Thread: The potential problem with low level Roulettes in 6.0

Originally Posted by Quintessa

I've come from fast paced games. .and this game's combat doesn't bore me at all, and to think, I'm a tank, which is supposedly the most boring job/class in MMO history according to people here. I got 15 days left on my free trial(or whatever it is) and gonna start my sub at the end. Can we stop speaking for everyone?

I don't think we are speaking for anyone.. Its peoples personal opinion. Its a forum and people sharing their ideas.
If you are not bored its good. Game certainly needs more new players.
But offline day count 100+ players with under 50 level jobs exist in every FC which implies there is a problem at low level content.

Originally Posted by Quintessa

I've come from fast paced games. .and this game's combat doesn't bore me at all, and to think, I'm a tank, which is supposedly the most boring job/class in MMO history according to people here. I got 15 days left on my free trial(or whatever it is) and gonna start my sub at the end. Can we stop speaking for everyone?

Some of the DPS literally go 30 levels with less buttons than a baby tank would have to press. ARC from level 1 to 30 only has 4 skills it presses: one filler (Heavy Shot), one being an oGCD every 15 seconds (Bloodletter), one self buff every 80 seconds (Raging Strikes), and the other being a DoT they press every 30 seconds (Venomous Bite—they get Windbite right at level 30 after completing the ARC storyline, so I don’t count it here). It used to have more to it (e.g., Hawk’s Eye, more oGCDs like actually-dealt-damage Repelling Shot and Blunt Arrow), but they’ve trimmed skill sets down from when I started that low level ARC is so monotonous.

Originally Posted by AngelCheese77

EverQuest 2 does this. Essentially all the skills are kept but the damage is significantly lowered to the player they mentor to. But I don't know how this game deals with skills, so it may be difficult to even do that.

Potency for abilities is generally unchanging (unless some trait changes the ability itself and replaces it with a version with different potency or something similar), but how that potency maps into actual damage is based on gear stats. That's how the damage is 'lowered' when synching into lower level content: by lowering the stats of the gear.

Unfortunately, the level sync math is already somewhat broken, given how gear is synched down. In some cases at high-end content it can leave people undergeared to a point where they should not have been able to queue, and in many other cases at low-end content it trivializes it (hence why people can faceroll so much early content, even synched down).

Specifically, my understanding—and someone please correct me if I'm wrong here—is that a given piece of gear which exceeds the ilevel maximum will be individually synched to that ilevel by removing all materia bonuses (i.e., taking only the base stats of the gear), then scaling down by an amount based on the difference in ilevels. But because stats have gone up from expansion to expansion at a higher rate than the ilevel has, synching ilevel 500 gear to ilevel 100 will give you gear with considerably better stats than any actual ilevel 100 gear has.

And since potency -> damage/healing power is based on those stats, that "better than actual gear of this level" situation means the damage/healing output will also be higher than you could actually get at that level, contributing to the "even synched to level 50, we can faceroll Crystal Tower raids" scenario; even with abilities and traits from later levels missing, the base stats that go into those calculations are still a lot higher than they would actually be at level 50 in level 50 gear.

This is also how it can backfire at the high end; let's say someone has their level 80 ilevel 430 weathered gear and wants to queue into a level 80 dungeon that takes ilevel 435 minimum and syncs to ilevel 445. They go and get two ilevel 480 accessories, because the accessories are the cheapest and it will raise their gearset average to around i439; that's enough to make the ilevel check, since that's done as an average. But once they get into the dungeon, those i430 pieces are left untouched but the i480 accessories are synched down to i445. And since this is level synching within an expansion, the scaling down is actually fairly likely to end up being roughly equivalent to real i445 gear. Now they may be insufficiently geared to survive the dungeon effectively; their effective average ilevel is now about i432, which would not have let them queue into the dungeon in the first place.

The upshot of which is "scaling consistently without having to have synched-down stats manually set for each piece of gear—or manually mapping it to some equivalent gearset at the target level—is hard, which contributes to existing balance issues."

Much as it pains me when I see my hotbars turn to a sea of disabled icons when Roulette dumps me in Sastasha, I suspect that letting me keep level 80 abilities in there would exacerbate an already-unbalanced level synching situation. For it to work, level synching would probably need to be rethought first.

Originally Posted by Packetdancer

Specifically, my understanding—and someone please correct me if I'm wrong here—is that a given piece of gear which exceeds the ilevel maximum will be individually synched to that ilevel by removing all materia bonuses (i.e., taking only the base stats of the gear), then scaling down by an amount based on the difference in ilevels. But because stats have gone up from expansion to expansion at a higher rate than the ilevel has, synching ilevel 500 gear to ilevel 100 will give you gear with considerably better stats than any actual ilevel 100 gear has.

Please note that I do agree with you just correcting the minor errors in your explanation.

The ilevel sync works by first removing materia bonuses (as you said), but then lowers each synced gearpiece's stats to the gear types primary and secondary stat caps of that ilevel. What causes this to be problematic when syncing is that non-pink gear is itemized to have one secondary at cap and one secondary at 70% of cap. What ends up happing is that high enough ilevel gear will sync so that both secondary stats are at cap.

And since potency -> damage/healing power is based on those stats, that "better than actual gear of this level" situation means the damage/healing output will also be higher than you could actually get at that level, contributing to the "even synched to level 50, we can faceroll Crystal Tower raids" scenario; even with abilities and traits from later levels missing, the base stats that go into those calculations are still a lot higher than they would actually be at level 50 in level 50 gear.

The Crystal Tower raid problem is that the first two were tuned for i90 and i110 max but sync to i130 and that Accuracy (a damage loss prevention stat) was turned into Direct Hit (a damage boosting stat). The Accuracy to Direct Hit change actually effected most of ARR's and HW's content.

A higher potency weapon skill to replace fast blade. I really don't want to be using that for another 10 levels.

There's no way you could scale down abilities to make them balanced for low level play. For example, DRG/LNC has no oGCD damage skills before level 30 (since they changed Leg Sweep in 4.0 to deal no dmg and also cross role). But having an 80 DRG sync'd down to level 16 gives them Geirskogul, High Jump, Spineshatter Dive, Nastrond, Stardiver, Mirage Dive, Dragonfire Dive. Even if these skills did like 30 potency, it's still much more than a level 16 Lancer's True Thrust->Vorpal Thrust. Melee don't have AoE before the mid 30s so you'd have melee using their AoE combo in low level dungeons but new players not having any AoE. There's honestly no way to do balance the potency to make it fair.