This may be an unpopular opinion, but equalized content (aka Scale of Harmony or Scale of Balance) is an incredible lazy design, resulting in unfun and limiting content.
Why?
You’re brought down to the boss’s lvl, and most of your gear is disabled, i.e. your relic sets, your tripods are not functioning.
This in turn ruins majority of classes and builds, some classes can do better in equalized content while others are completely useless.
The fight becomes super boring, where bosses are just HP sponges. You go from hitting 25 million to seeing tiny 1 million hits. Nobody wants to see that.
You lose any incentive to progress your character further because part of the content in this game is equalize, aside from raids which seems to be the only reason, which is entirely another topic.
You spend time and money to grind for relic sets, engravings, tripods, etc. only to have everything taken away from you in other parts of the content. Unfun!
Let’s look at some of the equalized content in game:
Chaos Gates (doesn’t scale to number of players either)
Challenge Abyssal Dungeons
Challenge Raid Guardians
Mystic Raid (upcoming)
Regular (non-equalized) content:
Chaos Dungeons
Abyssal Dungeons
Abyss Raid
Legion Raids
World bosses
Almost 50% of content is equalized!
I understand there may be reasons behind this approach, such as letting lower level players, especially new players, enjoy this content equally with others, this still creates an unfun environment. While I do not have a solution, some of the potential changes that can be made are:
Scale up, instead of down.
Make it use Book of Coordination
Do not equalize, but create several difficulty levels
Point of equalized content is not one shotting the boss, many people never experienced T1 and T2 guardians and abyssals and challenge guardians are extremely easy version of raids we once played through back in the day.
Equalized content brings everyone together so no one can be judged by what they have and don’t. It helps new and old players grow together. Unity, love and respect
My main issue with equalized content are the missing tripods and relic set effects.
A bunch of classes have very low crit chance without tripods, others have very low specialty meter gain without tripods. Some classes can’t even cast skills for longer than 30seconds due to lack of mana without nightmare set.
It is annoying and no fun.
I main Swiftness LC Sharpshooter. No tripods = no crit
No nightmare set = no mana
We cannot even use food buffs in that content. So I can’t use mana regeneration food to try and balance out the missing nightmare set.
Not thought through content design in my eyes.
+1
I didn’t spend TONS of gold and time to min/max my toon just to have all of that taken away forcing me to play like a fresh character.
That’s why I never tried a single arena or hell mode, and not going to.
I worked hard to get where I am ATM, so it’s only natural I want to take advantage of that.
I wish we could just keep relic sets.
I main reflux sorc and there are always mana problems. I need to switch to casting reflux for content like this to make it better.
Challenge contents are just weekly events with exclusive loots. They are fast and smooth. What you are talking about are the abyssal raids, like Argos. We will get more from them (3 or more - not sure - released on east so far)), no worries. We will get the Mystic one soon, later we will get the monkey and the Elgacia one.
As I see the equalized challenges are designed for quick pugable weekly chores. (because they are not challenging at all, but they are faster than the normal versions:))
Equalized content is just not fun as OP stated. My SF feels like an overcooked spaghetti in these instance, lucky im EO my up time is still better than most at this iLvl but still. You work so hard on your character to get it out of this powerless zone just to be smash down to it every week, its concerning. And to those who say oh but you can learn better, bro, these guardians are out since forever, if you still need to learn them, thats not on me thats a you problem
+1
And can we talk about spec classes?
I play 2xdb 1 deathblow striker triple spender and a demonic SH,
they all suck in this content - cause the bar generation is screwed.
On the other hand my 60/40 crirt swift scrapper pulls cruel fighter on challenge abyss cause loosing some stats doesn’t hurt him at all. So in short chars like Taj scrapper are so much better - this does not sound “equilized” to me.
I know ur just the publisher and sg would have to change thwt but why not do everything with book of coordination? Buff the bosses and let us use the book. - pretty please?
