Hey there,

I'd previously posted some suggestions in a reddit thread for Nevergrind. I've since kept playing and am now a 52 Ogre SK about to go up against Sanctum Guardian Ghalentus. I only mention this in case some of my suggestions are cleared up by simply progressing further in the game or whatever.

Story
Not trying to be rude, but the current story is totally lackluster. Kill enemies, move to another area, repeat. Named mobs are a dime a dozen and have no significance. Now I know EQ's own storyline wasn't critically acclaimed, but I feel like there's some revisions that could be made to make the game more engaging and enjoyable. Side quests, accessible through town with the rewards possibly shown before starting, could help. One thing I absolutely loved from EQ was the rarity of some items or mobs - some were truly rare and could trigger some interesting events. A sample side quest to promote grinding would be to gather X items from mobs that have an extremely low drop chance. Possibly they only drop in certain areas, and possibly the quest triggers upon acquiring one. Similar to EQ's Epic Quest for each class. It would break up the monotony of the progression. Some quests could require gold to start, e.g - We need to exterminate the kobolds from the tunnel under the town. Not only can't we kill them, but we can't afford the dynamite to collapse the tunnel. In exchange we'll offer some phat loot. This would act as a mechanism to eat up some of the gold reserves I find a bit too plentiful as well. Again the whole focus I think is needed is a sidestepping of the linear progression.

Items
Magic and rare items are completely useless for me currently. Unique items are all that I use. Whether this is a rarity or not I can't say, but all they currently do is take up space / genrate gold. This may be intentional and honestly it's fine, but it seems odd to have item rarities that're used until you get your first unique for the slot and never again. That being said, the unique items I currently have are strong but not entirely overpowered, so they don't need a nerf in my eyes. I think a better balance could be struck between the two.

It'd be great to see sets geared towards each class. Or unique items with +Skills for specific classes. By broadening the range of unique items and specializing them, you may be an SK who finds fewer eligible upgrades and when you finally do get one, it's more enjoyable.

As mentioned before, gold is plentiful and a bit useful for upgrading, but there could be more done. What about class specific upgrades in addition to the physical / magical ones? What about gambling, even though it's a played out concept it's a good gold sink. What about unique items sold in each town that can't be dropped elsewhere, but cost a ton? You could make heirloom type items through this - have a solid 1H for sale in the first town that costs 10k. Obviously a newbie can't afford this and won't want it by the time he can, but if I'm starting a new character now I'd buy it so I can save some time levelling in the future. Assuming items can be transferred via the bank? Not sure.

Classes
Specifically Shadowknights, my only experience thus far. I am a walking monster at this point. Combos only stop when the zone ends, or in the rare instance my pet dies and I'm OOM. Again this is normal difficulty so this may be intentional. I can't pull like 4 mobs at a time, but chaining them over and over is a cakewalk. My pet is a little weak, but from what I remember of EQ this was the case there too. Not an issue. Every skill is well balanced and used except feign death, but I could see this used in higher difficulties.

I mentioned it in my previous post, but skill durations would really help. I don't like not knowing how much longer my buffs or DOTs will last.

UI
Functional but could be better. The pull, attack and flee buttons are a bit awkwardly placed. A redesign of the UI would be nice later for layouts sake, but for the time being it's good.

Might amend this later if I get time. Overall I love this game and look forward to playing more and seeing you develop it further. Hope none of this comes off as harsh, I'd just like to see this grow even bigger and better than it already is.

Story: Side quests, go to a random area with random enemies of approximately your lvl looking for a rare spawn / drop. I'd think this would be the easiest way to implement this and keep it interesting. You could make some items only drop from certain side quest rares.

Items: Magic and rare items are incredibly useless... in reality all items need a buff as stats don't have a huge impact. This is true to classic EQ, I remember logging onto my rogue that had cleared PoP with his Ifir and Dagger of Time but here are his serpentine bracers of +8 dex... Up to Joe if he wants to make gear carry more weight.

Classes: SK is one of the best classes, it'll still get much harder at higher difficulties but certainly you could go make a wizard if you want a bigger challenge :p

Just a short suggestion - the level 20 bonus for Hyperstrike right now doubles the duration of the buff it grants. This is rather useless, since it is very simple to keep the hyperstrike buff on all the time. Any chance for a change to something more interesting?

Actually, Zurrain, yes. You're probably right about that. The duration was changed at some point, rendering this bonus near useless.

Hyper Strike L20 bonus was changed to 8% dodge. yay!

Thanks for the suggestions, Jellybones. Lots of great improvements that could be made. No doubt. I like to tell people that the version they're playing today is the worst version of Nevergrind they'll ever play.

Maelfyn, can you make it so that at character select, it defaults to the difficulty you last played? It's not a big deal, but sometimes I forget to change it from normal.

And actually at the moment, I can't select a difficulty - seems the options have disappeared.

Can't select difficulty? What? Uh, are you serious? lol

Ya, at the moment it looks like this. Tried reloading, etc.

Maybe it's a server only bug?

Confirmed. Non-server account works just fine for selecting difficulty.

Zurrain, I am not sure how your quest data was reset. Yesterday I did do some data type changes to the databases, but if these caused problems it should have affected everyone's quests, not just yours. My character Hanamaf appears to still have his quest progress, so I am not sure what happened. Did anything unusual happen? I checked and it looked like all of your quest progress reset to zero.

In any case, I went in and unlocked nightmare for Kerranti. Let me know if you see further issues.

Still seeing no option for difficulties - same picture for me as I posted before. Not sure what I did!

Really? Okay, let's try this again. If this doesn't work then something weird is going on. Select Kerrantie and let me know if you see Normal & Nightmare available.

Oh, I think I see what I did wrong the first time. I fixed Kerranti's data, not Kerrantie's.

Awesome, worked - thanks!