Undaunted Pledge – Dungeon Scaling are TOO EASY
Heya everyone,
I've tested the Undaunted Pledge twice with Premade character lvl 45, and the gear, echant provided by Zenimax. This is my feedback.
INTRODUCTION
I find the Undaunted Pledge a GREAT and so needed feature to be added to the game. While I'd have prefered to have a mentoring system where the players scale to the instances rather than the instance scale to the players, allowing players of various level to meet up and play together (like GW2 is currently doing with their Dungeons). I'm fine with the system used and I understand the reasons why Zenimax have choosen that route and not the GW2 one.
I think that the Undaunted Pledge will add a lot of replayability to the game, will allow players to enjoy regularly this amazing content created by the devellopers!
I LOVE the Dungeons. They are gorgeous, varied, different, wonderful stories and atmosphere, and the bosses mechanics are FUN!
The Undauted Pledge is probably the feature added in the game from all Update at this point that I'm the most excitted about, because it re-uses content and increase the life spand of the game.
MY EXPERIENCE
I've done Volenfell and Splindeclutch, scaled up to my premade character lvl 45.
For Volenfell, we started the Dungeon and the quest at 4. But after the first boss, one of our guildies had to leave and we continued at three. For Splindeclutch we were three without tank.
- Premade gear is a bunch of green items, with random stats and traits.
- We didn't take the time to get buff (Mundus stones etc).
- I played with my weird new, non conventional healing-caster build
- Some of my guildies played their class for the first time, testing their abilities as it goes.
Considering our non optimised group, and the fact that I played very recklessly for some reasons, considering our gear, the fact that we were three and we had no tank, I was expecting us to seriously struggle.
But we didn't encountered at all any sort of difficulty. We had some deaths, but this was really due to playing uncarefully. It was really not difficult enough
If we had been four players, with a tank, blue crafted gear with the right set bonuses and enchants, and mundus stones, it would have been a FACEROLL run!
Witout having a good knowledge of numbers I'd say the difficulty should be buffed atleast 20%
TUNING THE DIFFICULTY UP!
It's very important to have those Pledges challenging enough to keep players interested for different reasons.
- Dungeons are the most challenging activity a player can expect to do while leveling. It need to be a challenge. Not a huge challenge, but challenging enough to stay interesting.
- Players will learn to play with Dungeons. Leanr their class, learn teamplay, learn what gear to get, how to manage their ressources, how to create an efficient build, when to block and dodge etc...
- Difficulty make encounter interesting
- Difficulty make Dungeon relevant. It is fun to do the Dungeon, because it's excitting and challenging enough
- As the Dungeons scale to the players, it will not be possible anymore to artificially tune up the difficulty. While if players really want a faceroll run, they can group with a lower lvl character and have the dungeon scaled a bit lower than them
If the Dungeons are left with the actual difficulty, the Undaunted Pledge will lose the "attraction" of the challenge and players will farm them as boring dailies; It will become a grind. If it become a grind players will need rewards. If the reward is not good enough, players will whine, Zenimax will be forced to offer better reward, and blues will fall like a rain from the sky, making leveling super easy, and players skipping content. Instead of expanding the life of the game, it will decrease the life of the game, making leveling a task to perform to reach the "real content" at max level. Players will tent to level as fast as possible, skip stories etc and then whine because there is no end game.
In addition, they will not learn how to play, how to prepare their character and how to follwo simple tactics. Once they will reach Veteran content, they will face a wall of difficulty and whine, and Zenimax will be forced to nerf the Veteran dungeon aswell, making the whole ESO experience easy, and grindy.
If the Dungeon difficulty is tuned up, Dungeon wil stay a chalenge. Something fun to do because the fights are interesteing and because players have to learn how to play.
It will also make crafting important, build research important, teamplay important, management of ressource important. Playing ESO will be something important, and not just a boring task to do while watching a serie on the second screen.
For all those reasons I BEG Zenimax to consider this and increase the difficulty to an acceptable level.
Here a video to prove my points. For those that know me, I'm not a pro-player. I'm a very average player and I was playing very uncarefully. If I find the content a walk in the park, it seriously mean there will be absolutely zero interest for a good player to do this and that nub players and bad players will have no difficulty to finish the dungeon without even realising what happened.
ESO is not World of Warcraft! ESO need to tune up its difficulty, otherwise leveling will become a task, a grind!