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The AD Barrier is Too High
maynolu
Member Posts: 4 Arc User
Let me preface this by saying I really enjoy Neverwinter. I like the mechanics, I like the visuals, and the foundry is pretty awesome. I have also spent a fair bit of cash in the Zen shop, and continue to do so when I see something I like up, and I have no qualms about supporting the developer. There is no free lunch, and I'm not asking for one.
That said, the AD barrier at the end game is way too high.
Even just thumbing through the boons, in Tyranny you're looking at spending a minimum of 70K AD for a single boon. Now for people who made their riches back in the early game with the Gateway exploit and by selling obscenely overpriced T1/T2 epics on AH during the ensuing economic crash, That works. They have the AD to spare.
For 'casual' players, like myself, who enjoy logging into the game for 2-3 hours every few days to tool around with friends, guildmates and to otherwise just enjoy the well plotted story, it makes the game nigh unplayable. Now I'm sure many folks will come up with all kinds of excuses for how 'easy' it is to make AD in the game, but the truth of the matter is, it's not hard, it's detrimentally time consuming.
Rhix's quests take at least 3-5 hours to finish, and in the end they don't award much more than 15K or so AD. Add on top of that the 2-3 hours you need to spend doing zone quests to unlock the opportunity to get boons, plus the average 90 min it takes to queue and run any given dungeon for a chance to acquire epic gear you can sell on the AH for maybe 20K AD. That is an average of 5-8 hours of playing, DAILY. Even assuming in that time you make exactly enough AD to pay for the boons, that's still the better part of, if not an entire, work day you have to dedicate to this game just to maintain average progress.
All that of course is before you take into account the extraneous issues of a player base that will VK you from any dungeon if you don't have a GS of at least 15K (this is including T1s, in which the gear dropped is far below 15K levels), and the obscene prices on the AH. The breakneck pace of the game also doesn't help anything. This game was released, in...2013? If I recall correctly. That's roughly 2 years the game has been out and how many separate campaigns are there now? 4? 5 if you include PvP. That's 2 new boon lines every year with the AD cost of each boon steadily rising. There's no time to slow down and take the content in your own stride, it moves too fast.
So getting geared is nigh impossible without spending 5-8 hours a day, grinding. Playing with guild mates is basically impossible unless you're geared, because if you're not they may as well just put you in a stroller for as quick as you'll get one-shot in any dungeon. Story campaign progress grinds to a halt when you don't have enough AD to pay for the next tier, and pretty much all you're left with is the foundry. If all I wanted to play was custom single-player fantasy campaigns I would not be in a MMO.
Now will reducing the in-game AD curve solve all of the above problems? No. But it would certainly make the game far more approachable for the 'casual' players like myself who make up a large chunk of F2P MMO populations. I don't play F2P because I want the game for free; I play F2P because I need to be able to play the game whenever I have a spare moment and not just be flushing $15/month down the toilet.
Could we maybe see about making things less impossible in this game? Maybe slow down, or make campaign/boon prices a percentage of your total AD instead of setting the cost of playing the game so high? I don't even care about the AH, I just want to be able to make progress without withering in front of this game.
That said, the AD barrier at the end game is way too high.
Even just thumbing through the boons, in Tyranny you're looking at spending a minimum of 70K AD for a single boon. Now for people who made their riches back in the early game with the Gateway exploit and by selling obscenely overpriced T1/T2 epics on AH during the ensuing economic crash, That works. They have the AD to spare.
For 'casual' players, like myself, who enjoy logging into the game for 2-3 hours every few days to tool around with friends, guildmates and to otherwise just enjoy the well plotted story, it makes the game nigh unplayable. Now I'm sure many folks will come up with all kinds of excuses for how 'easy' it is to make AD in the game, but the truth of the matter is, it's not hard, it's detrimentally time consuming.
Rhix's quests take at least 3-5 hours to finish, and in the end they don't award much more than 15K or so AD. Add on top of that the 2-3 hours you need to spend doing zone quests to unlock the opportunity to get boons, plus the average 90 min it takes to queue and run any given dungeon for a chance to acquire epic gear you can sell on the AH for maybe 20K AD. That is an average of 5-8 hours of playing, DAILY. Even assuming in that time you make exactly enough AD to pay for the boons, that's still the better part of, if not an entire, work day you have to dedicate to this game just to maintain average progress.
All that of course is before you take into account the extraneous issues of a player base that will VK you from any dungeon if you don't have a GS of at least 15K (this is including T1s, in which the gear dropped is far below 15K levels), and the obscene prices on the AH. The breakneck pace of the game also doesn't help anything. This game was released, in...2013? If I recall correctly. That's roughly 2 years the game has been out and how many separate campaigns are there now? 4? 5 if you include PvP. That's 2 new boon lines every year with the AD cost of each boon steadily rising. There's no time to slow down and take the content in your own stride, it moves too fast.
So getting geared is nigh impossible without spending 5-8 hours a day, grinding. Playing with guild mates is basically impossible unless you're geared, because if you're not they may as well just put you in a stroller for as quick as you'll get one-shot in any dungeon. Story campaign progress grinds to a halt when you don't have enough AD to pay for the next tier, and pretty much all you're left with is the foundry. If all I wanted to play was custom single-player fantasy campaigns I would not be in a MMO.
Now will reducing the in-game AD curve solve all of the above problems? No. But it would certainly make the game far more approachable for the 'casual' players like myself who make up a large chunk of F2P MMO populations. I don't play F2P because I want the game for free; I play F2P because I need to be able to play the game whenever I have a spare moment and not just be flushing $15/month down the toilet.
Could we maybe see about making things less impossible in this game? Maybe slow down, or make campaign/boon prices a percentage of your total AD instead of setting the cost of playing the game so high? I don't even care about the AH, I just want to be able to make progress without withering in front of this game.
Post edited by maynolu on
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This hasn't happened. They've introduced exponential increases in powercreep but the rewards in PVE has failed to keep up. Green artifact gear are the "best drops". I sense this was intentional in order to gate everything through the auction house/zen store as part of their business model which I do not agree with.
I hate these topics.
This is SUCH an easy game. Easy to have any item you want. Easy to beat any content.
I'm glad they're nerfing EVERY single class into the ground and added in more stuff to do. If you seriously can't figure out NW economics then I don't know what to say. There have been about a hundred posts on the GAME FORUMS giving out information since day one on how to make AD. Use the seach tool at all before you wall-o-text?
I'll also point out that there are several well-written guides on how to make AD. Leadership is a good way to go but takes either a substantial investment of time or AD to level to 20. If you can squeeze a round of dragon herald hunting in WoD that can be a good source of AD (epics can be salvaged and blues are in demand as a good low-level source of RP). Also try pairing up your dailies with Neverember's daily to maximize your AD gain from dailies.
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Just double checked, the last boon is only 50k.
The op is right, unless you have hours a day to work at getting AD, you won't be able to make much headway at all making AD. I know, I have trying for months to get AD.
Max what time you do have. You mention the DR, you realize the marks you get every single layer sell for above 2k AD right now? It's all a matter of putting every little thing together.
I just checked. The last boon is 200k when not relying on rng and farming the tomes through dailies. Though the tiamat one is cheaper on the ah.
I have to agree with the OP and say that the barrier is too high. There's just too much needed to get the good stuff that it's practically unobtainable no matter how hard you work unless you:
1) Exploit
2) Make really good ah decisions (that money doesn't come from nowhere though)
3) Have a LOT of leadership toons over a very long time.
The wall is so high that even though I can afford it, I haven't bother maxing the ToD boons on all but one of my characters and only have legendaries on the 1 too. That's from being lucky to have made so much. Something I can see the vast majority being out of reach to. The cheap lesser enchantments could very well go up making it more newbie unfriendly.
People argue you don't need to reach that status, but should it be a realistic goal anyway? I'm not talking about it being handed to you which some people oddly seem to think when the discussion of walls being high is brought up.
Used the search tool with "AD", "how to get AD" and "Astral diamonds", after going through a mass of questions about zen exchange and stuff I found a guide
http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?567591-Trace-s-Guide-to-AD-Creation-and-Wealth-Building
-still quite time consuming
The problem with helping is that everytime someone has has helped in the past, the method that was explained was then nerfed. Helping others will just hurt you.
I find that you can make about 100 000 ad from just 2 hrs of farming epic pirate king or any other T2 dungeon during dungeon delve (an event which gives you guaranteed epics and goodies in the form of weapon enhancement shards at the end with no need for keys) if you run it with a dependable group.
By just following the simple rule of always hitting greed on epic gear and need on anything else you would prob gain around 8-12 pieces of epic gear per DD with some T2 weapons salvaging for 10k. It is by far one of the most reliant and consistent ways to get raw AD of which you can just transfer the items to your alts and use them to salvage + refine the ad and send it back to your main alt via the zen/astral diamond exchange. You can also get lucky and get various marks or enchantments such as the greater mark of potency which will always be around 100 000 ad if you get lucky with your roll.
100k? That should be extremely lucky runs. Also, OP complains about 15k GS, which somewhat rules out most truly "reliable groups" (read - overgeared to the point when they can be sloppy without fears of wipes, unlike folks with lesser gear). And this type of grind is just as mind-numbingly boring as any other. Of course, sometimes fun stuff like drama, wipes, glitched instances happens, but that means loss of AD every time.
Your main issues with this strategy for ad making consists of this:
1. Consistency
2. GS needed to use this strategy
3. Fun
1. Those runs are pretty consistent since a lot of the ad comes from the chest at the end of the dungeon during DD which has a 100% chance of dropping epic loot. I also have 4 alts that always have more than enough ad to refine each day for more than 2 weeks which shows that it is consistent.
2. GS is also not a problem as I have been doing these runs for a bit over 2 weeks on my 15.5k SW alongside others around my GS. A helpful hint when doing certain dungeons such as ePK or ToS is to have a group with lots of aoe to help progress through the dungeon very fast.
3. The concept of fun varies greatly from player to player as i tend to enjoy the grind and working towards making my character stronger. What you have claimed to be fun ended up being very frustrating for most of the community when the temple of tiamat was opened. If you really wanted to see drama, wipes, glitched instances then the Temple of Tiamat on release is perfect for you with a plethora of errors and glitches that angered people to such an extent, Cryptic later fixed them all. These glitches ranged from the tiamat heads not spawning, blame wars between various languages, everyone afking due to glitches, random deaths that you cannot see, multiple injuries per death and everyone dying to the green head's poison because they do not know how to use the green dragon soul. :rolleyes:
If you want further confirmation of this strategy then feel free to add me in game. My main character that i use for such runs is Kallista Dreadsoul@purphoria of which you can just give me a mail or message so that i can help you guys out.:)
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Not true, fun stuff at tia is still happens. Chances are, it won't ever go away, too, yay
What I dislike about this grind that at the end even your alts or comps won't be needing the stuff from PK, it's for sale or salvage only. Yeah, I know there's even a chance for an artifact to drop, but that's Cryptic RNG which translates as "abandon all hope ye all who enter here". I fail to see how it's even remotely fun. It's a grindy job, which is tedious both when your group consists of idiot DD chars or when people know what to do. It's really not that hard, the hardness is artificially inflated with the adds. There's no buff or debuffs you should be aware of, there's no special attacks, mechanics, phases - just add fest all the time. So what you're saying is that casual players absolutely must stomach this type of content every day to keep up, even if they have few free hours for play. Sounds as an opposite of fun things.
Right now, a rank 8 radiant is about 300k ad. If you play for only a few hours a day, the chances that you will make even 20k are very slim. And then, once you do acquire that 300k ad, all you're getting is small boost to your power or hp or whatever you get the enchant for. So to make any significant change, you actually need to replace ALL of your enchants, which at 300k a pop...well that is a ridiculous amount of ad or refining points or whatever it is you want to use to upgrade your stuff.
Luckily, all content is currently fun at 16 to 18k gs, for most classes, so it isn't a huge problem. But the progression in this game certainly slows WAY down once you reach a point, and that makes it frustrating, and is one reason I have put significantly less time in the game lately.
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3 Skirmishes is twenty minutes, tops.
1 dungeon is 25 minutes (VT)
GG PVE daily is 1 minute or less
GG PVP is 20-30 mins
GG Dungeon is 5-7 mins for one run
Not sure where you're getting your numbers from
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That's only BlackLake and only if you get pugged with other BlackLake farmers, not with genuine players of the said level
25 min, yep thjat's the queue time, you mean.
GG pve in one minute is arguably an exploit as you're not playing the WAI content
GG pvp it's a gamble, you can very well not get queued at all
GG dungeon, well it's yet another queue. Yes once inside the run time may be short but it's irrelevant.
Yup I don't even have that many leadership alts compared to some and I pull in 1million AD a week or so. Leadership is your friend.
Blacklake you can do in about 2min per run if you get a really solid farm group who understand stuff like not to hit the barrels.
I don't keep making disposable characters to farm it because holy boring, but it's some decent AD when I do make a newbie.
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You have a few issues:
- You're using the queues. Why. Just why. Only thing I use the queue for is Skirmishes and PVP. Everything else I make a full party then queue up
- 1 minute GG PVE is not an exploit, kill one enemy and you have participated in the GG PVE portion, therefore you completed that daily
- GG PVP not a gamble if you're a luskan
- Master of The Hunt and the Dread Legion skirmishes don't take long at all, if I try, I could pug both of them in 5 minutes or less
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Hells I've even managed to complete SoT in 4 minutes. Funny story, it was a guild group with 5 mins left on skirmish hour. I tell the party beforehand there is no way that we will finish before the timer expires and less than 4 mins later I was left with egg all over my face after a guildie reminded me of my very own words XD
The most important thing in life is to be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.