I want to say when I refer to level scaling, I mean skills, gear, and attributes gained as you level.
I have heard the devs speak of not letting future expansions trivialize the old content, where the easy drops won't beat old raid armor in stats, but I have not heard them speak on level scaling itself.
All MMORPGs and the players seem to love the "number go up" mentality. Start out doing 2 damage, end game doing 2,000. Start out with 10 hp, end game with 10,000. MMO progress boiling down to all progress ending up as "number go up." Factoring in cloth armor with more AC than mid level plate and the defense of a high level wizard turning them into an martial artist even the most agile of mid level monks cannot compare to. Now that pantheon has stats planned, I think it is fair to ask:
Will a lvl 50s be soloing lvl 20, 25, 30, 35, or 40 dungeons? It will happen for sure, but I am curious what level scaling will allow them to kill. I personally hope lvl 20-25 dungeons are the limit for a solo PC. A group of level 20 mobs should be as strong if not stronger than a lvl 50 mob on average.
This is an open world, unless you are level locking drops then you will have untouchable adventurers farming low level gear for money. When it came to EQ this was common. I would duo an old raid boss for mount drops. I would solo farm all sorts of bosses for loot to sell as a mage or simply use to twink out alts.
PC growth does not require trivializing content. You don't need to grow by leaps and bounds to have meaningful observable growth.
I ask people to look at a game like dnd 5e where your levels don't make you gods unless you are working together. Hp doesn't scale to broken numbers, your highest hp class focusing on maxing out hp goes from 17 to 325 hp. Most classes would only be around half that. If you are max level and get hit for 7 damage from a level one attacker it still about 3% of your max hp. A solo PC is relatively weak even at high levels, but when combined as a group you can defeat gods. Not including moon druids who are just gods on their own...
So if anyone knows where they said level scaling will be in Pantheon please let me know. Also where do you hope it will be?
edit: late edit adding a few missed words as I cant find a way to edit on my phone...
Ah, I understand what you mean and I agree with you. I prefer a more linear than logarithmic/exponential scale and I would like to see powerleveling, twinking and content monopolising curtailed.
VR have talked about wanting to have 'small numbers' be meaningful and wanting gear to last a long time. Sorry, I can't remember a particular stream or newsletter, but I'm sure I've heard it a few times over the years and it would imply a gradual scaling, not leaps into godhood.
There are lots of ways to stop high level characters wanting to take on trivialised content and/or to stop them powerleveling and twinking. Though they want their box to be sandy, I do hope VR employ some.
They haven't said anything about this topic specifically.
All that has been stated recently is that all races have had their base stats reduce to 1 (minus any racial bonuses or class bonuses) and reinforced that the world would have mobs of multiple levels inhabiting one zone making it difficult to navigate solo.
Personally I would hope that a level 60 would find it difficult to solo a dungeon around level 30-35 depending on their class, armor class, their resource management... etc. I think that even a level 60 who is faced with a group of 5 level 30ish mobs is probably going to suffer some substantial damage. Overall I'm not really for the whole solo mentality line of thinking and I fully support the idea of requiring at least one to two other people for the content that is more "solo-able" (if that makes sense) and around level 10 is when you really need start grouping.
Level scaling and power influx are probably going to be topics that are heavily tested and stressed during the alpha phases and before it enters beta.
I will say that I am curious about how they plan to handle future expansions though. They are going to have to do something that feels expansionary and allows for an increased power gain but also limits the amount of trivialization it causes to the rest of the world. They could do something like WoW does with its time walking dungeons and implement armor scaling in certain areas of the world this way there is still a succession of power at higher levels but going into lower dungeons and raids would reduce stats back to what they were during the prime of that content. The only issue with this is why would a now level 70 want to go back into older content, but I guess they could implement new heroic perception lines that would answer this question as well as the potential acquisition of rare mastery shards and skills which might have been overlooked during the previous expansion.
disposalist said:VR have talked about wanting to have 'small numbers' be meaningful and wanting gear to last a long time. Sorry, I can't remember a particular stream or newsletter, but I'm sure I've heard it a few times over the years and it would imply a gradual scaling, not leaps into godhood.
I remember seeing the same thing for gear, but that does not mean skills won't shoe horn you into said godhood. Gear may be slow to progress but leveling could very well give you skills which equate to ~5% chance to have the enemy miss you every level as many games have done before. So after 20 levels you are all but immune to attacks.
I have every hope this is not the case, Pantheon is still more dream than reality, but I feel that with the stats and skills now planned this question should be answerable. For everyone like me who wants PC growth to be based around gaining more options and tools with small linear scaling of stats, there will be someone, if not dozens of people, who want to one punch every goblin they see as an old frail wizard.
Having a well defined character power growth model is super important to game balance and mudflation control.
Level based systems are notoriously exponential growth systems. One of the biggest culprits of this is having HP and mana scale by level as well as by stats. Most table top RPGs have hp be equal to a (dX+some modifier)*level. In turn damage needs to follow fairly comparably. In this scale a level 10 can 1 shot a level 1 that would take a level 1 10 hits to kill with a chance to die while the level 10 might loose just 1% hp or none at all.
The extra challenge is that power growth also compounds scaling of weapon stats as items get better, scaling of characteristic stats as gear gets better, and scaling of new and better powers and scaling of synergistic effects between classes. All of which need to be matched by mob/encounter scaling.
If instead HP, Mana and Endurance only scale by gear and not level with a solid level 1 value then a huge amount of scaling falls out of the equations as damage also does not need to scale so rapidly as HP does ramp up. If we also scale DPS more by hit rate and resist rate based on skill levels capped by level vs defensive skills rather than magnitude of the damage with a near 100% hit rate we can also control the numbers across the game. Lastly if late game abilities are more counters to advanced encounter mechanics and synergies rather than even higher damage abilities the net effect will be an improvement more focused on synergy boosts rather than personal boosts. As synergy boosts it helps group play without boosting solo trivialization of content.
It is a different way of game scaling but I think it is still possible to have the feeling of significant advancement with out chasing mega crits.
Nah, I think it's more important to have a real sense of progression when leveling up. If far lower level content is not greyed out then the sense of progressing a level or two becomes trivialized. People with an exploration or completionist mindset I imagine prefer the sense of progressing past content.
It seems like it would have to go both ways. If mobs 20 levels lower than us can group up and do significant damage to one of us then a group of players 20 levels lower than a mob should be able to do significant damage to it. If it doesn't go both ways it will not feel natural at all...and I'm not really sure I'm sold on the idea of players being able to take out mobs 20 levels higher just by grouping up.
Ranarius said:It seems like it would have to go both ways. If mobs 20 levels lower than us can group up and do significant damage to one of us then a group of players 20 levels lower than a mob should be able to do significant damage to it. If it doesn't go both ways it will not feel natural at all...and I'm not really sure I'm sold on the idea of players being able to take out mobs 20 levels higher just by grouping up.
That is where relative skill caps of offensive and defensive skills come into play, especially if you include a gradient damage table that includes 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%. You can hit a mob 20 levels higher than you but when you do hit the chances are you will be on the lower end of that table. Also remember that mobs are balanced on the concept of 6 players for every 1 mob. If you only do an average of 10% of your at level DPS to a mob 20 levels higher than you then you would need 60 players to defeat a normal mob 20 levels higher than the players before some raw stat growth on the monster side. Also remember a mob 20 levels higher is going to have a bag of tricks of status effects that characters 20 levels lower just will not have access to the counters to.
Conversely having 5 mobs on you half your level will be like having 30 players half your level attacking you.
Also bear in mind that power growth rate by level is proportional to content consumption rate as some content becomes trivial as you gain power. In an open world game content is raw zones. For a small company new zones will be limited by the amount of manpower that can be pushed into content creation. Slow power growth really matches well with a small company that cannot produce huge amounts of content in a short time.
One point raised is that some of us want to be able to explore relatively freely once we have significantly outleveled the mobs. I note that it is not in any way necessary to allow a solo player to kill "gray" mobs to accomplish that objective. All that is needed is to do what many MMOs do - have gray mobs not aggro. This does not encourage a high level to kill mobs that lower levels need because it is an efficient way of getting large volumes of drops quickly. Yet it does allow the high level to explore in peace. I definitely recommend this approach over having gray mobs trivialized - largely to make it harder for high levels to interfere with lower levels doing content that is at-level for them. It gives a bad impression to players just starting the game if high levels keep coming in and sweep the mobs clear because they can aoe them down in seconds.
On the point of progression I much prefer a linear approach as disposalist says. Each level should make it significantly easier to kill mobs at the previous level but "significantly easier" does not mean turn difficult mobs into patsies. It means reduce the risk of death and reduce the time it takes to kill them. I cite EQ2 as an example. A REALLY bad example of hyperinflation in sttributes and other statistics and in gear so that at level 2 you may gain 5 hit points for leveling and at level 120 you may be nearing a *billion* hit points. People flock to the level-locked servers to avoid what the game turned into in later years.
The other way to do it is say start with 50 HP but gain 1 HP per level (or some other scaled value). This would be a shallow linear growth but with a relatively high y intercept. The y intercept could be anywhere from 10%-50% of the final value at the end of the slope. Its technically still logrithimic but in 3 straight lines (0-1 is a big vertical jump, 1-max is a linear increase, max to forever is a flat line).
Ranarius said:It seems like it would have to go both ways. If mobs 20 levels lower than us can group up and do significant damage to one of us then a group of players 20 levels lower than a mob should be able to do significant damage to it. If it doesn't go both ways it will not feel natural at all...and I'm not really sure I'm sold on the idea of players being able to take out mobs 20 levels higher just by grouping up.
I don't feel like this is accurate because I don't believe player character level is the same thing as mob level. Mob level is indicative of how strong the creature is for a group of players, so an "even" con mob at level 20 is a mob strong enough to fight a group of 6 level 20 players (meaning the mob is realistically a fair deal higher than level 20).
There's a narrow line to walk. EQ2 is probably the banner child for numbers getting simply too large.
On the other hand, it's possible for advancement to be too small. Rift's first Tier 2 raid -- Hammerknell Fortress -- was incredibly punishing at launch, and not always (or often!) in the good-design way. Indeed, it might hold the award for the single raid zone subject to the largest number of iterative nerfs in an MMO; if not, it's sure a contender! Hammerknell broke guilds. Contributing to that bad experience was that the loot, despite heralded as the new "tier" of gear, was really only tiny numerical upgrades over the drops from the immensely easier Tier 1 raids... tiny to the point where the improvement in performance from even two or three HK drops was sometimes impossible to see in real-world parses. Now, part of that was that many classes had a lot of RNG swing in their performance, so a linear improvement in numbers was easy to get lost in the statistical noise, but the "feel" of the gear was still terrible. No one wanted to run an hours-long, overtuned, grindy raid zone for... no discernable improvement.
Pantheon should absolutely want a slower progression of numbers than EQ2. Or arguably even than recent EQ or pre-squish WoW. But it's important that, when the numbers go up, they do something.
Tbh I think its a lot of fun to first be weak and struggle, then after im way stronger to come back and have my "revenge" in a lower level area. I do share the worry about expansions making previous content irrelevant, though. Most MMOs have increased level cap with expansions, I think that shouldn't be done. Those expansions don't really expand anything, its more like they replace the previous game.
I hope the power/damage progression is more muted than most game from WoW onward where you go from 1-10 to hundreds if not thousands of damage per hit.
I rather am a fan of doing 1-10 damage a hit to start and maybe by level 10-15 they get dual wield so sometimes they hit twice per round, then sometime between 15 and 30 they get double attack. So now they swing between 1-4 times per round (or 1-2 for 2H) with increasing odds/success rates as their skill/level raises. So even if the damage stayed the same (it would likely increase a bit anyway) that character has gone from 1-10 damage to around 10-40 damage per attack round.
Obviously casters would work much differently.
I just really don't want to see melee numbers soaring over 100 a hit (save for some 2H weapons). Certainly nothing anywhere near 1k.
Level creep, gear creep. These two things are always eventual in MMOs, it would be nice to see atleast for raids that mobs and bosses scale for both level and 'gear level', although scaling for gear level definently wont need to be in at launch since they are tuned for launch gear. But then you run into the problem of people not 'progressing' which I think in this instance is acceptable, since most people use their Damage output, healing output as a measure of wether they are getting stronger and not the bosses overall hp.
TheGoose said:Level creep, gear creep. These two things are always eventual in MMOs, it would be nice to see atleast for raids that mobs and bosses scale for both level and 'gear level', although scaling for gear level definently wont need to be in at launch since they are tuned for launch gear. But then you run into the problem of people not 'progressing' which I think in this instance is acceptable, since most people use their Damage output, healing output as a measure of wether they are getting stronger and not the bosses overall hp.
Well, they're not required per se. GW2 has neither. No new levels, no gear power progression. Ascended gear was added early in the lifecycle and... that's it. Raid drops, months-long legendary quests, whatever. Nothing is better than ascended. Progression is otherwise exclusively horizontal. Is that a sustainable model? Well, maybe. If the game gets its recently-announced third expansion and holds back the recent drop in player numbers, then perhaps it is. But it wouldn't be very much like the games that ostensibly inspire and inform Pantheon either.
((If you want to be ignored by grey mobs then you can walk through dungeons to the bosses room.))
A valid concern. One response is to have gray mobs always attack in dungeons - which is probably the most common solution MMOs use. Another is to have gray bosses give no reward so there is no incentive to stroll over to the boss and kill it - but this has multiple problems which need not be repeated.
One way to deal with higher levels overpowering lower level content for loot twinking alts would just be to have the mob no longer drop the prefered items after so many levels. That fancy dagger is no longer a dropped item if you are way OP in comparison to the encounter. VR could even possibly scale the drop rate pending avg group level to kill it. if the mob is a Red or yellow con the dagger drops at an accelerated rate pushing players to place a high importance on knowing the class they have chosen and the people they group with. On the other side of this coin if the mob is a green con and easily slain by the group the dagger should have a greatly reduced drop rate. Grey con should never drop the dagger. I dont mind having high end players with less to fear in the world then low level players but I would like to not see them farming the low level content. Im not sure how I would feel about quest content fitting into this rule maybe others can chime in. This would also serve as an added bonus for replayability in my opinion
@Sugarwood
That is considered trivial loot code. There are plusses and minuses to it. Rather than remove items from a loot table I would like to see rewards for doing challenging encounters. So long as no one on the threat table when the mob is killed that his more than 5 level above the mob it counts as a challenging encounter. Either an NPC rewards you with a random reward for a certain number of challenging encounters or a zone has zone wide drops that only drop for challenging encounters but at a really low rate.
Trivial loot code would absolutely need to be paired with a balanaced mentor system so that a high level player can mentor down and group to gain an item they want only available from challenging encounters.
Trasak said:@Sugarwood
That is considered trivial loot code. There are plusses and minuses to it. Rather than remove items from a loot table I would like to see rewards for doing challenging encounters. So long as no one on the threat table when the mob is killed that his more than 5 level above the mob it counts as a challenging encounter. Either an NPC rewards you with a random reward for a certain number of challenging encounters or a zone has zone wide drops that only drop for challenging encounters but at a really low rate.
Trivial loot code would absolutely need to be paired with a balanaced mentor system so that a high level player can mentor down and group to gain an item they want only available from challenging encounters.
I would like to see more intelligent, innovative ways of doing that these days.
The loot dropped and chance of it dropping should take account of the levels of the group relative to the level of the encounter, the number of times they've looted it before, etc. The algorithm could even take into account the time it took to make the kill, in case something other what *should* have made a difference makes a difference.
I know that sounds less 'sandboxy' than might be ideal, but I think the improvement would be worth it.
Basically, someone who takes on an encounter at appropriate level (or even when it's more challenging) should have more chance at the best loot in the table than someone taking it on when over-levelled. Someone who has farmed that monster for 10 drops of the same item has less chance to get the drop than someone who hasn't had it yet. Maybe an over-leveled farmer quickly has *no* chance at all.
Using the mentoring system would of course effect one part of that calculation.
I know it sounds a bit contrived and I usually don't like that kind of artificial system, but this one wouldn't actually effect the majority of players at all, only those out-leveling or farming.
As I type this is strikes me that the same consideration could be given to XP gain and faction gain as well. You get less if you are over-leveled or are farming.
Jobeson said: Has VR said they are even against farming? It was a staple in EQ afterall.
I think Joppa spoke about it in recent streams (or perhaps the round table) and they certainly seemed to think it wouldn't be a good thing to have people 'block' camps by continually farming them.
I'll maybe re-listen to it and dig up a quote or two...
EDIT: Joppa: (From the YT transcript of the latest Roundtable) "camping has always been an area of strong debate within the community while many players agree that loitering in an area of a zone or a dungeon for a while is great for socialization many players also agree that allowing players to stay in a single area for too long can drive toxic player behavior and lead to players purpose purposefully locking each other out of content. We [are] looking at handling spawns so that players are encouraged to move on after a bit instead of camp a single spot for long periods of time. There is more to that question...and that's another biggie, that is a biggie"
Also
"people camp an area because of a high value item or loot so we can spread that around or put it on several NPCs, you know to spread that. Kind of that goes back to what I was saying initially is that you know you get those kind of crazy situations in in some of those early games like EQ because there was only one place and one item like that and so one way to kind of soften this situation a little bit is to - yes you kind of take away a little bit of the items iconic-ness by creating counterparts and equivalents and place them in different places - but it does a lot to keep that kind of crazy build up in that one place and then also the the entire crafting sphere is another perfect example of how to offload some of that where instead of camping this one item may be an equivalent item is found or a couple of equivalent items are found in the crafting sphere and it's more about harvesting those extremely rare resources from that are can be found in multiple different locations"