touches until I hit higher level and realized how tedious finding parties and getting certain items will now be. Not to mention the pain that's now a part of trying to hit high level enhancement.

TLDR: I'm done spending money on Vindi until the over-tuned changes are rolled back. If they're left as is, which is likely with the DOL who acts before he thinks and doesn't take players into consideration then Vindi will just be a good time waster when I get bored with other games. There are three to four titles coming out or going into Beta by the end of this year, and another title that I'm already spending on, so if this is how Vindi stays I'll deal with it and stop supporting the game.

ERROR · June 21, 2017

It was obviously only meant to streamline things for new players.

The rest of us have 2 pros and a long list of cons.

elcausa · June 21, 2017

Still testing but AD divide not as great as I thought originally but still big, will continue doing more test before making a final judgment on it .
QB and board seem so much more needlessly complicated to look for runs now, combining all the boards into one is a good idea but poorly implemented.
I like the 3 sets idea. (hopefully DOL doesn't get the idea in the future to combine the stats of the equipped sets XD)
s2 should had been normal and hard, hero is misleading
Is somehow more buggy, I encountered more bugs and crashes on the few hours I played today than in the past 6 month combined

ikevi · June 21, 2017

elcausa wrote: »

Is somehow more buggy, I encountered more bugs and crashes on the few hours I played today than in the past 6 month combined

There are a huge amount of bugs.
http://forums.vindictus.nexon.net/discussion/6839/kr-patch-notes-08-06-15-06

All in all it is what I was worried it would be. Content has been nerfed/messed up so much that all but neam = done with 1 trans or less content if you have a +15. I don't look forward to what they will do to the new bosses to try to combat this :-(

Anduri · June 21, 2017

i love it so far but would someone tell me where i can buy the stones in what shop it says Enhancement Stones are sold at the shop for 400 gold but i have looked in all shop can not see them

ArkTerranigma · June 21, 2017

Anduri wrote: »

i love it so far but would someone tell me where i can buy the stones in what shop it says Enhancement Stones are sold at the shop for 400 gold but i have looked in all shop can not see them

It means YOU can sell them for Gold now at the Shop's

they were 0 Gold NPC Price before

Anduri · June 21, 2017

oh k ty ArkTerranigma for info

damm i read it R i was like you can buy them now lol nvm

ty again but

Xie · June 21, 2017

My first impression?
So... when's Dullahan?

Edit: I may be soloing or duoing most of the time now. Kinda missed 8 man but, eh.

Suhpreme · June 21, 2017

meh

whens miri and lynn 2nd weapon at least i'll enjoy playing those for a couple hours

Wilko · June 21, 2017

So how about those old marketplace obsolete materials? Can't incinerate them. Straight to the NPC vendors then?

"Rise" update - first impressions

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