Scaling Tech in Group Content Feedback

[jambalayabungee]

Thats a real good point actually, whether the relics and the like have an impact in stat locked content. It would completely negate the use of some adrenals for older content which would either make the content harder than it necessarily needs to be or would be adjusted to give a slightly higher cap than what was necessarily intended making the content a little more trivial while the gearing equally pointless.

 

Edit: Just jumped into the synced Hammer Station solo to test it out. Anything that boosts Mastery, Endurance or Power by increasing the stat rating does not function while synced. So any Relics that affect either Mastery, Endurance or Power are non-functional while inside a synced instance. The only reason to have gear equipped is to maintain your tertiary stat % (alacrity, accuracy & crit). Any abilities which affect stat % do still function though, so things like Stim Boost continues to function in its normal manner and the new Tactical Overdrive (15% mastery increase) will increase your damage and healing appropriately.

 

Checked too in Hammer MM, locked to 70. It confirmed what you said

I tried with some stats-related tacticals:

• The Krall Accord, which cycle between : Mastery / Accuracy / Power / Defense / Critical / Absorb / Alacrity and Shield in that order ( who is that supposed to appeal to ?? nobody needs all these stats, its like you like stat roulette or something XD ) . As expected, all stats but mastery/power were impacted .
  

BUT

• the Rolling Boil Tactical, which give you a 5% Mastery boost when a relic proc, was working . which confirm what you said about stat % .
  

Although the % stats on the set bonuses ... tested with a 2 piece mastery and a 2 pieces power. The mastery 2 pieces wasn't impacting, but the %2 power was ??

 

Its gonna be .... interesting ....

Edited August 4, 2019 by jambalayabungee

[Trassed]

Scalling like thats is not a a good idea to me. Maybe it's gonna be more easy for you to scale like that but in my opinion it's gonna be less fun.

 

There is so much mistake with your scaling tech, what the point of your new set bonus if we are downgrade.

+2% Endurance set bonus and we all have the save amount of health ==> Useless set bonus

+2% Mastery is nothing 2000 mastery so we got an extra 40 of mastery...

And same for power.

 

A player will pratice on an opération training target to do the best as he can and he will not be able to know if he is doing well on opération boss.

 

And btw master mode EC is to easy, killing walker in 2 bomber and kehpess just jump once.

[NikSunrider]

I ran HS twice, didn't have an opportunity to do the ops yet. What I can say is: the trash is harder than the actual bosses. I, without exaggeration, globalled the trio (pyro, healer, tank) boss, and killed the droid and final boss in about a minute each. That's on Veteran mode.

 

The mobs all pulled me out of stealth and my lvl 50 companion nearly died a few times on trash, which is just sad.

 

On Mastermode Hammer Station...my companion did die to trash. Not even the hard trash with gold mobs, but the standard/strong trash in the tunnels on the way to the first boss (without taking the shortcut).

 

Ran False Emperor on storymode, but had the GSI bot dismissed. It went rather smoothly, albeit I did think it was slower than on live currently.

 

The set bonus situation is quite like the utility situation - lots of options, most of which are so bad nobody is going to take them if they have a choice in the matter. For example the 2% stat increases seem to be based on your stats, not a flat +2 alacrity /whatever (like abilities/passives give you) so if you get 2k alacrity, you're only going to get 40 rating - that's about 1/3rd of what you'd get from an augment.

 

Alternatively, there's a set bonus (for operative/sniper) where frag grenade applies a slow to effected enemies. This is largely meh as an ability because: in operations/flashpoints, enemies are either immune to slows, or you're not running away from them. In heroics/general open-world questing you're already faster and can outrange/evade most mobs. The only use for this setbonus is PVP, except that slows build resolve and a frag grenade slow is a very clumsy and random effect. An operative has much better tools, like sever tendon/crippling slice, while a sniper will just use engineering probe.

 

Oh and the stat pool is really limited. For instance after getting full accuracy, you need to chose between crit and alacrity and can't actually get a meaningful amount of either. "Meaningful amount" is a GCD reduction + making sure your crits do more than just tickle.

 

The mix and match approach BioWare is trying to suggest for set bonuses is also not going to work, because the useful set bonuses are 4/6 pieces, and you only have 7 pieces that can have a set bonus. So at best you can have:

 

3x 2-piece set bonuses

1x 4-piece and 1x 1-piece

1x 6-piece set bonus

 

I tried running 110% acc, 40-ish % crit and rest into alacrity, and stacked 3 of the 2-piece +2% alacrity set bonuses on my sorc...I only got 10% alac. That's it. I can get that on live right now.

 

That's it. Not that different to using old PVP set bonuses as we used to in the past. Not a lot of variety

And a lot of them are, as I said, crap (frag grenade slows enemies) or poorly defined (your companion can attack faster -- didn't notice a difference with my comp).

And there's no clear path for what's BIS or what's not BIS because everything is so meh.

 

My thoughts are:

 

I think the scaling tech is annoying. It makes it harder to stealth content (arguably the main appeal of playing a stealth character) because your relative stealth level is so weak. I think locking you out of stats that are given to you by your set bonus is also a bit ridiculous...why bother getting good gear if you'll get downscaled anyway?

 

I don't know what's happening wiht mastermode Hammer Station. but I don't think companions should be getting oneshot. At least not anymore. Not after 4-ish years of companions being strong. Perhaps this change would have gone well in 4.0, but not now. What's the point of having a rank 50 companion anymore?

 

I think that you can make bosses a little harder in flashpoints, and drop the mob difficulty.

 

I want to see how things are in Ops now, and if they are just as ridiculous.

[Toraak]

I ran Hammer station Veteran mode twice solo. Once I was on a healing sorc, and the other on a Sniper.

 

On the healing sorc, with a rank 23 DPS companion I found it very easy to solo Hammer station on Veteran mode (using no healing stations). My companion never dropped below 70% health the entire FP.

 

On the DPS Sniper, with a rank 32 Healing companion I found the FP very easy, with the only exception being the companion continuously standing in stupid on the last boss. I had to keep putting it on passive just to keep him alive. Other then that it was easy.

[jambalayabungee]

 

I don't know what's happening wiht mastermode Hammer Station. but I don't think companions should be getting oneshot. At least not anymore. Not after 4-ish years of companions being strong. Perhaps this change would have gone well in 4.0, but not now. What's the point of having a rank 50 companion anymore?

 

I think that you can make bosses a little harder in flashpoints, and drop the mob difficulty.

 

I want to see how things are in Ops now, and if they are just as ridiculous.

 

I agree with most of the points you make. I did realised too the mobs were harder than the bosses, and the points you make about the set bonuses are really relevant. The bit about the companion getting one-shotted ... I think that in the live version, those masters are actually too easy and if they make it harder it should be more challenging ? I mean , there is some tuning to do in the pts, but I dont think master mode fps are intended to be soloable with a comp. Even veteran flashpoint shouldnt be soloable . Its my opinion. I know some people wont like it

[AwesomeTacoCat]

Can someone explain why it’s so hard to scale ops up to level 75? Like it seems like you scale boss health and dtps up by the same factor you’re scaling up dps and hps with new gear. Why is this not just simple multiplication? Like the scaling factory may be a bit ambiguous, but like if you just use a scaling factor of (dps in new bis gear)/(dps in old bis gear) for every boss in the game, that’s probably good enough for like 99% of boss fights. And similarly adjust dtps by (hps in new bis gear)/(hps in old bis gear). Why is this so difficult? And if there are particular bosses that you think are overturned currently (eg hm mono, m&b, NiM ec tanks) just adjust those on a case by case basis. Similarly if you feel some fights are currently undertuned, adjust those on a case by case basis. Most fights seem fairly well tuned at the moment I think...

[Wagerbane]

Hey folks,

 

Let's talk about the next thing we are introducing to PTS that we would like some testing on, new scaling tech which we are applying to group content in SWTOR. To test this new scaling, we recommend that you test the Flashpoint Hammer Station or one of two Operations; Karagga's Palace or Eternity Vault.

 

The idea behind this scaling tech is that we are trying to avoid some of the pitfalls from previous expansions. By re-leveling them to max level, we effectively have to rebalance them all over again. This creates some obvious issues where FPs and Ops can quickly become too easy, or too hard. The goal of applying this scaling tech is that it will allow us to leverage the original balance that for this content.

 

Take a spin through this content and if you want to really see how it plays, compare it on PTS to other FPs and Ops. Let us know what you think.

• Is it too easy?
  
• Is it too hard?
  
• Do you like this style of balance?
  

Thanks all.

 

-eric:rolleyes:

 

I heard a group went inside flash point and said is way too easy. Well because like 8 player group make it easy is normal and works ok. I have a issue with story Arena on Zakuul planet was not like a story level for solo one player needs tone down. You must be careful with folks requested harder than easy was not helpful to players with max up gear status for reach their goals inside story flashpoints . I experience that on public server but not the PTS and needs to be tone down right for keyboard and mouse can handle it. On a player character picture where you click it for set difficulty level like story, veteran and master did not change the difficulty wasn't working for letting you know. Enable our companion modify status gear for giving our companions extra status bonus over what you have. This will help our companions to stay alive inside flash points from story or veteran difficulty level.

[NikSunrider]

The bit about the companion getting one-shotted ... I think that in the live version, those masters are actually too easy and if they make it harder it should be more challenging ? I mean , there is some tuning to do in the pts, but I dont think master mode fps are intended to be soloable with a comp. Even veteran flashpoint shouldnt be soloable . Its my opinion. I know some people wont like it

 

Eh I'm torn. On the one hand I agree, group content shouldn't be soloable for the average player - otherwise what is the point of group content in the first place?

 

On the other: soloing hardmode flashpoints is fun. It takes decent gear, a decently-levelled companion, and decent knowledge of your class and mechanics involved. There's really no reason to run MM flashpoints on live unless you are doing it for the lols. So either they have to make flashpoints worth doing, or keep things the way they are.

 

I vehemently disagree with the idea of downscaling/level sync. It defeats the purpose of being at endgame.

 

What's there to do at lvl 70, or 75? Not much. There's a story you'll run once or twice because it is no longer class-based, and then there's a few ops. But that's only a fraction of the content you could be doing at endgame. And it is simply not satisfying to be downscaled for the vast majority of content you are doing at endgame.

 

Why would I chose to run a flashpoint on my lvl 75 instead of my lvl 17?

[NikSunrider]

UPDATE: So I ran three more VMs solo today.

 

Ran Athiss. Thought the scaling tech was only supposed to apply to Hammer Station. Turns out its live on Athiss too.

 

Most of the mobs I was able to skip, although those that I did end up fighting I could two-shot with Laceration. That's a bit surprising. Bosses weren't challenging but more...just time consuming.

 

Ran Hammer Station x2. Figured out why I was being pulled out of steatlh on my first run. TUrns out the gold droids have advanced stealth detection and I totally forgot about it.

 

Was able to stealth past everything else. Set companion to DPS and only used the kolto stations once on the Tunneler (forgot to cleanse companion, so bat-rezzed and used station to heal up).

 

Verdict: its ridiculously easy. Perhaps too ridiculously. The jump from VM to HM should not be so big.

 

For most flashpoints, there is no SM, you jump straight into VM, so I don't mind the difficulty being easy.

I do however think that the jump from VM to MM for FPs is a bit drastic. Either VM should be harder, or my companion should not be dying to weak trash on VM.

 

Simple as that..

 

I don't have a problem with HM FPs being soloable with a companion if the player knows what they are doing, really.

 

Ops...I still haven't done any ops. Still can't comment on those.

[ivanhedgehog]

Just a few points:

 

1: please say the date you did the runs so the devs can gauge it agaist their currwnt settings. Might now matter but might help them.

 

2: has anyone run any of these with a mixed party of 75's in gear and 50's in leveling gear? How does it react when it is not a uniform party?

[NikSunrider]

Just a few points:

 

1: please say the date you did the runs so the devs can gauge it agaist their currwnt settings. Might now matter but might help them.

 

2: has anyone run any of these with a mixed party of 75's in gear and 50's in leveling gear? How does it react when it is not a uniform party?

 

I did my runs today and yesterday - or well maybe yesterday and the day before that if we're talking US time.

 

As far as trying with mixed levels...it isn't exactly convenient to do it yet because the boost terminal takes you up to lvl 75, and we can't copy characters from live, so it would be a bit of a pain grinding out a character to lvl 50 just for flashpoints.

 

However, I don't think it will make much if any difference, because the "scaling tech" looks more like a debuff that reduces each individual player's stats. Therefore it would seam that having a lvl 50 in your group would not be much different ot having an lvl 17 in your group for hammer station (barring the overall lack of abilities, of course).

[GamingCrimes]

So I just want to share a bit of my thoughts, hopefully it's not too late.

 

I played KP on veteran mode and EC on master mode on the PTS and I have to say that the scaling feels really, really bad. The difficulty aside, I personally don't enjoy getting downscaled when I enter an Operation on it's highest difficulty. It doesn't feel good to pull high numbers on target dummies when I will just do 3k at most in lvl 50 Operations. Why am I getting new gear if it won't have any effect when I enter these older Operations? 95% of SW:TOR's endgame pve content are these older operations and I will personally lose a lot of enjoyment from playing this game when dps/hps/hp numbers are all over the place. It just wouldn't fit having multiple endgame operations on different levels. I'm not even so sure what you are trying to achieve here. Should the players experience the operations like they were when they came out? Do you want to have this kind of scaling tech so that you don't have to rebalance the older operations once we get new gear? I personally don't feel like there are many viable reasons for this. Rebalance them for Maxlevel, then we have something to reprogress once 6.0 comes out, which will hopefully feel challenging and thus kinda new again.

[Iymurra]

Can we just get rid of this "the numbers are all wrong" fallacy right now?

Numbers are numbers, its how they are in relation to the content thats what matters.

Whether you do 10k DPS to a target with 1mil, or 1k DPS to a target with 100k DOESN'T MATTER. Proportionally its the exact same kill time. Scaling up or scaling down will have the same kill time.

What bioware is trying to do is to create systems which will function in perpetuity so they don't have to devote as many resources to rebalancing the older operations with a level increase and I for one am 100% behind that.

[zorngodofall]

As someone who is GM of a raiding guild on Satele I wanted to give my input on this. The literal first thing I heard when some of my officers/members tested the PTS and discussed it amongst themselves was: "I think we need to find a new game."

 

Just flat out don't do this. It's going to kill raiding old content for a lot of reasons. People aren't going to want to do 50/55/60/65/70 etc ops. One because it takes away from what options you give us with gear aside from it altering rotations, two from "numbers issue" where noone is going to have any idea what numbers they are going to pull. Three that whatever 'balancing' you have achieved with this so far just breaks old content and makes it WAY too easy.

 

Nightmare content is not suppose to be hello kitty island adventure. We don't get much new content in this game and that isn't going to change, we accept that. We alleviate our boredom by running old content or progging through the newer, more difficult content or going for personal challenges (I'm a fan of Gatecrasher into Dread master timed attempts) and parsing. You break our want to do old content and then make parsing irrelevant. It is the worst of both worlds.

 

Also, you don't necessarily have to balance everything perfectly. 4.0 Brontes wasn't scaled correctly. 5.0 terror wasn't scaled correctly, both resulting in very challenging instances (bar 258 gear in which terror is a joke now). Things like this actually added to the game. People had to find work arounds and that was part of the overall challenge, it wasn't a bad thing. We care a lot less for balance issues than we do about things like Tyrans desyncs in DP, SNV's various game breaking bugs that make the OP incomplete-able at times. Fix the bugs, not what isn't broken.

 

Level syncing the raids just takes away any conception that old content is something you need to go through to progress as a raider, and it most certainly is. It is just an abysmal idea on so many levels. Do you realize if you hard cap mastery/power so we have way more tertiary stat and flat pow/mast that's breaking what tertiary stats should be right?, along with breaking what relics/adrenals are standard and the litany of balance issues and problems that will come from that. How does it not occur to you guys that this fundamentally breaks how gearing is done at a time when you are trying to add to it and make it better?

 

Please stop infantalizing content. It is hard enough already to get newer people into nim when with 258's groups that should barely be clearing HM's are clearing Nim. Things like dread guards, tanks, Bestia, Brontes, Tyrans are all suppose to be meaningful bosses that push you in certain ways to become a better raider and by the end you don't end up shell shocked when content is not scaled incorrectly because of gear.

 

That is by far the worst problem of 5.0 raiding. In 248 (post nerfs that occured at 242's) content was challenging enough to push people. I've seen a lot of people get really frustrated when after clearing all the old stuff in 258's people struggle immensely and get frustrated when legitimately scaled content isn't as much a joke.

 

That is what is broken with the current system. Scale gear once, add an op, fix the bugs and balance the classes, don't reinvent the wheel and cause people who have enough of a headache to have an entirely new one to deal with.

 

I know all of this sounds like really harsh criticism, but I genuinely appreciate the efforts you guys put in. I'm really glad we got nim gods after being told we wouldn't have it, I'm genuinely appreciative of many of the things you guys have done to attempt to bring the game back from the brink in 5.0.

Edited August 6, 2019 by zorngodofall

[ottffsse]

Scaling ops down is not bad per se but scaling down to level 50 is pretty extreme given how far item levels and abilities have changed. And yeah there is a problem when your relics scale and don't scale all over the place - you can't parse at that point unless there is a special "bolster/debolster" item next to your dummy specifically for ops.

 

On the other hand scaling up should be easy and "perfectly balanced" no? Like in 306 gear I noticed everyone's hp etc is approximately doubled no? so just scale the ops numbers accordingly. AND PLEASE FOR LOVE OF IZAX DoN'T BLOAT STATS WITH GEAR OVER OLD 242s equivalent - that is really what makes things messed up.

 

If an OP like GoTM / whatever new op in MM/Nim is balanced around 248 then ok - just buff stats to that level via a specifically designed item you have to craft like a special NIM crystal - but you give everyone fancy/higher gear ratings above the intended balance of course it will throw it out of whack. If a specific class has to have above average gear to compete and make specs fix the class and don't bloat everyone's gear. My 2c.

Edited August 6, 2019 by ottffsse

[KendraP]

AND PLEASE FOR LOVE OF IZAX DoN'T BLOAT STATS WITH GEAR OVER OLD 242s equivalent - that is really what makes things messed up.

 

But... how will they artifically increase the number of players doing buggy or otherwise unenjoyable new content without locking unnecessarily added gear behind it? I mean, how would you complete the same 7 year old content without new gear?!

(/sarcasm if it wasn't obvious)

Edited August 6, 2019 by KendraP

[jambalayabungee]

From screenshots I took, unfortunately I only took pics of my healer's stats, not the tank or dps (they could be different)

 

(aug 5) , MM hammer locked at 70:

Stats:

Mastery: 8905

Endurance:8555

Power:3908

(rest of stats , are like you allocated them on your level 75, unscaled)

from the screenshot the tank had around 127k HP, and i had 115k HP

 

Not sure what item level it would be related, maybe 242 like you said?

 

In any case, it was not **hard** but people were still taking huge enough chunks of damage, it wasnt that much of a faceroll . When we tried to 2man it with comps, they were hitting us pretty hard and our comps died super quick (mine was level 30-ish)

 

aug 3 , EV sm, locked at 50:

Stats:

Mastery: 1857

Endurance:1674

Power:668

Around 16K health

[ottffsse]

But... how will they artifically increase the number of players doing buggy or otherwise unenjoyable new content without locking unnecessarily added gear behind it? I mean, how would you complete the same 7 year old content without new gear?!

(/sarcasm if it wasn't obvious)

 

ez... you need components to grind to to craft that master crystal that will ONLY buff your stats withing the intended operation other wise you go in hardcore in underrated gear.

 

other ideas

you get a higher chance of getting amplifiers/ tacticals /gear sets whatever by doing new stuff

decos, cool costemic items if miniscule cartel coin grants. whatever. bloating gear rating levels just causes imbalances and head aches - and more work later for rebalances.

 

As for PvP gearing they should some some semblance of unsassembled compotents or some pvp gear currency for doing pvp but that is another topic.

[KendraP]

. bloating gear rating levels just causes imbalances and head aches - and more work later for rebalances.

 

Ahh but you see, they can just add gear that makes everyone more powerful relative to existing content and not worry about rebalancing anything 2 gear sets later! Win-win, right?!

(Again, /sarcasm)

[ottffsse]

Ahh but you see, they can just add gear that makes everyone more powerful relative to existing content and not worry about rebalancing anything 2 gear sets later! Win-win, right?!

(Again, /sarcasm)

 

with ops scaling down you can probably go in naked xD

[sdom]

Hey folks,

 

Let's talk about the next thing we are introducing to PTS that we would like some testing on, new scaling tech which we are applying to group content in SWTOR. To test this new scaling, we recommend that you test the Flashpoint Hammer Station or one of two Operations; Karagga's Palace or Eternity Vault.

 

The idea behind this scaling tech is that we are trying to avoid some of the pitfalls from previous expansions. By re-leveling them to max level, we effectively have to rebalance them all over again. This creates some obvious issues where FPs and Ops can quickly become too easy, or too hard. The goal of applying this scaling tech is that it will allow us to leverage the original balance that for this content.

 

Take a spin through this content and if you want to really see how it plays, compare it on PTS to other FPs and Ops. Let us know what you think.

• Is it too easy?
  
• Is it too hard?
  
• Do you like this style of balance?
  

Thanks all.

 

-eric

 

Does Bioware have any plans of rebalancing the expansions that are currently out?

It's no secret KOTFE and KOTET become better for rdps at harder difficulty levels, something that definitely needs addressed.

 

Particularly, the tower of prophecy on voss where you fight the horizon guard captain and the fight with the genoharadan leader are most in need of a tweak for mdps classes.

Be good to know there was something in the pipeline.

[AwesomeTacoCat]

So basically no one likes this scaling because it (1) destroys any ability to compare parses across operations, (2) screws up gearing due to mastery and power caps, and (3) appear to be terribly tuned. So in all likelihood Bioware proceeds as planned and implements this technology that no one likes?

[jambalayabungee]

to hear the devs talk about 6.0 operation scaling :

 

Hosted by Working Class Nerds podcast : https://www.buzzsprout.com/143519/1523599

 

around 0:39min of the podcast / interview

 

They also mentioned PTS would come online tomorrow - Aug 9 .

[KendraP]

So basically no one likes this scaling because it (1) destroys any ability to compare parses across operations, (2) screws up gearing due to mastery and power caps, and (3) appear to be terribly tuned. So in all likelihood Bioware proceeds as planned and implements this technology that no one likes?

 

See this guy gets how they operate. They've made their decision, and they might manipulate the numbers a bit, but there will be no major changes. They're smarter than you after all, because it's their job, right?

[Zinadu]

So basically no one likes this scaling because it (1) destroys any ability to compare parses across operations, (2) screws up gearing due to mastery and power caps, and (3) appear to be terribly tuned. So in all likelihood Bioware proceeds as planned and implements this technology that no one likes?

 

This I am actually concerned about because I don't think it will go well for a whole host of reason not to mention a bunch of sets and things like relic procs become useless.

 

The other part of that will be either they make the old ops way easier then they are or if we go back to 4.0 style and they become really hard except for the very top tier your going to see a lot of problems with things like DPS balance.

 

Sorta what you see in Gods right now where PT/mara stacking makes everything easier and there are some classes just not really worth taking to fights because of the massive dps differences between specs on live right now.