Mild concern with endgame progression

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So I just want to take the community temperature on a concern I have with the rewards tuning for hard and expert raids.

To put it briefly, I’m worried that once hard and expert raids are out, there won’t be much other reason to play the game beyond a weekly raid run. This is primarily because hard and expert raid loot is at a level higher than shard loot.

It is comparatively far far easier to complete hard mode raids than it is to reach and complete a T10 shard, but hard raid loot is comparatively much better. So why bother with shards?

I think some people will argue that shards can help you get to where you’re ready for raiding, but for those of us who are ready for raiding, there isn’t much to do in terms of endgame content now aside from waiting for the weekly raid reset. Another counterargument may be that because you can only raid once per week, this will give players a reason to do shards in the interim, but if there’s no way for those shards to give you a (reasonably) useful reward, I don’t see any reason to do anything other than wait for raid reset.

I think shards are a really well designed system for keeping endgame players playing, since the scale of effort vs reward is perfectly tuned to an endgame situation. It’s also nice to have there be a way to progress in the endgame with 5 people.

My proposed solution is to bump up the rewards from shards so that a T7 or T8 shard matches the rewards from hard raids, and a T10 shard matches the rewards from expert. It will still probably be easier to complete an expert raid than a T10 shard, and a hard raid than a T8 shard, but having the shard system there as a backup gives players a lot of varied content to play while they wait for raid reset.

To be clear I’m not proposing this to try and get a straight up gear buff. I think that’s one of several solutions. I’m just worried that I won’t have a massive reason to play this game outside of raiding once I get a few pieces of hard mode gear.

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Such is the nature of many MMOs. It is no trivial task to gear up and practice enough that you are able to actually down the hard mode raids. Expert will be a significantly harder challenge yet. It’s really hard to make all the content in an MMO stay indefinitely relevant at the highest levels of play.

If you just kept buffing shard dungeons difficulty and resulting rewards, it seems like that would have a similar effect of making all other content obsolete. Shards play an important role in progression but if shards covered all levels of the game from fresh 20 to top tier raider, it would be a little overkill and kind of bland as mastering the same mechanics you did since you first hit level 20 would be your indefinite fate.

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I think this is a really interesting question, because it’s really difficult to balance all of these disparate elements: Difficulty, week lockouts, guaranteed dailies, need for 5 people vs 10 people, additional costs to run each type of content, time investment, rate of gain, gear appearance, content preferences, etc.

For me I think it’s largely a question of progression rates and accessibility.

We get about 3-5 luck drops per raid run, and 5 tokens each. Gear costs an average of 10 tokens each. (5+5+10+15+15)/5. So even in a good scenario, you are getting about 1 drop per week (Half an item from tokens, half an item from drops). Assuming you want magic and physical defense variants and have perfect luck with getting one of each with no duplicates that’s at least 9 weeks of raids (and likely closer to 15-20). With shard dungeons, you can get a guaranteed drop every single day, plus about a 25% chance of an additional drop, so on average 8.75 T10 drops per week if you can complete T10’s.

Normal raids get you T5 gear, Shard Dungeons get you T1-T10, and Hard Raids get you 10.2. Given that it’s a relatively narrow portion of the player base that can do hard mode raids, it becomes even more limited. Not to mention that extremely few (if any) payers have completely maxed out their gear in terms of max stats in T10’s in both sets of defense armor. Not to mention alternate classes, which does a x4 multiplier on everything potentially.

So given all of that, at this point in time, to me, it seems that there is currently a viable place in the end game for Shard Dungeons and both Normal and Hard mode raids.

That being said, I am curious how it plays out in general, as we went from doing our Tradu Guaranteed Dailies to only doing our Shard Runs to now prioritizing both tiers of raids (though we still run a significant number of shards for the time being), so who knows?

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This is not even close to being true. I found the hard mode raids to be quite a bit more difficult than high level shards. The high level shards also go quicker and give you gear faster. Only one Guild has completed all 5 bosses in hard mode while multiple guilds have completed a ton of t10s.

But you do make a good point, what is next.

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Well considering you need a decent amount of potions to get the hard mode raid done I would say that gives you at least more to do in between reset times. But even besides that I think alone having to get 10 players together to complete what is for sure the hardest content in the game I think gives the raid drops of 21.2 justification. Like stated getting all the gear at its highest rolls for all pieces will be quite difficult to complete with current raid drop rates and expected set completion based off the token system. Getting drops from the shards with current infusing system will actually still be worth doing for gear, even if its just for getting a bunch of pieces to be used for infusing. For endgame in any game I feel like its falls on min/maxing your gear, with the raid drops chances low and then the gear vendor also being random the chances of getting your gear perfect from that would be awful. I know the gear from the raid drops 106 (Im unsure if it can go any higher) which is 1 higher than perfect roles from T10’s but like I said the RNG from the raid drops would make that quite awhile to get 106 on all your highest gear.

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What they could do is lock people who haven’t completed a shard 10, out from hard modes all together. Then, change the drops in easy modes to a progressive system where you can get something like shard 4-8 gear as you progress through the bosses, perhaps with an interesting set bonus once you collect them all, which makes the gear even better.

This would create a visible progression path for new players which would allow them to have an easier time progressing through shards, without it being super grindy. Ideally a new player could be moving through easy mode raids at the same time as shards, getting helpful gear from both. This would also ensure that everyone doing hard modes would be wearing roughly the same tier of gear, which should make the dungeons/raids a little easier to fine tune.

You want people to actually do all the content, but you want it to feel rewarding the whole time too. If people are just grinding out the first couple bosses in easy modes until they have shard 5 gear, and then grinding out the first couple bosses in hard modes until they have shard 12 gear, it seems kinda lame for everyone involved.

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To the point of getting 2 sets of armor, they could also just remove physical/magical/vitality defense as extra stats on armor, merge it it into the natural piece of armor, rebalance encounters and do interesting things that are player-based with equipment like enchantment etc lol.

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They should also make it so that boss 3 and 4 drops 2 tokens each, and boss 5 drops 4 tokens.

Ultimately you cannot expect the devs to keep creating content for the small group of 20 or so players who are at end game. The point isn’t to keep creating filler content to string along that group of players because they are the only ones who matter.

I think the rest of this game could use a lot of polish and there’s plenty of content for new players, so focusing on the earlier parts of the game is better for the business and the majority of the community. Better than adding yet another tier of gear, or another tier of raids, or shard raids, or more shard tiers, is not the kind of content people actually want. Because even with these 20.2 and 20.4 tiers, as soon as the expansion comes out and level 21+ exists, gear gets out dated immediately. The devs are already really REALLY stretching it with the incremental 0.1 tiers of gear.

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Kind of a moot point when one has been out for less then a week and the other for months. Also shard dungeons can range willy in dificulty deoending in what shard u get and wich dungeon you do.

I never been a big fan of hard and elite raids,for me it fragment the small community we have into even tinier chunks. There’s enough elitism in this small community as is.

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I believe right now… People are leveling shards and getting shafted as soon as they get more difficult ones (crypt or forest for example).

Maybe adding a way to re-roll these shards (with some way to penalize as not to discourage attempts at harder shards) will change the apparent issue of gearing in relative speed.

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Just make a re-roll -1 to the level and be done with it.

Or accept your RNG and try to overcome the hard obstacle/challenge like it’s supposed to be anyway.

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