A suggestion: Keep old content relevant, how to avoid entire mods being made obsolete.

ltgamesttv · November 2016

All MMOs have one thing in common, new content always promises new loot and most importantly new gear. Each mod that comes out in this game brings with it new gear with better stats and often with better set bonuses. The challenge in MMOs is keeping the power creep in line so that new content is doable and old content isn't a joke. However because Neverwinter's content revolves around a boon system of advancement rather than a level increase with each new mod it presents some unique challenges.

Typically when a new level comes out in most MMOs new gear is designed for those levels and is unusable to lower level characters. So that each new release of content has new gear that you gain and use as you level up through the new level cap. In Neverwinter 70 is the cap, and has been for mods and mods now. The issue becomes such that each new mod releases new gear that makes the last gear set obsolete.

Think of it this way, each mod has an associated zone and gear that is gained in that zone. For example IWD has Black Ice Armor that was BIS when it was released, this gear set was made obsolete by the gear from Tyranny of Dragons. Thus, as soon as the new mod is released the old mod is ONLY used for achieving those boons. The work the mods used in creating the gear sets and the entire black ice/ black ice empowerment system that likely took quite a bit of development hours is completely unused and useless. The zones associated are all but completely abandoned.

In other MMOs it would be more like when Icewindale was released it would be also increase the level cap by 10 levels making Black Ice gear relevant and BIS for those 10 levels for anyone coming up. Those levels would also take some time to complete so the gear would be worth farming.

The issue becomes even worse when entire mods of content are made completely useless altogether. I.E. Guantylgrim and Stronghold siege. GG is as difficult as SH siege was to get to pop a couple mods ago and Siege is dead, completely. Think of the resources and man hours wasted on developing completely different styles of PVP play with lush maps and associated mechanics only to see them sit dormant. If I was a developer this would grate on me tbh.

So the question that is begged is why? Why create content that you know will be obsolete in a couple months? I think there are several ways to solve this issue. I will offer one here, and anyone else can feel free to chime in with other potential suggestions. The solution I propose would be a large change to gameplay so it would be interesting to see what the opinions of the players are, however this is aimed at solving content obsolescence as the overarching goal so keep the primary reason in mind and offer better solutions if you have them.

Gear could be bound to boons as though they are the new level cap in most MMOs. What this means is that there would be requirements added to each successive set of gear that you complete the prior boon campaign quests. So that in order to get the Black Ice gear set you must first complete Sharandar and the Dread ring series of boons. Now, you could take it a step further to maintain a more linear gameplay like most MMOs do which is force players to complete the boon sets in order. Thus for each boon cap the gear would be relevant until that campaign was completed keeping the gear, the content, and the zone relevant. This would be potentially controversial, however, as it is a rather large change to current gameplay. One caveat to this suggestion is the difficulty of level 70 dungeons and the stats that older gear from older mods offers. This would have to be examined and addressed. Also PVP may be something that would be exempt thus allowing you to wear the tarmalune gear set, however another suggestion I have made before would be to remove tenacity from gear and give everyone the same base tenacity then change PVP gear sets to reflect Bonuses that are primarily beneficial in PVP to make sure they remain relevant. Give sets from each PVP area (i.e. SH siege/ToB/Tarmalune gear the same number of stats with differing stat distributions and mix and match set bonuses to make all PVP gear relevant and worth attaining. The same could be applied to PVE in that gear sets from different zones have similar total stats but different stat distributions and differing set bonuses that can be mixed and matched.

Ultimately it boils down to keeping content relevant by making rewards worthwhile and the gear useful for the amount of time involved in attaining it. This is a huge problem in PVE as who would want to farm BI Gear and power it up with BI when you can bust out a few tarmalune bars or get some guild marks and get some blue gear?

Simply put I think the devs need to take time when creating new content and new gear/rewards. There are a number of ways to make rewards worthwhile to keep older content playable, interesting, and relevant. By doing so you increase the amount of replayability which allows the game to stay robust rather than creating an ever increasing number of ghost towns and dead zones while only the newest zone is active. When zones are tied to rewards and gear you must create a demand for the gear associated, this will get you the most bang for your develper hour buck.

Thanks for your time.

frozenfirevr · November 2016

I gave a suggestion previously... That'd work too...

frozenfirevr said:
A new key creation system, where there is just 1 key (along with the keys from WB, VIP, Daily Key, so 5 keys in total), that can be made using each of the campaigns with the respective campaign currency. For example, a common 'Campaign Chest Key' (that can open all of the chests like Legendary Dragon Key) that can be made using each of the campaigns, separately. That is, I should be able to Sharandar dailies and make a 'Campaign Chest Key', simultaneously, I should be able to do Dread Ring dailies, Icewind Dale dailies, etc and make 'Campaign Chest Keys' with their respective currencies.
This has 2 benefits, firstly, there's a reason to do old campaigns. Secondly, people who would like to do more runs can make more keys by working for them. The Legendary Dragon Keys can continue to be available for those who don't have time or are lazy and want to buy them.

And/or remove keys from our bags.

frozenfirevr · November 2016

Finished reading. I get a feeling that your suggestions are toward keeping the gear relevant than the content.

asterotg · November 2016

In another MMO they implemented new BIS gear. One piece tied to every dungeon. Every dungeon had a certain item for every class, but the most desired item for the DC might drop in one and the best item for GWF in another. Ppl farmed them to get their gear. DC had to run one dungeon for his gear and the DDs joined, bc he had to help them farm the other one.

This kept ppl occupied for ages and I went into dungeons, that were irrelevant even before I started playing.

The problem is, that they would have to scale up old content. Seems not to be their strong suit.

pitshade · November 2016

Black Ice gear was never BIS in PVE and I don't think Draconic was ever BIS for anything, though the Lostmauth jewelry items were an upgrade from Ancient. Pre mod 6, set bonus ruled all, and for some even up till last week...

Having new sets with the same overall power level but different allocations is a good idea and hearkens back to mods 1 and 2 but ultimately Cryptic seems to br fixated on short term Smoke And Mirrors gimmicks to get players to run new content.

ltgamesttv · November 2016

pitshade said:
Black Ice gear was never BIS in PVE and I don't think Draconic was ever BIS for anything, though the Lostmauth jewelry items were an upgrade from Ancient. Pre mod 6, set bonus ruled all, and for some even up till last week...

Having new sets with the same overall power level but different allocations is a good idea and hearkens back to mods 1 and 2 but ultimately Cryptic seems to br fixated on short term Smoke And Mirrors gimmicks to get players to run new content.

You'll have to forgive me as I was trying to make examples not give specifics of which PVE set was best in which mod, just that each mod brought out gear that was made moot by the next. BI gear was only BIS in PVP most likely, forgive the oversight as it was more about the gist of the explanation than semantics.

frozenfirevr · November 2016

asterotg said:
In another MMO they implemented new BIS gear. One piece tied to every dungeon. Every dungeon had a certain item for every class, but the most desired item for the DC might drop in one and the best item for GWF in another. Ppl farmed them to get their gear. DC had to run one dungeon for his gear and the DDs joined, bc he had to help them farm the other one.

This kept ppl occupied for ages and I went into dungeons, that were irrelevant even before I started playing.

The problem is, that they would have to scale up old content. Seems not to be their strong suit.

That's what we had in the early days of Neverwinter. But they chose to stop that and move to seals.

mvffin1 · November 2016

DCUO actually has a decent system for this. Every time a new set comes out, the older set becomes much easier to get, and there are rewards for completing the set.

I'd say drop the grind time by 50-75% and give RP or power points or AD rewards from collecting.

uptondarkdiamond · November 2016

pitshade said:
Black Ice gear was never BIS in PVE and I don't think Draconic was ever BIS for anything, though the Lostmauth jewelry items were an upgrade from Ancient. Pre mod 6, set bonus ruled all, and for some even up till last week...

Having new sets with the same overall power level but different allocations is a good idea and hearkens back to mods 1 and 2 but ultimately Cryptic seems to br fixated on short term Smoke And Mirrors gimmicks to get players to run new content.

BiS prior to Mod 6 is different than it was now. I would say more that people had preferred sets rather than BiS set. For example, HV set was a must have for CW's, but you could us any set or combine different sets. For me, I preferred the the purified black ice set because because the of the healing bonus it provided to the party.

Was a BiS for using the purified set? Nope.

Could I do all content with my set? Yes. In fact, by using this set I think I boosted a pug's group success rate.

Probably could have done the same using HV, but there were so many different and fun combinations to choose from prior to Mod 6. I honestly think that is one of the aspects this game had but is now missing. What I mean is that you didn't need to have the BiS set, with the BiS spec, to be viable in all the game has to offer. You just worked on your playstyle while doing dungeon delves and such.....

Ahhhhh, the good ole days.

As for the OP's idea, I think making gear only available when you get certain boon is not good. I'm of the opinion that boons like there HE's are just getting old and boring. Look at how much time the new player now has to invest just to get the boons. Do you need them all? No, probably not, well maybe except FBI where it could mean the difference between a 45 minute run or a 2 hour run.....

No more silly boons, a different system is needed. Some thing that incorporates more dungeons than we have now currently avialable. Maybe a system that used different tier dungeons that can be unlocked within the campaign. The tier get progressively harder to beat but the loot gets better and better. Something like this.... IMHO

asterotg · November 2016

frozenfirevr said:

asterotg said:
In another MMO they implemented new BIS gear. One piece tied to every dungeon. Every dungeon had a certain item for every class, but the most desired item for the DC might drop in one and the best item for GWF in another. Ppl farmed them to get their gear. DC had to run one dungeon for his gear and the DDs joined, bc he had to help them farm the other one.

This kept ppl occupied for ages and I went into dungeons, that were irrelevant even before I started playing.

The problem is, that they would have to scale up old content. Seems not to be their strong suit.
That's what we had in the early days of Neverwinter. But they chose to stop that and move to seals.

No, we had 4 dungeons for T1 gear, 4 for T2 and GG for random drops. The other system included every gear aspect, they could add legendary companion gear, rings underwear etc, BUT DC underwear drops in CN, GWF in LOL, HR in EDemo etc., so ppl have to run all the old content to get the desired gear.

ilmenira · November 2016

i levelled 2 chars from scratch this year, the last one very recently.
i felt happy with the BROAD POSSIBILITIES all those zones offer to choose from.
with the freedom to take the dailies i feel like.
it's opulence! a feast!

i would not like linear game play.
it is always required in the most recent mod anyway (SKT right now)
and i "have to do" that with several chars... (the ones i really play currently)

on the other side the experience of levelling a new char these weeks
also made me think about actualizing parts of this rich older content a bit.
it's tricky, and OP saw that well.
thank you, @tolkienbuff for bringing it up and reflecting about it!

and as we are here: i would like to thank cryptic for the great improvements of elemental evil.
i did that one 4 times in the last few months and it is so much better than it used to be!
(yes, it used to be hell :-)) ).

loboguild · November 2016

Interesting read, thanks @tolkienbuff

I think it's important to distinct between PVE and PVP here. I couldn't agree more for PVP. The original Gauntlgrym, Open World PVP in Mod 3, Strongholds in Mod 7 all were instant fails or lost relevance over time. You need to find ways to keep them intact and imho the only way to do it is to detach them from the grind. You need a purpose after grinding content for gear to stay with it. Strongholds PVP has no competitive system attached to it, so players are leaving it as soon as they have the gear. And why not, there's nothing more to strive for... The same is largely true for most PVP content. The game lacks a true competitive system that becomes compelling AFTER you have acquired the best possible gear. Otherwise the endgame effectively ends with the grind and leads to empty zones.

I'm not too sure about PVE however. Your system leads to a more structured endgame progression, but it's not like players currently need more barriers thrown their way. I agree it's a bit wild, because you can largely skip old sets and just turn to Underdark / Seals / Trade Bars and then slowly work your way through SKT, but I don't think that's the main issue of PVE right now. Just like PVP most systems and dungeons are just part of the grind and player lack the greater endgame challenge after that. Plus it's actually necessary to cut down old zone relevance because the amount of daily tasks has blown up too much.

ltgamesttv · November 2016

loboguild said:
Interesting read, thanks @tolkienbuff

I think it's important to distinct between PVE and PVP here. I couldn't agree more for PVP. The original Gauntlgrym, Open World PVP in Mod 3, Strongholds in Mod 7 all were instant fails or lost relevance over time. You need to find ways to keep them intact and imho the only way to do it is to detach them from the grind. You need a purpose after grinding content for gear to stay with it. Strongholds PVP has no competitive system attached to it, so players are leaving it as soon as they have the gear. And why not, there's nothing more to strive for... The same is largely true for most PVP content. The game lacks a true competitive system that becomes compelling AFTER you have acquired the best possible gear. Otherwise the endgame effectively ends with the grind and leads to empty zones.

I'm not too sure about PVE however. Your system leads to a more structured endgame progression, but it's not like players currently need more barriers thrown their way. I agree it's a bit wild, because you can largely skip old sets and just turn to Underdark / Seals / Trade Bars and then slowly work your way through SKT, but I don't think that's the main issue of PVE right now. Just like PVP most systems and dungeons are just part of the grind and player lack the greater endgame challenge after that. Plus it's actually necessary to cut down old zone relevance because the amount of daily tasks has blown up too much.

One of my main issues was that the devs spent entire mods tying zones to gear and then giving them relevance by making them BIS for PVP or PVE (or at least intending to with stats). They only recently addressed the issue that the old school CN sets were still relevant and outperforming because of the unintended consequences of the bonuses those sets gave. Now that all sets are really more stats based than bonus based the only gear sets that are relevant are the newest sets. Frostborn/Warborn are P2W and very close to BIS. This change has effectively undermined 9 mods worth of gear and, besides the boons, zones by allowing you to skip to end game essentially since there aren't advancements in levels, only boon progressions.

This is the issue I'm trying to address. It's the idea that they are shooting themselves in the foot by continuing to do this without somehow making this gear/content relevant beyond the grind for boons (or purchasing them if you want to p2w with zen).

Thanks for your time.

ilmenira · November 2016

boons are quite relevant in this game, roughly 2000 of various stats per campaign.
thus each single boon would be equivalent to 1 new enchant slot with a rank 10 enchantment.
and that's what i go for when i level a new char through those campaigns.
it's fun too, and especially it is fun to do this with freedom of choice, without pressure and without linear guidance.
choosing my dailies from a broad menue, and sometimes don't do any at all.

ltgamesttv · November 2016

ilmenira said:
boons are quite relevant in this game, roughly 2000 of various stats per campaign.
thus each single boon would be equivalent to 1 new enchant slot with a rank 10 enchantment.
and that's what i go for when i level a new char through those campaigns.
it's fun too, and especially it is fun to do this with freedom of choice, without pressure and without linear guidance.
choosing my dailies from a broad menue, and sometimes don't do any at all.

I am well aware that boons are relevant and precisely how much they're worth. I don't think anyone here, or anywhere, has ever disagreed with the relevance of boons. It's the gear associated with the zones you go to for your boons that we're discussing here. Then the relevance of those zones after you've achieved the boons.

I understand your preference for a non-linear environment and that's why I was suggesting some other ways of keeping the gear relevant as well as the zones for replay-ability. If you have a suggestion along those lines I'd be glad to hear it.

Thanks for your reply.

Unknown · November 2016

This content has been removed.

armadeonx · November 2016

The stat increases on new gear are so small that older gear is still entirely relevant. I mean, if it wasn't for that pesky new resistance requirement, how many people would grind for the new STK gear? For stat increases of around 70 points (per stat per piece) is it worth the effort? Imo not at all - all the content is entirely doable with Elemental Dragonflight/Drow even if you do take more damage from frost. The real turnoff ofc is that it needs constant maintenance.

The fact people put the gear on to enter FBI then take it off again when through the door should tell the devs everything they need to know. They'd keep the gear on if it didn't need hours worth of effort just to make up for 1 run.

The real sticking point is that everyone knows the gear will not be needed in 3 months, making all that effort a total waste - personally I'm sticking with my previous gear and waiting it out. Which of course goes back to the main point made in the OP.

Personally I'd like to see a system that offers upgrades to existing gear rather than farming out a whole new set every few months. An additive system rather than total replacement. Complete new sets should be more like every 12 months with in-between mods offering enhancements such as Black Ice refining to Elemental.

SKT offering an upgrade for EF resistance to my current gear (that didn't need topping up) would've been a much better idea. Complete the campaign board, open the 'enhancement' ability and make a one time purchase for EF resistance armor enhancement kit (per piece) from the campaign trader.

ltgamesttv · November 2016

etelgrin said:
Yeah would be nice what you wrote, just keep the gear as relevant as new one. It won't mean people won't do new mod at all. Its not like new sets developers released are High Prophet or High Vizier equivalent. I have some of dragonflight gear adjusted with only once in a lifetime released +5% damage against dragons enhancement and I think those could be more popular and some real set bonuses like we had but far less powerful (say stacking 3% debuff for example instead of 10%) you know, people wearing these sets often had specific mindset, they knew how to stack debuffs/buffs to get max out as possible. I'd like to see Tenacity armor kits to allow more variety in gear or enhance tankiness if one likes.

As it is now, I guarantee one thing, as soon as Northern content is done and if you follow as you do now dear Developers all this gear will get salvaged as soon as ANY other new non-decaying gear arrives, even if a bit weaker cause nobody likes to keep voninblod running unless we will be forced to do svardborg and it will have its everblackice resistance kept. Sorry but I also can't understand people who grind for PvE purposes all these lanolins to unlock this mod gear and then even vivifying it sounds to me like someone is crazy it just consumes so much AD/resources/time for such insignificant difference it gives that I still stick to my dragonflight/drowcraft pieces and I only switch to tarmalune tradebar gear for ER if I want to run content then reswitch back cause I won't. I repeat, I won't empower it even once.

Forcing everfrost resist for the new content is a silly way to push the newest gear and keep players preoccupied farming voninblod, noone likes it, it's not content it's a job. Fishing for materials for the new weaponset is equally silly. They are forcing us to spend our gaming hours doing repetitive farming rather than running dungeons for loot.

A suggestion: Keep old content relevant, how to avoid entire mods being made obsolete.

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