The most Limited Content: Low-Level Dungeons

[linay]

but it really says something when people are excited to get a HW dungeon, or SB dungeon because "YES, It's not copperbell mines"

It says people like different things, nothing more. And apparently there are enough people who do ARR content, so yes, the roulettes are doing their job and I'm grateful for that. The people who don't want to do them don't have to and they can do what they prefer to do instead.

[PyurBlue]

I wonder how many time it would take for people to start silently kicking low level players from the group, to try to get a high level one with more useful aoes, skills and utilities instead. Probably not too long XD And what all the other issues that would be created could be.

"Lf for a remplacement dps for Aurum Vale ! If you are a level 63- RDM dont bother joining, we are not interested in someone not having Verraise."

Why aren't people kicking every DPS except SMN in Vale already then? No one would waste their time doing this and if they tried it they reach their kick limit. If I'm remembering correctly, your kicks are limited.

The leaver gets a 30 minute penalty so new players(or anyone else) won’t have to deal with the player with the bad attitude for another 30 minutes.

The party still has to deal with being down a person, and it's especially bad if the person that left was the healer. The person should not leave and they deserve the penalty, but that doesn't make the situation better for the abandoned party.

If you are Lv71+ and you want a Lv71+ dungeon, then the solution is to queue for said dungeons, not Roulettes. Old content gets facerolled as is due to gearsync and pre-50 potency changes from SHB release and I believe one can put up with playing with a basic kit when doing a daily roulette dungeon for 15min if they roll a low-end dungeon. If you can't deal with "not having fun" for a while, don't do it.

Or we can ask SE to change the game. Avoiding roulettes is not the only solution here.

The exp bonus you get scales based on the dungeon you got in the roulette. At level 79 getting sastasha can just as easily get you just as much exp as a Mt Gulg run. (Both hovering around 10-15mil)

But on topic, I've said it before in the past, but unlocking all skills at lower levels just unlocks a balancing nightmare for the developers.

'Potency scaling' would either take way too much effort, time and planning to get right, or it would create a situation where leveling up actually makes you weaker in lower level dungeons, or sheer ridiculously OP (even more so than now).
If you want to implement potency scaling, then what milestone would you balance it around to give parity to the newbies who only have 2-3 buttons at their actual level?

Balance around DPS. If a level 20 does 1000 DPS and a level 80 does 10000 DPS, the potency sync for level 80 is damage * 0.1.

We don't even need to be precise because leveling dungeons already aren't precise. They give lots of leeway for missing skills, variations in job balance (which can be terrible below the level cap), inexperienced players, and more. It's not as complicated as it's being made out to be and SE already knows roughly how to scale for level already because they know how much damage you're supposed to do in each dungeon.

If you balance the scaled potency at around 90% of your classes's capability to be on parity with newbies, you'd literally make a massive chunk of the player population do even less than if they only had access to 2 buttons, since a good chunk of the population can't execute their rotations properly.

We can keep level sync as an option for those who want it. Players could choose between potency or level sync.

Like, compare a level 80 WAR to a level 15 MRD. The WAR would be capable of not only using their entire mitigation kit where the MRD only has rampart. The WAR would be capable of using a full almighty IR Decimate chain paired with Nascent Flash for stupid OP levels of lifesteal where the MRD would have none. Heck, even compare a level 80 WHM to a lvl 15 CNJ. The 80 whm has access to all kinds of OGCD heals, regens, % mitigators and aoe damage spells the CNJ doesn't. Potency and skill scaling when handled improperly would create a system where having newer players would be an active hindrance, and history has shown time and again that such systems can easily be open for abuse.

At level 15, AST is a broken healer when level synced because of ED. All those extra high level skills are unnecessary and while they might make things easier they won't significantly change much. As for the MRD/WAR example, Rampart, etc, doesn't work on potency, but the numbers could still be adjusted. For example a level 80's Rampart might only be 10%. Again it doesn't really matter because at level 15 you almost don't have to heal as things are currently. What will make the biggest difference is the skill of the player, just as it does now.

While the level sync isn't the greatest system, it achieves its job on creating parity for the most part, the only outlier being stat syncing. A better solution would be to maintain parity by having jobs learn a lot more of their skills at lower levels; I've always vouched for the idea that a job's core fundamentals should be finished by level 50, with 51+ stuff only being additions/changes/etc to the core rotation. Also every job should have aoe by level 15 tbh.

A skill redistribution is also good idea, but it feels like if SE were going to do that it would make sense to include it as part of the new expansion. I wouldn't complain at having it done now though.

If you give a job most of its skills at a low level, what are you going to give jobs at higher levels to prevent leveling from feeling pointless?

Do we need to do anything? When I was leveling I didn't get much from new skills as I leveled because I'd lose them all to level sync. It was even more annoying back when different tiers of spells were separate and completely cluttered your bars.

I'd much prefer playing a more consistent class as I level and focus on learning the job instead of relearning it for every dungeon I happen to get, or forgetting that new skills exist because they're never available for use.

becuase it's random? blame rngesus.

It doesn't have to be.

Also I get Mt. gulg sometimes in levelling roulette and the amount of people that bounce immediately from there shows that sometimes people don't want to do high level content either with their whole tool kit. so it's lose lose lol

If that's the case we could just let people choose how they are synced.

Why would a new player be confused? The new player isn't going to know what's part of the job toolkit.

Unlocking something only to have it synced out of use regularly is pretty frustrating and it makes learning your job harder.

1.) Balancing Lv60-80 kits to work in pre-50 content will either result in:
- same-ish damage for vastly increased effort requirements (bad for the veteran)
- same-ish damage regardless of effort (effectively just prancing your fancy spell animations while rolling your face on the keyboard)

Both of these would be improvements over now for me. It's not about effort, but enjoyment. High level rotations are more fun and my skillbars are setup for them, not low level content.

- increased damage, trivializing the impact other party members were supposed to have and making it all about levels (bad for new players)

Item sync already makes new players weaker most of the time. Potency sync wouldn't make it any worse.

Doing old content is not us actually "doing" the content but rather regalling in memories of it, reimagining party members and results. The reason why we dont reimagine high lv abilities is because we didn't have them there to begin with. What you ask for is us going full Wandering Minstrel and pull a Minstrel's Ballad out of our <KUPO>, vastly overexaggerating how impactful our memory is as is wont if done by our favourite Bard.

Which is perfectly lore friendly. If I'm imagining something I've done in the past I can imagine it in ways that differ from reality easily. I'm not typing this response to you while floating in outer space but nothing is stopping me from imagining that I am (and it's pretty amusing too )

[MariaArvana]

Balance around DPS. If a level 20 does 1000 DPS and a level 80 does 10000 DPS, the potency sync for level 80 is damage * 0.1.

Again, what milestone would you balance the 80 idea around? I've seen MNKs do anywhere from 14k dps to 6k dps in the DF based on skill. That 6k MNK would be fine doing 1000 dps with a 2-button rotation, but you'd literally neuter and make that player weaker by using the scaling method on them if you assumed they'd be capable of doing the same as the 14k MNK. It's literally far more complicated than you think, since you have to balance around not just potencies, the content, etc. But you also have to balance around player skill to not make the new system literally a waste of time due to it making everyone weaker.

We don't even need to be precise because leveling dungeons already aren't precise. They give lots of leeway for missing skills, variations in job balance (which can be terrible below the level cap), inexperienced players, and more. It's not as complicated as it's being made out to be and SE already knows roughly how to scale for level already because they know how much damage you're supposed to do in each dungeon.

They give a lot of leeway precisely because they know every single player will have access to the same potential toolkit. Throwing in potency scaling just creates a giant mess of developer balancing nightmares.

We can keep level sync as an option for those who want it. Players could choose between potency or level sync.

That's not how the roulettes are programmed though, and I doubt they're interested in re-programming the roulettes to account for such things. Also it wouldn't be a potency or level sync, it'd be both at once. You can't be level 80 and waltz into a dungeon due to the fact you have 100x+ stats than a level 15 player in sastasha does, so level sync would be active no matter what. Potency scaling implementation would be all or nothing with how they've programmed their current system.

At level 15, AST is a broken healer when level synced because of ED. All those extra high level skills are unnecessary and while they might make things easier they won't significantly change much. As for the MRD/WAR example, Rampart, etc, doesn't work on potency, but the numbers could still be adjusted. For example a level 80's Rampart might only be 10%. Again it doesn't really matter because at level 15 you almost don't have to heal as things are currently. What will make the biggest difference is the skill of the player, just as it does now.

Remember when I said 'developer balancing nightmare'? What you said is literally the reason why it'd be a nightmare.

How would you change the high level abilities so that they'd still be useful with their new numbers, but not completely useless due to synced potencies/numbers? Think carefully on it for a minute.

Lets go with WHM quickly. a level 15 AST has zero regens. For regen to not be OP and completely outright crush everything that level 15 AST could ever possibly do, you'd have to nerf its potency so much that it'd be literally worthless to use, completely defeating the point of implementing potency scaling. Lets go with another. WHM's wings ability, which currently grants 10% damage reduction. If you nerfed it to say 1%, then what's the point of it even existing anymore at that level? 1% is going to do basically nothing, so what was the point of implementing potency sync if it may as well not exist? How about benediction? How would you modify a 100% full heal to meet parity with a level 15 AST without making it useless?

Also how do you balance jobs with AoE at 80 vs jobs with no AoE at level 15? like DRG. Having a LNC would always be statistically 100% worse all the time, since having AoE > no aoe. Unless you want to also nerf the DRG's aoe potency to the point it'd be useless to use which again calls into question the point of even implementing potency sync when half of your skills would be useless/nerfed to the point of non-use.

It's literally far, far more complicated and would essentially be asking to re-write every single ability at literally every single level to account for a TON of variables, requirements and balancing quotas. I've worked as QA testing for game companies when I was younger, these systems sound easy in the eyes of consumers who don't have to worry about every single fact of balancing that would be involved, but are infinitely more complex than what you're imagining to actually implement and not simply be a broken mess. A potency scaling system as you described would be a statistical nightmare of balancing issues, infinitely more work for essentially little to no payoff in the developers eyes.

[PyurBlue]

Again, what milestone would you balance the 80 idea around? I've seen MNKs do anywhere from 14k dps to 6k dps in the DF based on skill. That 6k MNK would be fine doing 1000 dps with a 2-button rotation, but you'd literally neuter and make that player weaker by using the scaling method on them if you assumed they'd be capable of doing the same as the 14k MNK. It's literally far more complicated than you think, since you have to balance around not just potencies, the content, etc. But you also have to balance around player skill to not make the new system literally a waste of time due to it making everyone weaker.

You'd have to balance around the top DPS. Yes, someone who isn't optimal would then be below par. Low level dungeons already have huge variations in DPS for very simple reasons like using AoE vs not. Nothing really changes. If it's that big of an issue, then players could be given the option to swap between potency or level sync (I know you have more to say on that, but I'll add more when I get to that part of your post).

They give a lot of leeway precisely because they know every single player will have access to the same potential toolkit. Throwing in potency scaling just creates a giant mess of developer balancing nightmares.

I think I'm missing the point you're making here. If everyone is using the same toolkit (which isn't true between level variation within a level sync window and role actions, which don't get synced) then you don't need leeway. Everyone is balanced by default. We have excess leeway right now, and it's not because of skill syncing, it's because of item level and player skill.

What this means for potency sync: there is leeway, which reduces the precision to which skills need to be balanced. A potency synced player and an on level player don't need to have the exact same potential DPS. The game will work despite them having fairly large differences in performance. All SE would need to do is scale potencies such that synced and unsyced are in the same general DPS range. They have to know what these DPS ranges are, or dungeons balance would be completely inconsistent. Balancing is also helped by the game's difficulty curve, lower levels have more leeway for imbalance higher levels, while higher levels will naturally require less and less syncing.

That's not how the roulettes are programmed though, and I doubt they're interested in re-programming the roulettes to account for such things. Also it wouldn't be a potency or level sync, it'd be both at once. You can't be level 80 and waltz into a dungeon due to the fact you have 100x+ stats than a level 15 player in sastasha does, so level sync would be active no matter what. Potency scaling implementation would be all or nothing with how they've programmed their current system.

Stats will need to remain synced but that's fine because they don't change anything about gameplay, they're just numbers and however they're synced now will work with potency sync. Potency sync would have synced stats, all skills available, and modified potencies. Level sync would be what we have now. We already know that skills can be replaced based on level (ie Thunder I vs Thunder III), which could potentially be used to introduce modified potency versions of skills. I'm sure it will take work on SE's part, but I'd like to see this implemented so the trade off is worth it in my opinion. If they can make it work, great, if not, oh well.

Remember when I said 'developer balancing nightmare'? What you said is literally the reason why it'd be a nightmare.

How would you change the high level abilities so that they'd still be useful with their new numbers, but not completely useless due to synced potencies/numbers? Think carefully on it for a minute.

Lets go with WHM quickly. a level 15 AST has zero regens. For regen to not be OP and completely outright crush everything that level 15 AST could ever possibly do, you'd have to nerf its potency so much that it'd be literally worthless to use, completely defeating the point of implementing potency scaling. Lets go with another. WHM's wings ability, which currently grants 10% damage reduction. If you nerfed it to say 1%, then what's the point of it even existing anymore at that level? 1% is going to do basically nothing, so what was the point of implementing potency sync if it may as well not exist? How about benediction? How would you modify a 100% full heal to meet parity with a level 15 AST without making it useless?

Also how do you balance jobs with AoE at 80 vs jobs with no AoE at level 15? like DRG. Having a LNC would always be statistically 100% worse all the time, since having AoE > no aoe. Unless you want to also nerf the DRG's aoe potency to the point it'd be useless to use which again calls into question the point of even implementing potency sync when half of your skills would be useless/nerfed to the point of non-use.

Level 15 ED, in level 15 content, is already stronger than Benediction. It's an 85ish percent heal on a 40 second CD vs a 100% heal on a 3 minute CD. Comparing the skills side by side, AST wins. A high level WHM obviously has a better skillset as a whole though, particularly regen availability as you point out. This doesn't change the fact that healing at level 15 isn't very demanding. A synced AST can go for nearly 100% DPS uptime and weave ED every now and then. A high-level potency-synced WHM could put regens on the tank constantly. It's not much of a difference. The mid 20's/low 30's where ED is a little weaker and AST still can't regen makes thing a little tougher to balance, but not by much. Regen might just be reduced to a secondary heal that lets you space out Cure casts rather than be strong enough to heal on its own.

Was there any particular reason to choose 1% damage reduction for Temperance? That would make it nearly pointless (I'm assuming the healing increase would be the number), but it doesn't have to be reduced to 1%. Let's make it 5%. AST can already manage to heal entry level dungeons almost without touching Benefic, so if WHM doesn't need to press something one of its skills, that's not terribly different. Also remember that you'll be getting Holy and Assize. Even if Temperance is pointless that doesn't negate the benefits of having other skills.

When it comes to AoE, it's literally no different from now. DRG's don't have AoE at low levels. RDM's and BLM's do. RDM's and BLM's are absolutely without a doubt superior to low level DRG's in dungeons with level sync. With Potency sync, Some DRG's will have AoE and deal more damage than DRG's that aren't leveled enough. At least some of the DRG's will be able to compete with RDM's and BLM's in that situation. This is the leeway I mentioned. We only have to balance to the extent that the game is balanced now, which gives us a lot of room to play with potencies.

It's literally far, far more complicated and would essentially be asking to re-write every single ability at literally every single level to account for a TON of variables, requirements and balancing quotas. I've worked as QA testing for game companies when I was younger, these systems sound easy in the eyes of consumers who don't have to worry about every single fact of balancing that would be involved, but are infinitely more complex than what you're imagining to actually implement and not simply be a broken mess. A potency scaling system as you described would be a statistical nightmare of balancing issues, infinitely more work for essentially little to no payoff in the developers eyes.

SE has the rough potency scale for all levels already from expected dungeon run times. So the first step is creating a multiplier curve that will scale down a level 80 to the appropriate DPS for all levels. From there we might need individual tweaks, but the game already has the ability to handle this, or something relatively close (tiered spells/abilities). A level by level adjustment is completely unnecessary, and near the top levels, probably 60 on, adjustments will be minimal. It's not a snap your fingers and done thing, but I see nothing indicating that it's outside the realm of possibility.