Also, I find it interesting how many people are worried about an Adventurer coming in and stealing a kill from a Vestige. This happens all the time in the current system, just the other way around. I often work hard to pick away at the health of a world boss, for example, only to have another player show up at the last second and take out what's left of the boss in one hit. I can guarantee that even in Adventurer mode I will not be one-shotting anything you're fighting, not even a mudcrab.

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

Good feedback and we are excited to see people try this. Will try and answer some questions before the system goes live and you all can see it in action.

- Exploitation: This is indeed a key area of focus for us and one of the reasons the rewards start with XP and Gold. At our core, we are an MMO and want to encourage players to play together, see other people, soft group, etc. so as we were developing a core pillar was to make sure we maintain that playstyle. Its something we will keep an eye on especially as we layer on more reward mechanism.
- Rewards: Initially you will most likely see the layered approach to rewards in the form of Golden Pursuits and interaction with the Tome system. From there we will see how best we can expand in that regard.
- Exploration: It is true that there are places in the game where you will see players of mixed difficulty engaging with the same content. There are a lot of places where that won't be prevalent, however. Story instances are a good example of content being primarily group instanced in some fashion so you will be able to experience those as challenging pieces of content. Delves and Public Dungeons also will have varied populations from time to time.
- New Mechanics - Monsters currently do have mechanics. in the current form of difficulty, most players that are adept at the game just do not see them. As fights become longer, those mechanics will be much more noticeable. As an example, I was testing the final story encounter in Eastern Solstice (The Final Dark) and actually had to dodge, block, interrupt, etc and still died on Vestige difficulty. It was a lot of fun to experience that with a character that had all the tools at my disposal.

One way to avoid some exploits is to have the leader set the difficulty for the rest of the group, the same way it works for Normal/Veteran difficulties.

This way for example, if I'm going to a Bastion Nymic with a group, everyone will be at the exact same difficulty, you won't be able to be carried by someone on lower difficulties.

But I'm also just assuming group instanced content will be affected by this, Skyreach Catacombs would be a popular farming spot as you can set your difficulty higher for more EXP while grouped with a friend on Adventurer difficulty to melt enemies through, not sure if ZOS would see this as an exploit.

DeathandDebauchery wrote: »

Djiku wrote: »

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

Good feedback and we are excited to see people try this. Will try and answer some questions before the system goes live and you all can see it in action.

- Exploitation: This is indeed a key area of focus for us and one of the reasons the rewards start with XP and Gold. At our core, we are an MMO and want to encourage players to play together, see other people, soft group, etc. so as we were developing a core pillar was to make sure we maintain that playstyle. Its something we will keep an eye on especially as we layer on more reward mechanism.
- Rewards: Initially you will most likely see the layered approach to rewards in the form of Golden Pursuits and interaction with the Tome system. From there we will see how best we can expand in that regard.
- Exploration: It is true that there are places in the game where you will see players of mixed difficulty engaging with the same content. There are a lot of places where that won't be prevalent, however. Story instances are a good example of content being primarily group instanced in some fashion so you will be able to experience those as challenging pieces of content. Delves and Public Dungeons also will have varied populations from time to time.
- New Mechanics - Monsters currently do have mechanics. in the current form of difficulty, most players that are adept at the game just do not see them. As fights become longer, those mechanics will be much more noticeable. As an example, I was testing the final story encounter in Eastern Solstice (The Final Dark) and actually had to dodge, block, interrupt, etc and still died on Vestige difficulty. It was a lot of fun to experience that with a character that had all the tools at my disposal.

I think you are playing down how frustrating it potentially will be engaging with players of mixed difficulty. Story instances are not the problem. You do story instances every once in a while. Would you care to eleborate what other places it won't be prevalent? Apparently there are a lot.
You engange with World Bosses, Delves and Public Dungeons way more often, on a daily basis. So the potential for exploitation and frustration is enormous.
Please take this seriously! This could make or break the whole system.

I agree with this sentiment. Everything about the success or failure of this system hinges on how exploitable it is if your going to do rewards. If its easy to exploit, you simply WONT be able to increase the rewards in the future because it will cause rampant exploitation.

E.g. lets say you put a reward in the future that is great for killing 10 DLC world bosses on Vestige. I sit on Vestige, 4 players sit on Adventure. I tag it, they kill it. Rinse and repeat. This will /ABSOLUTEELY/ happen and become the new meta if it is allowed.

Let's take another example - Skyreach Catacombs boosting or dolmens. Boosted character goes on Vestige mode, Booster stays on Adventurer. Now we have an even faster way for people to power-level and skip content.

If you don't clearly address the exploitable portion of this system, you'll be unable to scale its rewards or the system itself will create a new 'meta' that relies on gaming it.

Your almost better off making there be no rewards or finding a solution to the exploitation ahead of time to prevent this.

If they are going forward with the approach of not separating the playerbase into their respective difficulties (which is admirable), this will be a dumpster fire.
I would like for everyone to stay together of course, but this causes too many problems. Layering should be they way. They could find a way that you are not layerd while in player hubs and towns, but when you leave town you get layered. This would probably mean a lot more work to be done on the system but I'd rather have them do it right than not. Maybe there is a way to not separate players and have thos problems but I just don't see it.

If different difficulties don't have different instances, this system should not be released at all.

Love it, can't wait to see how it develops over time. I think the gold and xp bonuses are minor, a good start to gague interest. It won't be exploited, I see it as more of a consolation prize which is obviously the intent for anyone dissapointed. Eventually adding a drop rate buff would bring this full circle, not enough to make it better than base difficulty, but something.

For example, if you deal -50% damage done, presumably, the fight takes 100% longer, a +25% drop chance would be 1/4 of what it's worth in time, but enough to be interesting. For example, a lot of farming comes down to waiting for bosses to respawn. The amount of time I've spent waiting for a 150k mini boss in a dungeon, just to collect a lead, I'd love to increase my odds by +25% for +100% time.

I love that this is optional and doesn't seperate players. I think overland is fine for this, it's already the "wild west", what other people do is of little concern or control to you. However, I think a fair middle ground would be to instance pledges and group dungeons into the difficulty tiers, everyone going in would be at the same level making fights more interesting. Since they're loaded into, and there is potentially 100s of them, I think worrying about seperating players here is way less of a concern, especially considering there is only 4 tiers, not 20.

A few things I think need to be considered:

1. The players nameplate should easily identify their difficulty tier at first glance. This way we understand why a boss may be taking longer to kill than you'd expect. Don't make it bloated with the full text, but make it easy to identify. Also gives players another layer to show off like titles or alliance rank. For example:
   • White (Adventurer), Yellow (Seasoned), Orange (Master), Red (Vestige).
   • A unique icon similar to how Alliance ranks works. Small, easy to see, unintrusive.
2. The toggle should be in UI, easily accessible like the new respec system on U49 PTS. A simple 5s timer, and if you add instanced pledges/group dungeons, a load screen.
3. Drop system based on highest 12 damage dealers is problematic. Here's some potential solutions:
   • Make it higher than 12, 24 would suffice to account for events.
   • Determining factor should be based on TRUE damage before the damage nerfs, this way you're not punished for attempting a harder difficulty when someone inevitably joins a fight you're engaged with.
4. Players want a more difficult, optional experience to truely test their builds, but the feeling of seeing -50% damage done might make for a bad experience. May I suggest the following:
   • Smoke and mirrors = Nerf the player by -50% damage done server side, but client side buff them by +100% damage done, and enemies by +100% HP. This way, 3 mil targets remain 3 mil, but to the player with -50% damage done, they see 6 mil with normal DPS values. This is a minor change, but would add polish to make the experience from transitioning to overland to dungeons and trials more relatable.

If any of my points are already addressed with the new system, feel free to correct me, but that's what I'd like to see.

I am all for increasing difficulty but the damage you take scales way too high with this imo. 100%, 300% and 600% is absolutely insane. It needs to be a bit more realistic like 50%, 100% and 250%, especially if the rewards are just a minuscule and barely noticeable amount more gold and slightly more xp. Needs a proper reward to justify actually using it, up to 100% extra xp for effectively 6 times harder content is ridiculous, nobody is going to be using this. Gold drops currently are so low that you could increase gold drops by 1000% on the highest difficulty and it still wouldn't be worth it.

There is also the fact that this is supposed to encourage people to do overland content more but the rewards and the difficulty scaling being for most pve content means nobody will be changing how they play, they will continue doing exactly what they are doing now with just slightly more xp for doing it. If anything it will just significantly reduce the amount of stuff people do to be just the easier content that can be facerolled with the highest difficulty settings.

The other issue with the damage scaling you guys picked is that newer content is significantly harder than older content, especially the dolmen style events in newer zones. With 600% dmg increase from enemies we will have trash mobs going around 1 shotting entire raids of players at once meaning absolutely nobody would be using this system at all because the game would be unplayable. Though in this instance i am going to give you guys the benefit of a doubt that you aren't stupid enough to make a change like this and not make some serious balance tweaks to base enemy damage.

There is also the problem brought up by the person above me, enemies being harder to take down means nothing when you can have someone on base difficulty mowing things down while you chip away at them. Can't really split players based on the difficulty they are using because most zones in the game are completely dead as it is, might as well just make the game fully single player only at that point.

But the reward for using this needs to at minimum increase the drop change of rarer drops. Giving something like the new trade bars as a reward should also be a must with the higher difficulty settings having a higher drop rate.

But going off what is said in the article this will be doa and be nothing but a massive waste of your time doing. Lotro has a system like this already, the rewards are better and some unique to it and yet people still don't use i so i already know nobody will use this past the first week or two just to check it out. The only place i can see people actually using this is Alik'r dolmen runs and that is it.

Sorry - but I still don't get how you can have people on different difficulty settings in the same place at the same time fighting the same thing. That still doesn't make sense to me without separation for the difficulty - it's just scaling, not a difficulty setting.

i’m a bit confused/concerned about how group participation and experience/gold gained while in groups will work with this.

if group members are set to different difficulty levels, and if raising your difficulty also increases the amount of gold and experience you get, say you’re in a party with somebody who has theirs set to the lowest difficulty setting and yours is set to the maximum- is there anything in place to prevent this from becoming exploitable by players setting their own difficulty to max while having a someone else carry them around overland on the minimum difficulty setting and gaining boosted passive exp and gold drops?? or will passive/participation exp gain only be adventurer? how will this affect guild activities like world boss runs and dolmens/incursions?

if two players not in a group have different difficulty settings, but are attacking the same mob/boss, how will that affect distribution of things like curated drops (by damage dealt) and their own experience gained? such as for bosses where drops are only given to the top damage dealers. ty!

I've used Lord of the Rings Online's landscape difficulty since release and even have the title on two characters for leveling to 130 with it enabled. Everyone I've quested with on the 64-bit servers had it enabled too. People love that feature and use it as a reference point for other MMOs to adopt because it was well received.

It's an extremely simple balance tweak that made thousands of hours of content relevant and enjoyable to play through.
https://lotro-wiki.com/wiki/Landscape_Difficulty

That being said, TESO's implementation jumping from 200% to 600% is far too much. Look at LOTRO's landscape difficulty. They have 9 tiers and tier 9 is 600% dmg taken. 600% is fine but that's incredibly hardcore. There should be more tiers between.

Djiku wrote: »

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

Good feedback and we are excited to see people try this. Will try and answer some questions before the system goes live and you all can see it in action.

- Exploitation: This is indeed a key area of focus for us and one of the reasons the rewards start with XP and Gold. At our core, we are an MMO and want to encourage players to play together, see other people, soft group, etc. so as we were developing a core pillar was to make sure we maintain that playstyle. Its something we will keep an eye on especially as we layer on more reward mechanism.
- Rewards: Initially you will most likely see the layered approach to rewards in the form of Golden Pursuits and interaction with the Tome system. From there we will see how best we can expand in that regard.
- Exploration: It is true that there are places in the game where you will see players of mixed difficulty engaging with the same content. There are a lot of places where that won't be prevalent, however. Story instances are a good example of content being primarily group instanced in some fashion so you will be able to experience those as challenging pieces of content. Delves and Public Dungeons also will have varied populations from time to time.
- New Mechanics - Monsters currently do have mechanics. in the current form of difficulty, most players that are adept at the game just do not see them. As fights become longer, those mechanics will be much more noticeable. As an example, I was testing the final story encounter in Eastern Solstice (The Final Dark) and actually had to dodge, block, interrupt, etc and still died on Vestige difficulty. It was a lot of fun to experience that with a character that had all the tools at my disposal.

I think you are playing down how frustrating it potentially will be engaging with players of mixed difficulty. Story instances are not the problem. You do story instances every once in a while. Would you care to eleborate what other places it won't be prevalent? Apparently there are a lot.
You engange with World Bosses, Delves and Public Dungeons way more often, on a daily basis. So the potential for exploitation and frustration is enormous.
Please take this seriously! This could make or break the whole system.

I have to very much agree with this. Because in the current state, it looks like quite a few people might only turn this on for final quest bosses. Because those are the only things truly instanced. Everything else will have no point in increeasing difficulty since other players will still kill everything instantly

I'm happy that it's optional and that the rewards won't be over the top for those who want more of a challenge. Hopefully rewards will stay that way. I know rewards might change, but hopefully they won't be excessive at higher difficulty levels. For this game to work for everyone, rewards have to be balanced, meaning that equivalently-cool rewards should be available for every difficulty level.

Perhaps they can work it so that if there's a golden pursuit that involves overland, you get the same reward for completion, but the higher the difficulty mode, the more choice of colours for the mount, or something like that. Rather than creating golden pursuit rewards that will be out of reach for some players.

Anyway, so far I'm happy with it. I'll probably stick to Adventurer because overland is where I relax, but I'm glad there will be other levels for those who want to do more than pick flowers (or ancestral silk or whatever!).

Kallykat wrote: »

I'm not looking forward to more rewards being added and feeling pushed into playing a higher challenge level I don't enjoy.

Ditto on this, hence my comment above. Rewards need to be designed so that FOMO doesn't push people into playing modes they don't enjoy, especially when it comes to challenge levels. We're not even talking different content here, but a difference in combat challenge. I actually think the increased XP/gold rates should be enough for an optional mode like that, but I'm okay with other rewards as long as they're balanced within the entire reward structure.

I like this feature but add new achievements and new rewards for beating the world bosses again in Vestige difficulty to incentivize us to go back and do them once more.

+ one could add stuff like dyes and skill styls unic furnitures and non combat pets

The multipliers chosen here seem a bit too extreme. Dealing 1/5 of your normal damage to receive 3x gold(Vestige) could be worth for stuff like Delves, Public Dungeons and other places where mobs are already a joke both health and dmg wise, but apply those same multipliers to other stuff like DLC WB/Incursions and this quickly turns into not worth the trouble.

This also isn't even taking into consideration the whole mixing of players in different difficulty options or how the Damage Done Multiplier negatively affects builds that rely on damage for healing(Pale Order, Puncturing Sweep, Swallow Soul, etc) vs others that use flat values for mitigation/heal(Pragmatic Fatecarver, Critical Surge, Green Lotus, etc).

I like seeing that they're truly releasing a system for this, I'm happy for that. And I do also appreciate the rewards are not a huge focus, though I agree they will eventually need to be put higher before this system comes to the live game.

Sadly I think they did all of it in the worst possible way. Both with mixed players opted into different tiers playing together, AND nerfing the player's build directly.

I do think a lot of players do have unrealistic expectations as to what can be changed, but this just feels like an abusable/unusable system right out the gate and I'm not sure how the devs could see it not being so.

Sadly I think different instances for different difficulties is the main way this could go. Maybe they'll surprise me with a different approach, but I just do not see mixing different difficulty players going well at all for anyone. I would love to see it different though, because I know instanced difficulty modes could lead to dead areas, and that's not good either.