When you rebalance old story content for 7.0 changes. . .

[Ramalina]

Level scaling is broken on PTS, but just out of curiosity I ran some 4.0 chapters, first on Veteran, then on Master mode.

 

Normally, I somewhat despise doing that content. Slogging through seas of Skytroopers is not fun on live.

 

So I was surprised to find that it was sort of fun on PTS. That shouldn't be possible right? With all the alts I've run through that, I should permanently hate it, right?

 

It surprised me enough that I wanted to figure out what parts of outgearing and leveling made it fun, and what parts of outgearing and outleveling were not an improvement.

 

Starting with the bad stuff. It was too easy. It was too easy in a specific way though. I never felt that I was in any danger, even on Master Mode. This was an expected outcome, I'm out of practice, but with gear, levels, and HM raiding experience in 2.0 and 3.0, MM story chapters on PTS definitely shouldn't feel like a challenge. A few spots were a bit harder than the hardest H2 heroics daily quests, but not by much.

 

With the Master Mode content I also think I keyed in on what made it so much more fun. It went fast. Trash mobs died in 3-6 hits from a Guardian A tank. So instead of a slow slog it was reasonably paced. It also does feel nice to be the Big Bad hero carving a swath through the opposition. Very heroic. A few of the boss fights also gave some more perspective. Risk is what makes the boss fights interesting. Not giant damage sponges. So while I expect that Level Scaling will come back when 7.0 goes live, I suggest that you tune it differently. Give the NPCs more damage, but don't scale up health pools as much as they currently are on live.

 

The increased damage, especially if some of it is in big spikes, gives the element of risk that makes a boss fight interesting and fun. The reduced health pools, especially on trash mobs, improves the pacing by making it go faster (I was at the point where I was going through groups about as fast as my character's resources and cooldowns could keep up, just a second or two of pause between groups with a healing companion, about 5 seconds to meditate/heal every other group if no companion or non-healing companion). To be honest, increasing the trash mob damage some wouldn't be a bad idea either.

 

TLDR version: dial NPC damage up to increase risk to player, decrease NPC trash mob health pools (less scaling) so that seeing a hallway full of skytroopers doesn't make you want to rip your hair out in frustration due to the combination of low risk and high tedium.

 

Slow and safe is not fun.

Fast and and safe is not fun.

Fast and risky enough to keep you on your toes IS fun.

Edited August 13, 2021 by Ramalina

[Soljin]

This is a good take on fun vs tedious tuning. Fast kills with NPC's that can kill you if you don't pay attention is fun play. I think in the past they just made damage sponges a thing to artificially extend the content duration which resulted in an extremely boring play through. Edited August 13, 2021 by Soljin

[Toraak]

Hmm. Makes me want to try these when my main classes start getting put on the PTS to test them. Edited August 13, 2021 by Toraak