Trade skills apart from cooking and herbs are not money makers. You are lucky to break even over the long run.

Yea.. so why would I want to spend 300 credits on it? And herbalism takes a huge amount of dedication. Oh yeah, herbalism is taking a proxy-hit from this because sparkleberrys will now be more difficult to gather. Even if eating a sparkleberry significantly delays the effects on insanity, gatherers have to deal with stronger creatures while they're up there.

Wildnodes seem they're also going to become a frustrating grief-fest now. Get the nodes as quick as possible, release as many creatures as possible. Let them defend for you while you sit in another plane. Once you notice that another team has managed to clear its way to your node you can jump back into the plane completely sane and overrun the other team who by now is exhibiting at least mild insanity.

Gold got nerfed a long time ago, and even though it got taken out entirely this time, Astral was unbalancing exp and making certain skills too relevant. I doubt this change will stay as it is right now, it'll probably be made more tolerant soon; my guess is that eventually it'll be possible to bash Astral for one or two hours without dying too much. Still, like Viravain said, it's meant to be hard. Astral didn't get screwed up, it was simply made into what it was supposed to be all along - a very high level bashing ground which only very powerful players can touch. The key point is that it was meant to be this difficult. The game wasn't designed to allow people to get to Titan after playing for less than an year. So yes, high level people are going to have a harder time bashing from now on, most likely. They should.

And Diamante, I was being sarcastic. I know you all do more than that, I just think that whining so much because you lost your favourite bashing place makes it seem like you don't. And not all is lost. Effectively this just limits the rate at which you get experience from Astral; probably to the rate the game was originally designed to have.

EDIT:


It increases the amount of denizens you can bash, since you can influence all of your commune/city's loyals. I don't know how much Cosmic denizens are worth compared to Astral critters, but I'm sure you can rack up something from Empowering them.

This being said, yes, Lusternia needs more bashing areas; what we have now is not enough, and I even think the admin should focus more time on that than on new features right now. And since nearly everything is bashed out right now, this isn't the right time to nerf Astral.

My arguement on astral has nothing to do with the difficulty. I thought it was insanely interesting bashing with mega stupidity and spammed with visions while fighting just two creatures that could kill me from 8000 health if I was not careful. again, I have nothing against the difficulty on astral, my problem is the serious effect that the insanity has on RP and general tasks after your done bashing, when you go down to prime. Hell, I'd be happy with getting 2-3 afflictions and constant stupidity on astral , if it didnt so desparately affect things like spending time with my IG fiancee, it just hinders all RP if you are an astral basher

Just to point out a few things.

1. You are all blowing the times WAY out of proportion, basically everyone that came off astral after the nodes has long been back to normal(or normal enough to rarely notice it).

2. This is just like drunk/sleep/clothing/skills/etc, the "level" names are there for you, the game doesn't care what the name is. Just like in learning skills, lower levels come in smaller chunks.

3. The xp of astral has increased by a factor of three, 20 minutes on astral now is what you used to gain in an hour, more if you know what you are doing.

4. Hunting there in a group of 2-3 is far better than solo, it lets you all watch each others backs aswell as produce more mobs to kill in a shorter time.

5. The xp of astral can now be spread out more evenly, as no one person can spend 10 hours straight with an autobasher.

6. The lack of gold means... you have to actually do something other than sit on astral for 10 hours straight, that is if you want to afford health refills.

7. Insanity has been here for over a week, with the numbers watched constantly. We know exactly how long it takes to get to each point, and how much that will effect your ability to survive there(and elsewhere). It is very possible, once you all learn more about insanity, to still hunt on astral, but in spurts instead of huge amounts of time at once.

8. Yes, Diamante was screwed up pretty badly, he also spent over 2 hours there. The healing time is obviously slower than the gaining time(Diamante, if he's stayed off astral should be close to normal).

9. All you have to do is learn more about it, and it's effects, and adapt to it. It's not as bad as you think it is.

10. Can't end with 9 points, and can't think of a 10th right now... so 10 is... learn to adapt.

You do realise that influencing after level 80 doesn't give 1/10 the experience that killing the same creature does, right?

Again, Astral wasn't made harder, astral was made ridiculous. I am mad yes that my favourite bashing ground was taken away, because it was done in the most assanine way, that didn't need to be done. If you knew what you were talking about, and had actually been involved in any of the discussions involving changing astral you would know why alot of us are annoyed by this. I just happen to not care if they ban me from the forums for pointing out they went overboard... again.

Aside from the fact that to influence those high level denizens , you need high level of influence skill, and a race that allows it. As anything below a high charima race, trying to influence for experience is just plan stupid, anything worth doing is far to difficult for races with lower than 16 or 17 charisma

You do realize that you are 100% completely wrong and that influencing gives exactly the same amount of experience that killing it does, right?

Gregori, you and Diamante happen to be the only two people that were seriously effected by this change. After over a week of watching it, only you two were at dangerously high levels. Everyone else, any many bash up there alot, spent enough time off astral to not be at those extremely high levels.

Logged on to lusternia at roughly 230pm. Deffed, was up on astral, came down around 445pm-500. It is now 10:20pm, and Im still highly neurotic

That's interesting considering I would get xp alot faster killing them than I would influencing, and I spent alot of time influencing as a Faeling. Aside from that after level 80 there is nothing high level -to- influence.

Again, I have no problems with stronger mobs, I have no problems with more spawns, I have problems with insanity taking so long to wear off, with stupidity affecting you so badly that you are better to go afk for an hour and hope you don't get shrubbed for it, and with the fact that no gold means why would I bother with astral at all now? I can spend a bit longer on Prime, get gold, get xp, and NOT get lasting stupidity. Halving the gold would have been good, making it 0 gold means that higher level people have to bash out lower level areas in order to make a dime.

Again, lower levels are closer together than higher levels. You are actually very close to being normal(as is everyone that is currently afflicted), and the rate of stupidity effects is far below that of actually having the stupidity affliction.

What, you mean by getting rid of the gold drops higher level people have to leave astral... oh wait, that was the point.

Apparently the point sailed right passed you.

If me and 20 people like me are bashing everything on Prime to get gold.. what perchance are the other 60 people online lower than us doing?

This doesn't seem logical to me. Before insanity, I started a trend of bashing in groups of 8-10 people. Not only was it more social, it also make the chance of getting jumped far less because someone would have to rally an equally large group.

Now, in this former group was always Yuniko and Yukari. At any given time, we were summong 8-10 creatures (be them virgins, obsefessors, lobstrosities, etc). We all did very well and so long as no one screwed up linking, we were able to bash relatively safely.

How is that possible when people who were formerly fighting in a room of 8-10 astral creatures cannot tank 1? Furthermore if what I am hearing correctly, each link now generates more than 1 creature per person. Thus, a group cannot feasibly be more effective. The more people you have, the harder it will become.

While it may be of relative difficult for people the same level, it is not longer possible to bash with a spectrum of fiends and buddies who ranged from level 75-90...

And finally, it seems more logical to me that one person is safer against 2 creatures than 2 people are against 4 creatures. Why? One person can burrow, fly, and move without any form of coordination from another party. Thus if danger creeps up, the person in question can get the hell out of the way. This isn't so easy with 2 people... and it gets worse with the more you have.

True, removing the gold does mean we have to leave astral. Then again, far worse than no gold, the twenty minutes your there, in which you could make a few k, is far worse by the affliction you have once you leave. SO yeah, no gold, big mobs is cool, no gold, afflictions, same mobs is cool, no gold, hard ass mobs, and heavy affliction rate once your there for any length of time, thats when its a problem.


But Ill stop complaining. Im going to get back to normal, and test and learn each level's recuperation time, and see if a decent schedule can be worked out for bashing still. If not, well, I always have the grey moors.

Addendum to my last post:

Not to mention that you didn't need to get rid of gold drops to get people to leave astral...

You put in insanity to chase them off Astral after to long.

Yup. We need more exp sources, true. And doing things on prime isn't as good as bashing Astral. But as I tried to point out, you didn't lose astral. What you all lost is the chance to spend ten hours straight there hunting. Not everyone has that kind of time or that amount of vials, or is that tanky. This levels the playing field a bit. And if experience from Astral creatures was tripled, that means that the people who were already bashing Astral in short periods of time are actually benefitting from this. It also means that high level players won't have such a ridiculous advantage over low level players when it comes to getting gold. This is good, because the low level players need it more than tanky people who transed several skills. It also values tradeskills, questing and influencing. Without Astral gold you won't ever be able to make as much gold as you used to, unless a new source of gold comes up; this is good for the little guys who can't bash Astral, because now you and them have access to the exact same sources of gold. This means that lower level people, and people with lower skills, will now have a better chance at buying IC credits (Because this hopefully will cause the credit market to deflate even more). This means more characters with reasonable skills, which means that the game's conflict is leveled. So now instead of a handful of overpowered Astral bashers, we'll have more medium people around the battlefield. That makes the game more fun for everyone.

Although yes, I think that the consequences of Astral insanity should be changed into something more interesting than constant stupidity.

I don't know about you but it isn't exactly "easy" to get to Astral. Once you factor in the hassle of having to go from prime -> ethereal -> water -> cosmic -> astral... it almost seems to me like a complete waste of energy to stay up there for 10-20 minutes then come back, then rest up, then go back, etc.

I'll take my chance in the catacombs - where gold can be found!

changes

You are hearing wrong.