Ruined game

[Relic]

This update was proper junk. Some of the new mobs are great, and Dracula is exceedingly difficult, but some of the changes are horrible. The shard system is absurd and from what I hear, everyone hates it. The game is just no longer fun. I enjoyed it more before the update.

[RegularZach]

Can you elaborate more on some of the changes you think are horrible? I'm only just now reaching the shard system, but I don't know much about it.

[Glyph]

Sounds like you haven’t even played any of the new update. Perhaps experience the changes yourself before passing judgement on it.

[Grumpy Old Guy]

I'll be honest once I got to the shard system and did five level 2 rifts and got no weapons for my trouble I was not impressed.

I don't like grinding, and the game has at least up until that point been very much light on RNG heavy drop mechanics that hard gated gear.

To see that they abandoned that for a low chance gear drop roll at the last part of the game was really disappointing since honestly it isn't fun or hard to do it's just mindless tedium.

[Hiphoptimus Rhyme]

Originally posted by Grumpy Old Guy:

I'll be honest once I got to the shard system and did five level 2 rifts and got no weapons for my trouble I was not impressed.

I don't like grinding, and the game has at least up until that point been very much light on RNG heavy drop mechanics that hard gated gear.

To see that they abandoned that for a low chance gear drop roll at the last part of the game was really disappointing since honestly it isn't fun or hard to do it's just mindless tedium.

There are two vendors with whom you trade the rift shards for shattered weapons. The ones that can drop from rift bosses are bonuses. The only weapons that are strictly RNG are the unique/named legendaries, and I had 3 drop in 5 or six rifts.

[Todokoro]

the old shards are still in the game, you just gotta hunt for them in the console with the admin commands. My hope is that modders will eventually re-add the old shards.

Originally posted by RegularZach:

Can you elaborate more on some of the changes you think are horrible? I'm only just now reaching the shard system, but I don't know much about it.

in early access the shard system allowed for the placement of shards that gave you a 2 hour buff that you could stack onto other shard buffs. once you had it, everyone in your clan could interact with it to acquire said buff. However, in the new system there is only one soulshard necklace per person and to get more (depending on whether or not the server is pve or pvp) you have to either raid the person that had the necklace or fight the boss multiple times - depending on how many people in the clan still need the necklace. as a side bonus you have to kill level 84+ rift bosses to keep the necklaces repaired.

Originally posted by Grumpy Old Guy:

I'll be honest once I got to the shard system and did five level 2 rifts and got no weapons for my trouble I was not impressed.

I don't like grinding, and the game has at least up until that point been very much light on RNG heavy drop mechanics that hard gated gear.

To see that they abandoned that for a low chance gear drop roll at the last part of the game was really disappointing since honestly it isn't fun or hard to do it's just mindless tedium.

If you keep doing the rifts there's a chance for a legendary shard to drop, not just epic, but its only a 10% drop chance.

[Todokoro]

Originally posted by Glyph:

Sounds like you haven’t even played any of the new update. Perhaps experience the changes yourself before passing judgement on it.

I've gotten almost all the achievements minus one (which i think is kind of a fluke), so I can understand and see why the OP might be a bit disappointed.

[Combine54]

The stygian shard system is awful, I agree here.
While I think the game could have benefited from a similar, less location restrictive system (say, upon reaching a certain gear level and constructing a certain device, a zone would become possessed and every enemy inside that zone would drop shards with increased drop from V bloods and then possession would rotate to a different zone; enemies would scale to high level), in its current implementation it is a boring grind - from the purely PvE perspective, because the amount of shards dropped for, say, doing 20 t2 rifts doesn't allow to get everything one wants (all passives, at least 3 desired legendary weapons or Epic weapons with the matching magic type etc) and doing even 20 of those in a row is quite a grind compared to the rest of the game. Not only that, but rifts are also on a cooldown timer, making it extremely frustrating even to grind. Maybe it is a different story from PvP perspective - which I couldn't care less about.
Also - the decision to make most legendary weapons strictly favor one magic type is extremely boneheaded. They should have made it a random magic type instead.

[HO ANU]

Whenever you buy an epic shattered lvl 30 weapon with the greater stygian shards you have a chance for it to be a legendary.