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In RE: Scaling Changes from Dev blog 6/8
doriangreigh
Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 707 Arc User
I honestly don't have a good solution but I would like to state the obvious, the whole point of getting geared up is to make your life easier, all scaling is doing is punishing players who have spent time gearing. The money grabs you have in place are your problem, you are trying to balance a game designed around siphoning money from player wallets to be better than most or at max capacity in any given mod.
In all honesty if you would keep your stats and mechanics simple and stop being overly complex your theory of scaling might be easier to translate into reality.
You made enchantments to give players a boost, then designed content around those players that dumped a bankroll on getting max everything to speed run the entire game and average normal people can't participate in. I would think your solution should be to have simple stats that make sense and easily lower those stats but still taking into account that the player who has extremely high stats SHOULD be slightly above the curve for the gear he/she/they have.
I have 14 characters, 10 of which I play to try to keep up, but now days having and average character isn't getting you anywhere, if you are not stat capped max everything go play in old content and do dailies til you vomit and save enough AD to be come max.
The games lacks tanks and clerics, OK so yes this one reason I have a tank and cleric and a paladin (which is pretty much both), i have them pretty close to my main wizard (I have played CW since Mod 2 and frankly is what i enjoy the most but play heal/tank to not only enjoy content in a different capacity but til fill rolls that are needed more than DPS). However the way the game is going I can't keep up several slightly above average characters I feel like I have to pick one and max it out and stay max out forever, of which I have never been a maxed player due to spreading out amongst a wizard, fighter, and healer and sometimes some of the other classes just so i know how to play them.
I agree that you should do something that prevents players from roll stomping and one shoting everything (including bosses). But the scaling being used just feels over the top. Seeing all my hard earned gear that is purple and orange being reduced to the same value of a green piece of gear just makes me laugh and cry at the same time. At least if you are going to scale, make it so that purple gear blue gear has that slight increase over a green equivalent.
I humbly say please stop trying to scale enchants, you put them in the game, if they are so much of an issue remove them entirely and rework your ideas on gear and how players can improve. Sometimes old school mechanics are the best, just based everything on the gear you have not the "extras" you can put in them. Or maybe change enchantments for mods make it so you can't get max stats on every stat but you can choose what items in a gear piece give stats you want to work towards so players can customize play style totally.
I still say keep things simple. And for the love of all that OCD people hold dear, please fix the old artifacts so that they have even numbers again, why on earth did you shave 2 points from two stats and put them in another just so you can see 999 999 1002 and the like instead of a pleasing 1000 1000 1000????
In all honesty if you would keep your stats and mechanics simple and stop being overly complex your theory of scaling might be easier to translate into reality.
You made enchantments to give players a boost, then designed content around those players that dumped a bankroll on getting max everything to speed run the entire game and average normal people can't participate in. I would think your solution should be to have simple stats that make sense and easily lower those stats but still taking into account that the player who has extremely high stats SHOULD be slightly above the curve for the gear he/she/they have.
I have 14 characters, 10 of which I play to try to keep up, but now days having and average character isn't getting you anywhere, if you are not stat capped max everything go play in old content and do dailies til you vomit and save enough AD to be come max.
The games lacks tanks and clerics, OK so yes this one reason I have a tank and cleric and a paladin (which is pretty much both), i have them pretty close to my main wizard (I have played CW since Mod 2 and frankly is what i enjoy the most but play heal/tank to not only enjoy content in a different capacity but til fill rolls that are needed more than DPS). However the way the game is going I can't keep up several slightly above average characters I feel like I have to pick one and max it out and stay max out forever, of which I have never been a maxed player due to spreading out amongst a wizard, fighter, and healer and sometimes some of the other classes just so i know how to play them.
I agree that you should do something that prevents players from roll stomping and one shoting everything (including bosses). But the scaling being used just feels over the top. Seeing all my hard earned gear that is purple and orange being reduced to the same value of a green piece of gear just makes me laugh and cry at the same time. At least if you are going to scale, make it so that purple gear blue gear has that slight increase over a green equivalent.
I humbly say please stop trying to scale enchants, you put them in the game, if they are so much of an issue remove them entirely and rework your ideas on gear and how players can improve. Sometimes old school mechanics are the best, just based everything on the gear you have not the "extras" you can put in them. Or maybe change enchantments for mods make it so you can't get max stats on every stat but you can choose what items in a gear piece give stats you want to work towards so players can customize play style totally.
I still say keep things simple. And for the love of all that OCD people hold dear, please fix the old artifacts so that they have even numbers again, why on earth did you shave 2 points from two stats and put them in another just so you can see 999 999 1002 and the like instead of a pleasing 1000 1000 1000????
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Comments
To add to the issue (as mentioned in another post here), the incentive for high level players to go into levelling dungeons was to grab the AD at the end. The problem with that was that being over powered, players quickly realised they could speed run a dungeon in minutes, grab the AD and either farm the dungeon again repeatedly or move onto another source of AD. This resulted in levelling players (who either couldn't speed run or just wanted to explore a dungeon a bit) complaining about the speed runs.
I think on top of that, when mod 16 came along and the level cap went up, I think Cryptic thought introducing scaling across the board would help prevent legacy campaign areas becoming devalued as you'd have to work just as hard in them as if you were still level 70.
To be honest, in some ways I get the impression Cryptic genuinely thought players would appreciate keeping dungeons challenging. I am not convinced they really thought through that players want to be over powered (improving your character is kind of the point of the game) and that if they have to work at content, they expect to be handsomely rewarded for their efforts (as we know, legacy content and dungeons never received an update to the rewards they gave).
One of the issues Cryptic constantly face, but seem to be finding challenging, is achieving that sweet spot between keeping new levelling players happy and also end game players happy.
https://forum.arcgames.com/neverwinter/categories/collaborative-development-program
and it looked like it was picked up by the Devs at the time in a summary... but here we are with yet another change to that bloody scaling system, while there seem to be no word on any improvements brought to the reward system in general too.
For starters i'd suggest to remove the scaling from any "max. level" (Hell Pit for example) content, and then come up with a system where a player can only deal a specific percentage of damage to a target with one attack inside "lower level" content. That percentage could be higher for "trash mobs" while also being lower for "bosses" to keep events/dungeon/skirmish runs challenging but not frustrating, while also not deminishing any progress the player has made through reducing their hard earned stats.
I know, in the end this would also be just another kind of limitation, but perhaps this one might be easier to develop and maintain from now towards future modules?
And no offense, but it's starting to look like they'll not going to find the right spot for this player stats scaling thingy any time soon, so why not try to attack this "problem" from a different angle instead?