149762-time-to-revert-some-changes

== Content ==
			
Hey guys,
it'll soon be 5 months since f2p patch brought a lot of changes. The purpuse of which was to make the game more accessible to new players, so level up faster, make dungeons easier (less IA needed, less trash, abilities nerfed etc.), gold sinks and others.
 
Well, in my opinion some of these changes didn't really help the population of the game or the overall enjoyment of the game. I mean we are probably back to the same numbers we had in September or very close to (PvP servers are just as dead and battleground queues are actually worse). We had a huge influx of new players but only a small minority of them is still playing so clearly the changes 1) weren't the issue or 2) haven't been enough.
 
In this topic I'd to talk about leveling, I leveled my 3rd character in f2p, an esper, and I found it really plain and boring. I leveled up to lv 35 through PvP but when queues got longer I turned back to questing. It took me a while to realise I was slaughtering mobs with my level 10 pvp gear, since it scales up in instanced battlegrounds I wasn't worrying about gearing up.
In general it felt too easy and too fast, and completing all the episodes seemed a waste of time.
 
With the new NC Store and the Double XP event we already got plenty of ways to increase the leveling process so I wouldn't mind if it got some nerfs to make it longer and harder. Old players who want to reach level cap asap on their new alts can still stack Flasks and the double XP event, + 10 xp from Guild perk and +5% xp from Authenticator, and there's also the ingame +10% xp flask that you can buy for Renown.
 
I think also Vet Dungeons should be slighty harder, at the moment vet runs are easier and faster than normal dungeons simply because ppl are overgeared for them and want to skip everything possible. Of course when you have to buy hundreds of runecrafting bags you want to make it fast.
 
And do not make me speak about crafting >_>
 
Edit:
I know that once a change has been made it's hard to revert it. You don't magically switch a button to come back to 5 months ago but it needs new changes to bring the old situation back.
The point still stands, some changes were good for the game such as easier attunament, but others didn't do the game any good, if not made the situation worse. Now, after 5 months and before Steam release we can go look at these changes and see what's good, what's bad and what still need to be addressed.
			
				
	Edited February 19, 2016 by Weer	
----
			
Making vet dungeons harder? Man, they already made all the vet content harder than it was. The difference in Infestation, for example, has enemies that take as long to kill in my shiny 116 gear as they did pre-free-to-play in standard dungeon gear. And as it currently stands, it's difficult to be vet dungeon ready even decked out in the best gear you can get for completing all veteran dungeons. (Which is only ilevel 78.)
 
We've had a growing problem since free to play with veteran players being pretentious pricks to the newbies about gear level and "they don't belong in veteran dungeons yet!" In LFG, almost all dungeon groups demand players have at least ilevel 95, 100, or 110 gear. Meanwhile, it still takes completing all the vet dungeons to get attuned for raiding. And raiding is where you get that ilevel they want unless you wanna spend months just pounding your head against the contract board in repetitive grind. Meanwhile, crafting is actually completely useless at level 50 right now. The raid-tier gear is way below being up to snuff, takes an amount of special raid-only materials you're unlikely to get unless you're a guild's dedicated crafter, and even the stuff that becomes better as you imbue it more isn't actually up to par with completing the challenges specified unless you're being carried by others.
 
Making them harder- I almost wanna say it's the exact opposite of what we need, but really we don't need them easier. But there's something seriously wrong with the level 50 gear you can get from dungeons and veteran dungeons right now- because for completing them all a dozen times you can't even get gear good enough to, well, complete them. Unless you're a vet player like us or at least are chummy with a group of us, it's really hard to even get the chance to try them.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
In LFG, almost all dungeon groups demand players have at least ilevel 95, 100, or 110 gear.
 
Making them harder- I almost wanna say it's the exact opposite of what we need, but really we don't need them easier. But there's something seriously wrong with the level 50 gear you can get from dungeons and veteran dungeons right now- because for completing them all a dozen times you can't even get gear good enough to, well, complete them. Unless you're a vet player like us or at least are chummy with a group of us, it's really hard to even get the chance to try them.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
In this topic I'd to talk about leveling, I leveled my 3rd character in f2p, an esper, and I found it really plain and boring. I leveled up to lv 35 through PvP but when queues got longer I turned back to questing. It took me a while to realise I was slaughtering mobs with my level 10 pvp gear, since it scales up in instanced battlegrounds I wasn't worrying about gearing up.
In general it felt too easy and too fast, and completing all the episodes seemed a waste of time.
----
			
Needed changes:
Low level PvP more rewarding
Low level dungeons more rewarding
 
This problem rears its ugly head in Blade and Soul too: questing is stressed to an absurd level. Yes, you wanna encourage people to actually engage in the questing, but don't make it a hell ride that requires you to quest as the only means to level on average. You want to make dungeons VERY rewarding, but you can tie it to a daily quest so you do it once, you get a level and some snazzy loot/character power-ups, but then you're done for the day.
Beyond that...
I would like a veteran version of an Academy-style dungeon. Right now, Protogames Academy takes place as kind of the 'are you ready to upgrade to raids?' format on veteran mode. I think there's a huge disconnect between leveling difficulty and hitting vets. I don't think shiphands adequately prepare you for much (more a speed-zerg) and adventures just aren't played, though even then it's more about doing objectives than properly carrying out fight mechanics (the little there are.) So I think the best thing they can do? Introduce a dungeon that works new players into the veteran mind-set, and gives them a tougher, less hand-holdy version of normal Protogames Academy, but it still provides plenty of feedback on mechanics and the like.
Also: separate out the dungeons into tiers. "Veteran" tier and "Advanced Veteran" tier. Veteran - the original 4 dungeons. Advanced Veteran - the Protogames dungeons. Make two queues available: Veteran, which gives you ONLY the first four, and Advanced Veteran, which gives you the original four PLUS Protogames dungeons.
 
Hell, I think a primer on some abilities for all classes would be great. Do a training course where you get to see the different uses/situations for Slingers' Gate, for example. What to watch for when you need to dispel, etc.
 
Also I agree on vet dungeon difficulty insofar as overpowering it with raid gear. It doesn't need to be harder for new players, it just needs to be not-as-faceroll for, especially, DS raiders.	
----
			
I honestly think the dungeons are at a good spot in terms of difficulty for the overall playerbase. They're still wildstar style unforgiving. The problem is like you say, almost everyone who runs them is overgeared for them, and players are pushing newbies to overgear them as well before letting them in.
 
Edit: What I do think they should revert is xp gain from normal dungeons. I remember being able to run them before f2p at least.
			
				
	Edited February 20, 2016 by Jelletje	
----
			regression raiding?	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Don't buff the veteran dungeons. Nerf the gear instead. I'm sorry, but the whole "gear is used for nerfing raids" idea is ludicrous. You're having this insanely OP scaled gear at the expense of the rest of the game. 
----
			
From when I stopped playing back in February last year to when I came back in October, some of the new changes I saw really disappointed me. Mainly the new Quest Log UI (the one on the left when you're playing) and the Challenge system. The changes to both of them were a massive mistake IMO and really need to be reverted back to what they used to be.
 
The new quest UI is horrible, inconvenient and it keeps bugging out on me. All of the quests are mashed together in one big list which doesn't even show all my active quests at once anymore. Sometimes if I die, go to a Discovery area, get teleported to a quest area etc, ALL of my non-path or attunement quests just vanish and the only way to unhide them all is to open the Quest window and manually untrack and retrack them individually, or reload the UI. When I hide specific quests (attunement quests mainly) they reappear when I reload the UI (which is frequent due to the previous issue) or when I go to my housing plot. I don't want to see my attunement quests. I have no interest in them given that my current gear isn't that great to begin with so having to rehide them constantly is extremely annoying. It's also much harder to keep track of my Path quests. Not only does it only show me 3 at once now, they keep disappearing when I get far enough away from where the target area is. When they were displayed on the Datacrom this NEVER happened, all of the discovered ones were ALWAYS displayed regardless of how far away from them I got, only disappearing if I changed area entirely or finished them. I don't understand why they changed the UI to the buggy mess it is now. Granted it wasn't perfect before but it was countless times better than it is now. I want my Datacrom to display my Path quests again.
 
As for the Challenge system, there is absolutely NO reason to do challenges anymore. Before the change, every challenge would give you some kind of rewards whether it be gear, med-shots, food, decor, Dye boxes etc, which gave me a reason to do them. Even if you had to pick something and hope the RNG would give it to you, you still got some kind of reward for completing them even if it wasn't what you wanted. Now you get nothing for completing them. Yes, you can pick one reward after you complete multiple but the rewards you get from them are completely useless especially when you hit Lv50. The gear is crap, the crafting materials are low level and easy to find or purchase, the Rune fragments are never worth farming for, and you always have to complete more than one challenge just for one reward. You don't get decor or Dye boxes anymore except for the final reward in Illium/Thayd which requires you to complete multiple challenges to get. I used to constantly do Thayd challenges because each of them offered a Dye Box as a reward. Now I'm stuck with the 3 Dye Boxes you get from the Northern Wastes quests, or the ones you get for the Star-Comm Basin quests (the latter of which I rarely do as the ones that reward Dye Boxes require multiple players). There is also the fact that some of the Challenges don't show you the progress you need to complete them or reach the next level. The one that comes to mind is the geyser challenge in Ellevar. While the progress bar displays how long you have left to complete the challenge it doesn't show you how many geysers you still need to ride in that time. Other challenges do this as well but this is the only one that comes to mind right now.
 
From what I've heard the Contracts system and Crafting have both been revamped in a horrible way for F2P. I wasn't around when the Contracts were introduced so I'm not sure what those were like before nor did I do any crafting so I'm not entirely sure what they've changed but, from what I've read, these could do with being reverted as well. The contracts aren't worth doing and crafting just isn't fun in their current states.
 
EDIT: Regarding levelling, it felt a lot faster that it did pre-F2P and thinking about it, I don't like that at all. I enjoyed taking my time levelling my toons to Lv50 and completing all the quests but my Engineer who was made after F2P hit 50 during the first few quests of Southern Grimvault while before my Stalker, who was my first character and therefore levelled during P2P, hit 50 in the last few quests of Western Grimvault. I don't like either section of Grimvault (or anywhere else with the Strain), so the only reason I did it the first time was to grind the last few levels to 50, but now I have no reason or intention of doing the rest of it. Levelling and questing are my favourite parts of WildStar so the changes to levelling really disappoint me.
			
				
	Edited February 21, 2016 by Greedy Chibi	
----
			Yep, they can be completed with that gear if you are paying attention and can learn the mechanics. I would not PuG it that way, though.Getting Contract gear is probably the best way, though, since it's quite a bit better and gives you more chances to screw up and meet the DPS races against the enrage timer when that happens.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
And as it currently stands, it's difficult to be vet dungeon ready even decked out in the best gear you can get for completing all veteran dungeons. (Which is only ilevel 78.)
----
			The recommended gear lvl for veteran dungeons is 70. Crazy I know. Barring veteran protogames they're perfectly completable with gear of that level and in fact were intended for it. Any higher than 80 and you're overgearing the content.
			
				
	Edited February 21, 2016 by Jelletje	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Yep, they can be completed with that gear if you are paying attention and can learn the mechanics. I would not PuG it that way, though.
Getting Contract gear is probably the best way, though, since it's quite a bit better and gives you more chances to screw up and meet the DPS races against the enrage timer when that happens.
----