Epic Quest Scaling

[Cyr]

A plan has to be made to address DDO's endgame in the long term.

I truly believe that Turbine does not have the capability to keep up with even semi-casual players demand for new content if the grind was minimized to a non-insane scale and the level cap kept increasing into epic levels.

Therefore I think the solution is an expansion of the epic system into a true end game system meant to satisfy a variety of players.

This could be accomplished by scaling epic quests in the following manner.

* Three levels of difficulty 'epic', 'heroic', 'insane'. Normal epic mode would look just like what we have now for epics while insane would be a drastically more difficult.

* Heroic and Insane mode should be scaled to have quests from different packs more comparable in difficulty while normal epic mode quests from different packs could have a wider range of difficulties like it is currently.

* Grant increased favor for harder epic modes with some actually worthwhile favor rewards at the higher tiers.

* Loot is the key to all of this as far as incentives to run go...instead of handling loot like is done in n/h/e in epic/heroic/insane have loot work as follows....
** all epic loot has 3 tiers the current normal tier, a heroic tier, and an insane tier. Since heroic and insane difficulty are to be balanced for a more equal difficulty across packs/quests these upgraded pieces of loot can be very close in power levels as opposed to normal epic items where drastically different challenges must mean different powered loot. To upgrade a normal epic item you would have to find the heroic upgrade item for that specific item and combine it with an already created normal epic item. For an insane item combine it with the insane upgrade item and the heroic item. These upgrades would retain any augment crystal upgrades (no penalizing players for making better items).
** epic/heroic/insane all drop the appropriate seals/scrolls/shards (again no penalizing players who play harder content)
** a single quest/raid drops the specific item needed for a heroic upgrade only on heroic setting or insane settings
** a single quest/raid drops the specific item needed for an insane upgrade only on insane setting. This quest/raid should not be the same one required for the heroic upgrade.
** heroic/insane upgraded items should be dramatically better then normal epic items due to the high level of difficulty of quests needed to complete them
** heroic/insane upgrade items only drop from end chests or 20th reward lists (standard for all epic quests with separate counters for each epic difficulty...yes I propose a couple more bytes of storage per character to keep track of these)...a completion on insane would count as a completion on heroic and normal epic...if a 20th reward came up at the same time for multiple tiers of epic the quest giver would first reward the highest tier then open another reward box for the next lower tier so no loss of 20th reward lists was possible (ie no reverse incentive to run stuff on lower difficulty for better rewards)
** shards/seals/scrolls have increased drop rates on all epic difficulties compared to currently

The logic behind this as a suggestion is fairly straight forward.

* Turbine can not meet end game players demand if the game goes into epic levels due to having to design mostly new content for them at a vastly increased rate...they couldn't do it before the cap was 20 it only gets harder as the level range goes up.
* More casual gamers are really what the newer epics are targeted toward as an end game challenge. This is appropriate if everyone else has something harder to play, but if you have to design new dungeons to do this again you will never have enough content to keep up.
* Epic has an epic grind right now which is frankly not fun for almost anyone. Casual players get hosed completely as they have little hope of making items while more hard core players get burnt out because they are running what has become an easy quest for them dozens of times. This allows for the grind to be cut down dramatically for casual players and creates a real challenge for more hard core players to get their best loot.
* It is much easier to design challenging content for end game players when you are already fulfilling the needs of more casual end gamers with normal epic mode. This also allows for loot that actually makes sense for the difficulty of the quests they are obtained from while making no pack useless for a hard core player by making the heroic and insane items reflect the greatly scaled difficulty of those modes in those quests. Starter mode epics become no big deal to the hard core players because the heroic and insane modes are still geared to them (as well as have gear for them). Casual players due to their by definition more limited play time also have more then enough end game to play with just the normal epic content.
* It's easier to create scaled content then it is to create new content by a large margin.

Points against this suggestion...
* Gives up on the hope of epic levels in DDO, at least in the sense of bothering to make content specifically to support them.
* Makes normal epic items easier to obtain then they currently are (from a grind only perspective).
* Requires some real item design work that would not allow for the excuse of 'throw away' items when it comes to heroic and insane upgrades as these would be challenging to get and the incentives to run certain quests on certain difficulties would be degraded if junk items were in the tables.
* Increases the power level of the top level of players in the game with new more powerful gear. This would eventually require some even harder heroic and insane modes for newer quests that were made into epic mode (once a suitable level of slightly less severe challenges was obtained). Casual players would continue to get their fill of normal epics to keep on selling those packs.
* Slightly more work to produce an epic pack then before.
* Shifts the end game power progression in a comprehensive manner to gear.