So, I'm one of the lucky few that managed to get out of the starter Islands and settle on a lag free zone. Dealing with predator animals wasn't horrible yesterday, but after the last patch it's been almost impossible. Here are the issues I've been having:
NOTE: Animal damage is dramatically higher in other islands than the starter island, take that into account before replying.
1- Player Damage - I'm guessing there was some type of balancing done to prevent people from murdering each other in PvP too easily, but that also affected PvE badly. Mob health is still too high in comparison to how much damage a player can do. It's still doable to kill them, but due to the insane spawn rates, and the fact that they spawn very close to your claims, it's very hard to manage to kill all of the ones attacking your base, while gathering resources to repair your weapons. We've had constant shortages of resources.
2- Mob spawn region/rate - While I understand that spawn rates need to be moderately high due to being an MMO server, there should at least be a reduced spawn rate near people's bases, or at least something like a reduced spawn radius. Or just lower mob health / return the old PvE damage.
3- Knockback - The mob knockback is way too strong. Why does a wolf push me super far away? Like... It's punching me into oblivion. Several melee hits are constantly being missed due to being pushed a mile away at every chomp.
4- Awkward alliances - This is just a personal gripe, but I hate it whenever I'm watching a wolf have a fight with two snakes and a lion to suddenly make peace and charge straight at me to destroy me.
Recommendation: I don't recommend lowering animal damage, as once you have armor on it's not horrible. But I do feel that player damage against animals or over-all animal health needs to be reduced. That way it's at least somewhat balanced. Or restore old player damage and increase player health. And for the love of God, I can understand an elephant kicking me a mile away, but a wolf should not kick me away as far as an elephant. >_>
That's been making it super hard to progress as a small group, but otherwise the game is pretty solid now that I don't have to deal with all the lag. <3
