Feedback about potion/wound changes

I have continued to test this myself, and have kept my ear to the grapevine of player tells IG (Those who know me know how much I tend to chatterbox), and their opinions.

The major opinion so far seems to be that the ramifications of the new system implemented are far greater than the pros of the system itself.

Mobs in dungeons still hit extremely hard, and cumulative damage seems to be accumulating much faster.  I'm going to use Bruce as an example, because he was in the party I was in, I was in tells with him to get statistics back, and he's geared / skilled for Wyler better than my character is.

Firstly, he took a hit of 20 damage, through the 40 DR on his character mind.  Of that 20 damage, 10 was immediately chalked up to cumulative.... which seems to be happening now, since the potion change, that every hit chalks up some cumulative.  The harder fights do not stretch as long as they used to, but they do stretch out long enough that reds tend to become rather useless rather quickly.

Meanwhile, the cost per potion has been raised significantly to cut the mass production of them.  When questioned Bruce told me he had spent 450$ worth of potions just to obtain 3 lootables, and we wiped on the mini-boss to boot.  The way things stood before, the same cost and amount of potions would have seen him through both cultists and spiders before he had to restock.

The mini-boss mutant at Wyler has a few problems with him, most noticeably that he is still an incredible HP tank, and that he spams knockdowns so constantly that a team of focused melee characters that SHOULD have been able to take him couldn't..... which revolves the fight around chugging costly potions in the front and bringing enough riflemen to slowly blast him away.

Meanwhile, I've had Ziska tell me that while she has the highest detect on the server, as well as 3 abilities in detect, the stealth spawns STILL sneak up on her..... a fact that nearly wiped us on another recent trip.

At this point, it's far more costly to embark on any dungeon than it is to return with spoils, as most of what you make hardly recoups the cost of what is required to work through the dungeon in the first place.  The fights may be smoother and less lengthy, but the necessity of potions has not diminished with the changes..... and their cost has.  This is doubly so for the tanks of a group, who do their best to draw agro, and for the poor Medic who supplies us frontline saps with potions at cost or for free so that we can take all the hits.

The most common thing I've heard so far from everyone I've talked to is that potion spam was the ONLY way to proceed through dungeons previously..... and now it has been removed, without the necessary hardcore difficulty changes across the board to make content doable without it.

My suggestions.....

#1:  Lower the cost to create potions by a significant amount again.

#2:  Make cumulative HP damage accumulate much slower.  It shouldn't be ticking away with every hit.  It's making potions less a gold sink, and more drowning in a sea of lost gold.

#3:  Scale the overall difficulty of encounters back even further.  Mostly this would just entail certain abilities that PC's can use that NPC's tend to overspam, such as knockdown, or laying down several fire grenades at a time instead of one.

Everyone wants a solid profit out of each dungeon they go through (without wipe, of course), and it's hard to find the motivation to go through them if it's always guaranteed to be a profit loss.

At this point, most of the highest level dungeoneer groups have been postponed indefinitely until something is worked out.  :/

I've pointed out more times than I care to remember that the system is a work in progress. 

Perhaps we could get a small outline of what's intended to be added to it, to fully balance the dungeon mechanics and the new potion system in the long run, so that we can provide more accurate feedback rather than reiterating the same problems over and over?