Problems and Solutions for Shadowbane as seen by Me.

First and foremost the new player experience is garbage. Players are thrown into a world of tight stat points and templates without the proper heads up of what they should be doing. Half decent equipment is nigh unattainable by new players as well as the runes needed to build competitive characters. Buffs and boons play an important part in this as they are also unattainable by new players for lack of understanding of how the game works. Cities have no worth because there are still too many trees allowed on every server and owning a realm gives nothing. The base profession imbalance has been a problem for a while because Melee are severely overpowered against casters. The last and one of the biggest is the lack of things to do out side of the mine and bane WoO.

The character creation screen should emphasize the fact that the template of a character very much affects the quality of game play via its effectiveness. The box which provides what each base race and class can promote to should include links to there respective professions forum. In addition add new player templates that make use of the in game new player messages. They would guide you easily thru your chosen simple profession template based on a vanilla competitive build. Another problem is allot of the professions defining spells are granted to late in the leveling process and cost too much to train for lower level characters to actively level a character with out the need of higher level characters to help. I also believe a new safehold should be added that allows all levels to pledge but has restrictions on what characters can do. They would not be able to enter a zone with an active mine, a city grid with an active bane or use any siege or mine related ability or spell. This would be the new player guild for everyone to find a safe place to learn about the game. Veteran players would be encouraged to join this guild on occasion and help the new players.

Equipment is either hard to obtain or impossible to obtain past what the NPCs in Sea Dogs Rest provide. The random rolling ability of vendors has been greatly reduced with the introduction of mines. The easiest solution would be to upgrade the quality of all Sea Dogs Rest equipment to make it comparable to what the player might expect to see on there end game character. Regardless an upgrade the random rolling system is in order. Random rolled items should always include a prefix and suffix. These items should also only be rolled with tables of Tier 7+ enchantments only, meaning on rare occasions prefixes and suffixes that are currently only roll-able with expansion resources will random roll. But no prefix or suffix that would not be used or is not useful would roll.

The shear amount of buffs that are available in the game is just ridiculous and creates balance issues to people who can afford to run multiple instances of shadowbane on one computer. Characters with optimal buffs from all available sources have a much easier time defeating opponents with bare bones buffs. I would like to see all buffs past priest and bard once again become non stackable or personal. Most of the current buffs only favor melee and casters are left in the dust, but i will discuss that further later. In addition, I would like to see all buffs granted for free and all durations bumped to at least one hour. This would take away the need of requiring people to run multiple instances of the client in order to stay competitive. This would also make templates play a key factor in how a character performs.

Boons i believe where ill convinced from the start even before they started they where abused by exploits that have cropped up. This goes hand in hand with above statements of slapping too much on a character and skewing the balance between a characters template and available resources to twink it via in game additions. Acquiring boons should never of been a PvE activity. For lack of a better system i believe boons should be based on the rank of the Tree of Life of the city the shrine is located in as well as being free to use any boon from any nation members city. I also think boon benefits should be greatly reduced to be more in line with something that is nice to have, but not required. +8% stats and +16 focus lines is where i would cap most bonuses as well as only allowing one boon per character. People would have to choose between there racial and class boons.

Cities in the world of shadowbane have become nothing more then a spawn and repair ground to put your guilds real tags while other cities that are often kept secret are used to roll items with resources. Owning a realm does nothing because the key bonus of taxing people is not valid because people can simply add and remove what is needed when to circumvent loosing resources and gold via taxing. I believe realms should encompass larger areas (roughly 3 of most current realms) as well as a steep reduction in the amount of trees (I'm going with 6) that can be placed in each realm. In addition to having the top boon like mentioned above, they should also be able to tax the mines. Similar to the way taxing a city works, they would be presented with a slider that would empower them to take 0% to 20% of what each mine is set to produce by the mine owner. Any tree planted in a dead zone would be unable to hold a mine which would make these areas more attractive to only people looking to run an open city. In addition i would like to see the build time and ranking costs dropped greatly.

The base profession imbalance has gotten way out of hand since the advent of stacking buffs and equipment. I've addressed the buff aspect, but equipment could use a slight tone down as well. But this is not where the imbalance is lacking. Almost all melee characters enjoy the benefit of instant debuffs while casters have to waste time casting there debuffs before they can start doing damage. A melee character is doing damage regardless from the start unless they are stunned. Casters are also affected by stuns but also have power blocks to deal with. The time spent debuffing and using defensive spells is lost time when no damage is being dealt by casters. I believe melee should have longer recast timers on a few of there debuffing powers, notably Dark Night Stun and Bounty Hunter snare while casters should enjoy instant debuffs with similar recasts.

The lack of activities out side of mines and banes can be attributed to a few things. First, experience gains have been raised to the point where characters can level too quickly thus reducing traffic to areas that would otherwise provide pvp hot spots. The over all plethora of higher level areas and the distance between each is also a problem. The biggest problem yet is the ability to simply set up a pve macro at off times and come back with a fully leveled character over a few sessions that simply needs training to be effective. My solution would be to lower the experience gains on all servers and at the same time lowering the amount of zones to level across the board. Also a change to the grouping rules so that any level difference over 20 levels would yield the lower level character 1 experience point per kill. This would not be liked in the short term, but in the long run it would promote more pvp hot spots as well as easier leveling for lower level characters combined with the above changes. I also think each realm should only contain one type of mine so thats it mandatory to go out and start conflict to acquire all of the resources needed. This should also apply to the way resources are dropped from monsters. Of course other things could be added for further off time activities but these are just easy ideas.

Instead of dully gaining experience on a macro or half equipped group people would have to defend there experience spot gaining experience from the pvp as well as the pve thanks to pvp experience. Zones would be full of people and you would see the return of guilds who a focus on protecting the lower level groups from the big bad [i]griefing squads[/i]. People will have the tools and equipment to enjoy Shadowbane at all levels. A tree will mean something because real-estate will be valuable because of the mines in the realm as well as the zones. Just all out fun pvp all the time is my goal.


Heres a sample map of what i would like to see as a new world map. Obviously my skill in art is lacking, but it gets the point across.

Click here for a preview of my little map.

I didn't include a newbie island as there self explanatory. You can clearly see the Main grassy continent, the ice continent, the desert continent and the small expansion islands (which can be planted on and ruled) at the corners. Each realm (bordered by pink) has a limit of 5 trees. The safe hold marked in grey has its own realm with a 5 tree limit that is part of the non mine and sieging area. Your choice is to be completely errant, live out of a safe hold (or player run open tree safe hold[with its limitations]) or join a full guild.

Every area is quickly accessible as well as the mines and Tree of Life's in each realm. Fun PvP all the time is the name of the game.