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Improving the Level 60-70 Experience
commanderander
Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 93Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Hi everyone!
Commander Ander here, I'd like to talk to everyone about our upcoming changes to the level 60-70 content. We've been analyzing the current state of content from 60-70 and we agreed with the sentiment that it felt too grindy compared to the 1-60 experience. Many people on the team gave the same feedback as they ran through it (I personally put 3 characters through 60-70, so I'm quite acquainted to the experience!). We knew we had to do something to improve the experience, but the big question was, how? We couldn't just say, "Take the week and improve 60-70. See you all on Monday." We had to be very careful how we changed the experience, because it's a massive task and affects existing players.
Elemental Evil Campaign
Our first step was to create a campaign to track progress through the level 60-70 experience. We knew we were going to speed up the process for leveling, but we also wanted it to still take longer than the zones beneath level 60. Because of that, we created the Elemental Evil campaign to help players track their progress and also see what rewards they would get. We also used this opportunity to make the rewards from 60-70 better. We've put in a new set of gear that is given out through each zone to help players be at the power level we expect them to be. This new gear is also visually different from our other leveling gear (I know I might transmute one or two of them on my cleric!).
From the outset, our biggest goal was to make the campaign our first retroactive campaign. Players who have already played through content in 60-70 should have tasks completed in the campaign that reflects that progress. We are basing progress in the campaign off of the completion of vigilance wrapper quests (complete 8 vigilance quests) and Seed of Water/Earth/Fire/Air quests. Each zone has 3 wrapper quests and 1 seed quests. Completing 2 wrapper quests in Drowned Shore would mean you've completed 2 campaign tasks in the Elemental Evil campaign. Completing the seed of water quests means you've completed the entire zone.
Elemental Evil Quests
Our next challenge was what to do about the quests between 60-70. How do we improve the experience without asking the content team to stop everything they're doing? The answer was to re-use the quests we already made, but change the format and story in which they were presented.
This means that you'll see a more directed story throughout each of the zones, along with improved cutscenes when facing the prophets of the Elemental Evil, all without running any repeatable quests in the Elemental Evil zones. Got the quest to kill Glark the Rancid in Spinward Rise? That's the last time you'll ever get that quest, because now it's no longer repeatable, and it helps move the story of Spinward Rise forward.
Our goal for player experience is that players should be able to get to level 70 if they only did quests in the Elemental Evil zones and without having to run any repeatable content in the elemental zones.
Existing Vigilance Quests
All vigilance quests and vigilance wrapper quests will be automatically dropped from players when this update goes live. We chose to drop the quests instead of auto-completing them to avoid players being put into a bad situation. Auto-completing the vigilance wrapper is great for the player who has 7 out of the 8 quests completed, but terrible for a player who just started the quest, as they'd be pushed forward into harder content without the quests needed to help them with this. The choice was to give some players a boost, or some players a potentially bad experience, so we went with ensuring players don't get into a bad spot. If you're someone who is nearly finished with the wrappers, we suggest finishing them up before the patch goes live! There will be plenty of warning before this happens.
This update also marks the end of vigilance quests. That's it! Bye bye, no more vigilance quests. The only repeatable quests that exist in the zones are unlocked when a player completes all 4 zones. These quests are to complete Heroic Encounters to earn credit towards a repeatable task in the Elemental Evil campaign.
Exciting Heroic Encounters
We've improved the experience of Heroic Encounters in all four zones by having them set up similar to Stronghold and Demonic Heroic Encounters. Previously, Heroic Encounters were all on individual respawn timers. Now, there is a master controller that is turning on the encounters with a rule that there should be no more than 3 HE's up at a time. The result of this is that it should be much rarer for a zone to have no heroic encounters active for players to run.
Ending Note
We're all really excited to deliver what we believe is a much stronger leveling experience from 60-70. What I've written here is just a highlight of what we've done. These changes will be on Preview soon, so please hop on and give us your feedback! Below are the threads to direct your feedback:
Drowned Shore Feedback
Reclamation Rock Feedback
Fiery Pit Feedback
Spinward Rise Feedback
Elemental Evil Campaign/Existing Player Feedback
See you all in game!
Commander Ander
Commander Ander here, I'd like to talk to everyone about our upcoming changes to the level 60-70 content. We've been analyzing the current state of content from 60-70 and we agreed with the sentiment that it felt too grindy compared to the 1-60 experience. Many people on the team gave the same feedback as they ran through it (I personally put 3 characters through 60-70, so I'm quite acquainted to the experience!). We knew we had to do something to improve the experience, but the big question was, how? We couldn't just say, "Take the week and improve 60-70. See you all on Monday." We had to be very careful how we changed the experience, because it's a massive task and affects existing players.
Elemental Evil Campaign
Our first step was to create a campaign to track progress through the level 60-70 experience. We knew we were going to speed up the process for leveling, but we also wanted it to still take longer than the zones beneath level 60. Because of that, we created the Elemental Evil campaign to help players track their progress and also see what rewards they would get. We also used this opportunity to make the rewards from 60-70 better. We've put in a new set of gear that is given out through each zone to help players be at the power level we expect them to be. This new gear is also visually different from our other leveling gear (I know I might transmute one or two of them on my cleric!).
From the outset, our biggest goal was to make the campaign our first retroactive campaign. Players who have already played through content in 60-70 should have tasks completed in the campaign that reflects that progress. We are basing progress in the campaign off of the completion of vigilance wrapper quests (complete 8 vigilance quests) and Seed of Water/Earth/Fire/Air quests. Each zone has 3 wrapper quests and 1 seed quests. Completing 2 wrapper quests in Drowned Shore would mean you've completed 2 campaign tasks in the Elemental Evil campaign. Completing the seed of water quests means you've completed the entire zone.
Elemental Evil Quests
Our next challenge was what to do about the quests between 60-70. How do we improve the experience without asking the content team to stop everything they're doing? The answer was to re-use the quests we already made, but change the format and story in which they were presented.
This means that you'll see a more directed story throughout each of the zones, along with improved cutscenes when facing the prophets of the Elemental Evil, all without running any repeatable quests in the Elemental Evil zones. Got the quest to kill Glark the Rancid in Spinward Rise? That's the last time you'll ever get that quest, because now it's no longer repeatable, and it helps move the story of Spinward Rise forward.
Our goal for player experience is that players should be able to get to level 70 if they only did quests in the Elemental Evil zones and without having to run any repeatable content in the elemental zones.
Existing Vigilance Quests
All vigilance quests and vigilance wrapper quests will be automatically dropped from players when this update goes live. We chose to drop the quests instead of auto-completing them to avoid players being put into a bad situation. Auto-completing the vigilance wrapper is great for the player who has 7 out of the 8 quests completed, but terrible for a player who just started the quest, as they'd be pushed forward into harder content without the quests needed to help them with this. The choice was to give some players a boost, or some players a potentially bad experience, so we went with ensuring players don't get into a bad spot. If you're someone who is nearly finished with the wrappers, we suggest finishing them up before the patch goes live! There will be plenty of warning before this happens.
This update also marks the end of vigilance quests. That's it! Bye bye, no more vigilance quests. The only repeatable quests that exist in the zones are unlocked when a player completes all 4 zones. These quests are to complete Heroic Encounters to earn credit towards a repeatable task in the Elemental Evil campaign.
Exciting Heroic Encounters
We've improved the experience of Heroic Encounters in all four zones by having them set up similar to Stronghold and Demonic Heroic Encounters. Previously, Heroic Encounters were all on individual respawn timers. Now, there is a master controller that is turning on the encounters with a rule that there should be no more than 3 HE's up at a time. The result of this is that it should be much rarer for a zone to have no heroic encounters active for players to run.
Ending Note
We're all really excited to deliver what we believe is a much stronger leveling experience from 60-70. What I've written here is just a highlight of what we've done. These changes will be on Preview soon, so please hop on and give us your feedback! Below are the threads to direct your feedback:
Drowned Shore Feedback
Reclamation Rock Feedback
Fiery Pit Feedback
Spinward Rise Feedback
Elemental Evil Campaign/Existing Player Feedback
See you all in game!
Commander Ander
Sean "Commander Ander" McCann - Content Designer
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Comments
Any of my comments not posted in orange are based on my own personal opinion and not official.
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> xbox has to wait for this? i know pc gets the drops for updates/expansions first but it cant be that hard to rewrite some code and put an update through to xbox, im currently 63 on my first character ever and the vigilance quests just make me want to quit playing honestly. now im not complaining, im pushing through it because i love the game and ive gotten far with non stop play for the past 3 days and i enjoyed every minute of the grind to 70 wasn't fast but it wasnt slow. Then you hit 60 and ranking up maybe twice in 6-7 hours of play because of vigilance quests. Just would be nice for xbox and pc to atleast get this one update together. i looked on the xbox forums didn't see anything for this so i assumed it was only for pc which brought me here, i much prefer the game on pc but i have more friends on xbox.
grind to 60*
They were a good resource to farm additional power points. Either change the level up rewards and make it a 100% chance to gain a power point or bring those hourly repeatable quests back. A lot of people already dont like running campaign quests everyday to make a little bit of experience. It is much more efficient to run hourly quests in spinward rise. Please reconsider this when removing them totally or blocking acces to them.
Edit: I know there are also people who like to mindlessly kill mobs to earn experience. I can say from what i have seen on preview that i s possible to do that to reach your 1,75 million exp. Its just painful but probably our only option from now on.
Many are way above the expected difficulty for characters of the appropriate level, even in 10 man teams (Crabs and Emberclaw leap to mind).
Obsidian Oath - Warlock
A whole lot of other Obsidian toons as well.
If that is the case, I suggest compensating by increasing the number of motes dropped per HE by 1.
The most important thing in life is to be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.
First, change the number of motes required for the artifact gear from 100 to 250. For characters that have already farmed motes prior to the change just multiply their current motes by 2.5.
Then, make all the small HEs guaranteed to give 1 mote. Make medium HEs guaranteed to give 1 mote plus a box with a 50% chance of a second mote. If the box has no second mote, it has high-quality bound refinement items. For example, either 2 blue Resonance stones, or 1 purple Resonance stone. Likewise, make each of the large HEs guaranteed to give 2 motes plus one of the boxes.
The wands would simply add +1 mote to each HE.
On average, it would take the same 100 runs of the large HE to get the artifacts without using wands. But, there would be some incentive to play any HE available. Much better than the current situation where nobody will run any HE except the big one in each zone.
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In Spinward Rise, using a wand can be very efficient because of high spawn rates, with multiple HEs concurrently on each node. It's possible to simply run from one minor HE to another, and depending on your clear speed, they should be respawned and ready to go again as you finish.
In Firey Pit, using a wand is very inefficient because of infrequent spawning of HEs most players have a hope of soloing, with said HEs only available on a 5-minute timer. Most of your wand's duration would be wasted in wait time.
Reclamation Rock and Drowned Shore struck me as a mixed bag (the latter only once the Merchant HE was fixed to actually reward the player at all).
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
The main problem is the way we can get the weapons sets for each zone. Since doing that seems more complicated i suggest making the weapon sets a task like ToD campaign. And should require some currency from the campaign or simply just a few unified elements or the blue ones (dont remeber the name). Gate it with 1 per day and some ads like 20k.
1) When do these changes go live?
2) Will we still get the same ole elemental fire weapon at the end?
(or maybe a choice this time of which elemental set we want)
3) Are the proposed gear drops going to be more relevant then what is being dropped now?
(seriosuly the armor and what not is not bad but its not nothing to write home about either, i usually have to get gear for a toon from prexisting toons, which can be a pain)
Anyways just some questions i had
Kirk : My god bones...her head is gone :eek:
Mccoy : DAMNIT JIM!! im a doctor not a game developer
I don't play alts so this matters too me.
I really love having new visuals available!
Here are some of the answers I can give to questions:
1) The content, as it is set up right now, does not allow for level 70's to replay it. I understand wanting that, but the amount of dancing around we would have to do to make it both replayable at level 70, get existing players pre-70 to slide in to the proper neighborhood and not replay older neighborhoods, and have it just work normally for players leveling up, would be a lot and we would be biting off more than we could chew for the already enormous task of revamping 60-70 and also lessening the quality of what we're trying to put out if we try to do it now.
2) I can't give a date when this goes live, but it will be Soon (tm). We're testing alongside you guys and seeing where pain points are, what quests could be better (like making Learning to Fly's interacts less painful), and ensuring the flow is great. We've finished the large part of the work, now it's time to hit all of the very important smaller bits.
3) We're not changing the artifact reward at the end.
4) Regarding HE's. The change we made with the master controller was to help alleviate the grind involved with the's HE's. We want to improve the experience of obtaining these weapons by making more HE's a viable option instead of Neverwinter feeling like a really weird episode of Deadliest Catch (in the case of Drowned Shore). We feel the new system will be better, based off of the team's internal experience playing through the HE's on live. If you guys play it on Preview and feel we've made the experience worse, tell us! We'll figure out what we can do to remedy the situation in the remaining time we have.