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The State of Neverwinter: May 21 Q & A stream recap
mimicking
Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 83Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Greetings Adventurers- Thomas here,
It’s been a challenging few weeks for everyone. I have to say we were very excited about getting a new expansion into your hands- a whole new part of Faerûn to explore, a new hub, 5 zones, and 10 new levels to reach. We updated how classes play, from powers to feats and even some names-as well as many other changes-and we got great pre-launch feedback on them, so we felt although we didn’t hit all the marks, we were on the right track. Expansions are always a challenge. In order to build enough content to provide a great story and flow for the new leveling bar, you never have enough time to provide enough end game content once players hit the new level cap. Leveraging on the Hunts and the repeatable adventure quests from Chult, we created the Expeditions, and of course the end game Dungeon, a real challenge at level 80. Knowing early on that providing enough end game content would be a challenge based with the time we had to create the expansion, we crunched some numbers and saw how many campaigns were not being completed- and came up with the idea of the Challenge Zones; a system where the quests would be a challenge by level scaling, and in return get great rewards, filling in boons as well as getting great gear.
Well, our expectations were wrong. We took too much power and agency away from how you were playing before. Power you worked hard for and invested in.
We also Item level scaled dungeons. Now to be fair we’ve been level scaling dungeons and CTAs and some other events since launch, always with the goals of letting groups play together; having the barbarian with the 20K gear score charging ahead and killing the entire dungeon while the rest of the group tried to catch up is never fun for the rest of the group. But with the new dynamics of how powers work–basically resetting the clock on timing of how many powers you could get off vs the critters/monsters, and how we changed the scaling in the game–we really dropped a couple of balls, making the time in a queued event much longer that we really wanted, or even more importantly what you wanted.
You all gave us feedback and we jumped in and started fixing bugs-this monster was way too hard, this map level was wrong, the timing is off, etc. We actually put out several patches in the first couple of weeks.
During this time we were doing a lot of work and a bit of scrambling. That’s when we had the chance to start digging in deeper. We had numbers coming in showing kill counts in areas, and other factors which helped us treat some bigger issues that were called out on the forums. One big one was finding a huge group of encounter templates (what we use to spawn critters) that were dealing with a race condition- they would spawn at the (Avatars/players/characters) actual level and then level you down. Yay for race conditions!
This was fixing some big bugs, but didn’t hit all the core issues. We took away your ability to show and use your powers as much as before and substantially slowed your rate of gaining rewards. We also damaged your trust in us to deliver the Neverwinter you wanted and were more used to. So, here’s what we are currently doing to address this. Ready?
Below are the changes we currently have in motion. We're testing out some of these changes, and are still in progress implementing some of the others, so as to get them live ASAP. The rest have been implemented and are in stages of regression and testing. Once we are confident in the changes we will be putting them onto the playtest server (Owlbear) to get your feedback, adjust as needed, then to playtest, then to live.
Thanks again for all of your feedback, questions on the stream, and continued patience.
Enemies
Change: All enemies–including bosses–are having their health reduced by ~10%.
Purpose: Help players regain some of the feeling of power they lost; improve upon some difficulty issues.
Enchantments
Change: All Enchantments and Runestones, aside from Bonding Runestones, are having their Item Level and stats doubled.
Purpose: Restore the power players have already invested in.
Soloable Content
Change: All campaign zones, and soloable instances, will no longer be scaled by item level. Challenge Campaigns are being renamed to Legacy Campaigns. Rewards are not changing.
Purpose: Find a better balance of time spent to rewards gained, and allow players to once again wield the power they've gained over the course of the game.
Queued Content
Change: Most Dungeons and Trials are having their Item Level requirements and scaling targets increased.
Purpose: Give players more power while running this content, while still trying to keep high-level players from one-shotting everything in the process.
Change: Events that used to scale players to level 60 are going to scale players to level 40 instead.
Purpose: Find a nicer mid-point to scale players to, so that the content is still casually playable and accessible by lower-level players.
Strongholds
Change: We are removing the upward scaling on the Stronghold map, and making enemies consistently spawn at level 80.
Purpose: The upward item level scaling incorrectly powered up lower-level players too much, resulting in bad expectations being set for level 80 power in Strongholds. This addresses that.
It’s been a challenging few weeks for everyone. I have to say we were very excited about getting a new expansion into your hands- a whole new part of Faerûn to explore, a new hub, 5 zones, and 10 new levels to reach. We updated how classes play, from powers to feats and even some names-as well as many other changes-and we got great pre-launch feedback on them, so we felt although we didn’t hit all the marks, we were on the right track. Expansions are always a challenge. In order to build enough content to provide a great story and flow for the new leveling bar, you never have enough time to provide enough end game content once players hit the new level cap. Leveraging on the Hunts and the repeatable adventure quests from Chult, we created the Expeditions, and of course the end game Dungeon, a real challenge at level 80. Knowing early on that providing enough end game content would be a challenge based with the time we had to create the expansion, we crunched some numbers and saw how many campaigns were not being completed- and came up with the idea of the Challenge Zones; a system where the quests would be a challenge by level scaling, and in return get great rewards, filling in boons as well as getting great gear.
Well, our expectations were wrong. We took too much power and agency away from how you were playing before. Power you worked hard for and invested in.
We also Item level scaled dungeons. Now to be fair we’ve been level scaling dungeons and CTAs and some other events since launch, always with the goals of letting groups play together; having the barbarian with the 20K gear score charging ahead and killing the entire dungeon while the rest of the group tried to catch up is never fun for the rest of the group. But with the new dynamics of how powers work–basically resetting the clock on timing of how many powers you could get off vs the critters/monsters, and how we changed the scaling in the game–we really dropped a couple of balls, making the time in a queued event much longer that we really wanted, or even more importantly what you wanted.
You all gave us feedback and we jumped in and started fixing bugs-this monster was way too hard, this map level was wrong, the timing is off, etc. We actually put out several patches in the first couple of weeks.
During this time we were doing a lot of work and a bit of scrambling. That’s when we had the chance to start digging in deeper. We had numbers coming in showing kill counts in areas, and other factors which helped us treat some bigger issues that were called out on the forums. One big one was finding a huge group of encounter templates (what we use to spawn critters) that were dealing with a race condition- they would spawn at the (Avatars/players/characters) actual level and then level you down. Yay for race conditions!
This was fixing some big bugs, but didn’t hit all the core issues. We took away your ability to show and use your powers as much as before and substantially slowed your rate of gaining rewards. We also damaged your trust in us to deliver the Neverwinter you wanted and were more used to. So, here’s what we are currently doing to address this. Ready?
Below are the changes we currently have in motion. We're testing out some of these changes, and are still in progress implementing some of the others, so as to get them live ASAP. The rest have been implemented and are in stages of regression and testing. Once we are confident in the changes we will be putting them onto the playtest server (Owlbear) to get your feedback, adjust as needed, then to playtest, then to live.
Thanks again for all of your feedback, questions on the stream, and continued patience.
Enemies
Change: All enemies–including bosses–are having their health reduced by ~10%.
Purpose: Help players regain some of the feeling of power they lost; improve upon some difficulty issues.
Enchantments
Change: All Enchantments and Runestones, aside from Bonding Runestones, are having their Item Level and stats doubled.
Purpose: Restore the power players have already invested in.
Soloable Content
Change: All campaign zones, and soloable instances, will no longer be scaled by item level. Challenge Campaigns are being renamed to Legacy Campaigns. Rewards are not changing.
Purpose: Find a better balance of time spent to rewards gained, and allow players to once again wield the power they've gained over the course of the game.
Queued Content
Change: Most Dungeons and Trials are having their Item Level requirements and scaling targets increased.
Purpose: Give players more power while running this content, while still trying to keep high-level players from one-shotting everything in the process.
Change: Events that used to scale players to level 60 are going to scale players to level 40 instead.
Purpose: Find a nicer mid-point to scale players to, so that the content is still casually playable and accessible by lower-level players.
Strongholds
Change: We are removing the upward scaling on the Stronghold map, and making enemies consistently spawn at level 80.
Purpose: The upward item level scaling incorrectly powered up lower-level players too much, resulting in bad expectations being set for level 80 power in Strongholds. This addresses that.
Go ahead, click on the chest...
Post edited by nitocris83 on
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> @pariswinters#7118 it is worded to sound good but it's not. And double the stats on our enchants yay so now it's like r11 instead of r6 or 7.......still not good enough. It's still an insult to our time effort and money. All dungeons need to be level 80. So we can build our toons accordingly and effort isn't pointless. Scaling on this level is just ridiculous and no amount of spin can change that.
>
> the way things are going they are making progress.....albeit slowly....by mod 17 we will be OP again and in need of another nerf, which we will get come mod 18, and then it'll be 2-3 more mods until they fix that....I'm just waiting on the game to be fun again, so i can go back to doing the dungeons I've always loved (currently all broken)
My comments start here on phone quoting seems broken...
I like it the way it is. I have the choice to steamroll or not. Sometimes I do both. They are just taking away all agency from the player.
Already took away powershare and buff and debuff. That was all that was needed. everything else is overkill. They went way too far because of a minority of players
The one thing I hope it fixes is the fact that the mobs in the Stronghold are all of elite status, except for the beasts/drakes/spiders. It makes it very dangerous for even a level 80 to travel in the SH.
And I really have no idea how they could have thought what they implemented would have be even remotely liked by more than maybe 5% of people that play. That sort of baffles my mind. I think it was more a case of we need to get something done and changed, so what they gave us was the easiest thing they could do.
Also it would be nice if mobs speed and casting time would be reduced, so that we could have some interesting tactics (like avoiding red circles).
Have you tried to avoid red circles of Golems in Dread Legion? Currently it's almost non stop red circles, not to mention that those circles are huge and it hurts (btw, the boss fight is easier).
Some feedback to Our Beloved OP Dev: While I don't mind this, I think it's less a problem than the trash mobs who hit like *trucks* while the bosses are better balanced. From my perspective, the biggest problems with dungeons has been that trash mobs and environmentals will one-shot a tank through a shield, while a good tank with a healer can hold a boss without a problem.
(Leaving aside clear off-level bugs like "the souls in TONG cannot be killed", of course).
The issue isn't really boss/mob HP, it's mobs/environmentals doing unexpectedly huge damage and some mobs having off-the-charts-huge HP totals. Cool. I love it. Does it affect the 99% of content that's currently capped to R9s?
(If yes, and "capped to R9s" now means "capped to doubled R9s", that's a really good change? R9s are still "two weeks above the free gear" and should NOT be the cap for the most recent mods, but capping to doubled-R9s in L70 content is a good change IMO) No longer scaled by IL = "not capped to R9s"? But will still be scaled by Character Level - L80 toons with L80 gear will be downscaled to L70, but not capped further?
Also, you are clear here that this is Zone + Solo Instances. Dungeons and Skirmishes will still be capped by both level *and* gear? There's still no point in going above R9s in anything except LoMM, even if the R9s are better than they were before? ... this one I don't get. Do events get a lot of L5-35 toons in them but not 45-80? That doesn't exactly match my anecdotal experience, but I don't have the analytics you do. I'm assuming there's a good reason you're not just leaving L80s unscaled and scaling everyone else up to match - can you explain the logic here?
If Thom didn't "mis-speak" during the stream. He actually said when explaining it, that if you are Level 80 and go into Sharandar you will be Level 80.
So no level scaling, no item scaling. You go into L70 zones as your character IS, unfettered. You will be able to kick nine shades of HAMSTER out pretty much anything.
I reiterate that that is what he said in the stream. He also refers to Item Level as "Gear Score" so there is that caveat...
Dungeons still will be scaled, which isn't necessarily a bad thing unless they are scaled badly.
Ideally all end game content including Queues would be L80, and dungeons would be repopulated with L80 content and scaling would not be needed. But both from a commercial marketing perspective (I'm sure they want to keep shiny new content distinguishable from old) and a "Where is our time best spent?" I think that is not on the primary list of "Things that need fixing in a hurry."
Purpose: Find a nicer mid-point to scale players to, so that the content is still casually playable and accessible by lower-level players."
@mimicking#6533
please make sure critters also are same levels as players, if this change was meant to stop cta private solo queue just letting you know that the level60 scale down made it last longer, due to the encounter power long cd values and the way mass critters encounter surround us to die, we now need to use cc power to spread them/smoke them/entangle them, hadar grasp them, arm of hadar them, roots them, burning light them, chain of blazing light them so we dont get melted by a group of mobs no reason to reduce it to level 40 at all, noticed on siege event dragon wing attack radius seems larger than wod dragon wing blast area. if this change is to prevent player from solo cta events then it will be a waste of resources since these event only offer transmutes and refiner cache( for these caches, only private solo queue made it worth farm it) with these changes you are forcing us to public queue for it, you need to force the event currency drop that get from moving over it, to benefit all party, because if one party member picks them up rest of the party gets nothing, thats why i never queue for public @mimicking#6533 if only 1 player walks over cta event currency on the ground rest of the party doesn't get the currency and cta public queue is a group effort event all party needs to benefit from those pick up currency, also the weapon set from cta event means nothing for us players, there are better weapon sets in the game(primal weapons set is better than those).
The game is clearly headed in the right direction, good tweaks are being made following massive changes, and it's clear that you're now able to make changes much more easily than before, which will be of great benefit going forward.
Thanks for your efforts, and please keep it up
Thank you. You are recognicing all your errors with mod16. Thats good and I think once the big preview patch go live, most of the design errors Will be adressed and the game will be much better. You are in a good direction. You take time to understand but ok you are hearing players.
BUT there is still one thing you need to understand: some rough AD and some old seals ARE NOT OK for
old dungeons. Even if you are softing the scale presure on players.
You need to understand that having more options to Dungeon Will make the game more enjoyable. But need to give something that compensate the time invested.
Please, please think on this. We want to run all dungeons. No Matter if they take 30 or 40 mins. Make the rewards worth the time.
Caturday Survivor
Elemental Evil Survivor
Undermontain Survivor
Mod20 Combat rework Survivor
Mod22 Refinement rework Survivor
PS: Someone once said "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and that is true, because D&D Barbie girl named her great sword Beauty.
I too wish to be recreated, and to be loved long after my death.
Stats, scaling and difficulty are nowhere near bad enough to make progression or general play an issue despite what the soft, undeserving people complaining here think.
The way things are going, Power Creep, the EXACT thing you have been fighting to eradicate will return and if it does I urge the Dev team to respond to anyone who complains at that point with:
"This is a problem you created. Fix it yourself."