Horizontal Light / Gear Progression & Targeting Difficulty to the Audience
Was sort of having a shower thought and wonder what people thought of making gear have a light horizontal progression based on the idea of difficulty, how it has historically worked best in sRPGs for gameplay fun/value, and the players who need it.
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tl;dr- I think the dynamic of gear goes a bit against what ideally difficulty would do, and i don't mean that negatively like 'how dare you' as our current system makes sense in so much the harder stuff gives purely better stuff but rather just a shower thought on how difficulty normally functions in games to provide a better experience of gameplay, the gameplay itself. The more skilled and or masochistic, lol, pick harder difficulties because it being too easy would be boring to them, bringing the gear reward more in line with the concept that players who play for a challenge actually 'play for a challenge' (rather than they play for a challenge to make it not a challenge).
In such a thought then perhaps what would be better is not the skilled players making the game purely easier just partially so (new horizontal progression that is largely based around the idea of speed vs stability / survability).
So often it seems to read how face roll content is, almost always said by those who are now way overgeared, and perhaps this could help a little. While the players who likely need the help most would be getting that. So introducing gear progression such that there is waves of progression and lightning gear, progression gear built for stability and survivability and lightning gear built for speed and overall damage output.
By that I mean say in the current tier of content there is casual gear and savage gear (or whatever other duality example you want to give). Now normally the savage gear is very likely to be 100% better and a higher ilevel, of course there are situations where a lower ilevel item has better desired stat distributions but the general concept is ilvl is king (and the ilvl does relate to survability in almost all cases due to the armor and vit stat being bound around that).
Now instead of a clear ilvl progression from one content to another you'll have a basic concept where normal content provides progression gear, gear made for surviving, and savage/other difficult content provides lightning gear, gear made for getting stuff done fast but not as forgiving. Where in a current patch cycle you might see your top progression gear with like 500 VIT and your top lightning gear with like 450 VIT instead, maybe less armor too, meanwhile same ilvl, but with the later also coming with higher damage stats.
I think this would be an interesting change for a few reasons.
- I think it makes more sense in a new vs old player challenge setting, the skilled and new players of the same game might pick different difficulty settings if we were talking about a single player game. Of course there are different types of content, savage, ex, etc, but so too there is usually different types of content in a solo play game- I just think it's funny that our current system gives skilled (or rich/time handy) players the mathematically easier game than the players who would more likely benefit from it. That you can't give the players no reward for being skilled, of course and I'm in no way suggesting that, but giving them the reward of being harder to kill when they're already harder to kill seems to be usually anti to what would normally be how a game's difficulty design would be (taking away their challenge by giving them gear that makes them even harder to kill).
- That point grows in example as the players who play a lot or are more skilled would benefit if the game required them to pay attention rather than pay less attention, so if their gear made them play faster but required more attention (less mistakes are allowed). This means you are rewarded more (faster) but the game knows you've proved yourself and so it stays more active by also making you pay attention more, something you might have normally ignored or shrugged off is now a bit more serious. In this way older dungeons are slower to become sleep on the keyboard facerolls, now you might still go through them faster and faster, which is part of the reward, but a lightning geared player would have to pay attention to the mechanics or start to suffer more than they would have otherwise.
- This also slows down gear creep (each item doesn't need to be a higher ilvl than the last if it's still part of the same wave of horizontal release), and allows more types of gear to be valid for use as you might gear more accordingly (depending on how confident you are). Of course content with damage floors or enrage will require you to make choices on how to gear up, or alternatively just overlevel / overgear it by waiting patch or expansion cycles. Overgearing would still of course be a thing, just drawn out a bit differently.
- I believe this does something nice for relics where even if the relic isn't at the same stage as whatever brand new extreme content it'll at least be considered progression then. Relics happening to be both progression and lightning, but not always updated to the latest lightning item.
- Might add some extra value to crafting gear where you can create a hybrid of both gear types (between both sets in distribution, might consider it the balanced option as well which would offer decent stability and damage benefits). Of course picking the stats you want like before and stacking 5 materia and all that would still have some value too. So crafted gear would be stat with a hybrid and then the players can finish it with materia into specifically what they were looking for.
- I think it would improve interactions between distinct types of players in DF like content, where instead of going "omg this tank has old gear we're all doomed" the new tank who is in progression gear wouldn't cause significant concern. Or like a healer is new to some mechanics and keeps dying due to some very heavy hitting attacks that are really rough on poor geared characters but are super easy on well geared, well that's fixed now. You all know that moment when you're in epic synced down gear and basically shrug off all the attacks while that player who just got into the new expansion is getting hit like a semi-truck goes through a stack of wet cards on a windy day. So your casual or players rocking old content gear would be less likely to throw the dungeon into disarray while the players who would normally be bored out of their mind and thinking about tanking the boss for the tank as healer can continue to push the content faster but also need to pay a bit more attention than otherwise.
- Those who rock a lot of time on their hands will have value, beyond the collection aspect alone, in gathering the progression, hybrid (crafting), lightning, and relic, as they'd all have a little bit more of their own value within each ilvl tier.
- Something I've been hoping to see and not fully related to the above idea, but might be an excuse to do with this sort of system change, is abilities on gear. Such that you might see progression and lightning gear get theme'd abilities to their style sometimes- like legendary gear in other games. Say a dragoon progression spear might grant wind bristled scales, each jump grants a 10% max hp shield for 5 seconds (making jump a defensive cooldown in essence, and making it easier for those new to fights equipped in progression gear). While the lightning spear would grant a stacking buff on each jump that after 5 stacks changes the next full thrust into fire breath (dealing more and in a cone too, but also meaning a skilled or confident player would benefit from this). This concept traveling off into armor too, may even introduce a sort of materia / FFIX like concept such that you can move around some of your favorite abilities (or it might be an enchantment like system using materia as part of the ingredient).
- May help healers out as they go into harder content actually feel like healing is super important, at least we hear healers talk about how healing isn't that important- well if everyone is rocking lightning gear guess what is going to hurt a lot? lol. Actually have to heal more the more damage your team does, rather than heal less and press less buttons. As currently healer's job has a negative relationship with gear growth (in the sense of if you think healer's main job should be to heal).
It's important to note that you probably want to make sure DF for harder content is unlocked around the time echo allows progression gear to actually get over enrage / damage floors (with effort). Skilled players should be able to just barely hit those damage requirements in progression gear, but like it's uncomfortably close (and so lightning gear would make that smoother, but of course make other things harder like raid wide and mistakes).
Ultimately the main reasons though is I think there is something of value in having difficulty match the style of player, broadens the content diversity a little bit, and might actually feel nice for a casual player who is like "this progression gear is actually the best for my play style, I'm not in the bad gear, I'm just in the gear best for my style" rather than seeing some more extreme content and thinking they're just in worse gear but the task asked of them is too much so they're just going to have to settle for the worse option.
I think that relationship of new player hard vs skilled player easy could be improved through such a concept- in essence adding a soft difficulty slider to players (go faster and play harder or go slower and safer), while also making more gear valuable (even a skilled player might have lightning gear but choose to go with progression choices for the first time they go into new content).
Anyway, just a thought for fun (our current system clearly has functioned for this game and many others). I've also considered that people will push the lightning gear concept onto others who want to be sitting in progression, but in DF at least you'd not be able to easily do that and it would also likely not matter as what hits DF is what SE expects DF to be able to accomplish (so it's your choice, faster and less forgiving or safer and a bit slower), it's PF where people will be pushing their desires harder onto others but that seems to be a primary reason people use PF anyways (ensure they get the players they actually want to get). Obviously our endless creeping power system works since it's the most popular system out there for the most popular mmos lol. I had just thought it was interesting the relationship between challenge and those who needed it and then power was a bit off (like healer's relationship with power), and that it might help to still reward those skilled/hardcore/time intensive players but also offer them more challenge in content rather than less (while also flipping that relationship for those who need the first time not to be as crazy bumpy lol).