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Driftwood Tavern Questions Follow-up - April 16

nitocris83nitocris83 Member, Cryptic Developer, Administrator Posts: 4,495 Cryptic Developer
Greetings Adventurers! A couple specific questions were brought up during today's stream:

How long will the enchant exchange duration last?
The exact duration is still TBD but likely 1.5-2 months.

How is scaling looking?
While we understand some players have concerns over scaling, we believe it is in an overall pretty good place. We do expect there to be some post-launch tweaks to scaling as the content gets played more frequently and we receive more specific feedback.

Will Preview be updated this week?
Yes. Preview was updated last Friday and will receive another update this Friday, April 19. Preview Patch Notes will be posted on Friday.
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Comments

  • drizztdur78drizztdur78 Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 11 Arc User
    Scaling being in a good place - ask urself why would a lvl 80 ppl run lower content with this mess being up?are u devs one patch ahead?wouldnt make sense for targeting issues but hey not getting why you would call scaling good if not.

    being a legendary hero that revisited all existing content several times over and over again,slain the toughest monsters,demons and dragons we shouldnt run into a wall when being scaled down in the first place.

    generally as mentioned in posts above scaling is a penalise.
    experiencing new challenges in old content by getting one shot with all defensive mechanics up is not an enjoyable challenge for ppl,its broken.

    i do see the point in trying to make older content more appealing for ppl to revisit.this current scaling system just surely wont make me queue for lower then 80 content considering fun/time/value.
    tales of old is designed for revisiting the old dungeons that where removed mod6 with a new difficulty.including most of the existing lvl70 dungeons longterms with updated rewards would possibly make me want to revisit and queue up.

    its the first time devs having far more time then usually to pull off something really good due to small accinc mod.
    we get a couple hours lvling,class balance (can never be finished but...comparing amounts of patches for all the other classes to poor have noworries and be fine tr...gotta do better!),the opportunity to run old content agaaaaain with broken scaling (sry wai) and first part of lotm.

    hoping for tweaks to scaling,but knowing there is such an awful long list of things needed to be done im not sure if that would be my priority.im not seeing a mostly polished new mod and neverwinter going live next week.
  • noworries#8859 noworries Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 651 Cryptic Developer
    lowjohn said:



    How much more specific does "a level 80 character levelled to 70 has lower stats than the same character had at level 70" have to be?

    How much more specific does "the very low hard cap on stats in many areas is such that you cannot get better at that content because hitting the cap happens about 15 minutes after reaching level 70, so the fresh 70 in the Barovian Catchup Set and the maxed-out toon with R14s are experiencing the same difficulty" have to be?

    There are multiple things happening at once which is obscuring some of the intents of the scaling.

    The first is that current live players have been at endgame for years at level 70. Those players are far above what a fresh 70 would be as they are leveling up. The scaling of lower content is based around where players are likely to be gear wise in those levels. A current endgame 70 is going to see the biggest changes when scaled, but that will be a very rare case going forward with new level 70s.

    Yes, scaling is implemented as a cap system. This means a cap is put in place on what the item level for a piece of gear can be in a given piece of scaled content. This does mean a level 70 and level 80 can be experiencing the same difficulty in a piece of scaled content.

    The scaled campaigns are called Challenge Campaigns for the very reason that they are meant to be a given challenge to participate in even as you level up to other content. Dungeon Queues also have a set scale for each dungeon to maintain those at a given challenge level as well.

    It is not entirely true that a fresh 70 in Vistani (or Undermountain) gear will be just as good as a higher level player in content. In Barovia the scaling is set to a higher level than what the fresh 70 has (enchants are scaled to rank 9 and gear is scaled down to an item level higher than either of those sets).

    The scaling is setup so that a player exactly where they should be to do a piece of content for the first time, and a more leveled up player returning back are not at the same point (with the higher geared player being more powerful). However, if two players who have leveled up far enough past the scaling go back to a scaled zone, they have a high chance of ending up very comparable to each other.

    The plan is that the most recent campaigns and the current hardest dungeons are not scaled. If we look at where we are now, the current plan is the next two campaigns (let's call them A and B) after undermountain will be unscaled. Then when a third new campaign is released ( C ), campaign A will move to the challenge campaigns section and become scaled. Lair of the Mad Mage is also unscaled and will remain unscaled until a new tier of dungeons is added at which point Lair of the Mad Mage will get moved down into the Advanced queue and become scaled.

    There will always be a selection of the newest content that is unscaled and players can become as overgeared for as they wish. But the older content will be scaled to retain the challenge.


    All of that said, scaling will likely have tweaks as we move forward to dial in the best place for the content, but the majority of the scaling is currently close to where we want it and won't be seeing large/drastic changes. And of course we will continue to fix any individual critters that are too powerful compared to where they should be, such as how the first encounters in Castle Never were when we first went to preview.
  • lowjohnlowjohn Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 1,061 Arc User


    Basically what you're alluding to is that in the future, after whoever is left playing has gotten to the point where the current content is easy for them, that content will drop down into scaled content making it harder to complete, again.

    Progress = Dead

    When Mod19 comes out, Mod16 will become a scaled "challenge campaign".

    *IF* what he means is "the scaling will be set to the maximum gear that you could get while Mod16 was unscaled, just not anything higher than that", then that's not dead progress. Mod16's cap will be "best of Mod18" and Mod19+ stuff will scale down to that, while remaining unscaled in Mod17, 18, and 19. Mod17's cap will be "Best of Mod19" when Mod20 is released, etc.

    *IF* that's the goal, and *IF* the extreme scaling in the L70 content is just because of the level cap change making things difficult to accurately scale, then I actually think that's pretty reasonable and will get better as time goes on.

    However, if he means "Mod 19 comes out and suddenly you're scaled to L70, 600IL, and R10 enchants in Mod 16 when you were L80 with IL900 gear and R15s the day before", like what's happening with Mod14 and earlier right now, that's a serious problem for me.
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