Brilliant Reincarnation System

[ufo2013]

AFAIK, you don't get bonus comms first time through, whether daily or first time ever, you get a fixed set and that's it. So, no bonus comms. Meanwhile you DO get bonus xp, meaning a lot of people will hit 28 (or even 30 when available) LONG before they have 4200 comms.
I have a wizard who went from 19 to 20 thanks to U20, so exactly on the dot. I expect him to hit 28 in januari or maybe februari (except I'll be banking those last 2 levels while capping destinies), I seriously don't expect him to have 4200 comms before summer, if then, and sorely regret buying him that greater tome of epic learning...
Hey devs, how about throwing a bone and making said tome give a comm bonus as well?

Greetz,
Red Orm

You are correct. But what I was saying is that on a fresh epic toon you can do the same quest 4 times back to back and get comms each time. After you ETR, next life you can only do each quest once per day.

Okay, glin, so now I read about someone's nightmare I don't think your reincarnation system is that brilliant anymore:
https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...ere-do-I-begin

Here is what I propose:
1) Change requirement for ETR to simply capped Karma in desired sphere (nothing to do with character level).
2) When you ETR, your character level xp is not lost (a level 28 stays level 28, no hassle going thru the silly LR process and risk having some bug messing things up).
3) You lose all karma in your chosen sphere.
4) Each time you ETR, the cap Karma for that sphere increases by 10% (so yeah additional ETR for same sphere requires increasingly more Karma, but since stuffs are getting stacked 9x this is reasonable).

This will make it fair to iconics too. Right now, the whole system seems to be set up such that playing iconic feels like a trap. Think about it, right now a non-iconic ETR back to level 20, he has the option to TR immediately. For iconics, this is not an option - he has to level back up to 28 again.

[bloodnose13]

ill say only one thing about this system, the only thing that i dont like about it is the fact that to do a FULL TR from epic cap (epic tr+heroic tr) we have to do some weird stuff, i dont belive it changed but when i done it on lammania it was, first epic tr, then RELEVEL character from 1 to 20 JUST to do heroic tr to get back to 1................................................. ...........

im pretty sure there MAY be a big % of ppl that will want to tr in this way, maybe it would call for modification of EPIC tr UI to allow imput of second heroic heart along with epic for full tr?

[oradafu]

You are aware that the Old ratio for getting Hearts of wood (Pre MOTU) Farming Epic Quests with a timer it did take weeks to farm a heart.

Pre-House C, it didn't take weeks to farm for a heart, even if you had a single character. It took about a week. Even with the 18 hour wait for epic quests and 3 day raid timer, there were 20 quests that could be played everyday, that's discounting Spies in the House (rarely ran) and Black Loch (no tokens). Some of those quests dropped full tokens (as did the raids). Most dropped fragmented tokens usually between 30 to 65. Additionally, the old drop rate for fragments from mob kills usually resulted in at least 8 fragments, although getting 20 to 30 fragments wasn't unusually.

So players that could farm the old Epics could rake in a TR Heart within a week, and I'd say 5 days wouldn't be unusual. For players who couldn't run the harder epics (the majority of players that did Epics), it would have taken a little longer, about 2 weeks. For casual players, it would have taken several weeks.

The biggest obstacle to the old Epics was finding a Healer and/or an Epic DC caster off timer, if you only had one Epic ready character. But the ability to farm for TR Hearts could have been done within a week for players that could do Epics regularly (usually the Healer and DC caster). But even for the average dedicated Epic player, a TR heart could be farmed within 2 weeks.

[Draxis]

That's funny, considering I personally found repeatedly heroic-tring to be intolerable. Such a pain to have to collect and horde 20 lvls worth of twink gear. Thankfully, most of my epic gear will be accessible to me by lvl 23. Nearly all of it by 25. So I plan on epic-tring like crazy. THEN and only then would I consider heroic-tring - Once I'm all uber twinked-out with epic pl feats, the heroic grind should be a breeze, twink gear or no.

[PsychoBlonde]

I've been heroic TRing the last 6 months mostly, so I'm very much looking forward to spending the next year in epic content... I haven't played a ton of epic quests lately, so they will feel new to me.

I'm very excited about playing 20-28 a few times in a row. Better than just getting to 28 and staying there.

This. I have two completionist characters done, one with all destinies complete, the other with only a few not finished, and I'm really looking forward to running tons of Epic content on them, particularly the druid. I don't really enjoy playing that much when I'm not leveling (I hate grinding for loot), so Epic TR will be really enjoyable for me. And I get to keep my favor and still TR, so I don't have to worry about elite-streaking. Sounds like fun to me!

As for the complaints--I can't hear them over the sound of my laughing. Do you know how many runs I had to make to get my old epic gear in the old system? (Back when epic monsters were immune to EVERYTHING, too. Ugh.) Do you know how many times I ran Stealer of Souls to get the Sovereign rune I wanted back in the days when the runes weren't labeled? Heck, just capping a 3rd life toon in the days before BB and XP tomes and VIP bonus, now THAT was a GRIND. Oh, and doing 20 runs on a raid before raid timer bypasses. 60 days, and that was only if you ran the raid every. single. time. you came off timer--like clockwork. And the raids were actually DIFFICULT, so you couldn't just run with the first 11 people to hit your LFM, you had to spend 30 minutes to an hour getting a group together and begging healers to join, just to do the effing thing on HARD.

If you think the new stuff is grindtastic, heh, you don't know what grind is. The game has changed so radically to this great "jump on in" model it's not even funny.

[JOTMON]

Heroic Completionist is unchanged.

You don't lose Epic Destiny XP for any kind of Reincarnation.

my Epic reincarnation experience tells a different story.

https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...63#post5168263

Lost my favor, lost my epic destinies, lost my 50%xp pot lost my +5 tomes.
Stuck with a useless toon while waiting for investigation to which I have had no followup response to.

[ZzpxpzZ]

I quite like the new epic TR system, pretty well everything about it.

The one thing that players have to keep in mind, and have been burying their heads in the sand about for the last 9 updates, and that is that the turbine design goal is VERY CLEARLY to have players play all the content and not just a select few quests.

You may argue that you prefer some quests or another, or some quests XP per minute are too low, and while this is not all untrue or even necessarily subjective in the case of some ridiculously low XP per minute quests, but it is at least a design goal they are sticking to.

Every update since update 11 has gone further to push you towards running each quest once each life rather than farming a few quests, some by giving bigger and bigger benefits for doing so (bravery), others by increasingly penalizing repeated runs (XP Decay change). Whether you agree with this direction or not it is clearly the direction we are heading in.

Now, with this update, its really going to come down to this - if you farm quests or do exclusively the highest XP total quests and not spread your questing love around, you will cap XP too fast to acquire your commendations.

Honestly, there are a few oversights causing this that it would be nice if they were corrected, but at least if you play the way Turbine wants you to play you will achieve the goal of getting your commendations as you progress to 28.

The biggest problem is thus: The higher level quests are significantly more difficult, give significantly more commendations, but do NOT give significantly more experience. This drives people to just repeatedly do lower level quests rather than venturing into the higher level quests. When the Devs were calculating how many commendations you obtained leveling from 20-28 they probably calculated it based off running higher level quests as it became feasible and the graph of obtained commendations per level probably was an even steeper curve than heroic 3rd life XP used to be.

To show what I mean, consider VoN3 versus What Goes Up. Here you have one of the lower level old world epic quests versus the single highest quest in the game. VoN3 has a base XP of 31910 on EE and would give 35 commendations. What Goes Up has a base XP of 25174 and would give 65 commendations. This shows that VoN3 actually gives MORE experience than WGU however it gives almost half the amount of commendations. By extension, if you leveled exclusively off of VoN3 (just elaborating, clearly this is not going to be fully the quest but the point remains) you will cap faster and have less than half as many commendations than if you leveled exclusively off WGU.

Just ballparking some numbers here even further, if ~25k base XP results in approximately 75k XP after the quest ends with bonuses but no first time bonus etc, ~32k being around 95k XP at the end, if you capped exclusively on WGU you would have 5720 commendations at cap, way more than enough. If you capped exclusively on VoN3 you would have 2431 commendations at cap, way too few.

Even the amount of XP from What Goes Up is higher than the majority of quests out there, and the commendations bestowed per quest are not based on the amount of Xp the quest gives but rather the quest level, so other higher level quests become even MORE efficient at earning commendations.

TLDR - dont cap exclusively off of the super high XP low level quests, make sure you are running the higher level quests as well, spread your questing love and you will be fine, both for commendations earned and total XP earned. Even if you are not getting first time bonuses on anything, you will have plenty enough XP to cap now that they adjusted epic XP rates, as well as plenty of commendations.

[RobbinB]

You've really hit the nail on the head here I think.

Heroic TR wasn't popular because people LOVE grinding out nearly negligible improvements to their character (a few caster past lives excluded). Heroic TR was popular because it was fun. People people enjoy the chance to re-invent their character, and because there's a lot of really fun content from 1-20. Content that we don't get to play anymore once we reach epic levels.

On the other hand, epic TR doesn't change your character. There's no reinvention. It's just the same old character, but without all their gear and missing a few feats. There's no new content either. You jump back in and run the same old boring content you've been running to death for the past year. Lather, rinse repeat. That's not fun for anybody.

It is true that some players love the level 1-20 content and love exploring character development and perhaps therefore love the heroic reincarnation system. Other players do not love heroic content and may not feel releveling to 20 is worth it even if they actually like exploring different aspect of character development. If I'm re-designing the heroic system I would say that Turbine only got it partly right. Where's the option to completely reinvent your character and not have to relevel? This was the original thing that we all wanted to do prior to any implimentation of reincarnation (eg. I'm bored with my halfling sorc I want to change to half-orc paladin). Lesser reincarnation doesn't allow you to do this. Casual players may not want to (or simply not have time to) deal with multiple lessers or true reincarnation. As for those that do heroic tr, the basic idea was to provide a small bonus that is a nice to have but doesn't adversely affect newbie or casual players. While the past life bonuses are mostly ok, the wizard/fvs spell pen is one example where the devs got it wrong.

As for epic tr, the lack of reinvention is what some people like about the system. Because the actual effect of epic levels is small compared to destiny enhancements, level 20-28 allows a person to effectively be at endgame, which some enjoy, while accruing some bonuses (ie. "xp" not going to waste). Again, I put myself in the mindset of what we (forumites) were asking for prior to any existence of reincarnation - in addition to maybe having some way to explore character development without a reroll we also wondered if there could be any use for all that unused xp we were getting. This xp can now go into the epic tr treadmill. I really see 2 major problems though. Firstly, endgame content is not sufficient and is not being released at sufficient pace to allow this "endgame" to be as much fun as it could be. Secondly, the 20-28 treadmill has some major inconvenience issues currently, the major one being that crazy grind to get the heart to allow the tr (nuff said there). On a personal note, I also find dealing with the ML spread on my gear setup a huge pain, as many items will become unusable for certain portions of the releveling and inventory management in DDO is already a PITA. What's even the point of ML 28 items if you aren't spending any significant time at level 28?