I think if astral hunts are ten times faster than a motivated, fully artifacted individual, it really is something that should be addressed - Maybe bringing down the rates on astral, and bringing up the rates you'd get when doing solo/small group hunting? I think double experience rates for large groups would be okay, but as it is now, it's really silly.
I would like to see solo hunting be a viable alternative - Right now people can easily earn more essence in two hours than I can in a week of grinding, by just afking with their autobasher on.
Don't have a ton of experience here, besides for being in those trains, but in my opinion; solo, or small group bashing, of limited things needs to be massively buffed. The xp gain on things is quite low especially when you get to the higher levels that outside of these trains gaining experience is very difficult, due to limited resources.
This could be helped with reducing the limited resources with instanced areas, increasing the gains for anything that isn't infinitely spawnable.
I'd be hesitant to nerf astral bashing, as there is already a big penalty with there being almost no gold drops, and nerfs like that tend to inversely impact new players more then established players who were able to utilize things before the nerf.
If you really want to nerf astral, just reduce the power per energy tier held by the nodes. No one needs to rely on cone to get power from those necessarily - there's plenty of other sources for nexus power and no one is hurting in that regard. Every other option just muddies up the lines and threatens to affect group bashing in non-astral settings as well.
Would be neat if there was some skill or effect that instantly converted gold drops into exp/essence instead of dropping at all. The more gold you would have gotten, the more exp in turn? Could be something to consider for a counterpoint at least.
The biggest issue in my mind is that there is nothing worth solo hunting. There is no challenging bashing in the game for the solo player. Even Orrery is just a permalink.
It's completely a waste to stack expensive experience buffs for the solo player. For the group player on Astral now, you'd be silly not to stack them as high as you can. That's a huge difference right there, too.
Buff Muud. Buff Dio. Buff Lirangsha. Buff WSF zombies (not the ones that get released on the roads). Or make mirrors of these zones with mobs that give similar experience as a mob killed by a large astral group.
Solo / small group hunting needs a huge bump up. Then tweak down large group hunting a bit as needed. Nerfing experience buffs isn't going to do it, and it's really not where the focus needs to be imo anyways.
(Also that list is missing IRE Elite, I think, up to 25%)
It's crazy that a few astral hunts took my new demi from around 22mil to 99mil. I bought second trade, within 2 weeks of hitting demigod? That's insane (and I'm not including the essence I was given by the artifact). I ran wax lips, golden tonic and harmony when I could, and occasionally got lucky with poteen pot. *edit I forgot there was a few times also with 100% buff from cookies.
This is a ridiculously excessive rate of gain. Stand in one room, stratagems and SSC for eternity. The only effort is on the part of the person watching the linking. I love that I have avoided so much boring grinding but I also find astral bashes ridiculously mind-numbingly boring, but they are way too good to pass up.
I don't think astral mob generation or XP per mob needs to necessarily take a hit. I personally like the idea that getting a big group together is rewarded, but I'd rather see it turned into something that's more interactive and discourages people just basically afking.
My simple solution would be for groups larger than a certain size, there's a chance for a link to fling the group across the node, and perhaps generate some random walls within the area.
To me this is a more interesting mechanic which can be overcome if people are working at it, but will overall serve to slow down the faucet and end 20+ person mega-hunts with 15+ people basically just zoning out completely.
Idea: When you've hit 50 million essence for a sticky wondercrystal, also gain the ability to generate a non-sticky wondercrystal for 60 million essence.
What if instead of nerfing xp for large astralbashing, we tweak numbers for insanity instead? That gives more incentive to get those insanity artifacts.
>----------------------------------[ Changelog Entry #2020 ]----------------------------------< Entered by: Ianir the Anomaly Date: 2020-02-28 17:41:37 o Changed the squad size cap for experience splitting to 10 from 3. - For an explanation of what this means, before this change, 2 people in a squad would receive half the mob's exp, 3 people in a squad would each receive a third of the mob's xp, but 4 people would also receive a third of the mob's xp, and 20 people would each receive a third of the mob's xp. After this change, squad sizes up to 10 will receive an evenly split amount of xp, and after 10 people, everybody will receive 1/10th of the mob's xp. - This change has been made after multiple weeks of tracking where experience is coming from and how it's generated (limiting data to anybody who gains over 1 million essence per weave). In examining this data, we found large astral hunts were the primary source of large number essence gain, and only particularly in groups of 6-8+. Looking at causes for this, we found the group sizing effect and are attempting this as a fix. - The extra squad bonuses for XP were not affected here. These are still 5% per person after 2, 10% for covens and mindlinks. - We will continue to monitor the situation and make further changes if necessary. >---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<
In practice this was a 75% nerf plus or minus for a decent sized group. One step down, but...
I'm putting the final QoL touches on the demipower rework and would like some players to hop on the test server and give it a go. There was a lot of refactoring here, but in general, it should operate the same with the same commands. If you're interested in hopping on and testing the changed powers out or just in general testing the system, please let me know through a message in-game and I'll get you the server information.
Just to be clear, this isn't the continued leveling stuff with the perks, this is just the re-work of the current demipower system with adjusted powers and weight thresholds. It does move all the RP powers to 0 weight. That'll be what I work on next and I don't imagine it'll take as long to get out.
As we mentioned before, we do have more in the works, but it's not something we'll really be able to talk about until it's time to release (for reasons that will become obvious). Please don't think these two items are -all- that we're doing.
Any plans to adjust the weights of the powers? Having access to additional powers isn't really much of a change when demi caps at 50 and Aegis, for example, is 50.
Honestly they look good across the board. Weight compression happened, but several powers were reduced in weight so it's not as rough as may be expected (except for FA/Aegis, which stayed at 50).
I really like the forced rarity. There are at least nine different powers that I want, and having to make hard choices based on situation is interesting.
Its probably too late now, but would it be possible to add Illusion casting as a power. Since they are no longer combat relevant, would be nice as an RP tool.
>----------------------------------[ Changelog Entry #2020 ]----------------------------------< Entered by: Ianir the Anomaly Date: 2020-02-28 17:41:37 o Changed the squad size cap for experience splitting to 10 from 3. - For an explanation of what this means, before this change, 2 people in a squad would receive half the mob's exp, 3 people in a squad would each receive a third of the mob's xp, but 4 people would also receive a third of the mob's xp, and 20 people would each receive a third of the mob's xp. After this change, squad sizes up to 10 will receive an evenly split amount of xp, and after 10 people, everybody will receive 1/10th of the mob's xp. - This change has been made after multiple weeks of tracking where experience is coming from and how it's generated (limiting data to anybody who gains over 1 million essence per weave). In examining this data, we found large astral hunts were the primary source of large number essence gain, and only particularly in groups of 6-8+. Looking at causes for this, we found the group sizing effect and are attempting this as a fix. - The extra squad bonuses for XP were not affected here. These are still 5% per person after 2, 10% for covens and mindlinks. - We will continue to monitor the situation and make further changes if necessary. >---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<
In practice this was a 75% nerf plus or minus for a decent sized group. One step down, but...
Endgame Pt 2 is ready to begin testing. If you are interested in testing, please send me a message in-game and I'll get you the information to test things out. My goal is to test for a week and as long as there are no major issues that should delay things, get this released at that time.
A bit of information for the direction we went. We pretty much stuck to the proposed outline on the first page in this thread.
Some exceptions to that are that
1) You will automatically level up if you hit 1.999 billion essence. 2) Level costs will cap at 1.990 billion essence. 3) The cost to reset perks is 100 million essence.
As far as the level costs go, we've decided to leave them with the original numbers. When looking at the average essence gains for players the last month, the median essence gain was ~8-10 million essence a day. The top gainer was getting ~45 million essence a day. Our original numbers for level gains were based on a player gaining 100 million essence a week, which with the average numbers we're seeing, is something we view as achievable.
The last bit I want to mention is that this change and grind is meant to be virtually endless. It isn't really possible to hit the mechanical level cap and it's not meant to be. This change is primarily for those of you that like bashing, like grinding and enjoy seeing your numbers go up. We imagine most of you will get a few perk points but they are intended to be some 'nice but not necessary' features. If you don't like grinding and leveling - then don't do it! That's fine, you won't be missing out on anything major. There are passive essence gains that equate to ~100k essence per hour you're active that will help you hit those first levels.
After this is released, we'll be opening up envoy reports once more and we'll be getting going full force on the endzone concepts.
When looking at the average essence gains for players the last month, the median essence gain was ~8-10 million essence a day. The top gainer was getting ~45 million essence a day.
You know, I used to think I kind of enjoyed grinding/bashing, but I guess the reality is I really don't.
It's fair to say I -vastly- underestimated what was possible as far as essence gain. There are just so many exp buffs now, it's pretty amazing. If you keep most the buffs on all the time you can get some crazy high essence/day numbers. I'm not a fan of such a resource gulf between those who can afford the buffs and those who cannot, but agree with Orael the original numbers look fine.
- Omniscience is lovely. - Permanence feels useless and should maybe come with level 101+ automatically, but it's not hurting anything. - Transfer essence.. sure - Crits and Weight seem out of place. After discussion with some others, the lack of progress/bonuses on each level is not fun. You have to wait 5 levels and then you can do a thing? We think making the crits/weight be passive/automatic gains on each newlevel is a better solution. Re-scale to whatever is fair. - Racials seem lackluster. I doubt anyone is going to buy those, but again, not hurting anything by being an option. - Damage/resist buffs, seems fine. I have some concerns about the resistance one for classes that don't damage kill, but probably fine? - Regen buffs are imbalanced as is (see my previous post for more detail why), Orael is looking into those further! Yay! - Vitals buffs seem fine.
Looking back through this thread and having tinkered with it some, these perk ideas seem like good additions (more ideas would be nice, thanks Kali and the rest for the ideas):
1 perk point - Leadership +5% increased gold, power, and experience while leading a squad, stacking with respect, aethersuit and commandant artifacts. Allows squad bonuses even at 1 squad member.
1 perk point - Anomalous - automatically regenerate 5 archpower each month.
1 perk point - Domotheos - Faster stage 2 domoth claims (-10 minutes, 20% faster, or similar) , stacking with being a sealbearer/ascendant/TA. Remove essence drain in domoth realm (including stage 3 claim drain).
1 perk point - Crafty - lets you make trade items anywhere! No need to visit the workshops anymore.
1 perk point - Reformation - Enables ascendant reform/reincarnate mechanism.
- Crits and Weight seem out of place. After discussion with some others, the lack of progress/bonuses on each level is not fun. You have to wait 5 levels and then you can do a thing? We think making the crits/weight be passive/automatic gains on each newlevel is a better solution. Re-scale to whatever is fair.
I pretty much agree with everything Ixion has mentioned, but I wanted to underline this point. Having to get almost 2 billion essence to reach the first perks is not as fun as it would be if there were gains along the way.
The crit and power weight perks could easily be combined into a passive gain. Each level gets you +0.25 crits, and every 5 levels gives you +5 weight.
It would make each level have at least a little treat.
Echoing Ixion, an Ciaran, I think crits/weight should be tied to levels themselves instead of being a buyable perk. At the cost levels are and how fast it grows to high essence costs, I think having something in the levels would make it worth grinding out.
I feel like passive bonuses to criticals and weight 'along the way' exasperate the problem of haves vs. have-nots. In addition to whatever other useful investments they make, they'd just naturally be better bashers and have more demigod powers.
I agree that levels giving nothing until you hit a break point is less 'fun' though, so maybe instead the cost of everything useful could be multiplied by five, and crit/weight could just require less points / be scaled appropriately? That way, you could get a point every level and still potentially do something with it.
I honestly don't think that 0.25% bonus crits per level would lead to any significant gap at all. It will still take a crazy long time to reach the full 5%, and in the end it's only PvE relevant anyway. Maybe the extra power weights would feel like an advantage for the high leveled, but if so, I'd rather see them toned down but kept passive... Say, 5 points per 10 levels.
A fighter that only carried about PvP powers would have to get much, much higher level to maximize their potential weight from the system if they were only getting incremental weight along the way.
Unless it were scaled to basically be given away for free, which would defeat the purpose of having it available as a perk to begin with.
I feel like passive bonuses to criticals and weight 'along the way' exasperate the problem of haves vs. have-nots. In addition to whatever other useful investments they make, they'd just naturally be better bashers and have more demigod powers.
I agree that levels giving nothing until you hit a break point is less 'fun' though, so maybe instead the cost of everything useful could be multiplied by five, and crit/weight could just require less points / be scaled appropriately? That way, you could get a point every level and still potentially do something with it.
It already is going to cost 1 billion essence for your first two perk points, making this any higher than it is and you will see hardly anyone with perk points.
It does feel like the numbers are not geared for the general player; personally I doubt I will ever get a third point. I am not sure that it is worth coding in more options; might already have coded in too many, in fact. It is nice to have something to do with essence re: ranking up, but the perk points are too few to really matter / be worth investing any time into imo.
Kind of leaves me wondering why we are even bothering with perk points at all. Could have just done the underlying leveling system without it (and given Omni as a perk after X levels as a goal). Keep ranking up past that for the numbers as desired.
Edit: And tie the crits / weights to leveling instead of perk points as Ayisdra and Ixion say. 10 levels are achievable, with a lot of work sure, but doable. It is significantly more accessible than the perk point system and is a benefit to grinding those first ten up. If you do this, then maybe some more options would be useful to give people some flexibility with the 1 or 2 points they are likely to achieve.
I feel like passive bonuses to criticals and weight 'along the way' exasperate the problem of haves vs. have-nots. In addition to whatever other useful investments they make, they'd just naturally be better bashers and have more demigod powers.
I agree that levels giving nothing until you hit a break point is less 'fun' though, so maybe instead the cost of everything useful could be multiplied by five, and crit/weight could just require less points / be scaled appropriately? That way, you could get a point every level and still potentially do something with it.
It already is going to cost 1 billion essence for your first two perk points, making this any higher than it is and you will see hardly anyone with perk points.
Jaspet can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're misunderstanding him. His suggestion reads to me as:
1) Give a perk point every level instead of every 5 levels.
2) Keep crits & weight at 1 perk point cost per (so there's something you can invest in every level if you want).
3) Any other power that originally cost 1 point now costs 5.
4) Any power that cost 2 points now costs 10.
Because you're getting 5x as many points as you go, the essence costs to achieve all non-crit/weight powers would be exactly the same, but instead of only getting an "achievable" every 5 levels you get one every time you level up, and you can choose to either invest it or save it for future use.
This isn't my preferred solution, but is more closely aligned with the original design of the system (and thus may be more preferable from the admin standpoint?). It's definitely better than the current setup. I frankly have very little interest in the current design; I'll get 2 perk points and then just not really bother further I think. I'm not interested in the exp grind for the sake of the exp grind, I mostly just get mine in the course of pursuing dailies anyways / helping others get theirs.
If there was a point every level, at least it would give a "Hey, I'm close to leveling up now and I get something for it, maybe I should go push ahead!" As-is, there's just no incentive to me for that.
Comments
I would like to see solo hunting be a viable alternative - Right now people can easily earn more essence in two hours than I can in a week of grinding, by just afking with their autobasher on.
Would be neat if there was some skill or effect that instantly converted gold drops into exp/essence instead of dropping at all. The more gold you would have gotten, the more exp in turn? Could be something to consider for a counterpoint at least.
This is a ridiculously excessive rate of gain. Stand in one room, stratagems and SSC for eternity. The only effort is on the part of the person watching the linking. I love that I have avoided so much boring grinding but I also find astral bashes ridiculously mind-numbingly boring, but they are way too good to pass up.
My simple solution would be for groups larger than a certain size, there's a chance for a link to fling the group across the node, and perhaps generate some random walls within the area.
To me this is a more interesting mechanic which can be overcome if people are working at it, but will overall serve to slow down the faucet and end 20+ person mega-hunts with 15+ people basically just zoning out completely.
Explorer (80%), Achiever (53%), Socializer (53%), Killer (13%)
Bartle Taxonomy
(test yourself)
Entered by: Ianir the Anomaly Date: 2020-02-28 17:41:37
o Changed the squad size cap for experience splitting to 10 from 3.
- For an explanation of what this means, before this change, 2 people in a squad would
receive half the mob's exp, 3 people in a squad would each receive a third of the mob's
xp, but 4 people would also receive a third of the mob's xp, and 20 people would each
receive a third of the mob's xp. After this change, squad sizes up to 10 will receive an
evenly split amount of xp, and after 10 people, everybody will receive 1/10th of the
mob's xp.
- This change has been made after multiple weeks of tracking where experience is
coming from and how it's generated (limiting data to anybody who gains over 1 million
essence per weave). In examining this data, we found large astral hunts were the primary
source of large number essence gain, and only particularly in groups of 6-8+. Looking at
causes for this, we found the group sizing effect and are attempting this as a fix.
- The extra squad bonuses for XP were not affected here. These are still 5% per person
after 2, 10% for covens and mindlinks.
- We will continue to monitor the situation and make further changes if necessary.
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<
In practice this was a 75% nerf plus or minus for a decent sized group. One step down, but...
A quick update on where we're at.
I'm putting the final QoL touches on the demipower rework and would like some players to hop on the test server and give it a go. There was a lot of refactoring here, but in general, it should operate the same with the same commands. If you're interested in hopping on and testing the changed powers out or just in general testing the system, please let me know through a message in-game and I'll get you the server information.
Just to be clear, this isn't the continued leveling stuff with the perks, this is just the re-work of the current demipower system with adjusted powers and weight thresholds. It does move all the RP powers to 0 weight. That'll be what I work on next and I don't imagine it'll take as long to get out.
As we mentioned before, we do have more in the works, but it's not something we'll really be able to talk about until it's time to release (for reasons that will become obvious). Please don't think these two items are -all- that we're doing.
Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."
I really like the forced rarity. There are at least nine different powers that I want, and having to make hard choices based on situation is interesting.
Explorer (80%), Achiever (53%), Socializer (53%), Killer (13%)
Bartle Taxonomy
(test yourself)
A bit of information for the direction we went. We pretty much stuck to the proposed outline on the first page in this thread.
Some exceptions to that are that
1) You will automatically level up if you hit 1.999 billion essence.
2) Level costs will cap at 1.990 billion essence.
3) The cost to reset perks is 100 million essence.
As far as the level costs go, we've decided to leave them with the original numbers. When looking at the average essence gains for players the last month, the median essence gain was ~8-10 million essence a day. The top gainer was getting ~45 million essence a day. Our original numbers for level gains were based on a player gaining 100 million essence a week, which with the average numbers we're seeing, is something we view as achievable.
The last bit I want to mention is that this change and grind is meant to be virtually endless. It isn't really possible to hit the mechanical level cap and it's not meant to be. This change is primarily for those of you that like bashing, like grinding and enjoy seeing your numbers go up. We imagine most of you will get a few perk points but they are intended to be some 'nice but not necessary' features. If you don't like grinding and leveling - then don't do it! That's fine, you won't be missing out on anything major. There are passive essence gains that equate to ~100k essence per hour you're active that will help you hit those first levels.
After this is released, we'll be opening up envoy reports once more and we'll be getting going full force on the endzone concepts.
- Omniscience is lovely.
- Permanence feels useless and should maybe come with level 101+ automatically, but it's not hurting anything.
- Transfer essence.. sure
- Crits and Weight seem out of place. After discussion with some others, the lack of progress/bonuses on each level is not fun. You have to wait 5 levels and then you can do a thing? We think making the crits/weight be passive/automatic gains on each newlevel is a better solution. Re-scale to whatever is fair.
- Racials seem lackluster. I doubt anyone is going to buy those, but again, not hurting anything by being an option.
- Damage/resist buffs, seems fine. I have some concerns about the resistance one for classes that don't damage kill, but probably fine?
- Regen buffs are imbalanced as is (see my previous post for more detail why), Orael is looking into those further! Yay!
- Vitals buffs seem fine.
Looking back through this thread and having tinkered with it some, these perk ideas seem like good additions (more ideas would be nice, thanks Kali and the rest for the ideas):
1 perk point - Leadership +5% increased gold, power, and experience while leading a squad, stacking with respect, aethersuit and commandant artifacts. Allows squad bonuses even at 1 squad member.
1 perk point - Domotheos - Faster stage 2 domoth claims (-10 minutes, 20% faster, or similar) , stacking with being a sealbearer/ascendant/TA. Remove essence drain in domoth realm (including stage 3 claim drain).
1 perk point - Crafty - lets you make trade items anywhere! No need to visit the workshops anymore.
1 perk point - Reformation - Enables ascendant reform/reincarnate mechanism.
The crit and power weight perks could easily be combined into a passive gain. Each level gets you +0.25 crits, and every 5 levels gives you +5 weight.
It would make each level have at least a little treat.
I agree that levels giving nothing until you hit a break point is less 'fun' though, so maybe instead the cost of everything useful could be multiplied by five, and crit/weight could just require less points / be scaled appropriately? That way, you could get a point every level and still potentially do something with it.
Unless it were scaled to basically be given away for free, which would defeat the purpose of having it available as a perk to begin with.
It already is going to cost 1 billion essence for your first two perk points, making this any higher than it is and you will see hardly anyone with perk points.
Explorer (80%), Achiever (53%), Socializer (53%), Killer (13%)
Bartle Taxonomy
(test yourself)