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PvE Difficulty
CaptnChuck
Member
If bosses only scale based on how well your team performs......can they ever outperform you? Can you ever wipe to dungeon, raid or world bosses?
If bosses only perform as well as you, then they can never really kill you. And if there is no threat of the boss being able to kill you, then how would PvE be fun? When you get high level gear, you want it to feel like you went through hell and beyond to get it. You want it to feel like your team's coordination led you to victory. You don't want it to feel like all you did was stand still and spam your abilities, while occasionally dodging a boss' telegraphed abilities.
I really hope that they nail PvE difficulty and make it both, super challenging, and super rewarding.
If bosses only perform as well as you, then they can never really kill you. And if there is no threat of the boss being able to kill you, then how would PvE be fun? When you get high level gear, you want it to feel like you went through hell and beyond to get it. You want it to feel like your team's coordination led you to victory. You don't want it to feel like all you did was stand still and spam your abilities, while occasionally dodging a boss' telegraphed abilities.
I really hope that they nail PvE difficulty and make it both, super challenging, and super rewarding.
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I too am concerned about this. We don't need any One Tamriel, anybody can do any content, let's scale everybody to max level.
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.
The difficulty doesn't scale WHILE you fight a boss. It just adjusts the next boss in the dungeon if you're doing particularly well. Let's say standard clear for Boss A is 3 minutes. If a group takes 4 minutes, Boss B is going to be at normal difficulty. But, if the group only takes 2 minutes to take down Boss A, then Boss B is going to be at a harder difficulty.
You want to go for a faster clear because the higher the difficulty, the better the potential loot. If you can't take the boss down fast, you probably also have difficulties staying alive, not only from the boss, but from other groups trying to interfere with your loot acquisition.
Ideally, it should all balance out at some point.
The Dungeon AI will see it took you X time to reach boss 1 - Boss will enter Mode 1-5 depending on time.
if you took the longest time to reach the boss, you will fight boss in mode 5.
Mode 5 boss is "easy" but for the party it is still on "normal" difficulty setting, not easy to kill per say.
Now same group re-do the dungeon again. Remember how I said the dungeon has an AI based on performance, chances are TIME is gonna be a factory.
Let's say From entering the dungeon to the first boss room - the fastest possible time is 10 min.
So an AI can be set up like Under 10 min, 10:01-13:33 (mode 2) -- 13:34-17:00 (mode 3) -- 17:01-19:59 (mode 4) 20 mins or more (mode 5)
Boss Mode 5 = if it took you 20 mins or more.
So this party took 23 min the first time but this time, they barely made and got to the boss in 19 min and 55 second. Wether you enter the room at 17:02 or 19:58 the boss in mode 4 will have the same stats tho. The difficulty should still be challenging.
hope that made some sense - and this is how I have interpret it.
@Beekeeper
@novercalis
Thanks for helping me understand. I really hope that that's how it works.
What does it have to do with addons? I know nothing about addons so just curious.
NO. Addons don't increase PvE difficulty. They instead increase the difficulty of designing PvE content. Developers have to keep in mind the vast amount of addons that are allowed in the game while they are designing PvE content. If they don't, the raid might end up being too easy. If they do, then players that don't use a particular addon will be at a disadvantage.
I can see a case being made for dps meters, but for addons? HELL NO.
That's just incorrect, a lack of addons does not mean they have to make the bosses easier to compensate for their absence. Also, you're making some very bold statements about a game we haven't seen yet in any real detail.
As for addons = hard content/complex, I feel like the opposite is true as seen with the wow classic reruns/naked runs. Having more information makes runs easier. Addons are essentially made to make an encounter easier without them it requires the player have more experience and knowledge to compensate for the lack of detailed statistics, without them there is a higher chance of player mistakes which means you have to vet your raid in how an encounter is expected to play out.
There is a multitude of addons doing all kinds of different things.
But none of them play the mechanics for you or kill the boss.
A hard boss in wow for example is not hard because he surprises you.
They are hard because you know exactly what's coming but the tuning is so tight that you have to execute the boss almost perfectly without too many mistakes while still delivering top performance (dps / hps / whatever) to be able to beat him....
....and that's basically also why PVE content in a PVX will never really be hard.
In WOW everything is balanced around PVE that's why PVP sucks.
In PVX games in comparison you always need to balance for PVE and PVP as a result the bosses are generally easier.
Keep in mind that when I say "hard" I mean like hard for 2% of the playerbase, it's impossible for the remaining 98% without overgearing.
So that doesn't nesseccarily mean that raids won't be interesting in the beginning, but I think it is pretty fair to assume that it will turn into a speedrunning community reasonable fast.
The following is just my personal opinion:
I think making the bosses harder based on the performance of the previous boss is a big mistake.
In a vacuum it may seem like a really good idea to generate content in an efficient manner.
But it basically is only an improved scaling mechanism with a trigger.
As a result it comes with most if not all the disadvantages of scaling.
Where are you getting "bosses only perform as well as you" from?
Personally I feel that bosses should have a set difficulty in mind when designed, and they should be mechanically hard to beat, and if there is any scaling present it should only be the bosses getting even more difficult than they would normally be based on your dungeon performance.