UNDAUNTED PLEDGE - Dungeon Scaling is TOO EASY - video inside as proof

Elloa

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!

LonePirate

The Bronze and Silver chests for completing the non-Veteran pledges will need to offer much better rewards if you want the difficulty increased. Right now, the rewards are pathetic and don't really motivate players to complete the dungeons again.

leandro.800ub17_ESO

What about drooping warlock set vr12 in crows wood scaled? does it drop?

Dagoth_Rac

leandro.800ub17_ESO wrote: »

What about drooping warlock set vr12 in crows wood scaled? does it drop?

Crows Wood will never scale. It is a public dungeon, only private instance group dungeons and solo instances like Main Story, Fighters/Mages Guild, will scale.

Elloa

LonePirate wrote: »

The Bronze and Silver chests for completing the non-Veteran pledges will need to offer much better rewards if you want the difficulty increased. Right now, the rewards are pathetic and don't really motivate players to complete the dungeons again.

The motivation should not be the reward. The motivation should be the fun! How can you expect anyone to have fun if the Dungeon is so easy you can faceroll it eyes closed. Then players will do Dungeon for the reward, they will "have to do their daily" it will be a grind and player will start to complain. If the Dungeon is fun, then the reward is just a bonus added.

Now, between you and me, the actual difficulty is so laughable that it only deserve greys as reward and 5g for the time spent: Nothing more than that. If players can not face more difficult than that, there is no hope for them.

leandro.800ub17_ESO

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

leandro.800ub17_ESO wrote: »

What about drooping warlock set vr12 in crows wood scaled? does it drop?

Crows Wood will never scale. It is a public dungeon, only private instance group dungeons and solo instances like Main Story, Fighters/Mages Guild, will scale.

Thx for update

guybrushtb16_ESO

Elloa wrote: »

• 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.

Looking around in these forums, I'd have to assume that this is a perfectly accurate description of your average casual dungeon pug. Throw any more difficulty at them and they'll cry for nerfs.

Elloa

guybrushtb16_ESO wrote: »

Elloa wrote: »

• 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.

Looking around in these forums, I'd have to assume that this is a perfectly accurate description of your average casual dungeon pug. Throw any more difficulty at them and they'll cry for nerfs.

Exactly the reason why it should be more difficult. Thanks to prove my point

Gilvoth

we nightblades wont be able to handle that type of damage needed for completion so, it needs to stay as is.
and yes, im being serious.

thank you

Gyudan

Thanks for the stream @Elloa ; it was fun to watch.

A few thoughts:

- It's already possible to level by grinding. I'd rather see players grind dungeons than random zombies.
- As long as the rewards aren't that good, there isn't much room for farm abuse. Blue loot won't change anything, the tempers at that level are already pretty much worthless now (150-220g each on EU server).
- Normal dungeons have always been quite easy. I started rolling a new alt a few weeks ago and didn't ecounter any issue in them, especially the low level ones. Keep in mind that the level 15 players who do Spindle for the first time are only supposed to have a very basic understanding of how the game works. Weapon swapping is only unlocked at level 15, that means a lot at the beginning. Some players aren't even there yet when they enter the dungeons.
- If the dungeons are too easy for your taste, you can always give yourself different challenges: 3P, 2P or solo them, go naked, use only 1 skill-line of your character (for example only the summoner line for sorcerers), use items designed solely for that purpose that you'll keep in white/green quality. There are many ways to increase the difficulty simply by nerfing yourself.
- Did someone try one of the usually higher level dungeons with the level scaling, like Direfrost Keep or Volenfell? Did you try playing them at VR14? How was the difficulty?
- Chat bubbles seem awesome.
- That French accent reminds me of how terrible I must sound on TS. I feel bad now

Dagoth_Rac

They really cannot make the auto-scaling be too difficult. By definition, half of the players in any game are below average! With the automatic scaling, they can no longer out-level the content and beat it later. They will get frustrated and leave. I don't want a large bulk of the player population to quit. It is bad for the game. I would love it if these players took their struggles as an incentive to practice and read up on better builds and become top-notch players. But many won't. They want to run around with a gigantic sword and wear a cool looking set of heavy armor.

But this does not mean we should just accept the game has to be scaled to not tax mediocre players! There is an option that could make the game more enjoyable for both casual players and hardcore players!

Simply remove the set-in-stone scaling. Let scaling to group leader be default, but have a slider to manually adjust level of dungeon enemies. That way they could program it so that anything that scales up will be quite difficult. But if a random PUG of non-optimized Level 45 players cannot handle Level 45 Volenfell, they can set the slider back to Level 40 or Level 37 (I think that is as low as Volenfell goes) and try again. With the reduced loot and XP that the lower level entails.

dylanjaygrobbelaarb16_ESO

I would assume most would give the highest level lead. The content is already nerfed, my second play through was a shock at how much they nefred difficulty. Plus the loot is going to drop relative to level so its a wast of time for anyone to level down. Is this really an issue? Most People are going to group up to farm good loot, not group down for a walkthrough and never look back. people who will always pick easy mode will always suck, there is no way we can force them to become better players. This seems like a non issue to me.

timidobserver

Apparently you guys are confused. The only purpose of this change is to make it somewhat worth it to do the lower level dungeons, not to make the game more difficult. They are learning how to keep all content relevant rather than discarding it. It is a waste of resources to have fungal grotto become useless once you pass a certain level.

Elloa

Heyhey! Thank you guys for all your answers! I'm really happy you toke all the time to share your point of view, and even if we do not always aggree I'm gratefull you did it

@Gyudan Did someone try one of the usually higher level dungeons with the level scaling, like Direfrost Keep or Volenfell? Did you try playing them at VR14? How was the difficulty

Yes I played Volenfell. Same story. It's a walk in the park with only 3 players. Except that place where you have a trap of steam...

If the dungeons are too easy for your taste, you can always give yourself different challenges: 3P, 2P or solo them, go naked, use only 1 skill-line of your character (for example only the summoner line for sorcerers), use items designed solely for that purpose that you'll keep in white/green quality. There are many ways to increase the difficulty simply by nerfing yourself.

At three players without a tank it's already too easy. (see the video linked)
I understand that there is way to artificially increase the difficulty. But seriously? Will Zenimax reduce the players that want to encounter a normal challenge to such extremities? I believe it's not fair and it's not healthy for the game. It's group content, come on! I'm not asking to buff Doshia. I'm asking to give a normal difficulty to 4man group content that requiere players to have a minimum of wit, coordination and gear. Otherwise, why even bother to craft at lower level? Why even bother to play at all?
It toke me 7 month to level my character to Vet1! Seven months! Because I enjoyed the journey. I toke my time. Did all stories. Explored. Crafted. Did all Dungeons several times. There is players that are like me: they enjoy level their character. They are not trying to reach max level as soon as possible. All those players should just be penalised and have no fun group content to do because of impatient players unable to make a little effort and to handel a minimum of difficulty?

@Dagoth_Rac Simply remove the set-in-stone scaling. Let scaling to group leader be default, but have a slider to manually adjust level of dungeon enemies. That way they could program it so that anything that scales up will be quite difficult. But if a random PUG of non-optimized Level 45 players cannot handle Level 45 Volenfell, they can set the slider back to Level 40 or Level 37 (I think that is as low as Volenfell goes) and try again. With the reduced loot and XP that the lower level entails.

I'd like something in the line of what you are proposing. Like Diablo3 is currently doing or GW2 with the fractals. You can scale up yourself the "difficulty" of your game. That would be great alread y and motivate players to better themselves and their group. In addition to the daily-pledge, this would add a lot of replayability for players that actually want to meet some difficulty and feel a sense of progression that way!

@timidobserver Apparently you guys are confused. The only purpose of this change is to make it somewhat worth it to do the lower level dungeons, not to make the game more difficult.

I'm not asking to mkae the game more difficult. Even if I'd love totally love the game being more difficult! But here from what I've tested the difficulty is a joke even in comparison to what it was on live server right now. Zenimax should atleast keep the difficulty as it on Life now.

My guildies shared the same opinion than I, and we are not Entropy Rising, we are not uber players clearing Trials etc...We are pretty average.

I really would like to have the opinion of players testing the Pledge. No one else have tried?

Varicite

I'm having trouble following the logic that if the quests are easy, it becomes a grind, and if it's a grind, it needs better rewards.

If the quests are easy, why would they need better rewards? That doesn't make much sense to me.

Gyudan

Varicite wrote: »

I'm having trouble following the logic that if the quests are easy, it becomes a grind, and if it's a grind, it needs better rewards.

If the quests are easy, why would they need better rewards? That doesn't make much sense to me.

I think this answers part of your question:

LonePirate wrote: »

The Bronze and Silver chests for completing the non-Veteran pledges will need to offer much better rewards if you want the difficulty increased. Right now, the rewards are pathetic and don't really motivate players to complete the dungeons again.

Gulvar

I haven't played a MMO which I felt properly scaled content. It seems like it's more work to balance than developers are either able or willing to put in.

FF14 - At a glance scaling characters down for fates seems to be an acceptable level of slightly OP. However, a few days ago my black mage tanked and self-healed an achievement fate which an actual level 20 tank with two actual level 20 healers wouldn't be able to manage.

EQ2 - If any MMO ever came close to god mode then it would be a raid geared EQ2 mentor.

WoW - Almost got it right with challenge modes. Had it simply been play in the top 0.05% of your class then it would have been fine. Instead, playing at that level was expected and it relied upon composition gimmicks which, in my opinion, discouraged people from trying to become gold medal players. I'm not sure why the OP needed a WoW jab. Let's not pretend that as a whole ESO is anywhere near as difficult.

In regards to ESO, it needs to be easy. The champion system is an EQ AA inspired grind. I'm fine with that and prefer it to veteran levels but look at these forums and the people in the game. ESO is an extremely casual game with many people who don't enjoy MMO's but play anyway. Scaling seems to be difficult to begin with and scaled content seems to be either too easy or too difficult. We all should know which one of those two options ZOS will always pick. Other MMO's even tend to make the same choice.

Elloa

I'm having trouble following the logic that if the quests are easy, it becomes a grind, and if it's a grind, it needs better rewards.

If the Dungeons are easy, they are not fun for themselves. Players will find them boring and will do them only for the daily rewards. If the daily reward is not good enough in comparison of the time spend for doing a boring task, players will complain.
This is why Dungeon should be challenging for the average player OR having a system to increase the difficulty. Then players will do the Dungeon because the Dungeon is FUN.

xaraan

They were a little easy, I agree, but I'm not too worried.

We jumped on our moved characters, which were V14 with good gear and all that and did two pledges, one the non-vet version scaled to V12 and the other the vet version of wayrest scaled to V12, both with a three man team (one dps, one healer and one tank). We did the 'harder' version of both. Being able to do the non-vet version of the dungeon at V12 was really cool btw.

You could tell the dungeons were more difficult with things dishing out a bit more damage and taking a bit more. Granted, we were only three, but you could tell stuff was taking a bit longer to bring down. In the vet version of Wayrest especially the Lich gave us trouble (only b/c our healer wasn't ready for his leashing drain first time he did it) and the bone collosus boss took forever to take down b/c we weren't dropping his healing adds fast enough. Other than that it was pretty smooth, including the fact we did the gold key hard mode on the last boss.

That being said, our group is pretty good at what we do. We three man'd Crypt of Hearts at V12 when most were struggling with it. So it might be worth waiting until more average players run through them. Especially considering I think some bosses will be harder than others depending on their mechanics, once buffed.

As far as the whole grind/fun/leveling thing - players are going to do these for the dailies anyway. making them harder will actually keep more players away. I don't care how "challenging" they are, I'm not going to run them more than once a day anyhow. You make things too hard and it's not worth the trouble - much like vet arena - it's not really worth the trouble once you do it once for the completion. It's not a challenge, it's a random number generator to see if something one shots you or not - if it depended more on mechanics and less on that, it might be more on the fun side. Buffing stuff to just be tougher instead of adding new mechanics runs the risk of repeating this.

So, in the end. Yeah, they were not really hard. But we did have fun.

Syntse

@Elloa did I understood right that it took you 7 months to get vet char? So it means you have recently made vet char. You want challenge, have you tried the vet versions of the dungeons? With personal experience they are nothing like normal ones and can hardly be facerolled unless one of the competitive guilds.

Took us 2h to complete Banished Cells and still have not managed to complete Fungal Grotto. Normal versions are training but of course should provide some challenge on level.

iliatha

everything in pve gets boring after beating it a few times. thats why good mmos need good pvp end-content or tons of new and challenging pve content. ESO got nothing from both right now.

Elloa

Syntse wrote: »

@Elloa did I understood right that it took you 7 months to get vet char? So it means you have recently made vet char. You want challenge, have you tried the vet versions of the dungeons? With personal experience they are nothing like normal ones and can hardly be facerolled unless one of the competitive guilds.

Took us 2h to complete Banished Cells and still have not managed to complete Fungal Grotto. Normal versions are training but of course should provide some challenge on level.

I never played a Vet Dungeon on Live server, but tested end game content on PTS, including CityofAshes vet.
I know that Vet content is a real challenge and that's good.

Doesn't mean that the normal dungeon need to be too easy.

Before the Update5 and the Scaling Dungeon were already VERY easy with a normal group, and a bit challenging with a non normal group (only caster, or 3 persons)
With the Update5, and the Scaling Dungeon, Dungeon will be VERY easy with a bad group of 3 players without tank. So....how easy would they be for a normal group?

That's why I'm complaining. I'm not asking to make the Dungeon HARD (even if I'd have loved it). I'm asking to not make the dungeon so easy that you are not challenged by being 3 players with bad gear and no tank.
At the moment, the Scaling Dungeon are too easy, even in comparison of the pre-update5 dungeons.

kai_dahmenb16_ESO wrote: »

everything in pve gets boring after beating it a few times. thats why good mmos need good pvp end-content or tons of new and challenging pve content. ESO got nothing from both right now.

That's a matter of taste and opinion. I love PVE and I do not like PVP.

schroed360

I would say that one possibilty has not been mentionned .The vet 14 who want to play with his fresh lvl 45 buddy.In order to have interest for both of them (loot wise ). They will have to take the higher lvl as a leader.So that may mean à vet 12dungeon(normal) with 1vet 14 + 3lvl 45....Does someone has tested that? Cause I would assume THAT would be really difficult (if not impossible).
I m not sure that it work since tool group you in a bracket of 5lvl...but nothing say that if you do a premaid group like that it would not work?

Anyone ?

Gyudan

schroed360 wrote: »

I would say that one possibilty has not been mentionned .The vet 14 who want to play with his fresh lvl 45 buddy.In order to have interest for both of them (loot wise ). They will have to take the higher lvl as a leader.So that may mean à vet 12dungeon(normal) with 1vet 14 + 3lvl 45....Does someone has tested that? Cause I would assume THAT would be really difficult (if not impossible).
I m not sure that it work since tool group you in a bracket of 5lvl...but nothing say that if you do a premaid group like that it would not work?

Anyone ?

Yes, that's what would happen if a VR14 is leader.
If he passes lead to one of the lvl45s before entering the dungeon, then everything will be lvl45 difficulty.

guybrushtb16_ESO

I just now looked at the video, and from what it looks like, those dungeons should pose a decent challenge if you solo them now. Since I have been able to find a group for only 2 dungeons after being queued for almost the entire time from 1-50, I have most of them still on my to do list.

KenjiJU

As if blues are something so awesome.. unless we're talking v10-v14 dungeon drops, even purples are trashed. Most players in low level dungeons aren't going to be optimized setups at all. They're going to be piecemeal and ragtag. I'm pretty sure you've been in those dungeons before and know what you're doing.

xaraan

OK, after playing on live server I can definitely say a huge NO to this thread (unless they already took your advice, in that case they need to back up).

As I said before, we have a very good dungeon group. Some of those videos out there of doing 4 man dungeons with only 3- or even only 1 - are our guys. Not saying we are best or any of that, just that I'm confident in my opinion on this. The dungeons are definitely hard enough, if not too hard.

We ran the DC hard mode last night (did it with a couple diff guys with different groups) and our first run with our real mains went somewhat smoothly. We had a few deaths, the alit fight, the netch and the final spider all took forever to kill (esp the damn alits b/c of how they respawn if not killed at same time - with inc toughness there is very little room for error here). God forbid you have to do this dungeon on speed mode.

Let's not forget other tweaks they've made to dungeons, like Bodgan and his flame, not being able to dodge it anymore. Another stupid move - make the game more about healing damage and stacking than actually communication and being active to make use of interesting mechanics. Now that fight will be - not harder (except maybe b/c of scaled up) - just more annoying and less fun.

I also went to help some v3-5's run SC (I took my v8 templar) and the dungeon was scaled to v3 and we got destroyed, never even made it to first boss. Now, I can't speak for these other players, and I know I was just healing, but it seemed a bit crazy even for a group of pugs I was tagging with to help. If that is what most pugs will have to deal with when they try these, then I feel for them and know they won't enjoy or return for more.

Elloa

@Xaraan
I'm speaking about NORMAL Dungeons scaled to non vet players in this thread It's well known that the Veteran Dungeon are though

xaraan

Ah, ok.
We haven't tried any of those yet, just been focused on our mains in the vet dungeons so far and the only normal one we ran was on pts, but we did it on our mains where it scaled it up to V12. So the V12 non vet wayrest did seem easier than the v12 vet version of wayrest, but that's probably due to mechanics being simpler in non-vet dungeons.

Gyudan

Today's undaunted pledges:
- Normal Direfrost Keep, scaled to VR12: not particularly hard but definitely not a facreroll. I enjoyed going back there.
- Veteran Banished Cells, scaled to VR12: difficulty is higher than before, especially on the boss summoning waves of imps-twilights-clannfears. It took us a while to clear it and it was fun.

I look forward to tomorrow's pledges.

Durham

Its hard enough..... for the casual player its really hard ... please most people in this game 80% are casual players.. I think normal needs lowering and maybe veteran needs to be increased... I know of 5 players that have stopped not because it was to easy but its to hard....