HCE Playtest Feedback (13/3/2019, 20UTC)

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    • HCE Playtest Feedback (13/3/2019, 20UTC)

      For comparison the 2 maps played were streamed on twitch and you can find the corresponding video by clicking this

      A Few clarifications regarding the Group:
      1. All 5 Members were experienced HCE players, having completed at least 1 lvl 15 Map on time.
      2. Every DPS player was outfitted with at least 8.3 Excellent gear (8.3 MP blazing, 8.3 Exc Boltcasters, 8.3 Exc Witchwork + 8.3 Exc cryptcandle), Weapons and Offhands were all over 1600 IP
      The Maps tested were a level 12 Lumber Lunacy and a lvl 12 Stonewars.
      Our observations were the following:
      1. Money:
        1. When creating a 100% guild tax guild and comparing the guild balance with the lost silver there is a loss of about ~30-40k per map (230k income from lumber , ~310k from stonewars), only due to having respec activated on maximum specialisation.
        2. Poisons, (around 20x T6 and 5x T8) amount to a cost of ~80k silver
        3. Special Bufffoods like Lurcher Sandwiches require another 30k per piece for the Tank
        -> Net loss of around >120k silver on respec and consumables alone, this is a higher number for higher level maps.
      2. Counters and Finishing Difficulty
        1. Changes in Mobs:
          1. Lumber Lunacy - We Noticed that the boss will now automatically deaggro if youre standing outside of his attack range, disabling the current whispering bow tanking Method. Due to the high amount of damage dealt by the bosses autoattacks the map now becomes significantly harder to complete on high levels again. A few people brought up the suggestion to add some indication of the attack to the boss (short uninteruptable casting bar) to make it easier for the tank to recognize and dodge these attacks or to apply protective effects to him
          2. Stone Wars - The Miniboss now spawns an fireball totem (similar to those found by dungeon bosses). This is increasing the difficulty of the engage by a bit, although it shouldn't have much impact on how the Map will be handled in the future
        2. New Quests:
          1. Multiplication Error: Currently each mob killed counts as 5 kills on the quest, this is probably caused by a kill getting counted once per one of the 5 players in the engage
          2. Lumber Lunacy: We couldn't make any predictions on the difficulty of the map so far, since we failed to count the mobs when originally beating the map due to the bug mentioned in 2.2.1. If anyone were to count the amount of mobs we killed before defeating the main boss and send me this number via discord (DrNye#9092) or PM on the forums / ingame it would be of help
          3. Stone Wars: Due to a watcher of the stream (thanks to you toseidon) we were able to count the number of mobs killed using the usual skip route when completing a stonewars map, resulting in a total of 53 kills before defeating the boss (54 if the boss himself is included, we were unable to verify that due to the mentioned multiplication bug.) After defeating the boss we had a bit less than 3 minutes remaining after clearing the map with us wiping one time. (loosing around 2 minutes). This would mean around 5 minutes remaining for defeating another 10 monsters, which should be possible but hard when focussing on clearing smaller mobs instead of the current pulls designed to beat high-hp mobs, especially giants. I would assume you could beat the map with a total of around 2-3 minutes remaining on level 12 if you were to play it perfectly and without anyone dying. When comparing lvl 12 maps (525% HP bonus) to lvl 15 maps (888% HP bonus) you get around 58% more HP on every mob (988/625 ≈ 1.58), increasing the time needed by roughly the same factor. This would result in a time requirement of around 30 minutes with the current quest (we took 20 minutes -> * 1.5 equals 30). Decreasing that number to around 55 would probably make for the best balance between the challenge of time while making the map still beatable with a single wipe on level 14 or 15.
          4. The most likely effect the new quests will have is that players will shift from trying to kill packs with tanky enemies like before (berserker and giant quests) and focus on killing enemies with less hp (knifelings and wildlings for keeper maps, dogs and the squires for morgana, rats for heretic and skeletons for undead maps). Another fix to the high time requirement mentioned in 3. would be to keep the amount of required kills the same but add an x2 kill multiplier to "Big" mobs.
          5. Times that our group achieved will probably be hard to achieve using normal HCE groups, since we were used to playing with each other and were using 1600 IP+ gear on every DD, which is both unusual for current random party building.
      3. Balancing of new Parameters in accordance to other Oberon changes.
        1. Change of the current silver respec cost: since with the introduction of oberon both the amount of combat fame and famecredits required increased by 15%, the cost of silver/credit should also be lowered, in order to balance this out
        2. Silver and Loot adjustions
          1. Results of silver drop reduction: By keeping watch on around 3-4 Trade channels of bigger discord servers dedicated for HCE related content you can currently see a big amount of players trying to sell off their gear out of fear of possible worthlessness. After noticing those changes, a lot of players will probably quit doing hces / not invest in expensive gearsets anymore. This will have an overall negative influence on the game, as people who spent millions of silver (100s of millions in case of 8.3 MP players) will feel underappreciated after investing lots of their money into gear that doesn't pay off anymore. This will cause a lot of players to feel like they wasted hundreds of hours of time to get "worthless" gear sets that won't pay off anymore. Also HCEs currently are a great way to famefarm as a solo player (either by choice or when none of your guild / friends are online) as a filler activity and is a fast way to get into farming, when you dont want to spend an hour on building a group and walking towards a dungeon. By loosing one of those filler activities and making people feel punished by investing into equipment that feels worthless for them the chance for people to quit the game because of the update will be given, since a lot of players out there do either enjoy HCEs as one of their favourite kinds of content or loose 100s of millions when HCE items they own get worthless (for example the seller of the 8.3MP caerleon marketplace blazing will have a loss of over 100M on the value of 1 item alone). Also people who built their entire specs only around being competitional in expeditions will have to either respec or start a completely new weapon tree adding further frustration.
          2. Currently HCEs and GvGs for Mercia Townplots are the only activities to justify the use of 8.3 gear in any way. Removing HCE players from this pool will cause a massive backlash in high level crafting, especially for Non-Meta GvG items, basically loosing all of their value over night.
          3. Impact of HCEs on the black Market: HCEs currently drain a lot of the T4-T6 loot from the Black Market due to the high loot modifiers. This is correctly assessed by the developers of the game and reducing the loot drops from high level HCEs is a reasonable change. In addition to that it would probably be a good idea to further encourage players to use the black market, by having it create more buy orders, to increase the circulation speed of loot and making the game feel more rewarding.
          4. HCEs as a silver sink mechanic: HCEs provide a big role in "destroying silver" from the game, since silver and fame gained are in a roughly equal proportion everywhere. Whereas in Openworld activities such as normal dungeons, people usually dont pay high repair costs (over 50k per death), this is commonplace in hces. Therefore the amount of silver gained in HCEs is already beneficial compared to the open world system, whereas the only "sink" in the open world is the 10% trashrate of items, which only affects the item / ressource markets respectively (the 2% market tax is neglegible).
          5. Possible changes on Gold-sales by decreasing the attractiveness of HCEs: One of the biggest driving factor for people to pay ingame items with real life currency are usually items that will be "Permanently useful" . By decreasing that "usefullness" less players will be willing to spend real money on those items, which will reduce the amount of gold on the games markets and perhaps lead to problems like rising costs for the premium subscription etc.
        3. Balancing of OW content against HCEs
          1. Due to the Addition of random dungeons we now have an Open World activity that doesnt require massive use of relics or territories like normal dungeons do, for a higher reward than high level hces when using enchanted dungeon maps. If those dungeons are recognized as the new best famefarming method in the game people will naturally prefer those to in city activities, due to them being more rewarding and interesting (Due to the many different possibilitys they can be structured). Also they are designed to be designed to be quite similar in structure to expeditions, making them a possible alternative for HCE players since they are a similar type of content. Therefore i believe that especially high level HCEs should stay around the same level of reward as they are currently, since they also require relatively high skills and risks (100ks and mapcosts in the millions).

      • Summary
        • The new counter missions are nice, but are almost impossible to hit in time on lvl 15 without maxed out DPS and massive use of 8.1 poison etc. and perfect play, consider lowering those a bit or introduce progress for killing high HP mobs
        • The real economical problems in HCE loot occur from the black market being under-satisfied. I would recommend to keep the silver drops the same to further keep HCEs attractive and account for high investments and consumable / rep costs but "flattening" the increasement curve on the loot bonus (to have lvl 1 maps stay roughly the same and lvl 15s at around 1/3 of current loot) to get the loot drain down, while still obtaining items from low level hces.
        • Adapt Respec costs to new Fame Multipliers
        • Keep the great work up on OW features like random dungeons instead of nerfing instanced content to make people shift to it because its more fun not because HCEs feel less worthwhile

    • tabooshka wrote:

      DrNye wrote:

      The new counter missions are nice, but are almost impossible to hit in time on lvl 15 without maxed out DPS and massive use of 8.1 poison etc. and perfect play, consider lowering those a bit or introduce progress for killing high HP mobs
      pretty sure thats why its called hardcore expedition, because its supposed to be hard
      Have you completed a level 15 HCE before? This test was done by people who extensively HCE, I can vouch for each and every one of them. Their points are very valid.

    • A fame hall for "server first to complete encounter x" for encounters that seemed impossible at first would be first thing that comes to my mind - rembering how much effort and costly trials we put into wow...but to bad SBI is about to tune down on HCE in favor of OW/Procedual dungeons, but I guest you have to decide what your game is gonna be at some point in time...

    • I think the feedback is obviously very biased towards a tiny subset of players doing high level HCE. If anything, the new transmutation changes are going to reduce high level gear value anyways.

      I don’t think high level gear being valued less is a bad idea at all. Relic items are still going to be very expensive, and other gear being cheaper means more people are willing to take it out into the open world and risk losing it. Currently all this super high level gear is sitting in people’s inventories safe in Caerleon where it won’t trash anyways (because of HCE).

      If you look at the high fame rates and low silver rates in the new randomized dungeons, if people enable auto respec with high mastery/specialization it will probably end up taking more silver out of the game than repair costs for HCE. Also if people are willing to take higher level gear out during the update, these repairs will still be costly.

      The bottom line is that these changes are not going to make HCE unfun for players that like HCE content. The only real thing that changes here is open world fame suddenly becomes a lot more attractive, which will draw players out of the cities to actually play the game. A lot of people happen to forget that a major aspect of this game is supposed to be open-world PvP.

    • DrNye wrote:

      Change of the current silver respec cost: since with the introduction of oberon both the amount of combat fame and famecredits required increased by 15%, the cost of silver/credit should also be lowered, in order to balance this out
      I think that this is clearly intended as a silver sink.
      Additionally: the amount of silver gained in the openworld is also negative if you want to generate credits will full specs, now leading to the following:
      You have to choose between fame credits and silver generation.

      I'd love to see some balancing done on the timers of HCEs in coordination with experienced players and also some mob difficulty balance.
      I don't think that "bigger" mobs should count as 2x for the quest since the whole point of the quest is to make players actually do the mobs (and not skip most packs as they do on live currently), the balance should be in this direction. Doing some higher level HCEs would then mean: taking more time to do it, meaning an increase of the "hardcore" aspect (since you have to focus for a longer time).

    • 8.3 is as expensive as it is because of HCE. If HCE becomes worthless then 8.3 will become cheaper and will maybe even see play outside of Caerleon by the richer individuals - think reset day. SBI stated in the past that instanced content without too much of a risk should always be less rewarding than outdoor content. The way you make it sound by saying 'we paid hundreds of millions of silver for this gear' is that you want this game to be pay to win and I'm sure the majoriy of the players is against such a concept. I'm sure most of us have a HCE set that will be worthless soon, maybe not a T8.3 MP like you, but you are looking at it the wrong way anyway. That HCE set of yours made you a lot of money and fame since the time you bought it, so it was probably a good investment anyway. Then another reason why HCE might drop in popularity / maps increase in price: if the people that do map lvl. 1-10's right now decide random dungeons are a better alternative, then higher lvl map prices will go up.

    • The real reason people don't use 8.3 in open world it's because it's way to expensive comapred to the benefit and the cost of 8.2 excellent.
      Let's be serious here for a second. The price of 8.3 gear never was due to HCE, it's due to the fucking IP cap introduced at the realse making gear quality really strong comapred to tier increase.

      People liking it or not, HCE is part of the game and the economy. It also give some love to some gear that's otherwise not even consider anymore.

      It's time people stop bitching on HCE like that. the real issue here is not HCE but auto-respec feature. Before auto-respec, HCE wasn't at this level because what's the point of grinding gear already 100/100.
      The moment auto-respec came out, things went out of hands because of the fame value available, especially when you can gather the fame from every slot of equipement and spent it to 1 piece, making fame increase just perfect for the high IP requierment of HCE. (and hence also made high level HCE available)

      Now when you look at HCE money wise, guild taxes are already fucking them up hard because of the high investment/high reward.
      The real question here is : why making random dungeon almost tax free ? (most of the waelth is loot, and a good aprt of the silver is earn with pouches not impacted by taxes and prenium)


      Hence an other issue here : HCE is ballanced like this because of people with 0% tax guild, fucking up hard people with taxes.
      It's may be time to provide people for OW content when your all alliance/guild can earn fame bonus buff making guild usefull even for people staying all time long in Caerleon and also forcing them out to protect this precious buff.
      Melaween

    • Shevarage wrote:

      The real reason people don't use 8.3 in open world it's because it's way to expensive comapred to the benefit and the cost of 8.2 excellent.
      Let's be serious here for a second. The price of 8.3 gear never was due to HCE, it's due to the fucking IP cap introduced at the realse making gear quality really strong comapred to tier increase.

      People liking it or not, HCE is part of the game and the economy. It also give some love to some gear that's otherwise not even consider anymore.

      It's time people stop bitching on HCE like that. the real issue here is not HCE but auto-respec feature. Before auto-respec, HCE wasn't at this level because what's the point of grinding gear already 100/100.
      The moment auto-respec came out, things went out of hands because of the fame value available, especially when you can gather the fame from every slot of equipement and spent it to 1 piece, making fame increase just perfect for the high IP requierment of HCE. (and hence also made high level HCE available)

      Now when you look at HCE money wise, guild taxes are already fucking them up hard because of the high investment/high reward.
      The real question here is : why making random dungeon almost tax free ? (most of the waelth is loot, and a good aprt of the silver is earn with pouches not impacted by taxes and prenium)


      Hence an other issue here : HCE is ballanced like this because of people with 0% tax guild, fucking up hard people with taxes.
      It's may be time to provide people for OW content when your all alliance/guild can earn fame bonus buff making guild usefull even for people staying all time long in Caerleon and also forcing them out to protect this precious buff.
      Because good fame that is completely safe should not be free. Randomized dungeons are rewarding because you are taking the risk of losing gear and time by being in the black or red zones.

      Of course some gear will fall in value if HCE becomes less prevalent, but you’re acting as if that’s a bad thing. There’s plenty of items in the game outside HCE that don’t get used that are very cheap.

    • I can't understand why they are nerfing the silver drop in HCEs. All the feedback given before pointed out that the issue with HCEs is the fame gain in high tier maps (10~13). The total silver yield is already not that great considered the cost to run HCEs (consummables, repair, autorespec etc), to the point that most of HCErs have to tax evade in order to profit.

      So what we have now is a change that will remove HCEs as a valid option from starting/poor players while the rich will still be making an absurd amount of fame. It makes absolutely no sense to punish those that are NOT making "excessive" fame instead of the ones that are. SBI is just removing an option from people that weren't even the issue to start with.

      The change should be to nerf the fame gain in high tier maps while the rest is left as is. HCEs can, and do, perform an important role of giving accessible (but not that good) fame to starting players in lower tiers.


    • Olyvia was kind enough to share the ammount of consumables used in a lvl 15 Map.
      Current Market values Are:
      230k for 8.2 Food, Optional 150k for 2 x 8.1 in case of deaths
      20 * T8 Poisons -> 130k Silver
      8 * T8.1 Poisons -> 120k Silver

      On guaranteed expenses that is a grand total of almost 500k silver for a single map

      I dont see how it is possible to sustain this with the current plans of silver nerfing.

      I didn't want to have to phrase it like this, but as it seems that this won't be reconsidered i'd like to point out again that by implementing those changes youre basically killing the only High-Challenge PvE activity this game has ever head and doing so will have an devastating impact on both players morale and the games economy. I still recommend you to stop the change before it causes any irreversible damage (im already seeing people quitting the game over this decision as it basically spits on them by rendering the sets they often spent hundreds of hours of grind and even real money on basically worthless.). If you take a look at ANY discord server youre seeing people trying to sell of their sets last second before their trading partner noticed he has basically been scammed.

      Promoting new content by killing off everything else is defenitely not a way a "Sandbox" game should work. After being in charge of this game for over 1 year after release, even longer if you count in the betas you should know that.

      I sincerly hope you reconsider this change as i haven't seen a single reason for it except an underexplained "re-evaluation", which should be able to be talked about publicly. In case you don't, you should think what kind of implications it will have if the playerbase stops trusting in any stable game mechanics.

      Sincerly, Nye

      The post was edited 1 time, last by DrNye ().

    • Zahi wrote:

      @DrNye

      The silver that HCE's give is still a lot better than any open world silver. Seems like SBI is trying to move towards a model where 'auto-respec' will always cost more silver than you get in drops.
      "better silver" that you'll immediately have to spend again isn't "better silver"

      Robinhoodrs wrote:

      You're paying the price for a safe PvE experience, I'm glad they're nerfing HCE's as they shouldn't be that rewarding being locked away inside the city with no risk at all.
      Always crying about HCEs isn't going to get you anywhere. Would you want me to go around and just complain about every feature without even trying to bring up a proper argument?

      The post was edited 1 time, last by DrNye ().