Our goal is that scaling will be a thing, but that it is at a place that a random group of people who know the boss mechanics and work together can get through a dungeon successfully and without a lot of issues. On top of that is that there is a range of difficulty from leveling content, to intermediate max level content, to true endgame content.
The bolded part is the problem. See, I am a casual player. I have a day job and actual family responsibilities. My game time is NOT going to be tied up in watching YouTube videos and reading guides just to do a random pug. A person playing a game shouldn't have to do advanced research on boss mechanics to run a standard dungeon. The game should be designed to be able to experience it in game without "spoiling" anything for yourself by doing homework.
I like lore. I like those in-game "WOW" moments where something happens that I didn't expect. Expecting me to have to research how a boss mechanic works in advance because OMG THE BOSS PULLS SOME RIDICULOUS AOE DAMAGE OUT OF ITS BUTT AT THE 4:22 MARK THAT DOESN'T APPEAR ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE GAME AND IF YOU ARE NOT STANDING IN A VERY SPECIFIC AREA OF THE FLOOR YOU WILL DIE isn't "Challenging." That is bad game design.
This is why I stopped playing WOW. Because you can't experience instances and enjoy the moment. You have to treat it like a work assignment and everyone is expected to have just watched a video of where to stand and when to move and which specific "build" you MUST have to be successful, because the boss fights are designed that you must do a very specific set of things to succeed. Which is completely counter to true Dungeons & Dragons which is all about the players thinking on their feet and coming up with ingenuous ways of dealing with events.
Any situation in which a gamer has to go OUTSIDE the game to get information needed to succeed IN the game is bad design. Everything I need to know to succeed should be presented to the gamer IN game, not "Go watch a video on how to do it."
I don't think you need to do a lot of research to be familiar with the boss mechanics. You just have to run through them two or three times to learn them. Unfortunately, here is where you will run into problems that are purely caused by other players. Players who will not allow for people to learn or try to help them. That is the only thing that will drive players to need out of game resources to learn these mechanics.
Now I am going to address those "other players" specifically: If you join a random group, you should expect to be grouped with random people of various knowledge and skill levels. If you are already experienced and skilled and you are not willing to be there to help others then queue with other like-minded people. Don't be a jerk. You should not be expecting everyone in the random queue to already be knowledgeable, skilled and BiS. If you want that every time the only way to guarantee it is to pre-make your own group or join somebody else's. The random queues are for random people. If you don't like it then you are the one who needs to stay out of the random queues. Not the "noobs".
Defending the Sword Coast: Drow outpost, (rescue slaves from the drow) quest is set to have level 81 mobs that are beyond epic encounter strength. completely unplayable with 14K plus toon. Quest is listed at 11K needs a tweek or seven.
Even if these cases of NPC's being OP are fixed, the scaling will never result in fun - will be either too easy or too hard, because you would need a system designed to scale every single stat with each other, and there's no such thing here. After fix will still be the same as without scaling.
Only in ESO I saw a scaling that somehow worked, but they allowed low levels to be scaled up and high level scaled down at the same time, and for example while fighting a mid level boss, the incoming damage also scaled on impact, doing scaled damage while hitting both the low & high level player and received scaled damage as well, allowing any level to play together and contribute like they were same level.
Here just makes no sense, no gain from being scaled down: it's still too easy, kill in 1 hit or 3 is still certain win, or it's too hard, and that doesn't make sense when a higher level player can't kill a lower level monster (while same player can do just fine on his own level). No gain, just huge effort put into a feature that gives nothing good and has a huge cost, both in development time and player frustration leading to quit.
Should be easier to remove scaling, until a proper system is in place that would allow an exact adjustment (1,000 power is way more valuable than any other 2,000 stat for a DPS, but looks like this item system we have doesn't know that). It's enough that the players have to deal with the new nerfed stats, nerfed builds, nerfed companions, no need a broken scaling system to add to this right now.
Oh come on people. All we need to do is have the challenge of who can die the most. Put that lightning enchant in your weapon and armor and see how many trash mobs you can pull to your position. I mean you get scaled to their level and having at least 12 on you well just doesn't get anymore fun than that. Ok so they took a great game and ruined it. But hey these thing happen right?
The reason I want to call out that it isn't planned on being removed is so that feedback can be more focused on the different issues/bugs that need to get fixed.
Translation: "God you people are annoying me. Stop complaining about scaling. It's a flawed system and we know that but it isn't going anywhere so get over it. By the way, you have to learn new playstyles on top of scaling. You probably don't know how to play yet and you're blaming dying on scaling. Git Gud."
My 2 cents: Kudos. You'll continue to tweak the mess you created. It's almost as if that's your job. You had a substantial amount of time to tweak this mess and yet here we are. Still in need of tweaks after numerous complaints throughout every phase.
Did you believe this would go live and the playerbase would have a different view than the numerous players on preview that repeatedly complained about scaling?
blah blah blah blah blah lengthy wall of text I won't quote
Semantics. Few people care about the various forms of scaling at the end of the day. The main complaint is that a high item level player is being nerfed by going back to old content. Most will never like the way you've handled it. A reduction is one thing but making higher level players weaker than lower level is bad design and shortsighted. Being at the cap for endgame content should scale down to the same in lower content. Why reach a cap if it's invalidated the moment you go somewhere else?
Let's use.....you for an example.
You are a dev. You make 100k/year right now (funny I know). But maybe tomorrow I decide that I want to move your desk down the hall to where our Junior Devs work. I'm not demoting you. But I'm going to cut your pay in half because you're in the junior environment now.
Don't complain. This is working as intended. You're working with juniors surrounding you so you'll be paid like one. Maybe in the future we'll look to tweak your pay rate for this zone. If/when you move back down the hall we will reinstate your full salary. Oh and if you take a bathroom break that's our special "No Pay" zone. You can imagine what that does to your "stats".
The reason I want to call out that it isn't planned on being removed is so that feedback can be more focused on the different issues/bugs that need to get fixed.
Translation: "God you people are annoying me. Stop complaining about scaling. It's a flawed system and we know that but it isn't going anywhere so get over it. By the way, you have to learn new playstyles on top of scaling. You probably don't know how to play yet and you're blaming dying on scaling. Git Gud."
My 2 cents: Kudos. You'll continue to tweak the mess you created. It's almost as if that's your job. You had a substantial amount of time to tweak this mess and yet here we are. Still in need of tweaks after numerous complaints throughout every phase.
Did you believe this would go live and the playerbase would have a different view than the numerous players on preview that repeatedly complained about scaling?
blah blah blah blah blah lengthy wall of text I won't quote
Semantics. Few people care about the various forms of scaling at the end of the day. The main complaint is that a high item level player is being nerfed by going back to old content. Most will never like the way you've handled it. A reduction is one thing but making higher level players weaker than lower level is bad design and shortsighted. Being at the cap for endgame content should scale down to the same in lower content. Why reach a cap if it's invalidated the moment you go somewhere else?
Let's use.....you for an example.
You are a dev. You make 100k/year right now (funny I know). But maybe tomorrow I decide that I want to move your desk down the hall to where our Junior Devs work. I'm not demoting you. But I'm going to cut your pay in half because you're in the junior environment now.
Don't complain. This is working as intended. You're working with juniors surrounding you so you'll be paid like one. Maybe in the future we'll look to tweak your pay rate for this zone. If/when you move back down the hall we will reinstate your full salary. Oh and if you take a bathroom break that's our special "No Pay" zone. You can imagine what that does to your "stats".
Pretty sure you wouldn't care for this system.
Nice but I would also add this Even if your a dev in your level appropriate area, lets say an master expedition dungeon. Any bathroom break will be considered a disconnect and you will lose that days pay in full even if you spend less then 30 seconds getting back to work. After all a less than 30 second disconnect makes your players lose all their runes used and one of the 3 daily expedition quest even though it keeps you in the party but you get sent to yawning portal instead of back into the expedition with your party when you log back on.
It's clear now. Crystal clear to me that this game is going to hell.
You lost it. The amount of negativity around the game is through the roof. Your viewboted Gamepedia stream, the lies on chat that you are listening to feedback and the fact that people are actually quitting is proving that you lost it.
9
arazith07Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,719Arc User
This is a bug report sub forum...not a feedback sub forum.
Ok so we've got a scaling value that's an issue. That's easy to fix if they have a grand control number\factor and it's in a configurable like a .ini. A huge issue is the design of that system is flawed and they won't acknowledge it. Player's need room to progress and the scaling doesn't allow that. They need to allow a percentage over the scaling cap. For example; leveling scales to 10,000 power. I have 50,000 power. I get 10% of the extra over cap (number to be changed on balance) so I can progress. I'd get 4000 extra power.
Just played Elol again after the patch - its still awful. No fun and very grindy as an endgame player.
Are all dungeons really going to be like running endgame content? I'm finding it hard to get to grips with the concept as it seems to make this game not make sense any more - everything is geared towards people advancing their characters, but then all the advancement is voided for most of the content. Its like you could just do away with stats, gears, levels, upgrades, companions etc etc and just let people pick a class and a dungeon and go. They would all have fixed powers with fixed stats, as would mobs. You could also skip rewards as there'd be nothing to upgrade anyway.
Apologies in advance for the length of this, I looked for areas to trim down but it all seemed needed for the conversation at hand.
There are technically two types of this. The first is Item Level Scaling, the map has a set item level, there is a chart of adjustments to different objects item levels (gear and enchants are two examples) to bring the player close to the target item level. All of the Epic dungeon queues are setup this way.
Here is the problem with this. It fully discourages folks from upgrading gear. Likewise, there is no advantage whatsoever to upgrading tiers of gear.
For example, lets say the current level 80 weapons are iL 640 for the basic set, 660 for the next tier up, and 700 for the best. Then lets say someone has the bis from a previous mod that is 600. Once you scale to the set item level, you just nullified all sense of progression. It's just a naive design.
You need to scale it such that the 640 weapon is still better than the 600, but worse than the 660. None of these should ever get chopped down to the same level.
Finally, when it comes to enchants, you can't simply scale everyone down to rank 8s. This makes folks with Rank 14s be the same as those with 13, 12s, 11 etc. That is just stupid.
The goal of scaling, can't take precedence over player progression and gains from better gear compared to those with lesser gear.
Just ran a Tomb of the Nine Gods, mobs were fine in terms of difficulty, the mimic 'shell game' puzzle is bugged, the chests move erratically and double up on the platforms. Withers still has too much HP and the attacks are still too strong. Ras Nsi was 1 shotting everyone with any attack that hit us, not sure about his HP as we kept dying.
This was a mostly Endgame group, 21k OP tank, 21k HR, 21k TR, 22k DC healer and a 18k HR
Chill guys the dungeons aren't that bad they are supposed to be chanllenging and we are just not used to it. We either run a group of pre-mades and ignore the rest or you go to randoms and pray you get anything good or you take 42 f'ing mins to complete a simple etos sweating your balls off for 14 f***** thousand ad.
And btw i still say agro is messed up at least for clerics, i haven't seen my agro bar change from red the entire dungeon even when tank also has it or when i'm just using at-wills
I don't know if anyone has been able to finish manycoins skirmish? because i gave up... Still haven't played tiamat after patch but since i din't see anything in the patch notes a assume nothing was done to it.. nDemo is fine now Merchant prince folly is also fine but sometimes the mobs bug at the end and we can't finish the skirmish
on a side note, scaling is a problem, but the real problem will lie in whether or not players will accept to be challenged/have an increased difficulty compared to pre mod 16 but with same junk rewards that do not compensate for the difference.
Reporting a bug: non endgame content is too hard now.
This bug should be fixed, because there is no reason for intermediate content to be so hard. Why is low lvl content has to be hard? Any logic here?
At least fix the healing companions, because you've made them exactly 100 times less efficient (it's not a nerf, it's a complete removal of heals). With companions working again I might be able to actually play this game again (except for the places where I'm instakilled, but I can just abandon/ignore those instances until they are fixed, so no biggie here).
Tried Castle ravenloft and it was a complete farce. I had Divine Challenger feature set to make smite into a taunt, and was using oath strike at-will for threat, yet even when my aggro indicator was red the first boss still went after anyone at all and not me. Secondly when i tried to block Thief of Vitae it still oneshot me through shield. It's utterly ridiculous that you think this in in any state to be released.
Tried Castle ravenloft and it was a complete farce. I had Divine Challenger feature set to make smite into a taunt, and was using oath strike at-will for threat, yet even when my aggro indicator was red the first boss still went after anyone at all and not me. Secondly when i tried to block Thief of Vitae it still oneshot me through shield. It's utterly ridiculous that you think this in in any state to be released.
i agree with that, as a dc i'm getting messed up a LOT, on all the dungeons i ran, the only time i saw my agro bar green was inbetween fights.
I have tried to do Tiamat 6 times. Everyone in the instance except me gets disconnected after we kill the summoners, making a constant merry-go-round of additions to the instance who run boldly in, get one-shotted, die, run back, die, run back, lather, rinse, repeat, until we vote to abandon. Please shut down this instance until it gets fixed. Thanks.
2
isaintify1Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 414Arc User
> A group of friends and I did CN and it was good... The only rough part was the ball phase before the 2nd boss as the zombies hit upwards in the 250ks+. Also have insane resistances. Orcus in CN needs a small buff as he is to easy to kill. 1st boss has way more health than orcus. Took us 50minutes at 18k ilvls. (How it should be)
50 minutes to run CN and you think that is how it ahould be? There is nothing in there worth running for. Reward/ratio isn't worth it, at most that dungeon should be 25 min with a group that just qualifies.
We were 19k Barb Tank (me) 18k TR / 18K SW / 17k HR / 17k SW. We finished it in 50minutes but I am sure if we do it again now knowing what we know + the fix for the zombies at the bubble phase it should only take about 25minutes. But you are right the rewards are garbage and they have been garbage for the last few modules.
Elol: Scorpions have way more hp than they had at past or than the 1st and 3rd boss at current state. Elol: (bug) At final battle with Lostmauth, after the part where boss returns with 50%hp, you get 1-shotted by attacks with no red area all of a sudden. Even my tank who has 400k hp (pre-underscalled, ofc) had zero luck to survive and whole team had to rage quit after 3 attempts.
Throne of dwarven gods: (bug) Hulks are drunk. They break doors or the shield only if they are really close to them. If they charge by far, they do nothing.
Msp: (bug) First boss, Kabal, achieved immortality. He can't be harmed when fireballs are crushed to him.
Valindra's tower: The shades move like they took their steroids and drain your stamina in zero time and you can't escape them.
Master of the hunt: I think in current state is way too easy. I prefer it as it was 1 week ago. Now anything is getting 1-shitted. Boar-ing.
Tiamat: Them devil mobs cut you like butter. It's bad luck if you get Tiamat at RIQ.
Perhaps you just need to give healers (player classes and companions alike) more oomph to their single-target heals and some actual AoE heals that can also give bonus healing to single targets standing inside the AoE when nobody else is around?
Boost the Eye of Lathander to reduce cooldown?
Restore and boost the Phoera, Mystic Phoera, Bulette, Celeste and Angel companions' bonus effects when combined with the Soulforged enchantment?
Maybe add more Phoera-like companions that can boost resurrections further - with a "full-set bonus" or an added "gear/mount affinity" bonus?
Boost the Soulforged enchantment to make it more relevant.
Maybe introduce some new potions, enchantments and rune stones specifically designed to boost healing and increase critical heal chances?
For all classes and companions, introduce better gear or more role-specific craftable gear modifications, such as "Healers' Bastion" that can be applied to armor pieces used by Healer-spec Paladins and Clerics to be more rugged and durable under fire?
I admit that I'm grasping at straws here, but if any of these suggestions can help in some way, how worse can it get?
"Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire." - Sir Bernard Williams
Comments
Now I am going to address those "other players" specifically: If you join a random group, you should expect to be grouped with random people of various knowledge and skill levels. If you are already experienced and skilled and you are not willing to be there to help others then queue with other like-minded people. Don't be a jerk. You should not be expecting everyone in the random queue to already be knowledgeable, skilled and BiS. If you want that every time the only way to guarantee it is to pre-make your own group or join somebody else's. The random queues are for random people. If you don't like it then you are the one who needs to stay out of the random queues. Not the "noobs".
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Only in ESO I saw a scaling that somehow worked, but they allowed low levels to be scaled up and high level scaled down at the same time, and for example while fighting a mid level boss, the incoming damage also scaled on impact, doing scaled damage while hitting both the low & high level player and received scaled damage as well, allowing any level to play together and contribute like they were same level.
Here just makes no sense, no gain from being scaled down: it's still too easy, kill in 1 hit or 3 is still certain win, or it's too hard, and that doesn't make sense when a higher level player can't kill a lower level monster (while same player can do just fine on his own level). No gain, just huge effort put into a feature that gives nothing good and has a huge cost, both in development time and player frustration leading to quit.
Should be easier to remove scaling, until a proper system is in place that would allow an exact adjustment (1,000 power is way more valuable than any other 2,000 stat for a DPS, but looks like this item system we have doesn't know that). It's enough that the players have to deal with the new nerfed stats, nerfed builds, nerfed companions, no need a broken scaling system to add to this right now.
My 2 cents: Kudos. You'll continue to tweak the mess you created. It's almost as if that's your job. You had a substantial amount of time to tweak this mess and yet here we are. Still in need of tweaks after numerous complaints throughout every phase.
Did you believe this would go live and the playerbase would have a different view than the numerous players on preview that repeatedly complained about scaling?
Semantics. Few people care about the various forms of scaling at the end of the day. The main complaint is that a high item level player is being nerfed by going back to old content. Most will never like the way you've handled it. A reduction is one thing but making higher level players weaker than lower level is bad design and shortsighted. Being at the cap for endgame content should scale down to the same in lower content. Why reach a cap if it's invalidated the moment you go somewhere else?
Let's use.....you for an example.
You are a dev. You make 100k/year right now (funny I know). But maybe tomorrow I decide that I want to move your desk down the hall to where our Junior Devs work. I'm not demoting you. But I'm going to cut your pay in half because you're in the junior environment now.
Don't complain. This is working as intended. You're working with juniors surrounding you so you'll be paid like one. Maybe in the future we'll look to tweak your pay rate for this zone. If/when you move back down the hall we will reinstate your full salary. Oh and if you take a bathroom break that's our special "No Pay" zone. You can imagine what that does to your "stats".
Pretty sure you wouldn't care for this system.
It's clear now. Crystal clear to me that this game is going to hell.
You lost it. The amount of negativity around the game is through the roof. Your viewboted Gamepedia stream, the lies on chat that you are listening to feedback and the fact that people are actually quitting is proving that you lost it.
Are all dungeons really going to be like running endgame content? I'm finding it hard to get to grips with the concept as it seems to make this game not make sense any more - everything is geared towards people advancing their characters, but then all the advancement is voided for most of the content. Its like you could just do away with stats, gears, levels, upgrades, companions etc etc and just let people pick a class and a dungeon and go. They would all have fixed powers with fixed stats, as would mobs. You could also skip rewards as there'd be nothing to upgrade anyway.
For example, lets say the current level 80 weapons are iL 640 for the basic set, 660 for the next tier up, and 700 for the best. Then lets say someone has the bis from a previous mod that is 600. Once you scale to the set item level, you just nullified all sense of progression. It's just a naive design.
You need to scale it such that the 640 weapon is still better than the 600, but worse than the 660. None of these should ever get chopped down to the same level.
Finally, when it comes to enchants, you can't simply scale everyone down to rank 8s. This makes folks with Rank 14s be the same as those with 13, 12s, 11 etc. That is just stupid.
The goal of scaling, can't take precedence over player progression and gains from better gear compared to those with lesser gear.
This was a mostly Endgame group, 21k OP tank, 21k HR, 21k TR, 22k DC healer and a 18k HR
We either run a group of pre-mades and ignore the rest or you go to randoms and pray you get anything good or you take 42 f'ing mins to complete a simple etos sweating your balls off for 14 f***** thousand ad.
And btw i still say agro is messed up at least for clerics, i haven't seen my agro bar change from red the entire dungeon even when tank also has it or when i'm just using at-wills
https://imgur.com/iJXMboa
https://imgur.com/152wwSA
I don't know if anyone has been able to finish manycoins skirmish? because i gave up...
Still haven't played tiamat after patch but since i din't see anything in the patch notes a assume nothing was done to it..
nDemo is fine now
Merchant prince folly is also fine but sometimes the mobs bug at the end and we can't finish the skirmish
https://imgur.com/Ddh3J1w
It's hitting for what was probably my hitpoint total in one hit (as I'm sitting at 312.1k HP @ L78).
http://zap-robo.net/
Ras Nsi attacks are on point
This bug should be fixed, because there is no reason for intermediate content to be so hard.
Why is low lvl content has to be hard? Any logic here?
At least fix the healing companions, because you've made them exactly 100 times less efficient (it's not a nerf, it's a complete removal of heals).
With companions working again I might be able to actually play this game again (except for the places where I'm instakilled, but I can just abandon/ignore those instances until they are fixed, so no biggie here).
i can't see them but i get agro, so i assume they get stuck on a building
this is on the far right of the map btw when the dude is repairing the door
also i don't knwo anyone who managed to finish manycoins, the vault always gets destroyed
I had Divine Challenger feature set to make smite into a taunt, and was using oath strike at-will for threat, yet even when my aggro indicator was red the first boss still went after anyone at all and not me. Secondly when i tried to block Thief of Vitae it still oneshot me through shield.
It's utterly ridiculous that you think this in in any state to be released.
i agree with that, as a dc i'm getting messed up a LOT, on all the dungeons i ran, the only time i saw my agro bar green was inbetween fights.
https://imgur.com/Z0NG0nt
Tiamat 04-28-2019. Cheers!
Elol: (bug) At final battle with Lostmauth, after the part where boss returns with 50%hp, you get 1-shotted by attacks with no red area all of a sudden. Even my tank who has 400k hp (pre-underscalled, ofc) had zero luck to survive and whole team had to rage quit after 3 attempts.
Throne of dwarven gods: (bug) Hulks are drunk. They break doors or the shield only if they are really close to them. If they charge by far, they do nothing.
Msp: (bug) First boss, Kabal, achieved immortality. He can't be harmed when fireballs are crushed to him.
Valindra's tower: The shades move like they took their steroids and drain your stamina in zero time and you can't escape them.
Master of the hunt: I think in current state is way too easy. I prefer it as it was 1 week ago. Now anything is getting 1-shitted. Boar-ing.
Tiamat: Them devil mobs cut you like butter. It's bad luck if you get Tiamat at RIQ.
For Healers:
Perhaps you just need to give healers (player classes and companions alike) more oomph to their single-target heals and some actual AoE heals that can also give bonus healing to single targets standing inside the AoE when nobody else is around?
Boost the Eye of Lathander to reduce cooldown?
Restore and boost the Phoera, Mystic Phoera, Bulette, Celeste and Angel companions' bonus effects when combined with the Soulforged enchantment?
Maybe add more Phoera-like companions that can boost resurrections further - with a "full-set bonus" or an added "gear/mount affinity" bonus?
Boost the Soulforged enchantment to make it more relevant.
Maybe introduce some new potions, enchantments and rune stones specifically designed to boost healing and increase critical heal chances?
For all classes and companions, introduce better gear or more role-specific craftable gear modifications, such as "Healers' Bastion" that can be applied to armor pieces used by Healer-spec Paladins and Clerics to be more rugged and durable under fire?
I admit that I'm grasping at straws here, but if any of these suggestions can help in some way, how worse can it get?