1. The 'Ocular Migraine' style swirling blindness for ten seconds per harvesting turn is horrific. It makes some players feel ill and disoriented. Many have to close their eyes or turn away until it stops. This is an awful graphic, and I don't know why anyone would put it in a game. You even get to see it when other people do it. Just no. Please, no. 2. With reasonable skills attained, orbs are extremely rare. People with a single developed toon aren't getting many chances to try for these excessively rare crystals because they can't get orbs quickly. Also, my high skill toons don't get them any more often than my low skill toons, as if all of those fancy percentages in the character window don't matter. 3. Since the patch on Feb 2nd I have not gotten a single shadow balanzite crystals. They were already painfully rare, and now I can't get a single one. Feedback: In a game that seems more and more to rely heavily on extremely low-chance gambling for things we can't function without...this adds frustration on top of that insult. People are logging in for hours a day and not getting a single thing in the game that helps their toon. They can't get the celestials from PQs that seem to be the only way forward for raiders trying to make it to the next required resolve number. They can't get these crystals that apparently everyone needs a highly debated number of. The drop rate for no trade shinies is absolutely awful. And if you're a person with a job who can't sit around shadow harvesting all day you're completely out of luck if you are not also sitting on a small nation's worth of platinum to burn. I mention these other things to illustrate the point that if you base a game off of gambling for scraps of benefit and then make those scraps nearly unattainable...there is no reason to keep playing the game. Hours of time put in...and nothing at all in game to show for it. Not to mention that mage items have block instead of casting speed and other such perplexing gear issues right now, which is a whole other can of worms. When there is no reward at all why log in? Shadow harvesting is becoming a breaking point for a lot of people who are already frustrated.
Unfortunately, this is going to fall on more "deaf ears". People that tradeskill, have been brining many problems such as this one to the forefront, only to be ignored. Other people have come right out and demanded an answer from devs and magically got one. No such lock for crafters. DBG seems head strong to get rid of the Crafting aspect of this game, which used to be separate, and merge Adventure with Crafting. So everyone is a Crafture. Raiders don't want to be crafters and crafters don't want to be raiders. But to the people at DBG, DarkPaws and EG7, they don't give a %$^&, what the players want, it's their way or the highway. And if this game collapses, and they stop making xpacks and updating it, then so be it. They ... Don't ... Care ...! Crafters get patterns and no recipes, the others get recipes and either no patterns or don't have the skill. Speaking to all of you out there who love Crafting, and I KNOW there are a ton of you there. I have every single tradeskill class. Nearly everyone I know does. How many of your crafters are useful? How many people in chat, in the tradeskill channel, ASK for you to make them stuff? Once in a while I see PoP related stuff, or the other one, forget the name now... But when was the last time the majority of your crafters made anything useful? These last Tier [7] recipe books ANY one can make them from level 10 up, Adventure or Tradeskill, as long as they have the 50 shadow skills needed. Recipe books should be for crafters, not wizards, or troubadors... Those in charge here keep ignoring the crafting community, eventually, the crafting immunity is going to ignore paying them for subs. But like I said they don't care, so to them it would be a blessing, and they would not have to create a part of the game for crafting. Just go ahead make this one of those raiding games with a cash shop and be done with it. /rant stopped!
So mostly I agree but I will say a couple things from a different perspective - 1. It costs an awful lot of plat to fully infuse one celestial. There's no way to make that plat playing the adventure game. Getting your semi buffed harvesting toon out there and stumbling upon a rare crystal, right now, is about the only way for a casual to make a lot of money (obvs besides buying krono with rl money and selling them in game). 2. What are you going to do the next few months if you weren't grinding this stuff out? 3. I have sent my main TS toon back to finish the Kunark Ascending and CD TS questlines. Making older content relevant to the current game. If you already have all this stuff then, again, see number 2.
And I'm seriously considering it. I'm getting fed up to my eyebrows with the crap laughingly hidden by gating mechanisms and a failed RNG system. When a "game" is causing more frustration day in and day out with moronic design components and poorly implemented mechanics than the worst time I ever spent at work and I'm the one paying for it, there's something wrong.
And still, three days later, 8-10 hours of harvesting for researchers since then, still not one--let me repeat that statistic--not one effing shadowed crystal has yet been harvested since concept of the crystal has been introduced. Despite using staff every time it comes up, or getting the 2-3 shadow orbs that pop while I'm harvesting. And that's on a good day. Some times, after over an hour of straight harvesting, still don't get one orb. If there's one game mechanism that is currently more in fail mode than this, I don't know what it is.
Block as a stat on mastercrafted mage gear is evidently some kind of tradition as now in VOV we have block on mastercrafted mage gear. It's really annoying as you'd think someone may have mentioned to someone somewhere that mages don't covet higher block stats?
