Small Rant from casual player

[Hawkwier]

Can someone please point me to where the Devs have confirmed there will be a further rebalancing of mobs as part of U51?

I've seen a couple of references to this, and though I know there was a rebalancing from U50, but not aware there is more to come...

Really keen to understand what is intended here.

[Aelonwy]

Can someone please point me to where the Devs have confirmed there will be a further rebalancing of mobs as part of U51?

I've seen a couple of references to this, and though I know there was a rebalancing from U50, but not aware there is more to come...

Really keen to understand what is intended here.

This is the only item I've seen recently:

[*]We are also planning on removing the Epic Resilience buff from all monsters at endgame to make DCs across the board far easier to achieve.

but its more than possible I've missed something since the majority of time I spend on the forums reading is over my morning coffee before my brain is fully awake.

[Hawkwier]

This is the only item I've seen recently:



but its more than possible I've missed something since the majority of time I spend on the forums reading is over my morning coffee before my brain is fully awake.

Thanks for trying to help. Aye, looks like we've either both missed something, or folks are making stuff up as they go along...

[slarden]

DDO has a good solo niche and they really shouldn't blow that regardless of what players think other players should be doing.

The devs shouldn't water down content for soloing, but also shouldn't put in mechanics that mostly punish solo players - there are many solo players and you are more likely to lose those players if you try to force grouping. I don't exclusively solo, but the main reason I do is because of lingering medical issues from a car accident and I need to take breaks often - sometimes in the middle of a quest. I try to reserve my grouping for raiding as it's physically taxing for me to quest without taking frequent breaks.

To the OP, the devs stated they wanted to smooth out the leveling curve from 19-30 which includes scaling down level 20-29 quests. The early previews didn't include this part of the update, but it's something they've stated several times now.

I am sure it won't be perfect, but the devs are not intending to make epic leveling harder - not entirely sure if they plan to make lower epic quests easier but smoothing out the curve would imply that because it's a huge jump from 19-20 right now. If they smooth out the curve those lower level epics would be easier.

U51 will support hybrid builds (caster/martial combos) better and those builds are very solo-friendly as you can often combine cc, dps, self-healing ,survivability even though it's not the best at anything. A balanced build is good for soloing. So consider exploring those builds next preview.

I think the devs should have devoted a post to planned monster changes but here is what was mentioned previously and Lynnabel later commented there would be other monster changes besides these:

U51 Early Preview: Epic Destiny Revamp: Core Framework - Page 2 (ddo.com)

It would have been helpful if they followed through on this and actually provided more info about monster changes last preview - I assume they were busy and will get to it next preview. It's an important part of the equation!

[rabidfox]

Can someone please point me to where the Devs have confirmed there will be a further rebalancing of mobs as part of U51?

I've seen a couple of references to this, and though I know there was a rebalancing from U50, but not aware there is more to come...

Really keen to understand what is intended here.

You'd mostly have to go back to a dev stream (or was it a Sev stream) from a few months ago. There was no direct commitment about anything specific rebalance-wise other than the removal of epic resilience. But there was mentioning of how the early old epics did things differently then modern stuff which is why there's various HP bloat on stuff; and was something that might get updated. Also stuff about fixing various outlier stats on monsters. There's other bits and bobs mentioned here and there about work on mobs in u50 and u51, but it's all non-comital type things which keeps the devs from painting themselves in a corner. We know there'll be some stuff, we just don't know if it's just minor adjustments (resilience, etc.) or way more.

[erethizon]

I have to agree with the original poster on his point about experience rewards. Being new to the game should not come with an experience penalty. The idea that normal is worth less than hard and hard is worth less than elite made some sense when you thought of normal as the first life setting, hard for second, and elite for third. But in epics there are no differences in experience needed between past lives but still large experience reward differences between difficulties. Harder difficulties might be worth something more since they can take longer to complete but the amount as it stands might be excessive (I don't really know since I don't play anything but Reaper).

Challenges are the one things that somewhat got this right. The experience given for a challenge is directly related to how long the challenge takes. When the time for the challenge increases so too does the base exp. If you sell time to the foreman to make the time in the challenge go down, so too drops the base experience. The point is, if a newbie takes 2 hours to run The Temple of Elemental Evil on normal he should not be getting less experience than I do for running it in 15 minutes on elite. I guarantee you the one of us that learned the most during our play time (and thus gained more 'experience') was the newbie that took 2 hours. I realize directly rewarding time in quest might cause people to go afk in quests to drive up the time in quest, but as long as the time reward isn't massive it would still be more beneficial to race through multiple quests rather than drag your feet in one quest. Increasing experience for spending more time in the quest would also make optionals more attractive.

This also brings me to the topic of favor awarded. The idea that a quest giver is not going to like you as much for saving his daughter because the trolls you rescued her from did not hit as hard as they could have is absolutely stupid. All difficulty settings should give the max favor reward. DDO needs to drop this moronic idea that running content on harder difficulties is somehow morally superior and deserves better rewards. We should be able to choose difficulty based on what we find the most fun and not forced into certain difficulties because they are the only ones that come with proper rewards (I'm looking at you elite versus normal named item drop rates).

[erethizon]

Can you provide a source for this please (not trying to be argumentative, but, unlike for U50, I've genuinely not been aware of any mooted mob-side balance initiative for U51, so this would be very interesting)?

Can someone please point me to where the Devs have confirmed there will be a further rebalancing of mobs as part of U51?

I've seen a couple of references to this, and though I know there was a rebalancing from U50, but not aware there is more to come...

Really keen to understand what is intended here.

This is the only item I've seen recently:



but its more than possible I've missed something since the majority of time I spend on the forums reading is over my morning coffee before my brain is fully awake.

Where I heard it was the DDO Podcast interview (the one that had 4 or so developers on it talking about Update 51) and there they specifically talked about wanting to wait to bring down the difficulty of all the non legendary tier 2 quests until after they added the new ED's so they wouldn't have to rebalance the difficulty of all the quests a second time (i.e. they didn't want to first balance every epic quest for the current ED's and then have to go right back and rebalance every epic quest for the Update 51 ED's). So the plan is to release the new ED's and then balance all the contend around them. I do not recall if that rebalancing is supposed to be a part of Update 51 or will come in an update to follow.

[dunklezhan]

Instead of actual thinking of "how can I help this player so that he remains a member of the server population", people insist on replying with the same old stories err replies.

Not just that, but actually getting *mad* about it! Got all "you know what? doesn't matter" about it when disagreed with and everything. Haven't seen a teenage "cannot deal with my emotions when I'm disagreed with" strop like that in quite some time lol, but at least they were mature enough to walk away.

Irony is that the OP isn't even really talking about soloing yet still got suckered into an argument about it. OP is talking about newer or un-geared players and XP rewards for repeating quests. Which is a particular problem for soloists yes, but hardly the point being made. People need to put a bit more effort into reading comprehension, particularly when an OP is clearly either not a native English speaker or possibly is but just doesn't find writing the easiest thing in the world (slightly wrong tenses used in certain words, slightly odd phrasing... In such circumstances, put away your 'judgy native' hat, and put on your 'imagine a strong accent' hat instead, and look for the meaning, not the specific words and phrasing).

Anyway.

The loot and XP repeat degradation is mostly because they want people to buy additional content packs not run 1 free quest 50 times to go up a level but it also has to be noted that this was in-game when it was sub-only, pre2009, so that is very much not the *original* reason for it.

I think it's an unnecessary stick all the way up here in 2021, but honestly the game's got this far with that in place, I don't think its a deal-breaker.