This may be a bit of a general feedback post on artificing, but it deals predominantly with my experience of learning artificing as a tank and I will have some solid suggestions in the wrap-up of what needs to be changed. I will try not to give away anything too substantial about artificing, but I will explain what I need to to make my points. I also want to stress that I’m just getting into this, and there is MUCH for me to learn still.
IF YOU HAVE NOT DONE ANY ARTIFICING YOURSELF, I URGE YOU TO NOT READ ANY FURTHER BEFORE TRYING IT OUT YOURSELF. EXPLORATION AND EXPERIMENTATION IS THE REWARDING PART OF THE JOURNEY, DON’T SELL YOURSELF SHORT.
From here on out, it’s all spoilers, just to be safe.
Hidden
Recipes: First of all, I really enjoyed spending all my dram and resources exploring all of the overworld in my quest to find rune recipes. That’s half sarcastic, but I legitimately did enjoy this component of it. It was nice revisiting areas I had not been to in a while and looking at them with a fresh eye.
What to fix: I drank 4 potions walking through all of Highsteppe, the immediate surrounding area, all the way through to Wenderwood and Corner Path, into guild city and even ran through the level 8 dungeon and the only thing I found was the singular recipe. That felt like a real kick in the pants to waste all my time and potions going through there, so I would like to see a bit more recipes over there. It’s too big of an area to not have any use in this regard (for the most part). This is ever the more glaringly apparent when you compare this to the desert.
Runic Sight: I’ll be honest, this is awful.
First of all, let me talk about finding someone to help. The potion of runic sight requires that I find someone to help me, no way around it. I’m online for 4-6 hours every day, I play with all kinds of people from a bunch of different fellowships and different timezones (2pm-7pm MST covers pretty much everyone), even today I was participating in a nice big group of people doing the world bosses. What I’m getting at with this is that there isn’t a whole lot of reason that over many hours of trying it would be so difficult for me to find a skilled warrior to drink my potion and stand hitting a dummy for 10-20 minutes in the orders I request, but it absolutely was difficult. Want to know why nobody wants to do that? Because it’s not fun and they could be doing something much more productive with their time in game. Do I have to pay someone to stand and do basic warrior combos? With what? Dram doesn’t have a major value for most players, so what should I barter with? What is 20 minutes of someones time worth? (As an aside, I’ll tell you what most people want for their time: XP for their alt characters).
The alternative is that instead of hitting a dummy I watch another warrior do their thing in regular combat. The only problem with that is most of the time there are not two tanks in a group, so I have to either do an inefficient run in Tradu (for example), which wastes the time of everyone involved, or I have to take that tank out of doing a productive thing (say, Tradu) so that I can watch him do his thing on other enemies, and TRY to get all that information down, while also acknowledging that I’m going to also have to parse through more information in the runes (do to the enemy fighting back, fight conditions, status effects, etc)…so that doesn’t make much sense anyways when I’m trying to learn the basics.
So, needless to say, anyone who has done it before knows that there is nothing in it for them, and anyone who hasn’t knows that it’s more productive to do something else instead of hitting a dummy, so in the end, nobody wants to help with this. It’s a terrible experience when I go into a 5 hour stream with the idea of “okay, I know what to do today, I just need someone to help me” and I struggle to find someone.
How to fix this component: Give me a mirror and let me watch myself. Done. I understand why you did things the way you did, to make it a bit more interactive and complex, but it is just not an enjoyable experience to feel like a total loser because despite multiple posts in active communities on discord and active asking of anyone you think might be able to help, you just find disappointment at every turn due to the previously mentioned reasons.
Second thing I want to talk about is reading the runes. I’m having a tough time deciding where to begin with the problems I have with this. Doing this killed all enthusiasm I had for artificing (and there was a lot, I find the entire concept super engaging). I guess I’ll start with this: I do not understand, even a little bit, why a left swing doesn’t always have a corresponding rune for a left swing. This applies to every single move/attack a warrior makes. Runes are a written language, so there are two ways you can interpret them. The first way is that each rune is like a letter (or a swing/attack/move in this case…left swing, right swing, shield bash, etc). The second is that each rune represents a “phrase” (in this case, Provoke, or Cleave, or, even more broad, Stun, DPS, Block, etc).
If they represent the former, letters, then the runes need to consistently represent the same thing. The letter A is always going to be the letter A, no matter what letters you put around it. If I swing left, and later swing right, they shouldn’t show me the same rune.
If the runes represent the latter, phrases, then there is no need to show me runes until the “phrase” is complete. If I say the word moon, unless I’m a mentally challenged Stephen King character, I don’t say M-O-O-N, THAT SPELLS MOON. Furthermore, if they represent a “phrase” the components that make up that phrase should have consistency between phrases. Left means left, no matter whether you just swung right or just swung up.
From any perspective in the context of language, it doesn’t make a ton of sense when you’re trying to be specific (which the runes should be) to not be consistent. If you’re trying to be more vague (like stun, dps, etc), then runes should not pop up until that more general “phrase” procs, and a single rune should represent an entire concept (think somewhere between the German language and the Japanese written language).
Just as an aside to this: If there is a “phrase” for doing something (Provoke, for example), seeing the runes pop up one by one just muddies this concept up if they don’t represent the hits you are doing.
How to fix this: Don’t show runes until the “phrase” is done. This can include all of the extra runes like “start attack” “fast combo” “slow combo” etc., but having it presented as one coherent “sentence” would make the whole thing a lot less problematic, not only from an interpretation perspective (meaning, someone watching someone else who has taken the runic sight potion), but also from the perspective of making sense in the terms of language. My thoughts would be that the whole phrase would pop up in the air at once in one string of runes (running left to right, not vertical, as when we place the runes in our artificing station, we place them that way, left to right, not vertical).
SUMMED UP: Let me hit a test dummy in front of a mirror. As I hit that test dummy, once a successful combo or “phrase” is accomplished, have it show up on the mirror as one string of runes. This string of runes should include all factors that influence that specific combo I did and run left to right.
Why does this matter?: To learn any language, you start with the basics. Alphabet (if necessary), simple phrases, grammar, etc. You don’t watch a high level warrior in a fight with a high level boss to learn how to speak. You watch them hit a training dummy and establish the basics of the language. There is no incentive to do this for people, so let people who are interested in doing this do it themselves. Runic sight potion will still have plenty of value in crafting more complex and higher tier runic combinations that require a full group and a big enemy (especially as the game progresses and gets more advanced), and it will always be there for anyone who wants to test something out in a non-controlled, real-world scenario (watching someone else do their thing in a semi-unpredictable environment, ie, a boss battle). Another option here would be to let me take the runic sight potion and watch anyone do their thing. I’m sure I can find a warrior who is laying down some provoke and watch them for a bit. Sure, it would be messy, but it’s just another option. On top of this, if you’re going to keep it so two people need to be involved in this for it to work, you need to give people a real incentive to do it, because currently I don’t see much of one for any high level player.
Creating runes: No problems here, functions the same as alchemy, an already learned skill for anyone by the time they try this, so there shouldn’t be any issue. I DO however have an issue with the recipe pages in the book. Some specific recipes say “finish when blue” after them, and some pages say “finish when blue” at the bottom of the page, with nothing after each recipe. Pick one or the other and be consistent, that’s all I ask. If it’s at the bottom of the page, make that text larger and bolder please.
Creating rune sets: Again, no problem, if you know the runes you need to use to say the “phrase”, there is zero issue here. I might suggest that the actual runic tableau thing that you put the runes into be moved more towards the chest, since it is quite a ways away from the runes themselves, and can be a bit more of a reach/movement then it should be. But that’s not really a big deal, just a bit of a nitpick.
Misc. Thoughts On Artificing: As a warrior, and more specifically a tank, I feel like I’m getting the shaft on what I can do with artificing. All I care about is provoke and health. I can’t do health, so all that I can really do is provoke. I mean, sure, I can change things up, and go dps, or maybe compliment by provoke with Hamstring or something, but at the end of the day, all I care about is keeping aggro. Compared to any of the other classes, there just isn’t as much need for a tank to have any artificed gear, and I really don’t think that will do at all. I’m a tank, I’m required in every boss fight, yet when it comes to artificing, I’m a second rate citizen (lol). I just want to see a bit more flexibility with what I can do with artificing as a warrior. Maybe this ties into one of my other ideas (having combos link), but I would like to see the ability for me to make a runic set that includes Cleave and Provoke to do a group taunt, or Cleave and Shield Bash to do a group stun. This would require specific (longer) proc rules to keep it from being op, but it could really make it fun to play around with these things. I just don’t see much of that currently.
Also, from what I’ve seen in my limited experience with watching other classes, a singular spell (for example) has a singular rune in the context of the “phrase”. For example, in your blogpost you do FAM (icebolt 2, firework 1, runic M) when doing Frostbolt 2 followed by Ice Lance. For warrior, a group of hits (left, right and up) translates to 3-6 runes (including context runes). Shouldn’t a singular combo be treated the same way as a singular spell? Both require multiple strokes and precision on multiple angles. Treating a combo (provoke, for example) as a singular rune in the context of a “phrase” would allow the type of combo-combinations (lol) that I previously mentioned (group taunt, group stun).
That ends the spoiler’d up section.
I want to love artificing, and for the most part I do, but learning the runes you need to use to accomplish something needs some work right now, both to make sense and to be clearer to understand. This is a fantastic end-game crafting system for end-game players (or lower level characters that want some extra oomph for leveling), that requires resources from all over the world, and has multiple steps. This makes it deeply satisfying to pursue if you enjoy crafting in games. Once I have formed up an understanding of the language to the point that I can string together runic phrases, I will love it, but learning the language is like pulling teeth.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, I love Orbus and all I want is to see this game get better and better.
