New Players 1 0 1. How to make them stay and make-up the Power gaps?

[Potatofasf]

The tittle says it all.
Give solutions to easy the newcomers experience without throwing them pre-defined builds and make them comfortable playing their styles.

Not everybody wants to Sorcie out, W-lock blast way or Pew-pew-pew soloing everything.

What would be your cue to hook them for more than few hours of numbing gameplay?

[Karthunk]

The tittle says it all.
Give solutions to easy the newcomers experience without throwing them pre-defined builds and make them comfortable playing their styles.

Not everybody wants to Sorcie out, W-lock blast way or Pew-pew-pew soloing everything.

What would be your cue to hook them for more than few hours of numbing gameplay?

Only powergap that shows up is when we are talking about reaper.

[Yamani]

The tittle says it all.
Give solutions to easy the newcomers experience without throwing them pre-defined builds and make them comfortable playing their styles.

Not everybody wants to Sorcie out, W-lock blast way or Pew-pew-pew soloing everything.

What would be your cue to hook them for more than few hours of numbing gameplay?

Get the experienced players out of there ego bubble to help these said players (like a tutor!) Maybe even give them a boost in reaper points to get it started(not the dev's, the tutor.), prolly most of the "new player guides" are out dated and irrelevant anyways. And most of all stop pretending people actually care about the new players and actually do something yourself, using them as an excuse is a problem in todays forum users.

[droid327]

The power gap isnt between meta and non-meta builds. Its between vets and newbies because of all the PLs they will need to acquire.

All the salt about meta builds has nothing to do with the new player experience and everything to do with vets that want melee to always be arbitrarily defined as the strongest

As for pre-defined builds...one of the things that makes the game great is its flexibility in character creation, and that means having enough freedom to fail. Keeping players away from that precipice means putting training wheels on them at first, yes. But in the long run its what's going to retain players, once they learn enough to explore builds on their own.

[LurkingVeteran]

Get the experienced players out of there ego bubble to help these said players (like a tutor!) Maybe even give them a boost in reaper points to get it started(not the dev's, the tutor.), prolly most of the "new player guides" are out dated and irrelevant anyways. And most of all stop pretending people actually care about the new players and actually do something yourself, using them as an excuse is a problem in todays forum users.

Reset all PL/RP? :-)

The HC server technically did this and it seemed a huge success.

I think it's safe to say that the last ~5 years power creep from PL/RP is the biggest problem for new/returning players. They end up joining a reaper PUG and with their measly hp quickly get one-shoted. Meanwhile you have arcanes with several times their hitpoints. Especially the RP trees were just a really really bad idea for game balance. Something should probably be done, they have already made minor changes, but they might lose old players if they water this down too much.

Melee are also much worse off without the RP/PLs than ranged/nukers. I think that is a big reason for the arguments about Inq also. Yes, melee do fine if you have a ton of PL/RP, but if you don't, and don't play with a good CCer, most melee classes will have poor survivability.

The second problem is that many combat abilities are very clunky and outdated, and many trees just don't have any active abilities that are fun to use. Even new ones like Warpriest. Once every X seconds you press a button, and after some delay you get +10 more damage. There is little strategic thinking or twitch skill involved, just something you would prefer to macro for 5% DPS. Many that can have an effect are also just too random to rely on. The DDO basic attacks ares actually very good even by modern action MMO standards, so it's a shame that most DDO abilities feel more like something designed only on paper for a turn-based game. Personally, if an active ability has more than 6s CD I don't even want to bother. In 6 seconds you do 10+ attacks. Even a 6s auto-crit would be <10% DPS increase on average. For single target debuffs/CC, even 3 seconds feels like a long time in DDO combat. Contrast this to the slower WoW combat, where your special abilities are more than half your damage output.

When new trees are designed, they should start by adding some active abilities and making the gameplay interesting, then do the balancing.

[ShifterThePirate]

Stop splitting up the community with new game modes/servers would help... With Reaper and Hardcore it's really hard to find groups for new players that do normals.

[mr420247]

There is no way the devs r insane

3x pls to start just to start bs

and there losing so much money from it

every race class racial makes more tp then you will ever spend now

[Anuulified]

The tittle says it all.
Give solutions to easy the newcomers experience without throwing them pre-defined builds and make them comfortable playing their styles.

Not everybody wants to Sorcie out, W-lock blast way or Pew-pew-pew soloing everything.

What would be your cue to hook them for more than few hours of numbing gameplay?

To not read the forums and just make a toon and go have fun for themselves. Stop worrying about the havenots.