Coastal Fail Snail Another Sign Of A Bigger Change?
Well guys, here we go. We recently warned you not to rush the Strider mount because it likely will be the first of a whole new line of mounts with passive abilities and over the weekend we got a first glance of what might come thanks to a post on the official forum. The origin of the posted picture is not entirely known, but the best guess is it’s from the first Strongholds PVP Alpha test. The mount gives a massive 35% AP on a daily use, which effectively simply reduces the span between dailies to 65% of your AP. It’s so powerful that you can’t believe your eyes and while this might not be a final product, it’s alarming.
If Cryptic continues to only give super-rare legendary mounts (based on my RNG test I’d set the drop chance no bigger than 0.05%, 1 out of 2000 boxes) those amazing stats, the game will be closer to pay-to-win than it has ever been. Sure, you don’t absolutely need a mount like this, much less in PVE, but the margin between the haves and have-nots gets bigger nonetheless and in PVP it can be the difference in winning and losing. The passive is so strong you probably want to get the mount before maxing out other areas of your character.
We can only hope this is just a sign of a bigger change in the mount gameplay. People have been asking for an inventory for mounts and the devs stated they won’t bother unless it makes sense collecting them. Passives that you can switch out depending on your build and the situation might warrant such a stable. It also wouldn’t be as bad if they updated all existing mounts and adopted a companion-like system where lower qualities grant the same ability with diminished efficiency. That would also make sense on the business side of things, because mount upgrades from the Wondrous Bazaar suddenly would become more attractive.
With mounts of such magnitude you could go as far as an universal change to BtA. Or maybe even an account stable in which you can unlock the mounts similar to the ZEN store and reclaim it with any character. It’s probably more likely that China will top the Press Freedom Index though, but one can always dream.
Although players ask to stop the insanity, history shows this will be pushed through. Right now you can only hope that this is just a glimpse of a much bigger change and that such powerful passives won’t be as exclusive as it currently appears to be.
If this turns out to be real and they don’t add cash shop alternatives of at least the same power then this is a awful awful change , hopefully you guys can confirm it one way or the other next time they open the alpha server unless they remove the collections tab.
When the armored giant strider came out I said on this forum and in NW forum. The problem isn’t the 4000 movement speed. The problem s the addition of a mechanic to add personal stats via a mount. These things are/will be so expensive that it will create serious advantages to the pvp player with the biggest in-game pockets. Further dividing the players.
BTW, this also means you have a combat item which will be constantly needed for upgrading (if you are a max/min player).
Note that the price on the armored giant strider has basically halved on AH since this pic surfaced.
Now imagine facing a top tier pvp guild, with an ap gain dc, geared for maximum ap gain (high recovery, jewels, ap cloak, dc artifact), and has this mount while using hastening light.. So now you’ve reduced his cooldown on daily’s by 35% and his team is getting 10% of his AP with each daily use.
What more can you expect? They’ve shown time and again they don’t give a fuck about us, they just want our money.
i would be much more worried about pallys using it with their god amazing team invincibility daily.ive already gone against a pally whos kept his entire team invincible the entire game this will only make it much worse and more pallys able to do it. it wont even be a competition anymore if they have a pally.