Guild Wars 2

Apparently someone has already pointed this out (I could not find the post though) that, the side-kicking system has a fatal flaw at leveling. The down-scaling is calculated on your level, not your gears.

Suppose you are currently level 15 and leveling at a level 10 area. You have all the level 14 masterwork gears and level 15 trinkets. You can’t get any upgrade until you are level 20 for the next masterwork tier. The down-scaling is calculated on a coefficient as 10/15 for all your stats. If you gain a level, your stats coefficient becomes 10/16 and you will be a bit weaker. At level 19, it is now 10/19 which is almost 30% down when you gain 4 levels. Although you may gain some benefits from traits (depends on where you spend), still this is a ridiculous system. Why would your stats drop when you gain level? I confirmed that my power (after down-scaling) drops by 5 in a side-kicked zone right after I gained a level.

An easy solution is to calculate all the stats one by one from your gear level. Make the calculation decimal and round it up after you add them. By doing so, at least you won’t have your stats drop by side-kicking when you gain level. If you are still wearing some level 5 trinkets and you are in a level higher than 5, the calculation should not affect any stats from the lower level gears at all.

Please fix this ASAP because I am feeling so stupid to be side-kicked to become weaker and weaker per level gained for 5-6 levels. And that is assuming you update your gears constantly, otherwise it will be much worse. And if you cannot upgrade your gear due to tradepost on maintenance, you are only playing to become weaker and weaker. Side-kicking is not supposed to be working like this or it will be nothing but harassment for playing in any zone which is lower than your current level.

Considering that most people are complaining that overlevelling makes the game trivially easy, personally I don’t think this is a problem.

If anything, it would be cool if, the higher level you are, the more challenge lower areas present to you. If you want to roleplay it, you can say that, since you are so heroic and awesome at high levels, you deliberately restrict your power against weaker enemies just to get more challenge and fun.

i agree totally. the rewards need to be equal to your level, exp wise and money wise too not just character power is the problem. there is no reason for a high level to explore a low level area. i hate this. i like killing monsters everywhere i go. but the heart people’s rewards and the monster drops arent worth my interest and sometimes risk of engagment. you cant farm hearts waypoints or veiwpoints. the exp gained from these should scale according to level. people may find favorite areas to farm… but it wont last esspecially if they can get the same rewards at a different area. trust me anet. only the brain dead will farm one feild in a noob area over and over because you can kill 15 monsters very quickly over and over. all you have to do to prevent such things is make only certain rare crafting and armor types avaliable in each area. yes theyll farm the expensive ones…. but if your trading system works then price should go down as well. and dependency on one type of rare crafting material is bad design. make an “ecto” type of drop for each area that everyone will want.. sorry for straying from the topic.

Rieselle.5079:

Considering that most people are complaining that overlevelling makes the game trivially easy, personally I don’t think this is a problem.

If anything, it would be cool if, the higher level you are, the more challenge lower areas present to you. If you want to roleplay it, you can say that, since you are so heroic and awesome at high levels, you deliberately restrict your power against weaker enemies just to get more challenge and fun.

That is not how side-kicking supposed to work. You are talking about imbalance in some situation and action of some ignorant high levels.

And I am not talking about level 80 players. This problem does not persist for level 80 players because they are level 80 and they are wearing level 80 gears.

I am talking about leveling player. I have no idea how to explain that, I could kill some level 25 mobs with a specific skill combination at level 26, but I could only take them down to 30% with the same skills at level 31. Not any kind of RPG in the world will work like this even with the side-kicking system exists.

And I guess that why some story quests are insanely difficult and some are too easy. If they tested it under such situation without realizing its side effects, that will appear as a severe disparity in the difficulty for those story quests. A level 10 quest can be well-balanced for a level 14 players with all updated level 14 gears, but can become very hard for a level 19 players in exactly same level 14 gears.