Well, I guess I'll be the first to comment... cool new jungle shard! But...

The speed nerf is very nasty though... I spent a lot of real money (and reforge crystals) reforging all of my gear, to get high speed stats on them, because speed was THE best stat to have... now it's obviously not.

It leaves me feeling quite cheated. Cheated out of my money. The whole reforging thing is exactly like gambling, and I always hated it for that.

This is like going into a casino, exchanging $1000 for 40 $25 chips, playing for a while, losing half of it, then deciding to call it quits and cash out. Then getting told "Sorry, we changed the value of the $25 chips, they're only worth $1 each now, so you're only getting $20 for them" (when you expected to get $500).

It's not right, or fair, or ethical. I'm very disappointed.

Let me put my 5c into this jungle...

As I wasn't the fastest with none of my alts, I'm not that affected by the speed nerf. For me: it kinda brings me back in the game although I just don't want to know how many epic crystals and shardium I spent for getting speed on my gear.

+ I absolutely like the icons for character filter in blacksmith. Very cute and useful!
+ The stat display at salvage tab where it also shows what the gear would do when enchanted max. Super idea!
+ The speed nerf finally made some of my HoT gear useful. The Delver's ring eg which I just kept for no good reason. And the robe where I really was disappointed because I had a blue one which had much higher stats even w/o tier 2 and 66 int gem.
+ Give a huge mountain of cookies to the art guys/girls. Really nice job!


- The fact that only normal forest and desert MP are left for a while make the MPs quite...boring. We would have all to go naked to make them challenging again (on the other hand: new players won't have any probs to find guards)
- The guild bounties are bugged now, one can start it but nobody can join :(

What I am still missing is any option to speed up fishing and a skill deselect :D

I asked like 3 times if the HoT lvl 45 gear will be better than HoT 30 gear and you said NO. They are only ment for the new players you said.. Now we really have to slot, reforge and Tier up everything from start!?? How crazy are you!?!

The jungle came and what a surprise, its a huge p2w party!
but i come to that later...

1. Like always changes happen unannounced here.
Is it really so hard to give people an advance notice? "hi people we have finished the jungle and will release it i nthe next few days".
As most people stash their BH-tokens quite a while until they bother using them, with BH frozen those are useless for quite a while now.

2. The revision of player strength aka Speed-reset
I agree to most what andaho said, except the spending money part (but lots of time and countless crystals and shardium). While i agree that this gives newer players a realistic chance to compete, the "loyal" customers get screwed over - big time!
We all know and admit speed was overrated from the start, but well everyone adapted to that fact and spend a lot doing it.

3. p2w!
Beeing a committed F2P-gamer out of principle, i still dont mind people using money - in the end this game has to pay someones bills. What i mind though is the amount of advance the jungle gives hardcore p(l)ayers.
The first shock came with the "buy the +15 speed pack"-ad. As this is a limited offer, people are practically required to buy the pack if they want to stand a serious chance of playing in he future.
The other matter is the locking of tiers/BH. While paying players were able to upgrade their gear faster due to beeing able to run higher tiers, ALL players had atleast the chance to earn Fragments and Tokens. Now its a race to get to lvl 45 and this is only possible quickly by buying massive staminarefreshs. This headstart in earning frags/tokens will provide an advantage that can never be leveled.

Again i dont mind people using money to faciliate/brighten their gaming experience - but beeing a competitive player with f2p-principles, maybe this game just targets a different clientel than me.

4. Hot gear
I recall various occasions of the DEVS promising that the old-Hot-epics will match the new lvl45 items in stats after beeing upgraded to 45. First estimates show this to be unlikely. So if i "wasted" all my fragments on soon out of date items and beeing overtaken by all p2w players i will probably quit the game.

so jungle came - i went!

bfr

The way they nerf stuff, they may as well not bother with raising the level cap, and instead just reset the server for each major update.

"As for p2w aspect - well i lost all the hope anyway, when u introduced purchasable paragon tokens. Now i don't really care"

^^ Good point. Same for me too... from a 'feeling' point of view, I've often felt like quitting the game for a long time because of the P2W features... but I've been patiently waiting to see if it gets better, or worse... I reserve my judgement for now.

Hi. For what it's worth, here's some things to consider:

Everyone is having a knee-jerk reaction right now. There was a major change and you're all reacting to it, that's cool, but try to keep a rational mind about it.

First, consider the circumstances. This is, to my knowledge, the most major update SoT has ever undergone. Bugs are to be expected, and in fact this is far less buggy than I was personally expecting; the trick is to allow sufficient time for them to be fixed. The update was pushed live at the end of the day yesterday before they went home, which may have been a questionable decision on their part. Perhaps it would've been better to do it this morning so there could be devs available for triage and support throughout the day. At any rate I am sure they will be quite busy addressing our tickets today.

Now consider a couple things about online multiplayer games in general:
1) The best advance-notice of an update you can hope for is typically just that it's coming (we did know this). Personally I have not encountered a game that provides actual patch notes ahead of time. Only notice of upcoming changes, not their details.
2) Usually your former progress is almost entirely for naught when a major change like a lvl cap increase is implemented. Equipment, etc. is entirely replaced at the new lvl cap. This is typical. SoT on the other hand has allowed us to retain a lot of our progression, more so than any other game I've played in the past 20 years. The HoT gear is likely bugged at the moment (more below).
3) Balance is something never truly achieved. There will always be changes to how potent/effective your character is in any multiplayer game. These changes often shift the power and status of portions of the playerbase, especially when there are separations such as class. This is pretty much unavoidable, and as a player you kinda gotta just roll with the punches. Which class is "overpowered" and which class is "underpowered" is like the #1 ongoing debate in every single MMORPG for the entire duration of its existence.

Regarding the HoT gear: I lvled up my stuff, the primary stat did not increase. Everyone seems to think this was by design. Personally, I assumed it was a bug and am just waiting for it to be addressed. I am almost certain it is a bug and will have a high priority to be fixed. We can wait to see, but what we can't do is make any definitive statements or rash decisions about it.

Epic pack trinket: I think everyone is valuing this trinket through their pre-jungle eyes. Consider what portion of your total lvl 45 stats 1000 health, 150 AP, and 15 spd will be. Probably a very minor fraction of a percent. While I think this trinket is small and negligible, as are the bonuses it provides (including the speed), it seems to upset a lot of people. Therefore I support removing the speed bonus from it as a gesture of good faith, despite having purchased it myself.

Speed "nerf": Really it was just normalized and some diminishing returns put in place. Right now you are fighting non-heroic mobs of equal lvl. As the new speed mechanic has been described to me, your speed will be just as effective as it always was once you are back to doing your tiered heroics. Your reforged secondary speed stats are still useful, and probably still the best secondary you can get on a piece of gear. Think about how very few things provide speed, secondary stats are one of the only sources. Might I add that I actually think this is the single best balance change they have ever implemented. Speed was ridiculous, it made a joke out of combat. Why bother with any other stats or skills when the entire point of the game is to stack speed? Before, everyone would ditch several hundred ability power/attack damage just to gain 1 speed. Now we have slightly more options, and more than one build may actually be viable.

Not sure if I'm forgetting anything, but yeah. In summary, try not to freak out too much. Allow some time for things to settle and issues to be addressed. Try to actually experience the new content before reacting to it. Nobody even knows what combat or the new tiers will be like at lvl 45 yet.

Cheers

I'd propose to make it so that we can morph our old gear into new one (saving secondary stats, tiers, sockets...) with condition that the old gear must be lvl 45 and the price is like 50% or up to 100% of the actual 45 HoT gear price in tokens.
Since it's mostly the looks that change...