Neverwinter, like any MMO with multiple content updates, suffers from power creep making new content increasingly easily.
A small, but not insignificant, part of this is due to campaign boons, which players have been stacking over 5 normal campaigns, the stronghold, and a PVP campaign.
Cryptic's other game, Star Trek Online, suffered this same problem due to its reputation system, and its reputation powers. STO however has made a moves to reduce, and even halt, this power creep, despite constantly adding in new reputations, and I feel this move work would well for Neverwinter also.
Star Trek Online got rid of the choice between boons, simply giving you access to all of them when you unlocked that rank in the reputation, however you can only use 4 offensive based boons, and 4 defensive based boons, as well at 4 tier 5 boons in Star Trek Online, forcing the player to pick only a handful of boons to use at any given time.
This would take us down from the 20 tier 1-4 boons we have now in Neverwinter from all the PVE campaigns, down to 8. While still allowing us to have 4 of the tier 4 boons, giving us 12 total, down from 25 total.
This would greatly limit all the stat stacking we have going on now, and halt any future power creep from campaign boons as, no matter how many more campaigns they add in, you would still be limited to 4 offensive based boons, 4 defensive based ones, and 4 tier 5 boons.
Star Trek Online did not to long ago give players the ability to buy a 5th slot for each, at the cost of a large amount of lithium, its version of Astral Diamonds, and this could be transferred over as to something you can buy at a guild stronghold or something. But even with the 5th slot for each type, you are still limited to 15, compared to the 25 we have now, and would still be stuck at that limit even if they add 6+ more campaigns in the future.
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Also, gear totals have a smaller effect on power then you think. Gear rarity comes at an exponentially rising cost, for exponentially lower +stat increases. The difference between game start and 2,500-2,800 IL is an increase in power of several 100%. However, going from an R7 rune, to that of an R12, is an increase of 1.75%. All in all going from R7 runes, and other gear rarity of the same level as R7's, to that of mythic level artifacts and the such is really only an increase of like 25%. Which is a fairly large difference in terms of PVP, but in PVE it means nothing since any 2,500-2,800 IL character can beat everything in the game, and so few people actually bother to spend the large amounts of dosh to reach like IL 4,200 that they were never going to get content made for them. Not to mention the fact that around 410IL of the max comes from utility enchants which add nothing to your character's overall power. Making the IL gap between 2,500-2,800, and that of like 4,200 even more insignificant then it is already. IL and ultra rank R12 enchants/mythic level gear is nothing but a scam for idiots who don't bother to learn the math of the game they are playing and who dont realize its totally pointless.
But back to the original subject, another move to reduce power creep is to change stats from flat increases of "400 score = +1%" to that of a diminishing return system like in Star Trek Online.
This, on top of the boon thing, wold further reduce power creep, by making going from a +300 stat artifact, to a +1000 stat artifact, even more trivial then it already is.
Even if you stacked 5 of them, going from the 230 of R7, to the 700 of R12, would only net you, at MAX, a +5.875% increase in power for that one stat.
700 - 230 = 470
470 * 5 = 2350
2350 / 400 = 5.875
And even if you use even one of those for something other then that one stat, it will drop dramatically.
*garbage = the place we dumped everything that hitting DR on everything else
- Not all stats. ArP scales 1% per 100 rating, Recovery scales 1% / 200 rating.
- "MAX" means we are talking about a maximum. No assumptions. Weapon(2), off-hand(1), rings(2/4), shirt(1), Neck(1) and augment companion slots (6/9) = 13/18 offense slots means around 15% / 21%.
- Dual-stat and bonding even have higher stats and bonding trigger companions double/tripple the effect.
- You could have argued that a +x% increase in power is not the same as an +x% increase in dps because we have to calc the increase in percent from one multiplier to the next...
- "And even if you use even one of those for something other then that one stat, it will drop dramatically" -The DPS will drop when I switch from power to crit? ;-)
Power creep is heavy in NW. I never never understood why they removed diminishing returns (instead of trimming it) at the point the game needs it the most...
//Bellistor
You are doing nothing but reducing new players growth progression.
Its more reasonable to put caps back into place and reduce some of the ridiculous on stacking.
Do you think removing 2000 stats or whatever will effectively make power progression that much different? You can just buy one more mount.. bam.. there you go. Making the game alot further out of reach to regular players who dont want to spend money.
I will tell you.. reduction will not do much to a geared out player at all, it WILL however hurt a newer player without r10s slotted in every slot.
Where that cap should be? Is very hard to tell.. considering the power curve.
Putting a very harsh one in game, will alleviate making things easy, but it will also devastate everything except the perfect builds.. and that is how MOD 6 start was and thousands of people got upset about it.
Other games permanent modifiers had like 6 slots, you could get like 15 different ones and you chose.. but in reality it made the game much LESS grindy, cause no one got 15.. you got the 6 you were going to use and thats it. Since each one could be done separately and wasn't part of a campaign.
The only that are hard is the last 2 in ToD.. just skip them.
EVERY other player can get the rest.
Is this what this boils down to?
The rest of the boons are easily gotten.. heck underdark might have been the Easiest .. if not the most annoying of all the campaigns we had gotten.
Please bear in mind.. my feedback has since IWD.. not to give us any more campaigns.. they are boring to me.. I just want dungeons to run and real rewards for running them.. hopefully in escalating order to make them harder and harder and give more risk vs reward each time.
I will disagree. its not.. you can do 3-4 of these campaigns a day.. you have chosen to skip them it appears, though I dont know why.
Boons really are pretty easy to get.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
Each campaign ZONE takes 30 - 60 minutes to complete,
Sharandra, 1 - 3 ZONE´s , depends if unlocked all.
Dread Ring, 1 ZONE, quest you get depends - How far you gone in campaing
IWD, 1 - 2 ZONE + instance missions, after few week you get DW open
Tyranny Dragons, wide area questing, multiple location to go and do things
Underdork, Stronghold, daily dungeons, skirmish, mimic feeds... and takes just few hours per day, hmmm, 2 - 4 hours .... what I missing?
ps. And all are REPEATs now for SH...
The issue is the millions upon millions each individual had to throw in terms of AD and resources and time at the coffer.
How to make them worthshile... sadly they already devalued the whole process once, by basically ripping away the weapons from us.
I think the concept on the whole was good, but costing and reward is strictly via boons pretty much as gear is medicore or bad for some classes for pve purposes anyways.
Most poeple hate the drains/wards and would wish they were not in game.
I think overall more people will have access to boons soon, as they will lower cost .. mid level guilds, should see a marked increase on how fast they accumulate items and AD to progress.
- Dread Ring - complete
- Underdark - complete
- Sharandar - third boon complete
- ToD - 5 boons complete
- IWD - 4 boons (I was saving currency for black ice shaping, so I could have got 5th instead).
Since it is alt, I bought a dusk armor the moment it reached level 70 and this really helped. I have 5 other alts, but for them I've done only weeklies and underdark since they have all boons except for last two in ToD.