Guild Wars 2

One of the key concepts to Guild Wars 2 is that your power is always equal to the content you are playing. Going to a level 1-15 zone means that your abilities are matched to the zone.

However this is false.

Downscaling is not working as intended (i would hope).

People come along and steam roll the meta events in lower level zones. A prime example is the Shadow Behemoth. In beta i fought this boss. It took about 35 – 40 of us an hour to kill. Why did it take so long you ask. That was because we were appropriate to the boss. It wiped us repeatedly. It would cut over half of us down. Yet it was enjoyable. It felt like a challenge. Now let’s skip to the live game where everyone has level 80 characters. Yes people are downleveled to 16 when doing this event but that is not enough. Behemoth nowadays lasts no longer than 2 minutes at best and you barely see any damage done to you. It is a case of press 1 and win. (the extreme of this is the fire elemental in Thaumanova. 25 seconds one round took.)

Primarily this is not fair. The point of these bosses is to challenge low level players. To make them learn mechanics like dodging and blocking in a timely manner and the like. With things the way they are there is little to no hope that the players that the content is designed for can benefit from.

And before i get responses while the game wants us to play this way. Cut the crap, you know it’s not you just face roll the bosses for easy rewards.

I feel the need to be frank because i am annoyed. Yes i do have 80’s. No i do not farm these events. I do the events that are appropriate to me. Tequatl, Claw of Jormag, The god temples in Orr. Not robbing the fun experience from low levels.

TBH absolutely people come and steam roll every Meta Event no matter what level the zone it. do you think many people even know how the Jormag fight works at all?

Ratty.5176:

TBH absolutely people come and steam roll every Meta Event no matter what level the zone it. do you think many people even know how the Jormag fight works at all?

Judging from the amount of people that die from Icy Grave, not many.

As for downscaling, I believe it doesn’t account for the Weapon Strength value found on weapons. I don’t have any evidence of this, but try equipping level-appropriate weapons for the zone you are in and you’ll find you’re doing damage that’s more on par with what it should be for the level you’re downscaled to.

The same thing would go for using weapons with low Weapon Strength values when you’re upscaled to a higher level. You may have noticed you do far less damage than you’d expect to when upscaled from a low level in WvW.

Of course, I could be totally wrong about this

I dunno… I was in a low level zone today with a level 80 who used to pretty much ignore bad guys pecking at him. All of a sudden I am taking enough damage that I have to respond to attackers eventually, and don’t appear to be hurting them as swiftly as I used to. Purely a subjective observation, but is sure seems like they did SOMETHING. (Yeah, I still roll over them, but not nearly as blatantly.)

well the concept was very good: the whole game is endgame. I just can’t see this. Low level zones feel like a joke to me. I don’t even want better loot in those zones because this wouldn’t be fair… I’m steamrolling everything there.

talking about rewards: there aren’t really long-term rewards from low level zones which is kind of sad… there’s nothing to get from those zones. It would be quite possible to add zone-specific rewards (made a suggestion for that a while ago) to have people spend some time in those zones and exploring them instead of seeing it as leveling-content only – doing the hearts and 1-time visiting the poi’s – then moving on and never coming back. Think of all the events which are missed by such players.

PurebladeProductions.4875:

As for downscaling, I believe it doesn’t account for the Weapon Strength value found on weapons. I don’t have any evidence of this, but try equipping level-appropriate weapons for the zone you are in and you’ll find you’re doing damage that’s more on par with what it should be for the level you’re downscaled to.

The same thing would go for using weapons with low Weapon Strength values when you’re upscaled to a higher level. You may have noticed you do far less damage than you’d expect to when upscaled from a low level in WvW.

Of course, I could be totally wrong about this

IIRC
Downscaling simply puts your stats thru
stat*level you should be/level you are=scaled stat
So in a level 10 zone a level 80 character is stat*1/8
If you equip a level 10 weapon on a level 80 in a level 10 zone it doesn’t scale you differently because you changed weapons, you just have a weapon with significantly lower stats in your base attack calculation.

Yeah they need to find a way of reducing an items stats before the global downscale takes effect.

Aye downscaling is becoming quite a big issue. Stomping shadow behemoth is ridiculous when trying to do it properly on a level 16

The issue with downscaling is that at level 15 you’ve got single-stat gear while at 80 you’ve got 3-stat gear. Meaning that a downscaled 80 will have a piece of gear with (arbitrary numbers) 10 power, 10 precision, 1%crit dmg. But a true level 15 will have 10 power.

Also, a 15 will have a 20 sec cooldown on their spammy high damage skill but a downleveled 80 will have a trait lowering the CD to an even more spammable 16secs.

Some things you just can’t downscale. Unless, you want a downscaled 80 -> 15 to suddenly lose all traits that cannot be acquired by level 15.

A couple of weeks ago, I logged in at about 6 a.m. Central Time and had a very unusual (and memorable) experience.

I logged onto my level-80 engineer in the Godslost Swamp. For reasons I cannot fathom, there was nobody there. Nobody. I started the pre-events for the Shadow Behemoth, and the usual crowd was totally absent. It wasn’t just some marvel of the culling system—I mean there wasn’t another soul around! Well, not unless you count the ghost NPCs in the area…

Anyway, I started on the events, and I completed all of the portal events by myself. By the time the Shadow Behemoth appeared, one guy (sub-80) came by to help. My wife also came to join me shortly after that, and after talking about it in map chat for a while, another person joined us.

The battle with the Shadow Behemoth was incredible. It took us at least 15 minutes or so, and we didn’t damage any armor as far as I can remember. That’s far short of the hour the OP recalls from the beta, but then again, we have learned much since then. We had a great time, and we all reminisced about the beta weekends and how much fun it could be when we played the game as it was meant to be played.

After that, three of us (the one guy’s level was too low) went to the Blazeridge Steppes and did the same thing with the Shatterer.

All in all, it was a very fun experience, and while I have no idea where everybody was that morning, I really enjoyed their absence.

I hope we get a dev response on this or to at least know they are looking into it. As the poster above me has said these events are really enjoyable if played how they are meant to be done rather than farmed for shiny loot.

Seras.5702:

The issue with downscaling is that at level 15 you’ve got single-stat gear while at 80 you’ve got 3-stat gear. Meaning that a downscaled 80 will have a piece of gear with (arbitrary numbers) 10 power, 10 precision, 1%crit dmg. But a true level 15 will have 10 power.

Also, a 15 will have a 20 sec cooldown on their spammy high damage skill but a downleveled 80 will have a trait lowering the CD to an even more spammable 16secs.

Some things you just can’t downscale. Unless, you want a downscaled 80 -> 15 to suddenly lose all traits that cannot be acquired by level 15.

That is what City of Heroes did with their downscaling. Let’s say you are doing a level 30 instance and your actual level is 45. You lost all of your powers that you had unlocked from level 35 to your actual level. Also per City of Heroes the trait system was attached directly to skills meaning any enchancements attached to skills that were to be downscaled were lost.

Can’t they reduce the weapon damage or weapon stats? For example, I have have lvl 80 exotic bow, can’t they downscale its damage it to lvl 10 (if I’m fighting lvl 10 opponent) masterwork bow?

Strago.4071:

A prime example is the Shadow Behemoth. In beta i fought this boss.

I somehow doubt that the encounters haven’t been tweaked since beta.

The point of these bosses is to challenge low level players. To make them learn mechanics like dodging and blocking in a timely manner and the like.

Not really imo. The legendary karka queen or the claw of jormag are not different, you can do almost everything by just auto attacking. There are other occasions where people may learn how to play. The only slightly more challenging encounters are temple events.

The scaling is fine. You’re not supposed to be as weak as when you just started the game. There always is a slight power progression, and it’s necessary.

Iruwen.3164:

Strago.4071:

A prime example is the Shadow Behemoth. In beta i fought this boss.

I somehow doubt that the encounters haven’t been tweaked since beta.

The point of these bosses is to challenge low level players. To make them learn mechanics like dodging and blocking in a timely manner and the like.

Not really imo. The legendary karka queen or the claw of jormag are not different, you can do almost everything by just auto attacking. There are other occasions where people may learn how to play. The only slightly more challenging encounters are temple events.

The scaling is fine. You’re not supposed to be as weak as when you just started the game. There always is a slight power progression, and it’s necessary.

I’m amazed you completely missed the point of this post…The bosses were designed to be fought by the lower levels who has, as a poster said above, single stat blues at best not triple stat exotics or ascendeds. The point is that a downscaled players is not equivalent to players at the appropriate level to the content. And the other point is that downscaling does not match the strengths of players… I am using low level bosses as the example but you can cover the entire game with the problem.

Maybe you just missed my point.

Strago.4071:

The point is that a downscaled players is not equivalent to players at the appropriate level to the content.

That’s exactly how it’s supposed to be. And it’s not a problem at all. Read the April 30 patch notes:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-April-30-2013/first
Search for scaling. They increased the scaling so enemies don’t die too quickly with a lot of upscaled players. It’s totally working as intended.

Its people not level. Tons of people = quick kill. When there arent alot, it gets way harder, even if everyone;s actual level is 80.

Maybe the answer then is for arena net to increase the scaling of events…Give enemies more HP and give them new AoE’s capable of cutting down swathes of players unless they play smart and dodge and block rather than just being vulnerable to zerging.

I apologise to those who have replied to this thread. I thought the answer lay in dowscaling but i believe it is a combination of the two. Equipment needs to downscaled to single stat gear when in low level areas and events need to be upscaled to accomodate the 50+ that farm these events.

The problem is that while your base stats are scaled down, your gear is not, and you still have your traits and a full skill bar. That makes you significantly stronger than a low level, even when downscaled.
IMO the traits and skills are an acceptable form of power progression, but level 80 exotic gear with runes and sigils is insanely overpowered compared to even the very best that’s available at level 16 or whatever. Unfortunately they can’t really fix this without either a huge nerf to the stat boosts you get from your gear, or implementing a way to downscale gear. Both of those would be incredibly difficult to balance.