Content far to easy

[Stradlin]

18 hours ago, jamiesafc said:

 

. The difficulty spike at this point is way to big instead of a gradual increase in difficulty throughout the story and in to end game content. 

Yeah this is a paradox of some kind..game is so easy it makes the game hard eventually. It is extremely difficult to get any kind of rotation going when you play through the storyline. Everything always dies long before new player ends up getting to watch how various cooldowns interact with one another and in which order they should tick away.  If a player eventually starts looking into harder group content and such, these things are suddenly kinda expected of them. Turns out you can actually save the galaxy from immortal god emperor without ever having to move away from bad stuff on ground while still  doing damage yourself.  

Edited May 14 by Stradlin

[TahliahCOH]

23 hours ago, Traceguy said:

New players are still struggling. New players will be inadequately geared, just click whatever ability they feel like, if not spam the level 1 filler, and will avoid their purge, interrupt, and stun abilities like the plague.  Someone was asking for help with the False Emperor just yesterday, complaining on the fleet about needing to look up the mechanics for the final boss because it was too hard and they're still failing. They refused to believe it when I told them there were no special mechanics to know. Just "spank and tank Malgus from the stairs". Still to this day I'm seeing many players complain that they can't solo those 2 Jedi without Vette (Sith Warrior story on Tatooine).

Excellent points. The last time I was leveling a new SW on Tat, there was a guy standing outside that little hut in the Dune Sea where you have to kill the Jedi Master (forget his name now, but the one where Quinn is knocked out). I went in, finished the mission, came back out and he asked (in General, because of course) if I wanted to team up to finish it. I said sure, not telling him I already did it. He said in Group that he'd died ten times and thought it was impossible. I kind of chuckled, remembering how I had gone out to get more levels and better gear to finish it the first time. Now, of course, I don't bother since I know how to play my toon, etc. but yeah, first time through even on the current easy mode is still difficult.

Another time, someone in General was asking for help with Directive 7, said they kept dying. My first thought was, "wait, you can die in Directive 7?," but then I remembered that the first time I did it, I did die. At least a couple of times, not enough to quit, but enough that I looked up how to deal with (I want to say it was the Mentor fight with the generator things, but I honestly can't be sure now, it's been a while), anyway, my point being, that if you know the content, have even decent gear that's just dropped as you've gone along, and know your class, you can't really compare that experience to that of a new player who has none of that advantage.

I wouldn't object to an option to make class stories harder, but I don't think it's some big pressing issue. If you want them to be harder, wear crappy (or no)  gear, dismiss your comp, do only the class story (no sides, no Heroics) so that you don't outlevel the planets. There are ways to challenge yourself without diverting the devs attention from long-standing issues that haven't been addressed in YEARS (or from their tax and gimp focus. Heh.).

[Toraak]

6 hours ago, Pirana said:

When I mentioned 'smarter route', I chose those words due to the various skill levels among gamers, I don't need to use a healer, never have, unless I'm a HM FP and we lose the healer, that's it, open world, it's never needed. There was time before the companion change that each one had their own role, tank, heal or dps, and didn't have the option to right click the portrait and change, then yes, I would have used what their role was. Only going to use the Republic side and not the mirror classes or abilities:

Sage - shield, heal and HoT as a dps
Commando - DCD's, HoT, which people should be using between each pull anyway whether they're health is topped off or not to proc HVSC
Gunslinger - Cover or DCD 
Shadow - Stealth class that is over-tuned at the moment, notably Serenity. If someone is having a hard time, then reading one of those Vulkk guides might be in their best interest, there should be zero problems unless someone is new
Vanguard - Finally a class where there is some down time between pulls, no off heals and for a heavy armor wearing class, they're squishy and their rotation can be as unforgiving as Commando AS, so burning up cells can occur if you're not familiar with the class
Scoundrel - Off heals and a heal. Another over-tuned class currently that also has stealth
Guardian and Sentinel -  Two classes where there might be some down time to regen health due to being in melee range, so I can see using a heal comp here for two different reasons, downtime and new players.

With all that though, I can see some benefits to using a healer comp, everyone plays the game differently and it is a safer route. I'm almost always running around with 50%-75% health in the open world, not having my health topped isn't game breaking nor am I OCD. lol Running a DPS companion expedites open world content faster and that's been the case since the companions were given the option to select roles. People should play the game the way they want though, and if using a healer companion helps, then go for it.

Don't get me wrong I use Shae as DPS as well. Just depends on how lazy I feel like being at the time. If I feel like falling asleep or not paying much attention I'll put Shae in heals, if I'm looking to pay at least 50% attention I'll have her in DPS role.

[Pirana]

24 minutes ago, Toraak said:

Don't get me wrong I use Shae as DPS as well. Just depends on how lazy I feel like being at the time. If I feel like falling asleep or not paying much attention I'll put Shae in heals, if I'm looking to pay at least 50% attention I'll have her in DPS role.

Exactly why I only use DPS companions, content is trivial, no reason to use heals or a tank. If I'm too lazy or sleepy to play, I log off and find something else to do that doesn't involve gaming. 
 

[ytrenor]

"Story" difficulty level is fine.  "Story" is mean to enjoy the "story".

If you want a challenging experience during combat, there should be an option to up the difficulty. Any decent story based games have that. I'd like to say there is an option to set that if you right click your character icon... but I can't valide atm since the launcher gives me no server to login...

 

[supertimtaf]

2 hours ago, TahliahCOH said:

but yeah, first time through even on the current easy mode is still difficult.

Sadly I'd say that it's "difficult" because the game never stops you.
You can go through the whole game with a companion on heal and spamming either your filler or any ability that doesn't cost ressources (hello vigilant thrust). Because the game never stops you to say "okay now if you want to continue, maybe take a good look at your abilities". And this is a terrible mistake, because you end up with a gap between good players and bad players that's larger than the time it takes the devs to release an update.

The game isn't "hard", nor is it "easy". Try doing anything without a companion on heal and you'll actually have a bit of challenge.
Mostly because this game's definition of "challenging fights" is just "the mob will constantly hit you hard" rather than "auto attacks will not hurt that much, but please avoid this circle else you'll die", which is a rather unimaginative and lazy approach to difficulty, just like the fact that gold-tier mobs have defense chances and that it's never explained to new players.
It's just "stats make this hard" not "gameplay makes it hard".

Anyway, since we can't ask the devs to rework every fight, we can however try to make it so new players actually have an incentive to use two braincells rather than none. Maybe for example have companions be slightly less effective as healers. i'm not saying "make them useless" but I'm fairly sure that there's a big gap between what we had prior to 4.0 (with Treek and the likes) and what we currently have.

All in all, there's a huge gap of skill between new players and veterans, and that sucks. And for all the poor attempts at excuses that some of you make about "this is a story game not a tryhard game :(((((" please remember that there are other MMOs that are solo/story focused who still requires you to connect two braincells at some point in order to progress in the story. If every player from XIV, massively more popular than swtor, can progress the story and learn to somewhat use a decent rotation, I don't see why the ten newbs still playing swtor couldn't do the same.

Y'all are just making excuses for being lazy at this point. 

[juliushorst]

15 hours ago, Guyverarmor said:

They need to introduce a difficulty slider then, like LOTRO does with their content, so everyone can be made very happy and how hard they want the open world content to be.

It was suggested (and ignored by devs) when 7.0 dropped.

 

15 hours ago, Guyverarmor said:

People can keep the slider at 0 for as little thinking and processing as possible to play, or up the difficulty so they actually have to watch how they play else they get dusted. Everyone wins.

My idea (probably easier to implement) was either Story \ Veteran \ Master instances with adequately adjusted loot or buff similar to the one we had in 6.X based on gear rating, but one that you can enable or disable at will without any prerequisites.

[xordevoreaux]

I don't mind the idea of a difficulty slider, because that lends itself to a "play your way style" but curious how that would work grouping. Whose slider takes precedent, the person who formed the group?

[SteveTheCynic]

30 minutes ago, xordevoreaux said:

I don't mind the idea of a difficulty slider, because that lends itself to a "play your way style" but curious how that would work grouping. Whose slider takes precedent, the person who formed the group?

It should probably a debuff slider, where the player who has activated it gets a debuff (perhaps called "Do it the hard way"?) that reduces outgoing damage and incoming heals and increases incoming damage.  That way, it would be a per-player setting in group content.  Notice that I left "outgoing heals" alone on purpose.

[tsteenburg]

Given the way they implanted level synch for 7.x with essentially gear switching, it shouldn't be hard for them to have a check box that adjusts the gear switch to the equivalent of the planetary greens regardless of your maxed gear.  

[Traceguy]

16 hours ago, xordevoreaux said:

I don't mind the idea of a difficulty slider, because that lends itself to a "play your way style" but curious how that would work grouping. Whose slider takes precedent, the person who formed the group?

The phase owner. You can see their name generally at the top-center of the screen

[SteveTheCynic]

3 hours ago, Traceguy said:

The phase owner. You can see their name generally at the top-center of the screen

I vote, as noted above, for it being a per-character debuff that modifies outgoing damage (down), incoming damage (up) and incoming heals (down).  That way, it works even in open-area groups, and each group member can use the setting that suits the player in question.  Outgoing heals should not be affected because they are there for the benefit of the other members of the team.

[TahliahCOH]

On 5/14/2024 at 11:21 AM, supertimtaf said:

All in all, there's a huge gap of skill between new players and veterans, and that sucks.

Um, that's how it is in every game everywhere. Vets were once those vastly un- or under-skilled players, though, and learned to play better in the same game everyone is claiming is too easy. It's not too easy the first time you run through it, that's the point I was trying to make. But when you do it a few times (and the mission I was talking about actually disables your comp, so you can't rely on his heals/damage/tanking), you have to figure out how to make your powers work, figure out the mechanics (in that mish, I was actually thrown out of the hut and the guy I had killed was back and the master at full health when I reentered, so I learned to position myself against the wall fast, heh), figure out if you want to kill the lower level / adds first or focus on the boss (sometimes yes, sometimes no, but you learn that as you play).

I think leveling too fast is more of a problem--though obviously related--than the fights being too easy. If you do the sides and/or planet heroics, you outlevel planets so fast that by the time you get to the end of a planet's story (the "big fight"), it's a cakewalk. Well, for those of us who know the story fights, anyway. I'd rather see tweaks to that then to the actual difficulty of the story, which is plenty challenging for new players, especially if they are JUST doing story and are at a level within the planet's level range. But honestly, this is super low on the list of things that need to be fixed in this game, so I don't care if they leave it the way it is forever. I'd rather they work on bugs that haven't been fixed in forever than on adding some new mechanic to give vets more of a challenge. Vets can make it challenging on their own as it is (as I noted above, dismiss your comp completely, take off your gear, etc. It's not hard to make it harder.).

[PlasmaJohn]

On 5/14/2024 at 12:21 PM, supertimtaf said:

All in all, there's a huge gap of skill between new players and veterans, and that sucks. And for all the poor attempts at excuses that some of you make about "this is a story game not a tryhard game :(((((" please remember that there are other MMOs that are solo/story focused who still requires you to connect two braincells at some point in order to progress in the story. If every player from XIV, massively more popular than swtor, can progress the story and learn to somewhat use a decent rotation, I don't see why the ten newbs still playing swtor couldn't do the same.

And yet if you follow XIV's General Chat or reddit you'll see the same complaints by vets about their game being "too easy" and fail to teach rotations or mechanics.  Like here neither is true it's just that the vets have internalized all the common mechanics and can't imagine why a player new to MMO's cannot grasp something so "intuitive"

I will grant that XIV is slightly better at introducing mechanics but they still fail at reinforcing them.  XIV also holds back key abilities required to make most rotations work until the very end which makes it near impossible for a new player to learn it until they hit level cap.  At least they don't have set bonuses which only exacerbates the "proper rotation" gatekeeping.

[xordevoreaux]

Veteran < > mechanic mastery

I've been playing since 2013. That would make me a veteran, but I will never, ever, wind up in a NIM op. I'm ADHD and get data-overwhelmed fairly easily, meaning if there's just too much to going on, I freeze.  I can watch the floor for stupidity. I can watch people's health bars to heal them. But at a certain point, as the game mechanics pile on, I reach my limit and simply cannot function.  I reach my attention threshold and boom. Done.

Luckily, I'm in a guild that's understanding (kinda helps that I founded it) which means I can function at the level I can without holding anyone else back because the current leadership has a great lock on harder content, so our guild serves both the hard core player with different skill demands quite well. The people in my guild are proof those players can exist side by side.

But enough about me.

There are people, for reasons other than mine, who are simply not interested in doing a deep dive in class mechanics, op mechanics, anything. They log in, they putz around, they get their story done because it's nice and easy, BOOM they're gone until another day.

They're called casuals, and they're not noobies, they're veterans, and at that play threshold, absolute masters of mechanics they will never be.

Casuals aren't noobies that simply have yet to learn the mechanics, so it's a falsehood to believe that all the veterans of the game are bored of the game's current difficulty level. There are plenty of veterans in my boat and casuals too who are quite happy with the standard of play.

Appealing to casual players broadens a game's appeal. If this entire game was Nim-OP hard, you wouldn't see me here. You wouldn't see many people here. The game must cater to a level that makes it accessible to the greatest number of people, so yes, the make-me-crawl-through-glass people will be dissatisfied with the level of play.

 

So, in thread discussions such as this, recognize that the categories of players and play styles can and do overlap. You can't hold up a category like "veterans" and say they all demand harder play and this how every last freaking veteran in the game plays the game because they're veterans and the veterans all know how to run harder content.

That is garbage.

 

 

 

 

Edited May 16 by xordevoreaux

[denavin]

7 hours ago, xordevoreaux said:

Veteran < > mechanic mastery

There are people, for reasons other than mine, who are simply not interested in doing a deep dive in class mechanics, op mechanics, anything. They log in, they putz around, they get their story done because it's nice and easy, BOOM they're gone until another day.

They're called casuals, and they're not noobies, they're veterans, and at that play threshold, absolute masters of mechanics they will never be.

Casuals aren't noobies that simply have yet to learn the mechanics, so it's a falsehood to believe that all the veterans of the game are bored of the game's current difficulty level. There are plenty of veterans in my boat and casuals too who are quite happy with the standard of play.

Appealing to casual players broadens a game's appeal. If this entire game was Nim-OP hard, you wouldn't see me here. You wouldn't see many people here. The game must cater to a level that makes it accessible to the greatest number of people, so yes, the make-me-crawl-through-glass people will be dissatisfied with the level of play.

 

So, in thread discussions such as this, recognize that the categories of players and play styles can and do overlap. You can't hold up a category like "veterans" and say they all demand harder play and this how every last freaking veteran in the game plays the game because they're veterans and the veterans all know how to run harder content.

That is garbage.

 

 

 

 

I have to agree with this...

I play this game to have "FUN".
Not to increase my Blood Pressure or Stress Level.

As a casual player with only Green gear (since I am no longer allowed to have MAX gear), I feel it's hard enough just the way it is.

For the people that complain that the game is "Too Easy". I have noticed that they ALL use a Healer and have MAXed out gear with EVERY available MAXed Augment there is on them. Then they come here and complain that the game is too easy. Since MAX gear is no longer available to Casual players then this statement does not hold true.

They are wearing "RAID" gear and they complain that the STORY LINE missions are too EASY..... like DUH!

What is "EASY" for one player may be "HARD to Impossible" for another player, and as I said before catering to these players and making the game Extreme also makes it unappealing to players that just want to play the story without having to fight for their characters life in EVERY battle..

 

Being DEAD all the time is NOT FUN!

[Stradlin]

3 hours ago, denavin said:

I have to agree with this...

I play this game to have "FUN".
Not to increase my Blood Pressure or Stress Level.

As a casual player with only Green gear (since I am no longer allowed to have MAX gear), I feel it's hard enough just the way it is.

For the people that complain that the game is "Too Easy". I have noticed that they ALL use a Healer and have MAXed out gear with EVERY available MAXed Augment there is on them. Then they come here and complain that the game is too easy. Since MAX gear is no longer available to Casual players then this statement does not hold true.

They are wearing "RAID" gear and they complain that the STORY LINE missions are too EASY..... like DUH!

What is "EASY" for one player may be "HARD to Impossible" for another player, and as I said before catering to these players and making the game Extreme also makes it unappealing to players that just want to play the story without having to fight for their characters life in EVERY battle..

 

Being DEAD all the time is NOT FUN!

 

"Ok, class stories in this game are so easy it is ridiculous" does not equal  "I want Broadsword to turn this game into literal Dark Souls!" In general, there is bit of only sith deals in binaries - vibes here. You speak of being dead all the time, fighting for your life every battle, all that. Meanwhile, what people are saying is how it'd be nice if you'd have to pay some attention sometimes. Nobody is saying class stories should be turned into Dark Souls. 

 

Again, there is a hillariuous paradox of some kind here. Person whose body motorics and cognitive abilities are at  level that they can succesfully navigate from story npc to the instance where the fight is inevitably find  the actual fight quite  easy. So technically, there is a big accessibility disparity in here, Turning process of moving from Darth Baras to the correct instance in depths of Lord Grathan's manor fully automatic would be an accessibility function that'd  mesh well  with the curret combat difficulty.   Situation where the ultimate dark souls experience of navigating inside  the correct instance is paired  with fights as easy as they are now makes little sense.  In current setting, player faces obstackles of entirely different scale back to back. Something as  mundane as walking inside the right building is, by comparion, the demanding bit  while something that should be fairly epic,  like killing some sith lord or whommot is the trivial bit.

 

It'd be so nice  if occasional Sith Lord, Jedi Master or planet eating immortal god monster wouldn't fight and fall like a wet noodle all the time.  Like..how many fights there are in class stories that an NPC  companion can't solo? 

New players gets no opportunity to learn their class during the class story. No fight requires/ teaches you the  mechanics of anything.

 

Seriously, find 100  average 90 year olds  who have  never once  touched a computer in their life.  Subject them to two tests. First,  ask them to navigate from Darth  Baras to Lord Grathan's estate, with minimap quest icons and such helpers  active.

For second test,watch how they do with various boss fights  at any point in the class story. "Murder everybody in this room grannie!" I swear, second grannie field test would  have  like 100% success rate, while the first grannie field test  would be pulled off by like 0-25%  of grannies.

 

Edited May 17 by Stradlin

[supertimtaf]

16 hours ago, PlasmaJohn said:

And yet if you follow XIV's General Chat or reddit you'll see the same complaints by vets about their game being "too easy" and fail to teach rotations or mechanics

I'll be honest, I'm not saying that XIV is too easy or too hard. But when it comes to story content, at least they know how to make it right, and make difficulty engaging. At the end of their current expansion, you end up in a solo fight against a guy named Zenos. I can put a video link if that helps to see what I'm talking about.

The fight is not hard, but still, put any of these swtor casuals on it and they'll fail miserably because at no point did the game force them to learn that yes, aoes bad, dodge them and keep fighting. Again, if story casuals of XIV can get through it, I think that the fight isn't hard. Which is good. But it's still harder than anything you'll find on swtor.

I've done a few runs of Ruins of Nul recently, both veteran and master mode. And *every time* we reach the droid server boss, people are like "omg so many aoes this is hard ????"

Meanwhile all of the XIV casuals just laugh and clear the fight because this is *basic knowledge*. 

There is a skill gap on XIV, but the skill floor is nowhere as low as it is on swtor. And that's the issue.

Once again, if people can clear This while being casuals on XIV, probably means that XIV does a better job during the story to teach you about how to play than swtor does. You can't even say that the player in this video is better geared, his equipment got synced down for the fight.

That or maybe the swtor playerbase is by default missing a few neurons, but I mean, that'd be worrying from a health perspective. "This game is only played by dumb people" seems kinda unlikely, I think we can all agree on this.

 

[VilianSW]

At the time I was still playing FF14, it stressed me to no end - being forced to group up with people just to progress the story. It has changed, mind you, FF14 dungeons can be soloed now with comps, but back then it was huge pain and SWTOR story progress made me so relieved I ultimately chose it over FF14. Honestly neither game prepares the player for the other, they're entirely different beasts to casual like me. 
The difficulty threshold in SWTOR actually was past the class story. It's Oricon that makes you do two things if you really want to learn how the questline ends - you finally need to learn your interrupt for Bothrium Beast mission and you need to group up for ops. These were the lessons in mechanics that in FF14 would happen much sooner, would hit harder, but also would be so much better explained.
That said, these are two different games, with different approach to their players, and I don't think in comparison SWTOR players are dumber or lazier. We're often the same people, enjoying different things in different setups. 

[Pirana]

Leveling is trivial in every MMO I've played, whether it's GW2, ESO, FF14, WoW, even New World isn't hard. If people want to work on their rotations because mobs are dying too fast in the open world, hit up a target dummy on the Ziost Shadow on the Imp side or on the Gav Daragon on the Republic side, or run some FP's and use the opportunity when you get to a boss. Mechanics can be learned from reading guides or watching YT videos. 

When SWTOR first launched, the leveling process was much harder, and for whatever reason EAWare thought it was a good idea to tune it down and even altered mechanics such as the Jedi Knight boss fight near the end of the storyline, making it a near cake walk now compared to then. They also made the companions overpowered for awhile until they realized they buffed them too much and had to nerf them. Hit up the target dummies if mobs are dying too fast, work on rotations and your muscle memory, because it's not going to happen during the leveling process. 

[DWho]

The biggest problem is lack of new content to challenge players (people keep pointing to FF XIV but that game has had tons more new content added at the top end compared to SWTOR). There has been so little content in the game over the last several years that it is impossible to make the base game challenging at all for the massively overpowered characters that you have at max level to keep the end game players happy. In reality, there probably should not have been any significant gear increases since KoTFE/KoTET, then there might be some challenge left in the later game (and new content wouldn't need to be ridiculously over-tuned to suit that power level).

Quite simply, a lot of the content is "too easy" because players have abilities now that the the original content was never designed to handle. Walking around on the starter planets at level 80 with all your end game abilities available is most certainly going to trivialize the content. And lets be honest too, how many people are actually at a level appropriate for the planet they are on with all the leveling boosts (again something end game players wanted so they didn't have to deal with version 1.0 difficulty leveling their third or fourth character to end game level). Level Sync does nothing to make the content harder, it just makes it take longer. The only way to make the game more like "launch" would be to take away abilities that are not suitable for the planet the character is on and that would trigger massive "forum outrage". Just look at how bent out of shape people get when there is even a hint of them not getting max level gear from wiping out level 1 NPCs on the starter planets with their level 80 characters

It's less a problem that the game has been "dumbed down" and more an issue that the power level for end game characters has exceeded the content available for them to feel challenged.

[Pirana]

^ There are some truths in there, but make no mistake, the game was made slightly harder by pruning some of the abilities and skill tree choices actually mattering more now. The leveling process also doesn't grant you a plethora of abilities early on, which it did for years, launch no, but in the years following, players were granted a large array of their arsenal early on. The power creep, poorly designed level-sync and the game being made easier all play a part of the current game and its more casual approach.

If people want more difficult group content, play WoW's Mythic Plus, if people want more difficult open world content, play GW2's first two expansions, Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire, where if you're new, it's not a matter of if you'll die, but how often, and the HoT content had to be tuned down due to the difficulty after it launched. This game's difficulty is a shell of itself, and as little as they did to try and revert it over the years, it's still too easy and unlikely to change given the current status. 

[Toraak]

1 hour ago, DWho said:

 

It's less a problem that the game has been "dumbed down" and more an issue that the power level for end game characters has exceeded the content available for them to feel challenged.

While I'm sure this is true for some players, I wouldn't be surprised if there are many that are attempting HM/NiM Ops content that actually feel they need the extra boost to be able to do that content. Just like some of us think the Story content is easier then others, the same holds true for endgame. Some people are just more skilled then others.

 

Granted the biggest thing with such content is to master the mechanics.

[tsteenburg]

And there is an issue for some at the end of Consular and Knight stories since the final fights do have something approaching mechs, and if you fail to interrupt or avoid aoe or cones, you are going to die.  The ends of Inquisitor and Warrior stories are a joke because of the level-synch, although slightly harder than when the Korriban cap was 13. I remember doing a one shot on Darth Lard...

Edited May 17 by tsteenburg

[eabevella]

I died like three times when I first did the Consular last boss because nowhere in this game had taught me what "interrupt" is before the boss.

I wish there are tutorials made into story missions that teach new players utility skills like interrupt/break cc more than I want the class stories made more difficult. If I want difficulty, I'll just play marksman in nim raids.