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Ratings, Difficulty, and Challenge
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Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 651Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
As M18 preview is approaching, we wanted to take a moment to clarify the differences between ratings and the challenge level of content.
While ratings are a good indication of general difficulty, they do not speak to the challenge level of content. The big example of this would be Tower of the Mad Mage. The rating caps on ToMM are not particularly hard to hit for a player who has 24k item level. Despite this, it is particularly challenging content and this is due to the mechanics and damage used by Halaster.
The new dungeon in M18 is currently 23k IL to enter (although this could change as we go through open beta). Despite this, the critters have higher ratings than ToMM. If someone were to use ratings as the only factor in how difficult they expected content to be, then they would expect the M18 dungeon to be even more difficult than ToMM. And that's why we wanted to make this post prior to preview. The M18 dungeon is easier than ToMM and is more accessible to the general player base. In fact, the M18 zone and the M18 dungeon have the same ratings, yet the zone is certainly easier than the dungeon.
So why do we have a piece of content with a higher item level entry requirement, but lower critter ratings? That is due to two reasons. First is that ToMM was an experiment to see how players would interact with extra challenging content. This content didn't fit neatly into our current progression and because of that it ends up being a bit of an outlier. Suggestions have come up to have a special display/label for challenge content like that and we will likely explore those options in the future.
The second reason is that when M16 came around, we set critter ratings down lower than the ideal amounts to ease the transition over as it would take a while for players to gain a good understanding of ratings and how to gear their character as best they can. As a result of that we are bumping up critter ratings more in new modules than we would just from player progression alone as we gradually close that gap to where the ratings ideally should be.
We encourage everyone who has the time to do so to try out the new content when it arrives on preview and share their feedback.
While ratings are a good indication of general difficulty, they do not speak to the challenge level of content. The big example of this would be Tower of the Mad Mage. The rating caps on ToMM are not particularly hard to hit for a player who has 24k item level. Despite this, it is particularly challenging content and this is due to the mechanics and damage used by Halaster.
The new dungeon in M18 is currently 23k IL to enter (although this could change as we go through open beta). Despite this, the critters have higher ratings than ToMM. If someone were to use ratings as the only factor in how difficult they expected content to be, then they would expect the M18 dungeon to be even more difficult than ToMM. And that's why we wanted to make this post prior to preview. The M18 dungeon is easier than ToMM and is more accessible to the general player base. In fact, the M18 zone and the M18 dungeon have the same ratings, yet the zone is certainly easier than the dungeon.
So why do we have a piece of content with a higher item level entry requirement, but lower critter ratings? That is due to two reasons. First is that ToMM was an experiment to see how players would interact with extra challenging content. This content didn't fit neatly into our current progression and because of that it ends up being a bit of an outlier. Suggestions have come up to have a special display/label for challenge content like that and we will likely explore those options in the future.
The second reason is that when M16 came around, we set critter ratings down lower than the ideal amounts to ease the transition over as it would take a while for players to gain a good understanding of ratings and how to gear their character as best they can. As a result of that we are bumping up critter ratings more in new modules than we would just from player progression alone as we gradually close that gap to where the ratings ideally should be.
We encourage everyone who has the time to do so to try out the new content when it arrives on preview and share their feedback.
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Lets see how it goes.
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I very much hope, however, that there is an attempt to redress the design issue that already feels present with TOMM: a set of gear assembled to complete higher-cap content will perform notably worse in lower-cap content, due to the discrepancy between the Power stat (always beneficial) and the suite of offensive and defensive stats (zero benefit beyond cap.) Thus, if a player does not actively downgrade her gear every time she runs older content, so as to stack Power once again, the end result is that her character feels weaker in content she once mastered on her way to the endgame. (And on top of this, add scaling.)
Of course one set of equipment shouldn't be adequate for all content, and choices and sacrifices are welcome. But for me it's also vital that my character, after succeeding at some new and novel challenge, is able to translate that growth to some older, familiar adventure. I'd hate to eventually find myself with a specific loadout for every mod's dungeon, each one being a "downgrade" to the caps before.
Every 2,000 Combat Advantage gives 1% extra CA bonus after 50,000 (new cap at 150%)
Every 3,000 Deflect gives 1% extra deflect chance after 50,000 (new cap at 75%)
Every 4,000 Crit gives 1% extra critical chance after 50,000 (new cap at 75%)
Every 5,000 Defense gives 1% extra defense after 50,000 (new cap at 75%)
the above suggestion reduces combat advantage gain after 50%.. but expands its limit. Double damage from CA is a little too easy to get right now. This 'expansion' allows characters to specialize where they want... if willing to sacrifice other stats. Power stacking is not eliminated... but is joined by competing options. An advantage of such a system is that effects will always add to stats, not just a few that were programmed to bypass the 50% limit.
As someone mentioned above, ToMM is not difficult, although it requires more concentration because it has very fast mechanics. Maybe there would be more players finalizing this content if the classes had really been balanced, something I have no hope of ever really going to do.
How many of you tested this content without WIZ and Pally being a mandatory class? Seriously, at this point i don't think you actually understand what really makes TOMM difficult. It's not the capping of stats or the dodging, it goes deeper into the roots of the so called mod 16 re-balance.
What really makes me chuckle is that you actually pretend that TOMM is not accessible to the masses because of its foundation and that there is no way around it and yet you clearly are aware of the state and even numbers of non-meta classes completing this run. Then, why the HAMSTER are you then not making adjustments to these classes so that it becomes accessible to the greater majority and instead not just blame it on the difficult of TOMM? You guys would be ashamed if you actually played the REAL difficulty content in other top MMO's, accessible to all classes. Seriously disappointed by your lack of acknowledgement and pretense over this "TOMM not being accessible" issue.
You see, atm you can more or less use one setup for all purposes - tank, heal, dps for daily stuff. If the caps rise, you would not only notably split requirements for tank and heal (which is desirable in my opinion), but might force out one bonus build for daily stuff - which would be unique amongst all the classes.
I beg to differ. On xbox at least, it is nearly impossible to get a group in the first place, let alone one that stays together after the first respawn. Once a group is found, the mechanics require so much communication, that it is almost undoable, unless you buy the ToMM gear that those fortunate enough to have completed it are selling. Add to that the "snobs" that are spamming for BiS toons only, or 800k HP tanks only, and this trial becomes "pay to play". After having spent a few hundred dollars on the game on xbox in the last 2.5yrs this is unacceptable.
Imo that means content accessable to players with M16+ gear.
Hooray to ppl continuing only to play M16+, no reason to do anything at all, if Tomm remains the hardest (so newer ppl will pay and try and skip, or just skip) but the newer content has higher ratings (no brain needed to detect the best suited options when you will just use the new stuff).
I could meet the stats for Tomm, with orcus and dmg gear and whatnot, but the trend is there and people are already losing all the little interest they still had in playing content like Chult/Omu/Barovia at all...
Not that this is news exactly, but you will see how happy you will be with a playerbase like this.
A second thought about sharing feedback/interaction/communication:
Were there any changes to gathering feedback/communicate with preview testers/working with opinions/sharing of priorities? Are you all considering this as just another preview test similar to M16 in levels of interaction with the community?
Class Balance
We agree that there is an imbalance in the DPS roles. In M19 the two main classes being adjusted for balance are the Dreadnought and the Hellbringer. When M18 comes to preview we will have information on a few adjustments to Arcanist feats/class mechanics to bring them more in line with the balance target (I realize saying this will make people think the worst, but Arcanist will still be powerful after those adjustments and the changes will be available as preview goes live for feedback).
All of that is important context for the following part of that discussion. First is that there will never be perfect balance across the classes, and there will always be some classes that are harder to play and therefore under-perform for a more casual player, but can potentially even over-perform for a particularly skilled player. We have created a lot of analytics on class balance since M16. These include normalized damage charts, whisker plots, and percentile graphs, which we can filter by time ranges, classes, and specific content. We are actively using this information for how to tackle class balance.
As a general point, Assassin in most charts is right around where we feel ideal balance should be right now. Since ToMM was brought up, let's take a look at the PC results from 1 Nov to this morning, and use Assassin as a baseline for where the other classes are at when running that content. I think players may be surprised at where some of the classes line up in this comparison.
Class -> Damage performance in ToMM +/- %
It is clear there are outliers in Arcanist, Dreadnaught, and Arbiter. The others, however, are all very close together and in general would be considered all within an acceptable range of balance. In charts that include a wider range of content (or all content) there are larger percentage differences which shows there are more areas of balance to tackle than this one chart shows. ToMM is a useful example to see how the classes compare when played by top tier IL players, and hopefully also shows that ToMM is complete-able (and has been completed) by all classes in the game.
Changes from this chart compared to more broad charts show a larger positive differential for Arcanist and Warden, brings Blademaster below Assassin with Hellbringer right behind that and brings Arbiter above Dreadnought. You see a wider variance when including a larger selection of content as it adds a far greater percentage of the player base into the damage pool.
There were some paragon paths not listed there, such as Whisperknife, Hunter, and Thaumaturge. Whisperknife and Hunter are not performing where we'd like, and are paths we want to work on, however since those classes have very solid paths as their other choices, that puts the priority a bit further down the list on class work.
Always a popular topic so let's give a very brief history to this point and talk about the work going on for M19 and beyond.
I joined the Neverwinter team as Cloaked Ascendancy shipped. At that time there wasn't any useful scaling, although the game did attempt to level scale players in certain situations. As I'm sure many people remember during that time, if a player was level scaled up, they just got crushed (Ghost Stories). If a player was level scaled down, they didn't really notice it and just one shot everything.
We wanted much better scaling than that in the game. Unfortunately, there was not any real base structure for this to be built on. We did some initial backend work that I think was first included in the m14 build (didn't go back to verify while writing this post). With M15 we used this as part of the Acq Inc structure for running the dungeons at minimum item level. While this was the first time there was any noticeable effect from scaling, it was still far from ideal and still not very effective. The main aspect at this point was that we could now scale enchantments, although the way that worked is it would actually make the enchantments a lower or higher rank to change the effects.
With M16 we were now tackling a lot of core and backend structure of the game to allow the game to grow in a lot more ways. This isn't directly evident with what players saw as so much of the work was structural and organizational to allow faster and better work in the future. One of those tasks was to create a much bigger backend for scaling. The result still wan't ideal scaling either for us or for players, but it was a lot closer. Scaling now had a tangible effect, even if it wasn't as accurate as it could be and scaling up is still problematic in some ways. The main method scaling now takes is adjusting the item level of the different parts of the character, as all of the stats are based off of that item level (a change that we made in M16).
With M19 we plan to take the next pass on scaling. It is too early to guarantee how it will turn out/function/etc., but we can discuss the basic goals. Now that the backend exists, we can refine it and improve it. This is going to have a major change that most players will like which is that players stats will scale relative to the content's stats. In other words, the goal of this scaling is that if the player is capped on ratings at their unscaled item level, whatever content they're scaled down or up to, they remain capped on those ratings because they are scaled proportionally to the content. That will solve the major issues of having to worry about changing gear as you are scaled due to scaling tackling each equipment piece individually resulting in some over/under scaling on certain parts of the player that we have now. There are other benefits coming with this next step of scaling that include even easier adjustments on content difficulty allowing us to tune faster and better.
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> Scaling
>
> Always a popular topic so let's give a very brief history to this point and talk about the work going on for M19 and beyond.
>
> I joined the Neverwinter team as Cloaked Ascendancy shipped. At that time there wasn't any useful scaling, although the game did attempt to level scale players in certain situations. As I'm sure many people remember during that time, if a player was level scaled up, they just got crushed (Ghost Stories). If a player was level scaled down, they didn't really notice it and just one shot everything.
>
> We wanted much better scaling than that in the game. Unfortunately, there was not any real base structure for this to be built on. We did some initial backend work that I think was first included in the m14 build (didn't go back to verify while writing this post). With M15 we used this as part of the Acq Inc structure for running the dungeons at minimum item level. While this was the first time there was any noticeable effect from scaling, it was still far from ideal and still not very effective. The main aspect at this point was that we could now scale enchantments, although the way that worked is it would actually make the enchantments a lower or higher rank to change the effects.
>
> With M16 we were now tackling a lot of core and backend structure of the game to allow the game to grow in a lot more ways. This isn't directly evident with what players saw as so much of the work was structural and organizational to allow faster and better work in the future. One of those tasks was to create a much bigger backend for scaling. The result still wan't ideal scaling either for us or for players, but it was a lot closer. Scaling now had a tangible effect, even if it wasn't as accurate as it could be and scaling up is still problematic in some ways. The main method scaling now takes is adjusting the item level of the different parts of the character, as all of the stats are based off of that item level (a change that we made in M16).
>
> With M19 we plan to take the next pass on scaling. It is too early to guarantee how it will turn out/function/etc., but we can discuss the basic goals. Now that the backend exists, we can refine it and improve it. This is going to have a major change that most players will like which is that players stats will scale relative to the content's stats. In other words, the goal of this scaling is that if the player is capped on ratings at their unscaled item level, whatever content they're scaled down or up to, they remain capped on those ratings because they are scaled proportionally to the content. That will solve the major issues of having to worry about changing gear as you are scaled due to scaling tackling each equipment piece individually resulting in some over/under scaling on certain parts of the player that we have now. There are other benefits coming with this next step of scaling that include even easier adjustments on content difficulty allowing us to tune faster and better.
You keep mentioning mod 19 do you mean 18?
That said, Im much more positive now just seing what kind of things you are implementing to reach goals, and that tells a lot about the future of the game.
Also (I have to tell this), bug fixing is still a pain, and is unnaceptable that bugs supposed to be fixed (in patch notes) are still there. We understand that bug fixing is sometimes hard, but if you tell that something is fixed, it should be fixed. No excuse.
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I'm on xbox as well. I main a barbarian, it got too costly (time and/or money wise) to keep the rest updated. I have yet to even get into a run because I'm a barbarian. Very few callouts (near 0 for practice runs). Every exp xbox callout is pretty much 3 cws/trs+. I'm really salty Cryptic added a no-death achievement for this too. It's practically impossible for me. Thanks Cryptic. Really glad you made a dungeon where classes are explicitly left out.
Not only that, but only one tracked achievement hunter unlocked a flawless run. This is such a poor choice.
https://www.trueachievements.com/a284635/master-of-undermountain-achievement
Class -> Damage performance in ToMM +/- %
Arcanist +3%
Blademaster +1.8%
Warden +1.5%
Assassin --
Hellbringer -1.6%
Dreadnaught -3%
Arbiter -6%
I currently have ~50 clears of ToMM (all on my main, an Arcanist), and feel comfortable saying that ALL of them have included at least 3 Arcanists in total -- usually 4-5. Assassins and Wardens comprise the remainder of the DPS in the successful runs I've participated in. In my experience, if there is a Blademaster, Hellbringer, Dreadnaught, or Arbiter clearing, they are almost always (with a few exceptional exceptions) being carried, no more than 1 at a time.
I hope that going forward, the "challenge"-labeled content will feature more than just a 15-min single-target parsefest as far as combat goes -- some waves of adds would definitely spice things up, and would help other DPS classes earn a seat at the table. In the absence of that, I hope that all the roles below Assassin (and Blademasters) see some single-target love, because it is really demoralizing for players who used to main those DPS roles to be forced to adapt to support paragons or to beg for ToMM carries.
On the bright side, it is nice to regularly see all three tank paragons able to effectively clear ToMM, and to see all three healer paragons clearing as well -- though it does seem that OP shields are almost a must-have, which doesn't seem right.
And, lest I sound overly negative or critical, I love the overall level of challenge for ToMM & feel that it's just what the game needed. I just wish that changes to the DPS class balancing were made on a faster cadence than once ever mod or two, so that many more well-geared, mechanics-savvy players who happened to pick the wrong class could join in.
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Though i am not shocked by your findings because we have a barb that literally out dps's everyone other than skill ceiling wiz/ranger. You will be shocked to see some of the wiz's pulling some crazy encpds, i don't think that would be anywhere in the range of 3% of a skill ceiling rogues damage.
The other thing i can advice is that currently gear does not support arbiter, all your gear requires is AP gain and procs/stacks and arbiter is the slowest in them and doesn't really benefit from its dailies when it has no cooldown on its encounters. If you bring more diverse gear i.e. that can give us divinity or etc, you'll see some changes in their performance automatically.
The point of showing the ToMM data is not to suggest that in all aspects of the game the classes are that close together. It was intended to show that 1) when top item levels and top skill levels combine, the classes potentials are a lot closer than players would typically expect and 2) ToMM is not exclusive to any sub group of classes, although it is certainly easier for some classes than others.
We don't use that particular data set for where our major class balance efforts are targetted, we focus more on the top 10% game wide, which does show bigger percentage differences between the paragon paths, and does drop Dreadnought down quite a bit more as I had mentioned in that previous post.