Scaling In Mod 16: Enchantments - Is There A Better Alternative?

vordayn

Scaling in Mod 16 is frustrating.

I want to explain what is happening to the Enchantments when you are scaled down.

(Note: I won't be looking into Enemy vs Player level differentials here, or Enemy Opposing Rolls according to zone; there have been so many changes that I'm beginning to lose track of what was said was going to be implemented, to what actually is implemented.)

Findings:
1) Enchantments and Runestones are capped according to what level you are scaled to
2) Equipment and other items (not fully tested as to which specific ones however) do NOT seem to be affected by scaling

First, here are the values of the Enchantments that I used as reference in a level 80 zone:

1. Bonding Runestone, Rank 14: 65% companion's stats transferred
2. Empowered Runestone Rank, 11: +1600 HP +400 Power
3. Radiant Enchantment, Rank 13: +3840 HP +960 Power
4. Dread Enchantment, Rank 13: +4.5% necrotic damage, 9 magnitude damage every 4 seconds, -2700 target defense

In a Level 64 zone:

1. Bondings are capped at 22%. This value lies between a Rank 5 (20%) and Rank 6 (25%) Bonding Runestone
2. Companion Runestones are capped at Rank 6
3. Player Enchantments are capped at Rank 7
4. Weapon Enchantment additional effects are reduced to less than a Rank 7 (previously Lesser) enchantment, by extrapolation. For example the Dread Enchantment Magnitude damage is 9 unscaled, but in a level 64 zone this is reduced to 1.1. An unscaled Rank 8 provides 4 magnitude damage. The cap falls somewhere between R5-7 in my estimation, but there aren't any Rank 7 Dread available in the AH for comparison.

In a Level 70 zone:

1. Bondings are capped at 24%. This value still lies between a Rank 5 (20%) and Rank 6 (25%) Bonding Runestone
2. Companion Runestones are capped at Rank 7
3. Player Enchantments are capped at Rank 8
4. Weapon Enchantment additional effects are reduced to much less than an unscaled Rank 8. For example the Dread Enchantment Magnitude damage in a level 70 zone is reduced to 1.5 compared to an unscaled Rank 8 of 4 magnitude damage.

What does this mean for the player?

Level 64 zones:
The only zones which are scaled to 64 are Sharandar and Master of the Hunt. This means that having Bondings greater than rank 6, Runestones greater than rank 6, Enchantments greater than rank 7 are useless. The added effect of Weapon enchantments actually become worse than they are at its unscaled starting rank.

Level 70 zones:
Everywhere else besides Undermountain and levelling zones fall here. Bondings > R6, Runestones > R7, Enchantments >8 therefore have no added effect. Furthermore the added effect of Weapon enchantments also become less efficient than its starting rank.

Therefore, there is NO POINT in upgrading ANY enchantments in pretty much all content prior to Undermountain. You get R8 Enchantments just by accepting the initial quest for the Undermountain. R6 Bondings and R7 Runestones are cheap as chips on the AH (in the value of a few thousand AD). R15 Weapon Enchantments probably only add about 3-5% additional damage overall (according to my ACT analyses, although YMMV depending on your critical severity and active power use for the Vorpal), so what is the point in getting more than a R7 (previously lesser) enchantment if it doesn't do all that much?

Scaling is not in a good place
As others have mentioned, scaling is not in a good place. There is no differentiation between the prior T1, T2 and T3 dungeons. Scaled content does not discriminate between a CODG/CR/TONG vs an ESOT/VT/ELOL. All the enchantments are throttled to values less than basically starting enchantment values.

What this means is that there possibly will be less incentive to upgrade any sort of enchantment or runestone unless you are going for the Undermountain or Level 80 content, which is really quite sparse, having finished most of it in less than a week, and with LoMM not really providing a considerable increase in power or effectiveness in stats.

There does not seem to be any planning on where this game is going. Scaling is like a blanket hammer on anything that players want to improve with regards to enchantments (being capped artificially), and IL 909-950 gear is extremely easy to come by (with gear interestingly not affected by scaling).

My Recommendations?
Differentiate between various Modules and Zones, have scaling levels in increments of 2 (e.g. 70, 72, 74 etc) with corresponding increases in the cap of the runestones/enchantments (e.g. R6/7 cap, R7/8 cap etc) as one progresses.

For example Sharandar Level 64 (R5/6), Dread Ring 66 (R6/7), Icewind Dale 68 (R7/8), Well of Dragons 70 (R9/10), Elemental Evil/Strongholds 72 (R10/11), Underdark/Maze Engine 74 (R11/12), Storm Kings Thunder/Cloaked Ascendancy 76 (R12/13), Chult/Ravenloft 78 (R13/14). And then do not touch the balancing of these zones in future modules! Upsetting previous content and making them as difficult as the current meta is not the way to go.


What else do people think about this, any other ideas or thoughts?

ecrana

If I could hit Like, Awesome, Agree & Insightful all at once I would. Good job breaking this down. I bet it didn't even take you months of planing to come up with a logical way to handle scaling.

mdarkangel

Gear is also affected in all areas for anyone wearing gear above the item level cap for the area. For example, Barovia's item level cap is 644, meaning your item level 990 gear that provides 19,800 stat points in Undermountain will only provide 12,880 in Barovia (plus quite a few other areas last time I tested). It only goes lower from there.

kungskabb

I agree, good job. Unlike certain developers that obviously have no clue what the funk they're doing.

silverkelt

I simply dont understand the need to SCALE at all outside of dungeons. ALL it does is make campaigns longer and more frustrating for people, there is little else of value outside of a few weeklies.

The sheer amount of thier chosing scaling is horrendous, while Ive played games with scaling (I guess) I barely felt it, when I get fully kitted out and go back to old zones, everything still dies in a seconds. (GW2)


19 days of vip left for me.. I dont know if I will stay or not yet, its either they need to triple the AD rewards or fix some of the scaling issues.

(this is outside of obvious broken scaling/bug mechanics like Major hes, and dungeons mentioned (like msp, CR, tong and the like)

I would also suggest if they keep scaling to remove the random queues and just put the old system of running a epic, skirm ect back in place .. randoms dont have a clue and are just dying left and right.

I would also put a 2k + item level into every dungeon atm from where they are at... you need to lock out way more people until they understand better. Its simply not going to work the way you have designed it.

Yes poeple need to play better, but you set up a system for YEARS that wasnt like that, its your own fault and instead of doing it piece meal , you did it all at once.

Some of these players were never here for early mods when we did content with green r4s on and worked together.

They have simple gotten into the game, had others carry them or rolled a support that sat around doing nothing but debuffing (or rolled a paladin, that did nothing but hit extreme amounts of temp hp)

I am not blaming them.. you, the game company made the game like that, not them.

I DO NOT like the ideal that progression is halted in the extreme manner you have approached it.

mebengalsfan

Scaling vs. stat clamping are a thorn in players side for MMO games. Both have their positive and negatives and both result in players not feeling as if they progressed their character much.

As the OP pointed out the devs implementation of scaling is a failure and has done nothing but caused issues and complaint to NWO players.

When comparing Stat clamping vs. scaling the reason one picks scaling over clamping is that scaling over time will allow the players to grow in power and surpass their prior power level in lower content; however the scaling mechanic used has to be designed so that players can see this gradually over time. The issue is that when scaling is first introduced no matter what the player base does older content will always be harder and take longer because the gear typically offered when scaling is introduced does not allow players to see or feel more powerful in older content so it takes additional mods before players can feel powerful once again.

Stat clamping works better initially but over time players simply dislike that their stats are never improving as they continue to grow in power in older content. Even though with stat clamping they may still steam roll the content they simply are not seeing themselves get stronger like they would in a scaling system that is well designed.

I personally like stat clamping over scaling. Stat clamping simply reduces players stats to a maximum value based on what the player is running. This ensure top end players don't get wrecked when going into lower zones as their stats would be maxed in those zones and they wouldn't be wrecked do to an initial bad scaling design.

Right now NWO scaling system is flawed as pointed out by the OP.

Sharandar should scale as followed: Weapon and Armor enchantment should be R7 or R8 if an R7 does not exist for the weapon or armor enchantment. Than the rest of the enchantments/runestones should be ranked to R6.

Moving to level 70 zones, each zone should be analyzed to determine the appropriate rank for the gear. By the time a player hits Omu content, forget Barovia, enchantments should scale to R14 and weapon/armor as R13 if they are higher or no scaling should happen for these. If this is not happening than the devs failed at implementing scaling as those were max enchantments for that zone.

Gear scaling should be simply set level 80 gear to highest piece of gear for that content. If this is not happening than again, failure by the development team to properly implement scaling. They have the data and should be able to properly implement scaling.

Another thing to consider is that scaling takes more processing power than stat clamping. When you scale players you are slowing the overall system down and increasing the odd of having players rubber band when they run content when multiple players are in a zone or in a dungeon. Stat clamping is hard coded and better at reducing the impact to the server and ensures better playing experience and also takes less time to properly implement.

I will state this again as I stated more than once already; devs should have done stat clamping for us over scaling. They could have figured out the maximum stat based on gear/expected enchantments for each zone than provide top end players a cushion by adding 10% to that value to still allow us to feel a bit stronger than what we could have achieve if we maxed everything out for that zone/content at that time.

I'm hoping the devs consider fixing the scaling issue by changing it to stat clamping.

krumple01

They need to address the scaling issue as soon as possible. The fact that enchantment/runestone are being impacted so much it means any player incentive to improve their character are so dimished it will drastically impact the in game economy. If there is very little demand to upgrade them then players need fewer wards and possibly will dump their stones. Wards use to be a great metric for determining the health of the game but since their demand is now dropping dramatically it is very difficult to see anything.

Its funny too because their price on the AH for wards has gone up but their demand has plummeted.

mdarkangel

We are not scaled, we are not stat clamped. What we are is item level capped, and it is done differently depending on your level and the area you are visiting.

I don't have a problem with item level capping. The problem is the caps they have set are too low and are not equal for everyone. A level 70 in Barovia wearing Barovian hunt gear (il756) is not capped. A level 74 in Barovia in the same gear is capped to item level 644. A level 80 in whatever gear from Undermountain will see the same cap. And it only gets worse the further down the campaign list you go, except for Port Nyanzaru which has a cap of 805 for some odd reason (and makes no sense because there's nothing to fight, so why bother with a cap.)

mebengalsfan

mdarkangel#4696 said:

We are not scaled, we are not stat clamped. What we are is item level capped, and it is done differently depending on your level and the area you are visiting.



I don't have a problem with item level capping. The problem is the caps they have set are too low and are not equal for everyone. A level 70 in Barovia wearing Barovian hunt gear (il756) is not capped. A level 74 in Barovia in the same gear is capped to item level 644. A level 80 in whatever gear from Undermountain will see the same cap. And it only gets worse the further down the campaign list you go, except for Port Nyanzaru which has a cap of 805 for some odd reason (and makes no sense because there's nothing to fight, so why bother with a cap.)

NWO is using a scaling method and it is not by just item level by the combination of level and item level. It is a horrible scaling system. Stat clamping would be better because no matter what you use for gear in any zone you would have a maximum stat you would be allowed to achieve. This way a player that is level 80 with all R15 won't feel gimp when in Sharanadar or any lower zone; they simply would have max stats allowed in that zone.

As I also pointed out, scaling will cause server issues as it has to scale each player and that takes raw processing power. Clamping stat requires less system resources and is easier to maintain as once a zone is setup you really don't need to touch or adjust it ever again.

mebengalsfan

krumple01 said:

They need to address the scaling issue as soon as possible. The fact that enchantment/runestone are being impacted so much it means any player incentive to improve their character are so dimished it will drastically impact the in game economy. If there is very little demand to upgrade them then players need fewer wards and possibly will dump their stones. Wards use to be a great metric for determining the health of the game but since their demand is now dropping dramatically it is very difficult to see anything.

Its funny too because their price on the AH for wards has gone up but their demand has plummeted.

Other already pointed out that all you need is R8 to play NWO in mod 16. Why even bother improving your character if your stats are lowered below what you would have for stats in that zone if you were the proper level and wore best gear in that zone.

silverkelt

There should never be a reason, in any mmo, that you are less powerful in a lower gear/set level then you would be at a higher one.

Its simple a very very bad design.