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A complementary leveling system beyond level cap?
MitchoMan
Member
Will this game have a secondary leveling system beyond the initial level cap?
I will give an example :
Bob reaches level cap and can now start leveling his ''Paragon'' level from 1 to 999. Very simple
The name Paragon i just made up, please just work with me here.
Paragon level will not be tied to progression and is a standalone leveling system from character level.
This has been done in other games and i would like to see it in Ashes of Creation too.
With the AOC experience being as open and dynamic as it is, this system would introduce even more reasons to keep playing in order to progress and show off your experience in the game after your character reached level cap. I will even throw in an additional idea of adding rewards to these ''Paragon levels'' To give more interest for players to level it up. but that's another story.
Has this ever been discussed?
How do you guys feel about it.
I will give an example :
Bob reaches level cap and can now start leveling his ''Paragon'' level from 1 to 999. Very simple
The name Paragon i just made up, please just work with me here.
Paragon level will not be tied to progression and is a standalone leveling system from character level.
This has been done in other games and i would like to see it in Ashes of Creation too.
With the AOC experience being as open and dynamic as it is, this system would introduce even more reasons to keep playing in order to progress and show off your experience in the game after your character reached level cap. I will even throw in an additional idea of adding rewards to these ''Paragon levels'' To give more interest for players to level it up. but that's another story.
Has this ever been discussed?
How do you guys feel about it.
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That said, AoC will have multiple other areas of advancement involved, guild system, religion systems. I'm not an expert on all this stuff but you can read through the wiki and learn what we know so far.
This is another thing that makes GW2 my favourite MMO of all time. They only add horizontal advancement when expansions or updates come. They've only increased gear power/tiers once and that was with Ascended gear, and ascended gear is only as strong as the previously existing Legendary gear.
I detest with a passion the constant push of better gear that games like WoW and others do. All the work you put in to polishing your stats is useless in a year when they add yet another tier of gear. It's completely ridiculous. Not to mention how in WoW gear rarity has become bloated and they hand out epics like candy, where in vanilla/classic an epic was an achievement.
No, my idea is that it's not tied to progression. I should have said gear progression. That's what i meant
The system i explained is similair to how GW2 did it. And those levels werent tied to gear or anything either.
There was a recent thread about this.
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/266164#Comment_266164
Part way down I linked a video with time stamp as to Intrepid's answer.
The point of having a cap to available progression is to keep players somewhat close together in over all power.
All this system would do is mean that players with more time not only had better gear, but had higher paragon level than someone with lower levels. This just increases the ceiling for getting in to to end content effectively (with top end content in Ashes including sieges,as well as PvEactivities).
I am a huge fan of always having some form of worthwhile character progression available to every player, but I don't consider progression via pure grind to be a good way to do this
And I keep whispering, "Please introduce that into crafting." ......lol
I 100% disagree with this statement.
Horizontal progression isn't progression, it is picking up new things. If horizontal progression were that great - or if Intrepid thought it were better than vertical progression - we would be able to level up all 10 archetypes as primaries.
Firstly a diminishing player base, due to lack of progression and content in the late stage of the service.
Secondly the widening powergap in the playerbase (even with diminishing returns) associated with infinite progression systems.
Games like bdo only persist because of their plenty vertical progression grind systems, this game is glorified gear threadmill with nice t*ts. Games like GW2 with a lot of horizontal progression require a lot of added content in form of expansions and the living world thingy.
Ashes will have to position themselves somewhere inbetween those extremes. A „secondary progression“ path , as you call it would be an easy way to handle it, but it’s a lazy solution that comes with problems.
I‘d pref that they further explore the option of shared progression gated content, what they plan on doing with their node system.
This approach essentially gates new content behind the progress of the players on the server.
Everytime they reach a certain threshold that players worked towards, like node level 4, new content will infuse additional vertical progression that has diminishing returns once they hit the next roadblock to level 5.
So that the progression curve is not straight up asymptotic, it rather follows a pattern of several asymptomatic bumps that keep the playerbase close together, but still allows for repeated rushes of progression. Unfortunately the nodes are limited in their scope, when they reach the max level.
But this can also be done outside of the node system, for example with boses that gate entire dungeon systems for the server to explore. I think they hinted at that with their recent dev discussion "Boss difficulty-
Do you enjoy "gatekeeper" bosses -".
Optimally they would have a look at how the anime SAO did it with their tower that had like 100 layers. Ye... i know SAO... shit anime, i liked some of their ideas though.
In this case how progress raiders/front line players were tasked with slaying the boss of each layer, so that the entirity of the server can access the next layer, with new mobs, ressources and a fresh area to explore.
This allowed for an interesting dynamic where guilds did send, their best players to those frontline raids, and crafters and gatheres did their best to equip the players with the new stuff that they would get, from guilds that farmed the mobs of the new planes.
Now what would be more interesting is taking a system like that and doing it for PvP, Crafting, and even Dungeon crawlers. So you get some kind of end game experience in whichever field you choose to progress, and maybe even make you choose which path you would like to continue.
Offering maybe a special perk or ability to unlock, or extra stats something of meaning along with titles.
https://youtube.com/@TheHiddenDaggerInn
In addition, experience is lost with each death, both against npc and in wars against clans and alliances.
And the latter makes the issue of leveling up go into nightmare mode.
Vertical progression (for example: level cap increase, champion xp of some sort, gear item level increase, etc, etc) will ALWAYS be better than horizontal progression because you will get to a point where the game seems stalled and everyone will eventually burnout.
Even if people say they won't, thats just an illusion.
So definitely +1 here for vertical progression over horizontal.
That's definitely not true, and it's mighty presumptuous of you to put words into people's mouths.
Tons of people play GW2 very consistently and it has no vertical progression. And that's even with not taking living world updates into consideration.
The vertical progression the game does has is a lot less prevalent than it is in most other games, and there are systems in the game to disguise it even further, but the game does in fact have vertical progression.
I mean, the game has 80 levels, that in itself is vertical progression. There are also multiple stages of gear upgrades to work for, which is the stock standard form of vertical progression in most games aside from gaining levels.
It is fair to say that GW2 has less vertical progression than other games. I totally agree there. However, saying it has no vertical progression is as factually incorrect as saying vertical progression is always better than horizontal (it is usually better, but not always, imo).
That's extremely disingenuous to say and honestly it's outright ridiculous for you to make that point, by that logic every single game has vertical progression so this argument doesn't matter at all.
This thread isn't about progression, it's about developers extending the end game power levels arbitrarily
GW2 does not have vertical progression, the only time they ever did anything close was making ascended gear, which is only on par with the previously existing legendary gear.
Both the comment that vertical progression is always better, and the comment that GW2 only has horizontal progression are incorrect - even if they are mostly true.
You can't say that I am being disingenuous for pointing out that you are slightly wrong when you yourself are pointing out that someone else is slightly wrong.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Religions
Looks specifically at benefits, augments, and progression.
This may not be the horizontal progression system you have in mind, but it is the horizontal progression system they plan on going with.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
Except I'm not wrong? Literally other than Ascended gear there has been NO power or level cap increases. All new gear has remained on par with the gear released at launch day. You are absolutely making a bad faith argument here or are just not understanding what vertical progression is in this context.
I specifically said they have less vertical progression than other games, you are the one that said there is none, and then went on to name some.
The comment that started all of this was you pointing out that someone else was wrong when they said vertical progression was always better. That poster was wrong, vertical progression is only *almost* always better.
Likewise, GW2 doesn't have absolutely no vertical progression, it has *almost* no vertical progression.