Legion Raid Difficulty Scaling & Rebalancing

[kimmy]

I believe this game needs to consider a rebalancing of the current raid difficulties available in order to allow for a much more robust and flexible viability of gameplay for players with a range of roster characters, that allows for greater diversity and viability for those that want to push beyond the currently too low soft cap of 1500, whereby top level players are circumventing by parking their mains at 1500 only and leveling up to 6x 1460 or 1475 characters at the maximum efficiency cost-effectiveness.

I think it would vastly improve the overall health of the game to enable players to choose more effectively what range of roster levels they want to achieve which yields the same net result in terms of gold output to a certain general extent.

Given that the current cap item level is 1575, I believe the game is badly balanced and imposing a too low of a soft cap which punishes players to level anywhere beyond the 1500 item level. It too harshly and rigidly forces and imposed limit to the player and requiring them to level up many alts to a much lower threshold giving them little room to progress alternative to the set base standard of only a single character at 1500 and rest all maxing out to 1460 where the minimum requirement of Hard mode sits.

There should be additional scaling difficulties beyond hard, for example, Normal, Hard, Nightmare, Hell, and finally, Inferno (but not the equalized mode that we know), which caps out at 1550 or 1560 instead. They just give additional materials and gold which scales to be to an extent that considers the trade-offs and differences similarly as if someone played on 5-6 alts all 1460 in the current system running all Hard modes.

This would make it less inefficient and cost-effectively punishing for players to focus on only a single character and reach all the way up to the prescribed cap of 1575. However, mainly this would accommodate a range of roster levels beyond 1500 that can be achieved and net a balanced result. Upon which, you would then add some kind of limit or cap to how many characters could run the higher difficulties beyond hard mode, while also restricting how many characters run hard mode IF you have a character that can run the higher difficulties.

For example, if you have one character that is 1550, you would only be able to run maybe 2 additional characters on hard modes and earn gold rewards, and you would only be able to run a max of one character at the 1550 level. This is at the core, simply a QoL balancing update to the difficulty scaling system, which is already in place, giving more room for players to have freedom of choice of playing differently sized rosters of accompanying levels greater than 1500. Many players, myself included, simply cannot given their real life situation, spend every entire week, playing on 6+ different characters, this allows them to still be nominally cost-efficient without in anyway sacrificing the need to have to level up a roster of characters.

With this update, players can choose some in between roster composition, say one main that pushed to one or two levels higher difficulty but just 2 or 3 alts at hard difficulty they play per week. Comparative to 6 alts maxed out playing it would still be a much higher overall reward.

You would only increase the rewards of the difficulties by a small margin only but at least it’s not like utterly capped out at 1460 where if you only have a single character at 1560 you’d get a measly 1/6th of the potential rewards vs someone that had 6 characters each running the max difficulty. This doesn’t make any sense.

It would not warrant making it so it would FULL EFFICIENY viable to play ONLY one character, than all 6 characters at a high level. It would be a compensational type of balancing. You would likely have some in-between composition, with the trade-off to benefit drastically drop-off at a purely single character player, this is very important to note, versus someone that maybe has one main and 3 alts, but now they can have say 1x 1560 main, 1x 1520 alt, 1x 1500 alt, which all run higher than hard difficulties, and it would put them somewhere in-between someone who relatively speaking at the same-ish leveling output have 1x 1500 main, and 5x 1460 alts, or another example of say 1x 1520 main, 1x 1500, 4x 1460, etc…

Effectively, if you ONLY wanted to play a single character, you would have a drastically less efficient output at the highest difficulty, but not a complete waste of being literally 1/6th the rewards as someone who spent the same resources as you did to get one character to 1560 and instead 5x 1460, this is the borderline basis for this rebalancing update.

[staryimoze]

Good luck finding supports for that 1550 content tho.
Basically, you are splitting playerbase even more than current NM/HM, putting more pressure on static/guild members to level up their characters (and swipe) in order to keep up with the whales from their group, who won’t like to do 1460 content, when they could be farming 1550.

No bueno from me on this idea.

[Glumpo]

There won’t be enough players to fill all the categories. It takes a while already sometimes to fill a group. This will just segregate people even further. Just play by the rules and build a character to the minimum level required to be accepted to groups.

[kimmy]

You both have solid arguments, but I still believe you aren’t considering the reality of the game being that whales will whale and they will be a minority, and this system doesn’t require you to reach these difficulties, that’s very important to establish, it merely gives you the flexibility and room to push a bit further if you wish; they merely provide high-level pushers with the option to push further which for a lot of people is more about the achievement that drives them to play.

The current difficulties that provide you with the necessarily materials to upgrade your gear to the next tier (Relic) is all that is needed for most people, which these difficulties would not effect at all (they don’t give any new types of materials beyond the current Relic gearset), and beyond that is completely optional, thus, there are plenty of players, especially by now, that are easily forming groups now, in fact I would argue most of these players are literally just running on their alts and have long already beat it on their mains.

Perhaps in the beginning, as with all content release, there will be a lack of players that can sufficiently form groups, but that is only natural, and that includes these higher difficulties, which end up being scaled up to eventually by players playing more casually, but on a much longer horizon, perhaps even after the next content release for higher tier gear scores are out, but it doesn’t require them to do it, because it is merely a compensatory balancing + scaling difficulty that provides marginal gold reward increases that matches the same as if someone were to run many lower difficulties on multiple alt characters so that the current meta is still completely viable and will remain the standard for the majority.

I believe all content release should have some race to the top incentive to it, just like at launch, T3 Punika was available right from the beginning, but only the most hardcore players reached it only after the first week or so, before anyone else, and they were essentially in T3 completely alone at first. This is the same as that, so it wouldn’t matter if at first no one could even effectively run at these difficulties at first, the point is they exist and can be reached eventually by the majority for provide for vertical content for top-level players to push towards.

As a more practical example which I did not provide in the OP because I hadn’t come up with it yet and just cited some arbitrary values generally, you can see how many players would likely be able to already reach some of these additional difficulties based on the raid:

With Valtan being the lower of the two current raids, currently you have NM/HM being 1415 and 1445, and Vykas being 1430 and 1460. If you say, added simply 2 additional difficulties, and kept Inferno as it is currently as an equalized raid content, then you could have Nightmare and Hell after Hard.

Of which, Valtan, would have an ilvl requirement of for example, 1475 and 1500 respectively, which many players by now have reached with their mains, this then gives them more vertical content to access, and optionally choose to run.

Whereas Vykas, being the current highest release raid content, would have an ilvl requirement of for example, 1490 and 1520. That makes 1520 just slightly out of reach to most if most players by now will have reached around 1490-1500 and are currently parked at it and leveling their alts instead.

And then finally, once Kakul-Saydon comes out, you could have the Nightmare difficulty after Hard being at 1475 be 1520 and 1540, right up until the release of Brelshaza.

You could even delay the release of those difficulties for later once Brelshaza comes out, so effectively, you don’t see any raids with a requirement of 1520+ until you already have access to Brelshaza which will give you the higher relics and ancients for the boosted gearscore.

From a scaling perspective, it makes perfect sense, and I think you are overblowing the problem of there not being enough people and splitting them up too much, when you already have a large number of players that are running multiple hard mode raids on their alts because they are required to.

By all respects, this QoL balancing update would make a lot more people want to play more and also have to grind less and replay the same difficulties on alts over and over which is what is driving a lot of players away as well, and by that factor, would increase the influx of players that remain and continue playing the game and making more character progression if they had the choice of pushing beyond the current soft cap of 1490~1500, which by all accounts most people in reality have already reached. You were just taking the highest scaled number I gave as an example completely off the top of my head (1550) and blanketly stating that is “way too high”, without taking into consideration the practical nuances of how it would actually work.

In fact, it would seem so screamingly obvious that this should’ve been done this way from the beginning, that I believe that it’s either an oversight, or they were tailoring to the low-level players without realizing that they can equalize or balance the reward incentives in such a way that these higher levels are more trivial and non-mandatory for the majority of the players and simply having the scaling available as a choice for more people to be able to enjoy playing the game beyond just effectively 1460-1500 and then are forced to play alt characters which is hurting the playerbase.

I personally know of many people that are completely burnt out after reaching 1500-1510 because there is no point to push anymore and they just don’t feel like playing on a dozen alts and up to a max of 6 main alts all to 1460 (which is absurd, quite frankly), it’s like a juggling circus game or a sweaty grindy full-time job to them, that a lot of them have pretty much quit playing. And I know of plenty of supports that are 1530+ in the top-level whale guilds that are ranked top 5 in GvG, etc, where the Korean vets that min/max and whaled out on everything are in. So no, there’s not a lack of supports at those levels, you just assume there aren’t any. You can literally look at the unofficial Lost Ark leaderboards in NA West and several weeks ago the Rank 1 player who was 1575 already was a Bard.