What Do We Want as Maximum Character Power Scaling?

Something that I don't often see addressed by players when it comes to is the end points that players can get to, and I think it's something we should probably make our opinions known on, because it's not as obvious as it seems. Some MMOs force players to scrape and fight for every victory, even against relatively weak monsters in the overworld; this was particularly common among the oldest examples of the genre, like Dark Age of Camelot, or Final Fantasy 11. Other MMOs give so much power to the player that a passtime of some endgame players is seeking out endgame bosses, meant as group content, and soloing them as a means of providing challenge, and basic enemies are fought in groups rather than individuals - City of Heroes and the more recent Guild Wars 2 are good examples of this. Most games fall somewhere between these two extremes.

With this in mind, what is your preference for Ashes? Where would you prefer the game's scaling for player characters take place? My own preference is towards the higher end, where you can be confident that wandering into a group of enemies is going to result in a fun fight rather than getting yourself murdered, but I'm curious what everyone else feels.

As a note, this is a discussion on PvE, not PvP. We can generally assume that in PvP, players of equivalent build and skill are as likely as one another to defeat each other regardless of PvE scaling, so it's a moot point to this thread.

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Azherae

I still play FFXI because of the 'lower power scaling'.

But in order to do it, I have to 'refuse to level past 90'.

Even then, the general world content is still not a challenge, but lots of other things are, and level-capped content exists.

I'll play if Ashes is similar, and probably go back to playing FFXI if it isn't.

SongRune

Here's a prior thread discussing similar concepts, with a more concrete scale that covered the subject rather well.

I'm in the "Final Fantasy XI" camp. I want at-level overworld monsters to be individually interesting, and bosses/raids to require proper group skill and coordination.

Pod

What's the point of having a world if all the mobs in it are gonna be a trivial curbstomp? There's nothing fun about brainlessly AoEing down mobs, might as well sit in Orgrimmar and queue up dungeons then, same old gameplay.

Halae

SongRune wrote: »

Here's a prior thread discussing similar concepts, with a more concrete scale that covered the subject rather well.

That's interesting! Though I'll note that's much more focused on the question of AoE skills than it is on actual direct player power, which are different things. Still, quite relevant to this discussion.

Halae

Pod wrote: »

What's the point of having a world if all the mobs in it are gonna be a trivial curbstomp? There's nothing fun about brainlessly AoEing down mobs, might as well sit in Orgrimmar and queue up dungeons then, same old gameplay.

Sure, but there's a gradient here, isn't there? There's quite a large gap between "Will get murdered by a single rat if you go in unprepared" and "capable of waltzing through twenty dragons at a whim". What's your limit? What's your point of fun? What does a good fight look like to you?

MrPockets

This is a topic I actually end up thinking a lot about in games (not just MMOs)

My general stance is that I want pockets in the world that feel threatening and I want reasons to go there, but probably not every single mob needs to be a tough fight.

The thing with ashes, is that there is a deliberate design choice that the game is PvX, this puts a spin on the traditional PvE world content. How challenging can they make single/groups of mobs if someone can just come up behind you for an easy kill?

A good example of another game that does this, is Albion online, specifically their red/black zones. The PvE content is generally pretty easy, and players are encouraged to kill things for big exp rewards. The real challenge comes in when you know that you have to be ready to fight/flee if another player/group comes along.

personally, I'm not the biggest fan of albion's black zones...it is very stressful when playing solo/duo, and I can only handle it is short bursts. I'm hoping the corruptions system in Ashes will help alleviate that feeling, and fewer players will be motivated to just randomly kill anyone they see.

Rando88

There needs to be enough feeling of progression. Fighting a rat in a starting area could be a challenge starting out, but some levels later you should steamroll them. The scaling in ESO seemed good at first, but fighting a wolf at lvl 1 and the same wolf at lvl60 being a similar challenge is kind of dumb. Luckily bosses scale to how easily the previous bosses were defeated from what I read so dungeons will still scale to you, but just random monsters from starting area shouldn't be a challenge at all.

TheClimbTo1

What ever it is, it needs to be OVER 9,000!

StormCrow820

So, the best examples I can pull are from Vanilla WoW.
I think the numbers used are great, everything is relatively low numbers and 2 lvl 40s could potentially gank a T1 60. to be fair T1 wasn't that great, and the jump to T2 was noticeable. If you were out in the world wearing all T2 you'd feel confident. T2.5 added lots of hybrid options and in my opinion that's where the power lvl should have capped. Naxx introduced T3 and the power lvl of someone wearing Naxx gear compared to any other part of the game was just way too much compared to where it started.

There are certain mobs in the open world of Vanilla WoW that are Elite and are hard to solo. I think there should always be areas like this that are hard to solo even with the best gear in the game. Perhaps only people with the best gear should be able to solo some of the hardest open world stuff, and they should have to stay on their toes.

Savic Prosperity

i do prefer when everything has the potential to kill you but a little bit of power gain is necessary to make the journey to max level feel worthwhile
obviously we'll have armor so there could be some more deep maths involved

In my mind a game like Dofus where your base skills would say they do 15-20 damage but as you level and get more base stats and advanced gear you could start seeing several hundred damage from that same ability so its significantly better but not where you do 10 damage at level 1 and then 100k damage at max level

Dolyem

Running through a bunch of mobs should be difficult to lethal. Make it where players can't AOE farm like in WoW

Rando88

So I put some thought into it and let's say all these examples is damage at average gear and the same ability. Let's say at lvl 1 you'd do 100 damage, lvl 10 would be double , so 200. Then every time you double your level the damage doubles. So lvl 20, 400 damage. Lvl 40, 800 damage, lvl 80 1600 damage. Then 2 people at half your level could potentially beat you and you can't just run through every zone at a high level. This would be with average gear. Of course in pve there would be penalties if you fight monsters too high a level than you, otherwise you and a couple buddies would farm the whole game at lvl 20. To me this seems like a good power scaling.

MrPockets

Rando88 wrote: »

So I put some thought into it and let's say all these examples is damage at average gear and the same ability. Let's say at lvl 1 you'd do 100 damage, lvl 10 would be double , so 200. Then every time you double your level the damage doubles. So lvl 20, 400 damage. Lvl 40, 800 damage, lvl 80 1600 damage. Then 2 people at half your level could potentially beat you and you can't just run through every zone at a high level. This would be with average gear. Of course in pve there would be penalties if you fight monsters too high a level than you, otherwise you and a couple buddies would farm the whole game at lvl 20. To me this seems like a good power scaling.

I'm also a fan of more linear scaling as opposed to exponential. it makes things more intuitive and numbers more meaningful to players. Things feel very off when a player 1-3 levels above you does drastically more damage.

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