Was the system easy to use?

A: Yes.

What was the most challenging aspect of encounters?

A: World Bosses by far.

Did the risk feel appropriate for the reward?

A: Not really. It would be really really great and worth the time if you could also increase the drop rate of monster trophies, since right now their drop rates are abysmal and really a pain to farm actively.

Did you enjoy the system overall?

A: Yes, I'm really looking forward doing some quests as soon as this goes live.

So I've had some time to stew on the testing I've done for this, let me first establish my perspective.

What do I want out of Challenge Difficulty?
I want there to be an environment where the intended-to-be-solo parts of game is not necessarily hard enough to be 'hard', but hard enough to allow the impact of player's decisions to shine. As of right now on live, the difference between a player in green and white gear spamming Jabs, and a player kitted out in say, Ansuul's and Order's Wrath with Velothi, all purple or better. utilizing their full kit, isn't actually very noticeable. In fact in many cases the second player may be less effective than the first on account of mobs dying too quickly for the extra skills to have value.

Does the Challenge Difficulty as presented address this?
I'll address this on a level-by-level basis, starting from the top.

1. Vestige: I played three characters here. One was a Templar who basically started from scratch at level 3 (skipping the tutorial). No bank transfer, no pre-made sets, no CP. The second was a Dragonknight who used the level 50 template, fully golded sets, and a companion. The third was a Necromancer who followed the same path as the DK, but with no companion. I played the Templar to the end of Bleakrock Isle Zone Story, completing all three of the main localed but none of the side quests. By and large, she only struggled when there were multiple enemies. Any one-on-one fight she could self heal through. but a second enemy presented issues. The mine at Hozzin's Folly was by far the hardest part of the journey, but it was still doable entirely solo. The DK and the Necro both went and did the first two quests of the Western Skyrim Zone Story, culminating in the story boss fight against Sister Tharda. What I found here was that classical glass cannon DPS builds were... not entirely viable. An Order's/Deadly/Velothi dragonbreath build could win fights only if enemies could be killed before taking a second attack. The companion helped invaluably here but couldn't be relied upon. I decided to change up my builds, giving the DK more self-heal/HoT access with the Hiti's Hearth set, while the Necro pushed into tankiness, swapping mundus over to the Lady for additional resistance (nearly hitting cap once Resolves are active) and utilizing damage shields through Carve, and Ulfsild's Contingency. From here it became... kind of easy? I felt vaguely under pressure, especially on the Necro, but most enemies still died before they could really do anything. Bosses at least had some longevity such that Tharda's fight felt more reasonably paced, though I still feel like I'm able to do too much damage too quickly. After completing that fight I decided to take the Necro to the Spire of the Crimson Coin, one of the High Isle public dungeons. Fewer notes here but the trash packs felt spicy but manageable while the bosses were more ranging from "Doable but I get one-tapped if I *** up" to "I just don't have the damage to deal with this". And for the first time, the warning on the Public Dungeon tutorial that says something to the effect of "you might want a friend or two for these" finally feels appropriate.
2. Master: Fewer notes here too, but this feels like a much more laid back difficulty overall. It's easy while still asking me to pay attention, block, and watch my own health. Defense considerations feel more along the lines of what I expected when I first started playing. This honestly feels (to me) like what the base difficulty of the game should be.
3. Seasoned: I'm not gonna lie. I cannot tell the difference between this and Adventurer. At all. Enemies still die immediately. Supposedly the increased incoming damage could matter but not with how fast things die.

All in all Master is a great sweet spot where things are still easy but not to the point where I feel encouraged to ignore half the game. Vestige is a great hard mode up until Public Dungeons and World Bosses. That said though, I feel player damage output is still too high across the board. Currently the percentiles are 100/80/50/20. I think as of right now I'd want to adjust them to something more like. say 100/50/25/10.

There's one last wrinkle I want to bring up, however. And it's not the other players on easier difficulties that others have since brought up.

Companions are completely unaffected by difficulty
I know there's several people who won't care about this, but I personally like having companions around and I find them fun. But I won't lie and say that Sharp plinking enemies with Light attacks for more DPS than I'm capable of doing (which again I feel is typically too high in and of itself). Companion DPS was inherently kept low at the system's inception to avoid the overshadowing real players, but Challenge Difficulty currently flies in the face of that. They really should be subjected to the same outgoing damage multiplier as the player they're attached to, though I recognize that incoming damage, with their simplistic AI, is a bit of a rock and a hard place situation. They should probably take more damage on higher difficulties, though the full brunt that the player is dealt is probably too much.

Eratas_Dualitas wrote: »

Please add an icon (or anything else) next to our nameplates to see other players difficulties, we don't want random overland players to think we are weak.

Please don't do this, we don't want random overland players to be toxic about which difficulty we choose to play on.

I can assure you the only people who are going to judge you "for being weak" are the same [snip]s who are going to judge everyone else for not being on their level. 95% of people who play this game really don't care about someone else's damage level, and they will not notice somenone else's output.

allochthons wrote: »

This is probably a better place for this question.

I understand dungeons, trials, etc will be exempt from challenge difficulty. What about Lord Hollowjack during the Witches Festival? And, of course, the Crowborne Horror, but I'm not as concerned about that one.

If those instances are subject to challenge difficulty, would it be set to whomever has crown?

I can solo Lord Hollowjack on one or two of my characters, but gracious, I don't like to do it. And if he gets any tougher...

I suppose the "LFG" calls can be modified for "LFG Vestige."

From my understanding, the challenge mode is a glorified self-nerf. The code doesn't actually affect enemies or bosses in any way, and is fully player side.

So someone else set on a difficulty higher than yours affects you in no way except their performance tanking because they're on crazy mode and self nerfed themselves by 600%.

This is all assuming it affects the boss at all, which I'd be surprised. But I wanted to better explain how challenge mode works, as a lot of people seem to not fully understand that it's actually some very simple player-nerf-code, rather than anything that actually touches enemies at all.

After doing a side quest (solstice) and killing some trolls (as they count as veteran monsters) on my EU characters (EU player here), my opinion on the damage output still being too high was confirmed. Please note, that while I am a decent player I am nowhere near the top players and most of my builds are fun builds, where I forgo the best sets for ones fitting a theme.

For examples trolls; on adventurer they live about 2 seconds, on master they make it to 4 seconds and on vestige they make it to somewhere between 9 and 16 seconds, depending on how much I need to roll to get far enough away for arctic blast to work as a heal. I tested the vestige time with a frost warden and a bow/bow nightblade, neither of them is anywhere close to an optimal build.

Now why did it feel like the fights were too short.
- most quest end bosses are of the same level as trolls, the boss from the solstice side quest also died within 16 seconds. I would expect an end boss even from a side quest to live long enough for me to have to refresh my damage over time skills at least once, while on vestige.
- A troll dying in 14 seconds for example, only manages to get 4 attacks of in this time, if you count his light attacks.
- I spent 15 hours over the last 2 weeks leveling a character on vestige on PTS, at no time did I feel like I needed to upgrade my mostly green gear that I got along the way. Maybe I am wrong, but I would have expected at least vestige to feel like you want to improve your build, not as if upgrading your weapon to gold will optimize all the fun out of the fight.
- I really wished for the higher difficulties to make me want to build my characters, not to make me consider what would be the easiest way to self nerve so it feels like a more balanced fight.

So while leveling on vestige is great fun, I am at 20/20 Champion Level characters and I would really love to be able to play on a difficulty where not everything is one-hitting me, without bosses dying before sub assault even goes off.

My recommendations for the damage modifiers is still the same as in my initial feedback here. (in short, keep the incoming damage nerve the damage output more)

And while I understand that there is a lot of other things getting looked at for Update 50, I would really appreciate it if we could get a heads up, on if the damage output modifiers will get looked at and if yes, if it will happen as part of update 50.

After the recent update it's far easier to sustain damage from newer dlc world bosses so it seems most calcs are okay now.

However, I still believe that companions should also be subject to difficulty debuffs. A naked companion without any skills but taunt is able to live much longer than they should (they should get oneshotted with a basic attack). Companions kinda were made for casual gameplay, so idk why they would suddenly become "meta" for harder overland. My point is, with a tank companion you don't get to experience the incoming damage spike so much - which is the very point of having an increased difficulty.

Was the system easy to use?

Yes, once I noticed that you have to confirm the change.

What was the most challenging aspect of encounters?

The damage taken debuff.

Did the risk feel appropriate for the reward?

Mostly.

Did you enjoy the system overall?

Yes.

Any general feedback?

So overall I think this is a great addition. However, I am with the folks who say the damage taken debuff feels a little high, or maybe that the damage done debuff is a little low in some cases—the tuning just feels a bit off. My main thought is that while damage creep is a thing (which this responds well to), mitigation creep is less of a thing. A damage-focused build can't withstand a 50k untelegraphed hit like we see on Vestige, and while a tanky build could, tanks are already notoriously annoying to use in the overland because they do so little damage, so they'd have no real motivation to up their difficulty thus. While an organized, optimized group could probably handle it, no one is roving the overland in optimized groups. (Though if there was demand for that, then great.) Meanwhile, the 300% damage taken debuff of Master is pretty bearable, but the damage done debuff is still a bit low so even boss fights only last a few seconds. While it's not imperative for me—in terms of rewards or ego—to be on the highest difficulty all the time, it would be nice to have a middle ground where fights are still fairly dangerous and require paying attention and not standing in AoEs (a la Master), but also last long enough (a la Vestige) for that danger to actually manifest.