Let's Talk: Game Difficulty

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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A solution to the time put in and rewards vs failure would be to have more benefit to partially accomplishing something. This is already done to a small degree with chests through out quests and raids, but it would be nicer if more of these at major checkpoints gave more things of value. A very good example of this done well is shroud loot ingredients.

As to difficulty, I think things need to be more difficult in many places but NOT by just making stuff last longer by beefing up HP and Fort. That's just a war a attrition. LoB is a good example of high difficulty done well. I think another thing to avoid in high difficulty situations is making it so that one mistake can easily destroy the raid. Don't get me wrong, some of those mistakes should be very costly on higher difficulty things, but this is when resources should be called for in extra, make it hurt bad, but don't make it an absolute fail. An example of this gone bad is Abbot. A mistake in those puzzles by potentially one person often leaves no room for recovery even at the cost of more resources.

My first thought is class balance actually plays into this. Difficult for one class is not difficult for another.

My preference is that I expect normal to not be challenging for an over-leveled group, elite to have a risk of failure and no guarantee for success.

I will get a more detailed reply when I have more time. :)

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case?

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Yes.

I expect there are going to be some arguments stating that not everyone is cut out for end game, and/or epic content. This is a bunch of bunk. I have invested reasonable care into equipping and gearing my characters. I fully expect to be able to play in every aspect of the game. I expect to complete quests and game objectives in a reasonable amount of time. Sure, if mistakes are made running the quest, and we fail, I understand. What you have now doesn't feel right to me.

The top end should be hard. I don't think anyone should be soloing raids at level. At the other end of the spectrum though, the ship buffs have trivialized much of the lower end content. Sure a fully geared out TR should have an easier time, but when someone who just stepped off the boat as it were can run over everything it seems silly. There have been suggestions to scale ship buffs by appropriate level based on the spell/wand/scroll amounts and I support that idea if it is possible.

As for General quests....

With the new bravery bonus I have been running most quests on Elite. I find with an experienced group (meaning people who have played for a year and know the quest) that these are challenging, but the group will still succeed most of the time.

When I compare that to how I used to approach quests on Elite a year ago when I was a newb, this is very different. I was afraid of quests on Elite and they were very challenging for me, but having more experience with the game and particular quests makes a huge difference.

Now normal quests for me can easily be zerged, because I know them well enough and have my characters prepared.

As for Raids... I find these all very challenging. Some of them on normal are easy if you know them but still there is the threat of a possible wipe if things go bad.

As a casual player (read: slow to level), I really haven't noticed the Normal difficulty setting being an issue. Having recently brought my first character to level cap, there may have been the occasional quest where going in solo with a hireling was certainly difficult, but not extreme. Group questing typically lowers the overall difficulty as well.
To be fair, I haven't as yet run a lot of higher end content and raids. My first Shroud run on Normal setting was a couple of weeks ago and I was actually surprised how smooth, and in some sense "easy", it was with our group. Reflecting on it certainly highlights the benefits of good group communication and tactics. I was half expecting a party wipe after all the forum threads on how the blade damage mechanics were changed.
So to date, my limited experience with difficulty levels has been positive.

The difficulty in this game is schizophrenic. For example the Lordsmarch quest on elite are much harder than the GH quests on elite yet the GH quests are a higher level.

In the Flesh elite is harder than some epics, and definitely harder than Mindsunder elite.

I'd like to see stuff evened out and level appropriate, no more balancing a level 17 raid on people who have epic gear. A level 15 elite should be about as hard as a level 15 elite in a different pack.

Sentinels Elite mobs have DOUBLE the HP of old-school level 8 quests. Even it out. The "new" content feels right for close to level twinked people, it's hell on first-life non-twinked toons. Whichever you chose, please be consistent, level 8 elites mobs should be closer in HP to each other than they are in what we have now.

Regarding raids:

VoD and ToD: are fine right now, U11 elite was stupid hard, this is just difficult but not terrible.
Shroud: The blades do too much damage, this needs a nerf in all settings. I cannot believe your intention is for Elite Shroud to be harder than Elite ToD.
Titan: the drop-rate suck, please increase so we don't have to run this tediously annoying content over and over again.
Reaver: A level 14 raid shouldn't throw a 500 point spell at people, other than that it's fine.
Abbot: The HP on hard/elite are insane, cut them in half. And evasion? Really?
EChrono, eDragon, EQQ: are fine, leave them alone
LoB and MA: Have only done up to hard so I cannot comment on higher settings. Normal could be toned down a little so more people could learn the raid without it being so painful. One things though . . . FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY PLEASE STOP MAKING NEW JUNK THAT REQUIRES KITING OF MOBS. It is stupid, it is lame, it is boring and un-fun. Any time I see something like LOB where it's "kite this, kite that, etc . . ." it makes God kill a kitten. It's just so stupid and "MMO," please stop this silliness.

Challenges feel about right, other than the to-hit on the red-named mobs is stupid high meaning a melee requires a healer to follow him around to fight these things. Thats okay, we only bring our casters into these any way.

I don't think I want you touching Epic quests as I don't trust you not to make things worse.

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Originally Posted by Diyon

As to difficulty, I think things need to be more difficult in many places but NOT by just making stuff last longer by beefing up HP and Fort. That's just a war a attrition. LoB is a good example of high difficulty done well. I think another thing to avoid in high difficulty situations is making it so that one mistake can easily destroy the raid. Don't get me wrong, some of those mistakes should be very costly on higher difficulty things, but this is when resources should be called for in extra, make it hurt bad, but don't make it an absolute fail. An example of this gone bad is Abbot. A mistake in those puzzles by potentially one person often leaves no room for recovery even at the cost of more resources.

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Forgot about the fort-change stupidity of U11. All this does is marginalize melees over casters.

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

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There's a difference between challenging and just plain stupid. U11 ToD was just plain stupid, the current hard/elite abbot is just plain stupid. Just piling on HP and fort is the dumest change made to this game.

I mean if all a raid/quest is is a contest of who can kite mobs and toss heal scrolls you failed as a designer.

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard? NO, EXCEPT FOR TOP-END RAIDS

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout? DEFINITELY NOT

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you? THAT WOULD DEFINITELY BORE ME

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating. THIS IS ALSO A DDO-SPECIFIC ISSUE, GIVEN THAT OTHER MMO'S REWARD PLAYERS WITH XP EVEN WHEN THEY FAIL TO COMPLETE A QUEST. A GOOD SOLUTION WOULD BE TO GIVE QUESTS THAT YOU FAIL TO COMPLETE A PARTIAL COMPLETION OPTION, WITH REDUCED END REWARDS/XP, AND WHEN TURNING IT IN, SOME HINTS TO COMPLETE THE QUEST IF CHOSEN.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!' WITH THE EXCEPTION OF ABBOTT AND LOB, THIS IS NOT THE CASE. IT'S TRUE, THAT SOMEONE COMPLETELY NEW TO DDO WITHOUT A DECENT GUILD WILL HAVE TROUBLE JUST LEVELING, ESPECIALLY TRYING TO SOLO MOSTLY. THAT IS FINE, AND IS WORKING AS INTENDED, IMO, BECAUSE OF THE D&D ROOTS.

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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Thoughts in caps

Casual was introduced (IMO) as the never fail difficulty. Normal should still have some challenge to it.
On a scale of 1-10 though (10 being the hardest), I think:
casual should be a 1
normal should be a 3
hard should be a 6
elite should be an 8
epic should be a 10


Currently, normal is closer to a 2 and hard is closer to a 4
The difference between hard and elite is night and day

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

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Shorter quests at 'end game' may be a possibility. There are sometimes when I log on and just don't have enough time to wait around for a raid group to fill and then run a long quest. This is a little bit discouraging for me at times.

Also, I think a great change for difficulty would be to add more monsters. I think the changes to Weapons Shipment were greatly applauded. It is an intense quest that is exciting to play. I think that the difference between normal and elite difficulty should include a significant increase in the numbers of bad guys. This way you would feel like you are really getting ambushed or attacked by the enemy instead of the same 4-6 mobs around every corner.

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Originally Posted by grodon9999

Forgot about the fort-change stupidity of U11. All this does is marginalize melees over casters.

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Definitely. I glossed over that in my head since we were talking about game difficulty and not class balance, but they are somewhat tied together. As some others have said, making fort apply to spell crits could help here.

I believe that some of the recent changes to raid bosses have lifted the difficulty bar too high.

There is nothing wrong with augmenting the risk, so long as the reward is also directly augmented.

Personally, I believe that the most recent adjustments to The Shroud are fantastic. There is now much greater risk. However, there's almost an even amount of additional payout.

Argumentitavely, The Shroud (Normal) has also been made more difficult, and many suggest that it is no longer a Level 17 raid. I disagree, as I think the additional dangers in the blades have made the raid more exciting, and feel that level 17s can still complete this. The only problem that I have with The Shroud is that the PRIMARY ANTAGONIST now is Blades1, Blades2, Blades3, and Bladesx. This is kind of anti-climactic for poor Arraetrikos, who seems to have been reduced to a punching bag.

The contrary would be the Abbot raid.

As I understand it, raid loot out of the Abbot was seemingly much more rare. Further...it's a complicated raid. (Complicated - do not read this as "bad" - complicated, and requiring teamwork, is GOOD!)

Now with the raid boss balancing, some of the best players in the game have sworn the raid off entirely. Normal doesn't drop any loot to make it worth running. And Elite is too incredibly painful with the Abbot's new buffs. Sure, making players adapt is a good thing. A GREAT thing. But - having to beat on a raid boss for 20 minutes to wittle down all of his fully fortified HPs is not fun. ESPECIALLY if it comes with a heavy cost in the way of expendables and spell point potions.

So, I guess the tl;dr is:

Challenge == GOOD!
Challenge != Tedium
Tedium == BAD!
Increased difficulty with adequately increased rewards == GOOD!
Increased difficulty with expectation of taxing SP potions heavily == BAD!
Occasional "oh poo!" moments where minor use of resources are needed to succeed == GOOD!

Thank you for all that you guys do. I am constantly awed with the new content I experience. And, most importantly - the community LOVES YOU ALL when you communicate with us! :D

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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1. I find that a full party in many low too mid - lv quest have no problem finishing norm hard or elite. nothing lives long enough we just maul the enemy.

2. i find soloing elite in the 14-20 range much tougher than the lower quest, as i think it should be. (that's at lv or a lv or two behind)

3. over all i think the game in the last few yr's has become way too easy for the most part and the things that are tough are not so much tough as boring long beat down's , that is one reason i dont do alot of epic's i find them long drawn out boreing, altho i love epic chains:) always been a chains fan .:) love the game and Merry Christmas Turbine

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Originally Posted by Ganolyn

At the other end of the spectrum though, the ship buffs have trivialized much of the lower end content.

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That is true . . . the only thing that really makes a huge difference (the others are minor) are the resist shrines. We were never meant to have 30 acid resist when running Elite Proof is in the Poison at level 4-6. If at all possible this should be scaled down.

Low priority though, it all evens at at level 11 so it's not that big of a deal.

I think difficulty in this game is just fine. I don't consider myself an uber leet player, and I expect somethings to be very difficult for me to accomplish. I don't think that is bad.

Now the grind involved in accomplishing somethings IS extremely annoying. Specifically abbot flagging, and DQ loot. slightly off topic but related as difficulty should be rewarded. My suggestions for these specific instances would be:
abbot- add sigil pieces guaranteed on end rewards of appropriate quests. Also give a good chance of the random location pieces to show up on those end rewards.
DQ- make the 20th rewards based on class already. My wizard got to his 40th and vendored the chaosblade I got from the reward list because that was the most useful thing on the list. That was the same thing I did on my 20th also... in fact in 40 DQ runs I have never pulled a useful item for my wizard. I hear similar stories across the spectrum of classes for the things they are looking for. I feel like my effort there is entirely wasted, and am considering never entering the sands again, because I am tired of wasting my time there. Specific example: compare the time investment involved in acquiring and upgrading a toven's hammer vs the average amount of time a player has to spend to get a torc.

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Originally Posted by grodon9999

Low priority though, it all evens at at level 11 so it's not that big of a deal.

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It still makes a big difference to some. Calculate the cost of casting hour long reistance to all 5 elements on 12 people. It is alot of SP. The shrines are ~a sp pot on every caster you run with.

I think normal is quite easy. Trash dies in a few swings. This I kind of expect. This is why I don't really see a need for casual setting but to each their own.

Elite offers a decent challenge.

Hard is easy enough to just skip running beyond the first time bonus and doesn't offer enough extra XP to time to farm on this difficulty.

The bravery bonus is quite nice to entice players to run elite but it is still a one and done type of thing.

I think that leveling, to encourage players to run elite more than once for streak, XP should scale more for elite and less for normal. Right now, it is just quicker to run elite once for streak then do hard for first time bonus and any farming on normal because it is just so much quicker to blow through the quest on normal and repeat rather than farm on elite that would take a bit longer, and in some quests that have only one shrine, it would require a little better management of resources.

You can make sloppy mistakes on normal and still complete.

I like how Shroud was changed to offer extra chests for hard and elite difficulties and I think that quests that offer named loot, a increased chance of getting that loot should be scaled with elite difficulties. As far as I know, it doesn't, just gets us a chance at slightly better vendor trash so any farming I would do is just normal because it is quicker to complete and run again.

I have plenty of resources so early levels are not really a challenge. Things do get to be a bit more challenging toward the higher end but that is because mobs are actually hitting me for some real damage where early levels, I have pots of resists, haste, and the kitchen sink. I really would not expect this to change and I really have no problem with it staying that way. Early levels shouldn't be too difficult to discourage players.

I also don't think that content needs to be balance toward multi-TR'ed players. Epics should be a challenge to those that just capped and there should not be a requirement that you have multiple past lives to complete. If you balance content to multi-TR'ed twinked players, the average player isn't going to want to even to epics. It takes a while to get some of the loot needed just to be decent in epics as a first lifer, it would suck if you had to get all that gear AND get all the past lives just to have a chance in epics.

I think that you need mobs to buff themselves more. Players go in buffed to the hilt and then some. Mobs have nothing. I am so glad that epic ward went away but would like to see mobs buffed with spells that I can dispel. I don't mind mobs casting mass deathward, I would like it much more if I could dispel it, I hate blanket immunities. You could have mobs set with certain buffs such as FoM and resists when the players enter the quest but I would soooooo like it if I could actually have a real chance at dispelling that buff so that I can make my spells work.

I don't really think you are balancing to the hardcore player. I think that some of the changes upset people, I don't necessarly agree with all the changes, but I'm glad some things were changes...Shroud was just a joke in part 4 before so I'm really glad this was changed.

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Originally Posted by grodon9999

There's a difference between challenging and just plain stupid. U11 ToD was just plain stupid, the current hard/elite abbot is just plain stupid. Just piling on HP and fort is the dumest change made to this game.

I mean if all a raid/quest is is a contest of who can kite mobs and toss heal scrolls you failed as a designer.

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I agree with the first, but not the second. That just smells like standard mmo design. We have come to expect innovation and uniqueness in DDO. That the kite and heal is a bit substandard for what we have come to expect from the developers.

Every quest in this game once beaten once or twice can be beaten all the time by anyone. As long as communication is there.

Every raid can be beaten once you figure out the strategy. By strategy I mean that all raids have 1 main way every group does it. Word spreads by word of mouth or by other people sharing how it was beaten. As you (Turbine) changed some raids we have had to adjust what was being done, but it's still all the same.

I think in some stuff the game has been dumbed down but it doesn't follow the "uber-player". By dumbed down I mean stuff like dungeon scaling and dungeon alert.
For example: Weapon Shipment elite. I can go into that with a party of 6 and have to kill nearly 300 mobs. If I enter it solo on elite I will only have to kill 90 or so. Then I can just invite the other 5 once the titan comes on down.
Dungeon alert was made in my belief to slow zerging groups down that run past everything. Well it doesn't really slow those "zerging" groups down. Groups run past everything, gather them up at a certain alert level and then kill them all at once, and continue to run on.

I don't remember the specific name of the Amrath quest but you fight the end fight in the circle with the devil. That end fight is so much different on elite then it is on normal and hard which i believe is great! Though, once you have done it and got the strategy down it's a no-brainer like every quest in this game to succeed at.

Epics: Epics have the same strategy for all, and have even become the new thing to run "shortman". Why run epics with a full group of 6 since you can run them with half a group and they have less hp and it's like your doing it elite.

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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Normal should have the chance to wipe a new group, first time in the quest. I do not want “easy buttons” nor do I want have to grind for some piece of gear so I can run a quest / raid.

The problem comes from making quest that at level are wiping fully geared toons due to bad luck, the new shroud on normal should not be killing a 500 plus hit point melee because they cannot run away from some blades. A level 19 raid should not be significantly more difficult than a level 20 raid. Granted as tactics are developed to figure out the raid it will get easier, such is the nature of MMO quest / raids.

My solution would be to make the difficult level actually mean something other than just loot chances; Casual, should be easy to do, of course loot will be much less; Normal, should be a challenge to first time players (as in the first time they go in the quest) and be compellable rather easily with a group that works together and pays attention; Hard, should be a real challenge of skill, tactics, and teamwork; Elite, should be a major challenge even to the best geared toons at level; Epic, should be more than just an endurance and beat down fest.

Make quest have random traps in both type and locations, “hey rouge don’t worry about this trap, it only does acid damage and we all have acid resist” “when did they change it to blades?”. Have the mob spawns be random is size and in some cases type. “Oh, bring firewall because there are Trolls in here” “oops where did these fire reavers come from?”

Granted not all quest can have these elements but those that can will IMO really make the game more fun.

As to making quest for “uber-toons”, again that is what elite and epic are for.

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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One of the things that I dislike (and there are numerous quests in DDO where this is an issue, but recently the example would be the spawns in the LOB raid on elite/epic) is putting the harder to complete sections of the quests/raids at the end.

It's a good learning experience to find out that you don't have the right type of tools, or have the wrong character mix, or anything else that can keep you from completing a quest or raid. However, to find this out in the last five minutes of the quest, can be a huge dissappointment.

Just some quick thoughts on the Game Difficulty. I'll probably come back to this thread with more thoughts, but these are things I can think of right off.

There are 5 difficulties (Casual, Normal, Hard, Elite and Epic), use them please. If a level 20 is making content easy, adjest either the Elite setting or make an Epic level. There is no reason to rework the content in existing quests or raids from Normal to Elite because a capped player has been able to make the quests or raids easy.

Also, inflating HP and adding Fort just extends the length of the quest. They don't make the quest harder, just harder on the healer (usually a playing style that most people avoid wanting to play to begin with). Something that should be an alternative is to add DR to mobs on Elite. For example, Beholders should have a Byeshk DR, but currently in DDO I don't know of any Beholders that do. Why not, at least on Elite levels, adding Byeshk DR to beholders? It would be nice to put to use those Byeshk items that keep popping up in chests. I'm beholders aren't the only mobs that could have their proper DR on Elite difficulty.

Another alternative to Fort and HP increase is energy absorption. And unlike Fort that affects only melees, energy absorption affects everyone equally.

IMHO, ddo already have a nice way to balance things (except when it comes to epics).

We have 3 difficulties to choose from: Normal, hard and elite. Normal should be doable for any casual not perfectly geared player.

Hard should require a better geared casual player or some game knowledge

Elite should require good gear and game knowledge

To most quests it seens to be the case. Maybe some punctual adjustment should help a bit, but nothing big.

Problem seens to be the raids. Some raids seens to have gone one step higher, been almost non doable to a casual no greatly geared player on normal, and extremely challenging for a greatly geared experienced player on elite if at level.

On my current life I have taken an almost "elite once and done" strategy. It has been working greatly, except the only raid I have been able to run on elite so far was tempest spine. No one would even join a tr only lvl 8 chrono run. Filling a raid for that outside of internal guild runs is almost impossible, completing if you ever get that party is even farther.

I say raids difficulty should be lowered a bit.

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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I think there are a couple parts to that question. What do I feel is a reasonable success rate for the different difficulties and what party makeup am I thinking of when I consider those expectations.

This is just my opinon and observations when I consider if my time spent playing DDO was successful or not.

Normal - I expect to complete this 95% of the time with an average pug group. Applies to non-raids and raids.

Hard - I expect to complete this 90% of the time with an average pug group or 95% of the time with a more carefully selected group. Raids, maybe 10% less.

Elite - I expect to complete this 85% of the time with an average pug group or 90% of the time with a more carefully selected group. Raids, maybe 50% of the time with an average pug group or 80% of the time with a more carefully selected group since this represents the most challenging content.


Note: By average pug group non-raid I'm thinking one or two TR's with decent gear and knowledge, 2-3 non TR's that are decent players and either know the content or can follow a plan, and 1 person that is pretty much a liability for some reason. An average pug raid is usually a little stronger with 3-4 TRs, 6-7 non TR's that either know the content or can follow a plan, and 1-2 people that don't contribute much either due to player skill, build, gear, or communication issues. I'm also thinking that these players are at level for the quest.

Edit: I didn't answer one of your questions:
Q: We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'
A: I pug a lot because I like the variety, the challenge, and meeting new people, and think I have a pretty good feel for the average player. I also read the forums a fair amount and have a feel for what level of knowledge, gear, or skill an average forum poster has. Overall I think there is a fair gap between the average player and average forum poster when it comes to being capable of successfully completing quests. This could be because of any combination of knowledge, skill, or gear. As a result, I think any game balancing based on forum feedback doesn't represent the average player well. I'd say you either need to solicit feedback from players, for example using email or links in the launcher to surveys, or assume there is a drop off between what the average forumite thinks is just right and what feels right to the average player. It is important to get feedback from the average player since they represent the future growth of the game.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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Regarding the difficulty of ddo, there seems to be a large difference between older quests and newer ones, in old quests mobs aren't dangerous no matter the difficulty, partly due to having what used to be casters swapped for rangers, and partly because in old quests traps used to be the dangerous element. Older quests used to have less shrines and also made watching resources and playing carefully more important.

New quests seemed to be designed towards, take lots of damage, deal lots of damage, stop, rest, repeat. Removing some of the shrines in hard / elite, or using the old tear of dekhaan style behind locked doors (that are super hard to knock) would be more fun imo than what we have now.

When i started playing there was no casual and I did expect to fail on normal sometimes. 1 year later when I started to really know the game, I expected to never fail on normal, but that's due to knowledge / twinking / resources. I expect that new players should never fail casual, and have the same experience with normal as I did / do now.

Re: spending 45mins to fail a quest with no progress at all is frustrating, It's worse when doing epics or raids, and spending 45 mins on an epic quest, or elite raid, with no epic ingredients or raid loot. Getting epic tokens or fragments is not enough progress, and getting just a completion with no loot for any of the 12 people is not enough progress. I'd like to see a system where hard counts as two raid completions, and elite guarantees loot and counts as 2 raid completions. Regarding epics, the drop rates on seals and shards needs to be increased.

Moving onto your designing quests for the "uber-player" I disagree with this, I consider myself to be very good, and very well geared, yet in U11 you didn't cater quests towards me, You catered them to "Uber-groups" I didn't struggle with the raid changes in my guild runs, but in pugs they were a nightmare, I hated them, and stopped running them outside of guild until u12. I like where EVon 6 and EDQ are now, echrono i tolerate because the loot just makes it worth it. Shroud I dislike the blades, and I dislike how much harder it is for a new player in there than it was for anyone who started in 2009, Shroud is the gearing raid, players need it to achieve reasonable benchmarks for other raids.

The elite / hard changes to von 6, reavers, were and are over the top, either hugely increase drop rates or revert them to their old standard, as it is now esp with bravery i don't bother running either at level as most pugs aren't going to succeed.

What you did wrong with content this year was make old frequently run content tough to the point you mostly killed it, whilst ignoring abandoned area's like threnal / 3bc, they could be toughened up and have their level range increased.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

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My thought is this: if you put the time and effort in to grind out all the end-game gear and work to improve your skills and builds, you're entitled to the Easy Button.

Now, this isn't so much for newer content or Epic Difficulty on older stuff. That should be a challenge... "Is shortman Elite ToD too easy? Try our new raid, the Ultimate Meatgrinder From Hell... and that's just on the Casual setting!"

This is more aimed at trying to reinvent the older raids. There are people who haven't or can't put in the time to become uber, and as of late it is becoming harder for them to run the content that older players have perhaps become bored by. While someone with nothing but Epic and Greensteel gear would find Normal Shroud a cakewalk, someone who just hit the Vale for the first time and barely has any raid loot may see it as an insurmountable challenge.

If that isn't a horrid enough example, then I suggest taking completely ungeared characters into Abbot. It went completely off the deep end in U12. You could change it to yield the most loot of any quest in the game on Elite and I still doubt people would feel it was worth burning all those pots for. Normal should be old Elite, Hard should be post-U9 Elite, and Elite should be current Hard. Save current Elite for if and when you Epic the Necropolis. That'd be balanced.

My suggestions would mainly be as follows:

- Try to leave the older content alone - if you bump up the rewards (Hard/Elite Shroud), then it's okay to tinker with the difficulty some, but there's no increased reward to running Ultimate Meatgrinder From Hell (otherwise known as Elite) Abbot. There's actually less reward from running Abbot now with the nerfed base loot!

- DO NOT CHANGE NORMAL - I can't emphasize this enough. Give the newer/casual players a chance to learn the content and maybe get a shot at gear so they too can become jaded powergamers. Even some of the higher-end players want something they can go on autopilot for so they can rack up completions for that hard-to-find piece of raid loot or tome (this is my case with ATDQ2 lately.) We've started to adapt to the new Shroud now, but that does NOT make it OK to do this to other raids in the future.

- This one's for the powergamers - if the game really has become too easy for you, try something new. Go permadeath. Start completely fresh on a new server (no character transfers - roll a completely new character.) Intentionally challenge yourself by rolling a gimp character and seeing if skill alone can carry you. There's plenty of things y'all could be doing besides the usual "This is too easy now because I have all the loot" spiel.

I have a few issues I want to talk about here.

Abbot: This raid is brutal. One mistake and the entire raid is wiped UNLESS you have a PLIS... I don't know if Mantle helps or not. Also, a lot of bugs have been said to exist here. However, my issue is the puzzles. Asteroids is just the right amount of time. Ice is too easy. However, goggles can be finicky because lag can be a huge factor here. It's also too long in my honest opinion. Also, the abbot has too much HP.

Titan: EPIC. That is all... Okay, I know it's not hard but MORE LOOTS.

I had more things but then I forgot them.

It's nice that some of the content is insanely hard.

every wannabelegolas shouldnt be able to step into all content and win without a sweat

I prefer the 5-10 min quests that you can knock out quickly. As levels increase the time to complete also seems to increase. I am fine with that, even if it is the norm, but I like the 5-10 minute completion times of Korthos, harbor and marketplace. I find that any quest that lasts 20+ minutes I prefer to put off or skip completely. I do run Jungle of kyber/Wiz-King for the xp and enjoy them. But most times i see a lfm for xorian cypher or Tempest spine and end up switching to a low level alt and running them instead. I do like the 4 harbor solo quests and raiding the giants vault so maybe I would like more short solo quests in the 4-17 level range. The challenges would be like this for me but they are longer, and failure is an option. If i could solo them and knew that I(not you, you uber elite epic'ed out twitch spec ops trained unprofessional) would complete 90+ percent of the time i would prob run them more. But i have never been able to solo one even when i ran the level 4 one on my level 20. Last, less of the tricky walls like in coal chamber or raiding the giants vault if i wanted to play a plat-former game, then I would play that instead, I like strategy games i have reflexes that seem to require 3 second to react and very poor timing.
/end wall
I really enjoy DDO and want less challenge, more bs'ing with friends while we tackle/cakewalk through some random quest.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

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It honestly depends quite a bit on how many folks are in a group, and familiar with the quest, and capable of handling themselves, since the introduction of dungeon scaling. I'm not quite sure if you're aware of just how much of an impact that has on questing areas, so to use a simple example from when I got my maybar docent last go around:

In vale, checking procrate vs the typical 5 rats. Guildie in the party but not present in the zone. The proc alone kept the hitpoint bar maxed on out. As soon as he poped by, it started dropping a recognizable amount. At least to the point I had to turn on the aura.

Ok, there's a caster perspective. Now a melee one:

Amranth normal Sins of Attrition on an AC 70 dr 10/adamantine toon with a vampiric bastard sword: solo, that's enough to make it through with the occasional turtle and cleave. Bring one more person along, and that will not in any shape or form cut it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

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Player power fluctuates alot in fits and starts due to the pres overpowering the class inherent abilities instead of supplementing them. The older quests were built without those pres in mind, while the newer ones were not. It shows when you compare, say gianthold and lordsmarch, to name a couple I'm working a pair of TRs through. Throw in the massive difference in available gearing for experienced long time players, and the road-blocks that keep getting thrown up to bring the new guys up to what we consider par, and yeah, there's inconsistencies.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

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Normal needs to have enough lessons in it to prepare folks for hard where the lessons are useful, and then to elite where they are needed. This is not helped by blanket player immunities and 2-dimensional stats allowing folks to just plow through things and ignore situational awareness entirely.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

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Protecting Coyle is 15 minutes, and the poster child for getting it wrong. It is good to sweat a bit over completing, but the all or nothing reward is the biggest source of irritation. Take a page from Desert Caravan instead, with the rednames giving you a bit of xp, and the time points giving you a bit more, and that goes from 'we just wasted 14 minutes' to 'well, at least we got x'.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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It's not so much that you've been balancing this for the uber-player, as the uber-connection. Those blades in shroud that got all the complaints don't hit nearly as hard as a single epic trashmob (and that's only 2-4 character levels or so away for most folks most of the time.). Once. Hit a lagspike, and combine that with the physics checks that cause it to proc far more often than any mob attacks, and they accumulate to more than a redname.

I will however say there's far too much stacking in the game at present, and it's got side effects. Arcane damage stacking inflates mob HP while gutting offensive UMD, to-hit stacking inflates mob AC to the point where investing in damage mitigation is chancy, AC stacking inflates mob to-hit to the point of near-uselessness, and it all ends up stove-piping builds into all or nothing with very few situations where a partial commitment to some aspect of a character leads to a partial success that's worth the tradeoff, and this is really apparent when comparing classes with multiple attribute dependency. And that undercuts alot of flexibility, and hence replayability.

Possibly more later.

First part: The pre-20 game. A disclaimer: This comes from the perspective of a long-term veteran. Edit: Post 67 has a lot more in it.


General:
I think difficulty should be somewhere around the following. Note that quests with 'Extreme Challenge' warnings are IMO fair game to be two difficulties higher than this (so 'Extreme Challenge: Normal can be as tough as non-extreme Elites).
Casual: Sure success unless your play session is interrupted, you totally ignore quest parameters, or do something really, really dumb. You should not need to play to your class's strengths here. The Casual setting is needed in raids, IMO - I'll get to that later in my next post which is a fair way down in the thread.
Normal: Sure success if everyone has somewhat level-appropriate gear and is making a reasonable attempt to work together. No surprises that wipe unprepared groups (although surprises that kill individual players are OK in full groups). Mobs should not have save-or-die effects (including Disintegrate) as this is meant to be solo-friendly.
Hard: Casual players with no foreknowledge should succeed within three tries, possibly needing some resources. Party wipe surprises are only to be used to punish groups that do stupid things (e.g. enter Dead Pixel's room despite clear warnings 'this room has a very tough fight in it').
Elite: Might be beyond level-appropriate casual players unless they make a lot of attempts.
Elite+ (only relevant in 'extreme challenges): Veterans are likely to take multiple tries to get their first completion, and might need resources. Example of this today: Elite Bastion of Power.
Elite ++ ('extreme challenges' only): Completing this, at all, should be something worth bragging about. Example: Elite Stealer of Souls with Sor'jek when the cap was 16.

An example of a quest I think is balanced perfectly: Blown to Bits. Casual you will win unless you blow yourself up away from a rez shrine (i.e. ignore quest parameters or do something really dumb). Normal is pretty similar but you don't want to go in there with 170hp and no fortification. Hard is a little rougher, and Elite is a moderate challenge to veterans, with mobs putting up a real fight.


One last general point I elaborate on more in the next post I made (20 or so posts down the thread): The way DDO handles total party wipes is not pleasant. DDO could learn a bit from WoW in how to handle party wipes - for all that combat in that game is lackluster, they do get you back in the action fast after a wipe. I've been in PUGs in that game that have stuck together throughout 5 or 6 wipes because you are back in the fray within 2 minutes. OTOH, in DDO, recovering from a wipe might take ten minutes (everyone but one person recalls to the tavern, restocks HP/SP/boosts, then needs to meet up, run together through an explorer area killing their way back to the quest, then has to run all the way through the quest again).


Low level (1-7):
Casual/Normal are generally very forgiving (as they should be). Non-boss monsters can't do much to you unless they really swarm you.
Hard is usually too close to Normal, IMO.
Elite varies - in quests with enemy spellcasters, Elite with airship buffs is like Casual, but without airship buffs, it's actually really tough, especially since the changes to Lightning Bolt.

Suggestions: Level-restrict the 30 resist shrines. Low level is otherwise pretty well balanced - there are quests to suit pretty much anyone's preferred difficulty. There's the odd outlier quest (Proof is in the Poison, Chronoscope) that are much, much harder than their level indicates, but they are the exception not the rule. If you want to do anything, leave Casual, Normal and Elite as they are, but up Hard a little so the Normal to Hard jump is roughly the same as the Hard to Elite jump.



Mid level (8-15 or so):
Quest by quest variance here is more significant than difficulty setting. Chains of Flame normal is significantly more difficult than Trial by Fire Elite, for instance. This is IMO a problem.
Throughout all of these levels, almost all mobs just have no answer to the 'gather up 20 mobs, Acid Rain or Fireball them down' strategy. This lets veterans obliterate almost everything in this level range.
These levels are where the gap between veteran completion times and newbie completion times really widens - consider VON3, which I've done on Hard in under 10 minutes, but where a newbie might spend an hour and a half then not be able to defeat the Marut or the Troika before it. Xorian Cypher is similar - 4 minutes if your group speedrun it flawlessly, 45+ if you don't know it.

Suggestions: Reassess the Challenge Ratings of some quests. Add some abilities mobs can use on kiting players (not ray spells for obvious reasons, and not things FoM blocks - think things like Power Word Stun, PW: Blind, Dispel Magic, Divine Punishment, Burning Blood, Chain Lightning, and arrows of Slowburst, all of which can harry rapidly moving players).
But most of all: Warn players when they are about to step into a quest that is likely to wipe first-timers. VON3, VON4, Offering of Blood, Chains of Flame, most of Necro 3, and Crucible all need an 'extreme challenge' warning. The most common 'this game is too hard' feedback I've heard is from people has come from people stepping into one of those quests with no foreknowledge. A casual player that's just soloed Stormcleave on Normal and is now stepping into VON4 is more likely to enjoy the experience if they select Casual difficulty, and the 'extreme challenge' warning will help guide them to that difficulty.

High level (15-20, excluding raids)
Really this is all over the place. Some is much harder than endgame content (Elite Stealer of Souls is harder than any 6-person Epic content, as is Elite Bastion of Power). Some is mind-numbingly easy to me (IQ/DD chains, excluding Elite Mindsunder) but might interest some other types of players. There's few quests that are short in this range, which makes it difficult to do anything when you have limited time, unless you are a seasoned zerger.

Suggestions: Add more short quests that aren't the really easy Inspired Quarter ones. Reassess challenge ratings - leave the quests themselves alone, but change the CRs so that a newer player can make a more informed decision about which quests to attempt. Specifically (and yes I know I'm quoting myself here and that that is weird, but I did make these suggestions just days ago :) ):

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sirgog

My wishlist for the Update 13 release notes.

...(lots of stuff not related to this thread)

High Level Quests - Challenge Rating Reassessment
To make it clearer to players what the relative difficulties of these quests are, the following quests have had their CR changed (and as such, now award slightly different levels of random loot):
Against the Demon Queen (the preraid): Promoted to level 14.
Inspired Quarter: All quests demoted to level 17, except Mindsunder remains level 18.
Dreaming Dark: All quests demoted to level 17, except The Dreaming Dark which is demoted to level 19
Reaver's Refuge: All quests promoted to level 18, except Stealer of Souls which is promoted to level 20
Acid Wit: Promoted to level 18
In the Flesh: Promoted to level 17
Amrath: All flagging quests promoted to level 20, except Bastion of Power promoted to level 21. Tower of Despair promoted to level 22. Both non-flagging quests demoted to level 18.
Also note the earlier suggestion related to doing something similar for Epics.

All Quests - Quest Length Indicators:
Quests are presently rated as 'short', 'medium', 'long' or 'very long'. These ratings have all been reassessed. All ratings assume no foreknowledge of the quest, and that no shortcuts are used.
In addition, quest length changes (if required) with difficulty setting - so a quest like A Vision of Destruction that takes ungeared groups quite a bit longer on higher difficulties will show up as 'medium' if you run it on Normal, but 'long' if run on Elite.
Quests are marked as 'short' if it is expected that a level-appropriate party with no foreknowledge of the quest would complete it in under 10 minutes. Example: Stand Your Ground
Quests are marked as 'medium' if they are expected to take 10-20 minutes. Example: Running With The Devils
Quests are marked as 'long' if they are expected to take 20-30 minutes. Example: Prison of the Planes
Quests are marked as 'very long' if they are expected to take longer than 30 minutes. Example: The Shroud
Quests are marked as 'extremely long' if they are anticipated to take players over an hour. This only really comes up for chains that are hard to pick up partway through.
Quests are marked as 'varied length' if they have significant optionals that, if done, add a lot to completion time. Example: Gianthold Tor is 'varied length - very long'; Litany of the Dead is 'varied length - long', and so is The Missing Party from Delara's Tomb.
Finally, quests are marked as 'multi-part' (in addition to a length) if they are part of a chain that is hard to pick up midway through. Example: Captives of the Cult (part 1 of the Cult of Six chain) is marked as 'multi-part, extremely long'. Freeing Achka (Grey Moon Waning part 1) is marked 'multi-part, very long'.
...

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My second post will have what I'm more concerned with, the game at 20. That's post #67, IIRC.

Balancing difficulty in this game is extremely difficult because of the range of players... Things that can be soloed by well geared TR could potentially crush a party of new ungeared players, especially if they don't already know the quest.

The difficulty levels at the moment don't quite feel right to me. When I first started playing ~1 year ago I feared running anything on elite because I failed them, regularly. Now with a couple TR's under my belt and more experience, these quests are mostly a walk in the park to solo.

So I think the levels need to be rejigged slightly:
Casual - Should be soloable by a new player on their first life with limited gear (This allows new players to learn quests, get xp and gear if for whatever reason they don't like partying up/don't have time for a party to fill)
Normal - Should be a slight challenge for a party of new players with limited gear (Where challenge means that if a couple of mistakes are made the chances of completing drop unless resources are used, Encourages better teamplay and coordination for better xp)
Hard - Should be a bit of a challenge for a geared TR to solo( This 'should' also make it possible to do with a well geared party of new players/first life toons)
Elite - Should be a challenge for a TR party (This one is all about risk vs reward. A PUG consisting of a few TR's and a couple well geared new players will find it a fair challenge but could complete with good teamwork, A group of vet's who TR together and know each others abilities and the quests should even find this a slight challenge, but lets face it - if you balanced elite around those players it would become extremely exclusive and new players would never even attempt it)
Epic - Should be... Well, Epic. Capped Toons first life or not, with decent gear (Greensteel, ToD sets ect) should be challenged, somewhere around a 70% completion rate. At the moment most epics can be walked through with just a small amount of coordination just 1-3 well geared toons (One or more would need to be a caster but this isn't the place to be discussing that)

Here's a question to the playerbase:

Would you accept Elite/Epic quests that smacked you around like gimps, even with fairly good gear, stats, skills, multiple TR's etc...; where you had more of a chance to fail than succeed; where you need good planning, communication, tactics, skill, a little luck and still the outcome is not in the bag; as long as at the end of it you were guaranteed something you might want to loot to help you progress your game? This would make beating the quest the goal and not a certain number of completions hoping for a good drop. Yeah, you'd die a lot, but you would become better players for it and not treadmill runners. Would this be preferable to the mindless repetitive head banging that grinding and hoping the luck gods smiling on you that is in effect now?

I think to say "The game is too hard" or "The game is too easy" is too broad of a stroke to be taking. Really, we need to be able to see that we can leave appropriate, targeted, qualitative feedback on specific Quests, Mobs, Encounters, and Difficulties. Also, with 12 distinct classes, the relevance of party composition also comes into play. Saying "The game is geared toward the Uberleet" or "The game is way watered down easy button" ... it's just too general. How does feedback based on such premises turn into a change in product?

So, I will leave at least a couple pieces of feedback that are more targeted:

• Air Elementals - They were bad, then they were good, now they are bad all over again. 1 is bad in and of itself, and can significantly increase the difficulty of an encounter well beyond it's challenge rating - 2 or more in a pack become a nightmare. Was duoing Casual Running with the Devils with a level 16 Dex-Based Rogue, a level 18 Paladin, a level 18 Cleric hireling, and a level 13 Bard Hireling. There was a particular area in the middle where two elementals, a Djinn (who went into "invincible air form"), and two Invisible stalkers - and it nearly wiped us. That's *Casual*. It killed both hirelings, and even as a Dex Rogue found myself getting tossed and knocked over regularly not because of low reflex saves, because of lack of a cooldown or immunity timer on their various effects - 15 saves in the span of less than 0.5 seconds? Yeah, I'm likely to roll a 1 on at least one of them.
  
• Abbot - Not the puzzles, they're fine provided you have no server lag, no ISP lag.. whatever. The Black Abbot himself. High HP, High AC, High Saves, multitude of Undead + Lich + Purple Name immunities, and Evasion? It's just entirely too much on one mob. He's a caster - he should low AC. He's a Sorcerer, I believe? If I'm remembering that right, he should have a pretty poor Reflex, as well, since he can't benefit from Insightful Reflexes like a Wizard would. His Fortitude probably shouldn't be all too stellar, either. And where exactly does Evasion come from? It really doesn't serve the flavor of the mob. It's an example of a "super mob" - just because someone wants to Ascend to Godhood, that doesn't mean they are without imperfection.
  
• Quests where the trash/effects/etc end up becoming more of a threat than the boss mob - For example, Elite New Invasion. Barnzidu? I could care less about. But his traps, combined with the aforementioned Super-Air-Elemental? Different story. In this situation, you've got a relatively weak boss, to the point that he is on the back burner. The bigger concern is evading traps, getting a Power Word : Kill off the moment the Air Elemental spawns and hoping you don't get the "You are not facing..." Error that's been cropping up so much lately, and then you can deal with "the big bad". His Binding Chains are only scary and dangerous not because it allows him to close on you, but because it makes it very difficult to avoid the traps - again, the traps become the highlight, not the boss. Likewise, Shroud on Hard or Elite shares this issue - instead of the Boss, Arraetrikos, being the "difficult part", the new difficulty is instead the Blades, an "Effect". By Effect, of course, I mean that they do not follow the rules for either a Mob, or a Trap, or a Spell. They do not have AC, HP, and are immune to all player interactions attempting to stop them (Web, Dancing Ball, Massive Damage, Disable Boxes, other attempts to "Thwart" them.) They also do not have To-Hit, so player AC is irrelevant, and they do not have a standard Trap/Spell Save, so player Saves or status of Evasion is irrelevant. This is again where Turbine basically deviates dramatically from a D&D perspective. There really is no "Cure" for Blades, no resist, no buff, no offensive or defensive action aside from Large HP Pools, and Fast Response Healing. Different from that is Arraetrikos : He is an enemy mob with a To-Hit, spells with DCs and specific damage types, etc. He can be Debuffed, he can be destroyed, his spells can be saved or buffed against, etc. So... again, rather than the boss who intends to make Shavarath coterminus taking the spotlight... some "effect" of dead Barbazu becomes the focal point of Parts 3, 4, and 5.
  
• Caster Level/Hit Dice issues : These cause more problems in the game than we tend to think about, I believe. They can greatly influence the outcome of an encounter. An Epic Quest with all Ogres? Great. Cast Mass Hold, move on. An Epic Quest with all Drow? Same "Difficulty", except a great deal of a caster's spellbook is instantly nullified by the fact that they have SR45~46 on Epic Difficulty settings. Yes, there are non-SR-based techniques, but that's not solving the problem, it's adapting to lack of sufficient solution to the problem - make them 25 HD mobs instead of 35 HD ones, and an SR of 35~36 ends up being more a level well casters will see 40%~80% efficacy of "Landing" their spells, dependant upon how much they have focused on Spell Penetration. Likewise, when a CL:21 Greater Dispel Magic and rolling a 20 is insufficient to "Remove" a Symbol of Pain Debuff cast by an Epic Caster? That Epic Caster's Caster Level needs to be toned down. Player Character Caster Levels and Spell Resistances become as irrelevant in most Epic Difficulty settings as AC does.
  
• Difficulty Versus Reward : This is often a problem that I see, and hear complained about. Running Elite VoD is probably somewhere on the order of 6 times more difficulty than a Normal VoD, as a practical example. It will take longer, require more damage, more resources, better saves and gear... etc. However, the rewards for completion of Elite are not so different. A few new items? Good. But there is still a maximum of 3 chests, with only 3 chances for Major Pots/Renown/etc. It's sad that I can run one of the Dreaming Dark quests in 5~6 minutes, pick up the reward in 60 seconds, and be back in to repeat process, and net more material worth *and* renown than a 12 man group can do running an Elite Raid. Abbot Elite shares this issue - 1 Chest? Really? Really? 1 "Named Loot" chest - and five CR18 Trash loot chests. Do it. Elite DQ and Epic DQ have the same "Junk loot" chest? No. Epic should have an additional CR20 Trash loot side chest, the kind with a chance at unbound +3 Tomes. Do it - reward players that both attempt and succeed at high degrees of difficulty.

That's all for now.

Edit : Looking at that, that is a big wall of garbage. Horrible looking. I apologize. It might help to Copy/Paste individual bullets into Word and read them or something, because the forum format did not come out well.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO?

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The most-outstanding specific problem with DDO's difficulty: the lack of Normal Epic, Hard Epic, and Elite Epic. If NHE settings are good for level 1-19 dungeons, they'd be good at level 20 too.

The bigger problem (and more difficult to deal with) is spellpoint potions, and how they form an entire other axis of success/failure. Do other MMORPGs allow players to spend consumables to power through tough fights like that?

Yet another big problem is the loose way DDO measures a character's power, since whether an encounter is difficult is relative to the character attempting it. DDO deals with this by applying XP penalties or other drawbacks if a character is "too strong" for the content, as measured by his level. But the truth is that a 34-point FVS 13 with a Supreme Tyrant Greensteel Greatsword of Lightning is a much stronger character than a Drow Paladin 17, but yet the weaker character is penalized for being overlevel.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

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The giant pitfall with that kind of feedback is that it rests on the assumption that difficulty is a scalar; that all difficulty is interchangable. Of course, the truth is there are many different ways to make some content more difficult, and the various approaches can lead to very different gameplay enjoyment levels.

Once again, the problem overshadowing all that is that if you give Boss X +100% hitpoints, he'll stay alive +100% longer and do +100% damage, requiring +100% healing and up to +100% spellpoint usage. In one sense the battle has become way way more difficult. but almost all of that "difficulty" can be conquered by doing the exact same things a bit longer and clicking a few mnemonic bottles as-needed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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I'm sure class type matters some, especially against certain foes. If built as a min/max, that probably changes things too. I'm an old (OLD) pnp player... I built "characters" for my own fun, each life I've slipped a little closer to min/max allocation of points, and definitely putting more in CON that I would for pnp. It's... annoying... to do that with a DND character. Even kinda botched, it'd be nice to shine!

I think (would like) that every player/character/build stood a good chance at progressing through quests on Elite... also since that is favor reward bumps that unlock other additions and aspects of the game. It'd be nice for folks to have easier access to more content. Let there be that "Epic" level/version of quests where people who want a "challenge" *playing* a "game" can go and feel like they are pushing their attributes, gear, and personal twitch skills to red-line conditions.

In general for the higher level quests I'm one who would say that I would like an easier time on Hard and Elite difficulties... because that is where the xp is. Repeating on casual and normal the xp penalty kicks in to quick to count on that for good leveling. For the characters I build, the race I prefer to play, my playstyle, my gear there are many high level quests I actively avoid even on their casual or normal setting. Maybe that will change on life 10 or so....

I really enjoy most the quests and leveling from 1 to about level 13 (I'm a TR addict and like to see progress taking place). Levels 14-15 are okay... but the spread of quests is poor. I hate levels 16-20... even on Normal I find many of the quests full of foes and mechanics that sap a lot of the fun out of "playing" a *game*.

I have never done Shroud - I'm not likely too. What I've read about it sounds like a messy PITA. So, in my recurring lives I don't have greensteel items. I don't grind out Mabar, Cove, or Challenge stuff either. After trying the early cumbersome, confusing, unintuitive (compared to pnp magicking up better gear/weapons), unfun repetative button-clicking annoyance of "crafting" I haven't done that either.

Many of the quests on hard or elite, say in the levels 12-20 range, probably are a breeze for people with greensteel and uber epic'd gear. That's not me. That's not first life 28pt builds (I guess those folks still exist in the game and we get more now and then? Don't we even *want* more of them... they are new people to play the game?). I can't imagine folks who aren't guilded up and playing consistently with good parties finding much fun in many of those.

Critters like mephits, glass spiders and eye-horrors that do spawn-offs of additional critters... that do Not count towards kill count (but can be deadly, use resources, and can damage gear) are miserable. Blanket Immunities suck... I want a chance to be able to use all my abilities/capabilities/spells and see them be effective.

The mechanic where if one parties with another who is 4 levels higher the XP penalty hit is painful makes grouping in the higher level quests miserable as well. Limits too many chances to get into quests (even on normal) and see some good xp accumulated.

Some Wilderness Zones (Desert, Water Works, Red Fens, Restless Isles) could stand to have more critters added to instances that are just groups of fun, nice stuff to kill. Not every critter on the map has to be a potent foe. Especially for first life 28pt new players running through the area.

Puzzles. OMFG Puzzles. Some of them are deity-awful stupid to figure out *in-game* and benefit from doing (The Sane Asylum, Dream Conspiracy). I've recently been in a couple groups where we have been screaming along having a great time together and... pfftttt... those puzzles are a complete bog. Have had people drop group while trying to "solve". Swamp. Suck of time. Unless... someone is able/willing to alt-tab off to a freaking wiki to find a solution. Not Fun In The Game World.

If this actually saves (this message) will try to edit later with better/more details.

Personally I am finding the difficulty levels quite confusing. I am running my first TR and am trying to run everything on hard. I have noticed that hard in some quests are simple while some are a lot harder. The Catacombs at level are very easy, while the Seal pack is quite a bit harder (and longer).

I never did see a significant difference between normal and casual. Hard is definitely harder and Elite is a step harder still.

I am more annoyed with the xp awards for quests. It doesn't seem like the length of many quests are taken into account in the xp awards.

I recently got my 69 year old father to sign up for a F2P account. He's computer literate but not game savvy. After a month of casual play and much tutelage, he is beginning to learn the ropes. Watching him play, I'd have to say that at least low-level content is tuned just about perfectly for the casual or new player.

He's mostly been puttering about Korthos trying to figure the basic mechanics of running his character. He dies every once in a while but can handle most content on normal. Granted I've twinked his character so that failure is almost an option, but he's having fun and not getting discouraged when he fails a quest.

I suppose the greatest challenge he faces is simply the scope of the game. There is so much to do, so many lessons to learn. What I now take for granted, he has yet to master or even encounter. DDO has a high barrier to entry for a new or casual player. Not because the quests themselves are terribly difficult, but rather that the game is so enormous it can be overwhelming.

from 1-19 I find the game to be appropriately easy/difficult based on what settings you use n/h/e when you TAKE AWAY DUNGEON SCALING. With the exception of traps, I often find it easier to solo something on elite versus playing it on normal with a full party.

I like the general direction the game has taken with quest/raid difficulty over the past 6 monthsish. My only comment would be that some of the HP levels seem more than a little excessive. My favorite thing about DDO was the fact that as a semi'casual player, I could still run endgame content with only short bouts of 30 minute or an hour play time. Between organizing a party, the super high HP of elite/epic bosses, and the unneccarily long wilderness treks, I find it hard to participate in the new raids. Not b/c my characters are not up to snuff, but simply the time investment is not there. I can count on one hand currently my completions for both MA and LoB. I've enjoyed both of them alot when I have had a chance to play them, both on normal and epic. But I dont like having to wonder, "do I have time to sit in a LFM, clear to the quest, and complete before the wife comes home?"

TR'ing is nice b/c no matter how little time you have to play, you can log on and knock out some exp and actually accomplish something. Its a grind, but certainly not challenging. The new top tiered raids on the other hand actually seem to require some time investment

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

occasionally. some quests are just harder than others. some are easier. an easy lowbie example of a 'hard' normal quest would be Proof in the Poison. sure ship buffs have trivialized it a great deal, but it's still no walk in the park.

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

to some degree there are 'breaks' at what used to be previous level caps where the overall difficulty ramps up a bit (stepping into Gianthold for the first time ever is a bit of a daunting eye-opener) but that's not necessarily a bad thing

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

normal should be scaled so that a first time first life not-well-geared character can complete with some difficulty, but not too much. failing repeatedly is discouraging. failing once or twice usually sparks a person to ask "why did i fail. how can i do better?" especially if they were close to finishing.

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case?

YES YES a thousand times yes! it is a bit hard not to when a game gets a few years on it, and everyone has at least *some* gear... but i remember when i first started. i remember that some quests kicked my arse on normal. some zones were SCARY. Gianthold kicked my rogue's backside six ways to sunday, and god i avoided Shavarath my entire first life with Pointless, and she was my first 'capped' character. i was neither confident in my skills, nor my character, to play in a zone that difficult compared to what i was used to. the first time i ran IQ quests i remember thinking how hard it was. even the first time i tried to run it on Pointless' second life was a bit messy and trialsome. 2 days ago i ran Finding the Path normal, solo. as in, not even a hire. it was... easy. i was amazed at how easy. my husband and i turned around and duo-ed all IQ and most of DD (everything except the end quest with the dreamforge) on hard and breezed through it (ok, we didn't 'breeze' thru mindsunder, but we did complete with reasonable ease). but if the game were to be balanced to give us, a pair of decently geared third life TRs, a challenge, it would be next to impossible for that character my first life self was.

It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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some inline responses in yellow

many of the raids are, IMO, a bit out of whack. as grodon9999 said, a 14th level raid (reaver) should not be throwing 500 damage spells around (also, unrelated, those air elementals are INSANELY annoying), and as rdasca said, normal shroud should not be killing 500+ HP toons in seconds because they couldn't move away from the blades fast enough.

and as others have mentioned, In The Flesh elite is extraordinarily difficult/nearly impossible at level.

and Abbot is just downright ridiculous.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

---

The right balance vs success for me personally is first and foremost, casual (or solo)difficulty needs, let me emphasize that NEEDS, to be an option for every single raid and quest in the game. This allows people to go in the quest/raid to learn it with little expectation of failure, they can spend as much time as they want to in the area exploring the lore without being rushed by a group of players that has done the quest umpteen times and just wants to get in and out as fast and as many times as possible. (solo difficulty should also allow for the same rewards the quest/raid would drop, but at a very, very extremely low chance, like 0.0005% or less imo so that nobody that does the quest/raid, whether solo or in a group has a zero chance of a reward for the time they put in)

Normal I feel is a bit easy, but also just right. It allows a various divergence of playstyles to play, solo, casual, guild, non guild, group, RP, etc. Raids, I cannot attest to other than Chrono, and that was I still had to ask for help at the end boss when my Hurc was a fresh L20 no gear, so that to me is just about right.

Hard is good, if you do not know the quest well, expect to die if you solo it (in general) but there is a good chance to complete without a death.

Elite I feel is right there, and should be right there, when doing quests at level, you have a good likelihood to die from it as a solo and as a group, skill comes into play for the most part imo on elite.

The balance of success vs. failure to me is touchy, I play solo for the most part, and as such, I avoid quests where I know I haven't the gear to carry my way through, because nobody likes to fail, but the chance has to be there or the game has no interest for very long. I feel that harbor quests are a bit easy on all levels by the way, and give new players the misguided assumption that this is an easy game, maybe a slight bump in difficulty to all but Irestone and WaterWorks and Butchers Path and Kobold Assault wouldn't hurt much, and maybe give a real sense the game can kill you as a new player. When I group, I generally do so to get things done I don't feel I can solo at my level, and I personally like this aspect.


I also feel that re-tooling quests and raids to make at level elite impossible for at level players needing to do the quests just to make it a challenge for those that have already gotten all the gear from the raid/quest so as to make it easier is basically an affront to the up and coming new players that can now not expect to realistically ever get to do it on elite in a reasonable amount of time as well. When I say reasonable amount of time, I mean days/weeks/months. ALL content should honestly have an epic difficulty to accommodate the uber geared best players, to provide them with a myriad of quests and raids to play, even if all they get are tokens, I would love to see an epic Irestone inlet for example, or an epic 'The Pit'(with a higher chance at a muckdoom dropping) or an Stormcleave Outpost You could even take the old good gear from them and make special upgrade tokens for them etc. etc.


Time invested in a quest: ok, realistically, dying in a quest sucks. Really, nobody likes it, but it is a chance we take. The biggest problem I have with dying in a quest, is that about 1/3 of the time, by the time I get back to the quest, it has reset. THAT is where the frustration comes from, I would like to see the 5 minute timer before reset removed, and an option on the quest entry screen that says "reset quest" I get that they have to reset eventually, so how about they automatically reset the moment you step into a new quest (not explorer zone, as some quests are in them).

I really don't feel that people get so much upset about dying, but that they don't get to complete things when they do spend 45 minutes in a quest/raid. I think everything but epic difficulty should allow for re-entry, and every re-entry drops the % chance of the loot by a certain degree for each player that re enters the quest/raid.

Thanks MadFloyd for doing this, very much so.

Another difficulty problem:
In recent quests, the designers have tended to put in special additions on Hard and Elite, on top of the natural buff to monster/trap stats caused by those settings. Look at Small Problem or Demon's Den.

That pattern causes several problems, including making the difficulty less consistent with older quests: the amount by which it increases on Elite is much more if the monsters are not only stronger, but more numerous and in better situations. Previously Elite dungeons had strong encounters, but they had the expectation that players had learned the mechanics on Normal first. Now Elite gets its own separate mechanics, breaking that principle (and denying non-Elite players the opportunity to interact with those mechanics at all)

In-quest difficulties seem well balanced. There is a casual difficulty for guaranteed completions, normal for new/casual players, and harder ones for the crazy TR grinders. I think normal content should be hard enough that people will learn basic skills, so they don't sit like dead ducks on elite/epic content. The blades whirling around harry in part 4 of the shroud are a good example.


I find loot randomness to be really annoying in DDO. It is hard, but it feels artificial. Sure, raids have a 20th end reward list, but getting named quest loot and epic ingredients is hard in the worst possible way - you can't control it, and you can't progress towards it. Making more items/ingredients unbound would help a lot with this issue.


I really, really hate the mass instant kill spells. When a mob is held/dancing/webbed, that effect is timed. If the DPS are not good enough to clear them quickly, encounters will drain a lot of resources, and they might wipe a party. Wailed mobs don't come back.

I know there are wizards out there who ground out multiple TRs and rare loot to get their DC of 45 and use all sorts of debuffs to make their wail land more often. I don't mind those that much. It's the wizard who is playing terribly and getting random kills on lucky dice rolls (or worse: power word) that make the game look cheap and easy. I know it's not that easy, but the feeling is hard to shake. Adding a deathblock to key-mobs (like the Gnoll Conjurers in chains of flame) and higher fortitude saves would help a lot with this.

Overview for tl;dr - It seems the assumption has now become that all upper level content will be run in either groups or by leet players. Anyone not leet or who runs solo needs to assume he will not see the highest level content he paid for.



Difficulty choice hinge on what you guys want for a "customer".

You cannot be all things to all people. You need to target who you want playing this game, and think through interactions of the various systems within this game.

In my case, I do normal, hard, and elite up through about level 18-19 quests; then I am stuck on Normal and Hard only. I don't do Raids.

This is tied to the loot mechanic (including BTC flagging items, treasure, and ingredients)

I am a solo'er primarily. Because Elite content above ~18 and raids are primarily about hp,fort, and sheer numbers (require a tank/distraction that can think and survive) or being able to do mad crowd dmg (casters); I stay out of those on elite unless I feel like pugging.

Where difficulty becomes a problem for me is loot - i cannot get greensteel because of said limitations above UNLESS I roll up a character of said capabilities.

I can roll a caster (and actually enjoyed the one I rolled) to get BTA and unbound high-level loot to other characters; but the bound (and I could argue required) loot I _require_ (due to current difficulty balance) to experience the highest level content I purchased has to stay on that caster.

This is actually true to PnP somewhat, because you don't trade gear across character sheets;but with respect to DDO, it pigeon-holes a player into specific content for specific characters (or play styles).

Unbound gear would potentially screw with the economy (see - Diablo II - "you give me SoJ TT"), so BTA across the board seems the only way to allow all characters in my account to experience all content.

Compounding this is loot nerfs in much of the content in all but Elite and Epic (though I cannot comment on changing Epic since I've not run any of it) skill levels. A lot of the highest-level content requires at least a second life TR or better to run; but it's a catch-22 when the first-lifers cannot get the requisite Druidic Heart of Wood due to inability to access that level treasure due to the stuff above. So we're left with the choice of skipping paid-for content OR - IMAGINE THAT! They're up for sale in the DDO Store!

I cannot help but feel like it's intentional business strategy - hence becoming jaded. When the store was there for my convenience, I had no issue with it (I bought stacks of SP and thieves' tools because I was lazy - and didn't complain about it to anyone but myself). But when it becomes pay to play in THAT sense (must pay to experience content you had to... well... pay for once already), I find it a scam infinite loop.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

---

I have been a fairly steady subscriber to DDO (2006) in that time I have seen several transitions in game difficulty ..

My favorite packs have always been spme of the early ones i think the balance was good in most of them
mod-1, Mod-3, Mod-4 from there I would go to the vale ..these packs have good balance imo. for new players at lvl they pose a challenge..for vets most quests are trivial after xxx completions

the rise of the Arti pack is ok i like the flag quests..as for the raids..my healers ..never again will they pug those. all guild runs or channel people only..i don't mind dieing or getting beat in a quest i do mind blowing resources on people that cannot contribute to a completion

I do not mind the rising of the bar..but to go from IQ1-2 quests where everyone gets a ribbon even last place to needing to be a Blue ribbon player to qualify is poor management and weak direction imo


as for the last update...*** made anyone think that was a good idea?...and for the loot...Vorpal ring Are you nuts..If I had a stick that would reach from Wa. to Turbine Central ..I would beat the person/people that allowed that to go live

overall I like the game..i just don't run the quests that bring me no joy..
I prefer the many hours long beating that we took in von 3 (at lvl or below grp..no res cleric all first timers)

over the fast and easy quests

the deal with the Von 3 run..we used no resources except cure pots/wands we did die..a lot we did recall a few times...we did die a lot more...but we completed and lost 60k xp in the process great fun all around

if it was easy to beat every quest i would have been gone long ago..if i had my @$$ handed to me every quest i would have moved on long ago

I understand ya'll want to retain customers..strong and weak players...you added casual for that..i thought...the issue was you added casual AND lowered the bar for the other difficulties

I am sure you know this ..But i want it in writing somewhere :) When trying to build a product that appeals to many diverse people you need to IGNORE the extremes and go with the middle ground
yes the extremes tend to cry the loudest but more often than not it is only to self aggrandize themselves or their agenda
..it is rare that an extreme has the best interests of the product at heart

stop the buggy releases and put some heart into this game...remember its DDO
when all else fails go back to the basics

Is Normal too hard?

As I am now? No. As I used to be? Yes.
Like other people have said, this varies wildly with your class; things that would never challenge my well-built Artificer or my Sorcerer were absolute torture for my Monk/Rogue or my Fighter/Ranger/Rogue.

Is this associated with level?

Yes and no. As another poster said, the schizophrenia inherent in quest difficulties can be found throughout the whole game, but the inherent weakness in a weak build will be more and more apparent the higher you go and the more difficulty you have advancing.

For me, the very first time I was really challenged by the game was at Misery's Peak, which I entered at level 3, by myself. Many deaths and months later, I wouldn't call Misery's Peak a 'challenge' nor would I expect any of my characters to be unable to complete it, alone, at level 3. Because I've changed as a player.

Yet, instances of wildly different difficulty at each level start as early as level 2. Misery's Peak, Stealthy Repossession and Walk the Butcher's Path are a great deal more challenging than any of their contemporaries. Two of the three reward you for the extra effort in one fashion (gear) or another (xp and 'potential' gear), one does not. Stealthy, in my experience, since it is so difficult, gets run for favor by much higher level characters or now to increase a streak number as part of an iron-man type self-challenge for some high tier players. Is that enough for a quest?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

Yes, I do not expect to fail on normal when in a full group. But it wasn't always so. Familiarity with most quests in the game has raised my expectations of myself. Now, I should be clear, when I say 'fail', I'm talking about a full party wipe that leads to releasing from the quest and maybe trying again or more likely disintegrating the group. That kind of experience should be reserved for the higher tiers of difficulty. A death or several is not 'failure' in my book.

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

Partial rewards are a good way to ameliorate this, and could certainly be more widely instituted. An example is Eyes of Stone (One of the harder at-level quests in the game, I'll note), even if you wipe on the Medusa (Yeah, I've had this happen to me, on good characters and bad) you've had access to at least one chest, more likely three, one of which includes named items, so not a total loss.

Part of the frustration from dying, is not only a lack of partial rewards in some quests, but the very tangible loss of money from repair fees. I understand the need to penalize death in -some- way, so that it has meaning beyond temporal inconvenience, yet, you do understand that repair fees hurt most those players who should be penalized the least, yes? The poorly built melee character is hurt the most by repair fees and is generally piloted by a novice player who has the least resources to come back from such a setback; and now has even less with which to rectify and empower their character.

As a player, I've moved past the point in resources where dying is a dent in my pocket, but I remember playing before this was so, where dying in a solo attempt to finish a new quest on normal meant running that same quest two or more times -without dying- in order to fund the single mistake! It's a narrow niche, this 'medium level but weak character' but I don't think its a niche you should throw under the bus, since it is one that most of your players will occupy at one point in their times as paying customers.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Yes.

In the time that I have been playing 'seriously', all of the new content has definitely had a marked higher difficulty curve than -some- of the old content. The only exception to this in recent memory was In the Flesh, which has since been altered and adjusted to be a good deal more difficult.


Now to give you some thoughts on the question you didn't ask; What should we do about this?

I think that balancing content to level on a more uniform platform, then to player skill by selected difficulty is the key. In this regard, an inexperienced player can progress through the levels with a natural soft ramp in difficulty as he goes, hopefully matching or almost matching his increase in abilities and gear.

Meanwhile the grizzled veteran can enter the world of hellish difficulty and heavenly delights right from the get-go as he battles rappelling Ninja Troglodytes in Elite Misery's Peak.

Which is to say; Make normal more uniform and the difference between Normal and Elite more of a -difference-, not just an increase in numbers. Yes, this requires more time per quest and it likely isn't feasible to expect a massive sweeping change of every quest in the game. That's fine! A few quests per update would be just fine!

Do you know how happy I was when that first Korthos quest got a facelift? Even though I hadn't run through it in months? I made a character just to enjoy the 'new' Korthos experience, to get a feel for what the newbies of today and tomorrow would be seeing. Before too long I'll have to do it again; but if I can expect even one 'new' experience for each of my travels through the lower levels (reincarnations), that is a great carrot for a grizzled veteran.

One other thing I would like to mention while I'm here is the disconnect between reward and effort in many of the lower level quests. I mentioned in et al Stealthy Repossession but I'd like to bring it up again because it is a glaring red mark in the category of Difficulty. You have some great successes. The main korthos quests, waterworks, ringleader, butcher's path, durk's secret, the main quests in the Shan-To-Kor pack. And you have some infamous failures; Stealthy Repossession, Sacred Helm, the entirety of the Three Barrel Cove pack (Which has some schizophrenic difficulty in itself as well, some of the worst I've seen in the game), Kobold Assault and its attendant clones, the Ataraxia quests (a great area that needs expanding!)

I will break this down on quests and raids. Don't know or care to much about challenges.

Quests -

In a quest I do not expect to fail on normal. I can die. over and over. suffer pain. Spend an hour...or two...but not fail. Overall for a quest -
Casual - fairly easy even for a new player
Normal - Death and pain possible, but failure should be rare (New enter the kobold normal is probably spot on)
Hard - Here is where failure should be expected for new players and possible for vets/TRs
Elite - Should require me to pay attention on my double TR or vet groups

Rewards as far as xp seem about right now with bravery. Loot is always pretty meh, but maybe updated drop rates would help (i.e. stronger skew towards named and special items on elite).



Raids -
On normal I expect to fail going in on a first time on a raid. It should be more complicated. After some experience this should get easier. So overall for a raid -
Normal - Should be hard the first time, but easy once you get the hang of it. After time an at level PUG group should epxect to succeed with minimal resources if ~half the party knows the raid. I believe LoB and MA are spot on for this. ADQ and VoN also. Shroud is not currently well scaled for an at level PUG group on normal.
Hard - Should be challenging for a PUG group and very very difficult for people with average gear and experience.
Elite - Should be very difficult for a group lacking experience and gear. Experienced well geared groups should have to use some resources to complete or play 'perfect' for zero resources.
Epic - Should be impossible to do with a random set of people. Experienced well geared toons should be required BUT not specific classes or gear (i.e. please don't focus on SoS barbs and casters as the be all end all for raid completion).

Raid rewards for every raid should use the new shroud mechanism. In general the rewards for higher raid dififculties are often not scaling well (and in some cases counter-productive as drop rates shift).



Some specific comments -
I think updated epic raids are good. Pre U11 epic raids were pretty much take the 1st twelve and go.
I think updated shroud went too far. In particular this raid would be much better off with a timed death penatly ala LoB than the penalty box OR it should have weaker blades.
Updated shroud loot mechanism is awesome. Should be extended.
Abbott is always kinda funky. I don't care for 'platform game' features in an MMO anywhere.
Quest scaling with levels with the 'classic' quests works very well. You see a natural progression in difficulty as you level up. The recommendation to update the challenge rating system on some quests would be appropriate though (xorian, von3, lots of necro, some of the new stuff).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

Overall game difficulty is fine in my opinion

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I expect most normal quests to be a cakewalk and never die in them. When death does occur it's because of doing something stupid like going AFK when you think it's safe and coming back to find yourself dead and your party members laughing because they watched you die.

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

ANY quest with an absolute failure option sucks. And you know I'm talking about Coyle. To spend FIFTEEN minutes in there and have him die in the last 30 seconds is an absolute waste of time. It's not a hard quest, not at all. But his serious lack of hit points makes it difficult for people to even want to run this chain to get themselves a Mantle of the Worldshaper even at level 20.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

I still say "enough with the easy button", but I'm an experienced player. One way to possibly alleviate this is to make lower level quests easier and higher level quests harder. I realize that there is normal and casual difficulty, but since the release of the bravery bonus pugs don't run quests on casual/normal any more. Completely unprepared players are willing to go in on elite for the bonus XP only to nearly wipe while the one experienced player in the party is expected to carry them through. Personally I'm quite tired of this attitude from new players.

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

1) Lord of Blades. Pugs often fail this on normal. Perhaps lighten up a bit and drop the loot a little.

2) Master Artificer. Pugs often fail this on normal. Perhaps lighten up a bit and drop the loot a little. In this case it's the damage from the electric floors.

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Direct responses in red.

This is a scary proposal, but what about a casual option for raids for beginners? This would give people the ability to run raids that they normally can't get in or complete and at least learn the raid or learn what to expect. Make no raid loot drop from casual completions and the casual completions should not count towards their raid counter. This way they would still get random loot, but only benefit from the learning experience.

Let me try to make another contribution here. I think casual and normal difficulties are good as they are. Also agree that some changes to Raids can be good, but they can also be bad for casual players. But overrall let me ask for something more here.

This game has a history of some very distinct and some may say difficult quests as: The Pit or The Crucible just to name a very few. Please dont eliminate this type of the quests of the equation. Some of these are my favorites and others i really hate, but they are what give a different flavor to the game.

That said and incurring in the risk of saying something who should be obvious, casual should be for solo / inexperient players; normal should be for casual players in parties; hard should be difficult but not impossible for casual players in parties and elite should be difficult for regular players and at least present some challenge for experient players. Epic should be a whole another level for experient players.

That said, there´s really a gap between Hard and Elite. It´s something that maybe the designers should rethink in the future. Also, I'd like to see more traps and some more puzzles in the game, but that´s just my personal preference.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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Casual should basically be no fail but it should also not key you to run a raid people run casual vale and then do one on hard and can into the shroud.I think they should have to be completed on normal have casual give ok xp but no pie piece or a minimum favor from the set of flagging quests for the raid giver to talk to you.


Normal should be like casual but with better xp/favor/pie pieces .


Hard should not scale down with amount of people in the party but i think it should scale slightly up with more people an extra chest at the end with chances for special quest/flagging/other loot.

Elite should not scale down and should scale up decently this should be the last required diff to make/craft an item( like alchemical t3) end should have 1 extra chest same as hard but with increased drop rate in both chests.


Epic should scale steeply with each member of the party more spell selection for casters not just greater command greater dispell give them black dragon bolt, polar ray, niacs biting cold and what happened to hypnotism?
End should have 2 extra chests with increased drop rates in all 3 maybe double what normal gives.


Quests need to have decent xp for the level and diff those house C quests are pathetic xp on elite, getting more xp from waterworks is just plain silly.




Summary hard would be the elite for casual players epic should be very hard and not just more hp but the rewards need to scale up with difficulty and please stop with this binding to char stuff . If you don't want saturation of some things bind them to account all your doing is making parties harder to fill and forcing people to play classes they may not care for which then makes for bad questing.

It's fun to fail!
-FlimsyFirewood's signature

Actually, it's not fun to fail. But you are close- it's fun to almost fail.

Failing is frustrating, leading you to feel like you have wasted time and resources for no good reason. It can make you ragequit or just logoff and walk away.

Have you ever heard the theory that what makes us happy is the pursuit of happiness, the process, the anticipation, the feeling that you are gaining ground and achieving something?

That's the narrow line a game like this has to walk- challenge plus goals. We want to see progress and we want to feel like we earned our way there. (Except for pikers. They want someone else to do it for them. But even the pikers don't want it to be too easy or too hard.)

I don't remember the hundreds of smooth dungeon/raid completions I've had. I clearly remember the wipes and the almost wipes. They make good stories. But they also made an impression. And taught me lessons. (Some lessons are not to group with obviously drunk people, but that's still a lesson!)

On my first life, I ran Threnal with my family and guildies. 2 guildies, my two sons and my husband. I had no idea what to expect from the Threnal arena.

OMG.

We ran like crazy, died a lot and when we thought it was over, another wave spawned. Beholders!!! NOOOOOO!!!!

But we finished it, and upgraded our little blades into upgraded blades that we threw away. It wasn't the end reward that was cool, it was the struggle and the eventual win.

I ran Arena of Threnal last week with 2 TR's who had never run it before and were curious. We were at level. It was a snooze.

The quest didn't change. The players did, and I suspect it's the power creep of better gear rather than the changing of any specific quests. I know I didn't run that quest on my first life with the fully maxed stats and gear that a level 10 could possibly have... but my crafting work and the AH and past lives have all given me the means to make sure I have the best I can have for the level.

I'm not sure what the answer is. I think the quests are just about right for first life toons. I would not like to see the difficulty increased for low levels. The bravery bonus has convinced most TR's to run quests at the highest possible level for greatest XP rewards.

I don't really have a suggestion, just an observation. I started playing a year ago. In this past year, the gear choices have gotten significantly better. Cove items alone are really powerful. Cannith crafting with masterful crafting lets you max exactly what you need. The new challenge crafting combines some very powerful abilities into single slots.

The creep is from power gear. But I don't want you nerfing my gear!! Or drop rates!

The only thing I might suggest is a super reincarnation bravery bonus for doing elite below level. I almost hate to suggest it because I feel the current BB is really generous. But if you set it so that a TR would get a small bonus for being below-level elite it would encourage the people who are bored to challenge themselves further.

Oh, and nerf the Abbot! NERRRRRF HIM!

Context for my comments: I play almost entirely with friends, casual style (ie lots of family AFKs, no worries about xp/minute, sometimes 8 yr old son's are the barbarian, etc). However, I have played the game a long time with a lot of alts, but no TRs and no huge twink source. I build good characters and know what kind of gear they should have (though I don't always have it).

I like a failure risk and I like figuring out quests. While I'm happy with the difficulty levels in the game (see below), I do find there is huge variance in the difficulty of quests in the same level range, often without commensurate variance in the rewards. I like the new style of quests (Lordsmarch, Reign, etc) over the older quests, though I have mixed feelings about the ever increasing BtA supply.

Normal is monstrously easy. The scaling is the main culprit, since we often only have 2-3 people doing a quest. I can't stand doing a quest on normal, even first time ever. If the VIP 'start on hard/elite' benefit didn't exist, I might not still be playing.

Hard is a good place for the "new" style of quests (Lordsmarch, Harbinger/Reign, etc). Our first life, low twink characters generally can handle the quests unless its one with a trick we just don't figure out (first time in Monastery of the Scorpion got completely destroyed on final boss, for instance).

Elite can be much harder than "hard". All the older quests we do on elite, both because they are easier and because we know those quests inside and out. We can't always manage elite at level on new quests, but I don't think there's any problem with that. We don't have really elite geared characters.

To be honest, I haven't seen any actual evidence of this "scale for the uber elite" that gets complained about alot. Individual quests/raids (abbot) have issues, but I don't see the game as a whole having this issue.


SUMMARY: Party Size scaling is way too significant and makes normal trivial and exaggerates the gap between hard and elite, but overall the difficulty of the game is pretty decent.

Rather than wax verbose, I'll try to go with succinct. I'll fail, but try.

Overall, game difficulty should fall along a sort continuum. Very low level quests should be a bit too easy, low to moderate level should have some difficulty to them, and high level more difficulty, but not extreme. This is due to the fact that your player skill level will fall along the standard bell curve, with a few completely inept, many competent, and some prodigies. In general, this curve exists.

Problems:
1)Some quests, for whatever reason, have been designed to be near impossible (or improbable) to complete at level with your average pug. Obvious examples include the new psychotic blades of shroud elite, or the insta wipe mind sucking pain that is the end fight of In the Flesh. These aberrations of difficulty I feel detract from game play rather than improve. Of course, its often caused by....

2)There are 2 distinct tiers of player ability in the game. For people that have been around for years, especially those before epic gear, ship buffs, or high level caps, the school of hard knocks has taught them to perform at an increased level of play. Thus, much content that was normally seen as a moderate challenge is now, due to new gear, experience in the game, ship buffs, etc. as "easy". I think the argument that some content (high level raids, the quests mentioned above, etc) are coded for these 'elite' characters is accurate. I've played since 2006, but I have several characters right now that I simply cannot play because they have not gone thru the TR/Epic gear grind, and thus would be a joke in something like LoB. This level of extreme difficulty is a shame.

3)This makes it difficult to JOIN this cadre of elite characters, as you need to have the epic gear to complete many of the quests where you get the epic gear in the first place. Combine this with the fact that the drop rates of some Epic item pieces are so low that they are almost considered mythical to the average player, and that in general many epic pieces are too hard to get, and it increases your division between these two classes.

4)Conversely, I think much of the school of hard knocks lessons learned at low levels has been lost, and characters woefully unprepared for high levels are getting to them without the basic skill sets needed to function. Upping the difficulty of some lower level content might kill some more newbies, but will make them into better players as they progress.

Thus, instead of a single peak bell curve, we seem to be developing one with two distinct peaks. The haves and have nots, as it were. As the content to gear up to join the 'haves' continues to get more difficult, the gap between these two peaks will increase.

Solution
Do not code the game for the top 10%. If someone has gone TR/gear crazy and made a god of a character, good for them. Their reward should be an easier time in quests, not quests being scaled up to meet them. Code the game for the C average students, your 70% mark.

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard? Not often

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout? throughout but minor

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you? failing is ok occasionally, but a quest I have ran a hundred times and on a decent geared character shouldn't have a high chance of failure on normal. I should run elite for a challenge at that point, not worry about completing normal. Raids/Epics on normal shouldn't fail often either.

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating. The higher the grind, the more frustrating the failure is. Turbine made the grind high for too many things.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!' Yes. That was mainly aimed at Dungeon scaling and the ease of leveling. You also have to consider the main type of player who uses the forums and says stuff is easy. Powergamer Achievers who have everything on multiple characters are not going to have issues completing 99% of the game. They play the best builds with the best gear then complain the game is too easy. Stop reworking content for the upper echelon, you can't keep up with them.

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

The following quests are too hard in general for their level:
proof is in the poison
eastern threnal part 3(hold for reinforcements?)
chronoscope
bastion of power(only the dungeon alert issue)
in the flesh end fight
enter the kobold end fight
stealer of souls

I just went thru a TR1 on a Artificer/Rogue/Ranger mutt with a moderate amount of gear and resources. I was unable to complete in the flesh and east 3 for bravery. I stopped after level 16 quests.

There are many quests even with the bravery bonus are just too long to be good xp. Most of the higher end quests give horrible xp considering how much xp a TR needs at high levels. I tie this to difficulty issue as well, if the higher difficulty isn't rewarded I don't want to do it.

Some quests are trivially easy. Some quests are maddeningly difficult. Most are in between.

I really like the fact that there is a variety of quest difficulties in DDO. Some quests are so easy that I won't go through them more than once on Elite just to grab the favor, but there are a lot of players who need quests like those to practice in because they're just not ready for the tougher quests.

I really like the fact that there are some quests that I'm just flat out not ready for. I'd be sorely disappointed if I knew there were no quests waiting for me when I get better at the game.

I think some quests could be tweaked a little bit, but I think that the balance *across* quests is very good.

As for "balancing quests for the uber-players", there has been a little bit of this recently. And that's okay. There are still hundreds of quests for the players that aren't uber. It's okay to make a dozen quests for the people who really need the extra challenge.

Firstly thanks for this opportunity and I appologise if this post goes a little off the rails but these are some ideas thoughts and suggestions I have been waiting for an opportunity to air for some time!

There are a few things to consider with Difficulty.

The first is the type of player.

1) As a new player fresh out of the wreckage "Oi can you move?", the learning curve of the game can be quite challenging. To that end, quest easiness needs to be something all can relate to. going in on normal is likely to appeal to people over casual/solo. Since they are likely to do it first solo and will learn the quest at the same time. Grouping will come later but many new players will refrain from grouping unless they know someone else.

2) After a player has experienced a good portion of the game hes likely to want to do more difficult quests. He may not have a level 20 or TR'd yet but hes on his 3rd or 4th character and feels he knows the game well enough to jump in on hards and elites when he can.

3) Top end players that have TR'd multiple times will only want to run elites. They want to challenge not only their characters and skills but also their gear set up will make certain aspects of the game trivial.

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Second thing to consider is gear.

1) new players will likely struggle to aquire level approriate gear. they may be lucky enough to have a full set of Korthos gear by the time they are level 3 but around level 10 gear seems to be more difficult to get right. many key items are required by certain quests and are actually made difficult or even impossible without them like underwater action, featherfalling, etc.

2) Once you have run through the quests on a few characters picking up that minimum level featherfall boots or having a deathward item becomes trivial. however just as with a players experience once you get to the teens gear begins to let you down. You may still struggle to get the +6 items at their minimum levels or may need to farm enough ingredients to finish your first greensteel.

3) By now gear isnt a problem at all - you have the best gear regardless of level, often pulling from your TR stash as you reach certain breakpoints. By level 12 you are close to what the other two wont see until 17+. Also, having a large sum of disposable platinum also affects things like pot, wand, and scroll use throughout your leveling.

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Thirdly you need to consider time.

1) People new to the game may fail, and often will due to unknown things happening to them such as traps. when they start to group the will likely slow down more experienced players while they learn their way round a quest.

2) By now you have learned most of the starter quests, if your Premium/f2P you might have bought a few packs that you might consider trying out, not knowing what to expect, but overall you know how things work.

3) Quests are like telephone numbers to you, you stop short of any and every trap, find ways to bypass certain areas with spells or using the geometry to your advantage.

Ok now lets look at the quest levels...

1) 1-6 quests offer great challenges but dont always end in failure after the second or third attempt. 7-10 quests offer a greater challenge as certain elements become required for success, featherfall, waterbreathing and deathward all start to play a role in completion of a quest. 11-14 by this stage soloing is completely out of the question for a first lifer. Many actually turn to wilderness areas to level first time round if they find groups intimidating to join. Quests become alot more involved with many requiring chains or flagging. 16-18 quests are the break point for many first lifers IMHO. Most new players will have decided if they are playing a class worth sticking with or stop and make a new one. 19-20 quests for those that push on to cap are an uphill struggle - many new players will not "Bank" level 19 and will find groups for 19s difficult to find without a guild.

2) 1-6 quests are a breeze on normal, many will seek hard or elite groups or run quests N/H/E before moving to the next. 7-10 Quests start to become more challenging and a player notices his weaknesses - elites often fail without a full group but hards arent much more difficult than normal for them. Grouping is a little easier due to the knowledge you already have. 11-14 many quests seem easy but can turn nasty for an un-prepared, under-geared character. elites can wipe more frequently and the occational zerging hard can go south very quickly. however a careful player with the right group can find his way through these quests with little difficulty. 16-18 quets require some heavy grinding - by now most are bored of wilderness areas beyond picking up the initial explorers and rares so grouping is where the XP is at. for these levels its the start of the uphill struggle to 20. 19-20 quests are still new to this type of player, many tactics are used and although you have learned to bank level 19, getting to 20 can prove challenging to some still.

3) 1-12 quests are simply a roadbump for most veteran players. they will solo, small group (of friends) or hireling their way through them. 13-17 the grind starts for XP expecially for multiple life TRs, quests are attacked systematically to maximise XP with grouping common but mostly with those they know and trust not to slow them down. 18-20 quests continue the grind but lack too much importance as they are considered useful in most endgame content and raids.

Level 20
Quests for 20 have their own consideration. While for many reaching 20 is all there is, those that reach 20 are met with the new challenge of epics. some enjoy epics, others cant wait to TR to start leveling again or abandon one character for a new one, often using their 20 to twink others.

My thoughts on the quests.
Ok so thats the overall analysis on difficulty in the game as it stands. now here are my thoughts on difficulty itself.

for new players 1-6 quests are perfect. They can plow through them with expereinced players or learn the game at their own pace. for Vets 1-6 quests are normally broken down to a couple of High XP quests, the rest may as well not exist. Time Vs XP is all that counts, if a quest is too long they wont bother with it.

Difficulty at this level range is nothing more than "how much XP can I get?" which is fine as is.

Beyond level 6 quests should almost always be about grouping. pulling the community together to achieve a goal.

Currently the difficulty brackets of Normal/Hard/Elite are treated a little differently by each type of player. One of the key elements of a difficult quest is the amount of time invested. In my opinion optional objectives should grant the bulk of XP scaling with the length of the quest. The longer you spend in one quest the more XP you gain. if you fail you still feel you have achieved something in the process. This might not work well on lower quests but it would remove alot of frustration from failing a high level quest you spent 40 minutes on just to wipe at the last hurdle with just a large repair bill to look forward to.

How I view Difficulties:
Normal Quests should be accessable by all - regardless of player exprience.
Hard Quests should be accessable by all - player experience should make life easier as you have knowledge of what to expect from normal.
Elite Quests should provide a quest with new challenges. while still accessable by all, many inexperienced players will find that without good resource management elite is simply not possible "at level".
Elite should be aimed at providing TRs with not only the XP they need to level but also the challenges to keep the game entertaining and enjoyable rather than just a grind. Unfortunately the only way I can see of doing this is to alter the quest or add random elements to the quests. Perhaps moving or removing certain shrines, making traps random, etc.
More damage doesnt mean a quest is harder if you can avoid that damage altogether. This seems to be the approach elite quests have over normal or hard. quite frankly its lazy, unimaginative, and boring. Players simply find a way of avoiding the damage entirely which has since resulted in certain nerfs to spells that should be a part of DDO.
Resource useage should play a big part in Elite quests - shrines should be a commodity not taken lightly, many quests lately have far too many shrines for N/H/E although some see more use on Epic. Make this a more important factor of the difficulty.

EPIC
While the recent changes have been nice for people like myself who have little epic gear, epics just feel like elites with more HPs. Many vets I know find the changes made to epics have made them too easy. Personally I think they have made them more accessable which is a good thing.

I will pick on a single quest however, Epic Devils Assault. I ran this quest on a first life 20 pale master, well geared but in need of a TR, I found it impossible to fulfill my role in this quest. The damage was too heavy for the healers to deal with without good CC and I just didnt have the DCs to CC anything! In steps a 3+ life TR wizard PM with 40+ enchantment DCs and my roll was just to buff the party with rage and haste! This quest is certainly not accessable by all!.

Suggestions
New XP Reward: Include a bonus XP based on the number of times the party rests in a dungeon. The fewer shrines used, the more bonus XP is achieved.

Limit Resources: This might require some work but perhaps the inventory needs a little overhaul. My thoughts are to limit resources such as wands, potions, and scrolls during a quest. break up the inventory into potion belts, scroll cases and wand haulsters. while at a rest shrine you can place a number (say 10) of scrolls, potions and 2 wands into the relevant slots as you would preparing a spell. When you leave the shrine those resources are locked and can only be spent. When you rest again you can replenish/replace what you have used. All gear with clicky effects should be set up beforehand in clicky slots. In effect you have 1 clicky option per slot. so if you have a +4 int hat, an invisibility clicky hat and a water breathing hat you must choice one to load at each rest.

Final Thoughts
Drop the Damage wins all philosophy! every time you raise the bar on what HPs/DPS the players can achieve the damage the mobs take and deal has to increase. Without some additional level scaling, the more this happens the harder quests will become for newer players. Shroud blades is a good example of this.

Progression.
DDO misses out from one fundamental elements present in most MMOs, progression. Once you hit 20 there is nothing beyond. Many other MMOs simply raise the level cap to keep people interested. What DDO needs is some Extreme Quest Progressions. Aimed at Epic level quests only, quests chains need to be far more complex and challenging. giving people a sence of achievement beyond their next epic item. Achievements dont need to be virtual items either; special cosmetic gear, banners, titles, unique airship amenaties or new airships entirely, could all be used to entice people to play more.

Packs
Adventure packs need to cover more than just a few levels. sure there is still room for a couple more mid or high level packs but overall future packs should accomodate a much broader level range. However, they should most certanly not eliminate the existing content altogether!.

Challenges
Fatal error #1. A player can, if he so chooses, level from 4-20 on this pack alone. and he can do it solo! sure it could take some time and I'm assuming its the reason for the huge cost of this pack, however the free tokens make it possible (though very unlikely) for someone to get to 20 without paying you guys a penny!
Fatal error #2. Challenges ignore difficulty. While it may be nice to "try" doing a challenge quest at its highest difficulty for you, there is very little incentive given the scaling of the challenges. Crystal Cove was different in that it had a time contraint - players felt a need to achieve as much as they could from the quests because they where an event - Put CCove into a normal pack and you will likely see the same issues you are having now with Vault of the Artificers. IMHO you should remove the challenge scaling and replace it with traditional banded levels.

heres what I mean...
currently you have 5 quest options - Casual/Solo, Normal, Hard and Elite Plus Epic at level 20.
Dr Rushmores Quests
Behind the Door L4-15 ... becomes a level 5 10 and 15 quest. On the level 5 option Casual/Solo is level 5, Normal is a level 6, Hard is level 7, Elite is 8, there is no Epic.
Moving Targets L10-20 ... becomes a level 10 15 and 20 quest. On the level 10 option Casual/Solo is a level 10, Normal is a level 11, Hard is level 12, Elite is 13, the Epic version is level 20.
Picture Portals L15-20 ... becomes a level 15 quest and 20 quest. On the level 15 option Casual/Solo is a level 15, Normal is a level 16, Hard is level 18, Elite is 19, there is also an Epic version.

XP scales normally and overall people can play these quests continueously but eventually the XP will dry up and they will have to find new revenues for XP.
Casual/Solo needs a facelift. It should be made the quest of choice for those wishing to solo. Normal difficulty should be aimed at groups. perhaps adding in temporary hirelings for solo players to purchase in the quest that expire on exit, or simply adding additional resources or extra time. Casual should not be great XP. you want people to group for that. however casual xp should never zero out. my suggestion is set casual XP to 1/10th normal xp. with a +200% first time achievement. Casual does not affect bravery in any way and after 1st run xp drops with a flat 50% penalty for runs beyond the 3rd.

Bottom Line
Overall, I think difficulty needs to play more of an active role in quest design, not just a switch you flick that scales up the mobs hit dice.

edit: **** took me over 2 hours to write all that!

Ok -
1. Normal/Solo/Casual - I think these difficulties are spot on. Some quests are harder than others for new players, and the imbalance of classes means that sometimes you NEED some other type of player(s) with you to succeed if you are just a casual gamer. Great example of this is Ghola Fan; the end battle of that can be tough if you are soloing on a first life non-twink rogue. This is not a problem though with the quests, just a limitation of the game, not every character can do every quest at every level by themselves.

2. Hard - I seldom run hard, BUT....I do feel that other than XP, there is very little reason to run hard over Elite or Normal. The mobs hit harder, have more buffs (to hit, ac, spell selection, ect) and the DC's are slightly higher than normal for traps; and you get one use of shrines....this for a chance at slightly better loot & 1 time bonus for first hard run on XP.... I think hard needs some different standout otherwise it is a tool for TR's and that is really it....

3. Elite -sigh.... Elite is a crapshoot. Some quests do it well (Butchers Path is one) while others don't. The big problem I have with elite though mostly has to do with the raids.

3a. OK, so try this out if you haven't before. Take your level 20 character (class/race combo makes no real difference) and go do The Storehouse's Secret on elite. How many times did you die? This is something I LOVE about DDO. You can actually advance your character to the point that previous parts of the game offer no challenge.

3b. Which brings me to the problem with the most recent changes to the raids. A group of level 20's should be able to do a level 10 raid on elite with little to no challenge; a level 12 raid with little to no challenge; a level 15 raid with some small challenge..... ALL WITH A PUG. A level 17 raid on normal with very small challenges. I understand this means that some things are easier to farm for than others, but there really isn't anything wrong with that.

3c. The fact is, on NORMAL you should be able to PUG any raid in the game. That is not to say you can't sometimes fail (take shroud since F2P until mod 11 was released); but it is the exception rather than the rule. I really don't understand why VON6 would be difficult on elite for decently geared PUGS. The answer is - it shouldn't be. ELITE TOD, sure, that is actually what a level 21 quest on elite? It should be tough for your standard PUG - but normal PUG's should be sending out LFG's, and since 11 was released I have seen very, very few. That is a sign that the hard factor was turned up too much.

so... tldr:
solo/normal/casual=fine
hard doesn't fit well except for XP in its current form
elite is ok on some things but was fubar'd for raid difficulty and some quests (and if you are unsure of quests, we can provide lists).

One thing that made the lower level toons life worse was the difficulty scaling up for lower lvl raids: reavers and shroud. As those are ran all the time by capped toons, the scaling up in difficulty on elite reavers and overall shroud to make some match for those capped toons made the job for the first lifers ~17 lvl really difficult. I don't see it as such a bad thing, but really wiping an entire lvl 20 party on a 17 lvl raid on normal is weird. Also a mass spawn of air elementals knocking and slowing lvl 20 people without saves on reavers is annoying.
Now about LoB, considering AC wise (I know its another thread, but...) the raid is too hard for the normal difficulty.
Every other quests are fine, I think.
But what I really would like to see is differing difficulties on epics, may be for levels as challenges, or something more like the casual, normal, hard and elite.
I think that Shade's post here has some nice suugestions for this matter: http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=307339

There are plenty of thoughts in this thread I agree with. My general thought agree with the idea that the existing game difficulties are underutilized and do not present a consistent enough variation. I would add that players are like water - although they yelp at how much they want challenge - only a small percentage of the player base truly wants or needs such challenge. Elite and Epics are for those players - and they should be rewarded accordingly with extra rewards (e.g., as the new Shroud does).

That being said, running a quest, raid or not, on casual should be 100% success, even with a gimped character, normal should be a 95%+, Hard 80%+, Elite 75%+, Epics, know what you are doing and all bets are off.

I also agree that 'difficulty' should mean more than inflating HP and adding Fort, especially as quests level. I also think, in a sense, it should not include 'grinding' - wasn't this supposed to be the grind free mmo? Perhaps it should mean that curses, blindness and other debuff does not wear off - permanent until you use a pot, scroll or get a caster. Perhaps it should mean much deadlier traps; I do not think there is a problem in needing rogue skills for quests and suffering a punishment if you do not, as long as it doesn't require a mechanic for every quest. Perhaps it should be greater damage to your items - something that really hurts.

Overall, I acknowledge it is hard with the size of the game, variety of quests, to balance them out. We all have different playstyles and might find some quests easier than others compared to other players. That being said, I think the game has failed to fully capitalize on making use of the resources it has as it has grown. The spell pass seemed to indicate some re-balancing is on your mind - but is it?

Clearly, someone thought the game was too hard when 'casual' mode was created, rubber-banding added, debuffs given timers, and scaling put in. I think some of that went too far - I don't think the game 'needed' casual had Normal, Hard and Elite been used more wisely. I am concerned though, that there seems to be some drive to make the game 'harder' again - I do not want to see the game swing back too far and be a 'turn-off' again, as normal Shroud has clearly done for that scene, imo, as it will chase players away. Use Hard and Elite for the challenge seeking. The hardcore players will thrive under it. Give them extra chances at loot - they deserve it, especially when they grind. For the casual gamers, let them have their fun with a small shot at some of the good stuff - I feel that is what has been getting lost.

Good choice for the 1st topic.

Difficulty is a wide ranging topic, and Im going to address what is affecting that in the game as a WHOLE, not for any lvl or class.

I have been vocal about game balance & mechanics, and this is part of the scenario.

We as players several years ago, begged & pleaded with Turbine for new pre's, a newer (not always better) form of crafting, better weapon attributes, increasing the cap etc...

You answered the call! To the point of the basic balance being thrown off (including the loot tables).

The characters, weapons, spells, pre's and techniques employed by the players all combined (and a few things not listed) empowered us to run almost everything with an extremely low chance of failure. Gratifying only in the context of "winning" or the feeling of.

Staff then looked at ways to try and bring the game back to a satisfactory balance. Which led to several "nerfs" (hate that saying) or way to tone down the volatility of our new "uberness"

It's not a very deep trench we are all in, to try and bring that delicate balance back, while maintaining "playability" and keeping the challenge in tact.

For the newer player, some of this imbalance can be daunting, and in some cases over-whelming, resulting in players not enjoying the game and leaving without realizing the unlimited potential DDO offers.

Some of the more recent attempts to curb this has resulted in misplaced efforts that made certain aspects worse. We know for a fact, that is NOT your intent, but it has happened. (as the forumites, are quick to point out)

::


Ensuring the correct game balance is essential to how you (Devs) have proceeded to tweak things here and there. Which is what you should do.

As this subject gets discussed, more detailed aspects of the problems & (hopefully) solutions will arise from that.

My first suggestion, is to bring the original design team in for a pow-wow. Nothing more than a fact finding session to look at how the balance and challenge of the game can be maintained.

Secondly, (this will be the bigger topic) is to look at the characters, and how they are designed.

Third, FOCUS on dungeon & party make-up. This will be real hard to employ any changes, Edited.
The question needs to be asked here, if we dont have dungeons that "require" certain classes, then why have the dungeon or the class?

Madfloyd, you all are SO CLOSE to bringing this game back in balance I can smell it. Toes & egos (players not you all) will be bruised in doing so, but such is the nature of the beast.

I have edited this as I wrote it, trying not create another wall of text in the thread.

The other suggestions are more detailed, and are meant for the specific subject when you post those threads.

In closing, on difficulty; Because of the imbalances in the areas I mentioned above, the degree of difficulty is situational. ie. Newer players, over-powered casting (or to be more precise, spells) rendering melees to a mere A team hireling.
So I believe through proper balance, you can adjust the degree of difficulty much more precisely.

http://i299.photobucket.com/albums/m...h_b7543dc0.gif


Happy Holidays people.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

---

I've been doing this a while so my views are skewed a bit toward the geared and TR'd end of things here.



I kind of like where the difficulty is now for the most part. There are a few quests that are strangely out of touch such as Proof is in the Poison at level 4 if you don't know what you're getting in to.

A way of making the content scale to cater to both the 1st week newbie and the 6 year veteran on their 30th reincarnation is a difficult balance so here are some opinions on specific quests...

Decent scaling: Demon's Den. Slightly different objectives and additional threats at higher settings, but coupled with the tons of extra HP.
Good scaling: Harbinger and Reign of Madness chains. Varied mobs and quantity based on party size and classes.
Awesome scaling: Weapon Shipment. This is a blast with big groups. I do see more casuals on the LFM boards having issues with farming it now, to the point where they won't allow more than a couple extra people in their quest instance.
Bad scaling: Inspired Quarter/Dreaming Dark... More HP on top of More HP, but otherwise exactly the same.

The current trend of making elite quests actually hard by varying mobs, quantity, and adding more traps instead of just insanely more HP for mobs is a great start. I wish to see it continued in the same manner as Demon's Den by making objectives required slightly more difficult to do (as in the time limit on all 3 efreeti + mobile end boss).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

---

I feel game difficulty is almost perfect... Normal is always easy for me (which is how I like it), and elite (at level) can be quite challenging... I've been working on two TRs lately, and the Bravery Bonus has me doing most quests on elite at level. It is NOT a cakewalk... We have to work hard to get the job done...

I think it WOULD help if we got partial rewards for partial completions. Like someone else said, failing at the Shroud part 4 isn't too painful since at least we pick up some good loot and ingrediants.

I think normal should be accessible to everyone... raids included. I think we should get more rewards for doing hard or elite raids. The changes to the Shroud are very good in that respect. I'm not sure I like the LoB mechanics where you HAVE to complete it on epic to make the best items...

I like the Shroud way better where you can make everything just grinding out normal, or get it done faster on hard or elite... But no one is forced to run Shroud elite to make Tier III greensteel.

As far as balancing for the uber-player, I definitely think you need to be careful here... Again, let them do elite and epic raids and get the loot faster, but don't shut out the casuals... Take advice from players like Shade with a grain of salt. He's in a very different world than 99% of your players.

Also, the grind is way too much for most of the game... There's a ton of stuff to do in this game now... Old systems like Dragon scales from Tor no longer need to take a ton of time... Epic tokens are way out of hand too, in my opinion... 30 tokens per augment slot takes a long time...

With TRs, and alts, and epics, and raid loot, and fifteen types of crafting, we don't need each and every one of those to be a grind.

Do not balance the grind around the 60-hour a week players... Maybe the 20-hour a week player... That's a 3 hour a day commitment.. which is pretty big for a hobby... There's no need to make the grind big enough to keep the 60-hour a week players busy.

I think I'm just restating other posts at this point.

Make the quest level mean something!
A level 4 quest should be of a comparable difficulty as any other level 4 quest.
What is the point of making quests "extreme challenges"? As far as I can tell, it's just to stiff us out of XP and loot. If the quest is so challenging, just make it listed at a higher level.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Scraap

I will however say there's far too much stacking in the game

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I was going to save this for the AC thread, but: this.
If you think guild resists trivialise lower levels now; imagine if guild resists stacked with the resist spell, and both of those stacked with resist potions. Now throw in Turbine "balancing" traps and spells for those stacked resists. Congratulations, resists are now on a par with AC.

Part 2 of my feedback: Endgame (level 20 content, epics, and raids). The most important point is probably the second general note below, so it's underlined. Edited slightly.


Two general notes:
1) Character power level varies extremely wildly in DDO. In other MMOs, if someone says 'I soloed endgame boss X', people's immediate response is 'You cheated', as endgame bosses are designed to be so dangerous that unless you are defensively specced you cannot be healed through their concerted attacks, and if you are defensively specced, you cannot heal yourself enough to matter, and even if you manage both of those somehow, bosses require a certain minimum DPS to kill at all - often three to ten times what a perfectly played DPS character in the game's best gear can achieve.
In DDO, the lack of any DPS requirements on bosses means they can be killed 'slowly and steadily', and the customization of DDO toons has loopholes that let you build a character that can tank, heal and DPS at the same time.
2) The experience of a party wipe in DDO flat out sucks. In WOW (the other MMO I've played to endgame), wiping on a boss causes you to lose progress on that boss (they respawn at full), but other than that, you can get straight back into the action and can start your next attempt on that boss within 2-3 minutes. In DDO, wiping forces you to repeat an entire quest and maybe even pre-quests. This philosophy should change, IMO. If Arraetrikos kills a raid in part 4 of the Shroud, let them try part 4 again immediately, rather than forcing them to do the mindlessly boring 1 and 3 again (and no doubt losing 3-4 players to time constraints and thus forcing them to fill the raid up again).
The worst experiences of wiping come about in higher difficulty runs of VON6, LOB or tMA. If your group is powerful enough to consider running, say, hard LOB, you will not find the preraid area and initial LOB trash to be entertaining at all.


Raids:
It's my position that raids strongly require a Casual difficulty setting, even though that setting would not be designed for me at all. Casual difficulty is, at its heart, all about experiencing the storyline (and a lot of the game's best storylines revolve around raids) and seeing the sights of the game - experiences I don't think newer players should miss out upon.
To make Casual difficulty appeal only to the players it is intended to, give it the same loot as Normal, but a double-length raid lockout timer. Loot-oriented players won't run it, but more casual players probably wouldn't have run it more than that anyway, so it still appeals to them.
Secondly I think that, due to the long lockout timers on raids and the fast pace of levelling, you should tune Elite difficulty raids with level 20 characters in mind. Few characters achieve even five completions of any one raid before being level 20, and most raids are designed to be played 20+ times. If Elite is tuned for level 20s, then the raid can continue to be entertaining on the 6th-20th runs.
Also I'm happy with the vast divergence in difficulty from Normal to Hard and Hard to Elite that has been added to most of the older raids (even if Normal might be a little overtuned in some cases). A wide spread of difficulties means more chances to please every type of player, unlike (say) pre-U11 Reaver which had three difficulties that were all aimed at level 14 casual players.


Where I feel difficulty should be in raids:
Casual: Beatable by 6-12 people that make an attempt to work together as a group and have a somewhat coherent combination of classes. Minimal gear requirements. Still beatable if one or two of them need to unexpectedly AFK in the middle of it. Ideally does not require foreknowledge of the raid.
Example: Running pre-U12 Shroud Normal with level 20s, or pre-U12 Elite Reaver's Fate with level 14-16 characters.
Normal: The default PUG difficulty. Beatable by 8-12 people that are mostly following an easily communicated strategy, wearing level-appropriate non-uber gear that has been sensibly chosen. PUG groups might wipe if three or four people don't pull their weight or do something very stupid, but 80%+ of level-appropriate PUGs should succeed. Example: Normal difficulty Vision of Destruction, or if heat-seeking blades were removed, post-U12 Normal Shroud.
Hard: The default guild/channel group difficulty. Beatable by 12 people that closely follow a somewhat thought-out strategy, again with non-uber but sensibly chosen equipment. Should have additional complexity compared to Normal. Will require resources until groups discover what to do. Example: Tower of Despair Normal.
Elite: The default 'We'll all bring our best toons for this' guild run difficulty. Beating this should require many attempts, but every guild that works on it should down it eventually. Example: LOB Hard, or TOD Hard.
Epic: For new content, the difficulty that is designed to mercilessly wipe powergamers over and over, until they finally get it down. Server firsts should take a while. Example: LOB elite/epic, Shroud elite post U12. Existing pre-U11 epic raids are currently tuned closer to 'level 20 hard', but it's not worth changing them as too many people are part-way to getting items from them.

Specific raids:
Chronoscope: The non-Epic difficulties are far, far too hard for their levels but far too easy to be enjoyed at level 20. Epic is well done now, except for the final fight which still drags. IMO this should just be promoted to level 8 or 9 and otherwise left as-is.
VON6: Velah hits too hard at the non-Epic difficulties, but is too fragile (you usually don't even get to see her breath in at-level runs). Epic now feels like a very well designed 'level 20 Hard' raid. For casual difficulty, dramatically drop Velah's damage, and make her fire breath painful but survivable.
Titan: Should require 2 pillars on Casual, 5 Normal, 6 Hard, 7 Elite. The Titan needs more HP in the 'combat with the Titan' phase.
DQ2: Tone down Lailat's To-Hit on Normal and Epic, and her damage per hit on the non-Epic difficulties. Up her HP on non-Epic. On Casual, make her miss a 45 AC somewhat often, and remove the archers.
Reaver: On Casual, use the Reaver from the old, pre U11 Elite. He's well suited to a casual level 14 raid.
Abbot: On Casual, require only 4 sarcophagi to be smashed, make the puzzles more forgiving, and tone down Inferno. On the classic difficulties, drop the Abbot's HP.
Shroud: On Normal, remove 'heat-seeking' blades. On Casual, tone down Harry's damage output and remove all blades from part 4.
VOD: On Casual, halve the trash spawns and drop Suulo's To-Hit so that a 65 AC is missed a lot. Leave existing difficulties as-is.
HOX: On Casual, delay beholder spawns by 3 minutes, and tone down Xy'zzy's damage output. Leave existing difficulties as-is.
TOD: Change part 1 to allow raises, but with a raise lockout timer of 0/1/2/3 minutes (c/n/h/e). Remove Blasphemy from Casual and tone down boss stats (especially Shadowfiends). Leave n/h/e otherwise as-is.
LOB: Drop the Lord's to-hit to be maybe 5 points above Horoth. For Casual, remove Whirlwind, tone down Rain of Blades and dog vomit, and remove 'Gate Keeper' quori altogether. Add the shrine to e/EP to remove the boring Torc phases. That, and changes to how the game handles wipes, should see a lot more people run this fantastic raid.
tMA: Have the 'mega-shot' damage scale with difficulty - 200/400/500/600/700 (c/n/h/e/EP) instead of the flat 500.



Difficulty vs. Drop Rates:
Item drop rates vary a lot in DDO. Low drop rates do not in any way add difficulty to the game, they instead add grind - mindless repetition. Newer endgame content (LOB, tMA, eChrono, eFens) is generally harder than the older stuff, but doesn't have the low drop rates. Consider upping drop rates on older items to match.
Also raids have multiple difficulty settings - I feel loot should be noticeably higher on higher settings so that those players that like a challenge (like me) can make groups for the hardest settings and know that those people that prioritize loot acquisition will actually consider joining.
IMO the design principle here should be: "Will this raid be fun on the 20th/50th completion?" If no, then drop rates should be high enough that players should have everything they are likely to want within 20/50 runs respectively.
One thing that's not really been done is having the same item drop on Normal, Hard and Elite but with slightly different stats. Let's say you decided a raid should have a Warhammer with Holy, Greater Undead Bane and Greater Incineration on it. You could consider making the item the +3 if it drops on Normal, +4 if it drops on Hard, and +5 if it drops on Elite, and add an altar at the end of Hard and Elite that lets you upgrade lower level versions of the weapon to their (slightly) stronger forms. Some people might decide to run the raid on Normal until they get the item, leave it tier 1 for a while, then much later work on Hard difficulty and once they get a single completion, bam, they have a tier 2 version of their warhammer which they might be content to keep. Others will just go straight to Elite and keep running it until they get the tier 3 version in one go. And the difference between Normal and Elite versions is very small, so if you consider Elite too hard to ever beat, you can settle for having almost all of the power of the item in the tier 1 or 2 version.


6-person Epics:
These are all, with one or two exceptions, too easy to be entertaining for the number of runs that are required to complete items. Not because of the quest designs, but because the spells Wail of the Banshee, Implosion, Circle of Death and Undeath to Death obliterate them, and then almost all bosses are just 'surround and beat down for 1 minute' fights.
I'm not sure if your intention this year was to swap raiding and 6-person Epics in DDO's difficulty progression, but that has happened with U9. Almost every 6 person epic is now easier than the Subterrane raids on Normal, whereas before U9 almost every 6 person Epic was harder than VOD Elite.

Suggestions:
Keep the lower mob HP - this made epics more fast-paced.
Do something to the four problem spells. Finger of Death and the like are fine, it's the AoE versions that are killing this part of the game. Promoting some mobs to orange-named status would help.
Try to make boss fights more engaging, like you managed with some of the Challenge bosses. If a mob does nothing but melee, give them Improved Sunder and an extreme crit profile, or give them massive combat buffs and/or re-enforcements when they fall under 25% hp.
A lot of this is tied to class balance, as well. Give us a reason to take melees again. And if you see anyone successfully solo an Epic, that's an indication that either the quest is under-tuned, or their class or build is way out of whack.
Finally, give mobs some way to tone down player kiting. If mobs spawn too fast to kill without kiting them, reduce the spawn rates.

Encounters that are done well:
Demon of the Frenzied Blood (although the spawn rate on trash is too high, and the trash is too durable, meaning people pretty much only kite or Fascinate it)
High Priestess of the Depths (just because she has such a wide variety of ways to incapacitate players)
Raiyum
VON2 final fight (really dangerous until you neutralize the adds)

.. and ones that aren't:
Slomnuc (drags on and on but is not varied at all)
Crateos
Malicia (a little more variance here - a 68 AC is fine in general, just not in the easiest epic chain).


What I feel is missing from high level:
Difficult 6-person content that has loot incentives to repeat. For all their faults pre-U9, Epics were this, but they aren't now.
Casual difficulty raids.
More content for ungeared level 20s to acquire solid basic gear from. I posted some ideas related to this in my update 13 wishlist, here: http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=354769 (search for Paragon difficulty).

Want to add the easiest solution I had come up with in regards to Abbot was to only have one puzzle per difficulty and more hps.
Normal = meteors only
Hard = meteors and Ice
Elite = all 3
This basically removes the lag/latency problem because players can at least run normal at a high rate of success. Abbot has to be the highest % quest failure that I have run.

The quests are far too difficult and there are too many easy buttons.

Fix this.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jortann

As for General quests....

With the new bravery bonus I have been running most quests on Elite. I find with an experienced group (meaning people who have played for a year and know the quest) that these are challenging, but the group will still succeed most of the time.

When I compare that to how I used to approach quests on Elite a year ago when I was a newb, this is very different. I was afraid of quests on Elite and they were very challenging for me, but having more experience with the game and particular quests makes a huge difference.

Now normal quests for me can easily be zerged, because I know them well enough and have my characters prepared.

As for Raids... I find these all very challenging. Some of them on normal are easy if you know them but still there is the threat of a possible wipe if things go bad.

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Pretty much this has been my experience, too.

When i first started playing I found most content difficult, but as I learnt the game and passed down equipment from my older toons to the newer ones, and as i learnt the quests they became less difficult.

When the bravery bonuses came in I found that my wife and i can do elite quests within 2 levels with just our 2 toons, with just enough danger to keep things interesting (depending on the quest). I have found that it is somewhat harder to do this at later levels (14+).

I'm happy with the difficulty spread in the game at the moment. It should be somewhat difficult for a beginner (but this is a social game so gaming with other players who know what they are doing helps a lot, and levels are easy to get to begin with), and experience should (and does) make it easier.

Maybe there should be a more in-depth tutorial system for beginners (as it is a difficult game for a complete newb to get into), or maybe a system whereby patient experienced players are organised to mentor new players. I've done this a few times but really should do a LOT more if I want new players to enjoy and stick with this awesome game.

I think EVERY quest should have 5 diffacultys.
Cas Norm Intermeaded Hard Leet


And block out Cas & Norm on TRs until they've done it on leet first lol

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO?

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If I'm playing a caster toon? Too easy.
If I'm intentionally not playing a caster toon? At least moderately challenging if I'm doing something meant for my level.
Like 99% of the game feels about right if I'm running bravery bonus on a melee without a "good" caster in the group. Hard, but satisfying, and not crazy hard. A couple quests jump out and subvert this though, like acute delirium elite for one.

Epic is too hard for some and too easy for some.
Why did you decide to ditch the difficulity levels,one of the smartest features of DDO, when making epic?


Oh and leveling a TR is too easy, even if you are only playing on elite.
I'm not sure if I even want this to change, becuase TRing is the biggest grind I have ever seen in a game and I don't wish for it to take any longer.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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There is a HUGE inconsistency in terms of difficulty based on when content was released. Content that came out at game launch is REALLY easy compared to content of the same level that has been released after the level cap was increased one or more times. Hiding in Plain sight is a clear case of the higher difficulty of new content that came out with mod 2, even when the level cap did not go up. If you were to evaluate the true difficulty to other level 10 content released after the level cap went up, it might be more like level 12 content in comparison.

Quests in general could use a re-evaluation to make it so quests of a given level SHOULD give roughly the same amount of difficulty. Proof is in the Poison is an example of a quest that is much harder than the level would indicate, so why not bump the actual level of the quest to something appropriate?

Now, when it comes to high level content, we have a bit of an issue in terms of raid content vs. normal adventures. A raid will ALWAYS be seen as a challenge for that level, and when you look at content releases, four quests plus one raid means that 20 percent of new content will end up being raid material(1/5). If you have only three quests and two raids, that really makes it seem that the real focus is on the high level raid community.

What is really needed is a way to balance things, so there will be more adventures per release, which would satisfy the balance of raid players vs. more casual players. Mod 3 was 10 quests plus a raid, and we had the same for Mod 4. It was after that point that the number of adventures per release dropped like a rock.

So, how do you assess the true difficulty when some people are playing with characters with high end equipment, and others don't have access to it yet? Green Steel on a character that has been through one or more true reincarnates means that character is going to be more powerful than those who do not have that advantage. Now, do you balance around THAT, or come up with a new difficulty evaluation system?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Niv-mizzet

If I'm playing a caster toon? Too easy.
If I'm intentionally not playing a caster toon? At least moderately challenging if I'm doing something meant for my level.
Like 99% of the game feels about right if I'm running bravery bonus on a melee without a "good" caster in the group. Hard, but satisfying, and not crazy hard. A couple quests jump out and subvert this though, like acute delirium elite for one.

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Elite acute delirium is insane.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Targonis

So, how do you assess the true difficulty when some people are playing with characters with high end equipment, and others don't have access to it yet? Green Steel on a character that has been through one or more true reincarnates means that character is going to be more powerful than those who do not have that advantage. Now, do you balance around THAT, or come up with a new difficulty evaluation system?

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That is an outstanding observation. I was trying to find a way to fit in my post, (in different words)

I really think, that is where a HARD LINE STANCE by Turbine needs to taken. Like I said, "some toes & egos will get bruised" because of the outcome of that and several other issues.

Really, that is the single most constructive thing I seen on the boards in a long time.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

---

Coming from the perspective of someone who is a very good, very well-geared player, if not necessarily of the top tier of DDO players (that is, I've soloed difficult content, can be relied upon to contribute meaningfully to, and sometimes support, a group through challenging quests and raids, and tend to favor elite and epic content over normal and hard, even in raiding when I can).

I find that most of the game is on the easy side, with a moderate number of challenging things out there, and a small number of overly difficult quests or sections of quests that are too punishing.

I think the biggest problem, from the perspective of looking at difficulty in DDO, is that quest level and monster CR are both almost entirely meaningless. There are quests on normal that are considerably more difficult than quests on elite at higher level, and quests on elite that are quite a bit easier than normal content around the same level.

For instance, The Kobold's New Ringleader is much easier than Walk the Butcher's Path, in large part due to having fewer Kobold Shaman's and because you don't ever really get mobbed by kobolds in the former, yet they are the same level quest and are about the same length.

As another example, The Ascension Chamber is one of the most challenging quests in the game, yet is rated as level 17--my success rate in there, even with good, experienced groups is well under 50%, while it's at around 90% for Tower of Despair even with mediocre PUGs and about 85% for Epic Chronoscope.

Quest level unfortunately doesn't take into account the number of shrines in the quest, the number of shrines when weighed against the length of the quest, number of monsters fought per shrine, or the breakdown of monsters faced. More casters usually equals more challenge, a mix of divine and arcane casters usually equates to more challenge than that, and a mix of arcane and divine casters with some heavy-hitting melee or archer support usually makes for an even greater challenge. Lot's of monsters that trip or otherwise inhibit a player's ability to deal with the threat at hand also makes encounters more difficult.

For instance, Bastion of Power is more challenging than Genesis Point in every way:

• Bastion's shrines are more difficult to get to, and to get back to if you skip them.
• You have many more big fights (more than 3 or 4 monsters at a time) per shrine.
• Genesis Point has almost no casters, and when you do face them, they tend to be either only a single arcane or a single divine caster, while Bastion frequently throws both an arcane and a divine caster at the party simultaneously.
• Bastion has a lot of bezekira, which not only trip fairly regularly, but are also hard to spot, meaning that they can often get away with tripping party members a few times before being dealt with.
• Bastion mixes the monster groups (casters, trippers, heavy-hitters) in most of the fights making for a lot of threats that need dealing with quickly and in different ways, which draws on more resources--a Mass Hold is unlikely to get a whole group in Bastion, since casters have good Will saves, while in Genesis it is far more likely, and this holds true for most forms of crowd control.
• Bastion has narrower fighting arenas, which cuts down on using mobility as a defense.
• Bastion's endfight then combines all of the above into one progressively scaling encounter.

Bastion is more difficult than all of the other Amrath quests, actually, but is listed as the same level 19 as the others.



The end fight in A New Invasion is much more difficult on elite than it is on hard, as elite gains both an air elemental, which has a HUGE impact on the encounter, and the ability for the boss to chain a party member, while the end fights of the other 3 quests generally just gain more HP on the boss and more damage coming through to the party when moving from hard to elite, and not even much more of either of those. Bastion is the hardest of the quests on normal and hard, and 95% of Bastion is harder than all the rest of the quests on elite except for A New Invasion's end fight, which is among the most challenging encounters in the game.



I guess what I'm trying to say is that having clearer information on difficulty would go a long way toward satisfying people I think.



As to how I feel about the game experience...most quests are much too easy for players with knowledge of the quest, and for characters that are well geared. It's the reason that many TRs spend a lot of time soloing or short-manning. Randomizing more elements in dungeons would help a bit with the first issue--if I don't know where, or what kinds of traps I'll encounter, I'll have to go slower, will be more inclined to bring a trapsmith and will likely die to traps more often; if I don't know whether I'll be fighting 4 bruisers or 3 bruisers and a caster, or 4 trippers, or 3 trippers and a caster in the next room, I'll have to be more cautious with my approach and manage my resources better, not to mention managing Dungeon Alert better.



As far as gear goes, Bravery helped a little as it pushes players to tackle Elite content earlier than they otherwise would, but a lot of the stuff is still too easy. Trap damage tends to scale a little too much with difficulty, but monster damage tends to not do so quite fast enough in most areas. I also haven't really paid attention to the differences in spell list at higher levels, but I know that the difference between normal, hard and elite quests in the Harbor is pretty big due to the differences in shaman spell selection--adding Hold Monster instead of Bestow Curse is randomly deadly as you go up in difficulty. Meanwhile, Lightning Bolt (with the new double-strike chance) becomes much more deadly on elite than Scorching Ray on hard for characters without Evasion (hard being more dangerous for characters with Evasion is an odd effect of spell selection changing).



It seems to me that most casters don't upgrade their spells with difficulty setting, though.





Epics became much easier than they had been for casters with both a slashing of mob HP and removal of immunities. Too easy, really. I could just about solo a lot of epics on my wizard before either of those changes were made, and now I could probably absolutely crush (as Axer would say) most of those. My number one suggestion for improving that aspect of the game is to randomize monster groups and buffs. I don't know how easy or taxing that is to do, but having to worry about a divine casting Mass Deathward somewhere I didn't expect it is a bigger hindrance than almost anything else you could do in those situations, but expecting a divine with Mass DW doesn't raise the difficulty of an encounter by quite so much, though it definitely does.



For an example of this, look at the opening encounter of Epic Chronoscope. If I'm soloing for scrolls, my number one priority is to kill the teifling cleric as soon as it activates. If I do that, the encounter lasts about 1-3 minutes and I tend to use up less than 3/4 or 1/2 of my SP. If I don't, I can end up dying as the bearded devil continues to break CC and put on damage because I can't level drain him or otherwise deal with him quickly and easily, and the other monsters in the fight get more time to drain my resources. But I know about that, and have time to anticipate it, so I can throw up a Symbol of Death and hit Wail of the Banshee as soon as the monsters activate.



Now compare that to the fight with Razor Arm. I know that we're getting melees and archers in there, so I can drop Otto's Sphere of Dancing and largely ignore everything that spawns, but if some of those archers were actually casters, it would be a much different story, as a single caster can kill a few party members in a short period of time if left unchecked, and can make it more difficult to deal with all the rest of the trash.



We tend to see very little mob buffing throughout the game. Here and there are divines that toss Death Ward or Mass DW, an occasional Freedom of Movement here and there, and some tend to Rage or drink a Haste potion or cast Haste, but that is often the entirety of mobs buffing themselves and each other. Some casters hit themselves with Blur or Displacement, but they almost never do the same for their companions as far as I can tell. And we rarely see enemy bards any more. If enemy mobs could toss out Greater Heroism, or better yet, get a Warchanter tossing the GH song as an opening move, we'd have a little more variety in what DCs are required, for example.



There are certainly buffs going around, and many monsters have alternate tactics like Crippling, Bleeding Wound, trip and sunder, but I just feel that we don't see these in the sorts of varieties that we should. And with almost zero randomization, which makes for both boring and easy questing.





One last point in this massive response is in regards to bosses. Too many of them tend to just stand around. We're forced to break off attacking them through convoluted mechanics like Velah's periodic fire breath and the blades in The Shroud, but many of our bosses have the ability to get out of a huddled beatdown. I'd like to see more bosses that act like the Lord of Blades, but even his abilities feel a little gimmicky in this sense. We don't have many bosses that can knock us down, or hop over us, or knock us back to get a space to move through us. None can fly above us in anything but a sort of cut-scene-ish way (Arraetrikos in Shroud 4 flies around and shoots at a specific area, and is immune to our abilities to harm him during that time), rather than in an interactive fashion (see: Abishai air raiders). Give bosses less HP, and more ways to not just distance themselves from us, but move us around and change the form of the battlefield and the fight themselves more and fights will be more challenging.



TL;DR Version: Quest level and monster CR needs to more accurately reflect the actual relative challenge the quest presents, and we need more randomization in dungeons and fights in order to keep us on our toes and challenge us.

I think before quest difficulties can be scaled to something more appropriate......you should take the first step of "balancing" the classes.

It doesn't matter how you rescale quest difficulty, if one or a few select builds/classes are the easiest to play that's what people will tend to play and the people who want to play the less powerful classes will still flood the forums with this class/build is OP.....do something about it.

IMO...order game should be fixed is.....

major bugs
class balance
quest scaling.

Challenge for me or a new player starting the game? There is a big difference. Setting in stone difficulty (even 4 levels per quest) is going to net different experiences depending on character.

I may get shot for this but I think scaling was a good idea that needs more work. Quests should scale up, not just down. Scaling should not just take into consideration number of players but also character level, gear, guild buffs, party composition etc...
A team of 6 TR's with full guild buffs and top level weapons will shred a quest 6 new players would struggle with.
Make very quest at level (or even under level) a challenge for EVERY party that enters it.
If aprty has 30pt guild resists, scale elemental damage up. Not the full 30pt up but maybe half the difference.
If a group has a rogue, scale damage of traps up.
If group has twinked to the hilt why shouldn't the mobs be scaled up to match.

DDO needs to understand there is a huge gap between the haves and the have nots but need to cater for both groups. The 4 difficulty split just does not cut it.

Wow! Is there a way to +1 participants in this entire thread thus far? Well, except for that one guy...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Targonis

Now, when it comes to high level content, we have a bit of an issue in terms of raid content vs. normal adventures. A raid will ALWAYS be seen as a challenge for that level, and when you look at content releases, four quests plus one raid means that 20 percent of new content will end up being raid material(1/5). If you have only three quests and two raids, that really makes it seem that the real focus is on the high level raid community.

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This comment reminded me of something that I've been meaning to bring up in the forums. Since Raids are much different than quests (as they should be), why not allow raids to played at a lower difficulty without breaking the Bravery Bonus streak, especially since the changes to raids have made the quests a bit more challenging at level? I'm sure alot of people won't like this change, but I think it would be a change that will help grouping the raids at level.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Falco_Easts

Challenge for me or a new player starting the game? There is a big difference. Setting in stone difficulty (even 4 levels per quest) is going to net different experiences depending on character.

I may get shot for this but I think scaling was a good idea that needs more work. Quests should scale up, not just down. Scaling should not just take into consideration number of players but also character level, gear, guild buffs, party composition etc...

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I think the players are far better judges of how much challenge they want than the game could ever be. I would rather specify how much of a challenge I want to experience than have the game try to read my mind.

Before anything else I'm going to put out there that I've been playing Since October 2006 - Previewing for 10 Days during the Summer of 2006. I also limit myself to only 5 characters so I'm not an altoholic.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

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I like the direction of the difficulty that the Amrath and Cannieth Quests (U11 and not U12) brought but these were geared towards Level 17+

Quests on normal should still be set to a difficulty where four level appropriate geared players can complete and be challenged by the completion.

Raids should be geared towards 10 members

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

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Of the quest levels that have the biggest inconsistency in difficulty I find the majority are between levels 8 and 14. VoN 3 is more difficult then Eyes of Stone which is more difficult than Crucible/Madstone/Prison of the Planes

Why is a Level 9 Elite tougher than a Level 12 Elite which is tougher than Level 14 Elites?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

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The only time a party should fail on normal is if they are totally unprepared for what lies within, and I'm not talking 100 Spell point potions unprepared, I'm talking wrong gear/spells to use. And if they refuse to work together.

Not failing on normal would only bore me if there was absolutely no way for me to fail - Go in naked, no spells and 1 HP and can still win. Please don't go to that point.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

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One of the points I would like to make is DDO did a good thing with the Optional XP. The XP you get even if you don't complete the quest. Maybe a thought would be to put more optional components - Even mandatory optional components that distribute XP. Not so much that you could Farm an Optional and keep on leveling, but enough that even if you fail the quest you could get some percentage of reward possibly no less then 10% of the base XP.

Currently the only quests with the 45+ minutes and then failure that brings up frustration are Raids - Specifically Abbot and way back (haven't run this Raid in a long time) Titan.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

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I find the issue to be that I don't want a quest I can't complete unless I empty my Coin purse and TP cache, I don't want a quest that you need specific Class Abilities to complete (optional paths to victory) - Don't mind if those abilities can make aspects easier.

The problem is that there are those of us that have been around for years that have gathered some pretty nice stuff which makes things easier, there are those have tons of time to dedicate to playing giving them many more hours of play time, then there are those that have time to play on more a casual level.

Keep the idea that you don't need a full Party/Raid Group to be able to complete. Obviously the more you have the easier the challenge is made but only because you have more resources.

If I were to suggest a target I would suggest using the 28 point build. Quests should be able to be completed by a party of only 28 point builds on Normal - doing so should be not be a cake walk and should require some excursion and effort.

Hard/Elite geared towards 32 point builds as a base

34 and 36 point builds should still have enough difficulty on Elite to make these quests challenging.

I'm not advocating excluding 28 and 32 point builds from Epic content, just that it should be difficult - Not because of starting build points but lack of Raid level Gear/Completions.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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Just another thought - Why choose blades to make Shroud harder? Why that much of a boost in Damage? Make them mean something, but don't make them a way to kill off 700+ full HP characters.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sirgog

.

Encounters that are done well:
Demon of the Frenzied Blood
High Priestess of the Depths
Raiyum
VON2 final fight (really dangerous until you neutralize the adds)

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I kind of disagree here. The big thing these fights all have in common is that they have kiteable adds that, if left to their own devices, will wipe a party. That's a decent solution some of the time, but it seems like it is the default solution to too many fights in the game.

As a caster in the Demon of Frenzied Blood encounter I kite a bunch of trash around the room and try to keep a DoT and Ice Storm up on the boss.
As a caster in the Raiyum encounter...I kite a bunch of trash around the room and try to tag the boss with a Meteor Swarm when I can.
As a caster in the final fight of VoN 2...I kite a bunch of trash around the room and try to tag the boss with some DoTs or something when I can.

The DoFB encounter at least has the option of destroying the portals as an alternative to kiting, but the general idea is to distract the party caster from participating in the boss' destruction. And if you don't have an arcane caster in the party, the task falls to the party divine who replaces "try to DoT the boss" with "continue to heal the party." If you don't have a divine capable of that, you need someone with some decent ranged ability, or the party simply fails the encounter, and even a decent archer-specialized character is only mediocre in some of those encounters due to the slowness of archery, facing, limited space, and difficulty in healing both the party and someone else running around the room.

We need more encounters that incorporate everyone without devolving into this ring-around-the-rosy fest.

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.. and ones that aren't:

Crateos
Malicia

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...because they have too much HP, pose too little threat to the party, and have basically no way of manipulating players (knockdown, knockback, stun, dispel, etc...). Malicia also has too much AC for someone with so much HP and so little danger.

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What I feel is missing from high level:
Difficult 6-person content that has loot incentives to repeat. For all their faults pre-U9, Epics were this, but they aren't now.

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I agree with this sentiment, mostly. I think the level of repetition necessary in epics is a bit egregious, and is tied up largely in token attrition, but also in seal, shard and scroll droprates. I think making epics more difficult to Wail through would help things a lot, but I don't want to see everything become immune to Wail again, or see Wail get nerfed, because it remains an interesting tool.

Starting the game is too hard. There is so much information it is hard to choose what is important. It takes a long time to get gear and money. It takes a long time to work out how to lay out your chacter with some of the more non-intuitive features. The forums are established players. If you are going to grow and attract players to DDO and retain them, then maybe you need to get the opinions of a focus group of truly brand new players as part of this dicussion.

Good to see small changes like clean information re sharp and blunt weapons in Heyton's. And changing the cats for wolves in Cereleuan Hills. And upping the loot values in Korthos.

Well for me and my friends what has gotten under our skin as far as difficulty goes is the Dungeon scaling! We like to run stuff together with a full party a lot of the times and not every run do we want a challenge. Some runs we are helping out one player to get a certain item. Just plain old farming.

Will use Amrath as a example but it can be applied to almost any non raid and challenge. We have all ran the Amrath content on every level, solo and with parties. What really gets our gripe is when we are farming for a certain item on normal with a party of 6 and it feels way harder then elite content. The scaling seems to have gone through the roof lately with a full party. Almost to the point where everyone i know wants to keep it below 4 players so it is not insane. Bare in mind i am talking about farming missions and challenges. This is stuff we all do. We all do it tons of times. The Challenges on epic with a full party are so crazy That i honestly do not know why anyone would bother aside from actually challenging themselves!. You can two man em no problem. 3 man em with ease. Bring that 4th man in and your in for a whole different game. Every hit you take is big pink enhanced damage. Every enemy has their hp bumped up dramatically. In the challenges The bosses almost quadruple in hp.

I think when we initially choose Normal it shows we are not after a insane challenge. We just want to get it done. If we wanted a challenge we would have taken elite.

Bear in mind i love challenging myself. But I have to be in the right mind frame. Sometimes i just want to help some guildies get some item they have been after for months. I agree it should be somewhat ramped up when we have a full party so its not a bore fest, but I also think that the scaling needs to be toned down a tiny bit so a normal 6 man party is not harder then a 3 man elite party. It really makes no sense!

This almost encourages players to run with less people if we want to farm stuff fast and efficiently. I have soloed Every elite amrath quest alone and it was not half as bad as normal with 6 players. I have also done it with 6 on elite and that was a war to remember but we all knew it was gonna be like that. We want to be able to group with 6 players and still be able to have fun . Not do a epic battle to the death on normal! Every enemy hitting for epic damage! If we wanted that and some do, we would take elite... But for normal 6 man, tone it down a bit.

My only real concern with difficulty is the scaling. Raids are alright right now . Most are pretty good and scale properly depending on what difficulty you choose. . Abbott Has some issues that may need to be tweaked but most of the raids are pretty straight forward. The blades in shroud on normal still in my opinion need to be toned down a tiny bit. Not a ton just a wee bit so a lag spike is still recoverable for the healers. One lag spike at the wrong time often spells a party wipe in there now.

If you want to talk about the difference in difficulty between running a melee compared to a caster i think everyone knows that melee has the raw end of the deal. That is a whole different balance issue that you guys need to weigh a bit as well.

Some random thoughts:

• I love what you've done with eDragon and eDQ2 in U12. If you're attentive to the environment, they're easier than ever before, yet having to pay attention is what, in a way, makes them harder than before. This is way superior to just increasing bosses' HP and fort and calling it a day - U11 raid changes were just horrible.
• Make hard/long quests more rewarding. I'm fine with all level 6 quests not being equally difficult, but it's often the case that the longer and more difficult quest offers not only the same, but less xp than a shorter quest of similar level. You can choose to pretend that most people that play DDO in 2011 are dungeon crawlers that play for exploration/roleplaying/whatever, but the fact is that xp/min crowd is a pretty big one, and that grinding same quests over and over and over again gets mind numbing, but is still preferable to doing quests that offer horrible rewards vs. time spent ratio. Bravery bonus was, indirectly however, something that *kinda* fixed this a bit, but there are still quests that have such horrible xp that they're not worth running even with full bravery bonus. Long quests in particular should have more 'checkpoints', in the form of (relevant) optional xp/chests (someone mentioned Shroud which is a great example of that).
• Mob AC. Some mobs have AC that is completely out of whack - having to roll a crit to hit a mob isn't fun. There are a few older quests which are particularly guilty of this, mostly quests with vampires (which are already heavily skewed towards casters), but I remember having horrible to-hit issues in elite Fear Factory on a heavily geared third life melee toon (that even had fighter active PL clicky going) fighting the end-boss. He literally had more AC than a lot of epic mobs, which is just ridiculous.
• Dungeon scaling. You say it helps with server load - we can't really contradict you on that, since we have no data. Anyway, whether DA, when working as intended, is a good or a bad thing is a discussion for some other time, however, there are some quests where DA is completely out of whack due (I'm assuming) visibility/spawning issues (namely, Bastion of Power), making quests much more difficult than they should be, even when not zerging at all.
• Vamp form light damage vulnerability. This is just too punishing imho - getting hit for over 350 points of damage in normal level 12 quests is pointless - it doesn't matter if PMs get super-ubber-mega at 20, fact is 350 points is more than most epic traps hit for, yet you're getting hit for that much in low-mid teen level quests.
• Guard the NPC quests. These can be horridly difficult, due to the fact that a lot of NPCs' hit points don't seem to scale with difficulty. Can easily be fixed by upping their hit points, these quests would still be very annoying and most likely have bad xp/min, but they at least wouldn't be as punishing as they are now.
• Time != difficulty (as a general rule). Sometimes, indeed, time can equal difficulty - staying concentrated is harder for extended periods of time. However, for example, removing the shrine from eLoB and (basically) forcing people to torc off trash doesn't make the raid harder in any way - standing and shieldblocking requires no concentration or skill at all.

I haven't read through the five pages of responses, so much of this may have been covered already (and I expect that it has).

The last few updates have amped up the difficulty of the quests in relation to prior tendencies. Many people feel that this is a good thing. Some people feel that this is a bad thing.
I'm in the former group. I like that things have become tougher.

There are two major problems in my opinion.
AC and SP potions.

Player AC is simply broken. Or should I say that mobs' to-hit scores are broken? I feel that these problems are one and the same. The standard d20 system works fine for PnP, but in this game it doesn't. The power level of players is far beyond anything you'd ever see in a PnP game, which means that the mobs have to be adjusted to compensate. Adding more ways to raise AC via dodge bonuses and PrEs doesn't actually help the issue. In fact, it magnifies the problem.
There have been many upon many suggestions to fix the AC and to-hit problems this game has. I would like some action to be taken on this front. Search the forums, or start a Let's Talk to address this problem separately.

The second major problem this game has in regards to difficulty is SP potions in my opinion. You can simply drink your way to success. They need to have a cooldown timer beyond that of a normal potion.
I realize that this is a HUGE cash shop item, and that a cooldown will lower sales. But the fact is that this small loss in sales will make for a better game.

You will always have players that have been here for years telling you that the game is too easy. This is true of almost any game. You will always have new players that feel some things are simly too hard. This is also true of almost any game.
So I suppose that my opinion on the subject of the game's difficulty is that in and of itself it's fine. Newer players can be challenged on normal or hard difficulty. Players who have been around for a while can be challenged on higher difficulty settings. Continue to build content similar to what we've seen throughout this year and we'll be happy. But address the real issues that make the game too easy or too challenging, which are AC/mob-to-hit and Drinking your way to victory.
Once those two issues are addressed I believe we'll see a much more balanced game, as far as difficulty is concerned.

*edit:
Oh, yeah. And ship buffs. Ship buffs only magnify the problem. Things that might be difficult after a death are trivial if you haven't died. Ship buffs ruin the game's attempt at balance. Nothing you could do could possibly be balanced evenly for two players if one has ship buffs and one doesn't.
If you seriously want to have a discussion about what is and is not too easy or too difficult, then ship buffs need to be removed from the game.
Sorry kids, but it's true.

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Originally Posted by sephiroth1084

I kind of disagree here. The big thing these fights all have in common is that they have kiteable adds that, if left to their own devices, will wipe a party. That's a decent solution some of the time, but it seems like it is the default solution to too many fights in the game.

As a caster in the Demon of Frenzied Blood encounter I kite a bunch of trash around the room and try to keep a DoT and Ice Storm up on the boss.
As a caster in the Raiyum encounter...I kite a bunch of trash around the room and try to tag the boss with a Meteor Swarm when I can.
As a caster in the final fight of VoN 2...I kite a bunch of trash around the room and try to tag the boss with some DoTs or something when I can.

The DoFB encounter at least has the option of destroying the portals as an alternative to kiting, but the general idea is to distract the party caster from participating in the boss' destruction. And if you don't have an arcane caster in the party, the task falls to the party divine who replaces "try to DoT the boss" with "continue to heal the party." If you don't have a divine capable of that, you need someone with some decent ranged ability, or the party simply fails the encounter, and even a decent archer-specialized character is only mediocre in some of those encounters due to the slowness of archery, facing, limited space, and difficulty in healing both the party and someone else running around the room.

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Absolutely agree with this. Seems like devs can't escape integrating kiting in large majority of the end-game content. What really interests me, what was the devs idea behind these encounters? Did they really design them to be kited or do they just have no idea what the actual live gameplay/metagaming looks like?

The real issues in my mind when it comes go the games difficulty come in a couple forms.

1st It seems when you release a new pack that it is much more difficult on normal, than existing quests of its level range that already existed on their hardest settings. Examples Sentinels of Stormreach is much harder than Von for the same party. And The Lordsmarch Chain on Normal, is gnerally as difficult if not harder than Gianthold walk ups. To be frank here the newer stuff is too much harder.

2nd Compounded to this the newer quests (with few exceptions such as Sane Asylum, Eyes of Stone, Blockade Buster) have such terrible Xp for the time invested, and although the loot from these quests is nice and thematic it just isnt enough reason to run these quests when leveling up. I find that if you want TR's to buy and run your content you have to make the xp better, and to get newer players to buy and run the content you have to make it of equivilant difficulty/length as to other packs.

3rd Raids
Most raids are fine as they are...though I question a few design decisions. 1st Titan. No one runs this raid. Look at your internal records...reference the pct of f2p players with the pack with a % of characters that have EVER run the raid and look only at account created after F2P. I have personally seen a total of 5 Titan runs in LFM or guild runs in two years. Five. Make this pack attractive. Overhaul and/or get rid of that terrible preraid. Add a couple more quests. Give the explorer area a map. Change its favor to House Cannith.

Reaver- Get rid of that 500 pt disintegrate. Just no. Otherwise the raid is fine.

Shroud-blade damage. It makes playing a melee annoying. If your intent was to harm casters then instead of making the blades circle like they do now...Perhaps make the blades roam randomly OUTSIDE of melee range of Harry...make it so the healers/casters can choose to eat melee/meteor damage or take their chances with the blades.

TOD/Hound - fine

VOD - I just dont like this raid so Im pretty biased and cant make accurate opinions. Though those 'paladin' items you made I really hope are the beginning of a true Holy Avenger cause otherwise they are pretty terrible.

MA - The flash on the crystals causes visual lag across the raid...please remove it. Otherwise its not bad.

LOB - I don't know what to say here. The problem is the final trash waves. Please consider making it a single wave of quori OR beef up the red names and get rid of the multiple spawns of the trash quori. If you did this it would be a manageable raid for any team with teamwork and coordination as opposed to now where its either use questionable tactics/exploit (dont care what people call it.) or suck pots. And kill the LOB with the broken glass shards.

Lastly is epics. What you have done with the challenges needs be considered with all epic item construction. I want to feel as though I made progress toward an item, via gain x/xxxx collectables needed for item...than how it is now. I want to feel accomplishment in measured intervals.

This is all I can think of for now. If I think of more I will post again.

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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I don't think there is any question that even normal quests now are being balanced for TRs and not for new players. The difference between Tear of Dhakaan on Normal and Bargain of Blood on Normal is very noticeable. The hobs have more hit points, more AC, and do more damage. When you move to elite the differences become a chasm. The traps hit 2x as hard, have +10 more search/disable DC and the mobs scale much more difficult.

And this has been happening long enough that it has become a trend. New paid content is much more difficult than pre-DDO:EU free content across the board on all difficulties. I'm not saying you should make them easier, but they need to be comparable.

Also at some point, you need to address why the XP gets abyssmally bad in the level 18+ quests.

Rather than looking at quest difficulty (casual, normal, hard, elite, and in some cases epic gives you plenty of opportunity to tune and re-tune to cater to the broadest possible spectrum of player skills and desires), I hope you consider another aspect of what can make DDO excessively difficult for some players.

This game's ability to customize character builds is one of its biggest strengths but also one of the most potentially punitive mechanics facing a new player. This game (and many of the players in it) do not forgive "build mistakes". What is a new player who makes their way to the mid upper levels faced with when they're told taking Power Critical or Acrobatic or Improved Mental Toughness were big mistakes, or that their mix of classes is 'gimp', etc? It wont be altogether clear to many new players just how useless some of the feats are or how bad of an idea mixing certain classes is until they've invested some chunk of playtime - and then said investment looks like a big loss in light of the harsh reality of their options:

- reroll: do you want new players to feel like they've wasted all that time?
- pay for lesser/greater reincarnation: expensive.
- pay for one-by-one feat swaps that may not even work given feat selection progressions: potentially expensive.

'Expensive' is subjective, sure, but when you guys shifted the capability of players to swap feats for siberys shards by a couple magnitudes you essentially made real money the only option for repairing bad leveling decisions.

Some ideas for reducing this hurdle:

- revert siberys feat swap 'costs' to their previous levels (i.e. 1,000,000 shards for the flawless needed to feat swap at level 17 is nuts)
- provide every character slot with a one-time usable Greater Heart of Wood +5. This one time use does not renew across True Reincarnations. This would basically function as a single use 'oops' button for, so to speak, un-gimping a character. Maybe tie this to a certain level or maybe a certain favor threshold, but not so high as to be a grind unto itself.
- improve the feat swap and lesser/greater reincarnation interfaces to be more intuitive and forgiving. Consider a two or four hour timer after changes are made: within that window of time there is an 'undo' option, because the only thing worse than making critical mistakes building your character is compounding them because you didn't change out the right class at the right level or so on.

Let me give you a little of my background so you can quantify my response.

I began playing Dec 24th, 2009. That's two years ago this Saturday. In that two years I have purchased or unlocked all content except the Challenge packs and Artificer. I purchased WF and Monk. I have unlocked Drow, Vet, 32 points, and FvS. Since I purchased all of that content, I thought I would get the most of my money by unlocking the unlockable content and spending my TP only on things that were on sale. I do not have artificer because I have not unlocked it (see below) or the challenge pack because it has not been on sale. I will buy things like Supreme tomes, hirelings, and cosmetic items when they are on sale if I need/want them.

I consider myself a casual player. That means if I get a chance to play during the week its only about 30-60 min. I only get an average of 1-2 times a week to play. When I can play on the weekends, I can play for about 2-3 hours total. If the wife has something to do that day then I can get in several hours. Even then its not more than 6-8 all weekend. I can normally get my 2-3 hours in on the weekend. I spend more time on the forums because I can browse them on my phone or at work. When I browse the forums I try to poke my head in technical assistance threads and more community oriented stuff. I find most of the DPS calculation and optimal build/gear threads to be slightly bewildering. That, and I dont enjoy trying to do complicated math when I am trying to take a break from work. :D

I have 13 characters. Most are lvl 5-8, after I made an effort to get all past lvl 4. I tried to roll a character of every race and class, so I can log in and play just about any role I like when I have the time to play. I have a 14th slot waiting for my Artificer. I have one capped character. Otsegolation reached cap shortly after I unlocked FvS, and that was this last November. She was only 3 ranks away so I finished her off. She has not run any content above lvl 15, and she has no good gear. My goal for 2012 is to get her decently geared so I can work on TRing her in 2013. Yes, I expect it to take me that long.

I normally PUG or run with hireling(s). I love my guild but considering how little gametime I have and how many alts I have, I find I get left behind in the lvls by any characters I encounter in a PUG or in the guild. Otsegolation ran all those favor quests with a full army of gold seal hirelings.

Ok, enough about me, on to my opinion of game difficulty.

There are a few area's I want to touch on.

Firstly, Artificer. With only one capped and badly geared character that cant run the House C quests, and how difficult it can be to get favor with the Challenges, I dont expect to unlock Artie unless Turbine releases more House C favor that is more easily obtained. Its unattainable at this time.

Second, there is definitely a disconnect between the old and the new game. The content built when the level cap was 10 or 12 plays much differently than the content built when it was 20. I know I didnt focus on my gear when grinding favor, but I find that I am completely unprepared for the end game on my untwinked characters. Unless I spend the time grinding greensteel and other gears in the lvl 15+ quests, I will not be good for endgame, and it will be even longer before I can touch Epics. It will be very difficult even for my untwinked lvl 20 character to contribute even in a PUG unless I completely redo my gear. Basically, what I am saying is, I wish there was more middle game content (lvl 10-15) that reliably gave you gear to make it to end game and more low mid content (lvl 8-12) that prepared you for the difficulties of the second half of the game.

Third are the quests and raids I cant touch. I cant run Titan because the raid is not appealing enough for PUG's, and the flagging quest with the "Do not kill's" is very difficult for a person using hirelings. I wish the less loved quests in the game got some love to make them more appealing for pugs. I wish I could have run more quests leveling up on my non-favor grinders without having to do them over level or wait for a second or third TR so I dont blow past them. I hate the idea that to run them at level I would have to hold off on leveling for a while. I dont get a lot of time to play, and I worked hard for that xp!

To answer your question more directly, I love it when things go badly, at any difficulty. For better or worse, PUGs are more difficult now with the bravery bonus. Everyone wants to run quests that are sometimes more challenging than the players or characters can handle. I have run the lvl 1-8 content many times, and the near failures mean I really have to work and think to keep the quest going. I do not take my gametime seriously. I love laughing at my failures and joking with my fellow PUGers at how stupidly we handled a situation. I love the comradeship I feel when we pull off a quest that has particularly challenged our party.

I hope that input helps. I also hope it dosent give you the impression I hate the game. I love DDO and look forward to upsetting my wife by playing it for years to come. ;)

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

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In many ways, this is contingent on the build, and the dungeon type. And to be fair, not all 5th level mobs need to be same, equally so, not all 5th level dungeons should be the same either. The type of mob, their strengths and weakness play into the strengths and weakness of the various classes.

So, in that regard, there are some quests that when compared to other quests of their level, and in their own chain/pack do not equal out to where they should be.

The first and Foremost to me: Abbot.

Not only has this quest been messed with, and I will openly say the revisions to it have not been good in any way in my mind, it falls out of sync to the rest of the necro 4 pack. Currently the way it is working is that we as players can flag for Abbot at level (IE: doing elites at 16th level for Bravery, and 17th for Litany), and if luck favors us, some somewhat fun loot items, but then we need to wait till cap to do the actual raid.

And as many others have said and seem to agree, this is not a well received revision to the raid. Tone it back. In fact, tone it down to be realistic for 16th to 19th level range.

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If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

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Yah, this is another thing. There seem to be jumps in difficulty, and just hard "Level" areas for some players and some builds, I personally noticed my first time up, that 10th was the hardest time for me, but I was also F2P at that point, and I will say this, after expanding into the F2P quests, that made getting past 10th a lot easier. But also,11th is a huge "gear" step as well, as once a player makes 11th, they should be taking a substantial step up in gear, if they know what they are doing. I did not my first time up, so rightfully so, it was hard on me to level in the 10+ range until I was explained things like Heavy Fort.

Now I would say, it might be because the older content was designed for a capped 10th level, but while Tempest Spine seems to be a great raid, at it's level, even Vault of Night is viable at level on elite, However, Plane of Night is not.

In that regard, yes, there is a serious inconsistency issue with the amping of the difficulty of the quests namely at this point the Raids and "chain end" quests.

And to be honest, it really makes no sense for this to happen, that a group can do a quest series, and pretty much work their way though it with good challenge and just get owned at the end fight of the series (In the Flesh is an example of the Boss Fight being way out of proportion to the rest of zone it is in, as well as the rest of the series it is a part of)

Other quests that seem out of wack are:

The Dead Shall Rise. (The lich at the end with the falling floor makes this quest very annoying)

The Keepers Sanctuary. This is a really long drawn out quest that gives surprisingly poor EXP for the time sink that it is.

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What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

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I hate to be blunt but, I expect Normal to be easy. Normal in my mind is designed for first time players who may or may not have a clue what is good gear and what is a good build. Normal is the "Lets learn this quest" difficulty.

Because lets be honest about this, wiping on Normal (barring some act of stupidity) is a bit discouraging.

I hate to say it, but, if you are wiping on Normal, what is left? Re-roll? Give up?

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I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

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This depends on how they lost. If you spend 40 min to get the boss fight, only to have it so that 5 min later, the party is wiped out the the boss is only down 20% that is outright discouraging if not totally disheartening.

If a group "Just looses by the skin of their teeth" the fight, they can ponder tactics, or maybe "If I had this extra guard on" or "If only the cleric did not die at the start" or some other issue.

Players Can only overcome hurdles by two means: Skill and Gear.

After any fail, I always ask myself what could I have done better, and first think about could I have been better prepared? IE: Did I break DR, did I use the best weapons on them: IE: They are ice mobs, was I using Fire to do max damage, etc.

Then I ask: What could I have done better: Did I not engage the fight fast enough, too fast, what could I have done differently?

If at the end of the fight, I realize there was nothing I could have done differently to turn that fight around, It becomes a hopeless quest.

I remember a Post U12 Abbot, going in on Normal, after we did the Puzzles, we had the boss beat down. We got him to about 50% life, when I saw that the healers were out of Spell Points (all three of them), only one person down. I realize that there was no way we were going to win this. And that really turned me off to the whole thing. Just realizing that "This is hopeless".

I have not been back to Abbot since. I just don't see the point in it.

So, while I do not expect to win every fight, I don't enjoy a hopelessly overpowering encounter either.

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We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

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It is my personal feeling that, yes you have been catering to the "Uber Players" and it has not made me happy at all, in fact it has made me feel very excluded. The reality is, people will always scream easy button, as it is a standing joke that the best drop rate is when I have it and no one else does. But the truth is, players will run an easy quest, just like they grind optimal exp quests.

However, if the quest is too hard, it discourages others from playing it. Take a guess how it feels to feel excluded from content because, quite simply it requires a better guild/gear/team then you have.

Like needing to be in the right circles or have the right connections to run quests. Take some time to ponder how enjoyable that makes a game.

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Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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Well I have expressed my thoughts a bit.

TlDr; Too dificult? No.
EVelah,eDQ2, elite VoD, LoB, hard/elite Shroud,In the flesh end fight Grrreat.:)
Abbot,normal Shroud. Tweak.
Elite scaling--- Get rid of.
Hard scaling--- Lower.
Tie drops more closely to difficulty.
The fact that hard vs. elite is a different ball game fine by me.



Hmm don't have the energy to read the whole thread so will mostly respond to OP.

Fast answer: No.

Having just completed a TR with the bravery streak first time elite everything very few things while leveling were
particularly challenging.

I keep hearing about In the flesh elite as incredibly hard I realize it's a fairly low level quest but even so elite on a lvl 20 it was a cake walk and in no way harder then even easy epics (ran on a 20 monk with mediocre gear). In a
reasonably balanced and capable party at level this should not be an issue even if the end fight is nice in not just
being stand there and hit boss. Which btw I think is awesome if you have tactics and know what you are doing it's
easy if you run around like a headless chicken you get slaughtered that in my opinion is exactly how all elite and
epic quests should be.

1-2 years back soloing quests on elite at level was a big achievement now people seem to
expect that to be the norm. A large part of the reason for that in my opinion is that few people run quests
at a reasonable pace due to the leveling grind of tr1/tr2 lives. I find myself completely guilty of that no way
will I wait 10 mins to fill a group especially since doing so means I will most probably have to wait for a cleric
since the other players that join will expect one. Much easier to put "IP,BYOH,zerg" in the LFM and not wait,
that way you get going fast and whoever joins knows to not need a healer.

A lot of this could be fixed by actually removing scaling from elite altogether (as it should be imo) and
by lowering the scaling on hard. Scaling at this moment is one of the biggest hurdles to grouping along with the
party wide 10% death penalty.

I realize that adding end fights of the type you see in In the Flesh to most quests is extremely non trivial but on
the other hand it really brings out the team spirit/tactics approach which is often very much lacking in the
game due to brute force being the answer to so many challenges.

I do agree with gordon and other people though that the difficulty level of quests from different eras
is hugely out of whack. Gianthold is a joke compared to many of the new packs which are lower level. I'm slightly
confused about why that is since I don't think anyone was ever really whining about there being too many easy
buttons for leveling yet you seem to have increased the difficulty of the new content at low levels while
decreasing the difficulty of epics. That seems extremely counter intuitive to me.

In conclusion I would like to applaud the changes made to Velah, VoD, DQ2 and the two new raids with LoB in
particular. That in my opinion is the type of challenge we want to see more of. On the other hand Abbot
and normal shroud could use some tweaking (hard/elite shroud is just fine imo). MA in my opinion is great
but could use some incentive to run on anything other then normal and even then past 10 completions or so.

One remaining thing: Please tie drop rates more closely to difficulty. Something more along the house C quests (1 chest norm 7 elite) works better even
if the 5 chests on hard make elite a waste of time but at least there is something useful going on there.

Instead of add a bunch of blah blah blah to a thread filled with it.. I'll just say that I pretty much like the stuff that Sirgog said. :)


I like the new mechanics on Shroud and Weapons Shipment that reward higher diffs with more loot/more loot chances. We need more of that all around. Fun is fun. Grind is not fun.

BTW, Thanks for doing this.

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Originally Posted by hit_fido

This game's abilrity to customize character builds is one of its biggest strengths but also one of the most potentially punitive mechanics facing a new player.

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I have to agree with this wholeheartedly. You can see in this thread and in the game, the discrepancy between players who 'stick it out' for a year or more and those who don't and just give up. When you've stuck it out, run (and re-run) content and, if you are a heavy player, really ground for your gear, your game experience is a world away different from new players.

I said in another thread, ironically today:

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Originally Posted by Hafeal

I love the character planner (ty Ron).

That being said, I think it borders on criminal that a game as complex as DDO did not come with this type of tool or has not implemented a similar feature in 5 years. Having an 'official' resource would go a long way to helping players get accurate information for their builds. Relying on user created tools at the beginning has lost its luster and excuse. Further, it is unfair to expect users to continually keep these tools accurately up-to-date.

I think the time has long passed for DDO to step-up and give us a character planner as well as a way to get the data printed on paper or into data files. Many players derive enjoyment in reading and analyzing their character sheets.

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As far as normal day to day questing is concerned, the difficulty seems fine despite the discrepancies between newer content elites and older content elites. Normal/Casual are very accessible to the average player at level and elite is still difficult with a prepared party.

For raids, however, the difficulty is all over the place. While elite ADQ/VON6/Chrono are trivial to level 20s, elite abbot and shroud is very difficult even for moderately geared level 20s. Another problem is that most raid completions are done at level 20 since all other levels go by to quickly to gain raid completions even on a TR. Therefore the raid is rather trivial for the most part.

To quote myself from a different thread, I came up with an idea that would address these issues for players.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AmatsukaIncarnate

Many of the lower level raids are never run at level for many different reasons, primarily because loot is the only objective and doesn't change from your level and losing out on a bit of XP is not killer by any means. Also, loot from these lower level raids are usually not pertinent at higher levels. (few exceptions, but most level 20s will not get too excited about Belt of the Mroranon and ect)

But how about making all raids like Devil Assault where the difficulty is scaled to a different set of levels?

For example Chronoscope...
On normal, make it accessible to 5-7 level characters. On hard, 10-13 level characters. On elite, 16-19. And keep epic for level 20s.

And with each of these "tiers", you have a chance at a raid loot upgrade seal/token instead of the base item. So in essence, the base items drop on normal, and hard drops the first tier upgrade, and elite drops the second tier upgrade, and finally epic can drop a shard/seal/scroll for the final upgrade if applicable.

Each upgrade would make the item useful to that new level tier...
For example, Helm of Frost....

BASE ITEM ----------> First upgrade--------------> Second upgrade--------->Epic
Min lvl 5 -------------> min lvl 10-----------------> min lvl 16---------------->min lvl 20
Frost Lance----------> Cone of Cold--------------> Otiluke's Freezing Sphere->blah
Cold Resistance------> Cold Resistance (20)-------> Cold Resistance (30)----->blah
Might of the Abishai--> Strong Might of the Abishai-> ect. :P ----------------->blah
Charisma +3---------> Cha +5--------------------> Cha +6 (+1 exceptional)-->blah

So in essence, these are the positives
1.) Raid loot from all raids can be pertinent at end game if upgraded.
2.) All raids can be challenging to all characters and can be fun at all levels even at endgame!
3.) More incentive to run raids at level (more like disincentive for higher level characters and not entirely convincing but it will keep some higher level characters away from trivializing a raid of much lower level)
4.) Some of the trash raid loot that exists right now can be made useful without having to change the base item.

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The Uber player and the casual player does not have to be in any kind of conflict.

For me the answer already exists in the 12. when anyone goes to Amrath they see 2 choices that don't yet exist. There are plains on the list we can't access ( Lammania and Dolhurr)

It is perhaps a point of intepretation. The Uber player is always looking upward. He/She wants to progress and build on existing achievements because of the exhaustive and rewarding path taken. So these people want to keep moving forward. Invest in these people heavily but not at the cost of the path they travelled.

Also, there are those who enjoy the comfort of what we have now. The comfort of these people is the key. They are the ones who get the grind and ride out the grind without complaint. because they don't mind the gradual upgrade of the uber dudes who blaze the trail. In fact this group doesn't notice or will ever acknowledege it. And that is in fact OK.

So the simple advice on this issue is don't change what alreay exists, the community will have done something you never contemplated and have completely asjusted to.

However, this is where the standard increases exponentially. What is next? House C, IMO absolutely right on course. But all the time spent touching what already has been (Very Bad)

Big caveat is fix bugs but don't fix bugs to the point of re-writing the game.

It is so very important to take a step back and look at the big picture. keep the content moving forward, and in many cases forward isn't only about more quests it's about more class develeopment.

So moving forward doesn't mean reinvent what we got (Only players see that. Dev's should never judge on what we have but where we are going)

Distilled my 2 cents is always move forward (new content) fix the bugs and leave the rest alone (existing content)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MadFloyd

What are your thoughts on the overall difficulty of DDO? Sure, we offer difficulty choices, but do you find yourself in a postion where even Normal difficulty feels too much like hard?

If so, do you associate this with a given level in the game (e.g. 10+) or do you think there is just too much inconsistency throughout?

What's the right balance of challenge vs success for YOU? Do you expect to never fail when playing Normal - or would that simply bore you?

I'm raising this subject for a few reasons. I think a lot of people expect that when it comes to an MMO, if you put time in you must get progress/reward out of it - and that failure is just plain bad. Spending 45 minutes into a quest only to fail can be very frustrating.

We have been accused (and perhaps there's truth to this) that we've been balancing the game for the uber-player. Are you finding this to be the case? It seems like a couple years ago the salient message from the community was 'enough with the easy button already!'

Would love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to reference specific quests.

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The problem is that you guys essentially painted yourselves into a corner by sabotaging the old model of normal hard and elite.

What you need IS four difficulties, but they need to be different than they are now:

- Normal: Full dungeon scaling, easy completion for anyone, reusable shrines, etc.
- Hardcore: ZERO dungeon scaling, maybe even exp penalties on death, full complement of enemies (as opposed to the watered-downed normal), no mercy. Twice the chance at named loot than normal in the form of an extra chest appearing on quest completion(!!) at the end with a chance at any named item present inside the quest. (to prevent zerging to the chest only)

- "Epic" Light: Ideal for the people who want end-game content and items, but who aren't hard-core. The folks who currently love house D and P "epics" but who wouldn't run an old-style-pre-epic-nerf offering of blood if their lives depended on it.
- "Epic" Hardcore: Best of the best only need apply, twice the chance (or more?) to get the named items as epic light. F.ex 2 x warded chest, or more where appropriate.


And lastly, the absolutely most important thing the game is missing: A change in loot mechanics so that if you do run something that may even be very challenging, that you do end up 1 small step closer to getting your desired item. With this in mind, I think ALL epics and ALL epic raids need to track completions and once you reach 20 completions you get raid-like list of items, once you reach 40 you get a fuller list of items, and once you reach 60 you get a complete list of items.

If we tie the above with the difficulty settings suggested above, we could even make it so that completing something in 'hard core' would count twice for this completion count, which provides a good motivation to 'kick it up a notch' for those who can without shutting people down from content and loot for those who can't.

A sad reality I've noticed is that no matter how hard a raid is (f.ex epic DQ is not that easy anymore unless you have some key players) completely undergeared and frankly unskilled people will still try it, and still whine when they all fail horribly. Why? Well, because it's there, and because they too want the neato shiney they saw on the one uber-geared player who ate that content for breakfast.

This is the basis for my proposal: to provide two paths to power/content, one shorter, harder, and one longer, easier.

Incidentally, since many folks only run raids and epics, it would help out enormously if TRs were allowed to enter epics at levels 18+...