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Character Progression vs Content
tripsofthrymr
Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 1,625 Community Moderator
With every software development team, resources must be allocated. Only a fraction of features that the team wants to deliver can be worked on.
This is a plea to focus those efforts on creating new, challenging content rather than continuing the character power escalation we have seen in recent modules.
I understand that giving characters new artifacts to acquire (and to level!), and new boons to chase creates a system where players will repeat the same content (dailies) over and over, for the sake of having a stronger character.
However, content is now so easy and seasoned players so powerful that all PVE content is trivial for them. Case in point: During today's server outage, we lost three at Draco. A random DC and I almost beat the wyrm. My character is far from the most powerful in the game. Tiamat is also a cake walk if you get the right team in place. I'm 12 for 12 using the NW_Legit_Community timer.
Most content has also been rendered pointless for established players leveling alts. Why run Frozen Heart 30 times when I can buy the piece I want from the AH for next-to-nothing. Purples, and even artifact gear, drops like candy these days.
New players that have not learned how to generate AD, or who just want to experience the T1/T2 content for the first time, will find it difficult to find experienced players to join them. Other than grind-for-salvage, there's really not much point (for mains or alts).
Please, stop investing development cycles in power escalation and all of the tuning/refining inherent in that. Invest those cycles in unique and challenging content, and perhaps in re-invigorating the older content.
Thank you for your attention.
This is a plea to focus those efforts on creating new, challenging content rather than continuing the character power escalation we have seen in recent modules.
I understand that giving characters new artifacts to acquire (and to level!), and new boons to chase creates a system where players will repeat the same content (dailies) over and over, for the sake of having a stronger character.
However, content is now so easy and seasoned players so powerful that all PVE content is trivial for them. Case in point: During today's server outage, we lost three at Draco. A random DC and I almost beat the wyrm. My character is far from the most powerful in the game. Tiamat is also a cake walk if you get the right team in place. I'm 12 for 12 using the NW_Legit_Community timer.
Most content has also been rendered pointless for established players leveling alts. Why run Frozen Heart 30 times when I can buy the piece I want from the AH for next-to-nothing. Purples, and even artifact gear, drops like candy these days.
New players that have not learned how to generate AD, or who just want to experience the T1/T2 content for the first time, will find it difficult to find experienced players to join them. Other than grind-for-salvage, there's really not much point (for mains or alts).
Please, stop investing development cycles in power escalation and all of the tuning/refining inherent in that. Invest those cycles in unique and challenging content, and perhaps in re-invigorating the older content.
Thank you for your attention.
Caritas Guild Founder (Greycloak Alliance)
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
Post edited by tripsofthrymr on
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Here are a few ideas I have:
1. Add more boons, but along with them, add a boon-slot system, where players simply must choose a set number of boons that are actually active at any one time - so let's say you had 6 boon slots. You can place any six boons you want in there, and only those 6 are actually active at any given time. You can now add as many new and varied boons that you like, but you won't be able to have all active at the same time.
2. Add new features as a reward for completing new content. For instance, what if one bonus was a new quick-power-tray, which can be switched to quickly and easily, (all powers would be placed on cooldown to prevent exploitation). Another desirable feature would be one where you could apply multiple appearance transmutes to a single item, and change between them, for free, anytime you want, (if the appearance item is not a free-to-transmute one, you'd still have to pay to unlock that appearance).
"Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both?" -Tony Stark
Official NW_Legit_Community Forums
That is certainly the road well traveled. However, at least with Neverwinter, there's not much to do with the impressive power other than PVP (which is itself severely limited). More interesting and varied content is needed to prevent people from hopping off the treadmill for lack of a point to all that power.
I like your ideas. Slotting boons is similar to what they have done with the artifact offhand (except the OH is an AD sink rather than a time sink). That thought increases flexibility without necessarily increasing overall power. If all content continues to be beatable with the same formula, though, people will just unlock the optimal boons. I have exactly two power configurations for my HR: One for PVP, and one for PVE. Varied strategies are just not needed with the current content.
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
I'm not suggesting that anything be removed. I'm suggesting that development focus on creating new content equal to character power, rather than adding even more power.
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
I would love to see, even if just as an experiment, that the devs try adding some enemies that use different scripting/AI and powers - like add a bunch of enemies that buff their allies and debuff players, try to flank, use lots of mezzes, and so forth. Move away from just adding more HP and damage to enemies, and instead make them a genuine challenge. Also, please no more "special damage" that we need different gear to resist, (like Black ice gear).
"Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both?" -Tony Stark
Official NW_Legit_Community Forums
One thing I agree with is the power creep. I hate seeing it, but really being brutally honest, it's pretty much negligible in NWO compared to some of PWE's other titles (I'm not forced to spend $10,000 USD + on endgame gear that lets me solo literally all content, and breaks PVP so completely that it becomes a complete waste of time).
On the other hand... Lesser geared players still struggle to get their T2 gear if they don't just buy it with zen/farm AD to buy it, because the T2 dungeons are pretty **** hard for players in T1 gear.
Then, there's the third hand. PVP. I am quite sad by PVP in NWO. There's two Dom maps, GG PVP, and IWD open world PVP. There are several issues here.
1) Balance. TR's LOLfaceroll while invisible. Watching a 9k GS TR repeatedly faceroll an ENTIRE TEAM, solo, on a cap pad, where the other team has 18, 19, and 21k players, is unacceptable. There literally is no skill in permastealthing. Perma-anything needs to go. Stealth needs to drop instantly on the first hit, skills that last several seconds need to break stealth instantly, and there needs to be a nerf of perma-shields, and stupendous nuke-healing for DC's. Yeah, it's fun to be a TR and LOLWAT faceroll, to be a DC and nuke heal your team from 3 HP back to full health instantly, and GF's to just stand on a cap pad, immune to almost all damage indefinitely, but it makes the other classes worthless. Why play a CW and level up, buy gear, grind, whatever, when you can do so MUCH faster with a GF, DC, or TR?
2) Open world PVP in IWD is kinda lame. I get that it's an instance, but really, it comes down to getting oneshot by TR's you never knew were there repeatedly, running into a completely unkillable DC, or a GF that can literally stand behind a brick wall permanently. I did open world PVP once on my HR. Total waste of time. I ran into a DC, who I couldn't kill. A TR oneshot me 5 times before I gave up and changed instances. I ran into a GF that was immune to anything I could conceivably do. I do IWD on my TR and that's it. Fix it.
3) GG PVP is lame. It's a bunch of people running in circles capping points, until one team MASSIVELY overpowers the other team, and baselocks them. The number of non-movers (people who stand at the spawn point the ENTIRE match) is really variable, but I've seen 10 people doing this in a single match before. This can be fixed very easily. If you have 0 kills, 0 assists, and 0 deaths, no reward.
4) People are cheating the PVP dom rankings. There are a LARGE number of people who intentionally glitch out of Dom when they realize there's even a CHANCE the other team can win. These people end up having tons and tons and tons of wins, kills, assists, but very few deaths, and NO losses at all. I went against a team, in Dom, consisting of the 5 people on page 1 of the Dom standings list. My team, a Pug, had better skill (they out-geared us by a huge amount!), and when we were at 500-475, the other team vanished. We won. Not a single person on the other team had a loss listed, period, on their pvp standings. Unfair? Yes. I've filed tickets, which have all been roundfiled.
5) Game modes. PVP has 3 modes, Dom, GG PVP, and IWD open world. That's a whopping 5 total maps, in 5 separate instances, for PVP. Why not a capture the flag? Team Deathmatch? Last one standing? 5v5v5v5? 10v10?
In some ways, it's already friendly than STO, where you need to only gear up your character and your pets, instead of your character, away team members, and ships. In other ways, STO is better, since after you complete a reputation track on one character, you can generate a token to use on the same account for other characters that will take them half the time to reach the max tier of reputation / boons. Cryptic allowing people to respec boons for free when in a safe zone might be done, since it's already that way now in STO, when it didn't use to be. Cryptic's plan there, though, backfired when they put in the massive amount of grind and scaled back XP rewards along with just boosting enemy HP and damage on higher levels of difficulty. Right now, I'm content with how progression is, even though I just started playing the game not too long ago, and just hit 12k GS exactly with pet buffs. Even without that, ground combat here is more entertaining atm than in STO since all I'm doing there is running the same 2 or 3 elite grounds if I even feel like playing, in order to sink the equivalent of ~100 USD game currency into a single ship to get at least the gear up to max level, possibly even more if I want to upgrade the gear's rarity, too. Take that, multiplied by at least 4-8 ships per character that each player has that they played with before their new release, and each person has at least 3 characters, one in each faction, and you can see why the player base grumbles.
If it's the same in Neverwinter, I'll probably get bored with that, too, and switch on over to another game. There's better ones out there that don't focus on pure DPS for PvE content. At least Neverwinter is fun for PvP atm.
They want fast income, by milking. I don't see why all of a sudden they will "help the game" and not themselves.
I posted many times ideas to MAKE MONEY without destroying the game (...housing ... guild castles), they don't care because it envolves more resources (more investment), they just want to gather the little they sow.
I don't PvP, but the issues you point out with PvP sound totally valid and collectively are one of the reasons I don't PvP (the other being I have zero competitive streak, which no dev can fix). The only thing is, adjusting classes too much would start to ruin everyone's day in PvE again; the TR changes, for example, have made it actually fun to play my TR again because I can strategize with his new feats/stealth mechanics, and not die constantly unless I just do something stupid or can't see through ground splats. The same goes for my DC -- it's actually viable to play solo through campaign zones with her now, whereas before IWD used to make me want to beat my head against my desk. Though my only gripe with my DC is that sometimes stuff dies *too* fast now.
The point is that we need to realize that the encounters, stats, gear, etc. we have are well-suited for PvE where we're mostly mashing minions that are supposed to be less powerful than us, or fighting bosses that are supposed to be more powerful than us. They just don't work when we're supposed to be fighting other players who should be relatively equal in power (ignoring differences in GS and playstyle). Tenacity was supposed to be a step toward evening things out in PvP without messing up PvE, but it sounds like it's not going far enough. It seems to me that we need to change how classes work in PvP (damage, stamina, control durations, etc.) without applying the changes to PvE. They're too different of systems for changes in one to work well with the other.
Kaylee Krankenwagen, level 60 GF | Tavandruil Wayfinder, level 49 GWF | Aldith Langley, level 51 HR
That, and it seems like the current artifact gear pigeonholes characters into specific builds. Like the active bonus on one artifact set? Too bad -- it has an ability score that's worse than useless for your class, so it's stupid to choose anything other than That Artifact Everyone Else Has because it has the most useful ability score for your class.
What I really enjoy in a game is more adventure zones, more places to explore, more environments with unique goings-on, more storytelling, more immersion. I really love IWD, for example, because it's a whole new area to explore with a whole new culture and backstory to it. I was hoping IWD would get expanded with future mods because it's just a great place, but with the direction ToD is going, I don't think that's going to happen now, unfortunately.
Kaylee Krankenwagen, level 60 GF | Tavandruil Wayfinder, level 49 GWF | Aldith Langley, level 51 HR
Actually, classes can be nerfed just in PVP. There are different combat attack and defense modifiers for PVP. It would be easy to make TR's oneshot everyone with every shot, or make GF's be a oneshot to everyone, without effecting PVE.
For artifacts... There isn't an aftifact to boost the at-will I use the most on my TR, so I just used the first one that dropped for her. Screw builds, I did what I wanted to do. I went for pure damage, screw stealth. I'm deli meat for permastealth TR's, but I can easily oneshot them if I can see them. I can also kill DC's using a pretty well rehearsed skill chain. Only times I use stealth are to get the massive damage boost for lashing to finish someone off, or to avoid other TR's.
For Tenacity gear... It's mostly useless. The Profound set is an exception, as is the final tier of BI (corrupt or purified), but most gear with Tenacity gives up too much to get it. A chest for level 55 without tenacity would have stats like: 400 Power, 150 Crit, 250 defense. Tenacity gear would be: 300 Power, 100 Crit, 200 Defense, 200 Tenacity. Yeah, you tain a ton of tenacity, but from running both pieces in Domination, the first one would be more beneficial. Tenacity doesn't appear to even DO anything.
And, your second post, which I'm too lazy to quote.
I'm a gear w****. I played PWI for years, just because I wanted more gear. I farmed the legendary low level gear, I obtained the rarest of the rare (The Penetrator bow, there were like, maybe, 6 of them made from molds, which are resellable, and I have two of them). Yet even I am getting bored with the constant dailies to get gear in NWO. >_> Once you get Artifacts and artifact equipment, you then have to dump TONS of resources into RP for it. Quite boring, or expensive. This is where NW starts to get into pay to win territory. I can spend hours and hours and hours grinding for RP for my artifact belt, or I can dump $200 in on my credit card, convert to AD, and just buy the RP needed. Enchants are the same. You either spend a ton of time grinding for the resources to level them up, or you gotta pay $$$ to do it rather quickly. I don't mind putting in a dollar now and then, but seriously, I have 11 characters. If I wanted legendary gear on all of them, main hand, offhand, neck, and belt, that's an awful lot of money. Like keep Cryptic's servers up for a year money. For now, I'm just focusing on one at a time, but even then, it takes a lot of time, and still some AD for scrolls, to get it done.
At the moment almost every slot in our inventory is already an artifact. For mod6, there remains only Artifact pants and Artifact shirt. and starting from mod7 the devs will have no choice other than filling their mods with stories/quests/content, not with gear.
or change them with new more powerfull gears ! xD