SWTOR Nightmare Mode
Posted 05/04/12 at 12:46 PM by zeidrich
As my powertech, I reached level 25 on Balmorra by the time I finished the quests there. I still had to go through Nar Shadda and Tattooine before I would even begin to see monsters my level. I decided to try not doing any planetary storylines, and focus instead solely on class storylines. Additionally, I shoved all of my fancy gear into the cargo hold and dropped down to green quality items, and whites where I had no greens.
From there, I was going to just do class quests, and grind for exp and items. Obviously I quickly caught up to my level in mobs, but surprisingly, once I did get to that point, it wasn't horrible to continue. Obviously it was more of a chore than questing, but it gave a pretty different feel to the game.
There's obviously some failings to playing this way though since the game wasn't designed to be played like this.
My conclusion is that there's fun in the leveling game that gets eclipsed over by over abundant and over rewarding mission content. I understand that most players don't like grinding and would consider it strictly a failure if it were necessary to level. But I think the balance has shifted too far away from monster killing to questing.
It's not particularly radical change, it's just pacing and balance. Make it so that doing missions doesn't overlevel you, reward you for doing higher level missions, and make item drops more interesting by stopping the flood of specially tailored mission rewards.
From there, I was going to just do class quests, and grind for exp and items. Obviously I quickly caught up to my level in mobs, but surprisingly, once I did get to that point, it wasn't horrible to continue. Obviously it was more of a chore than questing, but it gave a pretty different feel to the game.
- My ability to kill higher level monsters is important now. Previously everything was trivial, but now being able to take on monsters a few levels higher than me means I can hang out in a higher exp-granting area, and complete higher level quests, letting me level more quickly.
- Item drops become exciting. I look forward to seeing a green beam on a corpse, because my only item acquisition path is through mob drops now. Not only are the drops potentially upgrades because I'm fighting at my own level and don't have a bunch of blues and oranges from commendations and quests, they also factor in to my ability to progress. Better items mean I kill faster, which means I level faster, since leveling is tied almost solely to my combat effectiveness.
- I learn my class intimately. Playing my overleveled shield tech powertech, I just did whatever. If it was a group I would use death from above, but otherwise it was just whatever. I'd often cycle between rapid shots and flame burst, maybe I'd use unload, I would rocket punch if I was in melee. Things would die and I would move on.
Playing against challenging opponents my rotation tightened up a LOT. Death from Above is great, but reserved for packs where I can get 3 opponents to stay in it's area for duration, otherwise I keep explosive probe on cooldown and use Flame Thrower if I can hit at least 2 targets with it. For individual mobs or when the AoE is on cooldown, Rocket Punch is top priority since it hits hard, crits often, and always triggers ion gas cylinder, and I'm very tuned in to the sound that is played when I shield an attack to be ready to switch to it again since the shielding resets it's cooldown. After rocket punch, I use Rail Shot, just because rail shot is marginally better than flame burst and has a chance to trigger ion gas cylinder. Additional cooldowns are spent using rapid shots if I am higher than 15 heat, and flame burst otherwise. If a fight is close, I will use flame burst instead of rapid shots as long as I end the fight before I overheat. The particulars of my rotation are unimportant, but the fact is I've spent time refining it because it's helped me play better, while playing in a standard fashion it was totally irrelevant for the most part.
- Credits are actually pretty meaningful. Avoiding death is important because repair bills are a burden. Getting my speeder and paying for skills is tricky. You learn things like elite monsters are really credit pinatas. All of this is marginalized when you are playing properly because while elites might give good money, missions give way more. At my level, a regular mob pack of 3 mobs might give 100 credits worth of grey drops, probably closer to 60 on average. An elite is going to give a guaranteed 250-350 straight credits, plus a grey or something maybe. A class quest will often give me 2000+ credits.
- Stims, medpacks, companion choice is also quite meaningful. This is just because I'm up against challenging content rather than trivial content so any edge is a useful edge. Remembering to buff myself and maybe use a fortitude stim will give me an additional 11% health. If I'm against something that's a close fight otherwise, that will turn it into a sure win.
There's obviously some failings to playing this way though since the game wasn't designed to be played like this.
- Pacing is wrong. There are some multi-level jumps between class quests whose gap needs to be filled, and grinding exp with no rested pool for more than about 2 levels gets a bit stale, even for someone as odd as I am.
- Drops are too rare. It's funny, playing "normally" I felt green drops were almost too frequent because they kept filling up my inventory, but that's because I never actually wanted them, and just kept them around in my inventory. I was also conflating greens from quests and greens from drops. My inventory was probably filled with greens from quests that I didn't yet sell, but when I got it from a drop I just kind of attributed all the greens in my inventory from drops. Ultimately I probably only have been getting 1-2 useful green drops per level.
- You miss out on story. This is obvious, but sometimes it would be nice to break up the monotony, however, as soon as I start doing quests again, I'll start getting gear that makes drops less interesting, I'll start getting enough cash to not be struggling to avoid repairs. I could just do one here or there and that would probably be fine, but when do you stop? I made a decision to just do class quests because that's the bare minimum. Maybe later I will try class quests and main planetary storyline but no sidequests.
My conclusion is that there's fun in the leveling game that gets eclipsed over by over abundant and over rewarding mission content. I understand that most players don't like grinding and would consider it strictly a failure if it were necessary to level. But I think the balance has shifted too far away from monster killing to questing.
- It's too easy to overpower content through general mission experience. This is a pacing failure just like skipping all missions is. I think the balance lives between the two points. I don't know how to fix it really though, lowering mission exp would be a naive way to do it, but a lot of the exp from a mission also comes from mob kills. The honest issue is that you end up doing a lot of grinding in your missions to start with. The difference between missions and strict grinding is that you're incentivized to stick around and finish missions in a trivial area, while when grinding you're incentivized to move to the most challenging area you can ASAP. You feel like you've missed something when you don't complete all the missions in an area, you don't feel the same way when you've only killed 500 sand people.
I think a better solution would be to far more harshly drop off experience for green quests. The game feels like it plays best when a monster is +/- 2 levels of you. It gets challenging when it's more than 2 levels ahead of you. If you greatly discounted experience, (Like probably drop it to 1/5th, I think right now it's about 1/2 or 2/3) when something was lower than 2 levels below you, and even better I think if you granted bonus when a monster or mission is more than 2 levels ahead of you (maybe x2) you would push people to attempt to do content that's challenging (making them more invested in understanding the game).
Ultimately what that would do would be that players who just want to play the game normally (kind of lazy questing, normal shit) would not notice much difference. Players who are OCD about doing all the quests would be able to, but would not end up way over the target level for the next area when they move on. Players who are interested can try and level as fast as possible by doing +3 missions. This would also give some value to shit like the inheritance and birthright items, because having a great weapon for a few levels might mean you can do some overleveled content and get a nice leveling speed boost, as opposed to just doing all the same missions at all the same rate with all the same travel time.
- Items are boring. More specifically, you get too much perfect shit from missions. Too many class-relevant (though only green quality) items come from missions that dropped items are uninteresting. I think the best solution here is to take a more diablo style loot system for the leveling game. Missions can give credits, random roll boxes, or companion gear, but shouldn't give items that directly compete with dropped items except in rare circumstances.
It's not particularly radical change, it's just pacing and balance. Make it so that doing missions doesn't overlevel you, reward you for doing higher level missions, and make item drops more interesting by stopping the flood of specially tailored mission rewards.
Total Comments 0
Comments
Total Trackbacks 0
Trackbacks
Recent Blog Entries by zeidrich
- SWTOR Nightmare Mode (05/04/12)
- Final Fantasy 1 (03/28/12)
- Forgetting the past in games? (Or 5-year-old review) (12/02/10)
- Random thoughts on the progression of complexity since vanilla wow. (08/21/10)
