This isn't a whine post. This is a constructive criticism post. Please don't assume anything here is me pissing and moaning or demanding action or a personal attack or an assault on something you (as a reader) implemented. This is just a bunch of bullet points of stuff I think could or should be improved on coming from someone who never played here or anywhere else before.

I did a druid 1-30.

1. The summon monster spells are nifty. Using the rest menu lets you pick what you summon. There is no way to tell the stats of the thing you're summoning, some have absolutely terrible stats, missing icons, are actually garbage, and there's no way to know until you blow the spell. It's a crap shoot. Suggestion, fix some of the wonky ones (great ape) and add an option that explains what you're getting. This doesn't mean stats, it should be just "A badger is known for its tenacity and fits of rage" or "This fae creature puts enemies to sleep but can't fight well on its own." A little menu tree from the same rest menu where you pick your forms that tells you what they are good at would go a long way, or if you click 'elemental' you get a block-o-text telling you what you can expect at each level of summon monster.

2. Solo XP is low, group XP is high. Solo is also riskier. I'd recommend tweaking XP so a solo player gets a boost from what they get now (as if they had a 2 person party) but larger groups start getting less 'extra' XP, because a group of 5 can clear 3/4 packs at once without batting an eye. Soloing was a frustrating experience playing a class that had 2 buddies, I can't imagine trying to level a rogue. Solo XP needs a bump. Leveling was fine otherwise.

3. Everything casts storm of vengeance and it's insane. Please assign a more varied 9th level spell assortment for those end-game mobs. Not only does it mean you chug mind blank potions (a trivial expense) you can then just kill the caster and watch that spell stun their buddies. EVERYTHING pops storm of vengeance from my experience. Please tone it down. It's been old since Brog orcs.

4. No way to tell what anything is strength wise. I got shit-wrecked by moving one area over and there's no real indication the recommended ECL is that much different.

5. The Bear animal companion is a total jobber. I think it dies faster than the spider. High HP but low AC and essentially trivial DR means the 'tankiest' companion gets blown apart in a single pull, consistently, because every attack hits him. This was at druid level 25 and 26.

6. Mythil crafting is amazing. Perfect.

7. Making any piece of armor look like anything is likewise amazing. The number of options means I can look however I want at any time. Blew me away once I started playing with it.

8. Lack of DM's. This is being addressed elsewhere so I won't go into it here.

9. PVP rules need a spawn protection clause, specifically when people pop from server A to B and you arrive utterly unbuffed, and casting any spell or drinking any potion means you can be killed. Even if you're just porting in and doing what you always do (port and pot) in 'time to grind mode' but instead kablammo. Dead by some guy with greater invisibility, because drinking a potion of cats grace enters you into the pvp contract. Two DM's told me this was legitimate despite being at a spawn node. You don't need to legalese it, just 'please don't fight at spawn, and consider people buffing at spawn that can't detect you might just be buffing to do PvE content, or just ask them ooc if they want to fight at spawn.' I know it's bad to go OOC for PvP but man, porting in and seeing multiple wizard familiars, hostile, standing a few feet from you, you're unbuffed because you just swapped servers, they don't respond to things you say, I mean, what the fuck do you do besides get merced? PJSalt.

10. Massive floating moving polygons in random areas. Bendir Dale has one by the windmil. So does the Fort.

11. One area (a trade post I think) crashes my game. Two DM's and many players say they all crash there too. Please gut what ever might be causing the crash until an actual workaround can be found, replace it all with grass tiles and an OOC 'work in progress' sign. That's preferable to crashing. I feel this one is pretty unacceptable.

12. The boss at the end of the gibbering mouther dungeon "Get behind the pillar!" crashes the server if he kills the party. DM informed me the code was a mess and everyone was reluctant to try and fix the code due to it being an impenetrable fog. Recommend you gut all the code and script and just make him like, a wizard with spells who can't get knocked down until it's fixed, so the server doesn't crash every-time people die. Should be a very very easy fix.

13. Summon monster IX seems worse then elemental storm. Really worse. I might be wrong but it just seems REALLY bad. Recommend buffing IX.

14. Spellbook is full of spells with no description, "Druid punch?" What the heck? I think these need actual descriptions (even if the spells are for shits and giggles) just so you know what it does.

15. Some quests are a bitch to do, then you get only a tiny bit of gold and 0 xp. I also can't get rid of quest items so I guess I just get to keep a notebook and snake charmer item forever.

16. That stupid buffalo in Brog has like 900 million billion HP.

17. I found at least 7 actual bugs (spells doing wrong things, items not firing, etc) and all but one got fixed within hours of reporting it, and most of the time it got fixed right then, w/o a reset. Good on you guys.

18. Barkskin is fucking HORRIBLE to look at. I don't know how hard it would be to do, but I really think barkskin/stoneskin would be much much better if everyone just got a few rock or wood orbs floating around them as opposed to changing into an awful horrible texture. Either that or just make the texture not change. Seriously, it's disgusting.

19. I've yet to find a use for animal empathy. Sort of want to request a rebuild because, while it's in character, I can't tell if it actually DOES anything. Recommend you change the 'feed your companion' ability to heal based on your check and then multiplied by a number, and give it a cooldown so it actually has a real benefit.

20. Everyone is really nice.

21. If that stupid carriage driver throws me off his cart one more god damned time I'm going to stab him. Remove this event or something it serves no purpose.

22. My helmet gives wisdom so every time I have to go through a gate I potentially lose spells. I think the gate helm requirement is dumb but I'll bet I'm in the ultra minority.

23. The fire giant dungeon is utterly devoid of furniture and I don't know how or why they live there. Or why I have to walk down 10,000 steps with not one encounter to get there.

24. The trap gauntlets are great. Please make more.

25. 1k faces is great.

26. A little more hugging, kissing, and butt grabbing then I would like to see. Get a room.

27. The end is a grind. Everything casts storm of vengeance. Everything requires freedom of movement or/and mindblank. It is maddening. Please add another zone or two that just covers the early/late 20's range.

28. Read point 18 again, that's really important to me.

29. More hidden merchants.

30. See 18 again.

That's about all I got. Remember this isn't bitching/moaning just my observations.

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ANT ALARM

ANT ALARM

For that barkskin, you can download graphical upgrade for it, it looks really great, nice textures and such...

Problem is I don't know where you can download it anymore, maybe someone here have it and can help you

Nice, thank you for the feedback!


I think this is a pretty good point considering how small, population-wise, the server has become. It used to be no issue at all to find a couple of buddies to go with regardless of what timezone, and the party bonus was actually to encourage more group parties, to encourage being inclusive rather than solo boss grinding. Now, a lot of people are forced to hunt alone. Boss hunters are going after EXP anyway, they're after loot. Providing a sort of "solo hunter's relief" EXP isn't a bad idea, we'd just have to figure out what's fair.

I think a lot of things should adjust to the reality of the smaller server population, really.

I think this is mostly because there aren't many high level spells that have the potential effectiveness of SoV, and a lot of our old mobs were built by people with build savvy to 'counter' the boss grinders. Things were optimized with that in mind, so it ends up being repetitive during end-game. Something that could definitely be improved, but it's not high on the list - partially because the team doesn't really have any monster balancers anymore. We'll be waiting a while for this one, unfortunately.

Yeah, that's a problem now for similar reasons of population reduction. It used to be there were plenty of people to get information from. Now it's all seat-of-the-pants. It'd be nice if we could implement an examine function similar to what they have on some other servers where you get an approximation of the creature's challenge rating based on your skill or ability. It was initially turned off for PvP issues. Not sure what the best solution is, but I agree something being done about this would be beneficial, even if it was as simple as IG markers of some kind - whether environmental information objects, or literal signs.

Yeah, they do. Our PvP rules are a mess and there've been several attempts to clean them up.

I feel like this is due to a missing file. If you don't have all of the custom Amia stuff installed then you get weird stuff like this. You SHOULD be seeing our custom descriptions, I'm pretty sure?

Which quests, aside of the Snake Charmer one?

You'll have to get a custom override as suggested in the post above.

You use Animal Empathy on hostile critters, animals and magical beasts and it temporarily converts them into an ally that occupies its own "slot" so you can have one out with a Summon and an Animal Companion at the same time. I forget how long they stay friendly, but you can just re-Empathize them once it wears off. It's pretty useful! You should have it hot keyed so you can just use it like a spell on any appropriate hostile mob. (You can use it on Neutral mobs also, if you really want, but some characters might yell at yours for stealing their dog, or whatever. )

Here's your complimentary membership to "Spellcasters Against Headgear Removal" club. Welcome. There's a lot of us.

That's intentional design, and I think there's some IG lore to be found on why it is the way it is.

^

I believe this is being worked on, but making balanced dungeons takes time and, like mentioned above, we're missing monster balancers to populate the Areas made.

In regards to a few things: Yeah a lot of people complain about the end being just a grind... it is, yeah :/ Fire giants area is a hot button for a lot of people, a good number of people dislike how it's setup but I don't think it's ever going to get revamped (it was different about three years ago, but yeah).

And as for the massive floating thigns in Bendir, that's hit or miss for some people. My work laptop will get those but my home PC never does. Do you have an nVidia GPU? That's my problem, laptop does, home PC is AMD.

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Whomst've'll'd'mn't I play:
Salema Nefahri :: A penny for your thots
Zrae'a'stra'fryn :: That which nightmares are made of
Khasir :: From the East a storm is coming

I would prefer a floating stone thingie to the stoneskin skin texture, or something similar for barkskin, because they do look bad. The summon monsters are varied, and they should get cleaned up to be more in-line with that level of spell. The giant bison are cool- leave them alone. The +4 INT helms and whatever helms that have WIS on them should be removed with some other non-helmet item to replace them, or the whole remove-helm at gate thing should go away. More hidden merchants....uhh, they won't be hidden for long, but I vote for more random-loot merchants instead. Various bugs should be fixed of course, although my NWN doesn't crash like it used to for whatever reason. More xp for solo characters- sure, as long as it doesn't dissuade people from partying. PvP rules are a mess of course, like Letum said. The cart driver thing is annoying. Pervs and such like to rp that sorta stuff a lot even if they keep it within the rules. The Storm of Vengence thing doesn't bother me too much, but maybe a few different powerful spells can be introduced instead (?). Animal Empathy works I think. Lack of DMs- yes, and not enough ways for fun and interesting things to happen because of this (NPC guards are everywhere and everyone hides behind walled cities or places that a lockpick can't get through). I think that's everything, but I'm inspired to make my own post like this for things that bother me- mainly the idle state that all characters have to be in because nobody can do anything without a DM.

Edit: The Fire Giant dungeon makes no sense to me, it is annoying to go through since you can never see anything your character sees, and the doors are too danm small for giants. BRING BACK THE OLD SPIRES!!!! That place made sense and was 1000 times more fun.

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Those things are awfuol, mechanically speaking. Tons of HP and DR and you get like 100 XP for killing them. It's easier to kill a pack of Brog orcs for more XP and it's faster to kill those, too. Every party I have been in laments at spawning those.


Why should they be removed? Just because you have to remove your helm at a gate doesn't make them useless. I have a char that uses one for when he removes his +4 INT ring. And that's just the risk you take as a caster; having to remove that gear. You can easily buff your caster staff before removing the helm anyways.


God yes, I so want getting thrown off a cart removed. Or hell, even give an option to pay double and not get thrown off. I would do that every time.

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Whomst've'll'd'mn't I play:
Salema Nefahri :: A penny for your thots
Zrae'a'stra'fryn :: That which nightmares are made of
Khasir :: From the East a storm is coming

The Bison give great xp if you are of a particular class. A monk or something would be punching it as fast as it regenerates. It's a nice morsel for some, and apparently not for others.

Dun gotsta kill it.

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I was always imagining the "Super ultra uber-cool undefeatable paladin" riding the cart... Then driver spots bandits and is like "Lol, nope" and kicks paladin off the cart

Oh god no, not that eyesore. The new Spires are awesome, makes sense from an IC perspective (An ancient dwarven kingdom with not only dwarf-hating giants and other things that you don't know about but adventurer's literally picking it clean over the years will make it empty) and look a lot better than the Ruins tileset. Although one thing i'd like to see is those bloody stairs removed. Literally serve no purpose beyond "loltraps" (which once you've encountered the first time can be easily avoided) and time consuming. If not removed, then maybe a new area with a collapsed grand stairwell and a hole/chasm in the floor with a chain or rope leading down to the upper chambers.

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You can use number 19 to tame your own 16.......

That sounds awful, what the hell?


As someone who's gotten a fair bit of mileage out of Animal Empathy, I'll just put these two together. It's a very situational skill, to be sure, but you can get a pretty damn solid boss tank by taming a bison or one of those ice manticores.

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Currently playing:
Aven Brinyflask
Safaya Dalai
Riyit
Chsera Hile

(Credits to Raua for the sprite, sauce -here-.)

Cast Owls Insight before you take it off. On Epic druid levels it gives you the full +12 wisdom and lasts super long.

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Yeah but I didn't always have this spell. Earlier on I got a wisdom helm and going into town meant I lost spells.



A few spells just tell me to look at my journal. A DM told me they were custom proof of concept spells from a while ago. Dunno if I'm missing stuff though but that's the only thing I see that's 'missing.'



Pretty sure the one in Brog where you had to get the ice and stuff. Also I never finished the other one and can't get the notebook out of my inventory, or the snake charmer thing. I don't really have any intention of ever doing those quests now so...



Yeah but putting a good vendor behind something that requires a small group to do is fun, at least for me.



Hang out by the brog mountains you'll see them, or not. DM told me by casting any spell or drinking any potion we entered into a 'pvp contract' or something and were thus ok to kill despite no word from them. But whatever. I don't need to level anymore so invisible people on spawn points killing me at level 23's arn't as annoying as they were.

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ANT ALARM

ANT ALARM

I thoroughly enjoy the cart drivers kicking folks off. Even my LG cleric! "So, there we were in the Amia forest. Cart driver says, 'I think I see bandits!'. So I jumped off the cart and told him to get to safety. Course, there were no bandits but it was nice to have a stroll through the forest so it all worked out."

Anyone know the upgrade for barkskin? Please share.

And what druid doesn't enjoy animal empathizing the odd bison? 900 hp folks.

I used #6 to make it so #22 wasn't a problem.

Great list AirPhforce.

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2015 Mr. AMIA with the Fabulous Estara ~ 2015 Best Developed SOB Character: Rith'tar

Eyesore? Don't see how it looked all that bad, but okay. Maybe we can meet in the middle and have the whole Fire Giant area redone with a different tileset.

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Yeah, the bison complaint wasn't that it was too strong or couldn't be tamed and abused mechanically, it's that it's an utterly obnoxiously statted creature.

Also really, if you can change it, just make barkskin an orbital thing like stoneskin is sometimes. It's a hideous effect and I hate walking around either rocked or barked 24/7. If anyone knows a texture patch that will not make it do that hook me up.

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ANT ALARM

ANT ALARM

Found this;

http://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn ... fects-nwn1

Doesn't work on Amia though.

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ANT ALARM

ANT ALARM

Tend to Agree on the SOV spam, and even worse is spawning five ice fey all spaming the same BLIND spell,

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Plays:
Ragnar Ungorn
Hasam Alrab

For all the barkskin lovers! Try this one...


I want new barkskin!!!

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Reynard d'Aubernon - Retired
Balaeyi Elandinai Haeren - Active
Jaezred Kilr'ae - Active

#5 - I got to watch this week a fully buffed Bear Companion get shredded in a party against our very first spawn of Sahaugin. 470hp of fully buffed Bear gone in no time flat. This is the CL25+ Bear, not a lower level one. My PC was tanking for the party and the Druid was in Melee and the Bear still melted in a single spawn.

He spent a longer time buffing the Bear than it lasted in Melee. I don't know what the stats are for the Bear and I don't know what "niche" it's supposed to fill but it can't fill any niche if it's dead.

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Tark Hammerfeast - Immovable Object
True Greenspan - Bendir's Boy Wonder

Sadly its the same for nearly every other Animal companion and most Mummy dust summons, there are two (good) Animals, witch i can't mention unless you want this locked ^^
There is and always will be Summon balance problems

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Plays:
Ragnar Ungorn
Hasam Alrab

There's something fundamentally wrong with this particular companion, but perhaps you are correct that the issue exists with more than one.

My view is that whatever the niche or purpose or theme of the various Epic summons/companions some base level of survivability is necessary for them to carry out that purpose. This fails that test. If it dies instantly who cares what flavor it is? Do designers like to creatively work on creatures and areas that never get used? I doubt it. This is a high Epic Companion. Companions scale both as a group and individually, by level. EMD you can get at low Epic and it doesn't even scale. This should have better functionality.

I'm guessing this is supposed to be a damage cannon, but low AC and modest DR just do not work together unless the thing has 1000HP or crushes everything it hits in 2 rounds. It's getting hit deep into the attack sequence by everything every round, so it's getting swamped by hits. Sure it has good HP and some modest DR, but it's dying by 1000 cuts even when there are other party members around taking up slack.

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Tark Hammerfeast - Immovable Object
True Greenspan - Bendir's Boy Wonder

Is too hard to change these things? Seriously tho, does it take a long time and lots of effort or something?

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I can chime in there. My bear got insta-gibbed sometimes in the first pack. Basically past level 10 the 'tanky' companion died almost instantly.

It just needs more DR, and regen, and other shit. Make it like that damn bison most people say druids should love.

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ANT ALARM

ANT ALARM

Dont think we have someone that deals with monster/summon balance atm
And lke i said before in the 10+ years of playing Amia this was always a problem.
This is especially a problem for new players suddenly finding there epic summon worthless and it favors those like myself who knows the stats of most high lvl summon
Still think they should simply make a compilation of available summons, but that's for another topic

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Plays:
Ragnar Ungorn
Hasam Alrab

Point number 1.

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ANT ALARM

ANT ALARM

XP change seemed to fix my big complaints with how long it took to level. So things like point 2 aren't valid anymore. Good work.

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ANT ALARM

ANT ALARM