Update 29: Level 30 Overview

[Kynestra]

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

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

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

[blerkington]

Hi,

At first glance, two thoughts:

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

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

Thanks.

[Silverleafeon]

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

Love the extra twist slot, woot!

[Drevok]

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

Besides that, the rest looks interesting!

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

[Xipify]

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

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

[RapkintheRanger]

A couple of quick knee-jerk reactions:

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

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

I agree.

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

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

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

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

thanks

[maddong]

I like it except:

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

[CorinBrightbane]

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

[elvesunited]

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

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

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

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

[Cetus]

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

Lets explore the reasoning then.

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

Devs - in case this was missed.

Please provide some reasoning other than "just because".

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

[Saekee]

I like it except:

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

cleverly stated!

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

[Silverleafeon]

Flattened Epic levels is very Red Box D&D.

[Noircere]

Thoughts:

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

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

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

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

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

[Blastyswa]

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

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

[elvesunited]

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

[AngryDude]

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

[Qezuzu]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[standard_deviation]

---

Epic XP Curve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[wlmartin]

You got this very very wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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




What is the real answer?


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

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

[Qeistalan]

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

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

My Questions:

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

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

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

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

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