When do the training wheels come off?

[linay]

I like the idea of getting better gear to make things easier, but we can have that for current expansion stuff. Take off those benefits for old content and let us have our nostalgia back.

That seems backward. If anything, current expansion content should be more difficult than past expansion content.

[Tigore]

@ linay

I think he / she just means the mechanics shouldn't be trivialized. As Zhamkyong said, Steps of Faith actually has cannons as well as a tower that traps the dragon in place to take lot of bomb damage thrown to him by NPCs. But because there is no ilvl sync for the dungeon, we are still gradually getting stronger each expansion for that battle. It's come to the point where we can mostly tunnel the dragon (with the tanks picking up adds) and he still croaks. The same could be said for the 2 Main Scenario dungeons since they don't have a proper ilvl sync either. We have 30 minutes of cutscenes building up Ultima to be almighty in power only to see both the healers DPS 70 - 90% of the time yawning.

[linay]

@ linay

I think he / she just means the mechanics shouldn't be trivialized. As Zhamkyong said, Steps of Faith actually has cannons as well as a tower that traps the dragon in place to take lot of bomb damage thrown to him by NPCs. But because there is no ilvl sync for the dungeon, we are still gradually getting stronger each expansion for that battle. It's come to the point where we can mostly tunnel the dragon (with the tanks picking up adds) and he still croaks. The same could be said for the 2 Main Scenario dungeons since they don't have a proper ilvl sync either. We have 30 minutes of cutscenes building up Ultima to be almighty in power only to see both the healers DPS 70 - 90% of the time yawning.

I think mechanics shouldn't be designed to be trivial in the first place as a new experience. However, if we're going to have "gears make content easier" solution, then it should apply to the entire game and older content should naturally suffer more than newer content.

The part I was responding to wasn't about nerfing new content because people found it too difficult. Just the natural progression of our character being stronger via increase in level and wearing better armor while the content staying static.

[Nixxe]

This is pretty accurate.

There was a point in time when the regular dungeons were a bit of a challenge in 2.0. But since then, our potencies have gone up each expansion and its rendered alot of these dungeons trivial because of it. I do remember running Stone Vigil and normally having to Sleep one of the large birds in the 3x pull or watch your tank get wrecked. Or switch from AOE to ST on the sprite pulls so they don't Blizzardx3 your tank to death.

Right now dungeons from 15-60 could do with a bit of scaling, increase mob hp by 25-40% and their damage by 10-20%. And have a bit more restrictive item lvl scaling when you're scaled from a higher level. For example, if you're doing Auram Vale, you should be scaled to item level 45 or 50, not any higher.

I also believe any content not in the current expansion should have item level scaling to 5pts higher than its minimum (or its level if it had no minimum). I like the idea of getting better gear to make things easier, but we can have that for current expansion stuff. Take off those benefits for old content and let us have our nostalgia back. And I don't believe everyone would struggle, they would simply adapt, as they did when all the content was current.

Blizzard already did something like this. The only thing it accomplished was making the content more tedious. You can't make intrinsically easy content difficult by making it take longer. You can certainly make it less pleasant to run though.

[Kaethra]

Blizzard already did something like this. The only thing it accomplished was making the content more tedious. You can't make intrinsically easy content difficult by making it take longer. You can certainly make it less pleasant to run though.

Blizzard never did this.

And I'm not suggesting to increase difficulty, but to rebalance around new patch changes. ShB content was already balanced around this. ARR, HW, and SB were not.

[Ayer2015]

I'll be the bad guy.

I don't know why we talk about new players as if they were defenseless babies.

I beg to differ.

[Nixxe]

Blizzard never did this.

And I'm not suggesting to increase difficulty, but to rebalance around new patch changes. ShB content was already balanced around this. ARR, HW, and SB were not.

It was done as a part of zone scaling (I think; it has been a while). Dungeons saw a net buff relative to player power. All that ended up happening though was everything took longer. Nothing really became dangerous (except for things Blizzard forgot to adjust) because the mechanics were utterly trivial anyway, and it certainly didn't become more fun (it became less fun). Going back and rebalancing all of the old content becomes an increasingly large workload with every additional content patch and expansion and for relatively less value, since the more content there is in the game, the less you run any of the older stuff, since you generally just run it in random queues. And if the mechanics somehow end up being dangerous, then you're just increasing the amount of game knowledge required of players to do something simple like a roulette and will increase the frustration of players who did remember it. Not really seeing anywhere this adds value to the game.

[Shurrikhan]

Blizzard already did something like this. The only thing it accomplished was making the content more tedious. You can't make intrinsically easy content difficult by making it take longer. You can certainly make it less pleasant to run though.

I preferred the changes, honestly, even if they could get a bit tedious if the whole party was incapable of doing level-appropriate dps. At least then I could get a cast off, compared to pre-buff mobs in decent parties. But even so you've picked a particularly bad example. Their solution to power creep of varying degrees across various level spans was to just throw in a blanket arbitrary buff to all mobs, rather than just the ones that needed it in order to have anywhere near the difficulty they had in their own expansions. They may as well have been lent 10k by one person, 30 by another, and 5k from a third and just paid each back 5k. That's obviously not how tune-ups are supposed to be done.