Basing Solo Progression on HE's is not Future-Proof

fritz · April 2023

Ever since Dragonbone Vale there seems to be a tendency to hard-cap solo content behind HE's in a way that I think is not future-proof. It basically makes some stuff too hard to achieve while it's still relevant. In Dragonbone Vale the only viable option to get a faction up to level 5 was doing an insane amount of HEs. Sure it's only cosmetics but level 4 gives you three pieces of companion equipment that could certainly come in handy (later pieces have better item levels but cost ADs).

In Northdark Reaches you need to complete a bunch of BHEs for your weapons, and you need tons of currency for boons and the belt item. Now in Menzo getting your hands at one of the new Enchantments is closely tied to running HEs into the ground. This is all fine when you start out a module with everyone else and be able to benefit from the large HE trains that usually trample through for at least a couple months. But if you're late? In case you are genuinely trying to complete HE's for legacy quests you know the pain. At best it's a long wait, at worst there simply won't be enough players to complete the content. Maybe you have friends, guildies, etc. to help you out, but we're talking solo content so that shouldn't be mandatory.

In both Dragonbone Vale as well as Northdark I wisely capped currency as early as possible on as many characters as possible because I knew doing Heroics would get substantially harder down the road. Dragonbone Vale is already a full stop, Northdark Reaches will follow at some point. I think there has to be a way to get more currency outside Heroics to prepare for the inevitable time when the big trains will be gone. I think solo-able weeklies that give a good amount of currency like Valhennas are a good bet here, because that way it becomes a slow grind and not an impossible grind. HEs should be an uncapped resource of currency but not the only reasonable one.

plasticbat · April 2023

fritz#8093 said:
In Dragonbone Vale the only viable option to get a faction up to level 5 was doing an insane amount of HEs.

I played 9 toons and they all got all 3 fractions to level 5. They did not do much HE except the amount needed for weekly quest. They got their fraction done by doing quests and dragonsight.

fritz#8093 said:

In Northdark Reaches you need to complete a bunch of BHEs for your weapons

Which weapon need to complete a bunch of BHE to get?
Coins can be obtained from quest. You only need one spore to buy.

arazith07 · April 2023

Who says these are meant for solo players? It's an MMO, interacting with others, even if only to happen to be side by side while doing a Heroic Encounter or questing is part of the game. If the items are worth getting, there will be others you can group up with.

rikitaki · April 2023

plasticbat said:

fritz#8093 said:

In Northdark Reaches you need to complete a bunch of BHEs for your weapons
Which weapon need to complete a bunch of BHE to get?
Coins can be obtained from quest. You only need one spore to buy.

It is the quest to upgrade the weapon set - 4 purple worms. You might not know about it, 2 out of 3 of my chars there did not get the quest at all.:D

ksell · April 2023

arazith07 said:
Who says these are meant for solo players? It's an MMO, interacting with others, even if only to happen to be side by side while doing a Heroic Encounter or questing is part of the game. If the items are worth getting, there will be others you can group up with.

hard to get full party for HEs when there are like 2 peps with u included; not like everyone using chat or respond to msg

fritz · April 2023

plasticbat said:

I played 9 toons and they all got all 3 fractions to level 5. They did not do much HE except the amount needed for weekly quest. They got their fraction done by doing quests and dragonsight.

Congrats, but this is way out of the scope of what I would call reasonable. I'm not sure what you've been doing but we're taking thousands of quests and Dragonsights across nine characters I would assume. That's upper 0.5% type of dedication and not a very good example of how most people interact with the campaign.

arazith07 said:
Who says these are meant for solo players? It's an MMO, interacting with others, even if only to happen to be side by side while doing a Heroic Encounter or questing is part of the game. If the items are worth getting, there will be others you can group up with.

That's true and maybe the value of the items will indeed draw more people than I anticipate. Nonetheless HEs imho should be a farm mechanic that has little impact on progression. I'm always coming back to Valhennas which offered enough currency through dailies and weeklies and allowed players to farm as much as they'd like through Insurgencies and HEs. There's plenty of group content you can play with your friends. Campaigns shouldn't be gated in such a way. I know Cryptic likes to mix it up but they sometimes do it in weird ways that does not make sense at all and throws obstacles at players that simply aren't necessary.

plasticbat · April 2023

rikitaki said:

plasticbat said:

fritz#8093 said:

In Northdark Reaches you need to complete a bunch of BHEs for your weapons
Which weapon need to complete a bunch of BHE to get?
Coins can be obtained from quest. You only need one spore to buy.
It is the quest to upgrade the weapon set - 4 purple worms. You might not know about it, 2 out of 3 of my chars there did not get the quest at all.:D

Well, actually, all my toon got that through that route. Yes, you are right, I forgot.
Yes, if you try to get that through the quest, you will need to do the worms.
However, you can also just purchase it from the store.
Of course, as usual, I could be missing something too.

plasticbat · April 2023

fritz#8093 said:

plasticbat said:

I played 9 toons and they all got all 3 fractions to level 5. They did not do much HE except the amount needed for weekly quest. They got their fraction done by doing quests and dragonsight.
Congrats, but this is way out of the scope of what I would call reasonable. I'm not sure what you've been doing but we're taking thousands of quests and Dragonsights across nine characters I would assume. That's upper 0.5% type of dedication and not a very good example of how most people interact with the campaign.

Well, not really. It will take longer to do HE. The quests are fast if you can stream line that (i.e. doing things that can cover multiple quests). Way faster than doing HE train in my opinion. It does not need thousands of quests or Dragonsights. In addition, easy to solo. Yes, small HE is also easy to solo. Yes, I still did extra small HE if doing that could fulfil the fraction quests in the process.

After I got 3 fractions of level 5, I still have tons of unused (wasted) Dragon's Jewels.

This is one of the characters:

theelusiveone · April 2023

plasticbat said:

rikitaki said:

plasticbat said:

fritz#8093 said:

In Northdark Reaches you need to complete a bunch of BHEs for your weapons
Which weapon need to complete a bunch of BHE to get?
Coins can be obtained from quest. You only need one spore to buy.
It is the quest to upgrade the weapon set - 4 purple worms. You might not know about it, 2 out of 3 of my chars there did not get the quest at all.:D
Well, actually, all my toon got that through that route. Yes, you are right, I forgot.
Yes, if you try to get that through the quest, you will need to do the worms.
However, you can also just purchase it from the store.
Of course, as usual, I could be missing something too.

And I call bulls... You can't buy them from the store until you unlock them.
So you have to go through the quests to get them first.

plasticbat · April 2023

theelusiveone#4954 said:

plasticbat said:

rikitaki said:

plasticbat said:

fritz#8093 said:

In Northdark Reaches you need to complete a bunch of BHEs for your weapons
Which weapon need to complete a bunch of BHE to get?
Coins can be obtained from quest. You only need one spore to buy.
It is the quest to upgrade the weapon set - 4 purple worms. You might not know about it, 2 out of 3 of my chars there did not get the quest at all.:D
Well, actually, all my toon got that through that route. Yes, you are right, I forgot.
Yes, if you try to get that through the quest, you will need to do the worms.
However, you can also just purchase it from the store.
Of course, as usual, I could be missing something too.

And I call bulls... You can't buy them from the store until you unlock them.
So you have to go through the quests to get them first.

Fair enough. I guess I missed something.

rockster · April 2023

arazith07 said:
Who says these are meant for solo players? It's an MMO, interacting with others, even if only to happen to be side by side while doing a Heroic Encounter or questing is part of the game. If the items are worth getting, there will be others you can group up with.

There are lots of players in the game (and always have been) who are either not in a guild or in a dead guild or in a solo guild and most of their content is done solo as well. The only time they see a party or group is probably during their daily randoms. For those players, for certain content, they need to rely on having enough people in an instance randomly, in order to group up and get it done. The two Soshenstar BHEs come to mind. If the instance is dead or no-one responds to a call, you cannot complete the content.

fritz · April 2023

I think it's generally hard for folks to step outside their bubble and see the game through the eyes of different player types. I have characters and accounts in different guilds and alliances and the amount of players that give up on certain grinds because they do feel it's completely unreachable for them is noticeable. Like if you have only 1-2 hours to play and have to wait 30 minutes for a HE to pop or trying to figure out how to assemble players to help with a simple campaign quests that's a red flag.

plasticbat said:

Well, not really. It will take longer to do HE. The quests are fast if you can stream line that (i.e. doing things that can cover multiple quests). Way faster than doing HE train in my opinion. It does not need thousands of quests or Dragonsights. In addition, easy to solo. Yes, small HE is also easy to solo. Yes, I still did extra small HE if doing that could fulfil the fraction quests in the process.

After I got 3 fractions of level 5, I still have tons of unused (wasted) Dragon's Jewels.

This is one of the characters:

Rank 5 is around 2k reputation iirc. So you're saying you've got nine maxed characters which means you've farmed 54,000k reputation. A quest gives 4 reputation with the faction bonus, a HE as well. Coffers give 3.6 per on average, let's make it four as well. That means you've done up to 13,500 quests, HEs, and Coffers minus a few weeklies and some extra. Scaleblight quests give six per but I'd advise not to unlock them to keep all quests in the basic areas. Going back and forth between the Summit costs too much time.

Really the best way to do this was zerging a train (HEs give reputation for all factions) and in between short breaks do Coffers and questing. And you still needed to do hundreds for a single char. Without the train you need to do close to 400 quests and coffers to get to one level 4. It's possible but my goodness.

plasticbat · April 2023

fritz#8093 said:

Rank 5 is around 2k reputation iirc. So you're saying you've got nine maxed characters which means you've farmed 54,000k reputation. A quest gives 4 reputation with the faction bonus, a HE as well. Coffers give 3.6 per on average, let's make it four as well. That means you've done up to 13,500 quests, HEs, and Coffers minus a few weeklies and some extra. Scaleblight quests give six per but I'd advise not to unlock them to keep all quests in the basic areas. Going back and forth between the Summit costs too much time.

Really the best way to do this was zerging a train (HEs give reputation for all factions) and in between short breaks do Coffers and questing. And you still needed to do hundreds for a single char. Without the train you need to do close to 400 quests and coffers to get to one level 4. It's possible but my goodness.

Honestly, I don't really know how much reputation each rank needs. It does not show the numbers. Each rank seems to be the same amount of reputation to me. I did not feel doing rank 5 took longer than (say) rank 1. Of course, 'feeling' is not a fact.

Where do you get the numbers of each rank?

I don't even consider I was grinding for reputation but grinding for alloy. I basically just did the weekly for every toon and did certain fraction quests here and there. I mainly did Dragonsight which has a timer.

I don't think I did 54 millions reputation. I don't even think I did 54000 reputation.

fritz · April 2023

Well you can guess the amount of reputation by spending lots of gems and see how much the bar moves (they do not get boosted by the chosen faction). Maybe it's not 2k, but 1.5k. We did this estimation a long time ago.

Rank 1 is 100
Rank 2 is 300
Rank 3 is 600
Rank 4 is 1000
Rank 5 is 1500

So yes, Rank 5 does take substantially longer than Rank 1. No offense but your perception of how "easy" it is to rank up Dragonbone Vale without HEs simple seems to be wrong (even if you take 1.5k reputation and not 2k). Maybe it felt easier back in the day, but if you've maxed nine characters you've literally done thousands of quests, HEs, and coffers. And again, taking HE trains out makes it substantially harder.

plasticbat · April 2023

fritz#8093 said:

So yes, Rank 5 does take substantially longer than Rank 1. No offense but your perception of how "easy" it is to rank up Dragonbone Vale without HEs simple seems to be wrong (even if you take 1.5k reputation and not 2k). Maybe it felt easier back in the day, but if you've maxed nine characters you've literally done thousands of quests, HEs, and coffers. And again, taking HE trains out makes it substantially harder.

You are probably right because I did not pay much attention to the fraction progress. My attention was on getting alloy. The most I did probably was Dragonsight while getting other quests done on the route. Fraction progress was just icing to me. It was done on its own with tons of Dragon's Jewels left over. As a side effect, that could be my perception that it was 'easy' because in my mind I did not spend much effort on that (directly).

fritz · April 2023

I didn't want to diminish your achievements btw. I think it's amazing somebody got nine characters to max in the Vale. I did one to 3x level 5 and then a couple others to 1x 4 to get the companion gear and then stopped to bother because it's just such a grind without that much reward. Either way, the best way to get to level 5 was 500-ish Heroic Encounters, which is do-able but still a pain. You can probably do one every two minutes with a potent train, making it roughly a 16-hour task.

I'm not sure how many quests and coffers you can do, but coffers are time-gated anyway and quests probably take closer to five minutes per completion and only contribute to one faction. So we're probably talking 80-100 hours to get all rank 5, five to six times longer. The calculation for Northdark might be a bit more friendly, but HE trains are the best way to get currency there as well.

plasticbat · April 2023

fritz#8093 said:
I didn't want to diminish your achievements btw. I think it's amazing somebody got nine characters to max in the Vale. I did one to 3x level 5 and then a couple others to 1x 4 to get the companion gear and then stopped to bother because it's just such a grind without that much reward. Either way, the best way to get to level 5 was 500-ish Heroic Encounters, which is do-able but still a pain. You can probably do one every two minutes with a potent train, making it roughly a 16-hour task.

I'm not sure how many quests and coffers you can do, but coffers are time-gated anyway and quests probably take closer to five minutes per completion and only contribute to one faction. So we're probably talking 80-100 hours to get all rank 5, five to six times longer. The calculation for Northdark might be a bit more friendly, but HE trains are the best way to get currency there as well.

I really cannot figure out what I did. I don't think I did 500 HE combined (for all 9 characters). I don't recall I spend too much time on it for 9 characters combined. I did not like to do HE train because it spend too much time travelling, gathering people, waiting for people, begging for +train, jumping instance, etc. For me, that is the grind.

I could complete multiple quests when I consolidated the effort to do (say) one thing. e.g. I could choose to do a HE when I could also complete 'kill N something', 'pick up something' quests, etc. I tried not to spend time to fight to complete the quest. i.e. I picked up stuff from the place other players already cleared the area. I had no hurry to complete fraction quest. I could come back later if my route dictated that.

My main goal was to do Dragonsight, mini boss and then, on its route, tried to complete quests as little effort as possible. I was not eager to complete fraction quests. I just did them when it was convenient and time efficient.

May be the weekly quests contributed too.

Yes, Dragonsight is time gated, 1 hour. Hence, when I had done 12 dragonsight with one character, I moved to the next character. The fraction quest did not take me 5 minutes. One could spend that much time if one concentrates to do one at a time in full effort (spend time on travelling, fighting, etc). I spend as little time as possible because I was doing that as 'part time', a side job. My Dragonsight/mini-boss route + whatever available on the route dictated what I could do with fraction quests.

ncognito1959 · April 2023

> @"fritz#8093" said:
> In Northdark Reaches you need to complete a bunch of BHEs for your weapons, and you need tons of currency for boons and the belt item. Now in Menzo getting your hands at one of the new Enchantments is closely tied to running HEs into the ground. This is all fine when you start out a module with everyone else and be able to benefit from the large HE trains that usually trample through for at least a couple months. But if you're late?
>

You have a very valid concern and it is one of the biggest problems in the game. No offense to the other people that replied to you, but they do not understand what happened in the past. Let me explain.

When Cryptic got the contract to make Magic Legends they took resources away from Neverwinter. All three games, STO, Neverwinter and Magic Legends shared the "core team" for their games. Neverwinter content needed to be made with much less resources. Fast forward to a Reddit Dev AMA sometime after that and we got our answer as to why this game is so reliant on Heroic Encounters despite the fact that they cause so many problems as you have stated. Here is what the Cryptic dev said:

"It takes us less than 1/8 the time to make a Heroic Encounter than it does to make a Skirmish or Dungeon"

Let that statement sink in. If you had queueable skirmishes and dungeons with each mod, in addition to bringing back all the ones that were removed, you wouldn't have to worry about running out of people to play with. Queueable group content is forever, but it is easier to make Heroics, so that is what they do.

trinity706 · June 2023

Mod 25 (Menzoberranzan) seems to have gotten it "right".

The only things that require group content (RTQ and ADQ for seals of the dragon) are the boons and the donation task. Pretty much everything else can be obtained outside of queued group content, including the character equipment (excluding the Mythic Dark Maiden upgrade set). This type of format is fairly decent compared to Mod 24 (Northdark Reaches) where the character equipment and spider totem task requires currency from queued content.

- The Drow Glyphs of Warding drop from HE's and quests.
- The Menzoberranzan Elite sigils drop from elite mobs that can be soloed.

Both of the above currencies are readily available even to solo type players that come into the content later on down the line and even if the zone isn't as populated for effective HE farms.

melotai · June 2023

Yes, but the content being presented is boring. Basically once I finish the quest line I do not feel motivated at all to even get the last boon for my main or other items available in the new campaign. A major part of it is that I do not have any 80K toons and barely have three 75K ones to even do the end game content so whatever items I may want cannot be gotten anyways and I consider it pointless to even try.

Dragonbone Vale appears to be the last mod where I am still active with my alts where as the others after that one I stopped doing the other mods that came after as soon as I maxed out the campaign currency and while I have made the effort to prepare my Alts for the Dragonslayer campaign by upgrading the mods I care about to T3 I have not actually done anything else with them.

Currently, doing the event on all ten toons for the new legendary mount mostly and if I happen to have enough then War Drum Ogre.

Not sure what I did last year but for some reason none of my toons have any left over figurines so probably no jubilee unicorn this year. At least none of my toons has gotten any extra figurines from opening that bounty stuff unless it is something you can only get from the hospitality thingies of which I have not opened any.

Instead, I have been finishing up some older content for my Alts and for some reason took the time to upgrade a few more workshops to rank 4.

trinity706 · June 2023

Last year the figurines had an expiration timer on their tooltip that expired not too long after the event was over. This year personally haven't seen the same tooltip on the figurines so they may be permanent until use now...

Figurines can drop for you when someone uses a hospitality "beer" on you if you yourself have used a "high" number of beers on others. Personally started getting figurines after having used around 100 beers on others.

Basing Solo Progression on HE's is not Future-Proof

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