Before I begin this critique I want to state that this is from the perspective of a duelist.
In this critique I'll outline the good, the bad, and how to problems within Revelius, while doing this I will draw examples from similar servers gear systems such as Wynncraft, or other Open World games such as The Witcher or Zelda when referring to exploration, or quests. I'll also be dividing this review into numerous sections.
My intention with this thread isn't to cause controversy, but instead to provide a calm and respectful take on Revelius, and a platform for civil discussion on the pros and cons of the update.
Exploration
The map in the update is by far the most well done aspect of Revelius. The new map is a clear improvement over the old map, the resource pack also being a great improvement. The builds are excellent, matching their environments perfectly, towns are built around rivers or coasts, just as they would be in real life, places like Wigtown are distinctly different in their icy environment when compared to other places like Antrum in North Scottland. The locations of mobs are for the most part reflective of where they would be in real life, many of them have excellent environments, for example, Poison Toads living in swamps, or Explosively Ended Newts living in desolate land covered in fire. These environments are clearly reflective of the mobs placed in them and are just fun to look at. The biggest problem with the map, however, isn't in the builds, but instead the space between the builds. There are vast plains, rivers and environments between towns, but in many of them there just isn't anything. North East England has great mountain ranges and rivers but is entirely devoid of towns or mobs or anything to do there. Between Emberskins and Hogsend there's only one town, a town lacking in vendors tailors or Fire Dust connection, just a vast space of mountains forests and rivers, with nothing to do within it. This is a problem that is easy to solve and will most likely be fixed in the next few months, with the addition of more towns, mobs and quests to fill in these empty gaps.
The actual exploration in the map is where my problem lies. With these vast plains of emptiness there is no incentive to explore, you know exactly where every quest is, exactly where every town and vendor is, the only incentive is chests, chests which give a 10th the reward they gave prior to the update. In games like the Witcher 3 it has a similar system to Potterworld, you can't travel to a point before you've discovered it. However, unlike Potterworld the map is packed with things to do. When travelling you have 2 options, stick to the main road or cut through a forest or swamp. Take the first option and its highly likely you'll encounter a quest alongside the road, someone getting robbed, or just a small random event. Cut through the forest and you'll be attacked by all sorts of things, might stumble across a hidden treasure or maybe even a boss fight without realizing. Its the same in Zelda BOTW, a game focused on exploration, everywhere you go you could find a memory, a tower, a shrine or a cool piece of gear, there's none of this empty space so common around Potterworld. Potterworld for me feels very similar to Fallout 76, a huge, promising map with structures clearly just made out of passion rather than necessity, but within all of these great builds there's rarely actually anything to do. You know exactly where everything is since its laid out on the map and you just want to get there, rather than experience the world. However, different to Fallout 76 where you're forced to at least see this great world, even if it is empty. In Potterworld people hop on a broom, fly super high up so they don't hit any trees, line up with the coords and just hold W whilst watching youtube or checking their phone. There's nothing holding a players attention, leading to the travel just being a waste of time for players. This problem is further exaggerated by the ridiculous price of firedust, nobody wants to travel for hours on their broom but then only the richest players will consider it worth it to spend that amount of gold on firedust to travel, every open world game, mmo everything that I play fast travel costs next to nothing or just nothing at all. Skyrim, Elder scrolls online, The witcher, Assassins Creed, Breath of the Wild, Destiny, all of these games fast travel doesn't come at a cost to the player. The only problem with having fast travel cost minimal gold is that it stops players from experiencing the world, which is true in games like the Witcher, but in Potterworld when regular travel is you staring at the sky for 10 minutes, that argument is simply invalid.
PVE and overall Entertainment
The spells system is fun. I personally prefer using the magic system to the combat in other minecraft servers like Wynncraft. It's fun and takes practice and when you get good at casting spells you feel like you earned it, like you're skilled. However the problem with PVE is that it doesn't reward engaging in active combat. On the very first day of the Revelius update I was able to get a full set of common Level 80 gear. All I had to do was sit in a tree and sling spells until the mobs I was fighting died. They simply couldn't reach me. And even if someone does actively engage in fighting mobs, the combat is just walking backwards, occasionally turning and running, whilst hitting the mob with the same set of spells until it dies. Mindless, boring work. Keyword is work, people don't enjoy grinding for gear, it's better than nothing, but not by much. And when someone has spent enough time grinding for gear they'll grow to actively despise it, as I have after just a few days of Revelius being out. This problem is largely causd by the great variety of movement options, brooms, ascendio and appareo are more than enough to let players mindlessly camp in a tree and slay level 80 mobs and is rather tricky to solve without removing them. I'd suggest giving most mobs an aoe that can force players out of trees, or at least force them to stay alert. This is quite a hard problem to solve so I'd be happy to see some suggestions in replies to this thread.
Pre Revelius, other than dueling I derived most of my enjoyment out of fighting bosses. I had an obsession, I tried to solo every boss in the game, I could beat the Enchantress, the Butcher, the Wraith, stage 1 Zirxas and Yassmir all on my own. I was looking forward to seeing whether or not I could finally beat Zirxas with the new Revelius system, or gather some of my friends and say that I was one of the first people to beat the Revenant post Revelius. However, both Azkaban and the Revenant are disabled. This means that the only form of PVE left are the mobs that majority of people kill in 2 hits. You'll find very few people who say that the dungeons were bad, perhaps lacking in some minor aspects but getting a group of friends together and doing Yassmir was fun, and enjoyable, even with the pitiful 50 gold reward. It wouldn't take much effort to change the damage and health of the dungeon mobs so as they match Revelius level stats.
Another key feature in the entertainment of players is quests. Some quests I really enjoyed, others were just miserable. Majority of the quests would just be fetch quests. Talk to this person, waste 5 minutes flying over here, kill 50 of this thing, come back and give me item, rinse and repeat. Some of the most enjoyable quests I did were things like the Grad quest, it had parkour, puzzles and even ended with a boss fight. A refreshing change of pace to be continually playing a game, as oppose to just reading coords and spamming vermillo on wiggleworms. There need to be more quests like the enjoyable and engaging grad quest and less quests that involve killing 100 thestrys until i get 6 hearts so I can brew a random person a potion to complete a quest that I regret starting.
PVP and Gear
Ignoring all stat issues, the arguably largest flaw in the gear system is the price. Earlier today I got a legendary recipe, and the expense from crafting all the materials for it and the gear itself amounted to around 6000 gold. For just one piece of gear. This would be forgivable if it was just "they're grads if they're going for legendary gear they're probably well off anyway!" but the price for gear even at low levels is ridiculous. Low level quests give barely even enough gold to buy a piece of firedust, let alone enough to fully equip a player with gear. There just isn't enough gold, I've witnessed first hand some of my 6th year friends not having enough gold to craft gear, imagine how hard it must be for low levels who don't have access to 6 years of quests, but instead only the year 1 quests that give them pennies. Gear needs to be cheaper to craft or simply not cost anything at all. If it doesn't add anything to the game then it shouldn't be in the game. All it does is inconvenience players and prevent low levels from progressing at a fast pace and it's not fair on low levels that they're having to resort to just begging for gold in order to progress in the game.
Gear stats are very, very unbalanced and broken. There have been many instances of one of my friends saying "I just got a new legendary!" "oh wait its trash nevermind" with the low drop rate of legendaries people shouldn't be deciding that they'd rather keep their common gear. Furthermore, the fact that every gear piece can lower cooldowns and increase damage of stats is mind boggling. Within less than a week there are already people running around, able to one shot other graduates with spells that have ridiculously low cooldowns, It's not right that duels are decided by "who found the most recent flaw in the gears system" as oppose to "who has the best aim, knowledge of spells, and game sense" like it was in the past.
The spell tree is a huge step backwards from talents. Talents gave people interesting buffs, which could suit different types of playstyle. As oppose to a player having to decide between having shortened cast time, or extra range, bonus healing or bonus damage, players can just invest in certain spells to make good. They just choose a spell and say "ok that spell isn't trash now" a huge variety of spells were completely knocked out of dueling by this. People want to be able to experiment with the new dueling system, not have to reset their spell tree every 5 seconds to see whether or not a certain spell is good. This problem is further exaggerated by the insanely high price of 50 ac to reset your spell tree. How is a player meant to experiment with spells and find new things when its that costly to reset it? Their are other things like spells having their counters cost ridiculous amounts of spell points to make viable. Finite used to be a mandatory spell used by players, however now without any points it has a 60 second cooldown, furthermore in order to improve it a player has to invest in 3 spells before being able to level it up once. And even at max level it still has 18 second cooldown. Meanwhile you're trying to cope with the 18 second cooldown whilst one of your friends has 4 second cooldown on spells like Paralotum. One of the biggest casualties of this are the players without lacerum. Not only is Lacerum an excellent dueling spell that costs 0 spell points, but even after investing 6 spell points to get finite up to max level it still has a cooldown 7 seconds longer than Lacerums. But don't worry, if you really want to counter Lacerum you can work through the entire healing spell tree to get Vulnera, which by default has a ridiculous 60 second cooldown.
Ok so that was really long and by the time im writing this im sleep deprived and uhh my brain broken
thanks for reading, apologies if i began veering towards disrespectful in the end, I'm very passionate about dueling and watching my favorite part of the server be so severely damaged like this hurts. The fact its 6am while writing this doesn't help either.
-Foirie
In this critique I'll outline the good, the bad, and how to problems within Revelius, while doing this I will draw examples from similar servers gear systems such as Wynncraft, or other Open World games such as The Witcher or Zelda when referring to exploration, or quests. I'll also be dividing this review into numerous sections.
My intention with this thread isn't to cause controversy, but instead to provide a calm and respectful take on Revelius, and a platform for civil discussion on the pros and cons of the update.
Exploration
The map in the update is by far the most well done aspect of Revelius. The new map is a clear improvement over the old map, the resource pack also being a great improvement. The builds are excellent, matching their environments perfectly, towns are built around rivers or coasts, just as they would be in real life, places like Wigtown are distinctly different in their icy environment when compared to other places like Antrum in North Scottland. The locations of mobs are for the most part reflective of where they would be in real life, many of them have excellent environments, for example, Poison Toads living in swamps, or Explosively Ended Newts living in desolate land covered in fire. These environments are clearly reflective of the mobs placed in them and are just fun to look at. The biggest problem with the map, however, isn't in the builds, but instead the space between the builds. There are vast plains, rivers and environments between towns, but in many of them there just isn't anything. North East England has great mountain ranges and rivers but is entirely devoid of towns or mobs or anything to do there. Between Emberskins and Hogsend there's only one town, a town lacking in vendors tailors or Fire Dust connection, just a vast space of mountains forests and rivers, with nothing to do within it. This is a problem that is easy to solve and will most likely be fixed in the next few months, with the addition of more towns, mobs and quests to fill in these empty gaps.
The actual exploration in the map is where my problem lies. With these vast plains of emptiness there is no incentive to explore, you know exactly where every quest is, exactly where every town and vendor is, the only incentive is chests, chests which give a 10th the reward they gave prior to the update. In games like the Witcher 3 it has a similar system to Potterworld, you can't travel to a point before you've discovered it. However, unlike Potterworld the map is packed with things to do. When travelling you have 2 options, stick to the main road or cut through a forest or swamp. Take the first option and its highly likely you'll encounter a quest alongside the road, someone getting robbed, or just a small random event. Cut through the forest and you'll be attacked by all sorts of things, might stumble across a hidden treasure or maybe even a boss fight without realizing. Its the same in Zelda BOTW, a game focused on exploration, everywhere you go you could find a memory, a tower, a shrine or a cool piece of gear, there's none of this empty space so common around Potterworld. Potterworld for me feels very similar to Fallout 76, a huge, promising map with structures clearly just made out of passion rather than necessity, but within all of these great builds there's rarely actually anything to do. You know exactly where everything is since its laid out on the map and you just want to get there, rather than experience the world. However, different to Fallout 76 where you're forced to at least see this great world, even if it is empty. In Potterworld people hop on a broom, fly super high up so they don't hit any trees, line up with the coords and just hold W whilst watching youtube or checking their phone. There's nothing holding a players attention, leading to the travel just being a waste of time for players. This problem is further exaggerated by the ridiculous price of firedust, nobody wants to travel for hours on their broom but then only the richest players will consider it worth it to spend that amount of gold on firedust to travel, every open world game, mmo everything that I play fast travel costs next to nothing or just nothing at all. Skyrim, Elder scrolls online, The witcher, Assassins Creed, Breath of the Wild, Destiny, all of these games fast travel doesn't come at a cost to the player. The only problem with having fast travel cost minimal gold is that it stops players from experiencing the world, which is true in games like the Witcher, but in Potterworld when regular travel is you staring at the sky for 10 minutes, that argument is simply invalid.
PVE and overall Entertainment
The spells system is fun. I personally prefer using the magic system to the combat in other minecraft servers like Wynncraft. It's fun and takes practice and when you get good at casting spells you feel like you earned it, like you're skilled. However the problem with PVE is that it doesn't reward engaging in active combat. On the very first day of the Revelius update I was able to get a full set of common Level 80 gear. All I had to do was sit in a tree and sling spells until the mobs I was fighting died. They simply couldn't reach me. And even if someone does actively engage in fighting mobs, the combat is just walking backwards, occasionally turning and running, whilst hitting the mob with the same set of spells until it dies. Mindless, boring work. Keyword is work, people don't enjoy grinding for gear, it's better than nothing, but not by much. And when someone has spent enough time grinding for gear they'll grow to actively despise it, as I have after just a few days of Revelius being out. This problem is largely causd by the great variety of movement options, brooms, ascendio and appareo are more than enough to let players mindlessly camp in a tree and slay level 80 mobs and is rather tricky to solve without removing them. I'd suggest giving most mobs an aoe that can force players out of trees, or at least force them to stay alert. This is quite a hard problem to solve so I'd be happy to see some suggestions in replies to this thread.
Pre Revelius, other than dueling I derived most of my enjoyment out of fighting bosses. I had an obsession, I tried to solo every boss in the game, I could beat the Enchantress, the Butcher, the Wraith, stage 1 Zirxas and Yassmir all on my own. I was looking forward to seeing whether or not I could finally beat Zirxas with the new Revelius system, or gather some of my friends and say that I was one of the first people to beat the Revenant post Revelius. However, both Azkaban and the Revenant are disabled. This means that the only form of PVE left are the mobs that majority of people kill in 2 hits. You'll find very few people who say that the dungeons were bad, perhaps lacking in some minor aspects but getting a group of friends together and doing Yassmir was fun, and enjoyable, even with the pitiful 50 gold reward. It wouldn't take much effort to change the damage and health of the dungeon mobs so as they match Revelius level stats.
Another key feature in the entertainment of players is quests. Some quests I really enjoyed, others were just miserable. Majority of the quests would just be fetch quests. Talk to this person, waste 5 minutes flying over here, kill 50 of this thing, come back and give me item, rinse and repeat. Some of the most enjoyable quests I did were things like the Grad quest, it had parkour, puzzles and even ended with a boss fight. A refreshing change of pace to be continually playing a game, as oppose to just reading coords and spamming vermillo on wiggleworms. There need to be more quests like the enjoyable and engaging grad quest and less quests that involve killing 100 thestrys until i get 6 hearts so I can brew a random person a potion to complete a quest that I regret starting.
PVP and Gear
Ignoring all stat issues, the arguably largest flaw in the gear system is the price. Earlier today I got a legendary recipe, and the expense from crafting all the materials for it and the gear itself amounted to around 6000 gold. For just one piece of gear. This would be forgivable if it was just "they're grads if they're going for legendary gear they're probably well off anyway!" but the price for gear even at low levels is ridiculous. Low level quests give barely even enough gold to buy a piece of firedust, let alone enough to fully equip a player with gear. There just isn't enough gold, I've witnessed first hand some of my 6th year friends not having enough gold to craft gear, imagine how hard it must be for low levels who don't have access to 6 years of quests, but instead only the year 1 quests that give them pennies. Gear needs to be cheaper to craft or simply not cost anything at all. If it doesn't add anything to the game then it shouldn't be in the game. All it does is inconvenience players and prevent low levels from progressing at a fast pace and it's not fair on low levels that they're having to resort to just begging for gold in order to progress in the game.
Gear stats are very, very unbalanced and broken. There have been many instances of one of my friends saying "I just got a new legendary!" "oh wait its trash nevermind" with the low drop rate of legendaries people shouldn't be deciding that they'd rather keep their common gear. Furthermore, the fact that every gear piece can lower cooldowns and increase damage of stats is mind boggling. Within less than a week there are already people running around, able to one shot other graduates with spells that have ridiculously low cooldowns, It's not right that duels are decided by "who found the most recent flaw in the gears system" as oppose to "who has the best aim, knowledge of spells, and game sense" like it was in the past.
The spell tree is a huge step backwards from talents. Talents gave people interesting buffs, which could suit different types of playstyle. As oppose to a player having to decide between having shortened cast time, or extra range, bonus healing or bonus damage, players can just invest in certain spells to make good. They just choose a spell and say "ok that spell isn't trash now" a huge variety of spells were completely knocked out of dueling by this. People want to be able to experiment with the new dueling system, not have to reset their spell tree every 5 seconds to see whether or not a certain spell is good. This problem is further exaggerated by the insanely high price of 50 ac to reset your spell tree. How is a player meant to experiment with spells and find new things when its that costly to reset it? Their are other things like spells having their counters cost ridiculous amounts of spell points to make viable. Finite used to be a mandatory spell used by players, however now without any points it has a 60 second cooldown, furthermore in order to improve it a player has to invest in 3 spells before being able to level it up once. And even at max level it still has 18 second cooldown. Meanwhile you're trying to cope with the 18 second cooldown whilst one of your friends has 4 second cooldown on spells like Paralotum. One of the biggest casualties of this are the players without lacerum. Not only is Lacerum an excellent dueling spell that costs 0 spell points, but even after investing 6 spell points to get finite up to max level it still has a cooldown 7 seconds longer than Lacerums. But don't worry, if you really want to counter Lacerum you can work through the entire healing spell tree to get Vulnera, which by default has a ridiculous 60 second cooldown.
Ok so that was really long and by the time im writing this im sleep deprived and uhh my brain broken
thanks for reading, apologies if i began veering towards disrespectful in the end, I'm very passionate about dueling and watching my favorite part of the server be so severely damaged like this hurts. The fact its 6am while writing this doesn't help either. -Foirie
