U51 Early Preview: Epic Destiny Revamp: Core Framework

[LargoKeyWest]

Looking around on Lam.. I notice that my character, while being triple literally everything, is level 30 with only 40 fate points (13 perm)

How do I fix this? I've spoken to each rep, have the +3 tome, and did all the Epic past lives. Can't seem to find the last 3

[mikarddo]

Tier 5 at 30 level seems to be a bit over than common sense... I am not sure how I can describe my feeling about it. Tier 5 at 29 level please?

A very good point. Seconded.

[Stormraiser]

One item to consider. For those who are actively TRing for EDs and iconics, they will never experience the level 30 feats, because as soon as some people hit level 30, they TR right away. Unfortunately, I can't think of a good solution to this issue, because move the level 30 feats down to 29 would overlead the gains at level 29 while also making it seem like there is no gain for getting to level 30. Perhaps brighter minds can come up with a good suggestion for this?

[dunklezhan]

Leveling Up in Epics
In order to address the backloaded feat flow and frontloaded enhancement flow, we are meeting in the middle for the new level-up experience for Epics.

I don't understand why L29 is empty. There is no need for any of those rows to be empty. When I level I want choices. The proposed progression is a vast improvement but... for goodness sake, why leave *any* empty rows? Can you not consider ED Tier 5 to L29, let me experience a max power ED for a while before I hit 30, get bored and TR?

[Thar]

What happens to the epic reincarnation past life feats? are they remaining as is?

[mikarddo]

This is far too much level gating. You made a system where we get 4 DP (Destiny Points) each level, this alone adds power on a per level basis.

Change ED Tier 3 and Core 2 to level 21
Change ED Tier 4 and Core 3 to level 23
Change ED Tier 5 to level 25

Leveling up in epics will be so much less fun with the amount of level gating you have added.

[Aelonwy]

I don't understand why L29 is empty. There is no need for any of those rows to be empty. When I level I want choices. The proposed progression is a vast improvement but... for goodness sake, why leave *any* empty rows? Can you not consider ED Tier 5 to L29, let me experience a max power ED for a while before I hit 30, get bored and TR?

I agree, it would also look like a smoother more patterned progression. E.g. Tier 1& 2 are available at 20, 3 levels later (23) Tier3 opens up, 3 levels later (26) tier 4 opens up, 3 levels later (29) tier 5 should open up no? but for some unknown reason its lumped at 30 along with the final epic feat and first legendary feat leaving 29 empty. Why?

[Valerianus]

level gating is really unsettling. players discussed already a lot about this and it feels really bad.

but i guess it's already decided.


obviously it's too early to say something, but it looks really bad now to do epic tr, more boring. tier 5 at 30...

[LargoKeyWest]

huh.. losing a Feat @ 29.. this sucks

Under this new system.. I'm actually LOSING 2 feats in Epics because the conditions and available feats change

Current:
21 Epic Feat: Epic Eldritch Blast
24 Epic Feat: Intensify Spell
26 Epic Destiny Feat: Epic Arcane Eldritch Blast
27 Epic Feat: Overwhelming Critical
28 Epic Destiny Feat: Perfect Two Weapon Fighting
29 Epic Destiny Feat: Arcane Warrior
30 Epic Feat: Force of Personality
30 Legendary Feat: Scion of Celestia

New:
21 Epic Feat: Epic Eldritch Blast
22 Epic Destiny Feat: Perfect Two Weapon Fighting
24 Epic Feat: Intensify Spell
25 Epic Destiny Feat: Pierce Adamantine
27 Epic Feat: Overwhelming Critical
28 Epic Feat: Embodiment of Law
30 Feat: Force of Personality
30 Legendary Feat: Scion of Celestia

Please add feats to 23, 26, & 29

[SardaofChaos]

The 995 points spent on the “Key of Destiny” is now wasted : (

Or am I missing something?

It looks I still get the benefit from my store micro-transactions for the “Tomes of Fate” but I see nothing for the points spent on the “Key of Destiny”.

The key of destiny gave you a one-time benefit: the ability to skip over a destiny to adjacent ones without having to spend time leveling it, and now presumably you have been playing with the newly-accessible destiny/destinies. This is like complaining that the experience potion you bought and used a year ago isn't going to have a sudden additional benefit.

[Kielbasa]

Initial reaction boy these trees are expensive DP wise there are too many 3 cost DP perks and Tier 5 should be level 28 since that is around when most people jump into end game raids and legendary content so you will want them to have their full destiny power by then plus it will give people splashing and dashing at level 30 a chance to experience their full destiny before they ETR. There are many things that are currently iconic to certain destinies that have been moved/removed.

[LeoLionxxx]

I) ED Onboarding Flow notes

When hitting lv 20 & when entering the new Junction of the Spheres area, it would be nice to have a campaign-quest-thing pop up, to prompt me to go to all 12 NPCs to grab my free Fate points. That will help ensure players don't miss them; you don't want players going "oh, I don't need to talk to the Arcane people, since I'm not going to use magic at all"

In talking to the Fatespinner, I didn't see anything that prompted me with how to access the Epic Destiny trees (by pressing ctrl + e). Perhaps add that detail here.

The new areas look great!
- Martial Area: Stepping on the Turret should shoot you off into the distance; for funsies :P
- Martial Area: Shadow dancer took a long time to grant his Fate point; thought for a moment that it was broken
- Arcane entrance: A cat on top of one of the Book cases would be cute; maybe give him a little wizards hat as well.
- Arcane area: Ooh, the music and dragon are cool!
- Primal Area: The sky is so pretty!

II) Epic Destiny UI

1. Enhancements panel: Now that ED abilities live here, it would be nice if there were a filter on the bottom (similar to the feats tab) to show/hide Heroic/Epic enhancements.
2. Before unlocking the destinies, I saw a grey dragon design. on the ED tiles. It was neat, but offered poor contrast with the enhancements. Here, it would also be helpful if locked destinies had CTAs (Calls to Action) that prompted you to go unlock them.
3. After unlocking the destinies, I noted that all the sections had the same background colour. Some variety here would be great.
4. At this point, the core section looks very empty. I suggest spreading those out a lot more (until even more are added)
5. Lists of EDs on each tile: Could they be sectioned off into sublists with headers? That way it would be easier to select the ones that might best fit you. Alternately, it might be nice to click a button and bring up an info card briefly describing each ED and what it focuses on; basically an abridged version of the info that ED NPCs do/will provide.
6. Can and should the "chink" of selecting enhancements be more grandiose for Epic? Or at least sound different from the heroic version.
7. <Sphere> Tokens: With 1 token on a Primal stack, the number '1' did not appear.
8. <Sphere> Tokens: Primal token buff appeared on the buff bar and appeared indistinguishable from a regular buff. I suggest something grandiose/distinctive be added to the Token icons, such as a fancy purple boarder. As well, perhaps Epic Token buffs should always be aligned to the end of the Buff list, to ensure they don't get lost from the player's view

[Zaalaos]

Idk, is it just me, or are those reworks looking incredibly bland, weak, and random? GMOF stance grants nothing to monk which is stupid. Same with their "charge" abilities. Martial abilities, doing force dmg, scalling with spell power? Who's gonna take those? Handwrap EK build? Shadowdancer granting arcane charges, but nothing on tree using/boosting them? Weird as SPELL, not SLA? Why not just give it to arcane classes in base spell book, and put something nice in here? What is shadowdancer supposed to actually do here? It's caster tree now right? Shiradi losing it's sonic and force proc? Are double rainbow procs modernized? Dire charge moving to LD only, forcing 90% of melee builds to be LD from now on?

Idea behind changing current system into heroic like system where you can mix/match trees is great, but abilities are so terribly weak it's depressing. Most of "epic" spell like abilities are significantly weaker than heroic ones. Single target ray spell doing 1d6+6? Come on, bump it to 1d6+18. It'll still scale lower than lvl 9 spells, but it's gonna be something.

So far only abilities that have me excited are new Primal Scream, and shieldbash doublestrike thingy from divine crusader. If my numbers are correct scream can reach ~1000 dmg before spellpower assuming you burn 3 charges.

And worst of all - everything that is looking moderately fun is gated behind T5. So you can play with fun abilities at cap only. Yay. ED tiers should unlock faster. After all in heroics you can get to T5 abilities at lvl 12, around halfway into your leveling process. Allow us to use T5 destiny abilites from lvl 25/26, with T4 from 23/24 and t3 from 21/22.

[Micki]

Unless you're planning to increase level cap at the same time, don't put top tier at 30.
This game is all about reincarnation and few people stay at 30 that long.
For the end game raids I usually put the lfm 29-30, since there is quite the power boost at 29 right now and characters are just a lot weaker before it.
Making characters even weaker before 30 is just a bad idea.

[rabidfox]

And worst of all - everything that is looking moderately fun is gated behind T5. So you can play with fun abilities at cap only. Yay. ED tiers should unlock faster. After all in heroics you can get to T5 abilities at lvl 12, around halfway into your leveling process. Allow us to use T5 destiny abilites from lvl 25/26, with T4 from 23/24 and t3 from 21/22.

Yeah, it needs to be way lower to unlock that stuff. Low epic quests were always annoying(/hard) on new characters with no prior destiny stuff; now we're going to be gated into limited stuff every life at 20. We'll be a bit better than a brand new 1st lifer with the current system, but way behind in power at low epics compared to current live. Unless they go back and rebalance all the old low level epic quests, it's gonna make the grind a lot more painful for everyone with this gating. Without energy burst at 20, my casters kill so slow with the HP bloat the epics bring (or hunts end on ranged).

[kpak01]

Core 4-6: Will eventually be available at levels higher than 30. Exact breakdown TBD.

No. Just, no. Please, implement the entire ED system, and permanently and completely throw away this stupid "higher than 30" idea once and for all.

If you are committed to this crazy level cap raise idea, feel free to ignore any and all other feedback I give, because I won't be playing DDO anymore anyway. I experienced when level cap raise from 20, and do not intend to do so again. Why did you bother spending the past few years building up a substantial end game if you plan to just throw it all away again? So stupid.

These new ED trees are a mix of the old ED abilities and brand new ones, providing a huge variety of options to players both familiar with our current EDs and hungry for new exciting abilities.

You talk about "huge variety of options" but mostly it looks like you are homogenizing them to all be carbon copies of each other. Current system has problems, but making them all the same isn't a good solution.

[NeMMaNjaO]

Great like leveling on epic wasnt hard enough for solo players (because your servers are ghost town and almost no players on level 20-29) you just killed any sort of power we could use to help us get EPL. I feel dumb for not grinding them when cap was 25 now

[-D_Rock-]

After a long hiatus of getting a master build PC and playing other games, This oldie but goodie game is finally having me stoked to come back. Love how you are making it more simplified for heroic vs epic enhancement styles. Also removing the karma garbage. Personally that one alone made me want to quit game multiple times for a few power points to play a build i never wanted to in the first place because it felt like i was being punished rather than just enjoy the game how i want to, seriously cant give you folks enough cred for that alone. Keep doing the right thing and this player will come back. Stoked to see the future news.

[hit_fido]

On the positive side, simplifying the system by removing spheres/karma and the new feat progression both look good.

[Cernunan]

Let me add to the chorus, these changes look bad, and will make epic leveling very unfun.

Epic moments are fun. Now most are gone or greatly gutted.
Most of the things I would twist are gone. The few that remain are gutted and not fun.
Cocoon, the little bit of self healing now requires giving up an entire dps tree in order to slot an otherwise uselss caster tree, a tree that used to at least have some dps options now absent.

Epic leveling is now going back to being unfun. Having the full destinies I have ground out, to have for epic levels, now level locked is going to make the process much more tedious. It was fun. Now it will be not fun.

I have not felt this ambivalent about this game in a long time. Last time I took a year off. I feel much worse about the game this time.