03-10-2016, 02:35 AM
Just here to bump one of my threads, not actively playing anymore for now, but this actually seems worth responding to. 
In my opinion, the mod being fun greatly depends on your playstyle. I am one of those players you will usually find somewhere outside of the barricaded spot, further away from the maingroup, tryharding to get as many kills as possible. Its a lot more fun for me to play like that, compared to something like the seriously boring roles of e.g. shielding/slashing behind shielder. Basicly anything where I dont have to constantly fear being gruesomely murdered by a bunch of nords with rabies seems boring. I would much rather just quit the mod entirely before starting to play like some of those people who spend most of their ingame time afk or imitating a clickbot. Its also the reason why I really love cavalry mode despite its plethora of flaws, simply because you have to be constantly on edge trying to survive, while also dealing some damage.
Kiting also goes towards that category of fun ways to play NI, but sadly it seems to be absolutely resented by the dev team, for whatever reason. With all those anti-kiting measures it becomes more and more impossible and discouraging especially to new players. You know, like making the spawns much larger than they should be for playercounts less than 5, decreasing the xp/gold gained all the way down to 50%, making certain bots way too fast (curse those loki spawns), etc. As far as I have seen, that greatly contributes to lowering the playercount in this mod. Kiting used to be an amazingly effective way to get some public runs started. Anyone who has kited for a while knows how it works, just when youre about to reach that next respawn point you suddenly have a whole bunch of players invading your server. Sometimes it goes horribly from there, sometimes it develops into a nice run. When searching for servers youre often confronted with the problem of a very limited choice. Usually there is that one hard or rag server at 16/16, and another normal run thats either full as well, or somewhere at 10/16. Joining that normal server is more or less a waste of time, unless you are playing a low level character or want to help out a bit. And trying to spamjoin that full run is incredibly tedious and at least equally much of a time waste. At that point I have only two choices left, quit playing or start kiting, but very few actually still opt for the kiting choice, for reasons mentioned earlier.
And on the importance of gear, as far as I am concerned, besides your support item it absolutely does not matter how much you own, you can pretty much always find someone to leech some weapons off. Just buy something cheap like a SHC and then start saving up for hero class and eventually a useful weapon of your own. Especially with pikeman it can be really fun, because you get to use all sorts of throwing weapons throughout your runs. Armor does not really matter if you play it smart, anything with more than 30 body protection is enough to save you from dying after one hit. Having all those expensive legendaries is indeed more of a style issue. Just spend a few hours in native every now and then to git gud.
In my opinion, the mod being fun greatly depends on your playstyle. I am one of those players you will usually find somewhere outside of the barricaded spot, further away from the maingroup, tryharding to get as many kills as possible. Its a lot more fun for me to play like that, compared to something like the seriously boring roles of e.g. shielding/slashing behind shielder. Basicly anything where I dont have to constantly fear being gruesomely murdered by a bunch of nords with rabies seems boring. I would much rather just quit the mod entirely before starting to play like some of those people who spend most of their ingame time afk or imitating a clickbot. Its also the reason why I really love cavalry mode despite its plethora of flaws, simply because you have to be constantly on edge trying to survive, while also dealing some damage.
Kiting also goes towards that category of fun ways to play NI, but sadly it seems to be absolutely resented by the dev team, for whatever reason. With all those anti-kiting measures it becomes more and more impossible and discouraging especially to new players. You know, like making the spawns much larger than they should be for playercounts less than 5, decreasing the xp/gold gained all the way down to 50%, making certain bots way too fast (curse those loki spawns), etc. As far as I have seen, that greatly contributes to lowering the playercount in this mod. Kiting used to be an amazingly effective way to get some public runs started. Anyone who has kited for a while knows how it works, just when youre about to reach that next respawn point you suddenly have a whole bunch of players invading your server. Sometimes it goes horribly from there, sometimes it develops into a nice run. When searching for servers youre often confronted with the problem of a very limited choice. Usually there is that one hard or rag server at 16/16, and another normal run thats either full as well, or somewhere at 10/16. Joining that normal server is more or less a waste of time, unless you are playing a low level character or want to help out a bit. And trying to spamjoin that full run is incredibly tedious and at least equally much of a time waste. At that point I have only two choices left, quit playing or start kiting, but very few actually still opt for the kiting choice, for reasons mentioned earlier.
And on the importance of gear, as far as I am concerned, besides your support item it absolutely does not matter how much you own, you can pretty much always find someone to leech some weapons off. Just buy something cheap like a SHC and then start saving up for hero class and eventually a useful weapon of your own. Especially with pikeman it can be really fun, because you get to use all sorts of throwing weapons throughout your runs. Armor does not really matter if you play it smart, anything with more than 30 body protection is enough to save you from dying after one hit. Having all those expensive legendaries is indeed more of a style issue. Just spend a few hours in native every now and then to git gud.