Update 29: Level 30 Overview

[Vargouille]

As you may know, we're planning to raise the level cap to level 30 with Update 29. Here's some initial details!


New Character Features Gained from Leveling Up to 30

Here's our current plan for what characters receive from gaining levels 29 and 30.


Feature
Level


+2 Fate Points
29


Tier 3 Epic Destiny Feat Slot (3 Destinies capped)
29


+3 Fate Points
30


+1 Twist of Fate Slot
30


"Normal" Feat Slot
30


Legendary Feat Slot
30



Notes:


Number of Twist Slots: This is +1 compared to whatever you currently have. You might or might not have gotten an Epic Completionist slot yet. The 4th slot you have costs 4 Fate Points to unlock tier 1, the 5th slot costs 5 points to unlock, regardless of what order you gain your extra slots. If you drop below level 29/30 (Reincarnation), then you lose those Fate Points and slot until you level up again.
Reincarnation Flagging: According to our tests, if you flag for Reincarnation before Update 29 (make it so Character Select shows the big REINCARNATE button), you will be able to reincarnate after Update 29 without any further changes. You won't have to gain additional XP or levels, etc.
The Normal feat slot is similar to the slot you get at 27 - it can hold lower level feats that you can usually get (aka: not Epic Destiny feats).
The Epic Destiny Feat slot can hold lower tier Epic Destiny feats that you qualify for, or new options only available here at level 29. Like other Epic Destiny Feat slots, this cannot hold other kinds of feats.
The Legendary Feat slot can only be filled from a specific list of new feats.
Epic Reincarnation and Iconic Reincarnation will require being level 30 after Update 29.



Epic XP Curve

We're changing the Epic XP curve! The average amount of XP required per level (on average) is staying exactly where it is, but the "curve" is now entirely flattened to be the same XP requirements for each Epic level.


Total requirements for level 30: Neither we nor most players wanted to see level 30 requiring ~10 million XP. That just seemed like too much, especially in comparison to today. We're landing at 8,250,000, which is reasonable for two more levels after 6,600,000.
Level 28 is the same: Under the old curve, you needed 6,600,000 XP for level 28, and that's still true. This also required an average of 825,000 XP per level (6,600,000 / 8), which is what we've flattened every level to require, including past level 28.
Why flatten the XP curve?

It makes sense for characters to spend similar amounts of play time at each level, rather than new levels coming slower and slower over time. For comparison, consider the old Heroic 3rd life XP requirements and levels 18-20. While that's a different case overall (from 1-20), we want to get away from that feeling that the last few levels are just so much harder.
XP per epic quest doesn't increase much with increased level, which takes away from one reason to increase XP requirements over time.
Unlike the normal "start" of an XP curve, there's no great reason for designers to rush characters through the early Epic levels. That's not where most of your abilities come from, either from a power perspective or "cool new things to use" perspective. By the time a character is epic they've got lots to do, and Epic Destinies are on a separate track. Given that, it's largely nicer to space the "dings" of gaining a level out more - yes, they come slower early on, but you never reach that large gap at high levels where it seems to take forever to get those final levels. (Players may remember the old Heroic 3rd life XP curve being somethign like that at level 18/19.)
Based on quest and XP distribution, it makes sense for the lower levels to require as much XP as higher levels. Though we've relaxed a lot of "restrictions" on epic questing, many players do still play quests around their character level, and/or in increasing order.


Existing Characters after the change: Similar to when we updated the Heroic XP requirements, existing characters would lose neither XP nor levels when this change goes live. For instance, if you have 800,000 XP the day before U29 launches, you'll be level 22 with 800,000 XP. After U29, you'll still be level 22 with 800,000 XP - you wont revert back to level 20, even though a new character reaching epic levels would only be level 20 with 800,000 XP. That character would need to reach 2,475,000 XP to reach level 23 (like any new character), and the XP bar won't begin filling up until you reach 1,650,000 XP (the new normal requirement for your current level).
Bank Note: If you are "banking" an epic level before Update 29, you may want to take that level before the update goes live. Depending where you are on the curve this may get you to that level much sooner than otherwise.





Level
Old Requirement
New Requirement


20
0
0


21
300,000
825,000


22
750,000
1,650,000


23
1,350,000
2,475,000


24
2,100,000
3,300,000


25
3,000,000
4,125,000


26
4,050,000
4,950,000


27
5,250,000
5,775,000


28
6,600,000
6,600,000


29
8,100,000 (old curve if unchanged)
7,425,000


30
9,750,000 (old curve if unchanged)
8,250,000



* Another proposal we're considering, in later post in this thread: https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/467833-Update-29-Level-30-Overview?p=5727258&viewfull=1#post5727258


We'll have some more details to share in the near future, including specifics on some feats, but please keep comments on those specifics to those threads.

Thanks for reading. If you have general thoughts on the structure of Feats with new levels, or Twists of Fate and Fate Points, or the XP curve/flat line, etc., let us know!


P.S.: Details on feats! https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/467837-Update-29-Feats-Overview

[GoldyGopher]

A first blush I think the XP changes will be harder on the casual player if you go with a flat curve.

I want to think about it some more but that jumped out at me.

[Spoonwelder]

Overall ok....it will make banking sagas for ETR less appealing as you don't pop to 22 or 23 as soon as you ETR but the overall idea is fine.

Now about those new feats......? Can we get some information on those?

[Toxxyk]

Everything looks good, except for this:

"Existing Characters after the change: Similar to when we updated the Heroic XP requirements, existing characters would lose neither XP nor levels when this change goes live. For instance, if you have 800,000 XP the day before U29 launches, you'll be level 22 with 800,000 XP. After U29, you'll still be level 22 with 800,000 XP - you wont revert back to level 20, even though a new character reaching epic levels would only be level 20 with 800,000 XP. That character would need to reach 2,475,000 XP to reach level 23 (like any new character), and the XP bar won't begin filling up until you reach 1,650,000 XP (the new normal requirement for your current level)."

What you should do is give that level 22 character 1,650,000 XP. Otherwise I'm forced to get 1,675,000 XP to go from 22 to 23. That is crazy.

Rethink this.

[Steelstar]

Now about those new feats......? Can we get some information on those?

That'd be on me. Hopefully a little later this afternoon!

[alancarp]

A couple of quick knee-jerk reactions:

1. I don't really like the flattening curve idea... I appreciate the fact that it should be harder to achieve the upper levels. "Flattening" might be okay, but definitely not "Flat".
2. I just don't see nearly enough fate points being available to make decent use of a fourth twist slot...and definitely not a fifth one.

One thing missing from the missive above: for planning purposes, an approximate date of implementation would be good to know. I've already started TR'ing my 28-level chars, but that's just me.

[TPICKRELL]

I think that is +2 at level 29 and +3 more at level 30 for a total of 5 fate points. Is that the correct reading, or is it +2 at 29 and plus 1 more at 30 for a total of +3?

Thanks!

[Vargouille]

I think that is +2 at level 29 and +3 more at level 30 for a total of 5 fate points. Is that the correct reading, or is it +2 at 29 and plus 1 more at 30 for a total of +3?

Total of +5. Enough to definitely make use of +1 Twist of Fate slot, if you want to. (You can ignore it and upgrade your other slots, of course.)

[arkonas]

Everything looks good, except for this:

"Existing Characters after the change: Similar to when we updated the Heroic XP requirements, existing characters would lose neither XP nor levels when this change goes live. For instance, if you have 800,000 XP the day before U29 launches, you'll be level 22 with 800,000 XP. After U29, you'll still be level 22 with 800,000 XP - you wont revert back to level 20, even though a new character reaching epic levels would only be level 20 with 800,000 XP. That character would need to reach 2,475,000 XP to reach level 23 (like any new character), and the XP bar won't begin filling up until you reach 1,650,000 XP (the new normal requirement for your current level)."

What you should do is give that level 22 character 1,650,000 XP. Otherwise I'm forced to get 1,675,000 XP to go from 22 to 23. That is crazy.

Rethink this.

personally i think the adjustment is fine. the xp from 20-28 hasn't changed. only the xp needed. someone mentioned people might not bank saga xp. i still think they will do that no matter what. it doesn't bother me that the xp is increased for the first few levels while the others were reduced. no matter its the same amount.

[Grosbeak07]

As a more casual player this looks OK.

While it may take a bit more at the lower epic levels, its nice that I'll no longer have to slog through 1 million + xp each time in that 27+ range.

[Flavilandile]

A first blush I think the XP changes will be harder on the casual player if you go with a flat curve.

I want to think about it some more but that jumped out at me.

I agree... lets see what can be though quickly...
I modified the new values in Varg quote.






Level
Old Requirement
New Requirement


20
0
0


21
300,000
400,000


22
750,000
800,000


23
1,350,000
1,600,000


24
2,100,000
2,400,000


25
3,000,000
3,200,000


26
4,050,000
4,300,000


27
5,250,000
5,400,000


28
6,600,000
6,600,000


29
8,100,000 (old curve if unchanged)
7,800,000


30
9,750,000 (old curve if unchanged)
9,000,000







In the end lower level are a bit harder ( but not that much ) as well as high level, though high levels are not as hard as without the change. I always considered that you had to work to get more levels.
( logic : 400K, 400K, 800K, 800K, 800K, 1.1M, 1.1M, 1.2M, 1.2M, 1.2M )

[losian2]

Old style XP curves from 20+ didn't make sense, devs are making a good choice in flattening out.

1-10 should be way faster than 11-20, because you are still building your character, you're making the meat of it happen, you're fleshing out the basics.

At 20-30 you aren't doing any of that. The devs make a superb point with the comments in this thread. Also, since the XP required IS THE SAME nobody is being punished at any point. It may take slightly longer to get the first level or whatever with an existing character, but the rest will come faster than they would prior.

This really is just a small technical change, and it's an excellent point also that it gives people more time to play out the epic content they want, rather than missing a bunch early on due to leveling quickly through the low 20s.

Great move, devs. Every game with steep curves has gone back and adjusted them.. for good reason.

[dunklezhan]

Number of Twist Slots: This is +1 compared to whatever you currently have. You might or might not have gotten an Epic Completionist slot yet. The 4th slot you have costs 4 Fate Points to unlock tier 1, the 5th slot costs 5 points to unlock, regardless of what order you gain your extra slots. If you drop below level 29/30 (Reincarnation), then you lose those Fate Points and slot until you level up again


I'll read it all properly shortly but re the above: i really like this approach, please consider revisiting the 'dead' epic character levels (22, 23, 25 basically) and using this 'get slot/points' mechanic there too (but spread the 5 points you're adding at L29 and 30 across that range - put a +1 fate point at 22 23 25 29 and 30). I get little to no sense of progression or choice from enough of the epic levels (unless I have an ED unfinished) that this is honestly the main part of why I can't be bothered with Epic play. I want to play epic, its where all the cool kids (namely my guildies) are... but this kind of thing really puts me off. Spreading those 5 points out would do that at a stroke and you'd still have the level of power you, the devs, are after by the time you hit 29/30. It'll add some power to the lower epic levels and I know its not really needed there, but it'll smooth the curve (which I would think would make future balance tweaks to existing content easier, surely?) and bring back some choices every time you go through those levels no matter whether you're levelling an ED or not.


EDIT: read it all, happy with it. No comment on whether it's 'enough' extra fatepoints. Its more than I have on all but one character in one fell swoop (I really hate levelling and getting no choices. Honestly!) so +5 by L30 - no matter what level I get them - seems wonderful/amazing to me, as a casual player.

So yah, my only constructive comment is whatever the total fate points awarded by 30, unless there's a really good, long term "sustainability" type reason to cluster them in the last two levels, I would really prefer that they be spread out over the 5 levels I mention above. And if there is a good reason, I really need those earlier levels to see some love in terms of choices before I bother with making any effort in Epic play. Its dull to already have all your advancing already done except for gear and autogrants. DULL.

[TPICKRELL]

...
2. I just don't see nearly enough fate points being available to make decent use of a fourth twist slot...and definitely not a fifth one.

...

My two main's already have twist slots at 4/3/2/1 with a a couple of fate points to spare. It takes a lot of destiny and ER grinding, but the points are available.

Regardless they are giving enough free fate points to open the new slot so no complaints from me.

[Sardonica]

Oh. Hmmmm. This is actually rather attractive. As a rule, I do not like things that thin out the player base, and so have been dreading this announcement. But the extra twist slot and fate points really sweeten the pot. This will help out players who play a lot of alts. Most likely alts do not yet have epic completionist and that fourth twist slot.

[UurlockYgmeov]

overall I like.

couple of thoughts: why not make it 8,000,000 even? just saying.

would like the extra twist slot at 29, mainly because many players won't be spending time at cap. Cap is boring. Cap is well, the end. Hit the 8 million and reincarnate - that is the ticket. So the benefits of level cap increase seem to be all end loaded.

Just like epic greensteel. if eGS has a ml of 30 many will just go *meh* and not worry about it since they will be reincarnating straight away. (Make it ml:26 so much like original GS - good for reincarnation).

[Dragavon]

I do not like the flat XP requirements. More time spent in the weak and boring low epic levels, with weak gear.

More fun to spend more time at higher levels with all the good gear I have there.

[Dandonk]

Level curve: I'm a little torn about this.

On the up side: The last epic levels are long, and annoyingly so. Takes forever to go the last two, or so it seems. The lack of progress really gets to me there. So flat levels help a lot, and make for a smoother experience while levelling to cap.

On the down side, this will mean a longer time spent in the low epic levels before you get the fun high level items. It will also increase the need/want for low-epic level gear - and I don't really have TR space left for more TR gear.

So... not sure I like an entirely flat levelling curve. Flatter than before would definitely be good, but entirely flat? I think that would be annoying in some ways. I would much prefer some middle-ground version.

Feats etc:
I like these - of course depending on ED feat/legendary feat choices :)
Another twist slot will be awesome, really like that.

[Wulverine]

I like how U29 is starting to present itself.

The XP rebalance makes a lot of sense. It also has the effect of spreading the epic population over more epic levels which should be good for grouping.

Since this update is targeted at the new endgame, i like the goodies you get at lvl30. The poster above that wants the twistslot at lvl29 is completely missing the point. This update is the first step in bringing people back to the endgame. That's a whole demographic of players that this game lost. From what im seeing, looks this will convince some players who left for other games to back to ddo endgame. (people i used to play with). ER is boring and without challenge for myself and those players.

Can't wait to see the raids!

[Cetus]

The TR cutoff should be level 28. I've mentioned this in the council with pretty good support and apparently you guys think differently.

Lets explore the reasoning then.

Adding grind for no good reason isn't my idea of a good time...

[Brac]

overall I like.

couple of thoughts: why not make it 8,000,000 even? just saying.

would like the extra twist slot at 29, mainly because many players won't be spending time at cap. Cap is boring. Cap is well, the end. Hit the 8 million and reincarnate - that is the ticket. So the benefits of level cap increase seem to be all end loaded.

Just like epic greensteel. if eGS has a ml of 30 many will just go *meh* and not worry about it since they will be reincarnating straight away. (Make it ml:26 so much like original GS - good for reincarnation).

If there was an end game players would spend time at cap. Don't give the impression that it is acceptable that there is no reason to stay at cap. Let them create content with the purpose of people playing an end game.

[jalont]

If there was an end game players would spend time at cap. Don't give the impression that it is acceptable that there is no reason to stay at cap. Let them create content with the purpose of people playing an end game.

I'm not sure any sort of endgame is possible in DDO as it currently stands. Any whiff of challenge, and the people crying for an endgame become enraged, meaning endgame will just be like what we have now. Easy pack to farm until the next one comes. I'm not sure "endgame" is something people truly want, even if they say they do.

[Qhualor]

Nothing stands out that I might have a problem with here.

[Wulverine]

I'm not sure any sort of endgame is possible in DDO as it currently stands. Any whiff of challenge, and the people crying for an endgame become enraged, meaning endgame will just be like what we have now. Easy pack to farm until the next one comes. I'm not sure "endgame" is something people truly want, even if they say they do.

The people who want a proper endgame are not the ones to start crying about how something is too difficult when it is offered to them.
There's a lot of misinformation about this topic because some people incorrectly get labeled as endgamers (imo)

[Dragonlover333]

So the new twist slot disappears and reappears as you TR and return to 30. Say a character isn't an epic completionist, so they only have 3 slots, and then reaches 30, giving them the 4th. At some point they do become epic completionist, which means that while they are level 30, they have 5 slots. My question is: is the slot that comes and goes permanently the 4th? As in, is it possible to end up in a situation where you have access to 4 slots for most of the epic levels, with the last one costing 5 points to unlock because of the order you achieved level 30 and epic completionist?

[FranOhmsford]

Epic XP Curve

We're changing the Epic XP curve! The average amount of XP required per level (on average) is staying exactly where it is, but the "curve" is now entirely flattened to be the same XP requirements for each Epic level.


Total requirements for level 30: Neither we nor most players wanted to see level 30 requiring ~10 million XP. That just seemed like too much, especially in comparison to today. We're landing at 8,250,000, which is reasonable for two more levels after 6,600,000.
Level 28 is the same: Under the old curve, you needed 6,600,000 XP for level 28, and that's still true. This also required an average of 825,000 XP per level (6,600,000 / 8), which is what we've flattened every level to require, including past level 28.
Why flatten the XP curve?

It makes sense for characters to spend similar amounts of play time at each level, rather than new levels coming slower and slower over time. For comparison, consider the old Heroic 3rd life XP requirements and levels 18-20. While that's a different case overall (from 1-20), we want to get away from that feeling that the last few levels are just so much harder.
XP per epic quest doesn't increase much with increased level, which takes away from one reason to increase XP requirements over time.
Unlike the normal "start" of an XP curve, there's no great reason for designers to rush characters through the early Epic levels. That's not where most of your abilities come from, either from a power perspective or "cool new things to use" perspective. By the time a character is epic they've got lots to do, and Epic Destinies are on a separate track. Given that, it's largely nicer to space the "dings" of gaining a level out more - yes, they come slower early on, but you never reach that large gap at high levels where it seems to take forever to get those final levels. (Players may remember the old Heroic 3rd life XP curve being somethign like that at level 18/19.)
Based on quest and XP distribution, it makes sense for the lower levels to require as much XP as higher levels. Though we've relaxed a lot of "restrictions" on epic questing, many players do still play quests around their character level, and/or in increasing order.


Existing Characters after the change: Similar to when we updated the Heroic XP requirements, existing characters would lose neither XP nor levels when this change goes live. For instance, if you have 800,000 XP the day before U29 launches, you'll be level 22 with 800,000 XP. After U29, you'll still be level 22 with 800,000 XP - you wont revert back to level 20, even though a new character reaching epic levels would only be level 20 with 800,000 XP. That character would need to reach 2,475,000 XP to reach level 23 (like any new character), and the XP bar won't begin filling up until you reach 1,650,000 XP (the new normal requirement for your current level).
Bank Note: If you are "banking" an epic level before Update 29, you may want to take that level before the update goes live. Depending where you are on the curve this may get you to that level much sooner than otherwise.





Level
Old Requirement
New Requirement


20
0
0


21
300,000
825,000


22
750,000
1,650,000


23
1,350,000
2,475,000


24
2,100,000
3,300,000


25
3,000,000
4,125,000


26
4,050,000
4,950,000


27
5,250,000
5,775,000


28
6,600,000
6,600,000


29
8,100,000 (old curve if unchanged)
7,425,000


30
9,750,000 (old curve if unchanged)
8,250,000




We'll have some more details to share in the near future, including specifics on some feats, but please keep comments on those specifics to those threads.

Thanks for reading. If you have general thoughts on the structure of Feats with new levels, or Twists of Fate and Fate Points, or the XP curve/flat line, etc., let us know!

8 Million XP is frankly ridiculous!

For those who've already got their E-Destinies and E-TRs done it may sound ok but for those who haven't it's BRUTAL!

800,000 for Lvl 21?
OK I know I've stated on multiple occasions that the current xp for 20-21 is too low but talk about overreacting!
This is going to require ALL Base Lvl 17-20 quests/Raids {incl. Dreaming Dark and Tower of Despair} to have their Base XP DOUBLED! Otherwise players hitting 20 are going to simply ignore them in favour of running EN VoN3/Spies/Wiz King 2x each!
And Epic Snitch, Partycrashers, A Small Problem, Big Top, Tharashk Arena, Prisoner, Lords of Dust, Spinner of Shadows, Bargain of Blood, Storm the Beaches, Black Loch, Tide Turns, The Last Stand, Claw of Vulkoor, Fathom the Depths and Into the Deep will ALL need massive Boosts to their Base XP too {On ALL difficulties!}!

Adding another 1.650.000 xp to the number needed by players at end-game also makes the Base XP for newer high level Epic Quests even worse than it currently is {and it's currently BAD with a Capital BAD!}.


The very least you could do is to make E-TR {OK not I-TR} only require the 6mil Karma in a Sphere rather than both that AND hitting XP Cap!
Yes this would be a smaller requirement than for those who've already done all their E-TRs but it will allow newer and more Casual Players a small chance to play a little catch up!




P.S. This is yet another nail in the coffins of alts!

[Atremus]

I like the flat curve.

The "big" XP at 20 just means I take my guildies into challenges in House C or out in ES to get over that hurdle. Nice to have a reason to run those challenges.

[jalont]

8 Million XP is frankly ridiculous!

For those who've already got their E-Destinies and E-TRs done it may sound ok but for those who haven't it's BRUTAL!

800,000 for Lvl 21?
OK I know I've stated on multiple occasions that the current xp for 20-21 is too low but talk about overreacting!
This is going to require ALL Base Lvl 17-20 quests/Raids {incl. Dreaming Dark and Tower of Despair} to have their Base XP DOUBLED! Otherwise players hitting 20 are going to simply ignore them in favour of running EN VoN3/Spies/Wiz King 2x each!
And Epic Snitch, Partycrashers, A Small Problem, Big Top, Tharashk Arena, Prisoner, Lords of Dust, Spinner of Shadows, Bargain of Blood, Storm the Beaches, Black Loch, Tide Turns, The Last Stand, Claw of Vulkoor, Fathom the Depths and Into the Deep will ALL need massive Boosts to their Base XP too {On ALL difficulties!}!

Adding another 1.650.000 xp to the number needed by players at end-game also makes the Base XP for newer high level Epic Quests even worse than it currently is {and it's currently BAD with a Capital BAD!}.


The very least you could do is to make E-TR {OK not I-TR} only require the 6mil Karma in a Sphere rather than both that AND hitting XP Cap!
Yes this would be a smaller requirement than for those who've already done all their E-TRs but it will allow newer and more Casual Players a small chance to play a little catch up!

Honestly, I think you may need to find a more efficient way to level through epics. I don't foresee this change changing anything I do in early epics. I mean, 28-30 is going to take some fine-tuning, but I will run everything else the same... and that won't be running a single quest on EN (really? why? EH is literally just as quick and offers more xp) or running any heroic quests in epic.

[Anaximandroz]

I do not like the flat XP requirements. More time spent in the weak and boring low epic levels, with weak gear.

More fun to spend more time at higher levels with all the good gear I have there.

This. And Why not only 8 million (each ED need only 2 million to cap, still have space to add +1 ED)?

[Cordovan]

*snip*
One thing missing from the missive above: for planning purposes, an approximate date of implementation would be good to know. I've already started TR'ing my 28-level chars, but that's just me.

This will be for Update 29, currently expected to arrive before the end of the year.

[Drwaz99]

I don't like the much, much higher amounts at lower epic levels when I am weak. They will drag on and it inevitably will cause a spike in EN "dailies" for people until the reach 23-25. I'd much rather do a bit more work near the top end with all the good gear I've spent way more time trying to acquire. You are also going to punish with "extreme prejudice" the casual and new player this way.

Between this and the legendary raid timers, I'm not sure who you are listening to, but they aren't giving you good ideas. (actually it's quite easy to see. Most notably forums posters and PC members who agree with everything you say. Here's a hint: they are leading you in the wrong direction.)

[DANTEIL]

A first blush I think the XP changes will be harder on the casual player if you go with a flat curve.

I want to think about it some more but that jumped out at me.


As a casual player this was exactly my first thought... to get to Level 21 it will take as much as it now does to get to Level 23+. I am a very slow leveler, and that just seems brutal. Yes, I realize the curve flattens out with each higher level, but this is not appealing to me at all.

[Vargouille]

So the new twist slot disappears and reappears as you TR and return to 30. Say a character isn't an epic completionist, so they only have 3 slots, and then reaches 30, giving them the 4th. At some point they do become epic completionist, which means that while they are level 30, they have 5 slots. My question is: is the slot that comes and goes permanently the 4th? As in, is it possible to end up in a situation where you have access to 4 slots for most of the epic levels, with the last one costing 5 points to unlock because of the order you achieved level 30 and epic completionist?

You never unlock a particular slot. You only gain +1 to your "Number of Twists of Fate" statistic.

If you already have four, the 5th is going to cost 5 points to unlock. Doesn't matter what order you've done things in.

For most players, who are reincarnating and have Epic Completionist, they will have 4 slots for Epic and a 5th that costs 5 points upon reaching Legendary (level 30).

[FranOhmsford]

Honestly, I think you may need to find a more efficient way to level through epics. I don't foresee this change changing anything I do in early epics. I mean, 28-30 is going to take some fine-tuning, but I will run everything else the same... and that won't be running a single quest on EN (really? why? EH is literally just as quick and offers more xp) or running any heroic quests in epic.

EH may be just as quick for you - I'm gonna guess that you're perfectly capable of running EE anyway - But it would take me at least half as long again to solo EH VoN 3 as it does to solo EN!
And then there's the fact that for most EHs I'd have to wait with an LFM up in the vain hope of getting anyone to join it whereas EN I can start and finish even if no-one joins me!

EEs are simply far too hard to be made a requirement for everyone and the amount of XP the Devs are talking about pretty much does just that!

I'll tell you now that there's no way I'm going to be running EE Amrath, Vale or Orchard quests unless I'm already CAPPED and probably not even then until I've got every destiny AND every E-TR done!

My monk with 4 Epic Past Lives at Lvl 20 did fine in EE Loch/Beaches and Tide the other day IN A GROUP but yesterday having taken Lvl 21 I needed to get an EE BoB done to finish the Saga and NO-ONE joined so I had to solo it - It took me 6 Deaths, 3 RE-ENTRIES and over 40 MINUTES and I got just 6k XP from it upon completion!

[Ykt]

many players won't be spending time at cap.

How do you know?

I have 12 level 28 characters and never ETR'd.

[FranOhmsford]

For most players, who are reincarnating and have Epic Completionist,

You really think MOST players have Epic Completionist?

No wonder the numbers you're talking about are so BRUTAL!

Those few players on each server who have Epic Completionist won't be bothered at all by these changes - Can you please think of the rest of us for a change rather than catering exclusively to the UBER-ELITE!

[Propane]

With the increase to the XP at the lower levels - please give us the option to reset the explorer / slayer XP for a ETR.

Getting to LV 23 & LV 25 are some big gear unlocking points - taking longer to get to those levels will be painful - adding back the explorer / slayer XP will help some.

I know some people like keeping there SAGA rewords for the next life = gives them a boost to staring the way back to LV 23. Don't mess that up.

Either make it a person to talk to / a clicky in your pack or something...

[Vargouille]

You really think MOST players have Epic Completionist?

Nope. Nothing of the sort. You are entirely misreading what I was trying to say.

I gave an example in order to try to answer someone else's question. Those were the presumptions for that example, which otherwise would not make any sense. Not an assumption of reality.

[Demsac]

Can you put epic feats in that normal feat at 30..?

[Wanesa]

I am ok with flat XP curve. You have to count with EDs. First life toon starts to build first ED at level 20. He will have 3rd ED level on 21th character level. So there is a lot of fun from advancing during level 20. After capping ED at level 5, he will need aprx 160kXP to reach level 22.

TRed toon with many EDs is currently very powerful at level 20, he can run harder quests and gain more XPs.

[Vargouille]

Can you put epic feats in that normal feat at 30..?
Yes. Epic feats aren't special except for their level requirement (and we grouped them into a heading in the UI because boy there's a lot of feats to sort through).

[Propane]

You really think MOST players have Epic Completionist?

No wonder the numbers you're talking about are so BRUTAL!

Those few players on each server who have Epic Completionist won't be bothered at all by these changes - Can you please think of the rest of us for a change rather than catering exclusively to the UBER-ELITE!


Agreed - the game should encourage more alts for players - not less. I have a large stable of alts - only 2 Epic past lives, most of my alts are first or second heroic lifers!

More alts --> more questing at different level ranges, different loot requirements --> more questing and AH action, more DDO store spending for alt specific items (bags, cosmetics, etc..)

[Wulverine]

Can you put epic feats in that normal feat at 30..?

Yes. It functions the same as the feat slot you get at lvl27. So you can still take, for instance, Ruin (a lvl27 or higher feat) at level 30.


The Normal feat slot is similar to the slot you get at 27 - it can hold lower level feats that you can usually get (aka: not Epic Destiny feats).

Edit: Outninja'd by Vargouille!

[Apollos713]

Fine with the changes and flattened curve. Leveling up in epics is really just in the EDs anyways, and once those are capped things outside of EE become pretty easy.

[Saekee]

my main concern is power creep with players getting more buffs at levels 29-30. I would not add fate points or a legendary feat; maybe just a third destiny at best.

[Talam]

Not as bad as I thought it would be. However, I agree that giving us the 5th slot at level 30 won't help much, as most won't stay 30 but will simply ETR again, unless of course there's going to be some reason to stay at cap, which will in turn destroy the rest of the levels. What about giving it at level 28 or 29?

[slarden]

Delayed use of CITW weapons is the only thing I will really notice about the change to xp leveling. I swap to my CITW weapon(s) at 23 and my TF weapon(s) at 26 and other than that I don't bother with many gear changes.

I can live with it, but like the existing low xp requirements of the early levels for weapon swap purposes.

Everything else looks great!

[FranOhmsford]

Agreed - the game should encourage more alts for players - not less. I have a large stable of alts - only 2 Epic past lives, most of my alts are first or second heroic lifers!

More alts --> more questing at different level ranges, different loot requirements --> more questing and AH action, more DDO store spending for alt specific items (bags, cosmetics, etc..)

If I only had one character it would probably be Heroic AND Epic Completionist by now with +7 tomes on all stats and maxed out gear Or more likely by far I'd have quit the game years ago!


As things stand however the most TRs I've done on any single character is 4 {5th Life currently} and said character hasn't got a single Epic Past Life!
Meanwhile the most E-TRs I've done on a single character is also 4 and said character has NEVER TRd! {Will do so for the first time as soon as I've ran 2 quests from EE Storm Horns again}.

I have every inventory slot bought on MULTIPLE characters!
I have every bank slot bought on MULTIPLE characters!
I have 100 slots in my Shared Bank and over 2 million plat also in there as well as at least 12 pages full at all times in the Crafting Bank!
My Guild on Cannith is Lvl 110 and 90%+ of the renown earned was earned by ME! {Yes I also bought a Kraken!}.

If I only had one character I can guarantee you that I would have spent a heck of a lot less money on this game than I have done!

These changes won't stop me from playing ALL my Characters - It will just cut down the time I spend on each one and therefore make my ever reaching Completionist on any one of them an impossibility!

[zehnvhex]

Personally if we're going to spend roughly 8x as much time in the 20-26 level range then before I'd like to see the min lvl on most, if not all epic items have a min lvl of either 20, 25 or 30.

[Chi_Ryu]

1. I don't really like the flattening curve idea... I appreciate the fact that it should be harder to achieve the upper levels. "Flattening" might be okay, but definitely not "Flat".

Totally agreed; I strongly dislike the flat scale. It would be nice to get to 23 quicker - it'll be almost twice as much XP when update 30 hits, and will last for shortly less time (assuming obsolescence by lv 26)


2. I just don't see nearly enough fate points being available to make decent use of a fourth twist slot...and definitely not a fifth one.

I currently run 4/3/1/1 or 4/2/2/1 today. I could do 4/3/1/1/1 by level 30 on my main, given the extra fate points.

[PsychoBlonde]

It sounds okayish to me, but there's going to be a HUGE cutout in power level between levels 28 and 30.

The reason why this worries me is that the TR train means that people tend to be fairly well distributed among the range of levels available. If you enjoy grouping at all, the sudden power cutout is going to either make it utterly miserable to find people to group with (because they're low level and severely underpowered) or going to make it pretty miserable for other people to run with YOU (because you're way past them). This has been the case every time the cap has risen since I started playing (when it was 20).

I'm not saying "don't do it"--cool new stuff is cool.

[sirgog]

Flat curve is a huge improvement.

There's a reasonable amount of content from 20 to 23 that you don't get to play because those levels go past so fast, and the gear from them (mostly ML 20) gets obsolete so quickly.

Now there's a use to getting ML 20 gear.

This does mean it is now time to overhaul the XP for the 17-19 heroic quests though.

[SableShadow]

I see more bank space needed.

[Tahkhesis]

I like it. Thank you.

Question: can we have a Korthos alternative? I think I could run it blind folded and drunk at this point, and if the TR/ETR train is now much longer, it would def mix stuff up enough to make it worth it.

[Thar]

Epic XP Curve[/B]

We're changing the Epic XP curve! The average amount of XP required per level (on average) is staying exactly where it is, but the "curve" is now entirely flattened to be the same XP requirements for each Epic level.


Total requirements for level 30: Neither we nor most players wanted to see level 30 requiring ~10 million XP. That just seemed like too much, especially in comparison to today. We're landing at 8,250,000, which is reasonable for two more levels after 6,600,000.
Level 28 is the same: Under the old curve, you needed 6,600,000 XP for level 28, and that's still true. This also required an average of 825,000 XP per level (6,600,000 / 8), which is what we've flattened every level to require, including past level 28.
Why flatten the XP curve?

It makes sense for characters to spend similar amounts of play time at each level, rather than new levels coming slower and slower over time. For comparison, consider the old Heroic 3rd life XP requirements and levels 18-20. While that's a different case overall (from 1-20), we want to get away from that feeling that the last few levels are just so much harder.
XP per epic quest doesn't increase much with increased level, which takes away from one reason to increase XP requirements over time.
Unlike the normal "start" of an XP curve, there's no great reason for designers to rush characters through the early Epic levels. That's not where most of your abilities come from, either from a power perspective or "cool new things to use" perspective. By the time a character is epic they've got lots to do, and Epic Destinies are on a separate track. Given that, it's largely nicer to space the "dings" of gaining a level out more - yes, they come slower early on, but you never reach that large gap at high levels where it seems to take forever to get those final levels. (Players may remember the old Heroic 3rd life XP curve being somethign like that at level 18/19.)
Based on quest and XP distribution, it makes sense for the lower levels to require as much XP as higher levels. Though we've relaxed a lot of "restrictions" on epic questing, many players do still play quests around their character level, and/or in increasing order.


Existing Characters after the change: Similar to when we updated the Heroic XP requirements, existing characters would lose neither XP nor levels when this change goes live. For instance, if you have 800,000 XP the day before U29 launches, you'll be level 22 with 800,000 XP. After U29, you'll still be level 22 with 800,000 XP - you wont revert back to level 20, even though a new character reaching epic levels would only be level 20 with 800,000 XP. That character would need to reach 2,475,000 XP to reach level 23 (like any new character), and the XP bar won't begin filling up until you reach 1,650,000 XP (the new normal requirement for your current level).
Bank Note: If you are "banking" an epic level before Update 29, you may want to take that level before the update goes live. Depending where you are on the curve this may get you to that level much sooner than otherwise.





Level
Old Requirement
New Requirement


20
0
0


21
300,000
825,000


22
750,000
1,650,000


23
1,350,000
2,475,000


24
2,100,000
3,300,000


25
3,000,000
4,125,000


26
4,050,000
4,950,000


27
5,250,000
5,775,000


28
6,600,000
6,600,000


29
8,100,000 (old curve if unchanged)
7,425,000


30
9,750,000 (old curve if unchanged)
8,250,000




We'll have some more details to share in the near future, including specifics on some feats, but please keep comments on those specifics to those threads.

Thanks for reading. If you have general thoughts on the structure of Feats with new levels, or Twists of Fate and Fate Points, or the XP curve/flat line, etc., let us know!

SOOOO... your making the least enjoyable part of the epic grind (20-22) where you don't have a lot of the epic gear from motd or weapons from citw longer. The part where we do not have our gear so it takes longer to kill (with champions). At least before you could skip this undesireable time with saga xp. Now we're forced to live in the mess of quests that were pre motd. These are frequently unbalanced. So what will happen? more von3/wiz king farming. yes this is fun (not).

The old progression was fine. it got a little long at 26/27 but you expect that as you grind through those level quests. I don't currently feel on a new TR or life that I am forced to repeat content until getting close to cap. Now i'll be unable to do higher level content so i'll have to repeat the low end garbage quests or do the xp loop quests which bore me.

I know you have your reasons but you fail to meet the customer needs for these low levels. it's not fun as you have no real epic abillities. You have no real epic gear. It's a floundering till 23 when you hopefully have citw weapons. it's only bareable on a new HTR where you get first time and bravery bonus to get through it as fast as possible.

[Theolin]

XP thought

I understand flattening it, I just don't think I want it totally flat, what about something more like, I know that moves 28 down a little, don't have the time to try to fix it at the moment but the idea ... slight increase in xp requirements for each level but not much & nothing over 1mil for a level



level
xp needed
total xp


20
0
0


21
600000
600000


22
650000
1250000


23
700000
1950000


24
750000
2700000


25
800000
3500000


26
850000
4350000


27
900000
5250000


28
950000
6200000


29
1000000
7200000


30
1000000
8200000

[Qhualor]

Not as bad as I thought it would be. However, I agree that giving us the 5th slot at level 30 won't help much, as most won't stay 30 but will simply ETR again, unless of course there's going to be some reason to stay at cap, which will in turn destroy the rest of the levels. What about giving it at level 28 or 29?

this wont be useful for those that rinse and repeat reincarnations. its no different than right now where the level 28 feat selections and the level 28 gear aren't useful for those kinds of players. when new content comes out, I see a lot of players that do hang out at cap or continue progressing to cap while focusing on that new content until they get what they want. after that, its back to the grind with them. the way I see it, if you are used to not having it than you will continue to be used to not having it. not having the 5th slot shouldn't be an issue really. with legendary content coming, there should be more to do along with content that is already being played at cap now.

[Thar]

As you may know, we're planning to raise the level cap to level 30 with Update 29. Here's some initial details!


New Character Features Gained from Leveling Up to 30

Here's our current plan for what characters receive from gaining levels 29 and 30.


Feature
Level


+2 Fate Points
29


Tier 3 Epic Destiny Feat Slot (3 Destinies capped)
29


+3 Fate Points
30


+1 Twist of Fate Slot
30


"Normal" Feat Slot
30


Legendary Feat Slot
30



Notes:


Number of Twist Slots: This is +1 compared to whatever you currently have. You might or might not have gotten an Epic Completionist slot yet. The 4th slot you have costs 4 Fate Points to unlock tier 1, the 5th slot costs 5 points to unlock, regardless of what order you gain your extra slots. If you drop below level 29/30 (Reincarnation), then you lose those Fate Points and slot until you level up again.
Reincarnation Flagging: According to our tests, if you flag for Reincarnation before Update 29 (make it so Character Select shows the big REINCARNATE button), you will be able to reincarnate after Update 29 without any further changes. You won't have to gain additional XP or levels, etc.
The Normal feat slot is similar to the slot you get at 27 - it can hold lower level feats that you can usually get (aka: not Epic Destiny feats).
The Epic Destiny Feat slot can hold lower tier Epic Destiny feats that you qualify for, or new options only available here at level 29. Like other Epic Destiny Feat slots, this cannot hold other kinds of feats.
The Legendary Feat slot can only be filled from a specific list of new feats.
Epic Reincarnation and Iconic Reincarnation will require being level 30 after Update 29.



We'll have some more details to share in the near future, including specifics on some feats, but please keep comments on those specifics to those threads.

Thanks for reading. If you have general thoughts on the structure of Feats with new levels, or Twists of Fate and Fate Points, or the XP curve/flat line, etc., let us know!

These seem like fine end game benefits. Not overwhelming but you get SOMETHING for each level progression. Looks fine so far pending feat lists.

[Qhualor]

Flat curve is a huge improvement.

There's a reasonable amount of content from 20 to 23 that you don't get to play because those levels go past so fast, and the gear from them (mostly ML 20) gets obsolete so quickly.

Now there's a use to getting ML 20 gear.

This does mean it is now time to overhaul the XP for the 17-19 heroic quests though.

this is what I am thinking too. content that tends to get skipped over may see a little more replayability.

[sjbb87]

As you may know, we're planning to raise the level cap to level 30 with Update 29. Here's some initial details!





Level
Old Requirement
New Requirement


20
0
0


21
300,000
825,000


22
750,000
1,650,000


23
1,350,000
2,475,000


24
2,100,000
3,300,000


25
3,000,000
4,125,000


26
4,050,000
4,950,000


27
5,250,000
5,775,000


28
6,600,000
6,600,000


29
8,100,000 (old curve if unchanged)
7,425,000


30
9,750,000 (old curve if unchanged)
8,250,000






ok....
I liked the majority ...
But the new xp curve this very painful ...
And the current took us 29-30 this very high ....
It can make an average between the two ??

playing epic levels ... just gets more fun when you take the level 26, before it is kinda boring

[EllisDee37]

8,250,000I lobbied for 7.5 million, but 8.25 is close enough. Fair play.

Boy, that sure is a lotta extra feats!

[mraz]

im ok with the xp changes but... if you could add a lil something on lvl 22 and 23 that would be great.
cause more then 1,5 mil. for only +2 on skills is kinda meh...
other then that i like the idea :)

[Vargouille]

I'll read it all properly shortly but re the above: i really like this approach, please consider revisiting the 'dead' epic character levels (22, 23, 25 basically) and using this 'get slot/points' mechanic there too (but spread the 5 points you're adding at L29 and 30 across that range - put a +1 fate point at 22 23 25 29 and 30).

Interesting.

[kemetka]

You really think MOST players have Epic Completionist?
they know its a minority, it was just a answer to a question


No wonder the numbers you're talking about are so BRUTAL!
what? early stages yea it will take a wee bit longer, but thats part of the fun, people need to stop complaining that TRing is a grind, and start playing the game that was created for them, doing the off teh wall side stuff that they always gloss over, go have a romp through the slayer areas for the funsies. I'm willing to bet there is a great deal of this game that most players have either never seen, or simply forgot about. Nostalgia questing can be quite fun.


Those few players on each server who have Epic Completionist won't be bothered at all by these changes
true, i wont, not on my main character anyway, but thats the point, this game is great for the fact that there literally is no end game, you can take your same charcter and keep playing them over and over until the game literally dies out, instead of being forced to keep a character your super invested in at cap level to run the same stuff repeatedly.

Alternatively you can make an alt > see what i did there :P < and play through all shiny and new. And while most everyone has them, i'm willing to bet their arnt a great many players on any server who wish their alts the best of luck and let them live of random loot gen and no ship buffs like the game was so long ago.

If you want brutality, make a new character, dont join a guild or ever get guild buffs, rely on random loot generation and that characters own money only, and play permdeath style. This is what I do with all my toons, and the ones that are level 20+ i look forward to seeing if they can survive all the way to their first epic TR.


Can you please think of the rest of us for a change rather than catering exclusively to the UBER-ELITE!
uh... they did, they are looking at a proposed reduced xp chart, and honestly if I were to grind, REALLY grind, i could have 28-30 completed in 3 hours tops, 2 if its a good group.

add to this, that there is so much to do in epics, that typically ( on my uber stupid toon ) to get from 20 - 28 as it stands currently doing all the sagas out in eveningstar on elite at level with bravery, thats most of the entire epic life right there after you turn the sagas in for xp gems.

[Kalaxia]

Total requirements for level 30: Neither we nor most players wanted to see level 30 requiring ~10 million XP. That just seemed like too much, especially in comparison to today. We're landing at 8,250,000, which is reasonable for two more levels after 6,600,000.

•Epic Reincarnation and Iconic Reincarnation will require being level 30 after Update 29.


To be honest, it's a huge mistake to increase the time for epic reincarnations after they've been this way for 2 years now.

You should really consider one of the following:
A> Allow people to reincarnate at 28
B> Allow people to reincarnate as soon as their destiny sphere is at 6m karma
C> Rebalance the XP curve to 6.6m for 20 to 30
D> Buff epic dungeon XP (I would say roughly half of them are way too low compared to others to begin with. Which is why people grind the same dungeons over and over.)

Personally, I would choose A or B. It's simple. It's straight-forward. It doesn't throw a wrench in people's time to ER.

If people want to level cap to 30, requiring extra XP makes sense. I get that. But it makes no sense to increase the time to reincarnate, after it's been this way for 2 years. Things like this tend to drive away newer players, and cause vets to give up where they left off.

If anything, MMO's should be reducing time for older character development mechanics.. not increasing it. If you want to make the game more difficult/challenging... add in that new difficulty mode. But don't add extra time for existing character development. Character development is probably one of the biggest things in DDO, and reincarnations play a big part of that.

[EllisDee37]

How will epic levels effect grouping XP now that the spread is 10 levels? Specifically:

- What's the power leveling penalty level split, if any? Will a 20 get full xp in a group with a 30?
- What is the bravery mechanic for epic levels and quests? It doesn't work like in heroics, with a 2-level split.

[kemetka]

To be honest, it's a huge mistake to increase the time for epic reincarnations after they've been this way for 2 years now.
they stated this was coming though... for a while now, yet its now just becoming a big deal.

You should really consider one of the following:

A> Allow people to reincarnate at 28
they've already stated this isnt going to be the case, were beating a dead horse at this point

B> Allow people to reincarnate as soon as their destiny sphere is at 6m karma
they can > see heroic reincarnation < otherwise, its not working like that now, why would it work like that afterword, furthermore, one of the complaints against going to 30 is that it makes it more difficult for newer players ( not really, just a little long ) and is not fair for them when the people who got their EPL's already ( guilty ) did it at 28, well guess what changing it to this would be just as unfair to us, please skip on the dose of hypocrite in the morning.

C> Rebalance the XP curve to 6.6m for 20 to 30
a sensible solution to a degree, however doing it this way would basically make increasing the level cap arbitrary at best, in all likely hood not going to happen

D> Buff epic dungeon XP (I would say roughly half of them are way too low compared to others to begin with. Which is why people grind the same dungeons over and over.)what? why? for what reason? EE spies ( and its been a while so i could be wrong ) is around 200k xp+ on its own, the first Estar chain on EE is about 500k, the saga that spans Lord of Dust all the way to Estar 3 chain ( 2 of them mind you ) is about 2 million xp run on EE with first time bonus. Then you've got the saga turn ins

now is everyone going to run it on EE, no, but i'd be willing to bet if you put up the lfm people would join it
"if you build it they will come "
will you die? maybe, but this is D&D death is a very real part of it, and so is raising the dead. So what if you die, it happens.



If people want to level cap to 30, requiring extra XP makes sense. I get that. But it makes no sense to increase the time to reincarnate, after it's been this way for 2 years. Things like this tend to drive away newer players, and cause vets to give up where they left off.
they havnt increased the time to TR, its still at max every 3 days, unless you have a bypass timer. and how exactly is this going to drive people away? that statement was senseless, thats like saying everytime wow comes out with a new expansion and raises the max level people leave cause "darnit im no longer max level" people leave cause they want to play new games > i.e. fallout 4 < not cause the developers give them more stuff to do. thats like getting mad cause you found easter eggs in your game.


If anything, MMO's should be reducing time for older character development mechanics.. not increasing it. If you want to make the game more difficult/challenging... add in that new difficulty mode. But don't add extra time for existing character development. Character development is probably one of the biggest things in DDO, and reincarnations play a big part of that.
so you want the time reduced for characters to get super powerful, and reduce the time for power creep to increase? isnt that one of the main things people are against?
new difficulty mode would be interesting.... hardcore mode that says your character is erased upon death? sign me up, will it happen, pfff please i doubt it. but theres your challenge.
no extra tim has been added for char development, timer still remains 3 days

[kemetka]

a questino about the fate points given at 29 and 30 though, are those permenant or just for that life? if for that life, i assume they are treated like a feat of some kind?

[golruul]

The TR cutoff should be level 28. I've mentioned this in the council with pretty good support and apparently you guys think differently.

Lets explore the reasoning then.

Adding grind for no good reason isn't my idea of a good time...

I agree. The typical time for me to ETR/ITR is 3-6 months and now it'll take a lot longer for no good reason. "Because the max level was raised" isn't a good reason to me.

Anyway, the staff weighed the feedback and decided to increase the XP to ETR/ITR. Ok, fine, that's their decision. I just cancelled my many-year subscription, though, as part of my feedback to them.

I'll probably still play as a free-to-play account from time to time, but I won't be a paying customer ever again.

[Erik_Loki]

The curve has to be redesigned to be 7.000.000, max 7.500.000

8.250.000 is too high

[phalaeo]

I see more bank space needed.

Yes.

Did you guys at Turbine hear that? More bank space!

[Jiirix]

Looks like we will spend far more time at the low epic levels. Can we get a trade in for all seals, shards and scrolls like we have for the sand scrolls please?
I really would like to use some of the old epic level 20 stuff, but even after playing DDO for more than 5 years I have hardly any "seal, shard, scroll" sets complete. You would need X seals/shards/srolls from the right pack to turn them in and still will have to grind for the base item. Compared to ALL the other epic items that just drop in one piece that won't be over the top, right?

[Hafeal]

Well, well, well. 30 finally on the horizon for real.

8.25 million xp? It was inevitable, I assume the plan is that all new content in the foreseeable future will be built for mid-to-high end Epic. To me this means Heroic content, and a much needed new starter area, remain on the back burner for the foreseeable future. Or will there be some room for both?

I agree with Fran on 1 thing - this xp grind continues to favor players who focus on 1 or 2 characters. There is hardly incentive to run a stable of alts with this xp curve, particularly and especially if you are a casual player.

Heroic XP, especially anything from 15 on up, needs such a major boost. Will there be any tweaking to allow 18-22s to run together in content without having to worry about it being at the 20+ Epic XP range? I just see the 17-20 level range being even more of a complete let down now. Once you hit 20, there will be absolutely NO incentive to run anything that isn't getting Epic XP scales.

I can also see people wanting to run Bravery Streaks more often in Epic now because of this. Too bad. BB should go. Is there a plan to replace BB with a better incentivized XP bonus? Please tell me yes.

[Blastyswa]

As you may know, we're planning to raise the level cap to level 30 with Update 29. Here's some initial details!


New Character Features Gained from Leveling Up to 30

Here's our current plan for what characters receive from gaining levels 29 and 30.


Feature
Level


+2 Fate Points
29


Tier 3 Epic Destiny Feat Slot (3 Destinies capped)
29


+3 Fate Points
30


+1 Twist of Fate Slot
30


"Normal" Feat Slot
30


Legendary Feat Slot
30



Notes:


Number of Twist Slots: This is +1 compared to whatever you currently have. You might or might not have gotten an Epic Completionist slot yet. The 4th slot you have costs 4 Fate Points to unlock tier 1, the 5th slot costs 5 points to unlock, regardless of what order you gain your extra slots. If you drop below level 29/30 (Reincarnation), then you lose those Fate Points and slot until you level up again.
Reincarnation Flagging: According to our tests, if you flag for Reincarnation before Update 29 (make it so Character Select shows the big REINCARNATE button), you will be able to reincarnate after Update 29 without any further changes. You won't have to gain additional XP or levels, etc.
The Normal feat slot is similar to the slot you get at 27 - it can hold lower level feats that you can usually get (aka: not Epic Destiny feats).
The Epic Destiny Feat slot can hold lower tier Epic Destiny feats that you qualify for, or new options only available here at level 29. Like other Epic Destiny Feat slots, this cannot hold other kinds of feats.
The Legendary Feat slot can only be filled from a specific list of new feats.
Epic Reincarnation and Iconic Reincarnation will require being level 30 after Update 29.



Epic XP Curve

We're changing the Epic XP curve! The average amount of XP required per level (on average) is staying exactly where it is, but the "curve" is now entirely flattened to be the same XP requirements for each Epic level.


Total requirements for level 30: Neither we nor most players wanted to see level 30 requiring ~10 million XP. That just seemed like too much, especially in comparison to today. We're landing at 8,250,000, which is reasonable for two more levels after 6,600,000.
Level 28 is the same: Under the old curve, you needed 6,600,000 XP for level 28, and that's still true. This also required an average of 825,000 XP per level (6,600,000 / 8), which is what we've flattened every level to require, including past level 28.
Why flatten the XP curve?

It makes sense for characters to spend similar amounts of play time at each level, rather than new levels coming slower and slower over time. For comparison, consider the old Heroic 3rd life XP requirements and levels 18-20. While that's a different case overall (from 1-20), we want to get away from that feeling that the last few levels are just so much harder.
XP per epic quest doesn't increase much with increased level, which takes away from one reason to increase XP requirements over time.
Unlike the normal "start" of an XP curve, there's no great reason for designers to rush characters through the early Epic levels. That's not where most of your abilities come from, either from a power perspective or "cool new things to use" perspective. By the time a character is epic they've got lots to do, and Epic Destinies are on a separate track. Given that, it's largely nicer to space the "dings" of gaining a level out more - yes, they come slower early on, but you never reach that large gap at high levels where it seems to take forever to get those final levels. (Players may remember the old Heroic 3rd life XP curve being somethign like that at level 18/19.)
Based on quest and XP distribution, it makes sense for the lower levels to require as much XP as higher levels. Though we've relaxed a lot of "restrictions" on epic questing, many players do still play quests around their character level, and/or in increasing order.


Existing Characters after the change: Similar to when we updated the Heroic XP requirements, existing characters would lose neither XP nor levels when this change goes live. For instance, if you have 800,000 XP the day before U29 launches, you'll be level 22 with 800,000 XP. After U29, you'll still be level 22 with 800,000 XP - you wont revert back to level 20, even though a new character reaching epic levels would only be level 20 with 800,000 XP. That character would need to reach 2,475,000 XP to reach level 23 (like any new character), and the XP bar won't begin filling up until you reach 1,650,000 XP (the new normal requirement for your current level).
Bank Note: If you are "banking" an epic level before Update 29, you may want to take that level before the update goes live. Depending where you are on the curve this may get you to that level much sooner than otherwise.





Level
Old Requirement
New Requirement


20
0
0


21
300,000
825,000


22
750,000
1,650,000


23
1,350,000
2,475,000


24
2,100,000
3,300,000


25
3,000,000
4,125,000


26
4,050,000
4,950,000


27
5,250,000
5,775,000


28
6,600,000
6,600,000


29
8,100,000 (old curve if unchanged)
7,425,000


30
9,750,000 (old curve if unchanged)
8,250,000




We'll have some more details to share in the near future, including specifics on some feats, but please keep comments on those specifics to those threads.

Thanks for reading. If you have general thoughts on the structure of Feats with new levels, or Twists of Fate and Fate Points, or the XP curve/flat line, etc., let us know!

Personally I think that the xp curve would do well with a little less flattening, and probably a little less experience. At level 20-24 I personally usually just run ENx2 quests myself, and then begin switching to EE sagas and newer quests at 25+ because of how much more powerful my character is at those levels. I think that subtracting a bit of xp from levels 20-23 or so and adding it in at level 29-30 (Or removing it entirely) would make the first few epic levels a lot less punishing. This will particularly affect casual players and players who try and play without farming quests with better xp/minute, because quests obviously take longer to complete the less power you have to use on them.

Aside from the xp, I like the rest of the changes. Adding in Fate Points at level 29-30 seems like a really great place to put them, and I'm looking forward to the new build options that will be presented with 3 extra feats. Big thank you for not making the xp incredibly insane, even if it is still a wee bit high.

[peng]

At one point the devs proposed moving caster levels from epic destinies to epic levels. Has that been permanently shelved? Or is that still in the works? I know a lot of cha-based arcane casters live in exalted because it's their best dc destiny, but that hurts caster levels, particularly if we can now uncap several spells.

[Blivit]

Level
Old Requirement
New Requirement


20
0
0


21
300,000
825,000


22
750,000
1,650,000


23
1,350,000
2,475,000


24
2,100,000
3,300,000


25
3,000,000
4,125,000


26
4,050,000
4,950,000


27
5,250,000
5,775,000


28
6,600,000
6,600,000


29
8,100,000 (old curve if unchanged)
7,425,000


30
9,750,000 (old curve if unchanged)
8,250,000






I am not happy with the new flat XP curves. It will take more XP to get to every single level than before, except for lvl 28. This will means it will take me longer to get to lvl 28 than before. Why? Because I'll be getting my better weapons at lvl 24 (CITW Antipode) and lvl 26 (Tier 2 Thunderforged wraps) later, which means I'll be killing things slower, and therefore progressing through my ETR slower. It's bad enough that ETRs are going to take a lot longer due to needing 8.25 million XP now, but it's rubbing salt in the wound to slow the rate of level progression, thus delaying the use of higher DPS weapons, which in turn lowers the overall rate of XP progression.

I understand the logic behind flattening the XP curve, and it makes good sense to me, but I am not happy with the impact this will have on the speed at which I ETR (12 ETRs to get an extra twist is going to take a LONG time already). An alternative would be to leave them as they currently are on live, then fudge in lvls 29 and 30 with XP requirements that makes no logical sense. This is unappealing and probably a bad idea. The only other alternative I can think of that might be reasonable would be to keep the 8.25 million cap at 8.25, but adjust the non-linear curve so that the lower levels (at least up to 24, where Tier 1 Thunderforged and maxed out CITW weapons become available, maybe 26 for Tier 2) are closer to their current values? This would slow down later level progression due to higher XP requirements in the higher levels, but I'd be getting vastly higher DPS weapons sooner, and thus it would speed up the overall time of the ETR over what is proposed. I am thinking that I would rather have slower higher level progression, as much of a slog as that would feel like, in exchange for faster overall ETR times. Even though higher levels would be more of a slog, the overall slog of the entire ETR would be less.

[Standal]

Rewards for level 29 and 30 look pretty decent. XP curve is very disappointing. Getting to level 23, 25, and 26 are big deals for me. I was looking forward to making some T3 Thunderforged and actually running some quests for XP with it. The flat curve maximizes my time when my character is weak and not fun to play. Thanks for that.

Why not just drop the XP for level 28 to 1.2 mil over level 27, then 1.2 mil for level for 29 and 30. 6.45 mil for 28, 7.65 mil for 29, and 8.85 for 30. Then I at least get to play with all my toys for a while before I TR. If you're really committed to 8.25 mil, no one will complain if you drop level 27 a bit.

[Karadon_II]

Considering I was expecting that the 9,750,000 XP requirement before ITR/ER was a done deal when level 30 would come into play, colour me quite happy with the new values. Also taking into account the pain it still is to get from 19 to 20, I always found it a bit daft that one got from 20 to 21 in the time it would take to eat dinner, so the balancing of XP between the levels is logical.

From reading the thread I do think there is a lack of 'fun factor' as well as a gear issue for some people [myself included] for the levels 20 to 22/23 now that we'll be there for longer. The Eveningstar commendation gear is fine entry-level stuff but I think there is an opportunity now to address the old L20 epic gear.

This person has the measure of it:


Can we get a trade in for all seals, shards and scrolls like we have for the sand scrolls please?

Yes please indeed. As we'll be in the lower end of epics for longer, much of this older gear could now be more useful again. The old epic gear represented significant power back in the day but has been practically obsolete for some time. I reckon these could be used more at 20-22 now that those levels can't be 'skipped' as much. You never know - people may even have 'fun' running those quests again while waiting to get to 23.

To facilitate this further I would also call for either:
[a] a significant increase the drop rate of these old seals, shards and scrolls components, because the current drop rates are not 'fun' IMHO,
and/or
[b] guaranteed appearences of random seals, shards, scrolls in the end rewards list for the relevant associated quests or end of chains/raids.

Just my 2c.

[sjbb87]

B> Allow people to reincarnate as soon as their destiny sphere is at 6m karma


Maybe you get 1 past life per 6m karma at level 30
this is good...

[Faltout]

I can't comment much on the fate points and twist slots. Allowing more abilities to cross over destinies limits destiny diversity. I mean, if you find 5 most powerful destiny abilities and twist them, you'll always be using the same stuff no matter which destiny you're in. On the other hand, it adds more power from EDs and I guess that was needed with a level raise. Adding and removing the twist slot upon reincarnation, not that smooth but if it works then all good...
Maybe you could also reset (or the option to reset) EDs upon such reincarnations instead of still requiring plat to do it.

Yes to raising the ER and IR point. Those types of reincarnation always mentioned they work at level cap and there were explicit dev posts about the cap going up along with the reincarnations. And it doesn't make sense to not be at level cap.

The xp curve should not be totally flat. Agree with the other posters that it should be flattened, but not totally. Reason: If you play quests at level (respecting that the level of the quest means something... which it doesn't if you compare MotU quests to old epic level 20 packs) then at level 20 you can do the level 18-20 heroic quests and some level 20 epic quests. At level 21 you can do level 20s and 21s. At level 25, a range of 20-25 quests.
Since quests do get an xp growth as level raises and you get to play from more quests, the curve shouldn't be totally flat.

[Kynestra]

I'm not sure "endgame" is something people truly want, even if they say they do.

I absolutely want an endgame, especially now. I am closing on triple heroic/epic completionist, and will hopefully be finished by the time this rolls out. it's the ONLY thing I want at this point, to be honest.

Oh. and bank space...
and a TR cache search function...
and..

[blerkington]

Hi,

At first glance, two thoughts:

1. The flat xp curve will make levels 20-23 painfully slow. XP comes at a higher rate later on because of quests being worth more, so by comparison the later levels will fly by.

2. I think you are adding too much power with these levels, particularly for ranged and melee builds.

Thanks.

[Silverleafeon]

Was hoping for around 8 million, 8 1/4 is close enough, thank you.

Love the extra twist slot, woot!

[Drevok]

I'd also like to add my agreement that the xp flattening goes too far.
Yes some flattening is fine, but as described is much too harsh.
For example if start at 600k for level 21 and increase that by 50k per level gives much of the desired benefit plus better fit of the higher the level the more xp needed engrained in most players.
and 600k is a bit less scary than 800k for a level 20...

Besides that, the rest looks interesting!

P.s. How about an epic feat that adds 5ap?

[Xipify]

Looks like we will spend far more time at the low epic levels. Can we get a trade in for all seals, shards and scrolls like we have for the sand scrolls please?
I really would like to use some of the old epic level 20 stuff, but even after playing DDO for more than 5 years I have hardly any "seal, shard, scroll" sets complete. You would need X seals/shards/srolls from the right pack to turn them in and still will have to grind for the base item. Compared to ALL the other epic items that just drop in one piece that won't be over the top, right?

Yes. Been playing a while with very few complete sets. Seems with the coming update the lvl 20 equipment from the seal, shard, scroll items would be useful.

[RapkintheRanger]

A couple of quick knee-jerk reactions:

1. I don't really like the flattening curve idea... I appreciate the fact that it should be harder to achieve the upper levels. "Flattening" might be okay, but definitely not "Flat".
2. I just don't see nearly enough fate points being available to make decent use of a fourth twist slot...and definitely not a fifth one.

One thing missing from the missive above: for planning purposes, an approximate date of implementation would be good to know. I've already started TR'ing my 28-level chars, but that's just me.

I agree.

Playing level 20 sucks. i get better gear by 22, 23, (and finally a decent hire) at 25. I have good gear at level 26. Playing longer at higher levels feels more fun than playing longer at level 20.

In fact, since you get more abilities as you go up, you have more options. I wait on some quests until i am 26, even though they are newer and more interesting content, jsut becasue i need to have more levels under my belt to play them well.

Flatening is one thing (and o) but flat is no fun.

I would rather have to get more exp at level 28 than more exp at level 20

thanks

[maddong]

I like it except:

Keep ETR/ITR at level 28.
Throw the playerbase a bone.
If you want to use the heart you will have to keep at least 1 character at level 30 anyway to farm seeds or use TP (either way turbine wins).
We will love you for it.

[CorinBrightbane]

The flattened xp curve is the only thing that I'm not really a fan of. As others have said, you will be spending a lot more time at low level epic than at high level. Takes longer to get through quests for various reasons. And At higher level, you'll have things like sagas, etc all completed, so "poof" there go those levels. Yes you can hold them on an ETR to use, but again, that's hurting the new or casual player a lot more than the "ole vet crowd". Comparing it to heroics, if I spent more or even the same time at level 1 as I do at level 18....I'd go crazy!

[elvesunited]

Higher level characters get more xp per quest. Higher level characters complete quests faster. The result of the flattening will be that we will spend a lot more time in lower levels and burn through the higher levels very quickly. This cheapens the upper levels as they'll be over too quickly and makes the lower epic levels a drag.

First time epic characters will be hit far worse. As they have barely started epic destinies they'll be far weaker than your average characters. The result will be that they'll still be doing the heroic quests at level 20 and it will take a freakishly long time to get to level 21. They just earned 180,000 to get from 19 to 20. And now 825,000 to get to level 21? And the it gets worse because nOt all levels are equal. Level 22, 23, 25 are basically whatever levels. After reaching level 21 for many characters it will be 2,475,000 xp before the next meaningful level change!

Character in mid-levels getting hit with millions of xp required to achieve a single level change? That's a punch in the face. Do you care how many times they'll have to repeat the same quests over and over again to grind their way past that? Some guy who doesn't do the forums is going to be level 23 and get hit with this? He will be furious! He'll consider playing other games,

To sum up. This flattening is freaking awful. New players will hit epic levels and lose interest. Older players will find themselves wallowing in lower epic levels with upper epic levels and the more interesting quests at those levels over too quickly. It is easily among the worst ideas that DDO has ever concieved of. At the same time it introduces new level 29 and level 30, it sabotages them by making them too short while freakishly lengthening the time players spend in lower epic levels. I don't understand it at all.

[Cetus]

The TR cutoff should be level 28. I've mentioned this in the council with pretty good support and apparently you guys think differently.

Lets explore the reasoning then.

Adding grind for no good reason isn't my idea of a good time...

Devs - in case this was missed.

Please provide some reasoning other than "just because".

This is a real detriment to those of us who have more ETR's to do.

[Saekee]

I like it except:

Keep ETR/ITR at level 28.
Throw the playerbase a bone.
If you want to use the heart you will have to keep at least 1 character at level 30 anyway to farm seeds or use TP (either way turbine wins).
We will love you for it.

cleverly stated!

I like that the levels are flattened. Makes old epic s s s gear more worthwhile and also more worthwhile to create a solid level 20 gearset for use until
mid-epics.

[Silverleafeon]

Flattened Epic levels is very Red Box D&D.

[Noircere]

Thoughts:

Epic reincarnation is doubly slowed down: once from more time spent at lower levels in less-powerful gear, and again by more XP needed to level cap. Please leave the level for ETR and iconic TR at lv28+. As we've already seen in this thread, there are some people who don't even bother with ETRs. No need to make them less attractive. If you're worried that no one will experience the new content at lv29-30 because they all ETR before that, the answer is to make there a compelling reason to visit those levels, not to water down the reason that's in place for lv21-28. Maybe add more tomes similar to the Mysterious Remnant tomes, available only via some collection mechanic from lv29+ quests? +1/+2 Heal Amp, Run Speed, Fortification, Double Strike, Double Shot, and/or Arcane Lore tomes?

Thanks for offering free fate points to unlock the new slot! Not sure whether I'll actually do so or if I'll upgrade existing slots, but choices are always good.

The "Normal" feat slot at lv30 no-longer means you have to forego Blinding Speed if you want any of the other lv27 feats. Given that that feat selection is usually framed that way, you should consider moving Blinding Speed to lv30 or to the "Legendary" feat pool. There's not really any choice in lv27 feat right now unless you're a spell caster. We could do with more feat options at lv27 in general, but the existing ones aren't being explored as-is due to Blinding Speed hogging all the attention.

We need info on the 3-Destiny feats, Legendary feats, and lv30 feats (if any)! It's hard to speculate about what these changes do without a ballpark of how powerful those feats will be. I'd imagine the team isn't done with them yet, but can we get a couple examples?

My first thought on the flat XP curve was that I didn't like it. After letting it sink in, I realized the majority of lv17-21 content never really gets touched, and this may help some of those levels. As mentioned above, this will have a side-effect on ETR speed. Another way to get content in those levels visited would be to add sagas to the rareliest-played quests, or just to tweak XP rates up. I'm assuming you have metrics on which quests are hardly ever visited since you mention players sticking to level-appropriate quests. Who knows, 2.75x XP for 21, and 1.83x XP for 22 might just give us enough time to hit all the original epics plus Amrath again, so the flat curve might "fix" this on its own.

[Blastyswa]

I absolutely want an endgame, especially now. I am closing on triple heroic/epic completionist, and will hopefully be finished by the time this rolls out. it's the ONLY thing I want at this point, to be honest.



Agreed. My main character is currently has all heroic and iconic lives done, and epic completionist. I've been doing one epic reincarnation a week (Don't want to be below 28 for raid nights!) for a month or so now in preparation for needing more experience to reincarnate, and I have to say that as fun as it is to rerun the same quests over and over for +3 PRR or +1% Energy Absorption boosts, it will be a lot more fun when there's an actual endgame to play.

[elvesunited]

The level gains seems too little on level 29 and too much on level 30. level 29 gets a epic destiny feat while most everything goes to level 30. level 30 feats and extra twist slot? Do they matter if the character is reincarnate bound? I suppose they could be earning xp to max a destiny sphere. But still with 2 new levels that need will be far less than before.


The problem with level 17-21 quests are .....
1) lack of xp. Which means they will get played less now that the xp level requirement has grown. Don't want to waste time on those quests. I've got 825,000 xp to earn. high xp epics only!

2) seriously antiquated rewards ( The level 13 and 14 new items beats a lot of level 20 "epic" gear by a wide margin ) And the crafting? Dragontouched armor? Alchemical weapons? Is anyone even trying anymore to craft those?

3) Many requiring group play to complete. ( you have any idea how hard it is to get a Lord of Blades run going these days? )

4) Many quests getting passed by the heroic to epic transistion. ( level 17 quests hardest hit ) You finish the level 16 quests on elite then level straight to 20.



I like that the levels are flattened. Makes old epic s s s gear more worthwhile and also more worthwhile to create a solid level 20 gearset for use until mid-epics.

The trouble is it doesn't flatten it. It greatly increases the time spent in lower epic levels and greatly decreases the time spent in higher epic levels. Now it will be heavily unbalanced in the opposite direction.

[AngryDude]

The flattened xp curve may make old style level 20 epic items useful. This can't be entirely bad. Also maybe the lord of blades will see some adventurers that want another few rounds in his circle. Cannith crafted level 20 weapons were not bad either. Holy burst evil outside bane, vampirism, etc. Maybe crafters will be useful.

[Qezuzu]

Unless you intend to doom players to even more rounds of EN Wizking/Spies, I don't feel flattening the XP is a good idea. Specifically, adding over 1000k to the required XP for lvl23.

As it is now, and to my surprise, the XP available in Epic levels is fairly evenly distributed, as far as base XP per level of quest. Discounting most of the raids:

Base normal XP in lvl 20 quests: 95,998
21: 327,472
22: 312,796
23: 100,820
24: 264,264
25: 105,171
26: 169,129
27: 91,927
28: 45,701
29: 107,705
30: 252,624

XP 20-23: 837k
XP 24-25: 369km
XP 26-30: 667k, with likely additions in u29

(Very) Roughly even, in fact it's front-loaded a bit. Of course this doesn't count optionals, but only a small handful of quests have notably high amounts of optional XP.

The problem occurs when you notice the number of quests. From level 20-23 we have a whopping 48 quests, for an average of 17.4k base XP per quest. Compare this to 26-30, where we have 30 quests at an average of 22.2k base XP per quest. Furthermore, only three quests in the 26-30 range fall below 15k base XP, whereas in the 20-24 range, sixteen quests are below 15k base XP. What this basically means is, you're going to spend a lot of time in the lower levels, where you don't have any fun toys to use. There's more XP available down there (for the time being), but only because of the sheer volume of unrewarding, low-XP quests.

A flat XP curve would be fine, but at the moment I don't feel there's a suitable distribution of XP in epic levels. If this goes live, people are gonna spend a lot of time in the first few epic levels, either repeating the actually good XP/min quests over and over again or slogging through a bunch of medicore XP/min quests.

And of course, you can easily you can run lower level quests when you're all leveled up and geared out. You can run lvl 22 epic quests at 26 without breaking Bravery Bonus...

tl;dr I'm not in favor of flat XP curve cause XP is not distributed evenly enough. There's simply not enough XP available when you're level 20 or 21, compared to when you're near the cap.

[standard_deviation]

Epic XP Curve

We're changing the Epic XP curve! The average amount of XP required per level (on average) is staying exactly where it is, but the "curve" is now entirely flattened to be the same XP requirements for each Epic level.


Total requirements for level 30: Neither we nor most players wanted to see level 30 requiring ~10 million XP. That just seemed like too much, especially in comparison to today. We're landing at 8,250,000, which is reasonable for two more levels after 6,600,000.
Level 28 is the same: Under the old curve, you needed 6,600,000 XP for level 28, and that's still true. This also required an average of 825,000 XP per level (6,600,000 / 8), which is what we've flattened every level to require, including past level 28.
Why flatten the XP curve?
[LIST]
It makes sense for characters to spend similar amounts of play time at each level, rather than new levels coming slower and slower over time. For comparison, consider the old Heroic 3rd life XP requirements and levels 18-20. While that's a different case overall (from 1-20), we want to get away from that feeling that the last few levels are just so much harder.
XP per epic quest doesn't increase much with increased level, which takes away from one reason to increase XP requirements over time.
Unlike the normal "start" of an XP curve, there's no great reason for designers to rush characters through the early Epic levels. That's not where most of your abilities come from, either from a power perspective or "cool new things to use" perspective. By the time a character is epic they've got lots to do, and Epic Destinies are on a separate track. Given that, it's largely nicer to space the "dings" of gaining a level out more - yes, they come slower early on, but you never reach that large gap at high levels where it seems to take forever to get those final levels. (Players may remember the old Heroic 3rd life XP curve being somethign like that at level 18/19.)
Based on quest and XP distribution, it makes sense for the lower levels to require as much XP as higher levels. Though we've relaxed a lot of "restrictions" on epic questing, many players do still play quests around their character level, and/or in increasing order.



Sorry guys, this, much like the so-called "balance" changes (gutting MRR --> dial back champs a bit on hard but not elite, and gutting Critical stacking --> dial back stupid wall of HP mob design, please), wasn't thought all the way through.

Your proposed XP curve adjustments heavily conflate things. In particular, the idea that XP per level is equivalent to time per level. It is not. Even if you run the same quests for the same XP at level 20 as you do at level 28, you'll be spending less time in each of those quests at level 28 than you would at level 20. You should be getting through them significantly faster due to significantly better weapons and gear, as well as the impact of the epic/epic destiny feats.

Also, as others have pointed out, the gear from level 20-22 is much more boring than the gear from 23+. Please don't make us spend that much time with it, at least, not without revamping the old level 20 'Epic' items. Heck, for a lot of my characters, going from 20 to 21 is a huge power increase just from the single epic feat (Improved Martial Arts or Overwhelming Critical, usually), and it's one that is significant whether on a first-time epic char or a 5th ETR.

Someone in the thread mentioned Cannith challenges being a great thing for getting past 20. Nope. The epic versions require level 21 to enter (this ought to be changed), and the heroic ones give poorer XP. Not to mention, a good chunk of the heroic Cannith challenges cap out at 15, meaning a 20 character will eat a huge XP penalty.

The current XP curve is probably a bit too back-heavy. The new curve is waaay too front-loaded. I'd suggest doing a set multiplier for each level. If 20 to 21 takes X, 21 to 22 takes 30% more than that, 22 to 23 takes 30% more than that, and so forth, where you solve X such that these all total to your desired cumulative epic XP. The increases will be noticeable but they won't be the insanity of the current curve, nor the insanity of your proposed curve.

[wlmartin]

You got this very very wrong

It,s almost like you said "How can we make Epic levels more of a grind?" And then came up with this.

The fact that you set the expectation for Epic levels on a system you hadn't forecast properly is not our fault. To change the bar each time you add new levels is hateful and now you just made it more grind worthy than before

Look at it this way...
The game is built.on gear
The game has gear unlocks through 20-28 we all work towards
You have extended these.periods through spreading the grind amongst all 10 epic levels

It's the equivocation now of having all the ML of epic gear go up.. I wouldn't accept that and I don't accept this

Perhaps you should.accept the system is broken and leave the last 2 levels as a victory lap and they flatten at the top. There is no solid reason it needs to go up and there is no reason it ever needs to go up

This is not WOW
The game is not built to handle over powered characters and since the only reward system Turbine knows how to build is MORE gear MORE power buy same content... There is never going to be a change to this and adding more levels doesn't actually fix anything it just makes the problem worse




What is the real answer?


A fundamental game change that rebalanced everything from scratch and essentially becomes a DDO 2

This bolt on mentality is wearing thin every update and this latest suggestion just reads as a change to benefit the developers rather than the players

[Qeistalan]

Currently, an Epic Otto stone is worth 2.0M Epic XP: based on old XP system, this would bring your character to just below Lvl 24; new XP system, same stone would get you less than halfway beyond Lvl 22.

When combined with all possible buffs, a current Epic Otto's stone can glean as much as 3.4M Epic XP (+5% guild ship; +10% VIP; +5% Master's Gift <or equivalent>; +50% Sovereign I xp Potion = 70%): old XP system, it gets you well into Lvl 25; new XP system, it gets you just into Lvl 24.

My Questions:

* Will Epic Otto's stones be increased to more than 2.0M XP? If so, what will be the new gained-XP amount?

* If XP is increasing for new Epic Otto's stones, will using currently-owned stones after U29 result in receiving XP based on the amount gained from new Epic Otto's stones?

* If the amount of XP is being increased for the Epic Otto's stones, will the Turbine point cost to purchase also increase? Or will the price remain static (because the amount of rewarded XP per stone is being adjusted only to accommodate the new XP system)?

* If the Epic XP system is being revamped, will Turbine/DDO program and allow "XP Bonus Weekends" to affect the increased amount of XP gained when using Otto's stones (Heroic and Epic)?

[I have used each type of stone during each type of XP Bonus weekend; no bonus XP is gained beyond the max +70% buff amounts available currently. Neither DDO Tech Support nor Customer Service has responded to my inquiries about why the bonus weekends do not boost Otto stone XP. When there are "VIP Bonus XP Weekends", these DO increase the amounts of XP gained when using Otto's stones, and they should benefit from Heroic/Epic Bonus XP Weekends as well.]

[QuantumFX]

Personally, I’m ok with the new epic XP table. There's a lot of content in the 20-25 range that many players choose to ignore. I’m sure I will find ways to take advantage of it.

[janave]

Exp. changes are too punishing for those who ignored the epic/iconic reincarnation so far, why would you ask more work from us for the same reward? (thinking only PL feats now).

Please add some compensation (if you stick with your plan):

- Remnant vendor exp pots. 25% for 3hrs.
- Epic Inspiration Augment +10% (stacking with Heroic but only past 20 (ML20))
- Adding new quest bonuses to exp, or raising existing ones, breakables, conquest etc..
- Boost Raid exp. if done perfectly! at the recommended levels eg: Tower of Despair 20-22. Dont be shy on it, thinking of x3/x4 multiply it. Seriously, it has like 10k base exp.

I am either seeing empty LFMs 80% of the time, or just players farming exp with a to-do list on EN.
This change pulls players even more down into this "daily exp farm" spiral.

Overall, I dont see how DDO benefiting from U29 unless it comes with a'm'a'z'i'n'g content that keeps capped players engaged for many months.

[elvesunited]

Personally, I’m ok with the new epic XP table. There's a lot of content in the 20-25 range that many players choose to ignore. I’m sure I will find ways to take advantage of it.

The basic reason they skip that content is because they want to get to higher level content quicker. How will increasing the xp at lower epic levels help that? Instead of trying out less run quests for less XP and less reward they'll double down on high xp quests. It will be more unbalanced than it was before.

Improvinging the outdated "epic" gear. Doing more area balance passes like they did for gianthold, 3 barrel, and orchard. Increasing the XP for some of them. That will get people playing them again. But not this.

[Aletys]

Please reconsider this severe flattening of the curve at the lower levels. It will mean we'll be stuck grinding the lower level quests to get up to level 24 or 25 (the point at which you start getting significantly better gear). Perhaps the uber triple heroic/epic triple completionists won't have a problem, but the rest of us will. I don't play this game to grind, that is no fun. If this game becomes nothing more than an endless grind thru the same quests over and over again, then this will discourage people from playing. Right now I can run what I enjoy (at least once I have the favor I need), and there's enough content that I can skip the quests I hate. This will make that impossible.

Frankly, I think that the ER/TR point should remain at level 28, once you've got your 6 million karma in a destiny sphere. Level 29 & 30 should be optional for those who want to go there for the extra rewards it brings. Forcing the rest of the player base to go to 30 after it's been at 28 for nearly 2 years is pretty sad. Please reconsider this. I'm afraid it will discourage a lot of players & cause them to leave the game. I know that most of my guildies will simply skip the ER train entirely, and that I'll be running epics mostly by myself.

[Aletys]

Personally, I’m ok with the new epic XP table. There's a lot of content in the 20-25 range that many players choose to ignore. I’m sure I will find ways to take advantage of it.

Perhaps because they absolutely hate some of that content? CitW being a prime example. Being forced to run quests you don't like is not fun. Being forced to grind the same quests over & over because you're skipping the ones you hate is also not fun. If it's not fun, players will stop playing. Perhaps that should be considered.

[Hawkwier]

As you may know, we're planning to raise the level cap to level 30 with Update 29. Here's some initial details!





Level
Old Requirement
New Requirement


20
0
0


21
300,000
825,000


22
750,000
1,650,000


23
1,350,000
2,475,000


24
2,100,000
3,300,000


25
3,000,000
4,125,000


26
4,050,000
4,950,000


27
5,250,000
5,775,000


28
6,600,000
6,600,000


29
8,100,000 (old curve if unchanged)
7,425,000


30
9,750,000 (old curve if unchanged)
8,250,000




We'll have some more details to share in the near future, including specifics on some feats, but please keep comments on those specifics to those threads.

Thanks for reading. If you have general thoughts on the structure of Feats with new levels, or Twists of Fate and Fate Points, or the XP curve/flat line, etc., let us know!

Thnks for the head's up Varg!

My question relates to the sale/use of Otto's Boxes and Stones, and the effect the change in the XP curve has on them.

An Epic stone will get you 2mil XP, which can be 3.3mil if you also use an XP elixir and ship buffs, etc.

As it stands 2mil will get you to just under L24, but under the new curve, you will still be 475k XP under L23.

And 3.3mil currently takes you to L25 with 300k toward L26, but under the new curve you will only just reach L24.

Both Otto's boxes and XP elixirs are expensive products in the store, so my question is: are there any plans to increase stones effectiveness, propotionately, to provide roughly the same relative starting benefit in terms of ETR levelling?

[dunklezhan]

Exp. changes are too punishing for those who ignored the epic/iconic reincarnation so far, why would you ask more work from us for the same reward? (thinking only PL feats now).

.

I have not bothered, I do not feel punished. There are other difficulties than elite. Flattening the curve means, on average, less need to farm daily quests and more opportunity to run other quests with a lower XP total without feeling like the end of the road is many miles away or without having to run Elite for extra XP. Only those folks trying to maximise their Xp will have to do the 'dailies' and they're choosing to do that. They don't have to now, and they won't at L30.

[dunklezhan]

Personally, I’m ok with the new epic XP table. There's a lot of content in the 20-25 range that many players choose to ignore. I’m sure I will find ways to take advantage of it.

Yes. I know this because the few occasions when I pay epic with my guildies, its always the same five or six quests unless I suggest something different. But once someone does suggest something else its not hard to get people to decide to run e3BC or 3GH, or eveningstar or even challenges - its like they just have a mental block when it comes to thinking of those quests.

[dunklezhan]

Interesting.

Thanks for taking notice. I suspect the lack of posts commenting on your post commenting on my post shows I am probably, as usual, alone in my opinion. Sad face.

[streep101]

if eGS has a ml of 30 many will just go *meh* and not worry about it since they will be reincarnating straight away. (Make it ml:26 so much like original GS - good for reincarnation).

Try making it ML:20.

ML: CAP or near it means devs have wasted their time for most players.

But I expect they'll be excited to release ML:30 gear, and 1% of the players will give loud golf claps about it.

[xaniri]

I think level 25 should stay where it is today, at 3 million xp, either by keeping the current xp needed for levels 21-25 or flattening the xp-curve a bit. Levels 26-30 can have a flat line of either 1050k/level for a total of 8250k at level 30 or anything between 900k/level and 1100k/level . Personally I would like to see levels 26-30 would need 1 million xp/level which would put lvl 30 at 8 million xp.
One reason is that I think there isn´t enough good gear for the lower epic levels to keep the xp-curve flat all the way.

As mentioned earlier in this thread I think the fatepoints given at levels 29 and 30 could be spread out a bit to prevent that those two levels giving a too big of increase in power

[Nyata]

really liking the changed XP curve. gives me a chance to actually do all the level 18 quests that I now mostly have to either skip or clean up later with XP penalties, since I am mostly still working on heroic TRs with the occasional epic TR thrown in. Though that probably means it is mostly attractive for the more casual players who prefer playing a diversity of quests instead of multiple TRs who are farming the perfect epic gear. Who knows, people might actually start running level 17 content (without bravery bonus, probably though) again instead of banking XP out of vale and going straight to character level 20 and epic questing.

[Ankiil]

Why flatten the XP curve?

It makes sense for characters to spend similar amounts of play time at each level, rather than new levels coming slower and slower over time. For comparison, consider the old Heroic 3rd life XP requirements and levels 18-20. While that's a different case overall (from 1-20), we want to get away from that feeling that the last few levels are just so much harder.





As we advance we become more powerful, can use better equipment and complete tougher quest faster and get xp faster
But the charm of D&D is also your achievements.
Building your character up to the high levels, is partly a grind to reach the power, where you can complete tough quest. I want/like to use my time in high levels to run the quests and raids where I can get nice equipment.
A progression where you use more and more effort and time to reach next level is desirable. Because you continuously use slightly more time where you are a little more powerful.

A totally flat XP curve will make us use more time on lower levels (less on higher). That brings the risk of making the grind tedious, and stopping the sense of fair progression. IE making newer and casual players switch to Fallout 4

Please reconsider the flat XP curve

[Jeromio]

I'm fine with flattening the XP cureve a bit, but why make it so extreme? Couldn't you just flat it out a bit? You don't always have to use a sledgehammer when making changes. ;)

Also, please let us ER/ITR at lvl 28.

[BigErkyKid]

I will comment in the overview, but this concerns all the feats.

My concern is the following. These feats will greatly increase power and hence further trivialize lower level epics. This means that strong capped characters can probably expect only to be challenged in very top content. How many quests do we have in that category? How many legendary quests are there?

This is a lot of power creep guys and we don't have content to support it. Unless of course you are working from the expectation that everyone is eTRing like mad and will continue to do so.

[Silverleafeon]

Interesting.

I could go with that approach.

[Hawkwier]

Thinking about the XP curve, I wonder if it wouldn't perhaps be better leaving L20-28 as is, including allowing ETR at 28.

Then have L29 cost 1Mil XP and L30 1.5Mil XP, with the additional twist slot only becoming available at 30cap.

That way players have an interesting choice at L28 to either continue to ETR, as is, or to make the jump for the new goodies L29 and L30 bring, which are not insubstantial, with the option of ETRing all the way back to L20 at L30cap too, if they so wish.

Interesting choice is good, to paraphrase the great Sid Meier.

And you don't hit any complexities associated with changing parameters around L1-28 either.

Just a thought... :)

[Arkai]

Considering I was expecting that the 9,750,000 XP requirement before ITR/ER was a done deal when level 30 would come into play, colour me quite happy with the new values. Also taking into account the pain it still is to get from 19 to 20, I always found it a bit daft that one got from 20 to 21 in the time it would take to eat dinner, so the balancing of XP between the levels is logical.

From reading the thread I do think there is a lack of 'fun factor' as well as a gear issue for some people [myself included] for the levels 20 to 22/23 now that we'll be there for longer. The Eveningstar commendation gear is fine entry-level stuff but I think there is an opportunity now to address the old L20 epic gear.

This person has the measure of it:



Yes please indeed. As we'll be in the lower end of epics for longer, much of this older gear could now be more useful again. The old epic gear represented significant power back in the day but has been practically obsolete for some time. I reckon these could be used more at 20-22 now that those levels can't be 'skipped' as much. You never know - people may even have 'fun' running those quests again while waiting to get to 23.

To facilitate this further I would also call for either:
[a] a significant increase the drop rate of these old seals, shards and scrolls components, because the current drop rates are not 'fun' IMHO,
and/or
[b] guaranteed appearences of random seals, shards, scrolls in the end rewards list for the relevant associated quests or end of chains/raids.

Just my 2c.


Totally agree with this.

1. Lvls 20-22 are going to be real boring and we do need some kind of love there. Truth be told, shard-scroll-seal system has needed a trade barter or something like that for ages.

2. Please, consider to increase epic Phiarlan and Sentinels XP (and similar range stuff): I got sick of spies-von3-wizking LFMS. And I don't want to feel like a moron running Snitch or other quests I love while everyone is just interested in xp/min. I feel very stupid after realizing I have not achieved any epic completionist yet, since the xp grinders now are not in this race anymore, and the goal was set even higher.

[Vanhooger]

I kinda like the change to early epic level, this mean that min lvl 20 item are now useful a bit longer and it make sense to run older house cannith raid to get some nice weapon. At the same time this will make the stpid daily runs everywhere with just von3-spy-wizking. You guys should raise othe lvl 20 quest xp, because as it is now it's very boring running just those quest each life.

[RD2play]

Good! Like what I am seeing here.

The first few epic levels always felt to quick for me, this will increase usefulness of ml20 gear!

[GeoffWatson]

The curve has to be redesigned to be 7.000.000, max 7.500.000

8.250.000 is too high

I agree.

[slarden]

I have not bothered, I do not feel punished. There are other difficulties than elite. Flattening the curve means, on average, less need to farm daily quests and more opportunity to run other quests with a lower XP total without feeling like the end of the road is many miles away or without having to run Elite for extra XP. Only those folks trying to maximise their Xp will have to do the 'dailies' and they're choosing to do that. They don't have to now, and they won't at L30.

I was thinking the opposite - that it would result in more easy daily quests at lower levels.

[Hoglum]

Why give a lot of power at lv 30? Why not give most of the power to lv 29 so people have time to enjoy it before TRing? People who like sitting around at max level will still have it and people who like to tr/etr get to enjoy it for a while too. Win win.

The way you have it is win/lose for your different players based on playstyle.

I hope your not making min lv 30 items either. Just make the most powerful items min lv 28 or 29 again so all players get a chance to use them.

[Vargouille]

a questino about the fate points given at 29 and 30 though, are those permenant or just for that life? if for that life, i assume they are treated like a feat of some kind?

The Fate Points and Twist Slot are granted by feats. As stated in the extra notes, those are lost if you are not level 29/30.


At one point the devs proposed moving caster levels from epic destinies to epic levels. Has that been permanently shelved? Or is that still in the works? I know a lot of cha-based arcane casters live in exalted because it's their best dc destiny, but that hurts caster levels, particularly if we can now uncap several spells.

There are currently no plans to remove caster level bonuses from any Destinies or to add them to Epic Levels.


I am not happy with the new flat XP curves. It will take more XP to get to every single level than before, except for lvl 28.

This is incorrect. Only levels 21-24 are harder than before.

Under the old requirements, starting at level 24 every level requires at least 900,000 XP. Under the newly proposed requirements, every level is lower than that.


We need info on the 3-Destiny feats, Legendary feats, and lv30 feats (if any)!

May I recommend you to the fine writings of Steelstar?

https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/467837-Update-29-Feats-Overview

[janave]

I agree.

Put another name in the hat.

I just cant see the people burnt out from exp. grind being eager to come back into an environment that add this much more exp into each cycle.

[PpalP]

Under the old requirements, starting at level 24 every level requires at least 900,000 XP. Under the newly proposed requirements, every level is lower than that.


Yes, but reaching 24 level will now require 1,200,000 xp more. Take in mind that the quest from 20-24 quest gives less xp than the 25+ quest, so the feel of eternal levels will be a lot painfull with the flat design because will be only better for the last 3 levels, so I think isn't a good idea.

I agree that extending the 21-24 xp to level up is a good idea to put some value on that quest and some 20-21s ML items, but 300k xp to 825k xp is a really BIG jump; if, on average, each quest gives you 30k xp that will be 18 more quest to do for only one level, I think is too much!

So I think the best option will be in the grey soft curve, not the black flat line or the white high curve.

Thanks!

[Mithis]

I'll read it all properly shortly but re the above: i really like this approach, please consider revisiting the 'dead' epic character levels (22, 23, 25 basically) and using this 'get slot/points' mechanic there too (but spread the 5 points you're adding at L29 and 30 across that range - put a +1 fate point at 22 23 25 29 and 30)

If the XP curve gets flattened then this is a great way to make the early epic levels feel like less of a useless grind and make levels 22, 23, 25 feel useful. Spreading some of the new power gained through the level cap increase will also avoid larger jumps in power at 29 and 30.

I would also like to second (or third or ???...) the idea of shifting more benefit into level 29. Many players do not sit at cap and getting a bunch of new abilities/feats at 30 just means they will never get used.

My suggestion that integrates some of the great ideas put forth so far:

Level 22 +1 fate point
Level 23 +1 fate point
Level 25 +1 fate point
Level 29 +1 fate point, +1 twist slot, ED feat
Level 30 +1 fate point, "Normal" feat slot, Legendary feat slot

Finally, I feel something has to be done about how existing character XP is handled. A (current) level 22 sitting at 800k XP needs 550k to get to 23. However, once update 29 is live that same character will log in to find they suddenly need 1,675,000 XP to get to 23. That is going to be an absolutely BRUTAL grind.

In my opinion, existing characters should be auto-granted the minimum required XP for their current level as determined by the new XP curve. I.E. a character with 800k XP would log on and be boosted automatically to 1.65 mil XP. Thus they go from needing 550k XP to 825k XP for their next level which is still a bit of a kick but not quite as bad. I understand that in some cases this method reduces the amount of XP needed but I feel that is a small price to pay for avoiding ticking of a portion of the player base. This is especially important given the recent balance changes caused so much bad blood...

Thanks.

[mikarddo]

This is incorrect. Only levels 21-24 are harder than before.

Under the old requirements, starting at level 24 every level requires at least 900,000 XP. Under the newly proposed requirements, every level is lower than that.

May I recommend you to the fine writings of Steelstar?

https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/467837-Update-29-Feats-Overview

Varg,

You are wrong. The cumulative xp needed for each of levels 21 through 27 will be higher than before. Example:
Now: Level 25 = 3 mill xp
After: Level 25 = 4.125 mill xp
Thus getting to level 25 will be 1.125 mill xp more than before.
Sure, once you are level 24 going from 24 to 25 might not be worse than before - but that is not really an interesting measure as you start epic levels at 20 with no way to magically start at 24.

The proposed change will most certainly make it harder leveling from 20 to 28 (not to mention 30) because we will have to earn much more xp at a lower level with worse gear, feats etc.

[Propane]

Hello-

I don't like the idea of a flat line, a shallow slope is better.

Get some of your toys earlier (Lv 23 and 25), get to use your big toys longer (lV 28-30).

Something like...

Level XP
20 -
21 400,000
22 900,000
23 1,500,000
24 2,200,000
25 3,000,000
26 3,800,000
27 4,700,000
28 5,700,000
29 6,800,000
30 8,000,000

[Cordovan]

Thnks for the head's up Varg!

My question relates to the sale/use of Otto's Boxes and Stones, and the effect the change in the XP curve has on them.

An Epic stone will get you 2mil XP, which can be 3.3mil if you also use an XP elixir and ship buffs, etc.

As it stands 2mil will get you to just under L24, but under the new curve, you will still be 475k XP under L23.

And 3.3mil currently takes you to L25 with 300k toward L26, but under the new curve you will only just reach L24.

Both Otto's boxes and XP elixirs are expensive products in the store, so my question is: are there any plans to increase stones effectiveness, propotionately, to provide roughly the same relative starting benefit in terms of ETR levelling?


Currently, an Epic Otto stone is worth 2.0M Epic XP: based on old XP system, this would bring your character to just below Lvl 24; new XP system, same stone would get you less than halfway beyond Lvl 22.

When combined with all possible buffs, a current Epic Otto's stone can glean as much as 3.4M Epic XP (+5% guild ship; +10% VIP; +5% Master's Gift <or equivalent>; +50% Sovereign I xp Potion = 70%): old XP system, it gets you well into Lvl 25; new XP system, it gets you just into Lvl 24.

My Questions:

* Will Epic Otto's stones be increased to more than 2.0M XP? If so, what will be the new gained-XP amount?

* If XP is increasing for new Epic Otto's stones, will using currently-owned stones after U29 result in receiving XP based on the amount gained from new Epic Otto's stones?

* If the amount of XP is being increased for the Epic Otto's stones, will the Turbine point cost to purchase also increase? Or will the price remain static (because the amount of rewarded XP per stone is being adjusted only to accommodate the new XP system)?

* If the Epic XP system is being revamped, will Turbine/DDO program and allow "XP Bonus Weekends" to affect the increased amount of XP gained when using Otto's stones (Heroic and Epic)?

[I have used each type of stone during each type of XP Bonus weekend; no bonus XP is gained beyond the max +70% buff amounts available currently. Neither DDO Tech Support nor Customer Service has responded to my inquiries about why the bonus weekends do not boost Otto stone XP. When there are "VIP Bonus XP Weekends", these DO increase the amounts of XP gained when using Otto's stones, and they should benefit from Heroic/Epic Bonus XP Weekends as well.]

The current plan does not include an adjustment to the Epic Stone of Experience, but that is something we can consider.

[mikarddo]

Hello-

I don't like the idea of a flat line, a shallow slope is better.

Get some of your toys earlier (Lv 23 and 25), get to use your big toys longer (lV 28-30).

Something like...

Level XP
20 -
21 400,000
22 900,000
23 1,500,000
24 2,200,000
25 3,000,000
26 3,800,000
27 4,700,000
28 5,700,000
29 6,800,000
30 8,000,000

I fully agree with both the reasoning and specifics. Much superior to the flat xp system.

[Doctorivil]

As pointed here the flat curve may a bit too much.
I totally agreed that there's a need to extend the progression from level 20 to 25, but flat isn't the solution.

With this new curve you will need the same exp to get from level 20 to 25 as to get from 25 to 30.
But, when you're leveling 25 to 30 you'll be able to do harder quests that give more exp, and you'll also be able to run lower level quests faster (aka dailie quests).
So, the progression from 25 to 30 will actually be faster than the progression from 20 to 25, and this feels kinda wrong.
I know that leveling 20 to 25 will benefit from most of the bravery bonus that you wont get later, but even then i don't think it's enough to balance it.
Plus on a 2nd ETR you'll no longer have the 1st time bonus anymore making the levels 20-25 a huge pain.

So please try and find a softer curve, we want to enjoy the progression from level 20 to 25 a little more than we do now, but don't make it so long as to make it painfull.

[Hawkwier]

The current plan does not include an adjustment to the Epic Stone of Experience, but that is something we can consider.

Thanks for the response & consideration Cordovan.

It strikes me that spending a ton of TP (i.e $,£, etc.) on stones and elixirs only to then not get the same starting benefit because of the XP curve changes would hurt, particualry when we will also have an increased XP requirement before ETRing at 30 then, too. (BTW, other than that concern, I'm pretty much in favour of all these changes).

Anything that can be done to alleviate matters, even approximately, by propotionately adjusting the stones contribution when the XP curve takes effect would be gratefullly received! :)

So, guess I'll watch this space then, and hope for some welcome news...

[Hipparan]

A few things I would recommend:


Put Otto's boxes on sale before Update 29.
Keep Characters at their current levels after U29 despite the EXP they currently hold, so we don't see our characters dropping in level and losing the ability to use the items they are wearing.
Keep the ETR level at 28. This way people won't complain so much, and in addition you can make money faster on epic hearts of wood from the DDO store.
Edit: Also please adjust the experience received from Epic Stones of Experience. I don't use them, but it isn't fair for people that do to have them nerfed when they are spending a lot of TP on them.


Also, a question: Will heart seeds drop in end rewards only at level 30 after update 29? Currently they drop at level 28.

[ed_slaying]

First of all I want to make it clear that I have three main characters and between them I have two that are heroic completionist and two epic completionist, so I can easily understand most of the concern some people are expressing here about these changes in the XP. Despite having grind that much in the past that doesn't mean I feel confortable to see new players who recentely started playing as well as older players who are in middle of this process need to grind all the epic past lives for a new ammount of XP which seems too disencouring to me and for the majority of the players judging by the feedback left in this thread so far.

So I would like to present a suggestion that might be help to solve some problems that have been point earlier.



Level
Old Requirement
New Requirement


20
0
0


21
300,000
500,000


22
750,000
1,000,000


23
1,350,000
1,500,000


24
2,100,000
2,275,000


25
3,000,000
3,050,000


26
4,050,000
3,825,000


27
5,250,000
4,600,000


28
6,600,000
5,600,000


29
8,100,000 (old curve if unchanged)
6,600,000


30
9,750,000 (old curve if unchanged)
7,600,000




First things first. Whitout any reasonable explanation is kind hard for most players understand why new curve has to be set at 8,250,00. We all probably accept that with 2 levels increase XP has to be higher to reach cap. That being said I started to consider the ammount of XP required to reach lvl20 on a 3rd life character which is 3,800,000. In my opinion (and I belive most players would agree with this value) this should be twice as much needed to reached lvl30 right now for a total 7,600,000 and represent that way some kind of logic and consistency between heroic/epic XP system.

With this XP curve I belive players would not feel a huge difference in early lower epic levels even if it would require more XP than before. Difference between lvl23 would represent only 150k.
Sagas rewards with all bonus would keep representing the same value of restarting at lvl23 again.
At same time, for higher epic levels like lvl27 or lvl28 that would represent less XP than before which could lead to a vision that those levels were easier/faster to achieve than what it is right now, because that seems to be also an objective from devs to change the perspective it takes too long to get lvl28 or it is so grindy.
On the other hand, lvl29 and lvl30 should represent more XP in my opinion because with the introduction of new feats and more power from end game gear this is not too boring or so hard to make it happen afterall, leaving it to 1mil for each level.
This also could avoid some issues with epic otto's box and stones of experience because things would stay pretty much the same way they are right now.

Another thing I'd like to add.. this could be probably the right time to allow iconic characters to start at lvl20 (instead lvl15) and completely separate the two TR systems. I belive most people would embrace this idea and it would be more fun for those players who really enjoy epics without hurt players who enjoy heroics.

[Loromir]

...This is a real detriment to those of us who have more ETR's to do.

I could buy this argument if we hadn't been notified way back when ETR and ITR were first released that we would eventually see lvl 30 and would have to go all the way to 30 in order to ETR/ITR. Granted it has taken longer to get lvl 30 rolled out than we in initially anticipated.

Never the less we knew from the start that leveling to 28 before ETR/ITR would be temporary. The proper response here should be: "thank you Turbine for the gift of delaying implementation of lvl 30, which has allowed me to attain more ETR past lives than I should have expected".

[Tom.JonesJr]

With the flat line curve we will be able to use the Bravery bonus longer on the lower level quest. This info is from DDO Wiki but currently here is the brake down for quest lvl 20 - 30 for xp doing a quest on normal the sum is for the base xp no bonus, but you can see we have a large concentration of quests for lvl 18,19, 21, 22 and 24. The higher lvls we have had to rerun quest that we have done before just to get the xp we need. With the flat curve it appears that more quests would be able to be run at lvl or in the bonus area.



LevelCountXP (N)
181678893
1921108922
2010118879
2118327473
2216346611
237100820
2416281918
256127601
269169129
27591927
28245701
294107705
3014312895

[xberto]

I'm excited because Level Cap to 30 is quite a milestone for this game. Personally I don't like the linearization of the XP in epic levels. In my situation I find the gear kind of lacking in that level 20-24 Range. In addition, with no feats at level 22 and 23 that range of advancement is just boring. It's just more fun to play your character after level 26 I think there should be some XP curve maybe not as steep as it is now

[Systern]

Why flatten the XP curve?

It makes sense for characters to spend similar amounts of play time at each level, rather than new levels coming slower and slower over time. For comparison, consider the old Heroic 3rd life XP requirements and levels 18-20. While that's a different case overall (from 1-20), we want to get away from that feeling that the last few levels are just so much harder.
XP per epic quest doesn't increase much with increased level, which takes away from one reason to increase XP requirements over time.
Unlike the normal "start" of an XP curve, there's no great reason for designers to rush characters through the early Epic levels. That's not where most of your abilities come from, either from a power perspective or "cool new things to use" perspective. By the time a character is epic they've got lots to do, and Epic Destinies are on a separate track. Given that, it's largely nicer to space the "dings" of gaining a level out more - yes, they come slower early on, but you never reach that large gap at high levels where it seems to take forever to get those final levels. (Players may remember the old Heroic 3rd life XP curve being somethign like that at level 18/19.)
Based on quest and XP distribution, it makes sense for the lower levels to require as much XP as higher levels. Though we've relaxed a lot of "restrictions" on epic questing, many players do still play quests around their character level, and/or in increasing order.




I would beg to differ here.

If Quest XP was equal at each level, which it's not, then this reasoning would be sound. However, since Sentinels of Storm Reach, Red Fens, Von1, etc are all fairly low XP, what this amounts to is that we end up spending more time at level 20, waiting for level 21 and our first epic feat, then at level 27 using that feat. (I think all melee builds take Overwhelming Critical first for a reason.) Tacking on half-a-million XP at the start is a much higher cost than shaving half-a-mill towards the end. You're delaying the point where Epic Characters start to actually use decent epic gear (level 24), and accelerating the time they use it until the next step (eNecro + ml28 Thunderforged).

For me, personally, I don't much enjoy epics as it is. It gets more enjoyable around level 24 when I can start using the CitW gear, Cove gear, 3BC gear. More time at level 20 means padding out the TR cache for ERs for the extended stay. Which means more Shard/Seal/Scrolls... and I have most of the ones my main wants, and have been able to downplay the desire::reward of actually getting the (hugely-PITA) epic Sands gear.

The Level 30 Legendary feats are nice... but I'm still on the TR/ER treadmill, so I'll use them for 10 minutes before clearing out my TR cache. What you're doing is not providing me an end-game, you're incentivizing me to play content that y'all deemed poorly structured, unrewarding, and frustrating! (the shard/seal/scroll system) :'(

I'd much rather see the existing curve to 25 (3 million XP), and then a capped increment of 1 million for levels 26-30 (4mil, 5mil, 6mil, 7mil, 8mil)

[geoffhanna]

Why flatten the XP curve?

It makes sense for characters to spend similar amounts of play time at each level, rather than new levels coming slower and slower over time. For comparison, consider the old Heroic 3rd life XP requirements and levels 18-20. While that's a different case overall (from 1-20), we want to get away from that feeling that the last few levels are just so much harder.



I've been thinking about this for awhile. I hope I haven't missed my chance to have my opinion heard.

I think there may be some unintended consequences.


I don't want to be level 21 so long that I need to have appropriate gear. Or level 22. Or any of the lower levels.
I don't want to have to repeat content that currently I do not need to repeat.


Right now I can power through the low levels in a (in a few weeks, depending on how much I am playing that particular character) using whatever gear she already has, plus that she discovers as she goes. I have some stuff banked, but not enough for weeks at every level.

And oh gods please do not make me run Druids Curse more than I already must. Once heroic, once epic, per life, per character is enough. More than enough. Way more than enough.

Two suggestions:

1. Start the level flattening at level 25 or level 26

and/or

2. Revamp XP awards for lower level quests with an eye towards avoiding the necessity of repeat runs

[Toxxyk]

Since I didn't see a Dev comment yesterday regarding what is happening to people that are not a cap, I will post again that your proposal of keeping them at their current XP and then having an "unexpected" amount to get to the next level is wrong.

Consider your average, non forum reading player who logs out "1 pip" from level 26 the night before the next expansion hits. Maybe they have a piece of equipment they are going to use, maybe its a new quest they will do at the next level. The point is, they log out expecting that the next day they will run a couple quests and get their level.

Instead, the update hits. They log in. They are now SOOOO much xp to the next level. In fact, they do a couple quests and notice their XP bar doesn't even move. This is going to result in support tickets. And frustrated casual players. These are significant downsides than incur real costs to Turbine (support isn't cheap).

Instead, you should recalculate the xp, so that if I'm 90% done level 25, when I log in after the expansion, I'm 90% done level 25. There are no downsides to this over what you've proposed.

[CThruTheEgo]

Flattened xp curve is a good thing for epics imo. Will hopefully mean lower level epics get run more often.

[Loromir]

And oh gods please do not make me run Druids Curse more than I already must. Once heroic, once epic, per life, per character is enough. More than enough. Way more than enough.



Off topic...but I'm curious why people don't like Druid's Curse. I know the loot is nothing special, but I actually like the quests.

[JOTMON]

The TR cutoff should be level 28. I've mentioned this in the council with pretty good support and apparently you guys think differently.

Lets explore the reasoning then.

Adding grind for no good reason isn't my idea of a good time...

I agree, there is little value in increasing the XP required to ER when Spheres already maintain their own XP cap of 6.6mm XP.

should be simple enough to Allow ER upon reaching the 6.6mm/sphere requirement and remove the level cap requirement.

Dev's have already unhinged Epic fate points/slot earned from level 29/30 as being inaccessible until reaching level 29/30 during reincarnations.


Number of Twist Slots: This is +1 compared to whatever you currently have. You might or might not have gotten an Epic Completionist slot yet. The 4th slot you have costs 4 Fate Points to unlock tier 1, the 5th slot costs 5 points to unlock, regardless of what order you gain your extra slots. If you drop below level 29/30 (Reincarnation), then you lose those Fate Points and slot until you level up again.

[Propane]

Unless you intend to doom players to even more rounds of EN Wizking/Spies, I don't feel flattening the XP is a good idea. Specifically, adding over 1000k to the required XP for lvl23.


tl;dr I'm not in favor of flat XP curve cause XP is not distributed evenly enough. There's simply not enough XP available when you're level 20 or 21, compared to when you're near the cap.

Agreed - Another reason to allow a reset Slayer / Rares for the explorer areas for each ETR.
(NPC to talk to, clicky item, heck a DDO store item if need be)

Am I the only one that sees this as a current gap for people on the ETR train?

[EllisDee37]

I don't want to be level 21 so long that I need to have appropriate gear. Or level 22. Or any of the lower levels. I get the feeling this is one of the design goals.

If so, I can't really argue with the logic. It always seemed a little cheesy to me to ETR, collect saga rewards and immediately start using ML23-24 gear.

[Iriale]

I am not happy with the new flat XP curves. It will take more XP to get to every single level than before. meh. Glad that my main is epic completionist. I'm sorry for my alts; this is too much for me, thanks. ER is enough boring now.

[Whippy]

Seems mostly like good ideas here, however I think that the curve being totally flat from 20-30 is a mistake. Sure, flatten it a bit, but it means far too long spent in the lower epic levels with not as good gear on, levels that we've all already played over and over and over and over again. And let's be honest, people are a bit bored at the moment. Perhaps a slight increase in required xp as the levels go up would make it more appealing.

Also we've all got a bunch of gear we've been working hard to get from DoJ etc that is lvl 28, we've hardly had it on yet as at the moment we get to 28 and ER or TR pretty much straight away, it'd be nice to actually have a bit of time to wear it, use it, get the benefit of our hard work and making the XP curve totally flat reduces the time we can wear that gear.

Then there is the question of Sagas. Currently a popular way to do your ER's is to bank your sagas, then turn them in when you are level 20, instantly taking you to level 21 or 22 etc depending on pots/amount to turn in. The ER process is already somewhat boring and the level cap increase will make it even more laborious, so taking the ability to get to at least level 21 with saga turn in away I think is a mistake.

In conclusion, flattening the curve is fine, making totally flat is a mistake.


Hello-

I don't like the idea of a flat line, a shallow slope is better.

Get some of your toys earlier (Lv 23 and 25), get to use your big toys longer (lV 28-30).

Something like...

Level XP
20 -
21 400,000
22 900,000
23 1,500,000
24 2,200,000
25 3,000,000
26 3,800,000
27 4,700,000
28 5,700,000
29 6,800,000
30 8,000,000


This I like... much better than totally flat

[Whippy]

If we are going to be level 20, 21, 22 etc for ages we'll need better gear for those levels probably rather than just something you had on you... so we'll need more bank space. Urgently need more bank space please for bound gear alone!

[Fluffib]

I agree with many of the other posters, I don't think the flattened xp curve is a good idea. While there are some arguments seemingly based on logic (why should 20-21 take much less time than 19-20), the game design is that people at all epic levels can enter any epic quest, and in practice you need to get to level 23-25 to be able to use the gear to contribute to the fun, popular, rewarding quests. That's why you see so many people run the same few quests over and over - because they are quick xp, so we can fly through levels 20-24 as fast as possible to get on with the fun stuff.

A potential idea is to flatten out the xp curve after level 25, requiring 1 million xp for levels 26-30, as thus:

Level 21: 300,000 xp
22: 300k + 450k = 750k xp
23: 750k + 600k = 1350k xp
24: 1350k + 750k = 2100k xp
25: 2100k + 900k = 3000k xp
26: 3000k + 1000k = 4000k xp
..
30: 7000k + 1000k = 8000k xp

Which doesn't change things in the early epic levels but flattens things out in the later epic levels.

[Qhualor]

If we are going to be level 20, 21, 22 etc for ages we'll need better gear for those levels probably rather than just something you had on you... so we'll need more bank space. Urgently need more bank space please for bound gear alone!

I still have my eChrono set, Claw set and TOD set that my characters would always where as part of their end game build when cap was 20. I stopped wearing them months and months ago instead using a couple pieces of Commendation gear, something from Wheloon and Stormhorns chain and ML11 gear. That's what I use until level 23 when I upgrade to mostly random loot gear with +8 stats.

I do think we could use some fresh ML20 epic gear, but not for the reason you are saying. When/if Turbine decides to create new epic level 20-23 content, it would be a good opportunity for some new gear choices and an added reason to run that content.

[Maudib_360]

Why flatten the XP curve?

It makes sense for characters to spend similar amounts of play time at each level, rather than new levels coming slower and slower over time. For comparison, consider the old Heroic 3rd life XP requirements and levels 18-20. While that's a different case overall (from 1-20), we want to get away from that feeling that the last few levels are just so much harder.
XP per epic quest doesn't increase much with increased level, which takes away from one reason to increase XP requirements over time.
Unlike the normal "start" of an XP curve, there's no great reason for designers to rush characters through the early Epic levels. That's not where most of your abilities come from, either from a power perspective or "cool new things to use" perspective. By the time a character is epic they've got lots to do, and Epic Destinies are on a separate track. Given that, it's largely nicer to space the "dings" of gaining a level out more - yes, they come slower early on, but you never reach that large gap at high levels where it seems to take forever to get those final levels. (Players may remember the old Heroic 3rd life XP curve being somethign like that at level 18/19.)
Based on quest and XP distribution, it makes sense for the lower levels to require as much XP as higher levels. Though we've relaxed a lot of "restrictions" on epic questing, many players do still play quests around their character level, and/or in increasing order.



I really don't like this idea for a flat XP curve as proposed. As other posters have mentioned, this is the equivalent of just raising the ML on level 23 and 24 items (CitW, 3BC, etc.). As current epic levels just serve as gates to what gear you can use, there is a reason to rush through these first few levels. I don't want to wait longer to use some of the cool items I've accumulated over the years.

This proposal will not reach your goal of "characters spending similar amounts of play time at each level". The first few levels are going to be painfully slow compared to the upper levels due to what gear we will be allowed to use. This is the exact opposite of what we have currently in epic and heroic.

I also disagree with all the posters that say this is somehow a good thing so that old ML 20 epic items will become more relevant or that now they will have time to run some of the lower level epic quests. There is nothing preventing anyone from running all those low level quests now. There are no over level penalties in epics, and bravery bonus is possible two levels over the elite quest level if I remember correctly. If those low level epics are so great, they should stand on their own, and we should not feel "forced" to run them because of the shape of the XP curve. I still run LoD at level 27 for XP. The same goes for the items. If you like your ML 20 epics, use them at higher levels if you'd like. Just don't force the rest of us to stay at these lower levels longer because it fits in with your personal play style.

There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread for shallower XP curves by other posters. I hope the Devs reconsider and use one of those instead of this flat curve that is currently on the horizon, because this current plan doesn't "make sense" as is.

[Assassination]

Just like epic greensteel. if eGS has a ml of 30 many will just go *meh* and not worry about it since they will be reincarnating straight away. (Make it ml:26 so much like original GS - good for reincarnation).

I second this! Will make epic Green much more useable.

[EllisDee37]

Actually, make epic greensteel ML20. That would largely solve the gearing issues raised by the flattened xp progression.

[Hafeal]

Actually, make epic greensteel ML20. That would largely solve the gearing issues raised by the flattened xp progression.

I like where you are going.

If it's tiered, perhaps make it:

ML 20 for base,
ML 24 for tier 1,
ML 28 for Tier 2,
ML 30 for Bonus Tier

BUT make it so that weapons equip and can be used at 20 only you do not get the benefit of each additional tier effects until you reach the minimum level. This is probably a lot to ask of programmers, but, if we can do it with Tomes, why not craftable gear?

[elvesunited]

Please no, If it can be avoided I'd like to have only one epic greensteel item that is of use during most of the epic levels. The great thing about heroic greensteel is that it's min level of 12 and has unique enchantments that can be useful even into high epics. It's a lot of effort to make one, but it's useful for the majority of the character life. That's why shroud raids are constantly going.

For epic greensteel to be popular it needs to also cover a significant portion of the character levels. Say starting at 22? If its 30, few will bother. If it's multiple tiers with different min levels.... that will require characters to have multiple versions of the same greensteel item which is also disheartening.

[FranOhmsford]

Thoughts:
My first thought on the flat XP curve was that I didn't like it. After letting it sink in, I realized the majority of lv17-21 content never really gets touched, and this may help some of those levels. As mentioned above, this will have a side-effect on ETR speed. Another way to get content in those levels visited would be to add sagas to the rareliest-played quests, or just to tweak XP rates up. I'm assuming you have metrics on which quests are hardly ever visited since you mention players sticking to level-appropriate quests. Who knows, 2.75x XP for 21, and 1.83x XP for 22 might just give us enough time to hit all the original epics plus Amrath again, so the flat curve might "fix" this on its own.

On the other hand the xp needed is now so high that I can't see ANYONE choosing to run Elite No BB Reaver's Refuge or even E-BB Amrath over VoN 3/4, Spies, Wiz King and OoB Multiple times on EN!

The XP differential between those High Level Heroics on Elite for the Lvl 17s or E-BB for the 18s and 19s and the likes of VoN 3 and Wiz King on EN is so high that this is going to kill those quests stone dead!

[IronClan]

I am cool with flat, it might drag lower epics out, but we'll see, I wouldn't be opposed to slightly less flat take 250,000 of the total so you have a nice round 8mil

Overall I like that the last couple levels will have those slots and twist of fate and points... something missing from epic levels is just how who cares they are if you don't get a feat choice.

[Vargouille]

Thanks for the feedback. We're likely going to reconsider just how flat the curve will be, though we do want more than ~24 hours for players to give feedback before we make any firm decisions. (If you have been quietly preferring the proposed flat "curve", speak up now and be heard.)


Instead, you should recalculate the xp, so that if I'm 90% done level 25, when I log in after the expansion, I'm 90% done level 25. There are no downsides to this over what you've proposed.

Since a couple of people have brought this up:

There is a major downside to this proposal: Players are strongly incentivized to stop playing DDO right now, this instant, because this unfairly rewards XP to those who happen to have stopped getting XP at a particular time/level.

Under this proposal, anyone who has exactly enough XP to gain level 22 should probably stop playing, especially if they think they won't hit level 23 before Update 29 comes out (maybe stop playing today, maybe in a week, etc.), or maybe get some alts up to exactly level 22 (or 21 or 23 or whatever breakpoint you think makes sense). Otherwise they are "wasting their time" because instead of playing they could just wait and get "free XP" for choosing to not play DDO.

While we will probably consider a more gently sloped curve, the same issue is likely to be there in some form. There's really no world in which we want to explicitly reward not playing the game. (Considering it's entirely fair to ask each character to earn the same amount of XP to earn the same levels, ultimately, we're willing to deal with the downsides, which we do recognize as being real downsides.)

[FranOhmsford]

Off topic...but I'm curious why people don't like Druid's Curse. I know the loot is nothing special, but I actually like the quests.

Wisps and Trees!

More Wisps and Trees!

Even more Wisps and Trees!

Yet more Wisps and Trees!

Who enjoys playing through quests where absolutely everything has 100% Fort, DR through the roof, Immunity to a tonne of different prefixes/suffixes, appears in huge mobs of enemies AND deals out insane damage!

Those quests are some of the worst made in the game {Along with Wheloon and most of the Madness Quests!}!

[Silverleafeon]

(If you have been quietly preferring the proposed flat "curve", speak up now and be heard.)

I like the Flat curve because its First Edition lore.
Having played thru a lot of old school heroics, I dislike the old death valley of level 18.

However, I consider the compromise made by you folks to approach our suggested 8 million to get level cap much, much, more important.
Thank you for the 8.25, and if you do adjust the curve, please keep within the 8 to 8.25 million range.

Should a great amount of players feel a flat curve is undesirable, I will shrug my shoulders and say, "whatever, no big deal..."

[mikarddo]

I agree with many of the other posters, I don't think the flattened xp curve is a good idea. While there are some arguments seemingly based on logic (why should 20-21 take much less time than 19-20), the game design is that people at all epic levels can enter any epic quest, and in practice you need to get to level 23-25 to be able to use the gear to contribute to the fun, popular, rewarding quests. That's why you see so many people run the same few quests over and over - because they are quick xp, so we can fly through levels 20-24 as fast as possible to get on with the fun stuff.

A potential idea is to flatten out the xp curve after level 25, requiring 1 million xp for levels 26-30, as thus:

Level 21: 300,000 xp
22: 300k + 450k = 750k xp
23: 750k + 600k = 1350k xp
24: 1350k + 750k = 2100k xp
25: 2100k + 900k = 3000k xp
26: 3000k + 1000k = 4000k xp
..
30: 7000k + 1000k = 8000k xp

Which doesn't change things in the early epic levels but flattens things out in the later epic levels.

Thats a very good scheme. No change to the lowest levels and a flat curve at the top end. That very much works.

[Devlinus]

The TR cutoff should be level 28. I've mentioned this in the council with pretty good support and apparently you guys think differently.

Lets explore the reasoning then.

Adding grind for no good reason isn't my idea of a good time...

I would like to add my agreement to this statement. TR cutoff for both Epic Destiny and Iconic should remain at Level 28.

As a player with many varied play styles, I have a lot of characters... one that I am actively working on as my main TR, and several that I always plan to keep single life with a very specific build/theme.

So, when I play the game, I have to choose how I want to spend my time... do I work on my main TR project? or do I work on a themed character concept.

Therefore, I don't have all of the EDs and/or Iconic lives farmed out on my main TR toon.

To now see that each life in the future is going to require somewhere between 1.5 million and 2 million extra xp is just not very encouraging. So 'not encouraging' that I just had a heated debate in game with other players while questing when they told me your plans, and then after we finished the quest chain, I came here to the forums to read it for myself, and now offering my opinion and input (which as you can see from my forum post count, I rarely do). But it is just that 'negatively' emotional for me right now.

I hope the developers will re-consider this point before it is implemented.

Thanks for your time,
Devlinus

[FranOhmsford]

Since a couple of people have brought this up:

There is a major downside to this proposal: Players are strongly incentivized to stop playing DDO right now, this instant, because this unfairly rewards XP to those who happen to have stopped getting XP at a particular time/level.

Under this proposal, anyone who has exactly enough XP to gain level 22 should probably stop playing, especially if they think they won't hit level 23 before Update 29 comes out (maybe stop playing today, maybe in a week, etc.), or maybe get some alts up to exactly level 22 (or 21 or 23 or whatever breakpoint you think makes sense). Otherwise they are "wasting their time" because instead of playing they could just wait and get "free XP" for choosing to not play DDO.

While we will probably consider a more gently sloped curve, the same issue is likely to be there in some form. There's really no world in which we want to explicitly reward not playing the game. (Considering it's entirely fair to ask each character to earn the same amount of XP to earn the same levels, ultimately, we're willing to deal with the downsides, which we do recognize as being real downsides.)

1) I think you're exaggerating the effect you're worried about a bit - Lvl 21 and 22 don't take that much time that many people who play more than once a week anyway will simply stop playing that character till the update.
Maybe a few people might leave a character at Lvl 26 knowing that they'll get a big chunk of free xp when the update hits but not at 21 or 22.

2) And exactly what have you got against alts?
I have 28 characters on Cannith, 14 on Sarlona, 7 on Khyber and at least one on every other Server {OK so on some servers that 1 is basically just a placeholder and gold-roller but I have spent significant amounts of time, money and effort on over 75% of my Alts...Many are now 2nd, 3rd and even 4th/5th Lifers! And not just on Cannith either - I have 2 3rd Lifers on Sarlona and 2 2nd Lifers on Khyber!}
If I want to play an alt who's currently at Lvl 10 on her 3rd Life rather than another who's parked at 27 on her 2nd Life with one E-TR already done for a couple weeks why is this a problem?


Thinking about it - The possibility you're worried about COULD be a huge incentive for people to dust off a few alts and play the game MORE!

[firstprotector]

why change the xp curve at all, just add the extra levels to the existing setup. no loss or gain to people playing. as for the TR level i will no longer play a iconic, since it is not worth the time for a reincarnation. i have spoken to my guildies and none are happy with the new planned changes.

[SableShadow]

We're likely going to reconsider just how flat the curve will be

My issue with the flat curve is "shiny time"; I like my shinies, and it doesn't delight me to have to wait longer for my cooler shinies.

I get what you're going for here, less time between 'ding!'s (heck, the entire enhancement system arose out of concern that the time between levels - between dings - was too long).

Just 2cp.

[dunklezhan]

Thanks for the feedback. We're likely going to reconsider just how flat the curve will be, though we do want more than ~24 hours for players to give feedback before we make any firm decisions. (If you have been quietly preferring the proposed flat "curve", speak up now and be heard.)


I am fine with flat curve. Good, even.

DnD 2nd ed went to a flat curve once you got past about L12 as I recall (though of course it was different XP depending on what class you were, because of how XP was awarded for certain class-based activities), and it worked just fine. It also presumably makes it way easier for devs to balance XP rewards throughout the entire curve. I didn't encounter the idea of an ever increasing curve till I played WoW, and even then you actually levelled just as fast because the XP went up entirely in line with the level of the content, being based on individual kills as it was. Here in DDO that's not how we do XP, and a flat curve seems entirely reasonable, especially if it helps the devs even out the rate of levelling a bit.

So I think its a good idea. Stick with it. If I lose out a bit on my several stalled L21-23 characters, so be it. After three or four months no-one will know the difference. Just yank the plaster off and move on with the rebalancing and content production.

[dunklezhan]

I like the Flat curve because its First Edition lore.
Having played thru a lot of old school heroics, I dislike the old death valley of level 18.

However, I consider the compromise made by you folks to approach our suggested 8 million to get level cap much, much, more important.
Thank you for the 8.25, and if you do adjust the curve, please keep within the 8 to 8.25 million range.

Should a great amount of players feel a flat curve is undesirable, I will shrug my shoulders and say, "whatever, no big deal..."

Yeah this, especially the last line. This just isn't something to get upset about. Nobody is really losing anything as far as I can tell, and if you do consider L21 or 22 suddenly being a little bit further away I'm sure it won't take you long to earn it back - any L20 or 21 can run VoN3 quite happily, y'know? If you are really that desperate for the XP. If people are really looking for something to get their knickers in a twist about, I recommend waiting until we've seen some Legendary (or Reaper, if it happens) content.

[FranOhmsford]

I am fine with flat curve. Good, even.

DnD 2nd ed went to a flat curve once you got past about L12 as I recall (though of course it was different XP depending on what class you were, because of how XP was awarded for certain class-based activities), and it worked just fine. It also presumably makes it way easier for devs to balance XP rewards throughout the entire curve. I didn't encounter the idea of an ever increasing curve till I played WoW, and even then you actually levelled just as fast because the XP went up entirely in line with the level of the content, being based on individual kills as it was. Here in DDO that's not how we do XP, and a flat curve seems entirely reasonable, especially if it helps the devs even out the rate of levelling a bit.

So I think its a good idea. Stick with it. If I lose out a bit on my several stalled L21-23 characters, so be it. After three or four months no-one will know the difference. Just yank the plaster off and move on with the rebalancing and content production.

You can't compare DDO with PnP when it comes to XP!

In PnP hardly any player would expect to take a Lvl 1 character to Lvl 30 {and if they did manage it it would be at the expense of YEARS of game play or a really monty haul DM!}.

In DDO the opposite is in effect where only a tiny minority of players expect to spend all their time at Lvls 1-10 {Mainly Permadeathers} and the object of the game is to level up and play the higher level content!

[Toxxyk]

Thanks for the feedback. We're likely going to reconsider just how flat the curve will be, though we do want more than ~24 hours for players to give feedback before we make any firm decisions. (If you have been quietly preferring the proposed flat "curve", speak up now and be heard.)



Since a couple of people have brought this up:

There is a major downside to this proposal: Players are strongly incentivized to stop playing DDO right now, this instant, because this unfairly rewards XP to those who happen to have stopped getting XP at a particular time/level.

Under this proposal, anyone who has exactly enough XP to gain level 22 should probably stop playing, especially if they think they won't hit level 23 before Update 29 comes out (maybe stop playing today, maybe in a week, etc.), or maybe get some alts up to exactly level 22 (or 21 or 23 or whatever breakpoint you think makes sense). Otherwise they are "wasting their time" because instead of playing they could just wait and get "free XP" for choosing to not play DDO.

While we will probably consider a more gently sloped curve, the same issue is likely to be there in some form. There's really no world in which we want to explicitly reward not playing the game. (Considering it's entirely fair to ask each character to earn the same amount of XP to earn the same levels, ultimately, we're willing to deal with the downsides, which we do recognize as being real downsides.)

First, thank you for acknowledging that you have considered this issue.

You are in a better position than I am to determine how many people have only one character that they actively play. Because those are the only people that I see that would act as you've described. Those people might stop playing DDO entirely until the patch hits.

However, I suspect for the vast majority of people, they would simply switch to another character -- perhaps rolling a new iconic in hopes of getting it to 22 before the patch.

Also, I don't really consider this "free XP" -- since you would not be applying the XP to the current epic destiny (at least, in my proposal, you wouldn't).

Personally, I am absolutely dreading the patch if you go forward as you proposed. I have a mid-epic level toon that will, frankly, gather dust for a long time if I have to grind out a massive amount of xp to get it to the next level after the patch. Now for me, that just means a toon I don't play, since I have many.

Consider the effect on a person that has only that character. They may stop playing DDO permanently.

EDIT: To be clear, I am most concerned about people that don't read the forums and/or even patch notes. People that do read the forums will game the system no matter what you do.

[Violentbeginning]

I would be OK with either the flat slope, or a curve, but if the XP per level is to be static, it feels too much. 750k per level would be more reasonable I think.

As far as implementing it such that folks would gain xp (to retain their level on the new curve/slope), why do that? XP per character should be what it is. If someone ends up gaining a level sooner, or having to work a little more to gain the next level (due to where they might fit on the curve) so be it. XP is XP, and nomatter where you end up on the curve or slope, you will still need exactly the same amount of XP as everyone else in the long run.

[Ewynn]

I respectfully disagree with Developer Vargouille's reasoning about the flattening of the epic XP curve. He provides three points to support his argument and a fourth point as a conclusion, summarized basically as:

1) There are two parts here, the first is that the same amount of time should be spend in each level, the second (related) is that that leveling should not become harder as you progress.
2) The amount of XP given is basically irrespective of level.
3) There is no reason to rush through the early levels
4) He concludes that XP should be the same for each level

The problem with point one is that a completely linear XP approach is that it is regressive. It forces the lower level epics to "pay the same price" as the higher level epics, but they do not have the same capabilities or equipment as higher level epic characters so it takes them longer to gain a similar amount of experience than it does for higher level epic characters. For example, it is much easier to run a 28th level character through EE Spies in the House than to run a 21st level character even though they get about the same XP. So the 21st level toon is having to work much hard to get the same amount of XP.

While I agree with point two that XP does not see a large increase in quests as you go up in level, your capability to complete higher level quests keeps pace with the quests' increasing difficulty. Nobody runs a 21st level toon in EE Mark of Death and expects to be a significant contributor, of course there are always the 1%'ers who will disagree. It does make sense that a consistent amount of experience is given because the challenge for higher level quests is matched with a characters increasing capability. If there capability stayed the same one would expect that the reward would go up, as it does not it reflects that the challenge of the quest for play reasons stays consistent from quest to quest.

Point 3 says there is no reason to rush through the early levels and I some what agree; however, the stark change from a soft progressive curve to a strictly regressive linear approach will frustrate new players with the difficulty of early epic play. A more reasoned approach might be to group the early levels into tiers where there are similar capabilities (possibly, 21-23, 24-26, 27-30) so approximately tier 1 600K, tier 2 800K, tier 3 1M each. This would allow a relatively consistent pace of leveling and prolong the time that characters get to use most of the highest level gear and capabilities. It makes the earlier levels less onerous and the higher levels last a bit longer to use your best gear and capabilities. Note also that each of the tiers offers only slightly increasing capabilities: Tier 1: One normal feat, Tier 2: One normal, one ED feat, Tier 3: Two normal, two ED and one Legendary feat. This also blends nicely with the primary gear sets:

Tier 1: Evening Star Commendation gear, Base TF, and CitW gear;
Tier 2: TBC, FoT, TF+,
Tier 3: TF Max, Orchard, MoD, DoJ, Epic Shroud

I am not sure why the strictly linear approach is being put forward, perhaps there is less development time involved, which would provide a change to the game at a reduced cost. Or, perhaps it is merely being put forward to solicit conversation/ideas from the player community. Either way I am glad to have the opportunity to play the game and will continue to play regardless of what is adopted. I like a lot of the other things mentioned as they increase the variety of builds, and once implemented will allow the developers to work on more new content.

Please do keep up the good work and I'll see you in Khyber --- uh, the server not the location. :-)

[Bobby88888]

Flat xp curve = bad. Please do change this. Higher level epic quests tend to give more xp and I don't want to be stuck at low levels for ages and then fly through the high levels. Do however keep the total xp for lvl 30 down as low as possible, getting an ER is already mind numbing and off putting as is and need another 2 mil xp isn't going to help it at all. How about making ER based off your kama in that sphere and tweak the kama values as needed? With IR remaining linked to level.

[Runerock]

Hmm I am going to say I like the idea of having 29 to 30 take a lot of xp. This would leave me more time to raid and more people at "end game" I am not married to this idea and just know we will all be in the same boat regardless.

[Thrudh]

Thanks for the feedback. We're likely going to reconsider just how flat the curve will be, though we do want more than ~24 hours for players to give feedback before we make any firm decisions. (If you have been quietly preferring the proposed flat "curve", speak up now and be heard.)

I never thought levels 26 and 27 took too long... I liked spending more time at the high levels because of the extra feats and good gear I could use.

But I will admit we spend way too little time at 20-22, and I do sometimes miss out on quests I'd like to run down there.

I would like some solution between the current and proposed exp curve...

Maybe 500k for 20-21, and 750k for 21-22, and then flatten it out from there.

[Hawklynn]

==> Epic Reincarnation and Iconic Reincarnation will require being level 30 after Update 29.

Looking back at the Update 20 release notes for Epic/Iconic TR introduction, it does say that these TRs would eventually be at level 30. Two years have gone by and the feel of hitting level 28 to perform
the TR has become a norm for not only me, but many friends online. My suggestion is just to allow the player to perform an Epic/Iconic TR at level 28, or anytime after until hitting level 30.

The reason for this pertains to how players get accustomed to a specific reward for an achievement. Level 20 has always been the level to perform a heroic TR. It was never set at level 12 or level 16 to perform a heroic TR, and then changed to only be at level 20. Also, when level 25 was introduced, players headed to level 25 acquiring all the new feats and filling their epic destinies with the XP gained. However, there was no Epic/Iconic TR at level 25. So when level cap of 28 came out, although many upset voices shouted out (based on XP gain for three more levels) there was an achievement reward provided for hitting level 28. That reward was the new Epic/Iconic TR. It helped players overcome the grief of acquiring XP for 3 more levels and introduced a new goal for the player community.

The new changes for level 29 and 30 will bring about new excitement to the game, new builds, and perhaps another rush of players coming back to DDO. The new TR requirements at level 30 seem to be a sting for those enjoying Epic/Iconic TRing. Level 28 has been the TR level for 2 years now. Changing it to level 30 is not needed. Just allow the Epic/Iconic TR to be capable once a player hits level 28.

Players can choose to acquire the new feats and abilities of level 29 and 30 and place that XP into their off destinies. Some friends have mentioned they wouldn't mind heading to level 30 and have that additional XP go into their off destinies (since current destinies are still capped at 6.6 million ??).

Other players can remain at peace knowing their XP needed to level 28 can still allow them to TR. Maybe it takes a player one week, one month or more to get from 20-28. That additional XP needed to get from lvl 28 to 30 is just .. a sting. Painful!!

[SirValentine]

We're likely going to reconsider just how flat the curve will be, though we do want more than ~24 hours for players to give feedback before we make any firm decisions. (If you have been quietly preferring the proposed flat "curve", speak up now and be heard.)


I prefer the proposed flat table. Currently, low Epic levels go by so fast, while higher ones drag. Evening it out, letting lower Epic gear be used more, and lower Epic quests (and Wilderness areas!) get run more, is an improvement.

I will, once again, second the motion for more bank or inventory space for bound-to-character gear. (Not just more Shared Bank. Not it's bad, it just doesn't at all address the real issue.)

[Aletys]

why change the xp curve at all, just add the extra levels to the existing setup. no loss or gain to people playing. as for the TR level i will no longer play a iconic, since it is not worth the time for a reincarnation. i have spoken to my guildies and none are happy with the new planned changes.

This. +1

[Gljosh]

==> Epic Reincarnation and Iconic Reincarnation will require being level 30 after Update 29.

Looking back at the Update 20 release notes for Epic/Iconic TR introduction, it does say that these TRs would eventually be at level 30. Two years have gone by and the feel of hitting level 28 to perform
the TR has become a norm for not only me, but many friends online. My suggestion is just to allow the player to perform an Epic/Iconic TR at level 28, or anytime after until hitting level 30.

The reason for this pertains to how players get accustomed to a specific reward for an achievement. Level 20 has always been the level to perform a heroic TR. It was never set at level 12 or level 16 to perform a heroic TR, and then changed to only be at level 20. Also, when level 25 was introduced, players headed to level 25 acquiring all the new feats and filling their epic destinies with the XP gained. However, there was no Epic/Iconic TR at level 25. So when level cap of 28 came out, although many upset voices shouted out (based on XP gain for three more levels) there was an achievement reward provided for hitting level 28. That reward was the new Epic/Iconic TR. It helped players overcome the grief of acquiring XP for 3 more levels and introduced a new goal for the player community.

The new changes for level 29 and 30 will bring about new excitement to the game, new builds, and perhaps another rush of players coming back to DDO. The new TR requirements at level 30 seem to be a sting for those enjoying Epic/Iconic TRing. Level 28 has been the TR level for 2 years now. Changing it to level 30 is not needed. Just allow the Epic/Iconic TR to be capable once a player hits level 28.

Players can choose to acquire the new feats and abilities of level 29 and 30 and place that XP into their off destinies. Some friends have mentioned they wouldn't mind heading to level 30 and have that additional XP go into their off destinies (since current destinies are still capped at 6.6 million ??).

Other players can remain at peace knowing their XP needed to level 28 can still allow them to TR. Maybe it takes a player one week, one month or more to get from 20-28. That additional XP needed to get from lvl 28 to 30 is just .. a sting. Painful!!

I say we hybridize the approaches. You can ITR/ETR at level 28 (or make it when you have the 6 million in a sphere for an ETR) BUT you can only farm the Heart Seeds (the 100 CoV items) when at level 30.

[mikarddo]

I say we hybridize the approaches. You can ITR/ETR at level 28 (or make it when you have the 6 million in a sphere for an ETR) BUT you can only farm the Heart Seeds (the 100 CoV items) when at level 30.

Thats not a half bad idea.

[Hafeal]

I prefer the proposed flat table. Currently, low Epic levels go by so fast, while higher ones drag. Evening it out, letting lower Epic gear be used more, and lower Epic quests (and Wilderness areas!) get run more, is an improvement.

I will, once again, second the motion for more bank or inventory space for bound-to-character gear. (Not just more Shared Bank. Not it's bad, it just doesn't at all address the real issue.)

I agree ... What would I like to see?

I would love to see a special Bound to Character Bank and Bound to Account Bank showing every (non-crafted) NAMED item in the game - lit up when you have the item, shaded when you don't; but you can deposit and withdraw the item from this special bank without it impacting your regular bank troves. Multiples could be designated by a number in the corner of the visual.

I would so PAY MUCHO DINERO for something like this. MUCHO. A LOT. TAKE MY MONEY, TURBINE. Whew.

[Aletys]

I say we hybridize the approaches. You can ITR/ETR at level 28 (or make it when you have the 6 million in a sphere for an ETR) BUT you can only farm the Heart Seeds (the 100 CoV items) when at level 30.

Please, please no. Let us farm them from levels 28-30. That is punishing. If we don't want to do levels 29-30, we should not be forced to do so. If I don't enjoy doing something, I should not be forced to do so because someone else does. That is a good way to get people upset.

Most of my guildies (who frankly enjoy heroics far more) will simply stop playing epics. It will be a no-brainer for them. Other players will simply quit playing DDO at all. Ramming something down someone's throat is not customer friendly.

[Nimdeadlee]

I say we hybridize the approaches. You can ITR/ETR at level 28 (or make it when you have the 6 million in a sphere for an ETR) BUT you can only farm the Heart Seeds (the 100 CoV items) when at level 30.

This .

[CThruTheEgo]

Thanks for the feedback. We're likely going to reconsider just how flat the curve will be, though we do want more than ~24 hours for players to give feedback before we make any firm decisions. (If you have been quietly preferring the proposed flat "curve", speak up now and be heard.)

I like the flat xp curve for epics. It makes sense for the reasons you all stated imo. And it means lower level epic content (old school epics) will likely be run more often. More variety is a good thing imo. I haven't kept up with the full discussion, so I'm not sure what all the concerns are with a flat curve, but one concern I've read is needing more/better lower level gear due to spending more time in the lower levels. That might be a good reason to update the old epic items of the lower level epics that will now (hopefully) be run more often. It would give players another reason to run that content and allay some concerns about gear.

[EllisDee37]

Wisps and Trees!

More Wisps and Trees!

Even more Wisps and Trees!

Yet more Wisps and Trees!

Who enjoys playing through quests where absolutely everything has 100% Fort, DR through the roof, Immunity to a tonne of different prefixes/suffixes, appears in huge mobs of enemies AND deals out insane damage!

Those quests are some of the worst made in the game {Along with Wheloon and most of the Madness Quests!}!My evasion paladin staff build with 65% fort bypass and 13-20x3 crit profile loves it. (Previously 11-20x3, but 13-20x3 is still solid.)

[jaedom]

I agree. The typical time for me to ETR/ITR is 3-6 months and now it'll take a lot longer for no good reason. "Because the max level was raised" isn't a good reason to me.

Anyway, the staff weighed the feedback and decided to increase the XP to ETR/ITR. Ok, fine, that's their decision. I just cancelled my many-year subscription, though, as part of my feedback to them.

I'll probably still play as a free-to-play account from time to time, but I won't be a paying customer ever again.

Several players I have spoken with are feeling the same way. Recently there have more nerfs than improvements and its really ****ing off the player base. I like the idea of balancing the levels but lvl 20 to 23 is awful. I am not a casual player. I am triple epic and iconic completionist and am well on my to triple heroic. This being said I feel you guys are making a huge mistake as the changes would kill most casual players. I know at least 4 people who plan to drop vip and move on to other games. I wont feel the sting that much but its not much fun playing by yourself.
Increasing the level cap to etr just is not fair to new and casual players. It also will hurt people who enjoy playing alts. Keep etr at 6 mil karma there is no reason to change that whatsoever. It will help new players and old alike and soften the blow that upping xp for lvls 20 to 23 will cause. Those levels suck for everyone especially since champions were added. Seriously, we hate those levels dragging them on will be torture.
In addition, the mobs hit points vs the power of weapons for those levels do not equate. I have been using the level 14 weapons from archons or the lvl 7 weapons from temple to 23 if that says anything. The weapons from Eveningstar challenges are better than most old hard to get raid loot. It would be great if you reworked some of the old epic gear to make them useful. It would make lvl 20 to 23 vastly more enjoyable. Everyone runs von for one or two items and xp leaving the rest in the chest to rot or passing them as jokes, this should say something. If older content raid loot was viable it would give us something to do and give opportunity for viable loot to use in the low lvl epic grind that is being proposed. There are several dead raids because the gear is just not viable and the grind to farm them not worth the effort. You do not even have to change up the raids as many new players haven't gotten to experience many of these raids. Von,ToD, and ADQ all need the old gear revisited if not scrapped all together and made fresh. I have seals and shards that I have saved for years hoping that at some point the gear would catch up with the game.

[EllisDee37]

Thanks for the feedback. We're likely going to reconsider just how flat the curve will be, though we do want more than ~24 hours for players to give feedback before we make any firm decisions. (If you have been quietly preferring the proposed flat "curve", speak up now and be heard.)As I said before, I like the proposed flat progression (it's not a curve) because I always felt like skipping the first 3 epic levels with banked saga xp to bypass ML20-22 gear entirely is kind of cheesy.

But while I was half-kidding before, the more I think about it the more I like the idea of making epic greensteel gear ML20. It fits with the heroic greensteel being low ML, it alleviates the issues about having to grind out 1.6 to 2.4 million epic xp before you can start using real gear, and it gives real incentive for everyone to make it. If it's a high ML, only endgamers will make it.

I trust the dev team remembers why we moved from EPIC to EN/EH/EE in the first place. Essentially, despite having a deep and well-designed endgame, in terms of % of the population, nobody was playing it. Thus EN/EH, which opened up epics to more than just the top 5%.

Make eGreensteel ML30 and we'll be right back to the five-percenters. Make it ML20 and everyone on every server will eye eGreensteel as a definite goal. It will reclaim the honored title of "It's the community college of DDO: Everyone is welcome."

EDIT: Also, as stated I can live with 8.25 million xp, but if there's any debate among the dev team still going on, I'd like to restate my vote for 7.5 million xp.

[jaedom]

Please for the love of God add a search bar to the tr cache. There is always that one item that takes 2 hours to find because its icon looks like 5 other items. Just a happy little thing that the players will all love you for. The only thing better would be a bag that hold scrolls, potions, and components. A girl can dream.

[Qhualor]

geesh, with all the gripes about underpowered gear and too painful to spend a little more time between 20-23 before you can get to the good gear its a wonder how anyone gets through those levels. why wasn't this a subject of discussion years ago? why wait until now? I have zero problems with any of this and I really don't see this as a glass half empty thing. ive seen the devs backtrack with the balance changes, I wont doubt that there will be some here too.

[EllisDee37]

geesh, with all the gripes about underpowered gear and too painful to spend a little more time between 20-23 before you can get to the good gear its a wonder how anyone gets through those levels.I suspect the complaints are mainly from people who don't get through those levels, but rather skip them entirely with banked saga xp.

[Blivit]

Since a couple of people have brought this up:

There is a major downside to this proposal: Players are strongly incentivized to stop playing DDO right now, this instant, because this unfairly rewards XP to those who happen to have stopped getting XP at a particular time/level.

Under this proposal, anyone who has exactly enough XP to gain level 22 should probably stop playing, especially if they think they won't hit level 23 before Update 29 comes out (maybe stop playing today, maybe in a week, etc.), or maybe get some alts up to exactly level 22 (or 21 or 23 or whatever breakpoint you think makes sense). Otherwise they are "wasting their time" because instead of playing they could just wait and get "free XP" for choosing to not play DDO.

While we will probably consider a more gently sloped curve, the same issue is likely to be there in some form. There's really no world in which we want to explicitly reward not playing the game. (Considering it's entirely fair to ask each character to earn the same amount of XP to earn the same levels, ultimately, we're willing to deal with the downsides, which we do recognize as being real downsides.)

I don't remember this being a problem when multi-life heroic TR's XP curves were drastically lessened. Why would it be an issue this time when it wasn't before?

[Edit, correction]
Sorry, ignore the above. I didn't read the post that Varg quoted in its entirety. I thought Varg was discussing a proposal such as the one by Propane to start at 400k for lvl 21, then increase the amount per level by 100k for each level after that, winding up at 8 million total for lvl 30. I very much support Propane's proposal.

Varg was not, however, entirely correct in his correction of my earlier post where I stated that the amount of XP required for every level <= 27 is higher than before. While Varg is correct that the delta between levels is smaller above 24 in the new curve than in the current curve, the cumulative XP required for every level is higher (the number in the right-most column of the posted new XP table is always higher than the number to its left). Players will spend longer at lower levels, where they will be less powerful, have worse gear, and do less damage. This means they will, in general, complete a given quest more slowly at a given new cumulative XP amount than they would currently, since they will be lower level. Epic level progression from 20 - 28 will go noticeably more slowly with the proposed flat curve than it does now due to requiring more cumulative XP for every level before 28. Please consider a shallow non-linear curve such as the one proposed by Propane.

[hunzi2010]

The current plan does not include an adjustment to the Epic Stone of Experience, but that is something we can consider.

Hello everyone,

Id like to way in on this topic here, because a lot of people are talking about ottos boxes.
Regarding the ottos boxes for sale. I buy these when they are on sale but the problem I have is I don't want the shards, I don't want the slayer boosts ect. I do however want to post an option of purchasing the stone only.
is there a way that Turbine would look at selling, for example, a basic ottos box with a stone only?
I believe you would sell a lot more of these as apposed to the current box that is filled with a lot of extras that most people don't want?
a lot of people I have spoken to ingame have also expressed this. the ottos box is expensive (last sale I spent $250.00 on boxes) and found a lot of items I have taking up inventory and don't use.
people would buy these more often of they were cheaper and only gave the stone..
Just some feedback to possibly consider.

thanks

Hunzi.

[btolson]

I'm against a completely flat XP curve as well. I know a popular opinion is that "all power comes from EDs", but that hasn't really been the case since the cap increased to 28, and a lot of the newer gear found its way into the game. The same quest can absolutely be completed much faster at 27 (or 29) than at 20. Consequently, a flat curve would result in a lot more time spent earning early levels than the last ones, and I don't think that's desirable at all.

Jumping on the bandwagon, I put together my own possible curve with the aid of spreadsheet and an iterative formula in the form of:

PrevXP + StepXP + [LeapXP * (Level - 20)]

where:

PrevXP = the amount of XP to earn the previous level; 580k to start
StepXP = 15k
LeapXP = 10k


Level XP to advance (in k) Cumulative XP (in k)
20 580
21 605 580
22 640 1185
23 685 1825
24 740 2510
25 805 3250
26 880 4055
27 965 4935
28 1060 5900
29 1165 6960
30 8125



One of the things I like about it, is that it takes almost exactly double the XP to go from 29-30 as 20-21 (a margin of 5k), which I think is an appropriate target to aim for.
On live, the ~4.5x XP required to get from 27-28 is noticeably much longer than earlier leveling, but I think a 2x differential should keep each level feeling like it takes about the same amount of time, or to put it another way, while not a flat curve in terms of XP earned, a flat curve in terms of time spent playing.

[Robai]

Let me explain why the proposed for U29 XP curve is not good:

A first lifer needs 1,900,000 XP for lvl 20. Are you saying that the next lvl will require almost half of the total xp (+825,000 XP for lvl 21)? Really?
I'd like to spend more time in higher lvls instead of lvls 20-23, because: 1) I'd like to play heaving epic feats, 2) I'd like to play having epic gear, 3) I'd like to do raids instead of slowly getting xp at lvls 20-23.


The old epic xp curve
Epic XP = 75000*(lvl-17)*(lvl-20)
was fine.

The new epic xp curve
Epic XP = 825000*(lvl-20)
is not good.

If you think that 300K XP needed for lvl 21 is too low then I suggest something like this:
Epic XP = 37500*(lvl-8)*(lvl-20)
For lvl 30 it will give the same amount of XP needed (8,250,000) as it was proposed for U29.
For lvl 21 you'll need 487,500 XP.
Also this will slightly flatten out XP needed per lvls (I prefer the old Epic XP formula for lvls 20-28 though, but this formula is much better than the proposed XP curve for U29).

I'm more interested in XP needed for each lvl (the differences):


Level rangeOld XP needed to increase lvl (for heroic: 1st/2nd/3rd life)The new XP needed (proposed in U29)If Epic XP = 37500*(lvl-8)*(lvl-20)
19 - 20180,000/270,000/360,000180,000/270,000/360,000180,000/270,000/360,000
20 - 21300,000825,000487,500
21 - 22450,000825,000562,500
22 - 23600,000825,000637,500
23 - 24750,000825,000712,500
24 - 25900,000825,000787,500
25 - 261,050,000825,000862,500
26 - 271,200,000825,000937,500
27 - 281,350,000825,0001,012,500
28 - 291,500,000 (old curve if unchanged)825,0001,087,500
29 - 301,650,000 (old curve if unchanged)825,0001,162,500

[ComicRelief]

Thanks for the feedback. We're likely going to reconsider just how flat the curve will be, though we do want more than ~24 hours for players to give feedback before we make any firm decisions. (If you have been quietly preferring the proposed flat "curve", speak up now and be heard.)
*snip*


As it is presented, under the new system, going from L20 to L21 takes 850k XP; under the existing curve, I would have advanced to L23 by then and would continue to be "two levels behind" until L25-new, at which point I'd only be one level behind (and remaining one level behind, until reaching L28 when all is square).

While I like the idea of flattening the epic XP curve, does it really need to be "reset" and flat from the start at level 20? You've already got a curve established up to L28, where the "old" and "new" XP marks converge, why not just make it flat from there? That way, no one would feel "penalized" if they are banking, but didn't level before U29 is released and would have the added benefit of not having a pre-U29 toon being a higher level than a post-U29 toon when they have the exact same amount of XP.

{I've not read the entire thread, mostly just the Dev replies, so I'm not sure if anyone else has suggested this or not. If so, then I'm just agree with them.}
;)

[maddong]

People are focusing on the **** Xp curve when they should be focusing on etr/itr at 28, heart seeds at cap. Flat Xp is fine. Don't make me do my last etr/itrs before the update.

[FestusHood]

Seems mostly like good ideas here, however I think that the curve being totally flat from 20-30 is a mistake. Sure, flatten it a bit, but it means far too long spent in the lower epic levels with not as good gear on, levels that we've all already played over and over and over and over again. And let's be honest, people are a bit bored at the moment. Perhaps a slight increase in required xp as the levels go up would make it more appealing.

Also we've all got a bunch of gear we've been working hard to get from DoJ etc that is lvl 28, we've hardly had it on yet as at the moment we get to 28 and ER or TR pretty much straight away, it'd be nice to actually have a bit of time to wear it, use it, get the benefit of our hard work and making the XP curve totally flat reduces the time we can wear that gear.

Then there is the question of Sagas. Currently a popular way to do your ER's is to bank your sagas, then turn them in when you are level 20, instantly taking you to level 21 or 22 etc depending on pots/amount to turn in. The ER process is already somewhat boring and the level cap increase will make it even more laborious, so taking the ability to get to at least level 21 with saga turn in away I think is a mistake.

In conclusion, flattening the curve is fine, making totally flat is a mistake.


I agree mostly with the sentiments expressed here. I was hoping to be able to spend more time using my level 28 gear.

Individual saga rewards aren't really all that much xp. I enjoyed grouping them together and taking them at once, usually taking advantage of an xp pot boost. It made me feel efficient or something. I find it similar to the xp stones you get from daily dice. Taken individually as you get them they are negligible. If i save a bunch of them and use them all right after a tr, i can usually go right to level 3 before i begin questing. It may not be much, but it does actually make it feel like they were useful in some way.

Since grouping the saga rewards to take advantage of finite xp boosts is efficient, people will still likely do that. Instead of using them for the head start on the next epic life however, they will probably use them at the end of life to get through the higher levels faster, since that's about the time you will have them ready, and you will still need enough xp to cap to be worth using them. This would result in people spending an even smaller portion of their time at higher levels rather than lower.

All this is of course assuming repeat epic reincarnations. People going through for the first time, with all their first time bonuses will still find it a breeze.

[FestusHood]

I like the flat xp curve for epics. It makes sense for the reasons you all stated imo. And it means lower level epic content (old school epics) will likely be run more often. More variety is a good thing imo. I haven't kept up with the full discussion, so I'm not sure what all the concerns are with a flat curve, but one concern I've read is needing more/better lower level gear due to spending more time in the lower levels. That might be a good reason to update the old epic items of the lower level epics that will now (hopefully) be run more often. It would give players another reason to run that content and allay some concerns about gear.

I like the idea of flattening the curve out some, i don't really like going completely flat. When they altered the heroic xp they flattened it some, but they didn't make it completely flat. Imagine if you needed 80k xp to get to level 2. While the epic won't be to that extreme, it will be similar. One problem being that level 18 and 19 quests are still heroic, and they don't get the large xp boost that epic quests get. I'm not a huge xp per minute guy, and i do still end up running those quests sometimes even after hitting epic. More efficiency minded people wont though.

I can adapt to whatever they decide to do, and i disagree with the people who think you should still be able to reincarnate at level 28. The overall amount of xp added to reach level 30 seems fine to me. I would just personally prefer to spend more of my time playing near peak character power than when it is weaker, same as in heroics.

[Robai]

I prefer the proposed flat table. Currently, low Epic levels go by so fast, while higher ones drag. Evening it out, letting lower Epic gear be used more, and lower Epic quests (and Wilderness areas!) get run more, is an improvement.

I will, once again, second the motion for more bank or inventory space for bound-to-character gear. (Not just more Shared Bank. Not it's bad, it just doesn't at all address the real issue.)
With flat XP curve lvls 26-30 will be WAY faster than lvls 20-23.
For example, I was farming daily XPs until lvl 26 then left those toons for raiding, but they reached lvl 28 too fast (wasn't doing any daily XPs at all), then I had to ETR again, which was a disappointment actually.
With flat XP it will be insane, you will see less high lvl players, also it will result in less raiding (except VoN for XP).

As for more BtC space? Hell, yes, please (off topic, but it's worth that since it's indeed THAT important).
I gave up on this matter (grats Devs, you win), but if someone brings this up I will always support it (+1 btw, will do tomorrow since today can't).

[Kompera_Oberon]

Overall ok....it will make banking sagas for ETR less appealing as you don't pop to 22 or 23 as soon as you ETR but the overall idea is fine.
This is a concern of mine as well. I like the Saga system. It promotes running more diverse content, as in completing all the quests associated with a Saga, rather than running primarily a huge daily repetition of the higher XP awarded quests. This change will reduce the incentive to run Sagas in order to bank their XP for an eTR. Having more XP needed to get to the new level cap of 30 will only provide more incentive for players to repeat the better XP awarding quests more often, and that makes other content far less desirable.



Otherwise I'm forced to get 1,675,000 XP to go from 22 to 23. That is crazy.

Rethink this.
Once. After your next eTR or TR you're back on the regular track. You aren't losing anything, you're just having to deal with the changing XP spread this one time. That's no reason to change anything to accommodate your concern given how ephemeral it is. If you're really worried about it you have three options: You can get to 28 and stay there until U29 is released, or you can TR into heroics or eTR and remain at or under 20th until U29 is released. Then you won't even have to deal with it once.

[FestusHood]

As I said before, I like the proposed flat progression (it's not a curve) because I always felt like skipping the first 3 epic levels with banked saga xp to bypass ML20-22 gear entirely is kind of cheesy.

But while I was half-kidding before, the more I think about it the more I like the idea of making epic greensteel gear ML20. It fits with the heroic greensteel being low ML, it alleviates the issues about having to grind out 1.6 to 2.4 million epic xp before you can start using real gear, and it gives real incentive for everyone to make it. If it's a high ML, only endgamers will make it.

I trust the dev team remembers why we moved from EPIC to EN/EH/EE in the first place. Essentially, despite having a deep and well-designed endgame, in terms of % of the population, nobody was playing it. Thus EN/EH, which opened up epics to more than just the top 5%.

Make eGreensteel ML30 and we'll be right back to the five-percenters. Make it ML20 and everyone on every server will eye eGreensteel as a definite goal. It will reclaim the honored title of "It's the community college of DDO: Everyone is welcome."

EDIT: Also, as stated I can live with 8.25 million xp, but if there's any debate among the dev team still going on, I'd like to restate my vote for 7.5 million xp.

If they make epic greensteel level 20, i can only see two possible outcomes. 1. Epic Greensteel will suck 2. Epic Greensteel will replace all other epic gear in the game. People already complain that once their destinies are filled they don't feel like they are making enough real progression while leveling through epics. If you remove getting access to better gear from that equation it will feel even less like you are progressing your character.

I would however like them to make it level 28 rather than level 30, since most people are still reincarnating and simply won't get much use out of max level gear. Even level 26 i could see, though that would possibly invalidate more gear than i would like. Guess it also depends on just how hard it will be to make. I am wondering if they will keep the taint and requiring 20th completions to get the cleanser to wear more than one piece at a time.

[EllisDee37]

I find some of these arguments compelling.

How about starting at 700k and adding 25k to each step:

21: 700
22: 1425
23: 2175
24: 2950
25: 3750
26: 4575
27: 5425
28: 6300
29: 7200
30: 8125

The last step from 29 to 30 would then be 925k.

[Torkzed]

I am with those who think that the flattening of the xp curve is too extreme. I enjoy the later epic quests more and I like access to my epic gear.

I was a very casual player back when the old epics were run a lot, and my ML 20 gear is basically the stuff that you get with EStar comms. Good enough for the low epics at the current pace, but I don't relish the idea of spending nearly half of an epic life with that stuff.

I'd also like to see the total XP to cap dropped a bit (~7.5M?).

I hear the argument that "Turbine gave you plenty of warning", but it still seems to me that this change is damaging folks who play at a slower pace. I have picked up my time-in-game in recent years, and I've been steadily working my way through ERs with a few characters, but I still have many I'd like to do. The thought of the increased xp requirement is a bit depressing and I start to wonder if it is worth bothering or if it is perhaps time to find a new game to grind on.

[Torkzed]

Thanks for the feedback. We're likely going to reconsider just how flat the curve will be, though we do want more than ~24 hours for players to give feedback before we make any firm decisions. (If you have been quietly preferring the proposed flat "curve", speak up now and be heard.)



Since a couple of people have brought this up:

There is a major downside to this proposal: Players are strongly incentivized to stop playing DDO right now, this instant, because this unfairly rewards XP to those who happen to have stopped getting XP at a particular time/level.

Under this proposal, anyone who has exactly enough XP to gain level 22 should probably stop playing, especially if they think they won't hit level 23 before Update 29 comes out (maybe stop playing today, maybe in a week, etc.), or maybe get some alts up to exactly level 22 (or 21 or 23 or whatever breakpoint you think makes sense). Otherwise they are "wasting their time" because instead of playing they could just wait and get "free XP" for choosing to not play DDO.

While we will probably consider a more gently sloped curve, the same issue is likely to be there in some form. There's really no world in which we want to explicitly reward not playing the game. (Considering it's entirely fair to ask each character to earn the same amount of XP to earn the same levels, ultimately, we're willing to deal with the downsides, which we do recognize as being real downsides.)


Varg,

I believe you are "overthinking" this issue with the "downside" described above. I think most will play anyway, because we like to play. There may be a few folks who would game the system the way you describe, but in other cases, rather than incentivizing folks not to play, it might actually iencourage them to play more, especially with Alts, as they scramble to pre-position alts at key points in the xp curve. Who knows...they may get hyped back up on an old character or class that they havent played lately and be even more eager to play when the update hits live.

More importantly, I would think there are far more important factors to consider than this one when you are determining the long term state of the game. Even if you were completely right and some people slowed their play to take advantage of "free xp" when the update goes live, this is a very short term issue. It should not take precedence over getting the curve right for the long term.

Torkz

[1Soulless1]

There's really no world in which we want to explicitly reward not playing the game. (


XP stones, Hi pot this is kettle :) (casts my anti-fanboi paladin spell)


And honestly Var, if I thought you and Sev would listen for a second to the people who posted here I would try to make a argument about it. But that's not happening, so... enjoy it. The End.

[nibel]

Off topic...but I'm curious why people don't like Druid's Curse. I know the loot is nothing special, but I actually like the quests.

Plant creatures have 100% fortification, are naturally immune to sneak attack (even if you have enough fortification bypass), mind-affecting spells and stuns. IN addtion, there are the large variety of three plant enemy types: Wood Woads (usually as miniboss), Vine Horror, and Red Musk Zombie.

Wisps (the fourth common enemy type) are immune to acid and electric, two very common elements used specifically because they are "less resisted" than cold or fire. They also have unsurmountable SR (I've never seen ANYONE bypass their SR, even playing overlevel), and have some annoying spells on their lists.

The quests are linear like all initial FR packs launched post-MotU. You can't sneak through them, there are barriers that requires you to kill everything to proceed, and there is no alternate branches to take for optionals (except on Druid's Curse). When you compound that with the lack of mob variety, the fights tend to feel repetitive.

Said that, I expect some people to like this pack. I'm one of the rare people that like Tomb of Tormented, and can understand the confusion when so many people don't get what you find fun in a specific quest.

[silinteresting]

I prefer the proposed flat table. Currently, low Epic levels go by so fast, while higher ones drag. Evening it out, letting lower Epic gear be used more, and lower Epic quests (and Wilderness areas!) get run more, is an improvement.

this is a good point indeed. low level epic quests hardly ever get run,this can only be good for the game.
keep the flat line for each level. i like it.

your friend sil :)

[sjbb87]

I am with those who think that the flattening of the xp curve is too extreme. I enjoy the later epic quests more and I like access to my epic gear.



Me too
If need a vote..
I vote to old xp curve

[Novalis]

XP stones, Hi pot this is kettle :) (casts my anti-fanboi paladin spell)


And honestly Var, if I thought you and Sev would listen for a second to the people who posted here I would try to make a argument about it. But that's not happening, so... enjoy it. The End.


+1

[Drevok]

Thanks for the feedback. We're likely going to reconsider just how flat the curve will be, though we do want more than ~24 hours for players to give feedback before we make any firm decisions.

thanks for looking into this. The middle road between the current status and the original proposal in my view is best. The lower levels are passed too quickly, so bumping it is reasonable. However 800k is very discouraging for starting epic levels. My vote would be closer to 550k to 600k for level 21 and slowly increase the xp required per level from there

[noble_pirate]

I like how U29 is starting to present itself.

The XP rebalance makes a lot of sense. It also has the effect of spreading the epic population over more epic levels which should be good for grouping.

Since this update is targeted at the new endgame, i like the goodies you get at lvl30. The poster above that wants the twistslot at lvl29 is completely missing the point. This update is the first step in bringing people back to the endgame. That's a whole demographic of players that this game lost. From what im seeing, looks this will convince some players who left for other games to back to ddo endgame. (people i used to play with). ER is boring and without challenge for myself and those players.

Can't wait to see the raids!

agreed! DDO at the moment don't have any endgame, it's time to get one finally. Without solid long-term goal (i.e. endgame) all TRs/eTRs/iTRs have no reason - as it's like preparation for nothing

[Whispurr]

. (If you have been quietly preferring the proposed flat "curve", speak up now and be heard.)


Ok, I prefer the proposed flat curve. I know a lot of other games have exponential xp curves, but very often, their quests also offer exponential xp reward as you level up. In DDO, once you hit EPIC levels, the epic level quests you get are all in the same range in terms of xp reward. So I prefer a flat curve at epic levels in DDO for steady progress.

[Lorianus]

People are focusing on the **** Xp curve when they should be focusing on etr/itr at 28, heart seeds at cap. Flat Xp is fine. Don't make me do my last etr/itrs before the update.

In a perfect DDO world this could be a good idea. But in reality to much players already have enough heart seeds in bags and too much epic/iconic hearts in the TR cache that farming commendation of Valor won't matter to them even if they go triple everything completionist. The "TR at 28, seeds at cap" idea would mainly serve to groups of players: The rich that can just buy hearts from the store and the ones that didn't play by the rules. And no, they can't delete any of those now or in the future because so much time passed that they can't tell what was farmed and what was not.

[Lorianus]

Thanks for the feedback. We're likely going to reconsider just how flat the curve will be, though we do want more than ~24 hours for players to give feedback before we make any firm decisions. (If you have been quietly preferring the proposed flat "curve", speak up now and be heard.)


I like a flattened curve but not that flat please. I would like to see a bit more XP shifted to levels 24+ simply because that is where the majority of epic quests and items are available. Level 20 gear means Evening Star set for everyone that hasn’t played for … like forever… and got some old-school epic items from the shard/seal/scroll/baseitem system. IF the levels 20-23 stay that way it would be very nice if you could add more recipes to the epic altar at the twelve for Shard/Scroll/Seal turn ins at some point in the near future. Something like: 3 seals/shards + X epic Tokens = 1 Seal/Shard of that pack.

[Standal]

this is a good point indeed. low level epic quests hardly ever get run,this can only be good for the game.
keep the flat line for each level. i like it.

your friend sil :)

It's not a good point. Low level epics don't get run because we either have the loot or it's not worth running for. Dailies get run because they're easy and give great XP. All the flat XP curve does is incentivize dailies more and discourage running anything else.

The current game XP structure encourages running the best xp/min quests on a daily basis. That happened because at level cap 25 they didn't have enough content to support the old XP decreases permanently per run system.

Level 21 XP should stay at 300K or lower. Let Varg figure out a curve that gets to 8.25 million XP with that as an initial condition.

[Ayseifn]

Ok, I prefer the proposed flat curve. I know a lot of other games have exponential xp curves, but very often, their quests also offer exponential xp reward as you level up. In DDO, once you hit EPIC levels, the epic level quests you get are all in the same range in terms of xp reward. So I prefer a flat curve at epic levels in DDO for steady progress.

Same, while there are more quests as you level up in epics they don't actually scale exponentially so I don't see a need for levels 29 and 30 taking forever.

If anything just up the xp for 20-23 so that gearing for those levels actually matters and that it can't be saga abused to bypass, some of those posted progressions that are somewhat in the middle of the initial proposal and what we have on live should be good enough.

Oh, on the saga abuse thing there's also a certain rare in the kings forest that gets abused to max out slayers, no idea if it's on your radar or a thing that really matters but it's an easy 684k+ before XP buffs. With a decent but not great group I can max it in 90 mins or so with a slayer pot, not uber xp/min but pretty good for how lazy it is. If you rebalance those early levels so that they're a mill xp or whatever short of level 23 after sagas then you'll have people screaming about having to do slayers to get their CitW weapons.

[Whippy]

I still have my eChrono set, Claw set and TOD set that my characters would always where as part of their end game build when cap was 20. I stopped wearing them months and months ago instead using a couple pieces of Commendation gear, something from Wheloon and Stormhorns chain and ML11 gear. That's what I use until level 23 when I upgrade to mostly random loot gear with +8 stats.

I do think we could use some fresh ML20 epic gear, but not for the reason you are saying. When/if Turbine decides to create new epic level 20-23 content, it would be a good opportunity for some new gear choices and an added reason to run that content.

Good point. I do have my ToD rings and epic chrono stuff kicking around somewhere too, as well as old dragon/queen epics that barely see the light of day anymore. What would really be nice though is some nicer weapons at level 20, it's pretty much use your greensteel until level 23 at the moment, unless you have one of a few specific weapons like SoS that work for that character. I guess the point really is, if it's worth me pulling all that stuff out my TR cache, I'd like the opportunity to earn or buy bank space to put it in. House K have been offering the same amount of storage since the dawn of time. It's about time the got down with the kids and let us buy some more space!

[Whippy]

==> Epic Reincarnation and Iconic Reincarnation will require being level 30 after Update 29.

Looking back at the Update 20 release notes for Epic/Iconic TR introduction, it does say that these TRs would eventually be at level 30. Two years have gone by and the feel of hitting level 28 to perform
the TR has become a norm for not only me, but many friends online. My suggestion is just to allow the player to perform an Epic/Iconic TR at level 28, or anytime after until hitting level 30.

The reason for this pertains to how players get accustomed to a specific reward for an achievement. Level 20 has always been the level to perform a heroic TR. It was never set at level 12 or level 16 to perform a heroic TR, and then changed to only be at level 20. Also, when level 25 was introduced, players headed to level 25 acquiring all the new feats and filling their epic destinies with the XP gained. However, there was no Epic/Iconic TR at level 25. So when level cap of 28 came out, although many upset voices shouted out (based on XP gain for three more levels) there was an achievement reward provided for hitting level 28. That reward was the new Epic/Iconic TR. It helped players overcome the grief of acquiring XP for 3 more levels and introduced a new goal for the player community.

The new changes for level 29 and 30 will bring about new excitement to the game, new builds, and perhaps another rush of players coming back to DDO. The new TR requirements at level 30 seem to be a sting for those enjoying Epic/Iconic TRing. Level 28 has been the TR level for 2 years now. Changing it to level 30 is not needed. Just allow the Epic/Iconic TR to be capable once a player hits level 28.

Players can choose to acquire the new feats and abilities of level 29 and 30 and place that XP into their off destinies. Some friends have mentioned they wouldn't mind heading to level 30 and have that additional XP go into their off destinies (since current destinies are still capped at 6.6 million ??).

Other players can remain at peace knowing their XP needed to level 28 can still allow them to TR. Maybe it takes a player one week, one month or more to get from 20-28. That additional XP needed to get from lvl 28 to 30 is just .. a sting. Painful!!


As a returning player (took 2.5 years off until march this year) I would definitely favour this idea. I've been frantically trying to make up for lost time and run my toons through TR's and ETR's as fast as possible to make them survivable/playable in the current game. A lot changed in those 2.5 years, most of my old epic gear wasn't even worth wearing when I started to see some of the random loot drops.

My point is that it's no secret that DDO is a bit quiet just now... we are all looking around for our guildies and mates and coming up a bit short. What we really need is some people to return, and if like me they have an enormous catch up to do, this just makes it too unappealing, especially for people who now have jobs and families etc. A few of my old guildies have expressed an interest in coming back but are already worried by the daunting task of trying to catch up. If ETR's are moved to level 30 this just creates an even bigger cap between people already at epic completionist and those of us who just want to get 1 toon anywhere near that, never mind the other 12 who are sat doing nothing somewhere around levels 20-24.

I agree with the above posters sentiment on changing the goal posts for the same reward. I said this in another post, the ETR process is already a bit dull, sagas and daily runs of spies/von3/wizking back to back, by adding another 1.5mil xp to the equation for the same reward its a bit rubbish. Perhaps the option to ETR at 28 could remain, with added bonuses if you go to 30 then ETR. Perhaps heading up to 30 before ETR'ing means you get an extra point of PRR or some other bonus depending on the circle you are ETRing from... perhaps between 28 and 30 you could get access to another couple of sagas that would be added bonus xp after the ETR. I'm sure there are loads of things that could be done, so that the option to do it at either point is appealing to different people.

There are 2 things in recent times that have killed DDO, DoJ lag was the first and the "improvements" (nerfs) were the second. Moving the ETR point to level 30 will sadly be most likely be the final nail in the coffin as most people simply don't have the time to play like they used to.

I'm not sure if leaving ETR at lvl 28 is even a real option but if it is, it would certainly help the people we need the most at the moment, returning players.

[Aletys]

I suspect the complaints are mainly from people who don't get through those levels, but rather skip them entirely with banked saga xp.

Nope. It's from people who actually play the levels, don't use stones, may occasionally use sagas to get them thru whatever level, not necessarily 21-23, and probably are not single completionist, let alone triple completionist. And, especially on a first life when you don't have any ED's behind you, and haven't got the necessary gear yet, it's pretty rough. The first time thru on any life you don't have any sagas to jump start you anyway.

[BigErkyKid]

When this goes live I will most likely stop ever eTRing.

The reason is that eTRs where encouraged (among the non grinders) to pick an extra twist slot. Now if give it to me at cap (which is what I like to play), 5 twist slots or even farming fate points is a much longer term goal.

You need 4 eTRs for an extra fate point and now those will be significantly more painful:

- Cannot get to CITW weapons as "soon", meaning playing quests without them for more hours.
- Total XP is a lot higher, meaning that every eTR implies more time getting back to cap
- More time in lower levels means more hours where you cannot really participate in the raiding scene for current important raids.

Now you kill eTRing for all but the most determined. But what is there to do at cap? Play DoJ, eVale and Tempest? Given timers (being locked for 3 days from raid) and low amount of quests this means that one is very restricted on what to play.

IMHO increasing the level cap without a good number of end game quests is the same mistake you made in the past and costed you a ton of players.

[N-0cturn]

thanks for looking into this. The middle road between the current status and the original proposal in my view is best. The lower levels are passed too quickly, so bumping it is reasonable. However 800k is very discouraging for starting epic levels. My vote would be closer to 550k to 600k for level 21 and slowly increase the xp required per level from there

I agree with this. A linear progressions means we would spent more time at lower epic levels, because it takes longer to complete the quests. Maybe:

21: 500
22: 600 (1100)
23: 700 (1800)
24: 800 (2600)
25: 900 (3500)
26: 900 (4400)
27: 900 (5300)
28: 900 (6200)
29: 900 (7100)
30: 900 (8000)

Or skip to linear at 1000 which means, lvl 30 would be 8500 XP.

EDIT: I also really like the idea to spread the fate points over the epic levels that currently lack.

[Anaximandroz]

i start my epic 1st lives playing the heroic 18s and 19s elite bb (without BB wont make half way to level 21) and lower epics. At level 23 i start raiding (DQ,Von, FoT). Ins the 2nd lives the Saga make for the 18 and 19s (useless now, without bb), Then er and tr. I'm against the flat xp curve because (in thelanis):

1- Dont promote playing different quests (do you really think someone will play a level 18 in elite for 15ish k instead a level 20EN for 40k - i do because i'm a flower sniffing- ? and von3/4,WK, spies are low level -off topic: Sagas promote);
2- Less time around the cap;
3- Less raiding (i already see Mods and DoJs with level range 26 to 28 so they can fill,and people still have to shortman);
4- Less grouping (with longer level the impatience will grow and BB will become a must in epics too, so the LFM will have the 2 or 4 level range instead around base level to cap. Also less people in the top tiers, who can play effectively in more quests.).

/signed for Propane's proposal

[rehakp]

Alot of new shiny things alot of new shiny build options i like that.
What i HATE is the XP change.
You can try to "explain" it in many different ways. Higher levels are closer together etc.
BUT. the truth is. Its big nerf to leveling in epics and nothing else.

Just pick ANY number betwen 0 xp and 5.774.00 xp and in the NEW system you are WORSE (lower level or more xp needed to next level) compared to the current one. And only betwen 5.775.000-6.600.000 you are the same.
The fact each level now takes the same XP doesnt compensate for the fact the Xp for early levels are SO MUTCH BIGGER and it doesnt improve before hitting level 28. You get EVERY level 21-27 LATER in new system and only gets level 28 the same time (but probably later in time because you know running content and exping at level 20 toon is little slower than on level 22 toon with same XP)

And the fact you even try to talk about this like "improvement" is making my head hurt alot !!!!!

If you want early levels to slow down but compensate for this on higher levels you are doing it wrong.
If you want to do it right you must lower the per level XP.
For example 600.000 xp. This way you get levels 21-24 later, level 25 stays the same and levels 26-28 you get sooner (all regarding to XP and not time as already explained. Regarding to time you still take 25 little later because 21 still run thru quest little faster than 20)

So please if your intent is to make lower levels slover AND higher faster then consider this.
And if you only want to make ALL levels slower (and mostly the lower) then STOP promoting this as something nice and helpful for people exping. because ITS NOT.

[rygard]

Please keep 20-25 as it is and do what ever you want with 25-30. As many peoples already point out new xp curve gonna hurt epic level progression deeply.

[pitong]

i don't like epic exp change, especially for low epic lvls. any half decent gear starts at ml23 like citw weapons. with armor it's even worse, gh dragon armors are ml 25. on my TRs i usually stayed with my hearoic gear. for now we can do few quests with ee bravery to reach it and after that proceed with good gear.
if you're going to make leveling from 20 to 23 (or 25) so much longer, we will have to store more gear for those low lvl epics and will need more banking space.
speaking of banking space i have to remind that TR cache design is just terrible. not only there is no search option in it, but taking stuff out of it takes ages. it usually take me over 3 hours to empty my tr cache when i want to TR.
also please test a lot and BE SURE about what you put in "Existing Characters after the change" paragraph. with all bugs we've seen here i think it can be a soft spot of this update.

Moreover I consider that binding of items must be destroyed.

[SirValentine]

All the flat XP curve does is incentivize dailies more and discourage running anything else.


That's what the current curve does!

Or, oh, that's what needing XP does, and running dailies or not has nothing to do either way with the exact level breaks.

[1cebeast]

if you keep experience flat, I will be wearing my House C challenge gear, more than I will be wearing my DoJ or Necro raid gear.
Please, no, no, no...

[Thar]

Flattened xp curve is a good thing for epics imo. Will hopefully mean lower level epics get run more often.

you mean von 3, wiz king and spies. yes they will be run more.

[SirDrakaden]

That flattening XP idea is -bad-, all you are accomplishing is a nerf in XP, you will force everyone to wear low epic gear for a much longer time, you will force them to over-grind quests in order to get to their next levels, that will also cause a dis-balance in quest XP rewards, and you will make so epic/iconics TRs will take a -lot- longer to accomplish.

I really dislike that plan. If you plan to stick with that new Xp line you need to raise all yer quest XP rewards accordingly.

[Hephaistor]

Flattened XP curve - time to run epic Phiarlan Carnival and epic Red Fens again.. or just do more Spies, VON or the Eveningstar Saga again? Make an educated guess what will happen:

http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20140926

Perhaps we could get some sagas for the abandoned low level epics?

[nibel]

(If you have been quietly preferring the proposed flat "curve", speak up now and be heard.)

I prefer the absolutely flat curve. Thank you.

[Kompera_Oberon]

If they make epic greensteel level 20, i can only see two possible outcomes. 1. Epic Greensteel will suck 2. Epic Greensteel will replace all other epic gear in the game. People already complain that once their destinies are filled they don't feel like they are making enough real progression while leveling through epics. If you remove getting access to better gear from that equation it will feel even less like you are progressing your character.
If they make it like Greensteel, where all items are the same level regardless of how many Shards you use to craft them, you'd be right. If they make it more like Thunderforged, where the min level of the item increases as the power of the item increases, then starting at level 20 should be fine.

Epic Greensteel is an opportunity for Turbine to offer players a way to customize items to fill in gaps in their gear. It doesn't have to be a step up in power from current itemization at the lower Shard (Shard equivalent) levels to be useful as long as it is able to be customized and has enough options to be useful to everyone. It can then go beyond current itemization at the top levels of Shard investment.

[Saekee]

When this goes live I will most likely stop ever eTRing.

The reason is that eTRs where encouraged (among the non grinders) to pick an extra twist slot. Now if give it to me at cap (which is what I like to play), 5 twist slots or even farming fate points is a much longer term goal.

You need 4 eTRs for an extra fate point and now those will be significantly more painful:

- Cannot get to CITW weapons as "soon", meaning playing quests without them for more hours.
- Total XP is a lot higher, meaning that every eTR implies more time getting back to cap
- More time in lower levels means more hours where you cannot really participate in the raiding scene for current important raids.

Now you kill eTRing for all but the most determined. But what is there to do at cap? Play DoJ, eVale and Tempest? Given timers (being locked for 3 days from raid) and low amount of quests this means that one is very restricted on what to play.

IMHO increasing the level cap without a good number of end game quests is the same mistake you made in the past and costed you a ton of players.

THIS!!!!!!!

also, I like the flattened xp idea. However, IF you do so, please consider the following:

1) A minor bump in xp of some quests like Pharlian and Fens
2) add an epic wilderness to Sands and Fens if it is quick and easy, otherwise focus massively on legendary content and faux endgame
3) Make it possible to put old seals (not shards) on the AH for S S S items and (ideally) give them a simple update (that will take work but hey! and please make such gear changes optional-retroactive).
4) Update Cannith and eStar challenge gear. The former has an obvious progression for level 24, make eStar have a selectable/craftable option that costs insanely high (like cloaks) so no annoying lottery--you make the thing you want. (Please, I am sick of getting a Steam weapon of Parrying.) Think how great that would be for customization and builds. People may turn to it for level 20 gear additions.

I find the low level eberron epics fun and run (and have run) them regardless. The eberron ones have the bonus of dropping twelve tokens/frags which are great for Lahar purchases.

[slarden]

Do what you wish with the xp curve. Only reason I even think about caring is delayed use of CITW weapons.

[inspiredunease]

Absolutely awful. I also like running eberron 19-20 content at the earlier levels. I will no longer bother with it if this change goes live. That content will be completely dead. Fine increase the early costs a little, just not 800k!

[Kompera_Oberon]

Consider your average, non forum reading player who logs out "1 pip" from level 26 the night before the next expansion hits. Maybe they have a piece of equipment they are going to use, maybe its a new quest they will do at the next level. The point is, they log out expecting that the next day they will run a couple quests and get their level.

Instead, the update hits. They log in. They are now SOOOO much xp to the next level. In fact, they do a couple quests and notice their XP bar doesn't even move. This is going to result in support tickets. And frustrated casual players.
You're overlooking the fact that this will happen once. Ever. Any player below 20th level won't even see it. Any player at cap won't even see it. Only people in the process of leveling from 20-28 will see it. Once. And if this is a real concern to them, they can get to cap and stay there until U29 hits, or eTR to 20th and stay there until U29 hits, or TR to 1st or 15th and start leveling as normal.


These are significant downsides than incur real costs to Turbine (support isn't cheap).
I'm often amused when people try to make their argument more compelling by trying to attach a dollar cost to it. Do you really think that Turbine is going to hire a bunch of new support staff to handle your hypothetical influx of tickets? No, they are going to let the CS staff already on payroll handle all tickets, same as it ever was. No additional cost at all.

[Kompera_Oberon]

When this goes live I will most likely stop ever eTRing.

The reason is that eTRs where encouraged (among the non grinders) to pick an extra twist slot. Now if give it to me at cap (which is what I like to play), 5 twist slots or even farming fate points is a much longer term goal.
I'm amused that you would refer to someone who earned a 4th Twist slot through Epic Completionist, requiring 12 epic past lives, a "non grinder."

I thought the incentive to eTR was the excellent epic past life feats, because even one is a nice boost to your character. Epic Completionist seem more like a cherry on top for people who had already collected a great number of those already, something for a grinder or a very long term player to strive for.

[BigErkyKid]

I'm amused that you would refer to someone who earned a 4th Twist slot through Epic Completionist, requiring 12 epic past lives, a "non grinder."

I thought the incentive to eTR was the excellent epic past life feats, because even one is a nice boost to your character. Epic Completionist seem more like a cherry on top for people who had already collected a great number of those already, something for a grinder or a very long term player to strive for.

It may be personal, but I feel that there is hardly any reason for going beyond the first 3 important PL feats for any character.

Fortification / healing power --- Doublestrike ---- Double shot / colors - Energy criticals / enchant weapon

Depending on your planned end build you triple stack the useful one. Besides that, yes, getting more PRR is good, but also a massive grind (3PRR per PL...zzZZZzzzZZ). The extra twist with triple stacked everything is the big milestone, the rest is for people who don't mind the grind.

Now they give away the twist. To unlock 5 useful twists you need a ton of fate points. Probably most people like me (we like end game, despise the mechanic of eTRing for power), will be satisfied with the amount of PLs we got and see little benefit for grinding 4x PLs at a time to get a single fate point. Compounded by the fact that now PLs will be MASSIVELY more time consuming than they were say at cap 25.

So yeah, this kills eTRing for me. I have currently 3 divine PLs, 3 primal, 2 martial and 1 arcane. I was going slowly towards eCompletionist (I am already hCompletionist) but I reconsidered strongly after seeing the proposed change.

[CThruTheEgo]

you mean von 3, wiz king and spies. yes they will be run more.

I'm not sure why you think that is the case. As SirValentine said above, needing xp at all is what encourages running the dailies, the actual curve doesn't make a difference for that.

Currently, you can go from 20 to 22 (or 23 with the right xp boosts such as streak bonus or xp pot) just by running Eveningstar chains 1-3. From there you can move onto the other Eveningstar chains – Druid's Curse, High Road, Wheloon, Stormhorns – and be well into the mid-upper epic levels. So all those old school epics can just get passed over completely. With a flatter xp curve, you'd spend more time in the lower epic levels, providing more of an opportunity to run the old school, lower level epics.

As an additional comment, I don't really understand all the rage about an extra 1+ mil to be able to etr. 1 mil xp is easy to get in epics and isn't really that much. You can get that in a few days running dailies. If anything, that is what will encourage running dailies more, not a change in the curve.

And for the comments about weaker low level epic gear, I don't really understand this much either. If you can blow through the Eveningstar chains with that crappy gear, then you can certainly blow through the old school epics with it because those are a lot easier than newer epics. If you're someone who is on the etr train, then you probably don't find any low level epic content challenging, so what difference does the gear make. And if you're not on the etr train, then this change probably won't affect you much. That said, if they are going to flatten the xp curve, then I think an update to the old school epic items, or the shard/seal/scroll system as some have suggested, is a good way to offer better low level gear and further incentivize playing those quests more.

[nokowi]

Now that 48 hours have gone by, I will share my thoughts.

ER at level 28 is a bad idea for the following reasons:

1. All those Mortal Fear weapons that won't work in Legendary content? Throw them in the trash because you would ER by the time you can use them.
2. ER at 28 severely reduces the number of players at max level. I would like to have a vibrant community of players at cap, and any action that reduces this is a bad idea.

If cap is 30, I can use My Tier 3 TF during ER. Level 30 cap gives a use for Level 28 gear, even after Level 30+ content provides better gear.


I have proposed 500K + 50K/ level as a compromise both for flatness of the curve, and total xp. This would be 7.25 million total XP, and would keep XP for level 25 at 3 million (when you get nice gear).

I have also supported allowing quest and slayer (but not raid completion) reset during ER as a free (automatic) or paid option. Combining both of my proposals, it would be easier to get to cap, not harder.

[Fluffib]

I'm not sure why you think that is the case. As SirValentine said above, needing xp at all is what encourages running the dailies, the actual curve doesn't make a difference for that.

Currently, you can go from 20 to 22 (or 23 with the right xp boosts such as streak bonus or xp pot) just by running Eveningstar chains 1-3. From there you can move onto the other Eveningstar chains – Druid's Curse, High Road, Wheloon, Stormhorns – and be well into the mid-upper epic levels. So all those old school epics can just get passed over completely. With a flatter xp curve, you'd spend more time in the lower epic levels, providing more of an opportunity to run the old school, lower level epics.

As an additional comment, I don't really understand all the rage about an extra 1+ mil to be able to etr. 1 mil xp is easy to get in epics and isn't really that much. You can get that in a few days running dailies. If anything, that is what will encourage running dailies more, not a change in the curve.

And for the comments about weaker low level epic gear, I don't really understand this much either. If you can blow through the Eveningstar chains with that crappy gear, then you can certainly blow through the old school epics with it because those are a lot easier than newer epics. If you're someone who is on the etr train, then you probably don't find any low level epic content challenging, so what difference does the gear make. And if you're not on the etr train, then this change probably won't affect you much. That said, if they are going to flatten the xp curve, then I think an update to the old school epic items, or the shard/seal/scroll system as some have suggested, is a good way to offer better low level gear and further incentivize playing those quests more.

You're right about people needing xp. But when people need xp they mostly run 3-4 quests: von3, von5, spies, wiz king. When people need more xp, they run those quest more. Not because those quests are fun and exciting and new, because those quests give the most xp per minute.

It doesn't matter whether you're in low epics or high epics - any epic character can enter any epic quest without penalty. You can be level 20 and enter an EE raid, you can be level 28 and do ES chains on normal. The difference between low epics and high epics is the gear you can use, gated by ML - so this flat xp curve is not about redistributing people among quests, but gating gear that people already have, primarily level 23-25 gear that is fun and exciting and starts to make you feel powerful. Yea, you don't need that gear to do en spies (or EE thread for that matter) but you do need it to do the higher level fun quests, the new quests, the raids - so then people are required to get to those minimum levels to use the gear, and since that effort is all about xp per minute - same 4 quests.

Unless the xp rewards from quests change, the epic quests that are not being run today will not be run tomorrow.

[FranOhmsford]

You're right about people needing xp. But when people need xp they mostly run 3-4 quests: von3, von5, spies, wiz king. When people need more xp, they run those quest more. Not because those quests are fun and exciting and new, because those quests give BY FAR the most xp per minute.

Unless the xp rewards from quests change, the epic quests that are BARELY being run today will NOT be run tomorrow.

Changes in Blue - Otherwise agreed entirely!

[BadgerFoot]

I'm on a 4th life character at the moment. The lower epic levels have always gone past very quickly. I think I'd prefer a flat xp curve but is it really going to make the game better? Some folk will like it and some folk won't.

I can't see anyone rage quitting if the proposal is abandoned. I can see folk rage quitting if the proposal goes ahead.

If I happen to be level 24 when the update hits and find that I can't equip some of my gear due to a level reduction I shall be somewhat annoyed. I wouldn't rage quit over it. I'd get laughed at by the group I play with each week but that'd be the extent of it. Some people could easily quit over this.

So why do it? Where's the advantage?

[BigErkyKid]

You're right about people needing xp. But when people need xp they mostly run 3-4 quests: von3, von5, spies, wiz king. When people need more xp, they run those quest more. Not because those quests are fun and exciting and new, because those quests give the most xp per minute.

It doesn't matter whether you're in low epics or high epics - any epic character can enter any epic quest without penalty. You can be level 20 and enter an EE raid, you can be level 28 and do ES chains on normal. The difference between low epics and high epics is the gear you can use, gated by ML - so this flat xp curve is not about redistributing people among quests, but gating gear that people already have, primarily level 23-25 gear that is fun and exciting and starts to make you feel powerful. Yea, you don't need that gear to do en spies (or EE thread for that matter) but you do need it to do the higher level fun quests, the new quests, the raids - so then people are required to get to those minimum levels to use the gear, and since that effort is all about xp per minute - same 4 quests.

Unless the xp rewards from quests change, the epic quests that are not being run today will not be run tomorrow.

+1

[pitong]

tbh i'd prefer exp required for 21-28 stay the same and have 30 near 8-10 millions than what you proposed. that would actually make me "waste" less exp. i usually do high exp stuff first so i can gear up and after that i do other quests do help guildies or find better gear or for favor or whatever. i really won't like to struggle with heroic or eveningstar commendation gear longer than now

Moreover I consider that binding of items must be destroyed.

[nokowi]

You're right about people needing xp. But when people need xp they mostly run 3-4 quests: von3, von5, spies, wiz king. When people need more xp, they run those quest more. Not because those quests are fun and exciting and new, because those quests give the most xp per minute.



I don't do this at all. I run these each one time. What is nice about these quests is that any player (regardless of skill/gear) can join a random group and get pretty good xp on a daily basis. Having top XP quests that are commonly in LFM's is a good thing.

I think people doing these over and over again aren't getting any better XP/min than they could by quickly completing sagas and challenges. The purpose of the bravery and daily bonus is to encourage you to run different things. 6 eveningstar challenges are over 700k in an hour. I think you would be crazy to farm Von 3 to boredom over running something new. If you have little time to play or are uncomfortable posting groups, having Von 3, Spies, and Wiz King (with a daily bonus) is a good thing for the game.

[slarden]

I don't do this at all. I run these each one time. What is nice about these quests is that any player (regardless of skill/gear) can join a random group and get pretty good xp on a daily basis. Having top XP quests that are commonly in LFM's is a good thing.

I think people doing these over and over again aren't getting any better XP/min than they could by quickly completing sagas and challenges. The purpose of the bravery and daily bonus is to encourage you to run different things. 6 eveningstar challenges are over 700k in an hour. I think you would be crazy to farm Von 3 to boredom over running something new. If you have little time to play or are uncomfortable posting groups, having Von 3, Spies, and Wiz King (with a daily bonus) is a good thing for the game.

Agreed! And I even got to group with Nokowi for the first time ever this way and watch him crush mobs with his amazing DPS.

[BigErkyKid]

I don't do this at all. I run these each one time. What is nice about these quests is that any player (regardless of skill/gear) can join a random group and get pretty good xp on a daily basis. Having top XP quests that are commonly in LFM's is a good thing.

I think people doing these over and over again aren't getting any better XP/min than they could by quickly completing sagas and challenges. The purpose of the bravery and daily bonus is to encourage you to run different things. 6 eveningstar challenges are over 700k in an hour. I think you would be crazy to farm Von 3 to boredom over running something new. If you have little time to play or are uncomfortable posting groups, having Von 3, Spies, and Wiz King (with a daily bonus) is a good thing for the game.

This is not true. Once you exhaust first time bonuses, challenges and most low level epic quests (even high level) are horrible XP/min.

Sagas are not necessarily done for XP/min, rather to skip the first "boring" levels on an eTR.

[Talon_Dragonsbane]

I prefer what most are proposing, starting smaller and increasing the xp required per level, capping at 8M xp. A flat xp curve makes the first few levels very slow when gear and feats are not as good for the upper level. Static xp/level seems to be catering to the L28 toons since it will only be 1.6M xp to get to cap and enjoy the new shinies.

[rehakp]

This is not true. Once you exhaust first time bonuses, challenges and most low level epic quests (even high level) are horrible XP/min.

Sagas are not necessarily done for XP/min, rather to skip the first "boring" levels on an eTR.

Exactly.
We are not running Vo3, spies, wizking because its best. But because AFTER you run all other options once then its best XP option for "daily quest" by far especially if you only have lets say 1/2 - 1 hour to run something that day.
When you exhaust first time bonusses and challenges and next level or even cap is soooo faaar you need XP, its simple. And you only have few options good enough to justify the XP gring. Few of them are VoN5 (mostly need more ppl to make it happen and some of ppl online can be on 3 day CD), Slayers (hmm kill several thousends of enemies .. definitely not so fun atleast after few first thousends and you can only make this once per TR not eTR). Then you are left with Von3, spies, wizking (god bless them) and you are prying to allmighty for all those gifts every day and for the fact there are actually "3" of them so you get only bored/3 ;)

Only change if that new XP change come life would be we will be running VoN3, wizking, spies even more because we will need XP even more and will be gimped in other higher/harder content because we will be 1 or 2 levels in power and gear options behind almost all the time up to 28.