Seems that veteran players are feeling the patch was a step backwards, and new players like the easy leveling. My opinion is that before the patch the balancing was almost perfect, but there were some silly things like crossbow overpowered, archery skills borked, two hand too powerful compared to polearms which technically have more range and various anomolies. I think most of the problems were cause by the sillyness of wpf and xp bonus for retiring being too good. I love the idea of players getting rewarded with extra skull crushing power for putting in the time, the mod is called cRPG after all. I must say playing this mod has been a by far the freshest gaming I have had been priviliged to have in ages and I thank chadz for his work on this. Lets face facts, you cannot have a modern rpg without grind. Grind is what seperates fps from rpg. Uncapped leveling keeps people playing, and building their characters. When I realized I can no longer be an effective huscarl type character I tried to come up with something else to be, mixed characters cannot get enough skill points to be effective. Would it not totally fix the whole old system by simply reducing the retirement xp and wpf bonuses? And for gods sake make the crossbow require at least some wpf or xbow skill? I had to have 6 power throw and around 130 wpf in throw to be an effective thrower while at the same time 2 handers running around with their 0 requirement sniper crossbows could be just as deadly. I am not whining I am just giving my input on the beta and I am not alone in thinking these things. Every other patch before this improved the game in my eyes, this one has created a whole new monster. The grinders will still do so and have massive gold reserves, new players will all be forced into restrictive boring builds and now even winning or losing the round doesnt even matter? There are many problems with the new patch but I still have faith in chadz. Long live chadz, and everybody do not hesitate to tell the devs what you think about everything they do, that is the entire purpose of beta testing.
Now I must away,
Lord_Ulrich