Some T12 Questions

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[Draca]

Player input regarding T12

T12 (Vex Thal) is under construction, and while it seems like these developments get to a point fairly quickly and then everything becomes a slog from there, I'm at a point where I would like some input from the community.

So, a few questions:

 • Assuming current Kael difficulty as a baseline, would you like to see new content:
   
   Much Harder
   Slightly Harder
   Same
   Slightly Easier
   Much Easier
 
   We have also been working on the idea/scripting to implement a 'hard mode*' in new content, so if you think the general zone should be slightly easier with hard mode, then that's good as well.

   *Hard mode would be an increased difficulty for all NPC's in the zone, both in damage output and hitpoints, but they would also award loot more often, and possibly multiple kill credits for quests etc.

  • Do you find the background lore, NPC emotes, quest background stories etc. engaging or entertaining, or don't really care much either way?

  • Is there any mechanic that we've used previously that you would, or would not like to see repeated?

  • Feelings on bane weapons?

  • Aside from the content, what would you like to see 'fixed' as part of this Tier? Example I've heard: Item effects are not very useful/being re-used. But it's open ended, whatever you'd like to see done better in some way, or fixed.

  • Since this post will probably get people's attention, is there anything currently broken or janky that you feel needs to be addressed? (completely separate from the Tier).

Anything else that comes to mind, by all means let us know here.

Draca & Sarthin

[Raygan]

Slightly harder...and a hard mode. Once you are finished with the first run through (slightly harder than current tier)...making it more difficult with a better drop rate(in hard mode).

[gnonim]

Not sure what "hard mode" will bring because.... after a week or two, it will be known if it's more beneficial to kill more mobs in easy mode, or if you can kill less mobs in hard mode, and which delivers more drops for total time played.  For simplicity, let's say you can kill 10 mobs in 10 minutes normal, but only 5 mobs in 10 minutes in hard mode.  That means unless hard mode delivered more than 2X the loot, no one will do hard mode.  And conversely, everyone will do hard mode if it is more than 2X loot.  Maybe things will be more complicated than that an part of the fun will be to figure out what's most efficient?  Could be.

The only instance I see this working, is if hard mode is so hard that it isn't possible for a non-Spud player to do it until you've gotten enough T12 loot to make up for, in this case, my gimpness.  At which point when reaching the ability to get plus 2X you would never go back to normal mode.

At first glance, it "seems" like a good idea.  In actuality I'm not sure if it's just an unnecessary complication both in the setup of the zone and the play.  I'm not against it, but am wondering if it's worth the programming effort.  Hard mode will make it quicker for the top tier players to complete the zone.  I don't have an issue with that, I'm never racing to be first or even 10th, but from the top 10 perspective, it seems like they'd have more downtime and overall less fulfilment in the game-play, unless that is, the encounters are so hard that it takes them more time to figure out in the first place, thus a higher level of achievement feeling.

Other than that, I really like the mechanics of T11 with chain bosses, buff removals during encounters to make you pay attention are cool too.  Like having the gambling coins or something similar as that keeps interest as well.

Love the last zone and looking forward to the next.  It will be fun with or without hard mode I'm sure.

[zefirus]

my recommendation based on a player who was end game in 2014 and is now coming back would be to approach this with a similar model as we see in successful RPG/MMO. Keep the current tier difficult, IE a step up from Kael, but bring down the entry point grind a bit on the earlier tiers. The point is that folks coming in will burn out before seeing your top 3-4 zones. I get it, folks grinded it in previous years, but that was when it was end content and the grind was the end game, nows its tiered grinds to get to, say Kael.

Also, when Aaron did old commons, it was tuned for a 12 box.. we seemed to have gotten well past those numbers. Would be nice to have an idea where we plan on tuning the content going forward. IE 12-18-24 plus.. scaling would definitely help that, and hard mode so we are on the right track.   I have been away for so long, that I am having fun just leveling a group up and immersing myself in content but the actual fact is, I need to pull another group in for the later tiers.

Also, since nobody asked, would be nice to see a way to increase DPS on pure melee outside of Rogue. May be as easy as adding a 0 at the end of monks/zerker skins in t8-t10..  understand in ST skins get huge dps increase and we get UW's which are a grind pre-ST.

[clbreastmilk]

Not sure what "hard mode" will bring because.... after a week or two, it will be known if it's more beneficial to kill more mobs in easy mode, or if you can kill less mobs in hard mode, and which delivers more drops for total time played.  For simplicity, let's say you can kill 10 mobs in 10 minutes normal, but only 5 mobs in 10 minutes in hard mode.  That means unless hard mode delivered more than 2X the loot, no one will do hard mode.  And conversely, everyone will do hard mode if it is more than 2X loot.  Maybe things will be more complicated than that an part of the fun will be to figure out what's most efficient?  Could be.

The only instance I see this working, is if hard mode is so hard that it isn't possible for a non-Spud player to do it until you've gotten enough T12 loot to make up for, in this case, my gimpness.  At which point when reaching the ability to get plus 2X you would never go back to normal mode.

At first glance, it "seems" like a good idea.  In actuality I'm not sure if it's just an unnecessary complication both in the setup of the zone and the play.  I'm not against it, but am wondering if it's worth the programming effort.  Hard mode will make it quicker for the top tier players to complete the zone.  I don't have an issue with that, I'm never racing to be first or even 10th, but from the top 10 perspective, it seems like they'd have more downtime and overall less fulfilment in the game-play, unless that is, the encounters are so hard that it takes them more time to figure out in the first place, thus a higher level of achievement feeling.

Other than that, I really like the mechanics of T11 with chain bosses, buff removals during encounters to make you pay attention are cool too.  Like having the gambling coins or something similar as that keeps interest as well.

Love the last zone and looking forward to the next.  It will be fun with or without hard mode I'm sure.

I think the concept makes more sense if you spread it across several zones instead of just the existing top zone, you could even make a quest that unlocks the feature ensuring that people can't just Jump into hard mode, they need to accomplish X first..  The "normal mode" should be tuned for the first time you get into the zone.  The Hard mode could be applied to earlier zones that allow gearing a new group of toons, faster and easier but at much higher scaling.  Adding a "Hard mode" to Kael/VP would absolutely have players going back to those zones if they aren't already maxed, and give newer players more to do as they break into higher tiers, extending the life of each zone.

Bane weapons = Could that be factored into a hard mode?  Where you'd need to farm bane weapons in the normal mode of a zone to work towards the hard mode? 

Would love a balance pass on class DPS without having to nerf rogues.  It's been many years since this was done and I know spud/sarthin can dps meter up most stuff or already have that data.  Other classes don't need to do More than rogue, per say, but at least be somewhat close.  I could run 12 rogues like many do, but meh.

[Acaelis]

I cant comment on tier 12 as I am currently working through T5.

However, here is my 2cents since you asked about what currently works/doesnt work/is a bit janky...

1) Group Scaling - I think the expectation that someone bring more than 12 characters is out of touch.  Personally, I think everything should be attainable (albeit not efficiently) completed with a single group of 6, maybe 12 at most.  A suggestion I have is to scale difficulty in personal instances based on number of players in the instance, if that isnt possible/isnt on the roadmap, perhaps balance around a group of 12.

2) Ramp up to current tiers.  The grind to get to T12 is too steep.  As someone before me stated, I get it, others had to grind to get to T12, but as tiers increase, the grind to get to current content becomes less and less attainable.  I think that tier 1-7 should be accelerated so that newer players don't get burned out.  Here are some ideas to lower the grind:

A) Time and LDON - Drop a page for every character that damages a boss
B) POD tier 2 increasing the drop rate of dragon class armor
C) HoH increase dedicated token drop rate for each avatar so that its easier to target farm tokens needed.
D) Airplane (T4) - Introduce a dragon class armor type drop to help shorten that tier
E) Abyss (T5) - decrease timed spawns from 30min to 15min, add all bosses to the random spawn pool and increase the random spawn rate to help speed up the grind.

3) What is Janky

A) Casters in general are complete garbage until later tier.  They need to be buffed at lower levels, i know in talking with Draca its hard to balance at lower tiers, but since those tiers are largely "throw away tiers" buffing these classes will really help to make them enjoyable to level
B) Mages - Honestly pet classes in general.  Pets randomly disappear, do terrible damage, they just feel like a burden to maintain.  On top of that Mages really dont come into their own until they get Shylo's Bolt, but that is gated pretty far into progression. Suggestion here is to introduce a summoned armor/weapon spell that increases by tier to drastically increase pet damage, perhaps something like appropriate ninjastrike aug level of proc damage for the tier.
C) Tank Variety - Warriors are exponentially better at tanking than any other class with the only other viable tank being an SK, but viable is a very very loose adjective.  I honestly dont know the answer here, but there has to be some opportunity to improve SK mitigation to bring them closer if not equal to a Warrior.  I hesitate to suggest making changes to Pally's since they are so strong as healers that they could become incredibly OP, but a 3rd option to tank would be nice to have some variety in the game.  Perhaps Beastmaster pets could get some buffs to make them viable tanks, this is probably a stretch, just thinking of trying to bring purpose to a rather rarely used class.
D) DPS Variety - Rogues are so far above other DPS.  Can we get some buffs to Monks, Beastmasters and Berserkers to bring them more inline with rogues. This would promote variety while maintaining optimization.
E) Shamans - Shamans feel like they dont really have a place, they are basically buff bots with a bit of melee dps, but they really struggle to find a place in a group.  Suggestion, revisit slows make them more effective perhaps this helps with making smaller groups more viable as slow could reduce incoming damage significantly enough to make up for missing a healer?
F) Ultimate Charm v1 quest is absurdly grindy.  Suggestion - Increase drop rates in LDON for the dedicated drop.  Right now there is no real way to target farm charmv1 upgrades and getting them on 12 characters is 100's of hours of grind for something that is off of the progression track.  Likewise increase the drop rate for v2 charm upgrades in HoH and/or add them to T5 drop pool.

What is working?

1) Epic progression is awesome, it's really fun to do the epic quests / upgrades each tier they feel meaningful for most classes.
2) Custom zones are a breath of fresh air compared to vanilla.  Very fun.
3) Custom quests - things like sceptor of time, illusion mask, pet sword, etc.. are really fun with good fun rewards.
4) Clicky toys - great utility, fun to use, wish there were more for other classes

I think that is my 2cents

Thanks,

Kirigami

[Gravel]

First, I'll caveat this with I've only just barely dipped my toes into t11 so I don't entirely know what I'm talking about yet. But that also means I have a recency bias because it's more fresh than those who's been doing it the last 8 months.

As is, I think the difficulty is just about perfect. My tank is basically capped out (outside of LRoA) on everything I can get prior to T11, with the exception of Hills of Shade items. Distant Relatives are about where I hit my limit. Meaning, I can kill just barely enough to gear up, which means it'll be a slow crawl to start before I can finally tackle all the stuff that spawns afterwards. Any harder and it becomes a frustrating game of wiping for hours and hoping I get lucky every once in a while with respawns so I can try again. That's not fun. Much easier and it just starts to become a check the box exercise of just killing everything and the "challenge" of the zone is one of time (which is typically what happens after you've hit the halfway mark of a tier, which I think is a good area to shoot for).

As far as things to look at, I do wonder if you have a roadmap for how long you want each tier to take. And by that I mean an estimated amount of hours. I blew through T5 in a week or two, but I also play a solid 8 hours a day (which is to say, time in weeks isn't how to measure, but hours). I bring this up because of a comment in ooc a while back regarding T11 being significantly longer than T10. And T10 is one of those things that I think needs more tuning. From what I can tell, it was developed to essentially be the end game without any content afterwards. The issue is, I spent a few hundred hours there and that seems like way too much. I know people like to talk about how it "used to be harder" with things like PB spawns and faction, but those things are more an issue for that initial break in. Once you get them out of the way and get your tank geared, you still have an insanely long grind. While I actually enjoyed the grind, I imagine most people will hit that wall and leave the server forever.

But if your goal is for it to take a minimum of 200 hours and cater to people like me who will grind and grind and grind, then I suppose it's in a good place (I should also caveat this with how I'm still not actually done with the zone and need several more hammers and tokens to "complete" it).

As for T12, I'll agree with Tnonim here. Players will always choose the path of least resistance. If the numbers show that two modes are equal, they'll choose the easier. If hard gives significantly more rewards, normal mode will go unused. Balancing this where it's an actually worthwhile feature seems like it could end up a waste of time as you'd be trying to predict human psychology and nailing the perfect numbers.

Regarding your other questions:

1) Lore: I honestly didn't notice any of it until VP, but it definitely makes it more engaging for there to be a story. That said, trying to read Venril spam 50 lines of text at me while I'm trying to kill him sometimes becomes a bit distracting.

2) Mechanics: For the love of god, please no more crazy knockbacks. I thought the juggernauts were bad (and they are super annoying), but then I met Ro'kki for who some reason kicks you halfway across the zone. Why is this a thing? It just makes it annoying, not difficult. Same with Master in ST, the knockback is so large that when you're on a boxing server that relies on proximity (and hits) to heal, there's not really any strategy involved, it's just obnoxious. I obviously can't comment on what the T11 knockback was like, but with how difficult it's been to break in already, I can't imagine that was enjoyable.

The DoT thing is interesting. In my mind I see it as a coding trick to basically account for the fact that the numbers are starting to get too big, so you basically set a handicap for the zone. To add to the "things that may need changing," I do find it odd that VP necros (and dragons obviously) are theoretically harder than T11 trash because you've got an AoE DoT versus single target. They make it incredibly difficult to break into VP because you've essentially got to overcome that handicap to survive (and with how rare things like GSS are in T10, that means the grind there becomes even longer).

3) Bane weapons: In theory they're fine. In practice I loathe them because now I've got to haul extra weapons around. Or if I forget to change them out (especially on every single box), suddenly I'm mid-fight and struggling against content that should be easy.

4) Other: I think people have struggled with the RNG of T5 for a very long time. I do wonder if the rate of random and trigger spawns shouldn't be increased by maybe 10% or even as high as 20%? Additionally, I'll agree on the timed ones being way too long. You can get around it with instance hopping, but that just seems like almost a roundabout way of cheating the system. And if you can get around the system so easily, why not just lower or remove it?

I'll just add this last one since you asked, even though I noted it not that long ago, but there's some kind of conflict with healing when you've got T10 Orc BP and UCv4 equipped at the same time that completely cancels it out. It's not a huge deal cause whatever, just put a different BP on, but still seems broken.

[Linamas]

I've sat on this for a couple of days, as I'm not entirely sure that I'm qualified to respond.  I'm not in T11 yet.  I'm not even in T7 yet (almost!).  However, you do ask about things on the server that could be addressed.  I'm sure you've heard everything across the spectrum, and I wasn't going to respond at all.  Then this morning a comment was made in Discord about old content "never being more trivial" in light of current knowledge of the game and server and the availability of end game buffs.  As a new-ish player to this server, who has committed a not so trivial amount of time to "only" be T6, I almost walked away from EZ.  And that's coming from someone who has enjoyed the server and what it has had to offer.  The previous content is not trivial, nor is it not without its faults.

Wings offers a great advantage when it's available.  Even with that advantage, T3/T4 you're stuck waiting on token drops and chance drops for characters to gear up and move forward.  I don't have the creative brain to suggest a solution, but at some point there's a tipping point where you've "finished" the content and it's punitive to farm the tokens and then have to kill the same NPC 100+ times to get one, singular drop.  That's AFTER you've geared 11 other characters fully, with (I wasn't counting) how many other kills along the way.  While it's effective at "slowing down" the (apparently trivial) progression through the game, it's also somewhat...unvaried and uninspired.

You've heard plenty on T5.  I actually enjoyed T5 and found it a refreshing change in pace from the tedium of T3/T4.  It's by far a more enjoyable Tier than T6.  However, it leads me to the next point - box/bot management.  EZ Server promotes itself as a "Solo boxing server."  The wiki says "12 and beyond," but we all know that people are easily running 18.  Mage group CoTH is broken, making moving characters around in large zones extremely tedious.  For the most part, MQ handles this fairly easily.  Occasionally you'll end up with a zone that has broken navmeshes, like Illsalin/Abyss, where you can easily spend several months playing.  Without a better bot management system, you're stuck tabbing across 12+ screens trying to move characters "up" over a ledge to get them in line with your primary driver.  In game there does exist a mechanic to do this, but it's locked behind a paywall that is reserved for a select few that have been with the server for a period of time, or those who happen to catch a donation window that appears as elusive as the random named(s) in T5.  I do not fault bringing down the donation system (I used to practice US tax law, so I get it, and no, I won't give you free advice).  However, with group CoTH broken, and no other way at lower tiers to solve this...it's a simple QoL fix that could be adjusted.

Looking forward, I agree with what's previously been said - bane weapons as a whole become a nuisance for a boxing server.   Having to keep track of 12+ characters, who has what equipped for which NPC "type" and then switching back, swapping out epic augs along the way, we'd spend more time managing equipment than we would playing the content.  Perhaps that's the goal, but if so...it seems less engaging than what I've experienced so far!

I always find the comments/emotes/NPC interactions to be entertaining.  Please continue them.  As a Type A personality, I know that I could never come up with that level of engagement, so it's fun to see (even the names, like the bosses in T5, were amusing to me).  While I don't catch the "lore" behind each tier that I've gone through, I do randomly see the text and get a chuckle the break up the monotony.

Sorry for the gripes - I meant this more as an encouragement that the content itself as presented IS in fact fun and engaging.  Each tier has presented new and unique opportunities.  Always fun to see some new stuff, and play along with new people. 

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