The maintaining part of it is not a big deal, it’s the clutter of a dragon in end game content and the disadvantage of having it in the wilds (what kamina mentioned). I personally would love to have a totem. I’d also see it as beneficial to be able to gather harvestables with the dragon.
It happens with your dragons and others. Rather than being unable to pet someone else’s dragon, can you just turn off petting during combat?
Okay, well I think we can fix the dragons lagging behind people thing. I get the clutter in terms of not wanting them out in dungeons/raids, and as I said when we were considering this, we were not anticipating them being out during that content, as the movement speed buff is out of combat only, and I guess I didn’t really consider the weight buff as something that was “significant” in that way, I guess unless you just really want to take a gear set for 3 classes into the dungeon or something.
That said, it sounds like if we can give people a way to have their Dragon equipped but not actually “out”, that would solve a lot of the problem and make it feel more like a regular gear slot for people who don’t really care about the dragon itself.
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that would be nice if we could “hide” the dragon
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It doesn’t matter, there is a lot of out of combat time in shard dungeons. A big part of making better time is maximizing your teleporting speed while out of combat. Even an out-of-combat boost will be compulsory.
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Yes This!
Great idea.
Riley, I’m avoiding the dragon system because it reminds me that my real-life, senior papillon dog, is sitting in the dark while I play, guarding me loyally and wondering why I ignore him so much. It’s a little heartbreaking when I think about it too deeply, so I simply avoid having a dragon pet. I really don’t want to have to pet and care for a dragon to get a needed buff while my little doggie sits alone.
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Good lord, go hang out with your dog!
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I think this is a pretty good compromise. A lot of my concern was born out of adding another time/money sink to the game that’s advantageous enough that it basically become required. If the process is fairly simple and takes little time then that minimizes that concern for the most part. Though that does make me wonder a little bit about why even bother adding a pre-requisite to a thing if it’s trivial, but I’ll take simple and quick over having to bend over and feed and pet my dragon every ten minutes.
It does make me a little nervous though when something like a pet mechanic becomes advantageous enough that it will be hard to ignore if you want to play the game effectively when it seems like the sort of system that should be purely optional for people to dive into.
My other concern was the potential visual and haptic clutter the dragons can cause when there’s so many of them out, especially in the 10-man raids coming up.
Making the pet slot into basically a weird gear slot that you charge with a buff that you can choose to show off or not I think mostly minimizes the concerns I have, but it does feel like a bit of a weird system that way.
I think the ideas some players have tossed around of your dragon helping you gather and hunt for ingredients sounds pretty interesting, and I think maybe giving dragons a more direct use like that could be a fun addition that makes putting some extra work into your pet worth it but wouldn’t feel necessary for everyone. Maybe some sort of a system where you hold an ingredient up for them to sniff and they help you hunt those nodes down or gathers them for you. And/or A dragon that will just mine any nodes you get close enough to might be nice too, like an alternative pick axe.
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I agree overall with most of your points. Really the only thing that’s a little baffling to me is, I’m not sure how this is a whole lot different than other things we’ve introduced to the game. For example, Potions seem like something that everyone agrees are pretty necessary for high-level play. And that requires interacting with a bunch of different non-combat mechanics, including harvesting and crafting, or at least buying them from another player.
Likewise, I see all the time people asking me when we’re going to introduce something for the wrist slot, which would be another thing you have to acquire, improve, etc. somehow to maximize your character.
So it just seems like maybe this is a VR thing where people have a different reaction to something perceived as an actual pet…or maybe it’s our fault for setting the expectation that the pet slot was purely cosmetic…or just that Potions have always been part of the game, and people are in general resistant to change? I’m not totally sure really, haha.
At any rate, we will discuss this feedback internally and decide if we want to do anything different here than we were planning on…I do want the dragon system to gain some depth, and I want it to have some use, but at the same time as I said the goal was not to make this something that was massively affecting combat, more a “nice to have out of combat” thing. So at the very least if we’re going to keep the current bonuses, we’ll need to make some modifications to them to achieve that goal.
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@Riley_D ~ A simple solution to the haptic issue could be an option in the menu to disable pet haptic feedback.
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I guess we will have to see it before we judge it. Might actually work well… But yeah… No haptic feedback in dungeons and the ability to hide dragons whilst we are dungeon farming please.
I understand where you’re coming from on that. I think MMO players, for the most part, accept that some time/money sinks will just part of life and that you will have to put in a little work to min/max to really play the game at 100% effectiveness.
I think the critical part of that though is maintaining the balance of how much time and dram you need to sink in to be able to achieve whatever level of optimum effectiveness. So people might be nervous about this addition because the current time/money sink already feels a little close to heavy already, or people are just worried about it being a pattern of adding more and more time sinks into the game.
The potions in your example are already a pretty heavy sink that takes a lot of the guilds dividing up jobs between everyone to be able maintain an appropriate raiding stock. Just to make one individual Intellect Boosting potion you need to gather 8 separate ingredients from the world, and then to make it really effective it needs to age for quite a while. And that’s all just for one potion.
So I think with some of the time commitment that’s already required to keep your potions, ingredients, and runes all in stock well enough to be able to raid consistently is already a pretty sizable time sink, so people are a little nervous about adding more.
It’d be a nightmare, at least for me and the amount of time I can put into the game, if I had to rely on only myself to keep potions stocked instead of splitting it among the fellowship. There’s probably arguments to be made that maybe it makes the game better to have everyone working together like that, but not everyone is lucky enough to be able to be in a large and co-operative enough fellowship.
I think maybe simplifying the potion system might take down a lot of the anxiety you see around here when you make some of these new announcements about added systems. It would give you a lot more room to add in more mechanics that might take some time without people worrying so much about being run ragged just to be able to raid at a high level of play.
Just my thoughts on the matter. I might be way off the mark.
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I just wish the potion aging had a meter on it so I knew how far along it was. I hate running separate spreadsheets to remember when I put in a certain stack of potions.
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Honestly I agree with @Riley_D on this, I don’t see how this is any different then the effort required to make or purchase potions.
The ability to hide the dragon would help in areas where having fifty dragons out have shown potential to cause world boss issues, and general rendering difficulty for some users so all in all I am pretty pleased with the direction it is going.
Just like the fact that I am not much a fan of fishing or potion making yet doesn’t mean I have any right to say it shouldn’t be part of the game though. I am just glad to see how many people have loved and participated in the new breeding system. For me, it’s the first thing that has really compelled me to go into my house other than my main chest.
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There’s probably a bit of this. It makes people guilty for ignoring real pets. It makes them self conscious for having a VR pet, if that’s not a thing they’re comfortable with. If they really like their dragon, they might be more attached to their dragon’s stats as a matter of identity than a mechanical tool to optimize for, even something non-visible like what buff they give you.
I mean, I immediately decided that, if anyone dropped a dragon out in the wilds, I’d offer it back immediately, for no cost, because I’d feel uncomfortable taking something with a potentially significant emotional attachment. Pets aren’t totems or potions, for better or worse.
Edit: I should add, I like dragons for buffs. There’s some issues, as discussed, but it’s as good a match as any. It’s just worthwhile to consider the unique emotional impact of pets.
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Would it be possible to simply not make the boosts work inside dungeons? That way they are still useful for the world st large but won’t affect raiding or shards.
i dont see why people are being so critical of this update, it looks amazing and i cant wait for it, but come on, if you dont use a pet dragon because you feel like your not showing affection to your irl pet then go play with the pet instead of playing a game, i have a lot of animals and i always find the time to show them all affection but am also really invested into the dragon system
again @Riley_D & all the dev team, amazing job on the updates im actually shaking with anticipation
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Wooooooohoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Super stoked!
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I like the potion system. Just wish we could make multiple potions at a time or make the color go faster.
If you don’t want to make potions, you always have the option to purchase them or trade for them. Also, most content can be beat without potions.
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