(Bonus!) Dev Discussion - Level Progression

Niran_Felmorne

Bit late to the discussion on this one but If I can throw my two sense into it.

I think that you should get a bit of experience for everything you do, however Combat Experience, Gathering Experience and Crafting Experience should all be separated from your level experience. Selling and buying/bartering should get you your own experience bar as well perhaps mercantile?

Combat Experience is the thing we all know kill to gain levels to grow your power. Simple easy and everyone knows this. Don't need to change that.

Gathering Experience should go in a pool for the exp you gather and level your resource collecting and levels that on its own. Same with crafting.

You have a over all 'Level' should be a combination of these things giving you some bonus to all things you do but to a lesser degree so its like +1% of your total. Imagine a max level crafter and high level gatherer has enough HP to survive a few hits at level 1 combat against a max combat player.

Mining should give you 'gathering' experience but not effect your combat level. I could see stats being increased based on what you do, so you could take mining and select your 'bonus' to be Strength or constitution by selecting the stat you rely on for that skill. Don't make it a large bonus but every level should give you something for leveling that skill like .5 or .3 of a stat.

All these systems would feed into each other and someone that spends more time in the game is rewarded for their work. Imagine your tank single mindly focused on gearing up their constitution score to tank those PVE hits this will allow long term scaling of Leveling since you are never done leveling expansions would instead of increasing the 'level cap' would instead increase the exp cap of a skill be it combat, crafting and gathering.

Fishing not only helps you get stat buffs from food, but also gives you a small stat boost permanently to the stat you want to use for it. Making it so you can select differing stats means that RP wise I could be a summoner that uses 'magic stat' to summon a minion that mines for me, what did you expect me to do that myself?

I must warn that any EXP boost, would be Pay too Win in this situation and thusly I'd be heavily against any form of 'convenience'

I'm of the mind that I want leveling to 'max' to take me 500+ Hours of quality game time with room to grow, leveling in ashes should be hard baked into the game and I could see a New Game+ where your character goes back to level 1 in their 'combat/crafting/gathering' skills to increase their max 'overall level' so just like Nodes we have to start fresh and build ourselves up to become stronger. Imagine adding a new continent or place that is just too damn hard for us and we have to break ourselves down to build up again.

That is likely not what is going to happen, or what people want but I want it regardless and I can dream that a dev would consider this for ashes. Please take your time don't rush this, and In my opinion Alpha 1 should not be over until we get all the classes tested. That's just me.

Ramirez

Long lvling ,months to hit last lvl like old mmorpgs, but without locking all the good content in the endgame... Like i want to get a great gear in an 20 lvl raid or pvp event and didn t change for a long time, i m playing new world and is really bad how gear you get is irrelevant after some hours some times even minutes...

krispy86

In general most MMOs take leveling to lightly and it happens to quickly. There is always this focus on the endgame and everything before that is just filler.

Personally I would prefer leveling to take a significant amount of time and each level should be equally significant. Levelling up should be important and it should make the player actually feel more powerful. There should be a real focus on the content and the length of time it takes to level should allow the player to experience the world rather than rushing through it.

Nerror

Long levelling times (which I am all for) can be a two-edged sword if the people who are still levelling feel they are useless in the game before max level. A time-casual player who might be looking at a year or more to reach max level on one character, might give up if they don't feel like they are contributing in a meaningful way to their guild or node for that entire year. I am sure some would be ok with it, but others not so much.

I think I remember Steven or Jeff talk about how people will be useful below max level, so they are aware of it at least, but the longer the level time is, the more it's necessary to always keep it in mind I think.

Songcaller

I prefer to grind for the most part. If you gain experience from PvP kills then more to the power. I have levelled through dungeons, levelled through PvP, levelled through quests (rare), levelled through crafting (once) and levelled through grinding (a lot). There should be a bracket for maximum xp gain in grinding like plus or lower 5 levels (Like BDO). I would hope all manner of levelling will be viable in Ashes because variety and choice stops the stagnation.

Nova Ordem

A singleplayer RPG like the witcher 3 takes around 100h to finish if you do the extras, I hope Ashes takes at least 200h to get to the endgame and around 300h to fully geared... or maybe more! this would be amazing since would bring back the old feeling of a long journey that can take months for most people, and would prevent a lot of alt accounts for gold sellers and people that get banned... would also prevent people rushing to endgame in a few weeks and complaining about the lack of content... I miss the times when a quest gave me 50 XP instead of 5000 XP.... I miss playing for a full day and only getting half my XP bar up instead of grinding 5 levels a day

Bot

I think ideally your first playthrough is primarily by questing to get shown around the world, different mechanics, and just let you adapt to the game in general. Second play through and such I think you should be able to level exceptionally faster. I think grinding mobs and mini bosses should be much faster than questing. That way people leveling a second character and such can do it faster rather than questing assuming they're overgeared/skilled enough to group up large amounts of mobs or solo stronger mobs.

TheDarkPaladin

I feel like it should depend on the risk that the player is taking, so for example fighting mobs that are way higher level than you would give more xp than any others activity or if you find a very rare ore you'll get more xp from it compared to just regual coal or copper for example

consultant

Well players have a tendency to min max. Was watching a Lazy Peon vidoe and he was talking about how he was compelled to grind a certain mob over and over for optimal loot drop. Same thing goes for experience player will do the content that is offers the most expereince.

So if a game has huge variances in leveling speeds as it pertains to leveling activities this will produce repetative game play and if a player gets bored then most likely will not wnat to play this game.

So in order to encourage and enable game play that has variety and not just killing the same mob over and over again or just doing dungeons then experence reward sould be some what close to each other but not the same. Lets while question you get 80 percent of expereince per hour as you would in a dungeoun. Now obviously dungeouns should be more rewarding than the open world but if the difference is to great the people will just do dungeouns and questing will not be appealing.

Obviously there is only so much the devs can do: I mean cannot have every mob in game give same experience but as far as activities like questing vs Doing dungeouns. Well think dungeouns should give more experience but if you campare the two questing expereince should not be meaning less.

As far as gathering and crafting well think those should give crafting experience. Not leveling experience.
I mean do you want people to level let say have five levels through activities such as crafting pretty cool for people that like crafting but maybe after 5 levels they find out they are to over powered for level 10 dungoeoun at level 15 plus how much skill is a player going to learn by crafting and gathering taking in consideration that this is well a PvP game not PvX. I guess it is a players choice if all they want to do is craft and gather and quest. Thing when their nodes get attacked maybe it might of been better spent in dungeouns or doing PvP content.

Since this is a PvP game (no way around it since every on will be flagged for PvP and there will be forced PvP Node vs Node and Corrutpion zones). Then PvP content as far as experience goes should be rewarding.
Just to be clear if every one is required to PvP or get punished if they do not then it is a PvP game not PvX game.Suites me just fine Im a PvPer but is somethign to consider.

So i think it would be better tosee how much expereince you get per hour in percntages should be have some difference but not to much. For example if you spend one hour questing that puts you 50 percent closer to next level then doing dungeouns since it is a more difficlult activity in one hour of doing dungoeuns then you should be at least put you 60 percent closer to next level but not to much higher than that.

In World of Warccraft there was an addon that told you which expereince path was the best and well it was advertised that you could reach max level in like 8 hours or less cannot remember excatt time but definitle lot less than a day . Now Ashes of Creation does not have addons but this type of addons can be ran seperately from the game cleint or even printed out on paper , because it is just information.

Now if Ashes of creation decides that leveling experience will come from gather exploring gringind that is fine just do make to much.