Grinding for Armor
DCarp
Member
Is this game going to be like Black Desert, a continuous grind for armor? If you don't spend 10,000 hrs obtaining gear, forget about pvping and its really, really, really time consuming to get gear.
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DCarp
Member
Comments
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Armor
I'm not a fan of grind/rng heavy games in general though, so personally I hope Ashes has a hard cap on their gear and level system or at least a soft cap with increasing diminishing returns. I've played the type of games where someone has to no life to be competitive. I will never spend 8 hours a day 6 days a week grinding/farming boring content I don't enjoy just so that 1 day a week I can have 1-2 hours of fun. Been there, done that, I already have a job tyvm. Its just not worth it and it never will be.
I dont mind spending 2 weeks to gather + craft end game gear (no RNG) with friends/guild in the open world.
I definatly dont want to spend time enchanting gear like BDO and AA. Total waste of mmorpg playtime.
I also dont like dungeon runs to farm armor/weapons
Gear should be valuable and meaningful.
Extremelly hard gear enchantment makes the game boring, as much as extremelly easy obtainable gear makes it a singleplayer rpg experiance.
Every mmorpg will contain some amount of grinding (you're not going to always get the armour you need/want on the first try). The trick is to not make the grind feel like a grind. The problem with the gear grind in BDO is that it takes up so much time and is heavily RNG-based.
My current expectation is that the difference between 200 hours into the game and 2000 hours will probably only be 10% raw numerical power.
My only question is how long the levelling process will be. It could be anywhere from 40-200 hours to get to max level, depending on how Intrepid wants to fulfill their promise that "there is no end-game; there's just lots of regular content." Does that mean levelling takes forever, but there is lots of low-level content (or lots of artificial scaling)? Or is leveling really short, so that you can quickly reach the max-level abilities, gear, and content (but don't call it "end-game").
In 2017, Steven threw out the ~45 day number, but was hesitant and quickly added he didn't want to give a number. He said levelling is intended to be more about the meaning (of what you're doing while levelling) and won't be a grind fest.
I wouldn't hold on to that 45 day figure because it that was 3 years ago and they mentioned levelling speed could also vary based on what activities a character is doing.
Well, I call anything done at level cap "end-game" content so unless there is no level cap, there definitely will be "end-game".
As for levelling time, what I'm curious about is how the character levelling interacts with node levelling. We were told that as a node levels up it will spawn higher level monsters in its zone of influence. If that is the case could it be possible at your character could out level the node to the point where there aren't any monsters that are high enough level to give you exp?
This is something we will need to monitor carefully in testing.
In terms of end game, to me end game is when you stop running content for experience, and start running content to otherwise better your character. In some games, this can actually begin even before you hit the level cap, and in others, experience still plays a role in character growth after hitting the level cap, and so you don't start end game content for a while afterwards.
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I can see it being possible (and reasonable) that players won't have content to level to the cap on until there is a nearby node at level 4 or 5.
This is a good thing though, as it would mean players in a specific area (or from a specific starting portal) would all want to fall in to line to progress *a* node as fast as they can, rather than all fighting over making sure it is *their* node that gets progressed fastest.
There will be some fighting, but if your character level also requires a high node level, the kind of people that would want to fight would also soon realize that they also don't want to slow down their own character progress too much.