Ramber wrote: »

MAybe instead of waiting for end gamers to fall from the sky try and help recruit and train some newer players that wanna learn. Its very rewarding and doable.

There are 2 kind of players in this game:

1- PvErs
2- PvPers

If you want to be an end game PvEr you need a guild. Most of them are very nice training guys and teaching them. Not doing so goes against their own goals.

PvP is different.

code65536 wrote: »

Gear does not make content interesting.

Honestly, if we're talking about Craglorn, that entire zone only ever ran on the novelty factor of it being an open air dungeon zone. Some of the spectacle was nice.

This isn't even really something that aged out with the zone. I mean, I'm sitting here thinking about the Crag Trials, and aside from a few enemy types that were, at the time, unique to them, the only thing they had going for them was the scale of Craglorn.

When we'd never seen a stone attro anywhere else in the game (except as ruins in one of the Crag delves), that was an amazing moment. But, you're not wrong, that content isn't interesting.

Maw of Lorkhaj is, kinda, a turning point, because it got into some legitimately interesting mechanics.

code65536 wrote: »

In other MMOs, this combination of power and content creep is made explicit, in the form of new level caps. In this game, it's implicit, hidden behind the fig leaf that every enemy is just "CP 160", but a "CP 160" trial from 2016 is not the same as a "CP 160" trial from 2019. The three bosses in vMoL have a combined total health of 182M (that's with Hard Mode) and the speed-run is 40 minutes. In Sunspire, we're looking at 398M combined total health (with HM) and the speed-run is 30 minutes. 10 fewer minutes. And well over twice as much health to slog through. That's why DPS levels that were fine in 2016 when vMoL came out are not fine in 2019 for vSS. That's what people mean by relevance.

The same goes for dungeons. Molag Kena in vWGT HM has, IIRC, around 3M health. The two latest DLC dungeons feature final bosses that have 15M and 17M health on HM. Content in this game creeps as much as power creeps. You can't cut one without consideration of the other.

And, this is, actually, a problem. It rests squarely on Finn's shoulders.

IIRC, dungeon bosses were running around 6m. I mean, that's up to Za'an. There was one anomaly with the boss right before her who had 10m, but that was a gimmick fight. I think Molag Kena is 6mil, but I could be mistaken.

Can't remember what the Wolfhunter or Wrathstone did for boss health. But, there seems to have been a decision with the dragons, "because they're dragons," to give them a **** ton of health. Which, like you said, has turned the, "it's all 160" into a lie.

EDIT: Even the overland dragons in Elsweyr. Who are these for? If you know what you're doing, and clearing endgame content, they're cool, but ultimately pointless. If you don't know what you're doing, and aren't ready for endgame, they'll smear you, and you won't even know what happened.

I had a unique experience at the press event, where Bert found a dragon, and pulled a couple of us in, with some guys from the press contingent who weren't familiar with the game. The frequency of deaths, for those guys really does kinda underline that this is not content that's open to new players, in spite of being in the zone they start the game in.

Vet Trial bosses were at 52m... but these are dragons. So, off we go to stat inflation town.

It's not a good situation to be in, because, like you said, it does invalidate older content. If the intention is for older content to remain relevant, that shouldn't happen.

Unfortunately, there is a real problem here that dovetails together hilariously. As player's DPS has gone up, it's trivialized even new content. Finn's response with Dragonbones and Wolfhunter was to introduce mechanics that punished overburn, which would have been fine by themselves, but now the burn is getting past those. With DPS unchecked, it's lead to stat inflation on more recent dungeons and trials, rather than addressing damage output first. Of course, when it does come time to address damage output, everyone loses their minds.

TBois wrote: »

slofwnd wrote: »

During Elsweyr Sekiro came out, but people would still sign up and log in for trials. This is definitely an effect of bad patch, not other games being released.

But classic wow came out. That is actually the same genre as eso and hugely popular.

Probably a mix of both. WoW classic and a patch that people overly didn´t enjoy too much.

nafensoriel wrote: »

Question.
You have a product that 1% use at a professional level...
and
99% use at a casual level.

Who do you develop for?

If I were a game dev, I'd want to make the most bad ace game I could think of. That means developing something that casuals probably couldn't or wouldn't be able to do. Something like darksouls.

The best games always have a focused audience they're delivering to and a very specific vision of what they want to do that is something beyond "just print as much money as earthly possible." All the games that DO focus very obviously on milking people are games I hate and find boring. Up to and including retail wow, which is doing something very similar (focusing less on raiders and more on phone game playing moms with ez access to their husband's credit card for MTX).

The casuals will play whatever garbage I put out anyways, because they're either concerned about collecting, completing all the easy crap they can, or something else that takes a pittance of time and energy to develop and provides near endless ROI.

Is it really surprising that most MMOs are moving away from raiding as primary content consumption and design source?

Yes, for reasons I stated. What kinda scrub dev wants to put their stamp of approval on a game like cafe world? Who makes that and is proud? They're probably just happy to have a job, but that's not what I expect from people who work for big game devs that have built success on passion and not penny pinching.

b.bredfeldtub17_ESO wrote: »

nafensoriel wrote: »

Question.
You have a product that 1% use at a professional level...
and
99% use at a casual level.

Who do you develop for?

If I were a game dev, I'd want to make the most bad ace game I could think of. That means developing something that casuals probably couldn't or wouldn't be able to do. Something like darksouls.

You wouldn't be the first developer to look at Dark Souls and say, "hey, I can do that," and then drive your game into a ditch.

In fact, the first MMO I remember playing that explicitly cited Dark Souls as a reference point was already falling apart before their first anniversary.

The problem is fundamental to the difference between Dark Souls and an MMO.

When you bought Dark Souls, FromSoft got your money. (Also, Bandai Namco, and Sony, Microsoft, or Valve, but you get the idea.) The game was in your hand, and the revenue stream was over. So, the game needed to stand on its own.

MMOs aren't like that. As a customer, you continue to cost the developers money. At the most basic level, the servers need to be turned on and running. Beyond that, you need to keep turning out content to keep people coming in.

The problem is, games like Dark Souls have incredible attrition rates, which works against the idea of keeping people coming back, and works against the MMO as a business model, and as a design.

Compounded on this, endgame content that is genuinely challenging to experienced players is expensive and time consuming, in contrast to simple grind content. The casuals cost less, are easier to develop for, and return more money than the hard core sweaty bois.

Games that have planted pinned their hopes on raiding communities have been let down, time and again.

b.bredfeldtub17_ESO wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

In fact, the first MMO I remember playing that explicitly cited Dark Souls as a reference point was already falling apart before their first anniversary.

I have a sneaking suspicion you're talking about wildstar. You're wrong about why the game went up, but I digress.

I'm not. I didn't even think about Wildstar, until you reminded me. But, yeah, that had other issues. I was actually thinking of The Secret World. Which, the devs explicitly stated they'd seen Dark Souls as an indication that people wanted really difficult content.

Unfortunately, their understanding of difficult content was to inflate stats of enemies, resulting in long, often tedious, combat in overland, which would be trivialized by group content, and overly punishing mechanics in 5 man content that meant, often, one player could scuttle a run in a fit of pique, or by rage quitting, punishing everyone.

But, hey, "it was hard."

b.bredfeldtub17_ESO wrote: »

The problem is, games like Dark Souls have incredible attrition rates, which works against the idea of keeping people coming back, and works against the MMO as a business model, and as a design.

Only reason primarily single player games have incredible attrition rates is they have definitive endings and stories and eventually stop delivering new content patches.

Yeah, that's the thing. Though, with Dark Souls in particular, most never even get that far.

Honestly, most players never finish the single player games they buy. You can see this on Steam's global achievement trackers, if you really want. Dark Souls is a bit of a challenge here because there are two, mutually exclusive, achievements, Dark Lord (at 9.2%), and Link the Fire (at around 15%), but there's going to be overlap between these, so it's not simply that 24.2% of players beat the game, especially given that only 21.2% beat Bed of Chaos.

b.bredfeldtub17_ESO wrote: »

Keep developing new content people want and things stay peachy. Take your sweet time, run out of ideas, or just flat out stop, and you hemmorhage players. Seems fair to me, though not like the best business model.

The problem comes in, when you realize that players will consume content faster than you create it. (This is going to be really important in a minute.) So, you'll spend months (in the case of trials, you might even spend a full year), with a team, putting that content together, testing to make sure it works, getting ready, and then presenting it to the world.

And then your players complete it on the PTS, months before it goes live.

Well ****.

Even when we're talking about single player content, making a game takes vastly more time than it does to consume that content. You cannot keep up with the players. You can turn content out on a regular basis, frequently, but players will burn through it faster than you can release it.

When we're talking about endgame raids, even back the day, that's months of dev time that goes into content that will last a couple weeks, before people clear it.

I don't know if you fully understand, but players are voracious.

b.bredfeldtub17_ESO wrote: »

I'd play an infinite number of souls games if they released them FWIW. I'd also consider souls to be as much an MMO as the casual content of ESO. I can see players, but don't need to interact with them, for instance. Exactly what 99% of modern MMO players do. Group up with your one IRL friend? I can do that, too!

It a character action game with online elements. Granted, those elements are cool, and there's probably a discussion to be had for the online elements in Dark Souls being more in line with persistent online worlds, but ultimately it is an action game, not an MMO.

b.bredfeldtub17_ESO wrote: »

Dark souls also has servers still running, despite having a finite income from the game, so explain that?

That's easy: it doesn't.

Dark Souls uses a peer to peer network. So, while there's some minor command and control, the actual game network is not really centralized. Your characters are stored locally, and can be edited by you, with a cheat tool if you're so inclined.

b.bredfeldtub17_ESO wrote: »

Servers aren't actually that expensive to keep turned on is the answer. Ask me how I know.

Because the server you used to rent for Minecraft/Quake/Teamspeak/ect wasn't that expensive?

Or because you used to run a server locally, for your LAN?

The thing about this is, your statement by itself is entirely true. I've got a laptop next to me that's been in use as an internal network server for years. It's basically free at this point.

The difference for MMOs is volume of data and volume of traffic. Also, no downtime, if the server crashes, that's a very bad thing. So, you're having to manage a massive database of user data. You're having to manage very high traffic volume, because everything you do in game, needs to go through that server. Technically, it's not one server, or might not be. You'll have stuff like a login server, actual account data, the live content itself. You can split some of this stuff off into separate databases (and probably should), depending on architecture. But, at the end of the day, if you do something in an MMO, the server needs to be able to confirm that what you're doing is legit.

This is in contrast to P2P games, like Dark Souls, where the session host is god, and everyone else has to petition their client for permission to move.

The casuals cost less, are easier to develop for, and return more money than the hard core sweaty bois.

b.bredfeldtub17_ESO wrote: »

All good things if your primary reason for development is printing money instead of building something you're proud and passionate about. Don't get me wrong, i get why finance, corporate, and CEOs want to out raiders or good gamers in general from their MMOs. Normal MMOs are dying while whale games like fortnite are making bank. Just sucks to be a game dev for a big company now I guess.

Fortnite is an interesting thing. Also, a bit of a bad example, because it's proved ludicrously successful. But, even ignoring the other Battle Royale games, it does have one very slick trick that means its content doesn't age out the way an MMO's raid does.

It's PvP.

You're not playing against static NPCs, you're playing against live opponents. In a case like this, they are the content, and they can produce new content just as fast as you can shoot them. It's part of why a lot of MMOs focus hard on PvP for endgame when they're getting started, and then kinda abandon it as the game evolves. It's one place where you can ensure that players will not get tired of killing things, until your production pipeline is up and running.

You're not wrong, it is a rough time to be in the industry, but stuff like Fortnite enjoys two things, a critical mass of players, and that the content is those players. The other stuff, the events, the changes to the map, that's all really low effort stuff. The players keep it evergreen.

starkerealm wrote: »

code65536 wrote: »

Gear does not make content interesting.

Honestly, if we're talking about Craglorn, that entire zone only ever ran on the novelty factor of it being an open air dungeon zone. Some of the spectacle was nice.

This isn't even really something that aged out with the zone. I mean, I'm sitting here thinking about the Crag Trials, and aside from a few enemy types that were, at the time, unique to them, the only thing they had going for them was the scale of Craglorn.

When we'd never seen a stone attro anywhere else in the game (except as ruins in one of the Crag delves), that was an amazing moment. But, you're not wrong, that content isn't interesting.

Maw of Lorkhaj is, kinda, a turning point, because it got into some legitimately interesting mechanics.

code65536 wrote: »

In other MMOs, this combination of power and content creep is made explicit, in the form of new level caps. In this game, it's implicit, hidden behind the fig leaf that every enemy is just "CP 160", but a "CP 160" trial from 2016 is not the same as a "CP 160" trial from 2019. The three bosses in vMoL have a combined total health of 182M (that's with Hard Mode) and the speed-run is 40 minutes. In Sunspire, we're looking at 398M combined total health (with HM) and the speed-run is 30 minutes. 10 fewer minutes. And well over twice as much health to slog through. That's why DPS levels that were fine in 2016 when vMoL came out are not fine in 2019 for vSS. That's what people mean by relevance.

The same goes for dungeons. Molag Kena in vWGT HM has, IIRC, around 3M health. The two latest DLC dungeons feature final bosses that have 15M and 17M health on HM. Content in this game creeps as much as power creeps. You can't cut one without consideration of the other.

And, this is, actually, a problem. It rests squarely on Finn's shoulders.

IIRC, dungeon bosses were running around 6m. I mean, that's up to Za'an. There was one anomaly with the boss right before her who had 10m, but that was a gimmick fight. I think Molag Kena is 6mil, but I could be mistaken.

Can't remember what the Wolfhunter or Wrathstone did for boss health. But, there seems to have been a decision with the dragons, "because they're dragons," to give them a **** ton of health. Which, like you said, has turned the, "it's all 160" into a lie.

EDIT: Even the overland dragons in Elsweyr. Who are these for? If you know what you're doing, and clearing endgame content, they're cool, but ultimately pointless. If you don't know what you're doing, and aren't ready for endgame, they'll smear you, and you won't even know what happened.

I had a unique experience at the press event, where Bert found a dragon, and pulled a couple of us in, with some guys from the press contingent who weren't familiar with the game. The frequency of deaths, for those guys really does kinda underline that this is not content that's open to new players, in spite of being in the zone they start the game in.

Vet Trial bosses were at 52m... but these are dragons. So, off we go to stat inflation town.

It's not a good situation to be in, because, like you said, it does invalidate older content. If the intention is for older content to remain relevant, that shouldn't happen.

Unfortunately, there is a real problem here that dovetails together hilariously. As player's DPS has gone up, it's trivialized even new content. Finn's response with Dragonbones and Wolfhunter was to introduce mechanics that punished overburn, which would have been fine by themselves, but now the burn is getting past those. With DPS unchecked, it's lead to stat inflation on more recent dungeons and trials, rather than addressing damage output first. Of course, when it does come time to address damage output, everyone loses their minds.

You make it sound like power+content creep is a bad thing. It's not.

There's a reason a lot of games do explicit creep: It means that older content becomes more accessible. Yes, power creep has made older content easy. That is a good thing. Do you remember how brutally hard vMA was when it was first released? I do. I beat it during the original Orsinium patch, but it took me over 2 months and I died literally hundreds of times. It's much easier now, and a lot more accessible as a result.

Or look at vMoL. Our guild started working on vMoL as soon as it was released, and yet we didn't clear it until almost 4 months after its Live release. 4 months. For just vanilla vet without hard mode. And despite taking so long, we were still the third guild on PC/NA to clear it. Let that sink in for a moment. vMoL was so hard that during the 4 months while we worked on it, only two other guilds on all of PC/NA had cleared it.

Neither vMA nor vMoL were ever nerfed. Yet both are much easier now thanks to the power+content creep combination. And you know what? That's a good thing. It means when new vet content comes out, it's able to challenge the hardcore crowd, and over time, power creep makes that content accessible for more and more people to enjoy. Can you imagine the outcry from mainstream players if, after 3.5 years, vMoL was so hard that you could count on one hand the number of groups capable of clearing it?

This creep also results in content that covers a spectrum of difficulty, forming a ladder of sorts for people who want to progress through harder and harder challenges.

Power+content creep is, again, a good thing for players of all stripes, from the elite to the mainstream. That's why so many games do it explicitly. But it seems that this new combat team (and you) missed the memo.

Lucky28 wrote: »

BloodMagicLord wrote: »

slofwnd wrote: »

General direction, or better to say lack of direction where combat is going during Scalebreaker and Dragonhold destroyed end-game pve population.
It's increasingly hard to find trial groups and guolds lately due to the fact that players just left the game and do not want to play anymore.
Scalebreaker healer and geiund dots nerfs were padded by single target dot buffs, so we were able to keep up the dps in trial groups. Once 5.2 patch notes were released I can't fill a trial roster in the last active trial guild I had.
Is that what developers want the game to be? Drive away players who were loyal to the game for years?

You know, once upon a time trials were actually hard, right? DDs had to run defensive ultimates and weren't pulling 100k DPS. This situation is ridiculous and it's good that ZOS is finally addressing it. Some players may dislike this and quit rather than adapt to the change, but if that's the case then they probably weren't too far from quitting anyways.

If Trials are so easy why is everyone not running around with the "godslayer" title?. Trials are easy when you know what to do and are able to leave it to muscle memory. at any rate, they are making all classes and all skills exactly the same, the only way they differ is visually - this is stupid and is what is killing the game faster than anything.

I am a beta player, have done every trial even when we still had "veteran points".
Nobody, even back then, needed to use defensive skills to perform as DPS, nobody had to use anything but all points in magicka and 0 in health. All it took, is to understand the mechanics and play well.

Actually, back then, ESO was awesome and fun. I *felt* my class.

That's why I'll never have "Godslayer" title: I have unsubbed at Scalebreaker. Now I don't *feel* my class any more.

It's a nerfed, deranged, entangled mess. A layer upon layer of clipped abilities, of uniqueness stripped away.

ESO is not "ES" any more to me. It could as well be a browser game, it turned my class in just another "browser game, big titted, anime girl. Zero soul, zero skills".

Xsorus wrote: »

Its WoW classic, it broke over a million views when it launched on Twitch....its got at least 2 million players playing it alone..

What makes WoW classic so relevant to ESO?

Players have abandoned modern WoW by the millions, because the devs twisted and broken perfectly functioning, unique and fun classes. They made "autoplay" specs and rotations. They took out unique abilities, unique buffs (Mark of the Wild anyone?). They removed flavour stuff (bullets, idols, consummables).

Removed. Removed. Removed. All for what? To cater to LAZY (not casual, LAZY) guys who wanted to play WoW with 1 hand and 1 eye closed, while alt-tabbing to watch "juicy girls online".

End result? Exactly like in ESO, WoW turned into a farce. A shadow of itself. People, the real players, quitting in disgust and boredom.

Then, some Blizzard guys, almost out of teasing, proposed to run Vanilla WoW again.
Little they knew how it'd turn into THE 2020 event, the first time a 15 years old game could rival Fortnite at Twitch streaming!

Players flocked into Classic WoW, now they are about 2.3M subs!

Because Classic WoW is a TRUE, PROPER, AWESOME, FULL EXPERIENCE MMO.

Like Vanilla ESO used to be.

We need Classic ESO, or, better, ESO before Morrowind, the first huge smash, when all classes got hugely nerfed at sustain and boring HA builds were born.

Today's ESO is no better than BFA WoW: two piles of steaming, rotten, twisted GARBAGE.

No surprise players are almost forced to quit both ESO and BFA WoW and go play Classic WoW. It's just too good to experience a Good Game again!

code65536 wrote: »

You make it sound like power+content creep is a bad thing. It's not.

Depends on two things: Is it controlled? Is it intended?

I can get behind you on some of this, controlled power creep is fine, it can be healthy for a game. Like you said, it can progress things in an organic fashion so that older content is accessible to newer players, and the only real stress is trying to maintain on the bleeding edge.

I'm not going to carve up your post to comment on each point. Because, for the most part, the idea that power creep can be a good thing is something I agree with.

What I don't agree with is the idea that it's intentional, or controlled. In your defense, this isn't a distinction you were trying to make.

Here's the problem, the combat team isn't trying to create controlled power creep. The dungeon team found a difficulty they liked around Dragonbones, and have aimed for that in subsequent content. Which sounds ridiculous when you look at the more recent dungeons. That doesn't inform us where they want the trials to be, but there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that power creep got ahead of where we were "supposed to be."

Even the CP freeze was an attempt at stemming the flow... even though it doesn't matter. We're way ahead of the curve.

If the intention is for old content to be permanently relevant, this is a problem. It doesn't work the way it's supposed to.

If the intention is for old content to become easier over time, great, but the difficulty curve for that looks more like a rollercoaster, as things are adjusted.

VMoL was designed for players at around 500CP. From what I know, vMA was aimed at 300. We're so far past that now, even ignoring gear improvements or skill adjustments.

If the goal is for controlled power growth, we're not seeing that. We're seeing fits and starts, with a lot of power creep mixed in around the edges.

@peacenote, yeah, you're not wrong about fatigue.

That said, 5.2 has some nice toys that have me a bit energized, but it's been a long slog to get here.

karekiz wrote: »

Vahrokh wrote: »

Removed. Removed. Removed[/b]. All for what? To cater to LAZY (not casual, LAZY) guys who wanted to play WoW with 1 hand and 1 eye closed, while alt-tabbing to watch "juicy girls online".!

Agreed with some of your post but this.

Ehhhhh, I think its far far FAR easier to watch netflix and do a mage rotation <And lets not forget how many raids stack mages> in classic than do a comparable Mythic BFA Jaina or Queen Azshara.

To put it into perspective people split raid <Do the content as 20 man in a 40 man instance> stuff like Onyxia which is considered relevant content in Classic. I can't see them doing that in current WoW assuming you run at the highest difficulty level.

I happen to play a frost mage in BFA WoW and to have played an UD frost mage in Vanilla. Sure, the rotation is not brain-splitting in either version, but in BFA WoW I cannot, ever run out of mana. This is a BIG deal! In Vanilla... hell, yeah! Only boss that can drain my mana in BFA is in Jaina instance, at Conclave, when I have to keep spell stealing one of the minibosses. That can drain me.

code65536 wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

katorga wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

LadyNalcarya wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Drako_Ei wrote: »

mikemacon wrote: »

It’s almost as if the “endgame” “community” hasn’t yet figured out how to engage these very challenging endgame encounters the way the devs actually designed/intended them and instead obsessively focus on attaining and then “requiring” absurdly high DPS numbers that sidestep that design/intention.

I’m reminded of how, for instance, vMOL HM was beaten way back in the day when 30k DPS was considered godly...but now the “endgame” “community” insists you “can’t” beat that HM with less than 50k (or whatever ridiculously inflated number gets pulled out of someone’s nether regions this week).

...when since the trial was released, nothing has actually changed.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Good luck doing godslayer with 30k dps

Didn't know you earned Godslayer in vMoL... oh, wait, that's right, it's because you don't.

If you're trying to earn Godslayer in vMoL, that might be why you're having such a hard time getting it.

Why do people keep bringing up vMoL and Craglorn trials? It doesn't prove anything, it's old content. In many other mmos old content often becomes obsolete. vMoL and Craglorn are not completely useless at least.
Can we talk about more relevant stuff like vCR and vSS?

In many other MMOs, the level cap increases with each release, rendering old content irrelevant.

In many other MMOs, older content is completely abandoned.

In many other MMOs, gear is bound to character, rather than account.

In many other MMOs, open world PvP is enabled, and you can be ganked by hostile players almost as soon as you start a new character.

In many other MMOs, you're asked to pick from a massive list of severs and can only interact with other players who selected the same one. If you know someone IRL, and they picked a different server, you're SoL for playing with them.

Can we talk about more relevant stuff like ESO, and not what "many other MMOs" do?

In ESO, content isn't rendered irrelevant the instant a new zone hits. The early trials are still very relevant because of IA, VO, Alkosh, and a number of other sets which still see some use.

So, yes, let's stick to the relevant part of the discussion, which is to say, vMoL and Crag are still relevant. And, while we're on that subject, the DPS checks in vAS, vCR, and vHoF aren't nearly as brutal as a lot of people seem to think.

Old content is irrelevant if you've done it too many times.

The PVE content in this game is generally blah. PVP was the really, really good part of the game, almost the successor to Dark Age of Camelot in terms of AvA. They's messed that up though with lag, bugs and whatnot. The first two years though, just amazing, fast, fluid and fun.

Might want to tell that to all the people who went back to HRC for their Advancing gear.

Gear does not make content interesting. When they undid the nerf to the Shadow mundus, Mother's Sorrow suddenly became the best set for magicka DDs in PvE. Did that make Deshaan relevant? Stop being obtuse: there is content creep in this game. Each new dungeon, each new trial, is more challenging than the previous and requires more out of players than the previous.

In other MMOs, this combination of power and content creep is made explicit, in the form of new level caps. In this game, it's implicit, hidden behind the fig leaf that every enemy is just "CP 160", but a "CP 160" trial from 2016 is not the same as a "CP 160" trial from 2019. The three bosses in vMoL have a combined total health of 182M (that's with Hard Mode) and the speed-run is 40 minutes. In Sunspire, we're looking at 398M combined total health (with HM) and the speed-run is 30 minutes. 10 fewer minutes. And well over twice as much health to slog through. That's why DPS levels that were fine in 2016 when vMoL came out are not fine in 2019 for vSS. That's what people mean by relevance.

The same goes for dungeons. Molag Kena in vWGT HM has, IIRC, around 3M health. The two latest DLC dungeons feature final bosses that have 15M and 17M health on HM. Content in this game creeps as much as power creeps. You can't cut one without consideration of the other.

Thank you for bringing in real numbers to illustrate this point. This is a really great example of what we've been trying to communicate to the more stubborn parts of our community, and it provides irrefutable evidence.