WARNING! Long Post.
First, thank you for the letter. It gave me hope. Now that I’m full of hope, I’d like to share some ideas for how to handle some of the concepts presented in the letter.
If it helps, I’m doing this not just as a dedicated player but also as a UX professional. I am also an older gal (44 fwiw) and so some of my suggestions are kind of based on an older gamers perspective. Please feel free to call me boomer, it’s cool, I do it all the time.
All that out of the way, let us begin.
Dailies
To avoid burnout I learned a long time ago to only do Chaos, Unas and Guardians on rested. I also make sure that I have no more than 6 characters (I have 18) on the same rested cycle. However, not everyone thinks this way and so I understand the burnout. Rested is great but let’s be honest, most people fail the marshmallow test* and that’s fine.
I believe we need to look at the rewards scale of 1 rested run and make that the daily 1x. Chaos gives that many mats, gems, accessories, etc. Guardians just drop 2 souls and Una’s drops from 3 to 2 per day with the higher bonuses. (Note on Una’s, I don’t have the analytics on it but I would think the number of Lopang runners is significantly higher than Leapstone. This should not cause too many problems with Leapstone abundance.)
We are getting Ebony Cube, so not going to touch that one.
Battle Items
We have Skin Storage, we should have Battle Item Storage. I have one tab for unopened boxes and one tab for loose pots. These are now roster bound. If you want make this feature part of Aura, it would be a massive boon to having Crystalline. The storage should also have a red dot indicator if any of the loose pots in storage is under 10, this way I know to refill my HP pots.
In addition, I would like to another programmable preset option for Battle Items. You have a split screen UI, One side is the Legion Raid Name (Guardian Raids are too fluid in how to set up because your number changes each time, but you can have a generic Guardian panel) and the other is divided into horizontal sections labeled with each gate and four empty boxes that I can drag and drop my battle items into. Allow players to set this either character or entire roster. This way if I have one Prokel runner he can have his own set for Brel and the rest of my roster can just run with the basic flavor.
Is it kind of fidgety to set up? Maybe take about 10 minutes, but think of all the time you’ll save not having to wait around in battle workshop for someone to be like “oh wait, need to change my items. Where is that chest again?”
Mats
Honestly character bound for necessary progression bound mats is silly. There should only be 2 tiers, tradeable and Roster bound for Crystals, Fusions and Leapstones. I get the shards being per character but the rest, is silly.
Let’s talk fusion, I’d like some Stronghold research that lets me decrease the life skill mats needed for crafting fusion materials. If you want to limit this to roster bound one from Stronghold farm, that’s fine, but at least give me something. It should be hard to and expensive to get your main along the path, but it should be easier for alts.
Accessories
Every other ARPG lets me share accessories with my full roster, why is this game different? Please note that if I put an accessory into my roster storage, then decrease the ability to trade it by 1 time or just auto make it roster bound as soon as it goes in. This way I have to make the decision if I want to transfer or get gold from selling it.
Also can we talk about the fact that I’m more like to get Grudge +3, Adrenaline +5, Expertise than the same with Spec? We need to be able to fix this. My solution is to have a Jewelry Smith (only works with Legendary and Relic). I can pay X game currency to reroll 1 thing on the item (increase cost with each roll or just put in a decent rate for selectable change) and at that reroll it’s character bound (like bracelets). Especially for new players who had no idea their Striker was going to demand an upfront 50k gold just for one necklace, it gives them an option to build their character and really see it shine.
I think with the Legendary and Relic limitation it helps new players and alts but keeps the market still wide open for the end game players.
Legion Raids
Valtan and Vykas need the most tweaking for helping new players. They are also considered entry level and thus if viewed in this lens they should be more efficient training tools. Instead Vykas, especially turns into a pile of hate and honestly, at this phase I have a mass pile of anxiety when thinking of running HM Vykas. Which should never be the case. We also saw a bunch of players drop from running this raid before the gold nerf, that should tell you something.
Before I get the “well nerf normal, keep hard, hard” I’m going to say no. You want it hard, there is Inferno for a reason. First no one runs normal and with 1445 basically the new start, you are one tap from 1460, so it makes no sense. You have to consider the new paradigm in this game for where players start. We are already seeing Kunga as the new Deska, which was the new Yoho. Notice the trend for starting points?
Valtan
Gate 1 – Balls and Stagger Easy way to fix this is to eliminate the order. Just grab your ball and you can have max stagger damage. Grab 2 balls and take a 25% of max HP hit and lower your stagger. So just know your spot get that orb and rock it.
Gate 2 --The second biggest problem I usually see, is getting knocked off the platform. Experienced and newbies experience this issue. I’ve been in juiced 1500+ Valtan runs and watched most of the raid just fizzle right before ghost phase. It happens, humans make mistakes.
To handle this I propose a change for getting knocked off, based on the saying “first time mistake, second time habit” First time you get knocked off, you get back on with a decent knock of damage and a 2min debuff that if you fall again, you dead. Maybe it kills you outright, but maybe you just spam your HP pot and continue. It’s still a painful smack that will get people to watch their footing a bit better, but at least there is a measure of forgiveness for the brain fart moment or the new player.
Vykas
Disclaimer, I hate this raid with the passion of a 1000 burning suns. So my bias is going to be a little obvious. However, please keep an open mind.
Gate 1 – Ball and Gates, instead of party wipe make the damage at the end scale with the mount of fails. Each missed gate is 25% with all four being the wipe. If you miss 3 it’ll hurt and probably kill someone not at full life, but at least you have more of a chance.
Gate 1 – Velganos, dear goddess above… why, just why? This is one of the worse damn mechs in the game and yes, removing it would be easier, but I’m determined to fix it.
Let’s start with its formation, the middle is stupid. Put the balls where the colored gates are for Blue zone. This way everyone is already spread out. That gets rid of the overlap issue.
The middle death zone needs to go, let people focus.
The swirling indicator is hard AF to see for those of us with visual problems (yes, I’m going blind, that’s a medical condition but dear god I have 10 years left of vision I’m going to see everything I can). We need some kind of ground arrow like the front and back indicator to let people know which direction without guessing. The rest is just running in a circle, counting ticks. (BTW a little audio ding or something would help let me know I got it).
At the end you take a sliding scale of damage based on the number of ticks you got. See Colored Gate mech for scale.
Gate 2 – Orbs and wings, honestly just scale the damage taken based on proximity to the correct shadow clone. If you want to stand in the middle like a goober, then that’s on you. If your slow and a little out of the safe zone, then eat some damage but not just kill you.
Gate 2 – Red and Black, it happens you typed a 3 instead of 4. The easiest way to correct this chance of human error is to fix the balls for a visual indicator. Red balls are bigger, black balls are smaller (like half the size) this way even if someone put in the wrong number you still have a chance to grab the correct ball and not kill the raid.
Gate 3 – Typing Test, legit make this shorter by 1 or 2 characters (yes, I know you can delete 2 letters with Innana but who the heck is going to waste a sidereal here?) or make the timer like 1 second longer.
Gate 3 – Swamp, honestly the biggest issue isn’t usually placement it’s just people not noticing what they have because the wording is kind of faded and the contrast of the what’s under your feet is difficult. Easy fix is to make the wording a little more pronounced, simply change it to Swfit or Swamp instead of it’s flowy title and make it a little bigger. Instead of instant death, you get a pile of meter and like a decent slap to the face (maybe it still kills you if you aren’t keeping your health up, but at least you have a chance).
EDIT! I forgot Tentacles for Vykas. Easy fix, don’t’ make the ability to hit the tentacle based on the Charm meter. This will make it easier for everyone to concentrate on just getting the things down.
Because Valtan and Vykas are dearly important for getting the initial relic gear and introducing some mechs that will be in subsequent raids, we need these to be as effective as training tools for new players. Experienced players will start leaving these raids once we get Kayangal and Akkan. Therefore any push to rework legion raids and retain new players it is vital to address them.
I’m not concerned with Clown and Brel** because they have training tools already in the game, you can literally practice these raids and players should be doing that. I hope Akkan has a training mode.
That’s it, that’s all I’ve got. Maybe it helps, maybe this turns into a flame war. Least the ideas are into the ether.
*Marshmallow test – kids were given a marshmallow and told they could eat it right away or wait for 5 minutes and get a second marshmallow. Most kids ate it for the instant gratification with very few reaping the rewards of simply waiting. This trend persists through most adults.
** Only concern with Brel is gate 4, there should be a disclaimer that people with vertigo conditions should take caution. I have vertigo and luckily my group knows this and thus they know if we do gate 4 I cannot move much and only have about 2 pulls before I have to stop and then my gaming is shut down for the night. I am also not the only player with this, I’ve met a few others. Personally the swirly camera thingy and moving foreground/background need to go, but that sounds like too much work.