Showing Posts For scorchbomb.3750:
TL;DR Give players the option to under-level their character in exchange for an experience bonus, to have more challenging and engaging combat.
I would love to see the devs add some form of effective difficulty modifier for PvE content. My suggestion is basically individual difficulty setting, which could work by “under-leveling” your character, while giving you an appropriate boost in experience-gained (and possibly loot drops). Of course, the reward should scale with your contribution to each kill, so it can’t be abused by fighting alongside players at a higher difficulty/effective level.
As it stands currently, the only way to make open world PvE combat more challenging is to handicap yourself in some way (e.g. fighting with weaker/no equipment, fighting in zones above your level, soloing group mobs, etc). The problem with this is it ends up taking longer to level; It takes longer to kill mobs, but they still give the same amount of xp. While this is good for casual players, those who want a challenge have few – if any – good options (at least that I’ve found find).
So, in order to justify an increase in difficulty (and therefore time-to-kill), you have to have an appropriate increase in reward-gain. Now this should, at the very least, sufficiently offset the time added, making the average time to level about the same. But, I would like to argue it would be more prudent to actually give a greater reward. Competent players performing well at a higher difficulty should be able to earn more than average experience-per-second, and should be leveling faster, for these reasons:
- It incentivizes learning the game and developing skills (more skill = more rewards)
- If the player has proven their mastery of the current mechanics available to them, they should be ready to move on to other challenges
- It allows veteran or advanced players a fun way to level alts that isn’t grindy
I would like to add that this shouldn’t, in any way, take away from the normal leveling experience. You should be able to level at the same speed and difficulty as you can right now. That way, both hardcore and casual players are satisfied.
What prompted me to make this thread is actually my single biggest obstacle so far in getting into this game: Leveling. Every person I find says the leveling experience is one of the best parts of the game, that it shouldn’t be a grind. But so far, the combat has been so mindless it makes the whole experience feel drudgingly repetitive. Mechanics and abilities are introduced with no real impetus to actually use them. Exploring new zones gets stale fast as the novelty is introduced at way too slow of a pace for me. Leveling tasks bog-down my ability to explore; just when I’m starting to have fun moving through a new area, I venture into areas too high level for me. If I slow down to level and do stuff like hearts, it gets very dull. Too many menial tasks and un-engaging combat.
This is the simplest solution I could come up with, and I’ve found it done well in other games just as I’ve suggested. Many RPGs accomplish this by making items in the game with stats that actually boost experience gained. These stats usually result in a trade off for power, effectively acting as an increase in difficulty and reward for the player. I could see this working well in GW2 if implemented properly.
Let me know what you guys think.
Hey guys, just looking for your suggestions for the most fun ways to level in PvE.
All my chars are relatively low level (highest is 36). Map completion has gotten stale. Fighting enemies feels mindless, especially in lower level zones. The only zone I had fun exploring was Caledon Forest, the rest felt kinda bland. Any recommendations?
I’m not a PVP player and I’m not looking for the most optimal way to grind experience. All the videos I’ve watched on the game say the leveling experience is fun, but it’s been pretty hit-or-miss for me so I feel I’m doing something wrong. I do really like the combat but it’s only rarely been challenging enough to be engaging, or to reward me for playing well.
I think this thread could use some input from a game developer because it seems to be lacking some knowledge in how this stuff works specifically. First of all, online is the only way to prevent cheating. The more aspects of the game that are client-side, the more power cheaters have. That’s why you can hack stuff into say GTA V online, but in League of Legends the best advantage you can have is scripting; as those games have a very different amount of data that’s handled client and server side. There is literally no way to have a true offline mode that prevents cheating. Fundamentally impossible.
That’s why a lot of games that can be played solo have always-online DRM.
On the other hand, all the assets and full game engine of GW2 is hosted client side; so there would likely be very little if any actual more data players would have to download. It may very well be more resource intensive, requiring the players computer to do the processing that’s done server side as well, but, on the other hand, it’s only handling a single player. So it also may not impact performance much at all.
But it’s true, the implementation of this feature could be an extraordinary amount of work depending on how the game is designed. Also, it could significantly increase server load, once again depending on how the game is designed.
In summary, the best you can hope for is a solo option, where you could experience content in your own personal instance, but would still require an internet connection. Something like how modern MMO-ARPGS handle the game, akin to Path of Exile and Diablo 3’s requirement for constant server connection.
Wow, there’s so much good discussion here, I’ll try to reply to as much as I can.
I am not goin to quote the OP on anything, but it seems the way the OP plays is always with people…
The only time I play with other people is when I encounter them in zones. I actually prefer, and spent most of my time, playing solo. Also, I’ve actually solo’d a few champions and elites, they just take too long to kill; and, in my experience, didn’t really necessitate a variety of mechanics or good strategies, mostly just a focus on dodging.
idk man maybe lvl up until you unlock dungeons then do the solo paths in them and gring exp?
Is that a thing? That sounds like it could be fun.
They actually fixed this problem to some degree in the expansion zones, where mobs have mechanics to them that the player is expected to counter.
Sadly most player’s response to this was to whine how “hard” it was.
I think this ties in to the OP’s complaint. In PvE the game does not teach you how to use your skills as you level up. The mobs at level 80 use the same skill level when attacking as lower level mobs. This leads to players afkautoattacking all through vanilla Tyria and then got unexpectedly hit with markedly harder content when they stepped into HoT. Of course people will complain if they’ve had 3 years of one type of expectation and get another level of gameplay without the game first teaching them how to use their skills in PvE.
I remember a few years back I thought I would try out a boon corruption build in PvE. So I set my skills up and went out to play. It didn’t take me long to realize that those skills were worthless in PvE, even on level 80 maps and I was better off using auto attack,
This. Exactly, leveling in pretty much any RPG is supposed to create a smooth learning curve. It should be teaching you the game. Introducing mechanics at a pace that’s palatable, instead of just skipping you to max level and giving you an overwhelming deluge of stuff to figure out. That’s the whole point. It’s not just a Skinner box treadmill to stretch out content as much as possible (though that can be a secondary purpose). That’s what keeps a game from becoming a grind, that there’s novelty introduced at a rate that doesn’t outpace your learning of the mechanics already unlocked. Sure GW2 does that well with a lot of spaces to explore, but the combat doesn’t evolve at all over that time (until apparently HoT).
And to answer a bunch of people’s comments, I’d like to re-emphasize: I don’t want to make the normal leveling experience harder. I just want an option that’s rewarding for it being harder. It IS possible to reward players that prefer a challenge without punishing those that don’t.
My big issue is this; all my options for a challenge actually result in me gaining significantly less experience than if I just mindlessly killed groups of weaker enemies. The game should be incentivizing better play, to help people learn so they can be prepared for more difficult content; and then there won’t be such a steep barrier for entry to that harder content. But of course, if somebody just wants to experience the other parts of the content; environments, exploration, story, content, they should have that option, too. Not everybody cares about combat.
Good developers will create a game that lets you do both, and great developers can do that without just having a “difficulty setting” that asks you at the beginning before you even get to play the game and figure out what difficulty would be best for you.
There’s a TL:DR at the end if this post is too long for you.
Just my 2 cents on my experience thus far. I’ve owned the game since release, bought into the hype and ended up falling short of my expectations. Not saying it’s a bad game, I just don’t personally enjoy it, and it boils down to one singular reason. The lack of a challenge while leveling. This game has so many great combat mechanics! Stuns, blocks, interrupts, parries, AoE, single-target, conditions, combos. How come I’m not encouraged to actually use them? There’s basically no mobs I can’t just group up and instantly nuke down (aside from the group dynamic events). The most effective PvE leveling builds are just your classes most powerful burst AoE damage spells (and some movement speed for roaming). And that’s just fighting enemies at my level; It doesn’t even take into account all the weaker mobs I stomp with all the backtracking to lower level zones I have to do for some reason.
There are ways to address this issue, even simple ones. The best I can suggest is to have a way – either through gear, talents, food buffs, or some other system – to sacrifice damage in exchange for experience earned in combat while leveling in PvE. This would hopefully reduce the effectiveness of AoE nukes, and extend the time spent clearing a mob, which could make encounters more challenging by requiring you to use skills strategically – depending on the situation, enemy tactics, etc – thereby necessitating and rewarding more skilled play. (I say hopefully, because I’m not sure if how skills are currently balanced would mean that burst damage wouldn’t still greatly overshadow everything else) The extra EXP would offset the longer amount of time it would take to kill mobs. This has the added bonus of not interfering with the current method for leveling, allowing players that like focusing on exploration and map completion the option of still playing with an easier combat difficulty. It should effectively work as a personal difficulty setting for players.
Other solutions include content made specifically with combat challenge in mind, re-balancing skills in open world PvE (why is my Engi’s rifle so WEAK), etc; But those all would likely have a larger implication on the game as a whole, or be particularly time and resource intensive for ArenaNet to develop.
Now granted, I haven’t run any dungeons yet. Maybe the challenges lie there, and I’ll actually enjoy that. Dungeons were my favorite way to level in WoW when I played, though I’ve heard they are a significantly different experience in GW2. Also, I haven’t hit max level yet, so maybe there’s end-game PvE content that’s satisfyingly difficult.
But from all the research I’ve done, I’ve yet to find a way to have a satisfying PvE experience. Unless there’s some other way of playing the game I’ve overlooked.
Also, I know PvP is completely different. But I’m not interested in that, I don’t play MMOs for PvP.
I’m curious what the community thinks. Do you guys have the same problem? Do you have any ideas to solve it? Is there actually a way to play the game I haven’t discovered that circumvents this issue? Let me know.
TL;DR I feel GW2 game lacks a way to level in PvE that rewards skilled gameplay.