When you look at M10 speedruns, you see a lot of min maxing gear for every encounter that’s even slightly hard. It’s not even an issue with the ward system in the game. If you look at the speedruns done on Empyrean Forge, they are still gear swapping for bosses even though all enemies are Human excluding a few lost enemies that don’t hit very hard. The fact that equipment loadouts were introduced, this behaviour is even more couraged. It’s now just so easy to do it that there is no reason not to do it. It trivializes the game, reduces skill expression and increases the barrier of entry.
Getting gear is not the issue here. You can easily craft with scarabs to make good starter ward gear or just buy 2 perk purples from trading post. But it still increases the barrier of entry for new people and the speedrun meta will also affect newer players because PUG’s want to replicate what speedrunners do.
My suggestion would be to somehow to lock people to their gear for the duration of the expedition. This would mean that people would need to consider the expedition as a whole when choosing the gear at the start. People would possibly use mixed ward pieces or elemental gems to help with harder parts of the expedition. If you struggle with the expedition then you can always increase your equipment load or run more constitution.
I could see few options how to implement this:
Change the out of combat timer to 2 minutes. If you want to switch gear during dungeon, you have to sacrifice time to do it. If you struggle with a boss, you can still change your build to overcome the difficulty but at a cost of score.
Add a modifier to mutation score where you lose half of your points if you switch builds. If you struggle with a boss with your build and need to respec, you probably would not get gold anyway.
Just lock people into their builds and you cannot change during expedition.
Having optimal gear set to counter every encounter in an expedition is not skillful at all. This would not really affect newer players or players who do not compete in leaderboards. This would only affect only the highest level of players.
Gear swapping is not fun during expeditions even with the quality of life increases from having gear sets. It trivializes content which is not that hard in the first place.
I don’t know if most of the players will agree with you, since most of them don’t want a challenge… (sadly) what they want is to feel like winners at all costs, this happens in all games xD
Personally when PVE is so easy it’s boring I play it once and put it aside, I don’t think NW improves in this aspect.
Game being super easy and trivial is not convenience. Switching gear is still an unnecessary hassle even with the gear sets.
Actually quite contrary, stopping people from switching their gear for every fight that has different enemy type sounds so much more convenient.
Sure, stopping people from separately optimizing every fight would make them harder but the game is super easy anyway. Any kind of challenge is just overcome by just using gear that specifically counters certain enemies.
To me swapping gear and having to setup these very specific setups just to make the game even easier than it is, is an inconveniece.
My biggest issue with new world game design in PVE is the fact that the question asked is never ”What is the best way to do the mechanics?” It’s always ”What is the best way to avoid doing the mechanics?”
well its good you think the game is super easy, now you can go clear an expedition with no gear for the ultimate challenging experience… what is the point in the game having several different types of wards if they wont allow you to use them when you need them???.. for the love of god…
hahaha as I told you, you will receive all negative reviews.
Most players don’t want a challenge, they just want to repeat repeat repeat the same dungeon for the item.
And the easier this content is, they will be happy xD
Quite the contrary. The current system punishes build variety and player expression. With the current system if you want to be at the top, you need to run the couple meta weapons and run light armor with minimal amount of constitution as a DPS. This is enabled by the fact that players can just optimize their gear for every fight and get away with being light armor. The gear set system made it much easier, so it will be even more prevalent.
Now with the ease of switching gear, I would not be surprised if the new meta is to have 3 sets for barnacles. Lost for first boss and trash mobs, Angry Earth for nereid and Beast for the crocodile section.
Being able to switch gear to have optimal defenses at every single situation is not increasing build variety. You basically use a single build and just adapt it into every single situation. This is not variety.
If gear switching was discouraged, you would have to take into account a lot more variables which affect how you build your character for the expedition. Hence creating much more variety on how to build your character. Not being able to just easy mode through every encounter increases skill expression for the players. Good players would be able to run light armor in melee, instead of everyone who has the min maxed gear for every situation.
Have you noticed that there are expeditions for each enemy type excluding beast? If gear was locked for the duration of the run you would probably see different builds used for ennead and lazarus. Lazarus could be 5x Ancient Ward while Ennead could be run with 3x Ancient Ward and 2x Corrupted Ward.
Having full ward gear and perfect gems for every situation trivializes the game.
Trivialize it for the best of the best, which you are not part of. You’re not even top 5 on any of the leaderboards. You’ve come here to complain on behalf of other people who aren’t even complaining.
Players swapping gear manually versus using a gear profile to instant swap doesn’t change the skill requirement. The fact the devs let us change our gear so we can adapt to new and changing situations is part of why the pve isn’t stale.
A very bad, poor idea is of course going to be received negatively. OP isn’t even on any of the pve leaderboards, and is making suggestions when he himself is struggling through the current content and he wants to make it harder.
M10 is easy for the top 1% of players and difficult for everyone else. The devs made the right call with finding a good difficulty balance that is just enough of a challenge for veterans without being too difficult for new and returning players or casuals.
You can claim to be the best of the best but since you can’t back it up no one is going to take your seriously.
Please don’t give AGS any ideas. We’re trying to enjoy the game and this would make everyone suffer. We work hard for gear and you want to limit us from using it? Nah.
The play here would be to stop making expeditions with multiple mob types. There are ways to make them more interesting without mixing mob types or re-using dungeon layouts.
But sure, I do not have a static team for speedrunning and I do not even try to aim for world records. I had a 3 month break starting from november and got back in the end of february. The meta had changed quite a bit during my time away and I played catch up with gear sets etc. You do not know me. I wouldn’t need to prove anything for you.
I play the gear swap game the same as anyone else. The fact that I don’t actively try to push speedruns with a static team does not mean anything. The fact is that everyone is a wannabe speedrunner following the lead of Benedicts or xtarsias group. It bleeds into the PUG’s as well and creates elitism which increases the barrier of entry.
It just is an annoyance to me and I don’t know anyone who actively thinks that managing multiple sets for the same expedition is thrilling content. It’s the most efficient way to play the game and I don’t blame the top speedrunners for it. They play by the rules set by AGS and there is nothing wrong with that.
Restricting gear swapping in expeditions will not make the game more challenging so the OPs suggestion is pointless. It’s only going to be an annoying inconvenience for most players.
The core game (PvE) is super easy and that’s where they should be making suggestions for change. Maybe the raids will be challenging, who knows?
xd
I told the OP that he will receive a lot of criticism because most of the players are reluctant to change when they already got the mod cons.
Maybe it is as you say and this is not the solution, but in this post you will find very few constructive criticisms, only people who do not want their comforts to be taken away
Personally I think that one of the problems of PVE (it’s too easy) is due to the healing of the game, both by the LS and the healing by potions.
The LS heals too much in AOE and there is very little chance of err those AOE abilities. Also the potions that you can consume every less than 20 seconds, this is absurd in both PVE and PVP.
So I think difficult pve requires good rewards and difficulty because of some mechanics not just stacking dr to whatever aoes are constantly happening or mob type.
Firstly the rewards in this game are mostly crap. This could be fine it makes inventory management a problem though, so this needs to be fixed. There also needs to be some sort of system in place that allows for soem player agency in gearing such as a token system or shop that has either better rng or some way to choose things outright. I think the flame core is a start to a good system like that.
Secondly pve mechanics need to be better than just constant aoe damage. This is partially why healing is overturned and in turn makes melee more desired(besides the cleave damage which could use some adjustment) .It also makes the healing role feel a bit more static . Just doing ground aoes for the most part is pretty weak gameplay
I think that in PVE the resistance system (corruption, etc) is a crude way to lengthen the game.
As you say, a lot of garbage falls in the dungeons, this is unnecessary. That in each dungeon when killing the final boss a coin falls for a particular store, I think it will be a way to see your progress and that it is not just RNG.
the boring thing about AOE heals is that they last over time (all of them) and it’s very hard to err with them.
Also in the game (particularly PVP) there is too much AOE damage, these abilities should nerf based on the number of targets affected, that way you don’t need as much AOE healing (They should also weaken based on the number of targets affected).
