Dogs of War Online

Hi everyone!
I am megaplini (ign doq_vdb)
and I am terribly annoyed with how the unit leveling system works.
Why can't there be a way to reset your units?
When you are new to the game, leveling up your units sure is exiting! But i'm sure you guys have all had this problem.
When you level a unit, it's Ap value increases. with a litle bit of bad luck, your army becomes 251 Ap instead of 250 and you are screwed bigtime. Why can't there be a way to change your abilities after you lvl them??

It is verry dificut to try out new strategies because of this system. Because if you lvl a unit to try out a new tactic and it sucks, there is no way back!!

Implementing a way of redistributing ability points should be an absolute priority!!

I completely agree with you.

PS: If you want to calculate fast the AP of possible companies, try using Hod tooltip:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2727

EDIT: I also think a reset scroll should be implemented, not reset for free

I agree with the above, but I think the "reset" should not be free.

I like it that choosing a skill is an important choice that you have to ponder. It defines the evolution of your character and make him/her unique (as opposed to a "generic soldier" that you can re-spec freely the way you like).

I think a "Reset Scroll" in the shop (like the Healing Scroll) would be a fair solution : you are not "condemned" to keep the skills of your character if you made a bad decision, but you still have to choose wisely because the reset isn't free.

To be honest i would love an item to reset talents but I'm not sure is the best thing for this game right now.

If you are a new players to the game (and yes the same exact thing happened to me) you are going to make mistakes, is just part of the normal learning curve, honestly most of the Units in this game are very cheap and easy to level till level 3 or so and the game gives you the flexibility to be able to still gain exp when leaving the units at level 1, so when you know what you want to do and have a plan you can use the talent points the unit has available to fit the company you are planning.

The problem i see with the talent reset item, is that from a dev point of view is not a good idea, look at the game right now, they are giving away a lot of cyans to people that play the 400 ap bracket, but at some point they need to be able to make enough money from the game to keep it going, if they make the talent reset item cyans only many people that start playing the game after the item goes live will cry about it being cyans only and how this game is pay to win but if they make the item to cheap to get with ducats to many people will be able to test many new things to fast without the need of farming and will eventually leave the game out of boredom after a couple of weeks, we only got 28 Units in the game so far and it is honestly not that hard to eventually try one of each (aside from the legendaries).

Talent reset item will also cut severely the sell of cosmetic items, due to the fact that once you bought the cosmetics you will just reset the unit for ever to fit your needs.

Then you have the problem of Meta we got only 24 Units in the game and the Meta is honestly very simple and always changing with each balance patch, but devs told us we won't see this Meta change patchs as much anymore, that they will make small changes from now on, so we got what is hopefully a long standing Meta. In every game of this kind some builds will be better than others but we only got 24 units in the game 8 per race, the combination of viable company builds are very limited. So, you go with what you think is an awesome build and fight some dude that completely wipes the floor with you, what do you do? some people will try to improve their own build and make it better, some others (i dare say most people) will just change their build to the one they lost, because you know? it's "OP". Give them the ability to be able to copy a build right away and you will have a game of everyone playing the exact same thing (more than what we have right now).

Maybe the solution to this problem is explain new players how the leveling system of this game works and to leave units at level 1 till they know how the game works instead of just leveling units blindly.

Or there could be other options but honestly I believe a reset talent item will break more than it fixes at least for now, maybe when we have more units in the game things will change.

This is also in discussion in the french forum.

I'd like to see an "anti-XP" system.

If you have a unit level 3, you can play it to level 4 and unlock a new ability, right. With anti-XP, i would be able to play this unit, but instead of gaining XP, it would lose it, until it goes to level 2 again (and so, lose everything from level 3). So, the unit would never be lost or wasted, because i would always be possible to go back, but at a cost : play time.

For every unit, i would have to check an option "anti XP" in order to apply, and i could uncheck it to go forward again.

In order to kill this play time, it would be possible to buy a scroll or something from the shop.

Tchey wrote:This is also in discussion in the french forum.

I'd like to see an "anti-XP" system.

If you have a unit level 3, you can play it to level 4 and unlock a new ability, right. With anti-XP, i would be able to play this unit, but instead of gaining XP, it would lose it, until it goes to level 2 again (and so, lose everything from level 3). So, the unit would never be lost or wasted, because i would always be possible to go back, but at a cost : play time.

For every unit, i would have to check an option "anti XP" in order to apply, and i could uncheck it to go forward again.

In order to kill this play time, it would be possible to buy a scroll or something from the shop.

Im sorry but that's the worst idea I've ever seen. Is this something the French suggested?

Not the french, just me. The "worst idea", shall you argue on that ?

SoulCollector wrote:...

The problem i see with the talent reset item, is that from a dev point of view is not a good idea, look at the game right now, they are giving away a lot of cyans to people that play the 400 ap bracket, but at some point they need to be able to make enough money from the game to keep it going, if they make the talent reset item cyans only many people that start playing the game after the item goes live will cry about it being cyans only and how this game is pay to win but if they make the item to cheap to get with ducats to many people will be able to test many new things to fast without the need of farming and will eventually leave the game out of boredom after a couple of weeks, we only got 28 Units in the game so far and it is honestly not that hard to eventually try one of each (aside from the legendaries).

Talent reset item will also cut severely the sell of cosmetic items, due to the fact that once you bought the cosmetics you will just reset the unit for ever to fit your needs.

...

Or there could be other options but honestly I believe a reset talent item will break more than it fixes at least for now, maybe when we have more units in the game things will change.

I completely disagree with you, because I think you never tried seriously to lvl up a legendary or an elite unit to lvl5, Especially you can have ONLY 1 legendary unit in your army, so if you give it a "wrong" ability then most of the players will probably rage quit both if they spent real money on cyans or hard earned ducats. Or then you can effectively say is a "Pay x Win" model, since if you pay lots of money you can try all the possibilities (you can buy units auto-lvled up) while if you want to play normally every mistake can be fatal to your company.

Considering the "earning" from the cosmetic sector, I don't think that a person who bought a lvl5 Worg with real money + cosmetics would remain in the game after discovering he wasted his money on a wrong ability tree and that he can't win also if he plays perfectly well. So the idea "reset will reduce the earning from cosmetics" is a bit stretched because nobody will stay after wasting money and not having the possibility to correct a stupid error! Resetting a unit then may keep or not the name and cosmetic add-on, that's another thing to think about.

Moreover, as the healing is, you can simply have that the "ability reset" cost would be different depending on the unit you want to reset its abilities, so that if you want to reset your schel lvl3 it will cost 1k ducats (so in that case it would be better to buy a new one), while if you want to reset your Golem lvl 5 it will cost 10-15k ducats! At least in this way you don't have to "waste" all your time and/or money you invested to lvl up a unit.

Also, there is a BIG difference between spending ducats to RESET your abilities or HEALING your units: in the first case is a CHOICE YOU MADE to try different combinations and so finding which composition suits better to your taste and it is NOT (theoretically strictly) NECESSARY: if you want, you can still play with a company with a bad abilities choice. Instead in the second case, the wounds to be healed is something YOU GET OUT OF LUCK. I would greatly prefer to spend 5-10k cyans to reset my Worg/Golem/PoB/Knight/etc. abilities respect to spend them to healing them (yes, lvl4-5 legendary units are VERY expensive to heal!).

Finally, considering the game in the long term, I think the players would be more present if they can try different companies set-ups without having for the 100th time to lvl up each unit from lvl1 and so losing with a high probability a lot of matches before arriving to the effective/efficient composition they want to try.

The key is to set correctly the cost of the reset item so that it will be expensive (so that you can't overuse it) but not too much and I would propose to substitute the "healing cards" with the "reset cards", making the wounds healing ONLY WITH TIME (at the moment, for high lvl players the wound are only a nuisance, while they are deeply hated by the new players).

PS: I don't like the idea of anti-exp because it doesn't make too much sense that when you're playing a unit its experience is going down. I think it would be faster and better a reset item directly...

Almanro wrote:...
The key is to set correctly the cost of the reset item so that it will be expensive (so that you can't overuse it) but not too much and I would propose to substitute the "healing cards" with the "reset cards", making the wounds healing ONLY WITH TIME (at the moment, for high lvl players the wound are only a nuisance, while they are deeply hated by the new players).

PS: I don't like the idea of anti-exp because it doesn't make too much sense that when you're playing a unit its experience is going down. I think it would be faster and better a reset item directly...

I would say finding the right Ducats cost for such a card would indeed make it a viable option but aside from legendaries most my units are max level, leveling a priest right now to level 5 its a lot of work but is still very doable keeping him at level 1, you know, this gives me a feeling of accomplishment, i set a goal and i go for it and along the way i plan ahead i see options, i ask around, i see other players using the same units to see what i like and what would fit me better and to be honest aside from the PvP part of the game i find this "farming" very addictive and it makes me stay, just doing PvP is not what this game should be all about, finding the best company for you it what is all about in my opinion but you just can't be using the same company for ever, so you just keep looking for other options, it is suppose to be time consuming.

Ducast in all honestly are too easy to get too, you can easily make 8k or so in 2 days at some point if not more.

I can't stop thinking making it to easy to reset talents will make for the perffect way to have cloned companies all over the place. At least the losing exp while playing to regain the talent point is a way of farming too and is not such a bad idea at all, I have done it before in other games and it works.

SoulCollector wrote:I would say finding the right Ducats cost for such a card would indeed make it a viable option but aside from legendaries most my units are max level, leveling a priest right now to level 5 its a lot of work but is still very doable keeping him at level 1, you know, this gives me a feeling of accomplishment, i set a goal and i go for it

I cannot imagine how this gives you a feeling of accomplishment. All you did was trade some arbitrary number of hours for advancement. It didn't take any skill; you could have just as easily played some absurdly high number of training missions for the same result.

It would make sense in a purely PVE context, where there were challenges to overcome and ultimate victory was not assured. In PVP, XP is senseless - a barrier to fun, as this thread has noted.

to be honest aside from the PvP part of the game i find this "farming" very addictive and it makes me stay,

It makes me leave. I hate grinding. I hate farming. I'd rather paint, or read, or run, or do something to improve myself rather than repeating the same mindless repetitive task to fill a progress bar. I am not a monkey. I am not amused by such trivialities.

just doing PvP is not what this game should be all about,

PVP is what this game is all about, because that's all there is to it at present.

But your point is well taken. I just draw the opposite conclusion. There are two closely related parts to this game:

1. Build your company, making decisions about what units and abilities to include
2. Use your company to beat other companies, making decisions about when to move units, where, etc

Part 1 is not fun right now. It is work. Mindless, boring ducat-grinding so I can build the company I want.

Ducast in all honestly are too easy to get too, you can easily make 8k or so in 2 days at some point if not more.

"You should spend more time doing boring mindless tasks to play the game."

I can't stop thinking making it to easy to reset talents will make for the perffect way to have cloned companies all over the place.

You'll see them regardless. The only way to prevent cloned (optimized) companies is for the gameplay to be robust and diverse.

When did we get Stockholm syndrome with our video games? Why does playing a game have to include work first? I'm pretty sure I play a game to have fun, not to do more work after the old nine-to-five.