Now that the servers of Asheron’s Call 2 have been stable for a few weeks, the forums are churning with things to fix and improve upon for this decade old game. I’ve had many of my own thoughts for a long time, but I didn’t want to really put them out until more important things were done. So here is my list of things to fix and things to upgrade, and hopefully most of them would be fairly easy to do (small features).
1) Make all kills upgrade in the group. I’m not sure what the thought process was for many quests in AC2. Most of them update as you might expect, but many do not. The weird thing is the ones that don’t, don’t really seem correct. There are a couple good examples of how this is in both ways.
The first is Rashan’s Revenge. You have to kill one of each of several types of drudges. But you have to be the one who did the most damage to the drudge to get credit. This makes the quest very annoying for groups but the quest is difficult solo because of the drudges hangs in a group of 5-8 other drudges.
The second example is Slavetaker’s head which has you killing a Slavetake Burun and taking his head (go figure). Like Rashan’s Revenge, you need to have dealt the most damage and there is only one head. This is a quest many in the forums felt needs to be more groupable. However, this particular quest is much more soloable than Rashan’s as long as you wait a couple more levels, it is also the end of a line of quests so it has more importance, AND the whole point is to kill this horrible boss. So I kind of get it. I actually am torn and wouldn’t mind it staying but wouldn’t mind it being a group update because it is kind of annoying still.
2) Quest Reward Modification. I feel like quests should be a viable method of leveling, both as a solo and as a group. Perhaps this is where I think AC2 could learn from WoW. I think that Turbine should go through all quests 15+ and increase the xp reward by about 25%. With an exception to some that already have decent rewards (most of the percentage based rewards are actually fine). Another exception I would make is Burun and Fets incursions because the amounts that people frequent these tells me that they give enough xp as it is, and Bogstalker Dillos as they are high even if no one realizes it.
In addition, they should create a 30 to 60 minute cool down on normal mob incursions and lower the cool down from 7 days to 5 days for group mob incursions. The first part of this I would expect would create a lot of yelling because it screws with Buruns in particular, but if you make other stuff more viable you can always go from one to the other to the other. I honestly don’t think that the devs should make the game for people who want to stay in one area. They should make people travel around the continent and explore. Honestly, I think the group mob one should be 3 days but I think they should do that slowly and see how it goes at 5. 7 just seems too long.
3) Compare Window. I really do like the new compare window of modern MMOs (something WoW did good). And think this would be a good addition to the game to make life easier. Just something to compare loot on creatures to what you have equipped.
4) Rare indicator. Originally I thought the border colors of items indicated rarity, but then I found it just indicates properties. So that sword I pick up with a purple border just has jolting on it. I don’t know if the solution is to have a new outline color or put a tiny icon over the item icon, but it would be really nice to just look at the loot and tell if there is a rare without examining.
5) Personal Point of Interest. It’d be nice to be able to mark the mini-map with your own point of interests. This is particularly important on Knorr where the map is completely blank of nearly all marks unlike the original maps. I actually think this was good because it lends to exploring which I like, but if I know a dungeon is somewhere it’d be nice to mark that it is there. Either that or having the marks automatically show upon discovery, though I think this would require more tech.
6) Faster dungeon spawn in Osteth, Omishsan, and Linvak. In particular for non-quest dungeons. There are a ton of dungeons in the world that no one visits cause the xp isn’t good. I noticed in Knorr that the xp is great in dungeons not really because the xp per mob is great, but really because the spawn was super fast. If they echoed this into the original continents I think those dungeons would see more play.
7) Continuation of city building. I don’t really know what was all planned in the city building and how it worked. I don’t know if you could pick different stuff for different cities, I’d guess not because the capitols are all the same. I would like more cities to get built up a tad, though I don’t entirely know how tbh. However, it would be nice to get weapon & armor shops in the starting cities so that crafters could craft newb items and put them up for sale.
8) Fix skill text. In the game it seems a lot of skills have old text from before they got changed. This isn’t anywhere more evident than in group buffs which don’t explain that they are group buffs and all have durations even though they are permanent. This is from a time when the skills got changed but the descriptions did not, this needs to get fixed because right now you have to go up the skill to figure out if it is worth taking. And if it is like this for buffs, I would imagine there are similar mistakes in combat skills.
9) Fix Server Status. Right now according to the log in page, the servers are always up. Then you go in and get disappointed when you can’t. They just need to make that log in screen accurate so we can avoid the waste of time and disappointment.
10) Friend list…. I didn’t even wanna put this here cause I think it was actually their first to do but yeah friend list.