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7 steps to make endgame content challenging and interesting again.
diogene0
Member Posts: 2,894 Arc User
As a veteran player that has experienced pretty much all of the big changes this game has gone through over the course of its life, I’m a bit sad to see that while it used to be challenging even for players with the best equipment and nice playing skills, this isn’t the case anymore, even for the most challenging content we have in game right now.
Why? Well because there are 7 big offenders.
1- The old, long-standing buff stacking issue.
This is probably the biggest offender. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like buffs and they’re a part of the game that shouldn’t be removed, but I believe that the way they work makes any content trivial as soon as we, players, start to stack them beyond what the devs consider a « normal » level in their internal testing, and this expected level of buffs and debuff is most likely way lower than what the average endgame group can achieve.
Let’s just take 3 buffs to see how they stack and interact in the game currently : Hallowed ground (+40%), break the spirit (+30%), and into the fray (+35%). These ones are trivial to stack and this is intended to be a very simple example, because there are many, many more buffs in the game.
Currently, with a base damage of 100, if all 3 buffs are active, we get the following damage output :
100*1.4*1.3*1.35 = 257
With 3 very trivial to use and sync we already achieve we are already increasing the damage output of every player in the team by a factor of 2.57. With three spells! As a result, everything dies so fast due to damage buffs that there’s little room for any kind of challenging content, as the devs still tend to try to streamline the experience and not make it too tedious for non buff stacking parties.
Sugestion: the way buffs interact with damage should be adjusted in favour of something less aggressively beneficial, for instance using the following formula:
(base damage)+(base damage)*(buff +1 buff 2 + […] + buff n).
In our example, we’d get:
100+100*(0.35+0.4+0.3)=205.
The damage increase is still significant but the discrepancy between the total damage will decrease with the number of buffs stacked.
If cryptic also wants to streamline the experience between different groups, there should also be diminishing returns added to the formula beyond what is expected to keep buffs in check.
2- Debuffs
They’re almost as bad as buffs, not as much as the formula is different, but there are a lot of debuffs all over the place in game, even on old pre-mod 6 gear. Most debuffs simply increase the damage a target is taking by x%, and while they don’t stack multiplicatively like buffs do, they’re still causing a lot of cheesing due to their availability and accessibility. They’re both on pretty much every parangon feat tree, on gear, on enchantments, in spells that still do significant damage, or provide so much utility that not using them would be a mistake. I’m not going to make a list. There are too many.
The problem is that there’s no cap to the amount of debuffs we can stack. They’re also working multiplicatively with buffs because buffs simply multiply the damage value, and that makes for instance, my control wizard hitting NPCs for 3M with an encounter that has a 60k base damage on the tooltip. We’re indeed looking at quite a lot of buffs and debuffs stacking, but sadly this is not an anomaly but a part of the current game mechanics.
Suggestion: like armor penetration does not work beyond a given level of resistance ignored, debuff value should have a hard cap.
3- Stat buffs granted to companions
Anyone owning a companion with bonding runestones who has ever played with a devoted cleric using annointed army knows what I’m talking about. Many stat buffs are shared with pets, and pets buff their masters accordingly through companion’s gift buffs. There are other « funny » offenders like the siege master companion’s ability to buff defense to ridiculous levels in a party. When I play with some DC players with a pets with 2x r12 and 1 r11 bonding, my power can go way up to 150k. This cannot be intended.
Suggestion: companions should not be affected by buffs at all.
4- Self healing is too strong and too easily available
In pretty much every single guild, the first building unlocked is going to be the one granting lifesteal. It’s now so easy to get lifesteal to ridiculous levels (above 30% chance) that even if NPCs hit me for 100k on a 105k hit points character, I’m not worried at all as my rotation has a very high chance of healing me for more than my total amount of hit points. This is made worse by buffs, but we’re back to the pre-mod 6 state of the game regarding survivability of dps and tank characters.
Other sources of self-healing include mount insignias and some spells on tank characters that let them heal themselves without any support from a healer. All this needs to be looked at to make healers not completely useless.
As a result, healing characters are either useless (devout paladin, temptation warlock) or cornered into the content cheesing monkey role (devoted cleric).
Suggestion: Self healing needs to be addressed. There could be something like the PvP healing penalty in endgame pve content too, that would work for all classes but devotion paladin, temptation warlock, and faithful/virtuous DCs.
5- Some spells didn’t age well.
When it was introduced, Annointed Army was unimpressive, because endgame content was all about hordes of adds that were not hitting for a lot but very often, ie endgame was about sustained damage, including boss fights. Now, after mod 6, dungeon design is all about big hits that only happen once in a while. It makes spells like annointed army extremely strong as it shields players for 3 hits, big or small, while granting them insane amounts of power. Since NPCs don’t hit that often, with a good AA spamming cleric, I can tank all dungeons in this game with my pure dps spec’d control wizard. It also makes 5 DC runs like the one we did in FBI and that I recorded (video is on youtube and on the DC forums) a walk in the park. This does not make any sense.
In the list of spells that didn’t age well, I must add the following ones :
- fox shift. It causes the same issues as AA. Since NPCs don’t hit that often, especially bosses, I’m just going to auto dodge the next big hit. When it’s combined with AA from a daily spamming DC, when I play my GF, in a boss fight, all I have to do is pressing tab and right click until the boss dies. I’m either going to auto dodge or not taking big hits while under AA’s control immunity. All the fun of the fight vanished : watching boss animations, positionning myself properly, managing my stamina bar, when using shift and when not to, timing my encounters, and so on.
- fighter’s recovery. Tactician GFs have been buffed so much over the years that even a noobish tank with low recovery will likely have its action point bar filled way before he’s under half health. He can then hit fighter’s recovery, and the guarded assault class feature (or commander’s strike) will passively do damage to NPCs and heal him completely for almost no resource investment. Paladins also have stupidly strong self healing abilities, even the tank ones.
- complete damage immunity. I’m not sure what the designers had in mind when they designed the paladin class, but it may achieve complete damage immunity stacking recovery and using immunity encounters and daily powers. There are so many damage immunity powers in this game that I’m not going to list them all. Most of them are really too strong and need to be looked at. I have seen a paladin tanking about 15 giants and as many bears and orcs in FBI for several minutes. No challenging content can be designed as long as paladins can achieve complete damage immunity.
Suggestion: offending powers that allows us to greatly cheese the content by avoiding taking damage and negate all of the challenges that the dev create for us should be completely reworked, as no difficult content can be created unless it’s pushed to unfairness level in that context.
Why? Well because there are 7 big offenders.
1- The old, long-standing buff stacking issue.
This is probably the biggest offender. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like buffs and they’re a part of the game that shouldn’t be removed, but I believe that the way they work makes any content trivial as soon as we, players, start to stack them beyond what the devs consider a « normal » level in their internal testing, and this expected level of buffs and debuff is most likely way lower than what the average endgame group can achieve.
Let’s just take 3 buffs to see how they stack and interact in the game currently : Hallowed ground (+40%), break the spirit (+30%), and into the fray (+35%). These ones are trivial to stack and this is intended to be a very simple example, because there are many, many more buffs in the game.
Currently, with a base damage of 100, if all 3 buffs are active, we get the following damage output :
100*1.4*1.3*1.35 = 257
With 3 very trivial to use and sync we already achieve we are already increasing the damage output of every player in the team by a factor of 2.57. With three spells! As a result, everything dies so fast due to damage buffs that there’s little room for any kind of challenging content, as the devs still tend to try to streamline the experience and not make it too tedious for non buff stacking parties.
Sugestion: the way buffs interact with damage should be adjusted in favour of something less aggressively beneficial, for instance using the following formula:
(base damage)+(base damage)*(buff +1 buff 2 + […] + buff n).
In our example, we’d get:
100+100*(0.35+0.4+0.3)=205.
The damage increase is still significant but the discrepancy between the total damage will decrease with the number of buffs stacked.
If cryptic also wants to streamline the experience between different groups, there should also be diminishing returns added to the formula beyond what is expected to keep buffs in check.
2- Debuffs
They’re almost as bad as buffs, not as much as the formula is different, but there are a lot of debuffs all over the place in game, even on old pre-mod 6 gear. Most debuffs simply increase the damage a target is taking by x%, and while they don’t stack multiplicatively like buffs do, they’re still causing a lot of cheesing due to their availability and accessibility. They’re both on pretty much every parangon feat tree, on gear, on enchantments, in spells that still do significant damage, or provide so much utility that not using them would be a mistake. I’m not going to make a list. There are too many.
The problem is that there’s no cap to the amount of debuffs we can stack. They’re also working multiplicatively with buffs because buffs simply multiply the damage value, and that makes for instance, my control wizard hitting NPCs for 3M with an encounter that has a 60k base damage on the tooltip. We’re indeed looking at quite a lot of buffs and debuffs stacking, but sadly this is not an anomaly but a part of the current game mechanics.
Suggestion: like armor penetration does not work beyond a given level of resistance ignored, debuff value should have a hard cap.
3- Stat buffs granted to companions
Anyone owning a companion with bonding runestones who has ever played with a devoted cleric using annointed army knows what I’m talking about. Many stat buffs are shared with pets, and pets buff their masters accordingly through companion’s gift buffs. There are other « funny » offenders like the siege master companion’s ability to buff defense to ridiculous levels in a party. When I play with some DC players with a pets with 2x r12 and 1 r11 bonding, my power can go way up to 150k. This cannot be intended.
Suggestion: companions should not be affected by buffs at all.
4- Self healing is too strong and too easily available
In pretty much every single guild, the first building unlocked is going to be the one granting lifesteal. It’s now so easy to get lifesteal to ridiculous levels (above 30% chance) that even if NPCs hit me for 100k on a 105k hit points character, I’m not worried at all as my rotation has a very high chance of healing me for more than my total amount of hit points. This is made worse by buffs, but we’re back to the pre-mod 6 state of the game regarding survivability of dps and tank characters.
Other sources of self-healing include mount insignias and some spells on tank characters that let them heal themselves without any support from a healer. All this needs to be looked at to make healers not completely useless.
As a result, healing characters are either useless (devout paladin, temptation warlock) or cornered into the content cheesing monkey role (devoted cleric).
Suggestion: Self healing needs to be addressed. There could be something like the PvP healing penalty in endgame pve content too, that would work for all classes but devotion paladin, temptation warlock, and faithful/virtuous DCs.
5- Some spells didn’t age well.
When it was introduced, Annointed Army was unimpressive, because endgame content was all about hordes of adds that were not hitting for a lot but very often, ie endgame was about sustained damage, including boss fights. Now, after mod 6, dungeon design is all about big hits that only happen once in a while. It makes spells like annointed army extremely strong as it shields players for 3 hits, big or small, while granting them insane amounts of power. Since NPCs don’t hit that often, with a good AA spamming cleric, I can tank all dungeons in this game with my pure dps spec’d control wizard. It also makes 5 DC runs like the one we did in FBI and that I recorded (video is on youtube and on the DC forums) a walk in the park. This does not make any sense.
In the list of spells that didn’t age well, I must add the following ones :
- fox shift. It causes the same issues as AA. Since NPCs don’t hit that often, especially bosses, I’m just going to auto dodge the next big hit. When it’s combined with AA from a daily spamming DC, when I play my GF, in a boss fight, all I have to do is pressing tab and right click until the boss dies. I’m either going to auto dodge or not taking big hits while under AA’s control immunity. All the fun of the fight vanished : watching boss animations, positionning myself properly, managing my stamina bar, when using shift and when not to, timing my encounters, and so on.
- fighter’s recovery. Tactician GFs have been buffed so much over the years that even a noobish tank with low recovery will likely have its action point bar filled way before he’s under half health. He can then hit fighter’s recovery, and the guarded assault class feature (or commander’s strike) will passively do damage to NPCs and heal him completely for almost no resource investment. Paladins also have stupidly strong self healing abilities, even the tank ones.
- complete damage immunity. I’m not sure what the designers had in mind when they designed the paladin class, but it may achieve complete damage immunity stacking recovery and using immunity encounters and daily powers. There are so many damage immunity powers in this game that I’m not going to list them all. Most of them are really too strong and need to be looked at. I have seen a paladin tanking about 15 giants and as many bears and orcs in FBI for several minutes. No challenging content can be designed as long as paladins can achieve complete damage immunity.
Suggestion: offending powers that allows us to greatly cheese the content by avoiding taking damage and negate all of the challenges that the dev create for us should be completely reworked, as no difficult content can be created unless it’s pushed to unfairness level in that context.
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Comments
6- Encounter design in dungeons should be more varied, like in the old dungeons (before mod 6).
There has been one very positive change in mod 6 : dungeon now require to kill npcs to progress, as rooms and further content are locked until all NPCs are dead. Misson design now prevent any kind of shortcuts like going under the map to skip content and get to the final chest ASAP. This is great!
However, we lost variety in encounters in the process. Now it’s all about big hits, once in a while. There are no more NPCs doing sustained damage, which is far more challenging to deal with than big hits. Big hits can be dodged or avoided with all the cheesing spells we have access to. Sustained damage requires mitigation and some healing. It would be nice to have this back in the game at some point. There are many good spells and game mechanics we don’t use, not because they’re bad, but because all dungeons are more or less the same.
7- Streamlining the experience by removing the "veteran player advantage".
A typical change by cryptic implies creating something new to try to fix something that does not work as intended, but the problematic element of the game are rarely completely removed. One of the most promiment example is the fact that pre mod 6 gear is still around and in use. Set bonuses like high prophet, high vizier, knight captain’s and fabled illyaburen (SWs only) create a great imbalance between players, and the ones owning this are greatly favoured.
This means that veteran players tend to stick together for their farming parties. This isn’t healthy for the game in general, for both new and veteran players. New players won’t be invited as easily to play group content, and old players are so much dependant on their friendlist that someone who stops playing creates some issues as it’s increasingly difficult to find suitable replacements that are deemed acceptable by an established group. Veteran groups are, for that reason, very static and that sucks, as this lead to various blatant social issues in the game, especially when people value efficiency over niceness.
I also cannot count the times I got an invite on my DC over other players because I own the High Prophet set. And who knows, maybe some people did it even though they don’t like me.
Overall, these old sets create a great imbalance in the game that impacts the game beyond the expected gameplay level. It impacts the social experience of the game for every player, and this is in my opinion a much more important problem than the cheesing aspect, as this is far more critical for the enjoyment of the game, and for this reason alone, it should be adressed.
So when cryptic decides to reintroduce nerfed companion gear, as that was said in the live stream, I do hope they’re also going to nerf existing items instead of simply introducing new ones. There’s no need for more imbalances that are going to impact the social aspect of the game right now.
I myself have a HV set but it has been collecting dust in my bank until recently, it sure is strong but I always liked gear progressions in games, it somehow feels natural that new items should be better and more efficient than the previous ones. I can understand though, that in this game, with all the refinement and incredible costs kinda counteracts the desire to upgrade items, maybe if the time gap between new item introduction were big enough to make item progression rather refreshing.
As with other buffs, ya its something that can be looked into together with proper class balancing.
For a CW, the HV set provides +30% effectiveness. But that's on top of effectiveness granted by base feats and powers, which can easily soar over 200% with the right build. The HP set bonus is strictly worse than this, capping out at less than +15% effectiveness (due to the unmitigated DR buff reduction). Neither of these sets are going to make a dramatic difference in party DPS, they are just the final frosting on top of an already good build seeking to get the last bit of DPS out of the setup. (FI may be an exception because it can significantly change party DPS, but that one is even less available).
That said, there is a tremendous power gap between new players and seasoned veterans. It comes from the sheer amount of stuff that you need to unlock/upgrade/rank up/deck out. Boons (esp SH boons which can be very significant at high SH levels), companions, high level enchants, artifacts (esp class sigils). I don't think removing mod5 sets would noticeably reduce any of the real sources of "veteran player advantage".
However, the changes can be considered as kind of items or power balancing. It could be good for the future content.
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I do however think the massive power curve line should be brought more in spec, there are many things that could happen to do that though, in both pve and pvp to better encourage a wider line of diversity.
I would be quite happy with a fix to things like the broken CS , the power sharing to pets , giving more stats back to people and the un-scaled items that loop back and generate more power then it should.
One of the issues in this game is simply the non linear scaling of enchants and bonding's, that create a larger power curve then needed, once scaled down to a more linear approach, it decreases the power curve , making it easier for wider amount of people to group together. This way , its LESS of a nerf and MORE of a general re-scaling. This same linear development, can be applied to all sort of enchants and bondings, So someone with r10s are not so far away as someone with r12s.
There would still be this HUGE power gap between toons that makes good dungeon design downright impossible. So I thought that a dungeon design like CN (and probably FI, too - haven´t accessed that yet, only watched the video) is the result of trying to create dungeons that will be played by toons of wildly different power levels. Basically relying on high-hitpoint one-shot monsters and lame "mechanics" (the lameness of the beholder encounter in cn really is from outer space...though closely followed by orcus). NPC-hordes doing sustained damage would be awesome...my dc would be giddy if the tank would go under without his mitigation and healing...my cw would have awesome fun if the whole group would highly depend on her expertly controlling hordes of npc´s...but how do you design that for dungeoneering groups of wildly differing power-levels??? I did some dungeon design in nwn1 and 2 and so I know it´s a tricky thing to do even if you design it for toons of a very specific power level. Even the 3.1kIL requirement of FI isn´t much to work with...not only can the power of two 3.1kIL toons vary wildly (since this IL doesn´t factor in a thousand things) but the dungeon is for toons of 3.1kIL al the way to the top...
As a newer player I feel cheated because I was never able to enjoy the old dungeons that (or so I am told and I believe it) were so much more fun....but back then game designers didn´t have to deal with this power gap and better game design was actually doable.
So maybe the only way to solve this would be to introduce a better way to gauge a toons performance (including all the things IL doesn´t), introduce all the ideas you have put forward and then design properly gated end-game dungeons....
Of course for this to happen they would have to make progression FAR easier (instead of making it harder) because there´s no point in creating dungeons for a small handful of players.
Sorting toons according to their power-level would also be the only thing to save PVP at this point...for a certain player type.
But they have so far not catered at all to a player type that actually likes a fair challenge neither in PVP nor PVE.....!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Instead, in both PVP and PVE your "reward" for spent time/money is that you get to be the elephant stomping ants...you get to make the rest of your team perfectly superfluous...dwarf monsters and other players´ toons alike...
So they have catered to a player type that enjoys this...unfortunately I'm not that type.
Now, turning things around at this point might be perfectly possible and even viable in terms of creating revenue with this game for a long while....but it would require a lead designer with an appropriate vision....and after listening to the recent stream I don´t see why I would have any hope for that...-.- Sadly.
I actually find the challenging dungeons far less fun, I don't enjoy CN because it's buggy as hell for me and stuff that never renders in one shots me even as a 3.5K GWF with a lot of hits (and a good comp/graphics card). It was fine pre pally nerf, the shield covered the deficiencies in the game. (my particular problem is that the band that connects 2 characters often doesn't render in at all if I'm not one of the two at either end so I get caught in the explosions).
I don't expect to get into FBI till mid 2017 if at all due to liking alting and the hoops required to open it up. No I don't want to grind hundreds of thousands of voninsblood or whatever it takes for the 3 characters I play on teams. All the descriptions of it I've read make it sound like something I hate anyway, not difficult, you just have to do exactly the right things in the right order which a bit of lag will destroy.
2. Don't need. The same reason.
3. Yes, maybe, and this is should be.
4. Yes, maybe, but there is no much instruments to do this. Also without overpower CW,SW couldn't heal so much. Maybe in epic dungeons there should be something like aura that will reduce your ownhealing as in PVP. But Healers (DC, OP, CW, SW!) - should have a normal healing opportunities. Also without normal healing low IL parties cannot fight any dungeon. I don't know, maybe no.
5. It's Ok, try to fight Blackdagger or Wolf's dungeon with AA only? Also you don't go with 2-3 DC's usually so 1 DC with AA isn't so much. And you tank Orcus without any immunity only with pet if you a range... But those spells were made for immunity. Maybe it needs some recovery and AP nerf but small one.
6. I don't understand what you mean.
7. Why? Can i tell you a secret? Who have this veteran sets they can do all the same things in the new armor too. If SW can kill a boss with Illyaburen so he also can kill it without it, just need a little more time. Just because they have a lot of experience in game, so why they shoudn't use all this if it good to them?
PS: Sorry i can't speak english well, i hope you'll understand me
As this is a somewhat of a divisive issue I wanted to give everyone a heads up that we will be removing pre-Module 6 set bonuses with the release of Storm King's Thunder: Sea of Moving Ice.
I would also add one thing: all mobs (not bosses) should be controllable. Resistant maybr but still controllable.
Born of Black Wind: SW Level 80
WHEN you resist ignore do not piercing the enemy damage resistance then your effectiveness against the target is lesser % BUT STILL the debuff is stable value your ri isnt.
About buffs how you can be sure the combo you described is multiplicative? weapon damage is not stable. personal feats can change easy the value of the base damage.
If you can't work out what this means then idk.
No buff adjustments or gearing needed for that..
"shudders and cries a little"
I will now go back to my little shadow corner, as apparently , that is what cryptic wants me to do.