Players need some way to gauge a FATE's strength or Devs to develop dynamic scaling

[Deceptus]

FATE strength is determined by how many players were present the last time it was completed. This can result in massively strong FATEs when there isn't the same amount of players able to complete them.


It really sucks zoning into an area after a FATE train has moved instances only to realize you have next to zero chance of being able to complete them solo if there's no one around to assist.

Perhaps institute a Star system (1-5) or a tier system (C-S) that indicates how strong a FATE is. There has to be some internal system that tells the game how strong a FATE is going to be.

Please give that information to the players.

[Raoabolic]

The issue is sort of solved via the instance system in the world but that assumes you have one open on your server for the area you are fate farming in. Besides, I think fates slowly fix themselves 2-3 are not completed in a zone. That said, best bet is just to smack it and if it isn't going down fast enough then just do something else for 15 or so minutes. A system showing the strengths of common fates wouldn't be a horrible idea, though I would assume it's a non issue for the majority of the playerbase for the devs to put this idea in the maybe pile.

[Misplaced_Marbles]

FATE strength is determined by how many players were present the last time it was completed.

Which, of course, is the most counter-intuitive system ever. Why don't they just scale based on the amount of players present? The world may never know.

[TaleraRistain]

Great idea, especially with this penchant of FATE trains to jump instances. That will be alleviated once we don't have instances any longer, but there will still be the problem of not knowing what was going on in the zone before you go there so not having any idea of whether you'll be stuck with your thumb up your butt until the system works itself out.

[Packetdancer]

Which, of course, is the most counter-intuitive system ever. Why don't they just scale based on the amount of players present? The world may never know.

Because the scaling is determined at the time of the FATE spawning in; it's not going to be able to easily adjust the mob health pools and such on-the-fly once the mob is already instanciated, especially if combat's already underway when the number of participants present increases (or decreases).

I suspect the reason they do it based on how many people participated the last time is that it works not as a measure of population but of interest. If you have a special FATE in the current expansion, and people are slamming it every time it spawns, it's going to scale up to account for that. If you have a special FATE in a previous expansion and people aren't really going to fight it any more because it's outdated content now... well, now it scales down, so it can be handled by smaller groups.

It's still annoying, I grant you, but there's at least some probable logic behind it.

[hobostew]

Because the scaling is determined at the time of the FATE spawning in; it's not going to be able to easily adjust the mob health pools and such on-the-fly once the mob is already instanciated, especially if combat's already underway when the number of participants present increases (or decreases).

IIRC HP adjusting on the fly has been a thing for at least world bosses in WoW since like MoP I think. Obviously they are different games but it's clearly not something impossible.

[Velnora]

I'd rather they just not scale us down for fates. Make gear progression actually useful outside of raids.

[Packetdancer]

IIRC HP adjusting on the fly has been a thing for at least world bosses in WoW since like MoP I think. Obviously they are different games but it's clearly not something impossible.

Honestly, the reason I think it's less feasible is not technical, per se, but because of how we tend to approach this game. If folks could figure out the scaling algorithm, do you really think someone wouldn't figure out how to optimize a FATE train such that you send one person on to fight a FATE boss down to like... half health or whatever (thus only one person participating and the boss is scaled waaaay down) and then the whole FATE train slams in at once, and sure the boss' health scales up, but...

If you had one person participating and the boss had, say, 500k HP, and they took out 300k of that HP, and then the FATE train lands and the boss' health scales up to a maximum of 4M HP... but the boss was already down to 200k/500k (so 40% of the health). So it scales up to a maximum of 4M health but only has 1.6M of that health on the bar (thus the percentage/position of the boss' health bar doesn't change). Now you only need to do 1.9M of damage total to the boss rather than 4M, but everyone still gets credit. Yay! Now the FATE train can go even faster!

Etc.

So it's not "there are technical reasons why scaling a FATE after it's already been engaged seems impractical" so much as "there are cultural reasons -- i.e., how we as a playerbase tend to want to optimize content consumption to an extreme degree -- that make scaling a FATE after it's already been engaged seem impractical to me".