106382-treatise-pve-systems-improvements

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I apologize in advance for the length, but this is a complex solution to a complicated issue I am addressing.
 
So here I am again, having sorted through some more game criticism.  For those who don't know, I try to distill criticism into something useful to the devs, along with helpful suggestions for them, even if it isn't my own issue (yet).  I think that, amongst the arguing, vitriol, and bitterness that can sometimes engulf these threads, people's disatisfaction often comes from small problems with easy solutions.  So I've been paying attention to the latest issues being raised here in General Discussion.  The buzzwords around the forums now are all based around raid attunement and how this is now apparently killing the game.  Which... let's stay away from the hyperbole.  It is good enough to say, "We, the players, want this, not to keep people around, but to make the game more fun for us."  That is why I've written this, for the players who are here now, for the long haul, just being pestered by nagging "bureaucratic" issues.  And these players have stated, clearly, that they enjoy the process of running dungeons, adventures, and raids; but that logistical and administrative issues are intruding on the game and either making it needlessly difficult, unrewarding to play, or making sure that it feels too much like work rather than the difficult PVE experience they wanted.
 
I should say at the outset that raid attunement, I believe, is a necessary function that checks someone's ability to function in a group raid setting and their willingness to deal with the vicissitudes of long, hard, slogging group PVE.  Raids are EXTREMELY difficult and raid attunement is a good way to make sure that, even if people aren't necessarily trained to run in a real raid, they've done high level PVE, worked with the chaos of 20 people, ground their way through bosses, etc.  I will take as given that attunement, as a function, is based around that idea and that idea alone.  I do not support removing attunement, and I'm not sure many people would demand its complete removal to enjoy the game.  There are, however, quite a few hurdles to be jumped that have nothing to do with this principle, and these are where changes could be made to make the process somewhat more enjoyable or, at the very least, less prominent interruptions in the otherwise pleasant gaming experience.  Other PVE issues (and this treatise is meant to address quite a few) revolves around issues of gear, about rewards for running dungeons outside and after attunement, about crafters and their place in PVE content, and others.
 
I have tried to read everything and address, in one swoop, a wealth of the problems the playerbase reports and to provide Carbine with a larger, but integrated, solution to many of the game problems PVE players report frustration with, in the hopes that some or all of the suggestions will make it into the game. To whit, I've compiled the following list of generally acknowledged ideas and made some observations:
 
Players say they do not mind "game difficulty", but they mind "tedium".  I'm not entirely sure how true this is, but it is an objective truth that the game is better when people are playing it as intended, rather than doing something else with it like sitting on their hands or skipping content.  I think this is what people actually mean.  They want to be running dungeons and killing mobs, see how much progress they made, and move on.  Players often dislike being "gated".  What I think people mean by that is that they would rather have a more measured grind that they can always make progress on than to have the grind move relatively quickly, but that you continue to have to stop at a cap.  Elder Gems are a direct issue here, as they cap at 140 gems per week but are used to essentially gain levels after you level and buy the initial attunement key, among other things.  There is a sense that, at cap, you have nothing more to do but wait for the reset, since there's no other reason to run dungeons.  More on that later.  Suffice it to say, people have said they simply log out for the week once the cap is reached, causing a depopulation of people in the queue and in the game world.
 
Players will say that their guilds have trouble constantly attuning members.  This would seem rather odd, given that's part of what a guild does, until you take into account that player attunement moves step by step in a rigid line.  So running veteran dungeons, for instance, only helps the people who are on that one particular stage of attunement.  That means constantly having to run different parts of attunement for different people over and over, making the process more daunting than it should be.  Obviously, it doesn't help if some of your people need to run vet dungeons, some need world bosses, and some need one of the boss kill quests.  It's a small wonder that the big raiding guilds currently playing Wildstar largely came up in one huge group that did attunement at the same time, then replenished their ranks being the only big guilds on their servers.
 
Players are experiencing dissatisfaction, in various levels, with the way gear is handled.  Gear is, of course, one of the primary ways to reward players for running dungeons.  At present, it is a better option to simply have craftsmen craft you (or purchase from the CX) optimized gear rather than get gear from running content, which generally gives you stats not useful for your role or that are not tailored to your liking.  It is true that the best gear drops from dungeons, but the odds of getting everything you want from a dungeon run pale in comparison to the price you could pay to simply buy it, optimized, from the CX.  It has led to people seeing dungeons as not worth running.
 
Players are saying "casual" players are turned off by the high attunement costs.  While many are simply running into the problem of finding people on their stage of attunement (see the second point) and have no other reason to run the content (see the third point) and are at their elder gem cap fairly quickly (due to the first point), there is also a sense that some people do not want to raid at all, but see raid attunement as the thing to do after hitting 50.  They don't see gearing through dungeons or running level 50 content as developmental for anything other than raiding.  That could be a problem for people who like to run PVE content, but dislike the idea of being in a 20 or 40 man raid.  Those people need content as well.
 
Finally, issues have been raised regarding the numbers of people in raids.  Due especially to the second point, guilds have a hard time maintaining 20 and 40 man teams and have issues attuning new ones.  Logistically, it can be difficult to run groups of 20 and 40 people through attunement and through intensely difficult raids when there aren't many tools to get people to meet and mix in a way that produces guild members.  There's not enough social glue, in a way, since people have a tendency to run a lot of content cross-realm and thus don't meet people in dungeons the way they did in vanilla WoW.
 
Given these points, I've tried to create an integrated solution that might solve all these problems, make the game more entertaining for everyone involved, maintain the high demands of difficulty the player base nominally expects, and hopefully make the attunement process easier for guilds to handle logistically.
 
First, artificial gating should be done away with.  Players will at least accept, even if not prefer, being rewarded directly for how much time they put into the game.  Therefore, I recommend removing the elder gem cap and retuning how many gems are received and at what rate.  It should be decided what constitutes a normal playing time, and then the amount of gems that drop should be tailored to provide a player playing that amount of time with the current cap.  For instance, if it is decided that a player normally would play 28 hours a week, the elder gem cap is at 140 now, then it would be reasonable to make sure that drop rates and gains from all sources would essentially give out 5 gems per hour.  This means that a player who active plays 50 hours in a week would probably have 250 gems, while a player actively playing 10 hours a week would have 50.  Regardless, it means there is never a point where it is not worth playing the game, because you will always be earning elder gems.  Considering the low drop rates for extra ability amps and such in the open world, this is probably a boon for those who want their playtime and activity to directly correlate to new character development.  I would recommend that you receive, for instance, about one per hour of playing after 50 from elder points, and having a chance for them to drop for every loot roll individually for a vet dungeon.  That means that, if you silver medal two vet dungeons in an hour, you would probably get one from elder points, and have a shot at four more, two each from the silver loot rolls.  This system can be retuned to affect drop rates, but it does mean people will have a reason to run dungeons.
 
It is also important to fix gearing without alienating the crafters, and there is a way to marry both.  I have two possible solutions.  In the first, all loot rolls should have a chance to have corresponding armor, weapon, gadget, etc tokens drop that bind on pickup.  We will call these "activator units" and your activator unit you get from a veteran or normal (at 50) dungeon will be different, as well as from adventures (and so on, I would leave the specifics of deciding on tiering gear to those with more specific PVE experience than I have).  Regardless, using the vet dungeon as an example, let's say a warrior was lucky and got an activator for a heavy chest piece.  This is just a token.  He goes to find an armorer (or to the CX).  Now, high level crafters will have learned how to make a piece of "inert" gear.  This piece of gear can be custom tooled, like all crafted gear, and is tradeable, but cannot be equipped.  The armorer makes a set of gear to our warrior's specifications, and sells it to him for money.  The Warrior uses his soulbound activator on the tradeable inert piece and, presto, he has a piece of soulbound gear tiered for his level of content.  If Carbine would like, they could also sell, for large amounts of elder gems, those same activators for lower tiers of content to "fill in the gaps" in gear that just will not drop for our warrior, no matter what.  In this suggestion, it might be helpful, if not necessary, for the crafter to also be able to add and control the rune slots.
 
The second option would be to install a new kind of crafting table, one that requires two people to trade through it.  This is an inherently more complex (and not more effective that I can see, but I provide it for discussion regardless) system that would take some testing.  However, in this version, the gear stays the same.  Our warrior from the previous example gets a heavy chest piece, but it's a tanking piece and he needs DPS.  So he goes to a crafter (not the CX, obviously) and joins him at the retooling table.  Every stat affected requires a certain amount of reagents to retool, but the crafter can then recalibrate the stats on the armor to be what our warrior needs.  In this way, the warrior has a vested interest in getting closer armor to what he needs (it costs less to retool one stat than all of them) but no heavy gear or swords are wasted on him.  In this suggestion, it is absolutely necessary that the crafter be able to, for a much larger price, add and change rune slots.
 
Attunement should change so that all stages where it is feasible can be completed retroactively, meaning that the stages credit completion if they were completed beforehand.  Many stages of attunement can thus be completed without having to be on that particular part of the quest, meaning that someone who hasn't completed veteran adventures can jump in with the guild on "world boss kill day" and clear or make progress on that stage of his attunement.  In this manner, it becomes easier to logistically move players through attunement, but does not become easier in content.  This would make it easier to farm talent, since they can come with the guild on certain days to do attunement content (because people will be running to get elder gems and new gear regardless, since that is now always producing fruits) and actually benefit from it every single step of the way.  This will also keep the lore progression in order, as opposed to my previous suggestion of one quest with all threads concurrent.  As many of these that can be done together and applied retroactively, though, should do so, to keep guilds from having to attune so many people who are on so many different stages of the questchain.
 
It should also be that overall timers should no longer be used as the metric for medals in group content.  They are fine, but not the best, metric.  One suggestion is to judge the party, from beginning to completion, on the amount of overall damage taken after mitigation and to require a full clear of all enemies of significance (anything that isn't fodder, at the very least counting decent trash).  There should be a certain "pool" of damage to be taken by the team before their medal is downgraded, and they should be docked by the medaling system for every enemy they fail to kill before the final boss.  This means not punishing a team for having to stop a few minutes to handle issues outside the game, but will punish people for not dodging telegraphs, even if they have certain members clear the content quickly.  This, definitely, checks skill, but allows the instance to breathe.  The devs obviously put a lot of thought and work into every detail of a dungeon; it seems such a shame it is best rewarded by ignoring as much of it as possible and rewarding groups for doing as little as possible.
 
Another possible solution would involve adding hard or soft enrage timers to every mob and boss, thereby moving the timers to a place that DOES have a correlary to raiding.  This would be a somewhat easier fix, it is surmised, and would at least not punish players for stopping outside of combat while still judging their ability to fight with some efficiency.
 
However, timers will not be gone.  To make 5 man content more interesting for those who do not raid, I am asking that certain "challenge modes" be accessible for those who have completed a dungeon or adventure.  These challenge modes alter dynamics through the dungeon.  This means that, if there are five challenge modes, then you have quintupled the content required to say you've "done everything".  They should be rewarded, either by guaranteeing a certain amount of elder gems or increasing the odds of seeing them.  As they are optional, they can take any form.  The possibilities are practically limitless, but a few I have thought of already could include:
 
-Timed Mode:  You have a time limit to clear to the end of the dungeon or adventure.  The dock for skipping adds remains, so the timers may be a little longer than now.  Still, no reason to be that reasonable.  This must be a challenge, after all.
 
-Lightning Mode:  Random telegraphs centered on random players at random intervals will force players to be moving out of extra telegraphs that also momentarily stun.
 
-Capture Mode:  Enemies that are killed are replaced by the same enemy at 100% health, including bosses.  Instead, at 10%, they must be "captured" using a tool given to every player and bound to the F or G key.
 
-Berserker Mode:  Every time an enemy dies near another enemy, that enemy receives a 100% boost in attack power, necessitating all enemies be killed around the same time or some manner of mitigating the damage be found.
 
-Zero Friction Mode:  Like an ice skating rink, stopping any movement key will, instead of stopping the character, simply keep them moving at a constant speed in another direction.  This necessitates players "running" in the other direction to slow down.  For this, moving while sliding (not pressing keys, will not count as moving for the purposes of casting spells).
 
Feel free to contribute your own thoughts to this selection.  The point is in making 5 man content even more challenging and entertaining to people who do not want to run raids, and even giving raiders more to do on off days in 5 man teams.  This creates a checklist, having people want to clear every single challenge and rewarding them by doubling their chances of getting elder gems (or giving them gems outright).
 
I have just three more thoughts on this.  One involves, of course, veteran shiphands.  I have heard they are in the process of being designed and implemented, but should iterate how important they are.  Shiphands don't require 5 people, can be done solo, tune automatically, and are extremely popular.
 
That social glue I mentioned before, however, gets bound in realm events.  Servers need things to do that attract people to it and give them a reason to group up in the open world.  This would require a bit more work than many of my previous suggestions, but future content drops should encourage not just big pinata bosses in the open world, but whole "veteran zones" where you can revisit old zones which have been retooled into massive events, gathering a hundred or more players per shard and allowing them to perform tasks in large groups, solo, fire teams, etc.  I can iterate an example, my "Darkspur Algoroc Invasion" scenario, if anyone is interested.  For the sake of some kind of brevity, I'll wait until asked.
 
Also, finally, I'd like to open the discussion on decreasing raid sizes.  That is a last resort, of course, I know that 40 man raids are, themselves, a target for Carbine and the game to have.  My other suggestions may be sufficient enough to make the logistics of running a guild of this size a bit more manageable.  If this is sufficient, the final point can be disregarded.  If not, at some point, it may become necessary to reduce the size of raids and retune bosses for less players or 15-30, or even 10-20.  I must stress, though, this is only being added as I think it might be necessary for good guild logistics in the reality of the game.  If it is avoidable, I would prefer to avoid it.  It should not be off the table, however.
 
At this point, I'd like to turn the thread over to others for thoughts and questions regarding these suggestions.
 
Addendums due to community suggestions and concerns shall be in this color.	
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Carbine, give this man a job.
 
I especially agree with attunement changes - I think it should be a no-brainer to change the quest to be able to be completed in any order. This would also take away the grindy feel of the rep requirement and elder gems (as you'd get that on the way most likely).	
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			No point having timers in adventure because we can't skip trash mobs in wotw, malgrave and siege.	
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I apologize in advance for the length,
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I'm going to play devil's advocate here and try to point out some of the potential issues with some of these proposed changes.
 
- Uncapping elder gems: One of the issues that came to mind with this is that part of the economy and ability to farm gold/platinum comes from being able to cap off your weekly elder points so that all of that EXP can be converted into gold instead. If the cap no longer existed, then farming platinum would become a lot more difficult and it could have some adverse effects on the economy. People will no longer have the same ability to farm gold and that will create a big gap between the people who are sitting on a ton of platinum and those who have somewhere around 1-5. 
 
- Attunement changes: Changing attunement into one quest with a giant checklist will take away from the lore aspect of attunement. There are story related quests weaved into the attunement process and, for those who enjoy following lore at least, the whole thing is meant to lead up to you finally finishing your preparation for facing the Entity, his minions and the corrupted Eldan. Making your proposed change to attunement will absolutely accomplish your goals of streamlining the process without changing the requirements, but what should carbine do with all of the lore quests and dialogue with Drusera that will seemingly be washed over?
 
- Changing medal requirements to judge parties based on damage taken: I am not fond of this idea at all. One of the tanks in this game (stalker) uses medium armor and relies on self healing. Stalkers will likely take more damage overall than an engineer or even a warrior would based on this armor difference alone. Why should stalker tanks become potentially non viable for dungeon runs just because they have less armor and inherently take more damage? In order for this idea to even begin working you'd need to exclude the damage that the tank takes from this damage counter. even if you were to only count telegraph damage and not auto attack damage there are still telegraph abilities that were meant to be soaked by the tank and are next to unavoidable without sustained kiting (stormtalon). I also believe that people will still skip as much content as possible with this system in order to minimize the amount of potential damage that the party could take, and content skipping is one of my biggest peeves with the timer system.
 
I do want to see some changes to the elder gem system and the dungeon medal system and I applaud the effort you put into this post. We need more coherent and detailed posts like this so that people don't become dismissive of feedback posts because they expect it to be full of whining and unconstructive criticism.	
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I don't really have anything to add to the discussion except:
 
I greatly appreciate you taking the time to type all that out, and the time spent compiling and thinking on these ideas. They show a great deal of polish, and that shouldn't go unrecognized. 
 
I'd love to see what you meant by the "Darkspur Algoroc invasion" scenario, but would prefer to see your answers to Mikemorveus' post first.	
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i'm not quite fond of your idea about medals either.
 
Tanking classes taking different damages is one... classes mobility is another, or just the fact that a wide array of perfectly healable telegraphs will suddently become a huge pain because of it.
 
I'd be in to base medal around death count however... 5 deaths should downgrade you to silver ( aka, no wipe to get gold... but you can still have the odd member die here or there) along with a more leniant timer  ( you still need a certain tempo... running with 3 healer 2 tank in order to get gold wouldn't be fun)
 
i'd also like more static trash... cause honestly i'm sick of people trying to pull all sort of gimmick in order to skip a mob who would die in less than a minute anyway.	
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-Zero Friction Mode:
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I'm going to play devil's advocate here and try to point out some of the potential issues with some of these proposed changes.
 
- Uncapping elder gems: One of the issues that came to mind with this is that part of the economy and ability to farm gold/platinum comes from being able to cap off your weekly elder points so that all of that EXP can be converted into gold instead. If the cap no longer existed, then farming platinum would become a lot more difficult and it could have some adverse effects on the economy. People will no longer have the same ability to farm gold and that will create a big gap between the people who are sitting on a ton of platinum and those who have somewhere around 1-5. 
 
- Attunement changes: Changing attunement into one quest with a giant checklist will take away from the lore aspect of attunement. There are story related quests weaved into the attunement process and, for those who enjoy following lore at least, the whole thing is meant to lead up to you finally finishing your preparation for facing the Entity, his minions and the corrupted Eldan. Making your proposed change to attunement will absolutely accomplish your goals of streamlining the process without changing the requirements, but what should carbine do with all of the lore quests and dialogue with Drusera that will seemingly be washed over?
 
- Changing medal requirements to judge parties based on damage taken: I am not fond of this idea at all. One of the tanks in this game (stalker) uses medium armor and relies on self healing. Stalkers will likely take more damage overall than an engineer or even a warrior would based on this armor difference alone. Why should stalker tanks become potentially non viable for dungeon runs just because they have less armor and inherently take more damage? In order for this idea to even begin working you'd need to exclude the damage that the tank takes from this damage counter. even if you were to only count telegraph damage and not auto attack damage there are still telegraph abilities that were meant to be soaked by the tank and are next to unavoidable without sustained kiting (stormtalon). I also believe that people will still skip as much content as possible with this system in order to minimize the amount of potential damage that the party could take, and content skipping is one of my biggest peeves with the timer system.
 
I do want to see some changes to the elder gem system and the dungeon medal system and I applaud the effort you put into this post. We need more coherent and detailed posts like this so that people don't become dismissive of feedback posts because they expect it to be full of whining and unconstructive criticism.
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I don't really have anything to add to the discussion except:
 
I greatly appreciate you taking the time to type all that out, and the time spent compiling and thinking on these ideas. They show a great deal of polish, and that shouldn't go unrecognized. 
 
I'd love to see what you meant by the "Darkspur Algoroc invasion" scenario, but would prefer to see your answers to Mikemorveus' post first.
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i'm not quite fond of your idea about medals either.
 
Tanking classes taking different damages is one... classes mobility is another, or just the fact that a wide array of perfectly healable telegraphs will suddently become a huge pain because of it.
 
I'd be in to base medal around death count however... 5 deaths should downgrade you to silver ( aka, no wipe to get gold... but you can still have the odd member die here or there) along with a more leniant timer  ( you still need a certain tempo... running with 3 healer 2 tank in order to get gold wouldn't be fun)
 
i'd also like more static trash... cause honestly i'm sick of people trying to pull all sort of gimmick in order to skip a mob who would die in less than a minute anyway.
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Carbine, give this man a job.
 
I especially agree with attunement changes - I think it should be a no-brainer to change the quest to be able to be completed in any order. This would also take away the grindy feel of the rep requirement and elder gems (as you'd get that on the way most likely).
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First off no need to apologize for your post length *bonks*
 
Elder gems:
In regard to the elder gems, I don't think removing the cap would be good. However what we are missing are reliable ways outside of gaining experience to acquire gems beyond the cap. As it is right now, we can only get them form boomboxes.
 
So I think that maybe having daily dungeon/adventure quests that give elder gems and perhaps even giving a small amount for completing the veteran/raid content would help. In addition to that, I feel like adding the purple epics to the elder gem vendor would give more goal options for people to have from the vendor. Have these locked behind certain requirements to purchase so players have to get that content done prior, but also perhaps remove the requirements for the current non-raid stuff(maybe).
 
Attunement:
I feel like perhaps the best way to work around this for organization purposes is to have retroactive rewarding, the player would still basically go through the steps they would do on their own and can read the quest text, but on stages like the dungeons, adventures, and world bosses, it'd help a bit. So if you were running a STL veteran and got a silver but weren't on that stage yet, you'd get that part of your attunement retroactively awarded once you do get there. 
 
In regard to specific instances, I think the timer is a "lazy" way of going about things. I'd rather the timers be on the boss fights themself if they were to remain OR that the timers be replaced with a point based system(Which might mean a complete rework of the medal system).  Think like...streets of rage or battletoads where you'd get certain Class ranks based on overall performance. I would say that the issue that was broguht up of damage done etc can be negated by the fact people queue as certain roles which could help determine the poitns such as tank performance judged by threat held, damage being on a damage threshold, and healers on an overhealing threshold i guess with overall "metrics" for the entire group too. Though that'd still be a hard to discern factor...
 
So maybe just having it where the objectives make up the points instead alongside the timer. One of the things I've noticed is that the objectives can be a bit inconsistent from run to run; So what if there was a threshold of X amount of objectives for bronze and silver and that the timer is an option for silver? As an example STL has...4(?) what if bronze were 2 of the objectives and the miniboss and optional graveyard were the silver?	
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			I edited the post to reflect the, in my opinion, superior idea of the community to retroactively credit quests rather than have them in one large quest.  This should keep the lore progression in order while still accomplishing the same goal.	
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First off no need to apologize for your post length *bonks*
 
Elder gems:
In regard to the elder gems, I don't think removing the cap would be good. However what we are missing are reliable ways outside of gaining experience to acquire gems beyond the cap. As it is right now, we can only get them form boomboxes.
 
So I think that maybe having daily dungeon/adventure quests that give elder gems and perhaps even giving a small amount for completing the veteran/raid content would help. In addition to that, I feel like adding the purple epics to the elder gem vendor would give more goal options for people to have from the vendor. Have these locked behind certain requirements to purchase so players have to get that content done prior, but also perhaps remove the requirements for the current non-raid stuff(maybe).
 
Attunement:
I feel like perhaps the best way to work around this for organization purposes is to have retroactive rewarding, the player would still basically go through the steps they would do on their own and can read the quest text, but on stages like the dungeons, adventures, and world bosses, it'd help a bit. So if you were running a STL veteran and got a silver but weren't on that stage yet, you'd get that part of your attunement retroactively awarded once you do get there. 
 
In regard to specific instances, I think the timer is a "lazy" way of going about things. I'd rather the timers be on the boss fights themself if they were to remain OR that the timers be replaced with a point based system(Which might mean a complete rework of the medal system).  Think like...streets of rage or battletoads where you'd get certain Class ranks based on overall performance. I would say that the issue that was broguht up of damage done etc can be negated by the fact people queue as certain roles which could help determine the poitns such as tank performance judged by threat held, damage being on a damage threshold, and healers on an overhealing threshold i guess with overall "metrics" for the entire group too. Though that'd still be a hard to discern factor...
 
So maybe just having it where the objectives make up the points instead alongside the timer. One of the things I've noticed is that the objectives can be a bit inconsistent from run to run; So what if there was a threshold of X amount of objectives for bronze and silver and that the timer is an option for silver? As an example STL has...4(?) what if bronze were 2 of the objectives and the miniboss and optional graveyard were the silver?
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The attunement isn't there just to get in your way of raiding... it's also trying to tell a but of a story. So clumping the attunement objectives up into one big pile would make it feel more absolutely like... a gate. And more of a grind. I think they need to remain ordered as it is.
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Would it be preferable to have an elder gem "soft cap" that can be exceeded by things like veteran dungeons, raids, et al?  I simply think having elder gems, and as you suggested more tangible rewards for those elder gems, as awards for content would encourage more gameplay than the hard cap, which discourages gameplay after the cap for the most part.
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I think it would be preferable if the economy were to be relatively the same where some players currently push their gem cap so they get an extra bit of gold from doing whatever they do and for some reason or another that is their primary income. If you were to completely remove the cap though then I feel as though other sources of income like vendoring, trash from monsters, and quest rewards, etc that would be effected by the current system should be boosted to at least place the players income level at relatively the same baseline.
 
If it wasn't for currency being connected as it is I would say just remove the cap though. I think then it would almost be like the heroic badge system we had in burning crusade(i never played beyond that expansion so i don't know if it changed significantly) which I actually liked a lot. 
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How would it make it feel like more of a grind? You'd get stuff done way faster if it could be done concurrently. Are you suggesting that the little tiny tidbits and gimmicky quests (like the heist and mech mission on dom side) take away from the grind or mask the gate? It is a gate, let it be a gate, I just think it needs some quality of life improvements to let guilds get more people through it that didn't do it all as a group at launch. I don't see how doing adventures, rep, dungeons and world bosses concurrently couldn't be one big step.  You could still have story elements along the way.
 
Plus there a plenty of other ways they could choose to tell that story. Many people are stuck on one part of the attunement for so long anyways that they likely have forgotten what the previous story elements were. Many others don't honestly don't care about the story and just want to get into raids.
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I think the idea of retroactive quest completion for the grindier bits should work fine in solving this problem.  That means you can still do the major story quests in order (those don't seem to be what people are complaining about) but if you've silvered vet dungeons when you get that link in the quest, you can automatically complete it.  That way, you can work on those parts even while not "having" the quest.  It would be a bit like the reputation grind; all they'd need to do is keep track of how many world bosses you've killed, vet dungeons and adventures you've gotten silver in, etc.  Those seem to be where people are getting annoyed.  I haven't heard anyone complain yet about the kitschy arkship quests, those seem to be fine for the playerbase unless I simply haven't been informed otherwise.
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{| class="blockquote"
Yeah that would be totally fine. I don't have an issue with the arkship quests themselves, I just don't think they justify making the entire process linear for the sake of telling a story. Not saying a story can't, or shouldn't, be told - just saying there is a better way to do it that would also streamline the attunement process. 
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{| class="blockquote"
0mm or flavoured?
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{| class="blockquote"
If Carbine ever feels it's necessary to put in attunement at this scale again, I would completely agree they need to make it, storywise, all part of one story.  That old Ony attunement questchain was awesome back in the day, but I don't think the modern community appreciates that kind of thing anymore.
 
It might be best if any future "attunement" was only in the form of story quests to set up the encounter.  If we need to be skillchecked again, I would advise that the check happen all concurrently.
 
But that's far in the future.  For now, I think it would be best if the skillcheck portions were retroactively counted (because you've been checked) for the sake of guild integrity and logistics.  The actual "quest" portions that would remain linear seem to be the more "popular" portions.  At the very least, I don't hear them being complained about.  I would appreciate any feedback from raid guild leaders on how to simplify the process since they are, at heart, who these changes are meant for.
 
Except the gear stuff.  That's all us. :)
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			The old Ony quest was fun and relatively short. I remember it taking a few days.	
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{| class="blockquote"
Oh stop it. ;)
 
Social problems
 
They start immediately upon getting off the arkship and last through leveling.
 
Show of hands: How many people still have 5+ quest tasks in your journal?
 
Awesome!
 
How many are on the same server? Work that out among yourselves.
 
See what I did there? We need a realm wide party finder system similar to FFXIVs. We need some way to grouo up for open world content besides shouting in Zone.
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{| class="blockquote"
I remember one of the twitch streams mentioning that the future attunements would be more story quest based, and less horrific than the current one.
 
That being said the old Ony attunment, particularly Bolvar's march in Stormwind was probably one of my favorite moments in the game.
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{| class="blockquote"
I'm not opposed to capping gems from certain sources or doing a direct gem-to-cash at the vendor.  I think we're on the same page, it's just in application.  Considering I've spent the better part of the last month or so leveling a pair of alts (mainalts?) I haven't had any issues with money.  Which of those two options would be better?  Having a set limit on how many gems you can earn from dailies and points in a week and then turning that into cash, but allowing things like extra vet dungeons and adventures to award them beyond the cap (the more complicated option, I think), or just having a way to turn elder gems directly into game currency at a roughly reasonable level (the easy way for the devs)?
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Here's what I would do with the current system:
 
Normalize ALL PvE drops to have set amount of main stat and grit depending on ilvl (grit costing nothing in item budget except for on tank gear), do the same for crafted gear.
Normalize amount of runes compared to quality/ilvl, make all slots omni. Scrap/simplify rune system at a later date.
Remove attunement. Completely.
(Optional): Remove all gear from medal rewards. Put vanity/extra rare non-gear stuff on instead.
Up the AMP/Ability point item droprates for the love of god.
 
Use that as a base to build on.
 
I know my suggestions seems extreme to a lot of you, but I really feel that's the kind of change necessary to make this game feel cohesive and logical.
 
edit: these changes are also designed to be fairly straight forward to implement (not trying to belittle the work required).	
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{| class="blockquote"
That might be an issue for people who aren't on Evindra. You would like some sort of global LFG channel?
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{| class="blockquote"
 
Here's what I would do with the current system:
 
Normalize ALL PvE drops to have set amount of main stat and grit depending on ilvl (grit costing nothing in item budget except for on tank gear), do the same for crafted gear.
Normalize amount of runes compared to quality/ilvl, make all slots omni. Scrap/simplify rune system at a later date.
Remove attunement. Completely.
(Optional): Remove all gear from medal rewards. Put vanity/extra rare non-gear stuff on instead.
Up the AMP/Ability point item droprates for the love of god.
 
Use that as a base to build on.
 
I know my suggestions seems extreme to a lot of you, but I really feel that's the kind of change necessary to make this game feel cohesive and logical.
 
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{| class="blockquote"
Can't remove attunement imo.....there needs to be a skill-check for raids of this difficulty. Removing it would be a nightmare for guilds trying to build competent raid teams.
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{| class="blockquote"
It's a hard call for me to say in terms of how easy it would be to implement either, because I'm not sure how Carbines coding is done. Though if I were to pick based on a general guess as to which would be easier to do it'd be the latter as you're essentially removing code that just places the limiter and IF they wanted to they could also add a "money bag" item as a purchase to compensate for what a player would have gotten roughly doing dailies capped, which I think would be reasonable. It wouldn't be too much to outdo CREDD(might actually make CREDD more valuable since people would possibly have more gold to spend if they constantly buy money bags), but it'd be enough that if you really wanted to grind for gold you could while having the option to either exchange the gems for gear or for a small bit of gold.
 
So the latter perhaps , might be better...
 
An actual Global LFG channel would be awesome. I would say use advice and or trade which I believe are global, but I don't like misusing a channel...
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You bring out some very accurate points, thanks for making a concise argument of the most glaring current game issues.
 
I would like to add that there needs to be an incentive to keep doing things that are currently available in the game, and there doesn't seem to be enough of it. 
 
There needs to be a real sense of reward for putting in time to complete challenging tasks. Higher the difficulty, the longer something takes - better the reward - right now it's all far too random and entirely luck based. And there isn't that much to strive for to begin with. Except for when it comes to crafting, where persistence actually pays off.
 
There is also a gaping hole that is solo content. We at least need Veteran Shiphands added (again, with appropriate rewards). Pet collection, mount collection can keep people occupied for months. Let people make further use of the Housing system by allowing them to save and sell custom builds to other players. Let us build and sell our own FABkits. Place some discovery items/quests/events around the zones (add some costume pieces or other vanity items as rewards). More solo content keeps people playing.	
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{| class="blockquote"
Normalizing gear and crafting gear isn't going to be as useful as integrating crafting more wholly into the endgame.  Otherwise, you will always have to balance whether crafting gear is easier (the people who think the game is P2W) or whether crafting has been marginalized (thus making it useless). 
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In regards to elder gems, I like the cap because it means I can make like a plat a day from doing my dailies.  I would say that it would be a grand idea if they made the following changes though.
 
Dungeon medals drop 1 elder gem per member per level that doesn't contribute to the weekly cap.  For example: 1 for bronze,  2 for silver, 3 for gold. 20 man raid bosses drop 5 elder gems for each raid member.  40 mans are 8ish.
 
I would drastically increase the price of Amp/Skill Upgrades from the elder gems but increase the real world drop rates that the average player would expect to see one every 2-3 weeks.
 
In regards to gear, I don't think anything can really be done but in hindsight, this is what I would like to have seen done.  Crafted gear is made so you can't dump all points into one stat just like they announced they want to do now.
 
Tier 0: Real world blues would be the lowest tier of gear.  Salvaging these blues gives you chances at weak hybrid power cores.  Crafted gear made with these are equivallent in points to real world blues.  This tier only has 1 rune slot on each piece.
Tier 1: Adventure blues would be the next tier.  Salvaging these would give you chances at rough hybrid power cores.  Crafted gear made with these are equivalent to adventure blues.  These would also have 1 rune slot on each piece.  There would be no epics in adventures.
Tier 2: The current levels of dungeons would be the next tier.  Salvaging these would give you chances at hybrid power cores.  Crafted gear with these would be equivalent to dungeon blues.  These would have 2 slots on each piece.  Dungeons would have a 2%/3%/4%/5% chance at dropping an epic depending on the medal at completion.  These would be essentially the same as dungeon blues but with an additional omni rune slot.
Subsequent tiers of dungeons would have higher and higher tiers of gear so that there is progression outside of raids noted as Tier 3b, 4b, 5b and so forth.
 
20 and 40 mans would break off at this point also so that there would be a Tier 3b, Tier 4b, Tier 5b...Tier 3o, 4o, 5o and so forth.  The end bosses of each raid would have a chance to drop a next tier item similar to how dungons would work.  Hence, pink weapons from 40 man end boss.
 
In regards to itemization, drastically cut the amount of points to get 1% strikethrough.  It should be something you want to cap because it is cheap to do so.  This will also help actually separate different forms of progression because you can make raid bosses harder and harder to hit and keep dungeon bosses with the same percentage so that raid gear will waste more and more points into strikethrough that is worthless in dungeons.  Make it so that we don't scale as well with Assault power to make assault power stacking less useful and therefore make crit better.  Increase the base numbers of each spell to compensate.  Reduce crit severity costs.  If you have 50% crit, 1% crit rating only gives you .5% dps increase yet is itemized very poorly for how poorly it scales.
 
In regards to attunement, as later and later tiers of dungeons and gear come out, this should become easier and easier for people to accomplish in time. 	
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I don't get this point at all. Could you elaborate?
 
Sure.  Gear being normalized, but not integrated (either you can make idealized crafting gear or get idealized gear) means you have the issue other MMORPGs like WoW have.  If you can get better gear from dungeons than you ever can from crafting, crafted gear has to be niched in or people will say professions are useless.  If, as now, you can get idealized gear from crafting but not dungeons, even if the best potential gear comes from dungeons, you get the complaint that there is no reason to run dungeons and the game is P2W.  Both are part of a balance dichotomy that tries to make both crafting and dungeon running equally good.  That simply doesn't work.  Integrating both though will alleviate those concerns.  Running dungeons to get tokens so that the current crafting dynamics can build idealized gear seems to fix those problems by keeping crafting relevant, allowing them to craft instance and raid gear, but only allowing it to be used by people who complete the content.  It answers the argument people have over how to fix the gear system against the backdrop of crafting being worth something.
 
The problem with that proposal is that it's just more bloat added on top of an already unbalanced jenga tower. Besides, if player retention is as much of a problem as it seems, then there's not time for a whole new crafting system created from scratch. My proposals are blunt and simple, they can use a machete on the chaff instead of a scalpel (or a makeover).
 
I don't consider it to be bloat on anything (I'm not entirely sure how the current gear system is like a jenga tower).  Player retention being a problem or not is beyond the scope of my knowledge and beyond my rationale behind making these suggestions.  I am interested in keeping people who are playing the game engaged, whether they are crafters, raiders, whatever.  This seems to be a simplification of the current gear system as high end tokens will make the current gear system a lot more streamlined (you don't need four or five heavy hands, just the token that functions for all builds of engineers and warriors that it might drop for).  You don't need to even create a new crafting system using option 1, just a set of recipes and the system for inert gear.  It's much better than going through every single drop and changing every single stat and the entire system that governs RNG.
 
I've seen this bandied about many times, but I've yet to see a compelling argument of why it should be the case. Raid guilds in other games have killed many extremely hard bosses before without prerequisite attunements, that should be proof enough that's it's not a requirement.
 
There are very few games that can be said to have extremely hard bosses on par of a raiding boss in this game.  More importantly, in a 40 man raid, we are talking about taking quite a bit of time to do something that requires a LOT of coordination.  There is absolutely no reason to assume that anyone who cannot (even at the current time) complete two weeks worth of attunement on 5 man content and open world bosses would be trustworthy in a raiding guild of this size and difficulty.  What I am addressing mostly are administrative concerns, as the current attunement system makes it difficult to continue to attune people who are joining raiding guilds.  Installing random queues and removing attunements necessitated the ease of content.  That seems to be the major interest of players, that attunement isn't to be removed, but that it's annoying to have to jump hurdles that don't make sense given its present stated mission.
 
If attunement is completely removed, we are talking about people going from flat level 50, without any gear, skill, or content checks, walking into a raid with a guess on the guild and their part if they can survive.  After attunement, you will have gear, the guild will know where your skillset is at, and you will have proven you've seen a lot of telegraphs.  Nothing really prepares you for raiding completely, but it does encourage you to find a guild (which is necessary) and gives the guild a good way to judge your knowledge.
 
I think it definitely needs to stay.  There is absolutely no reason I can think of that attunement should really be impossible for people who will make quality raiders.  Hence...
 
We're already there for a whole lot of people since raiding is off-limits for them, and everything silver dungeons and beyond is part of the 'raid-scene', so to speak.
 
I do not think there are very many players who think that raiding should be now the realm of people who are not interested in large group PVE.  That is the reason the rest of my post expounded on new things to be done in 5 man groups.  Attunement and raiding following should remain the realm of people who want to work in those large groups and work on exceptionally difficult PVE content.
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{| class="blockquote"
In regards to elder gems, I like the cap because it means I can make like a plat a day from doing my dailies.  I would say that it would be a grand idea if they made the following changes though.
 
Dungeon medals drop 1 elder gem per member per level that doesn't contribute to the weekly cap.  For example: 1 for bronze,  2 for silver, 3 for gold. 20 man raid bosses drop 5 elder gems for each raid member.  40 mans are 8ish.
 
I would drastically increase the price of Amp/Skill Upgrades from the elder gems but increase the real world drop rates that the average player would expect to see one every 2-3 weeks.
 
In regards to gear, I don't think anything can really be done but in hindsight, this is what I would like to have seen done.  Crafted gear is made so you can't dump all points into one stat just like they announced they want to do now.
 
Tier 0: Real world blues would be the lowest tier of gear.  Salvaging these blues gives you chances at weak hybrid power cores.  Crafted gear made with these are equivallent in points to real world blues.  This tier only has 1 rune slot on each piece.
Tier 1: Adventure blues would be the next tier.  Salvaging these would give you chances at rough hybrid power cores.  Crafted gear made with these are equivalent to adventure blues.  These would also have 1 rune slot on each piece.  There would be no epics in adventures.
Tier 2: The current levels of dungeons would be the next tier.  Salvaging these would give you chances at hybrid power cores.  Crafted gear with these would be equivalent to dungeon blues.  These would have 2 slots on each piece.  Dungeons would have a 2%/3%/4%/5% chance at dropping an epic depending on the medal at completion.  These would be essentially the same as dungeon blues but with an additional omni rune slot.
Subsequent tiers of dungeons would have higher and higher tiers of gear so that there is progression outside of raids noted as Tier 3b, 4b, 5b and so forth.
 
20 and 40 mans would break off at this point also so that there would be a Tier 3b, Tier 4b, Tier 5b...Tier 3o, 4o, 5o and so forth.  The end bosses of each raid would have a chance to drop a next tier item similar to how dungons would work.  Hence, pink weapons from 40 man end boss.
 
In regards to itemization, drastically cut the amount of points to get 1% strikethrough.  It should be something you want to cap because it is cheap to do so.  This will also help actually separate different forms of progression because you can make raid bosses harder and harder to hit and keep dungeon bosses with the same percentage so that raid gear will waste more and more points into strikethrough that is worthless in dungeons.  Make it so that we don't scale as well with Assault power to make assault power stacking less useful and therefore make crit better.  Increase the base numbers of each spell to compensate.  Reduce crit severity costs.  If you have 50% crit, 1% crit rating only gives you .5% dps increase yet is itemized very poorly for how poorly it scales.
 
In regards to attunement, as later and later tiers of dungeons and gear come out, this should become easier and easier for people to accomplish in time. 
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{| class="blockquote"
You bring out some very accurate points, thanks for making a concise argument of the most glaring current game issues.
 
I would like to add that there needs to be an incentive to keep doing things that are currently available in the game, and there doesn't seem to be enough of it. 
 
There needs to be a real sense of reward for putting in time to complete challenging tasks. Higher the difficulty, the longer something takes - better the reward - right now it's all far too random and entirely luck based. And there isn't that much to strive for to begin with. Except for when it comes to crafting, where persistence actually pays off.
 
There is also a gaping hole that is solo content. We at least need Veteran Shiphands added (again, with appropriate rewards). Pet collection, mount collection can keep people occupied for months. Let people make further use of the Housing system by allowing them to save and sell custom builds to other players. Let us build and sell our own FABkits. Place some discovery items/quests/events around the zones (add some costume pieces or other vanity items as rewards). More solo content keeps people playing.
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Well, I think some stats should experience diminishing returns.  Most notable are crit, dodge, crit severity.  I feel like strikethrough and crit dodge are fine being linear.  Along with Assault Power being linear.  Armor has DR already.  It would also make it more interesting on when you go for crit or AP on the way up.
 
I figure that the previous tiers should be what is necessary to start the next tier.  Like, it can be expected that you need to gear up in a tier to do harder parts of that tier.  Such as needing gear from that tier to do end bosses in a raid or needing to do KV and STL to be able to do Skullcano and SM.
 
I could definitely see what you are saying and that would work in regards to elder gems.  I am just going by them saying elder gems were supposed to be a back up method to the real world drops for obtaining points.	
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I agree with retroactive completion on adventures, dungeons and world bosses. It solves a lot of logistical problems while maintaining the integrity of the attunement process. It might even give people some incentive to do world bosses as they are leveling, since they are in the zone and they would know that the achievement would later count toward attunement. 
 
I'd like to see the timers stay, as I have felt the difference between a strong silver run vs. just scraping by vs. learning. I do hope we get some dailies/weeklies/egs post cap incentive to go in and do dungeons. It would lead to more people running dungeons on a regular basis and make it easier for people to find a group to get attuned with (and encourage people to help out on lower stages of attunement). (100% rare amp drop might be a step in the right direction, but I think more incentive is needed). 	
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			Vic takes the incomprehensible 15 year old pubescent forum angst nerd rage, and distills it into a well thought out and reasonable discussion. +10 internets.	
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{| class="blockquote"
It is also important to fix gearing without alienating the crafters, and there is a way to marry both.  I have two possible solutions.  In the first, all loot rolls should have a chance to have corresponding armor, weapon, gadget, etc tokens drop that bind on pickup.  We will call these "activator units" and your activator unit you get from a veteran or normal (at 50) dungeon will be different, as well as from adventures (and so on, I would leave the specifics of deciding on tiering gear to those with more specific PVE experience than I have).  Regardless, using the vet dungeon as an example, let's say a warrior was lucky and got an activator for a heavy chest piece.  This is just a token.  He goes to find an armorer (or to the CX).  Now, high level crafters will have learned how to make a piece of "inert" gear.  This piece of gear can be custom tooled, like all crafted gear, and is tradeable, but cannot be equipped.  The armorer makes a set of gear to our warrior's specifications, and sells it to him for money.  The Warrior uses his soulbound activator on the tradeable inert piece and, presto, he has a piece of soulbound gear tiered for his level of content.  If Carbine would like, they could also sell, for large amounts of elder gems, those same activators for lower tiers of content to "fill in the gaps" in gear that just will not drop for our warrior, no matter what.  In this suggestion, it might be helpful, if not necessary, for the crafter to also be able to add and control the rune slots.
 
The second option would be to install a new kind of crafting table, one that requires two people to trade through it.  This is an inherently more complex (and not more effective that I can see, but I provide it for discussion regardless) system that would take some testing.  However, in this version, the gear stays the same.  Our warrior from the previous example gets a heavy chest piece, but it's a tanking piece and he needs DPS.  So he goes to a crafter (not the CX, obviously) and joins him at the retooling table.  Every stat affected requires a certain amount of reagents to retool, but the crafter can then recalibrate the stats on the armor to be what our warrior needs.  In this way, the warrior has a vested interest in getting closer armor to what he needs (it costs less to retool one stat than all of them) but no heavy gear or swords are wasted on him.  In this suggestion, it is absolutely necessary that the crafter be able to, for a much larger price, add and change rune slots.
 
 
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{| class="blockquote"
 
This is from your OP to highlight what I mean by 'bloat' (the jenga tower simile I admit is probably not completely on the nose, what I mean is that it's already a complicated system with many interacting parts. Adding even more on top is going to be potentially very problematic).
 
You have a new type of item, the "activator unit", this needs to be interactable with a new type of crafted "inert" gear with use restrictions. This needs to be implemented for every class, for every gear slot. So you need to rework crafting, add new recipes for crafting or change the current ones, add a new type of item and insert it into all the different loot tables, add a new mechanic to work activating the gear in, then of course you need to balance it. What do you do when you want to implement this system on different item tiers? Make tiered tokens? But the gear stats have already been implemented on the 'locked' items. So what do you do then, scale the stats? How about rune slots? Will crafters still be able to craft without using the tokens? If not, people will be mad because it's a new form of gate and tokens are bop. If they are, tokens are just a roundabout way of adding a new tier of crafting (already implemented by the new technologist research tree), and will bloat the amount of items in the crafting tree (2 types for every item, token and non-token). So that needs resolving too.
 
How much time will that take to implement? Several months at the very least. Will the change be perfectly balanced and bug free? Possible, but not likely. It might as well end up causing more problems.
 
Meanwhile, what does it really solve? Crafting is a bit more fun? Well, I'll grant you that, but that's an issue that can be solved in other ways. Stat allocation is still un-optimal causing muddied item progression between the tiers. 
 
The other example is basically admitting the problem is what I said above (un-optimal stat allocation) in a roundabout way, but using a needlessly complex system to solve it.
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{| class="blockquote"
Vic takes the incomprehensible 15 year old pubescent forum angst nerd rage, and distills it into a well thought out and reasonable discussion. +10 internets.
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{| class="blockquote"
There are very few games that can be said to have extremely hard bosses on par of a raiding boss in this game. More importantly, in a 40 man raid, we are talking about taking quite a time to do something that requires a LOT of coordination.
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{| class="blockquote"
Well, I think some stats should experience diminishing returns.  Most notable are crit, dodge, crit severity.  I feel like strikethrough and crit dodge are fine being linear.  Along with Assault Power being linear.  Armor has DR already.  It would also make it more interesting on when you go for crit or AP on the way up.
 
I figure that the previous tiers should be what is necessary to start the next tier.  Like, it can be expected that you need to gear up in a tier to do harder parts of that tier.  Such as needing gear from that tier to do end bosses in a raid or needing to do KV and STL to be able to do Skullcano and SM.
 
I could definitely see what you are saying and that would work in regards to elder gems.  I am just going by them saying elder gems were supposed to be a back up method to the real world drops for obtaining points.
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			Just to be clear, I don't necessarily mind the token system, I'm sure it's a workable system, but I don't think it's what CRB should prioritize right now.	
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{| class="blockquote"
Dispelling the myth that is the first sentence is the first part of jumping off the attunement band-wagon. Wildstar doesn't represent a paradigm change in the world of challenging raiding, you just have a bit more creative red circles and larger arenas, generally. Also, there's no way of knowing what 40 main requires because no one's killed anything there yet (since the first boss is supposedly unkillable/bugged).
 
Meanwhile, what I can say for certain is that attunement is a massive *cupcake* for raid guilds - and by extension, the game - with regards to player retention.
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{| class="blockquote"
I agree with retroactive completion on adventures, dungeons and world bosses. It solves a lot of logistical problems while maintaining the integrity of the attunement process. It might even give people some incentive to do world bosses as they are leveling, since they are in the zone and they would know that the achievement would later count toward attunement. 
 
I'd like to see the timers stay, as I have felt the difference between a strong silver run vs. just scraping by vs. learning. I do hope we get some dailies/weeklies/egs post cap incentive to go in and do dungeons. It would lead to more people running dungeons on a regular basis and make it easier for people to find a group to get attuned with (and encourage people to help out on lower stages of attunement). (100% rare amp drop might be a step in the right direction, but I think more incentive is needed). 
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completely removing the elder gem cap is a bad idea
and one that is extremely unlikely to ever happen.
 
the way the elder gem system works is pretty good, in theory you can do any content you like to get the end game currency the cap could be raised a bit or the prices lowered but not a total removal of cap.
 
the biggest issue with the system are spending gems on gear that might be rubbish because you roll bad runes and the need to use all your gems on the amp/ability points for most of a year if you want to improve your character instead of being able to choose from all the cool stuff you can get.	
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