It is much more than 2%, that is already proven in another post with photos and different sets of armor and weapons.
It’s true, the experience system ruins the gaming experience a lot, but unfortunately there are still guys like the one above who defend it, they need to have another advantage against the rest apart from skill and equipment.
This guy did all the testing. He has the numbers under the armor mitigation tab.
It’s 2% per piece of armor, in total it’s 20% and that’s for those who already have GS600, for the new lvl 60 it’s much more and they are the ones who have the most problems with the experience system.
Thank you for this. Truthfully though from my experience the last few weeks I’ve had different experiences than what seems to be on this collected and tested data. I don’t know if its inaccurate or if I’m doing something wrong. Even at 575 average gear score, I’d say the average damage I do to someone in light armor is around 800-900 on a light swing from a great axe (yes i’m a braindead melee player sorry haha). In return with me wearing medium I die in about 3 heavy attacks from someone else after some testing with a friend in a duel. This is with me running resilient gear and full physical ward gems, and around 140 constitution.
I think they should definitely normalize OPR and 3v3 Arena’s and consolidate the brackets so level doesn’t matter. Let players join opr past like level 20 as well.
Your weapon damage is going to be low until you get a 625 weapon.
Your armor rating (plus absorption from gems and fortify) determine how hard you get hit. The armor rating difference between 600 to 625 armor is <2%. The armor ratting difference between 520 and 625 is about 5%.
This assumes you are level 60.
You can always start using the life staff until you get better gear. It is less influenced by gear gaps than playing a damage build.
It’s even simpler than that, just take out the experience system, thus lowering the difference gap that exists at the moment.
I believe you mean expertise, yes?
If so I don’t mind it, I think it’s good for the longevity of the game. Gives people something to work towards, a reason to login every day and keep playing. I do believe without a shadow of a doubt though that you should be able to raise it A LOT faster if you work hard enough, as it stands right now it feels incredibly slow. This is with me playing for weeks and 8 hours a day, doing all my gypsum dailies and dungeons with friends every single day. It feels like a slow crawl to get to the point where I can be competitive in a PvP environment, which honestly just sucks for me.
I would prefer that as well. That’s a seperate argument though as there’s the expertise system to get to 600gs and then the umbral system from 600 to 625 is also problematic.
Of the two I would probably ditch the expertise system first to fast-track players so they can start doing content that requires min. Gs of 600.
What the experience system does basically is that if you buy a GS600 armor, it lowers it to an average of your GS and the GS of the armor, if you are just coming back or you are new your GS is 500 at lvl 60, for Therefore it reduces it to 550, therefore you take more damage and deal less damage than you should.
Also, all the gear you can drop while you don’t have GS590 is pretty much useless. Only equipment with GS590 upwards can be upgraded with the threshold system.
I was hooked on this game when in one of the alphas I killed a level 60 player as a level 25.
I baited and kited him using throwing hatchets, blocks, dodging, better positioning and getting backstabs on him.
Now this was all possible because of stagger and the fact that I could keep him in my combos.
Now the game is much more like WoW and almost 70-90% gear based with maybe 20-30% being player skill, with the exception of a few weapons having some impressive skill shots you can hit from very far away such as bow/musket/throwing hatchet/ and the odd long range fireball, and well timed ice spikes.
Other than that everything became watered down AoE that is just impossible to fuck up, or has homing on it to cater to those players.
There was a big divide in the community when PvP scaling was implemented, where a group of people felt like it was not MMORPG like that they put in all the time to grind only to be killed by someone lower level than them and with worse gear than them, hence the divide was made for gear to have such a greater effect in the combat.
I whole heartedly wish we can go back in time to the earlier days but it is what it is at this point. Game’s combat is most likely not going back to what it was.
With balancing being such a shit show it’s hard but this month’s patch seems promising for build diversity and getting rid of useless perks on some weapons.
Also will be easier to get gear supposedly so that should help as well as the gear upgrades towards it.
Overall, I hope that they really re work the PvP so newer players can par take and level and feel rewarded.
Also add good PvP gear from the faction shop where we can control the perks. Hyper catering to these niches when the whole point of changing focus from the old game was so that they would not be so niche makes no logical sense to me.
There should be multiple avenues of content be it you want to PvE, PvP, or craft.
I really hate that there are these die hard group of MMORPG gamers who think in 2022 we should be doing everything such as mining for hours to get that piece of gear or doing this dungeon for months to get this piece. Yet these are the same people that would never want to grind arenas or OPR to get their gear.
When people only want to focus on one part of the game or the other.
Ultimately it’s hurting sales, hurting the game, and hurting the fun we could be having doing what we want to do.
This was a beautiful take. Thank you, especially everything about the alpha. I miss it a lot.
edit: except the stagger in pvp, I’m glad thats finally gone haha
I prefer non-balanced open-world pvp if they had loot drops for players gear on death (Albion). It gives lower geared players a rush when they group up and kill players with better gear they can sell for a fortune.
In NW, since open-world pvp is non-existent I don’t think it matters much one way or the other atm. NW doesn’t seem to have a vision for open-world pvp that they’ve shared. My preference would be to mirror Albion’s systems and fix the servers to handle the open-world zerg mayhem.
The developers removed scaling in open world and changed PvP damage formula on the first three or so patches.
Cause of players who townboarded to lv 60 and complained about not puppy stomping players cause of gear/levels.
Example:
they absolutely need more pvp options and incentive to people not maxed out, they are only catering to the players who have been here since the start which will not allow any growth of the game as new people buy it and leave because they cant have fun. cater to both.
terrible change in regards to no scaling, arenas should be scaled for one, for SURE.
The problem is that this same system is the one that affects the wars, in the end those with the highest GS go, not those who play the best.
Ultimately they catered to those die-hard “we spent more time playing so we should not die to anything” people and that is a big reason why there are not a lot of players left. I almost quit 20+ times bc of stupid PvP encounters where I land twice as many skills and attacks only to be 2-3 shot from a couple auto attacks. Game would have been way more fun for everyone if there was AT LEAST 1 game mode with good PvP scaling. and people wonder why PvP in this game is dead 
I was begging people in global chat to queue up for 3v3s yesterday (my server, Orun, is pretty much dead). Anyway, I convinced some fresh 60s to queue up. They were on the other team. I could one shot them with powder burn. It was bad. I didn’t have any fun and I’m sure they didn’t have any fun. It was over very quickly.
Arenas probably need to boost everyone’s gear up to 590-600 or provide loadouts (like a 600 GS con light, medium and heavy armor with resilient and refreshing, and all the weapons with enchanted).
They should also add 590 armor with resilient to the faction merchants.
I also think the faction merchants should sell random 590 to 600 gear each day/week. Since it’s random, sometimes the gear is terrible, but there is a chance it is BiS. Each faction merchant in different towns could sell different gear each day/week. This would incentives people to collect faction tokens via open world pvp.
That is solved by simply removing the experience system. Obviously it’s boring, we’ve been saying it for a long time now…