The Reaper XP problem

[DBZ]

That boat sailed it aint ever coming back get over it move on new grinds are coming

 

[Br4d]

SSG fixes problems all the time when there is good reason.

The stat crunch is a good example.

Just bump Elite up to R1 XP levels and be done with it.

 

[rabidfox]

Just bump Elite up to R1 XP levels and be done with it.

I can just see the complaints a month later, "hard mode should give the same XP as elite. I can't keep up with zergers on elite, they move even faster now that they don't occasionally get slowed by a reaper."

 

[Br4d]

I can just see the complaints a month later, "hard mode should give the same XP as elite. I can't keep up with zergers on elite, they move even faster now that they don't occasionally get slowed by a reaper."

There is actually a very good argument for just having one XP rate for all difficulties. The current tiered system just messes with new players ,most of whom dawdle for a month and then leave the game.

SSG should be looking for new players to progress very quickly through their first life. That's kind of the bubble point for whether a player sees value in long-term play or not. When progress is slow it is really easy to get diverted into playing something else and never come back.

 

[DBZ]

If they put some work in and made the ddo template builds even half decent for new players could completely change there game

 

[Br4d]

If they put some work in and made the ddo template builds even half decent for new players could completely change there game

The problem is the devs are effectively casual players for the most part. Tonquin aside I'm guessing none of them understand spikey play at the level that the best players do. This means that when there is a quiet break in the system (chains is a good example) it will just sit there forever causing ridiculously large numbers because the spikes know how to build and sequence stuff just right for it to do that.

 

[rabidfox]

There is actually a very good argument for just having one XP rate for all difficulties. The current tiered system just messes with new players ,most of whom dawdle for a month and then leave the game.

SSG should be looking for new players to progress very quickly through their first life. That's kind of the bubble point for whether a player sees value in long-term play or not. When progress is slow it is really easy to get diverted into playing something else and never come back.

New players level slow because they don't know the quests, nor the game mechanics, nor anything else. They're new. They're learning. I spent over an hour in Finding Dorris when it came out because it was new to me, I missed a note (they later made the notes easier to find), and I was exploring. Using newbies needing to level fast as an excuse never sits well with me. IMO they should explore and have FUN in the game. Power leveling is something to worry about later. I even know plenty of vets that still take their time and do optionals and aren't about the zerg life; I don't think SSG needs newbies at cap faster.

 

[erethizon1]

Reaper difficulty should not give additional XP over Elite. Reaper already supplies Reaper XP in addition to standard XP. It gives other bonuses as well to loot and of course the trees themselves and lost souls.

This would solve the R1 meta by turning it into an Elite or R1 meta depending on whether you are farming Reaper XP or not.

I don't really care if reaper gives more regular experience. There is so much regular experience that I run quests for zero experience every life. They can do whatever they want with regular experience. What I want to see is the RXP reward proportional to the effort. Heroic saltmarsh is the same quests as legendary saltmarsh and yet gives less than 1/10th the RXP. There is no good reason for that.

 

[DBZ]

That reminds me salt marsh 1 does it have teleports 2 is there anything at all useful in the saga list

 

[erethizon1]

There is actually a very good argument for just having one XP rate for all difficulties. The current tiered system just messes with new players ,most of whom dawdle for a month and then leave the game.

SSG should be looking for new players to progress very quickly through their first life. That's kind of the bubble point for whether a player sees value in long-term play or not. When progress is slow it is really easy to get diverted into playing something else and never come back.

I agree with this completely. I have been arguing for years that all difficulties should give max favor. It makes no sense that the father favors you less for rescuing his daughter from the trolls because you entered the troll cave when fewer trolls were home and thus had an easier time. You did what you were asked to do, you should have their favor. If anything is going to make favor payouts different it should be doing optionals, not the difficulty setting.

 

[erethizon1]

That reminds me salt marsh 1 does it have teleports 2 is there anything at all useful in the saga list

The heroic saltmarsh saga list has hay. The heroic Isle of Dread list is surprisingly useless. Not a single thing that is not found in every other saga list in the game. I usually just take a 1 skill tome because at least 2 crafting fragments is something I can keep. My level 200 guild doesn't need renown and experience is beyond useless given that I will get far more than 10 million experience every life whether I want to or not, so I never take saga experience.

 

[DBZ]

Legendary only 1 i care about cards meh seems about it

 

[Br4d]

New players level slow because they don't know the quests, nor the game mechanics, nor anything else. They're new. They're learning. I spent over an hour in Finding Dorris when it came out because it was new to me, I missed a note (they later made the notes easier to find), and I was exploring. Using newbies needing to level fast as an excuse never sits well with me. IMO they should explore and have FUN in the game. Power leveling is something to worry about later. I even know plenty of vets that still take their time and do optionals and aren't about the zerg life; I don't think SSG needs newbies at cap faster.

It's not power leveling I'm talking about. I'm talking about somebody installs the game and runs a couple of dozen instances at normal difficulty at the end of which they are level 4 or 5, and the instances are getting harder and it's hard to see the road in front of them.

Most people don't get beyond level 9 or so before they're faced with the choice of continuing to grind an unforgiving first life grind or doing something else with their time. I want them to be level 12 before they realize it.

 

[DBZ]

If they had a working template build it wouldn't be as hard they just need to find some gear then n work on things

 

[Jack Jarvis Esquire]

Reaper difficulty should not give additional XP over Elite. Reaper already supplies Reaper XP in addition to standard XP. It gives other bonuses as well to loot and of course the trees themselves and lost souls.

This would solve the R1 meta by turning it into an Elite or R1 meta depending on whether you are farming Reaper XP or not.

I think this is the crux of the matter. Reaper should be run for RXP, not XP. Cap XP to Elite levels. If you want RXP, run reaper. If not, and you only want fast progression, Elite will suffice.

The corollary is true at cap when XP is irrelevant, and RXP is the only game in town, so to speak.

 

[Toede]

The path templates don't even have to be completely optimal. They are really meant to introduce players to the game and get them through their first life or as an introduction to playing a class. They should let some of us volunteer to go through them and fix the builds and submit them for consideration. I've been thinking of slogging through a bunch of them just to see what the progression actually is for the different races because I can't find information on the paths for the life of me. But it's rough trying to play them. Some of the choices at level up make me scratch my head, if not cringe.

 

[Redoubt]

Unless you remove normal xp from reaper quests, most leveling will still be done on R1. Even if the R1 normal xp was lowered the same as elite. You cross a point where you are more powerful leveling R1 than on elite, so even for the same xp, R1 would be faster.

 

[Br4d]

Unless you remove normal xp from reaper quests, most leveling will still be done on R1. Even if the R1 normal xp was lowered the same as elite. You cross a point where you are more powerful leveling R1 than on elite, so even for the same xp, R1 would be faster.

If you don't run Reaper at all you never cross the point where R1 is easier than Elite. The only reason I ran R1 in the first place was because there was more regular XP there. Then after 11 Reaper points or so it was clearly easier to run R1 than Elite on the builds I play.

 

[Kintaya]

Nothing I wrote is true for the 6 people you run with. It is true that the vast majority of people that play R10's at legendary consider it a waste of time to run anything higher than R1 as they level up. You see this all the time on most servers. Some of these people even go so far as to complain that "heroic is boring because it is too easy" as these R10 players run R1 just because it is fast. The problem isn't that these people are not capable of higher reaper in heroics, it is that they do not feel like they are getting the reward they need to bother with it because it pales in comparison to what they get at the cap for R10's. There is no good reason to keep it this way and it should be fixed.

Not true. We sometimes run R10 lives straight from harbor to cap. Just for the extra challenge.
Also a lot of people just straight up solo R3-R4 because it's almost as fast and gives at least double RXP. And that stacks up quite fast compared to R1 runs.

SSG fixes problems all the time when there is good reason.

The stat crunch is a good example.

Just bump Elite up to R1 XP levels and be done with it.

WHAT? Stat crunch was one of the worst things they ever did.
1) There was no real reason to do it. We're already way beyond the scope of pen and paper.
2) Instead of creating a proper linear stat progression from 1 to cap they only squished the very top.

So now we have +8 gear at 15, +10 at 21, +11 at 27 (hello orchard my old friend), +13 at 29 and +14 at 32. So instead of linear or exponential progression of gear we have logarithmic. You can't squish only the top. All it did was make low/mid epic gear outside of weapons mostly pointless. So people still get sharn gear at 15/17 depending on the set, and keep that all the way to 32.

So what was fixed? And why was this even attempted? We'll always be in an arms race. New expansion comes out. The gear from it has to be incentivizing players to buy the expansion and run the content. So it'll be at least equivalent to previous gear of same level. Maybe a bit better. Then since gear is a bit better, mobs get a bit tougher. Hence the difficulty disparity between old and new content.

 

[Br4d]

They did stat crunch because somebody opened their mouth on the forums and opined that the gear was so good that it made past lives look weak by comparison.

I haven't been as straightforward since that mistake.