Ah DarkFall patch day, where the servers go down for longer than expected (can it really be unexpected when it happens every… single… time…?), the average ForumFall post is even more whiney, and while no one really knows how the new changes will play out in the long run, they sure don’t hold back on trying to doom and gloom predict things. Good times all around.
Which is not to say that some of the complaints are unwarranted. Certainly adding the dungeon-portal issue to cities (enter a portal, disconnect while loading, and bam, free escape back to your bindpoint) is not good, and the servers going down, back up, down, etc is annoying. I’m also going to go out on a limb here and predict that this patch also broke something else that will shortly be hotfixed. But like I mentioned above, this is par for the course with every patch from Aventurine, so while certainly not ideal, it’s not exactly shocking at this point.
One change that I do want to talk about that I was able to test very quickly last night is the mob AI change regarding mounts. Previously when you fought a mob mounted, many mobs would not behave very intelligently and instead of trying to kill your mount would get confused and try to get to you (which is impossible since you are mounted) by casting spells like Come Hither, or think the only way to reach you (despite you being in their face swinging away) is to cast an AoE spell. This allowed players to solo tough mobs like Blood Knights with a battlehorn rather quickly, and this more or less borked the ‘expected’ gold per hour rate. Why would you group melee/archery farm medium mobs that drop 200-300 gold between 2-3 players when instead you can solo battlehorn farm a Blood Knight and get up to 1200 gold in 3-4 minutes of work, especially when you then ride to a nearby spawn, kill that quickly, and head back to the Blood Knight? These PvE ‘loops’ were insanely profitable, making all mobs not worthy of battlehorning ‘worthless’ in terms of gold.
And in addition to borking mobs, this also made set-cost/gain things like villages, vendor reg costs, quest rewards, and respec costs trivial. Why spend the time needed to capture a village and get 250-550 gold an hour when in far less time, you can do a battlehorn PvE loop and get far more gold? Why worry about picking a specialization that costs 2000 gold to switch when you can make that amount in ten minutes? Quests that give 200 gold as a reward look like a joke when any mob you kill with a battlehorn drops more than that amount in a single kill. All of the above ‘broken’ because the AI was not responding to mounted fighters correctly.
Well this patch changed the AI, and mobs are now smart enough to realize they have to kill the mount in order to kill the player. From my brief time in-game, I noticed that a mob will still start by casting spells at you when you are away from them, but when you close the distance they will switch to melee. They also seem to do a better job at trying to move to a mount’s ‘blind spot’ rather than standing straight in front of you. In short, mobs like the Blood Knight are no longer doable solo on a battlehorn, and even lesser mobs like Moonbeast Ravagers are a definite challenge.
So what does this mean going forward? In terms of the economy, the amount of gold a player can expect to earn per hour solo will decrease, meaning gatherable items such as ore and wood prices will also drop, though how long it will take for this to happen will be interesting to watch. This will also change the value of the common drops from the previous ‘high value’ mobs. For example, I have enough Q4 blood from the Blood Knight to last me for a long, long time, but I fully expect the price of Q4 blood to increase now that fewer players will be killing him.
I’m also hopefully this patch finally makes group PvE worthwhile, as encouraging players to group up and go out to farm mobs is not only good general MMO design, but in DarkFall also means roaming PvP groups should find more players to engage without everything being a 5v1 mauling. I think this is what I’m most excited about, because as profitable as battlehorn farming was, it was also rather dull when compared to heading out with 2-3 people and camping a few spawns. Now that (hopefully) group PvE will be worthwhile, it should make DarkFall an overall more fun game to play.
How this PvE change, plus the addition of storage boxes (which are not cheap enough to spam, but are not so expansive as to make them worthless when heading out for some organized PvE), plus the teleportation chambers all come together and impact PvE and PvP will be interesting to watch, and I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on everything once I spend a little more time with it all in-game.
Posted by SynCaine 
