World of Warcraft. Early days. I’ll never forget when my guild cleared Molten Core for the first time. We were the first guild on the server to do it. What a feeling. Then we killed Onyxia. On to Blackwing Lair, ZG, AQ and finally Naxx. We did them all. We were epic. Eventually I had a full set of tier 3 epic raid purple gear from Naxx. We walked around like Gods amongst mortals. I even had the mighty orange weapon, Thunderfury. At that time I literally felt like I had beaten wow, I loved it. I did PVP while I waited patiently for the Burning Crusade expansion. I was so excited for BC, I woke up early that day to start playing, I was in college then, I think I even missed class.
But something strange happened, at level 61 I looted a random green item from a random mob that had better stats then my Epic Purple gear. How could this be? I was a God, and in less than hour the entire server had caught me. By level 62 every item I had was replaced by trash loot with much, much better stats. I felt crushed. I was demoralized. I was heartbroken.
OK, enough of my sob story. My point is, while I didn’t expect my gear to be best-in-slot all the way to level 70, I certainly didn’t think it would be outdated by trash loot in 1 level. I really wish games would scale better. I’m currently playing EQ2 again because the new expansion came out last month. I am enjoying it, however, there is a major problem with scaling. I have 500 million health with my clothy, and 1 billion health with my tank. Both toons hit in the BILLIONS! The numbers showing on the overhead floating damage was so ridiculous I had to turn it off.
I really hope Pantheon scales better than most other MMO’s I play. I realize this is often the result of an expansion, but not always. In EQ2 some raid mobs have 1 trillion hit points. It’s comical. I hope Pantheon will be aware of this, maybe the fact that items won’t have levels will help? Though, I fully admit I don’t understand how that will work.
This is something the VR team has addressed any number of times. They are certainly aware of the issue and intend to do what they can to avoid or minimize it. Starting character stats at low levels and gear bonuses at +1 to stats is part of the plan. Whether they succeed or not, time will tell.
Sweety said:But something strange happened, at level 61 I looted a random green item from a random mob that had better stats then my Epic Purple gear.
We must have played different games then, because my kitted out Warlock (with an Atiesh) going into TBC didn't replace anything until levels 68-70, and it was mostly sidegrades with different stat allocations. TBC was one of WoW's least offensive expansions in terms of negating a character's progress- assuming you had all the best gear from the previous one.
But I would agree with you in general that expansions shouldn't completely relegate all prior content to nothing. I really like ESO's system of horizontal progression (and other than being TES, nothing else about the game), and I hope VR can take some inspiration there for their expansion model.
One way to help mitigate this is to have some item slots be statless, but provide special effects that use %s or have special procs. I personally would like to see jewelry slots be statless. This way there could be highly desirable items throughout all tiers that will always be relevant no matter the content.
eunichron said:Sweety said:But something strange happened, at level 61 I looted a random green item from a random mob that had better stats then my Epic Purple gear.
We must have played different games then
I may have exaggerated a bit, but you get the idea. Plus, most people were not fully geared in T3 BIS at this point, so this did happen. Also, it was 14 years ago, the details are fuzzy.
Jothany said:Starting character stats at low levels and gear bonuses at +1 to stats is part of the plan.
This makes the most sense to me. Start with very low stats and scale slowly. Something or someone, 5 or 6 levels higher shouldn’t be treated the same as if they are 20 levels higher. In some games as soon as something “cons” red to you, there is basically no difference in what level it is. Maybe they should make the “consider system” a 10 level range and not a 5 level range, as an example. Though, I have no idea if Pantheon will even use the old EQ system.