During the Funcom live-stream announcement and explanations @den can be heard saying something to the affect that the challenges can be completed automatically during the average player’s normal play and therefor would not require much if any extra grinding.
After looking at the battle pass and playing it for a few days it dawned on me that this is just about mathematically impossible! The challenges reset daily and almost all of the ones presented there are nothing I nor most level 60 players do during the normal course of play - as Dennis suggested. One might… maybe even two, but certainly not all six of them.
It might be feasible for that to be at least possible if all of the challenges were live from the start to the end of each battle pass. So in the current UI that would be what, 6x60 challenge icons on screen at one time with no expirations? If that were the case then yes, there would at least be a possibility an extremely unlikely possibility, of completing them just by playing normally as Dennis said.
What’s up with that? Anyone? Am I missing something here?
If you half-finish a challenge, when it next returns to rotation, it remembers your previous progress. So if you have a “kill 10 bears” challenge, and on your way somewhere you kill only three, and you get the “kill 10 bears” challenge next week, you already have three kills banked. So the challenges will auto-complete eventually.
Of course, if you want to optimize a little, you at least pay attention to which challenges have a 10x multiplier each day, so you don’t accidentally miss an easily completable challenge.
True. But not if it’s not displayed. You can’t kill 10 bears with that challenge not in the queue (on screen) and when it does come up it’s immediately marked as completed. And you would need that behavior for it to even be possible - without consciously checking and doing the challenges.
There are 60 levels needed to complete a battle pass, right? It takes 4 to 6 challenges to bump it one level, correct? The battle pass expires in 90 days I think. And I’m not sure what happens if you bought it on day 60 of the season. But anyway, assuming you have the full 90 days and the average person plays two days a week for 2 or 3 hours a day they will be spending almost 100% of their time intentionally focusing on and doing nothing but, the battle pass challenges in order to complete it. Even if the player plays 7 days a week they are going to have to spend time just focusing on challenge completion.
That is a little different from “you can complete the battle pass just by playing normally”.
And this is especially true for an established level 60 player. Why would I kill bears or elk for example? Why would I skin or butcher animals when I already have two full chests of leather and thick leather each already processed through the tanner’s bench and at least 8 large ice boxes of premium meats? etc. etc.
By listening to the live stream I thought the challenges were going to be something kinda fun and that one might do in the typical day to day:
Climb 20m without falling.
Change your armor.
Slide 20 meters down a cliff face continuously.
Win three fights of any kind in a row.
Win a fight without taking any damage.
Ride a horse 1000m without stopping.
Get more than three enemies to chase you without taking any damage.
Or challenges which tutorialized the new sorcery mechanics - building the benches and casting the spells.
or that promoted exploration and discovery - entering the various dungeons and caves, aggroing such and such a boss or visiting some of the various merchant sites and NPC camps.
I didn’t really expect repetition like:
butcher 10 corpses.
skin 10 animals.
harvest 10 trees.
harvest 10 black ice.
harvest 10 rocks.
kill 10 tigers.
cut 20 flowers.
kill 10 prey animals
Really???
It would be a different story if we were told all this in advance. But expecting something based on what the live stream and, well… Hmmm… A tad disappointing is all,
Depends which ones, and most of all it depends if you have the multiplier. It takes 34 completions of a ‘30xp’ challenge with no multiplier to gain a level, whereas a 150xp one at 10x gives one and a half levels on its own.
But I also doubt that you’d get very far just ‘playing normally’.
Depends on what “playing normally” means. I’m still in the process of establishing myself in the Exiled Lands with a new character, so harvesting challenges etc. are what I do “normally”. Praying at Telith’s Island or completing the Well of Skelos dungeon are not.
So yeah, if you’re not aware of what the challenges are, chances are you won’t accidentally complete enough of them to complete a Battle Pass. But based on my experiences so far (your mileage may vary, of course) one doesn’t need to go terribly out of their way in order to complete enough of them. Kill a dragon for 700 BP exp? Do I feel like killing a dragon? If not, reroll. 1500 exp for completing the Well of Skelos? Can I do it with my noob character at this point?
But yeah, I understand how an established, max level character who already has everything doesn’t need to go do anything that would be included in those challenges. But that’s true for all game content. What do you do when you’ve already done everything? Except what I did, and restart the game. One saving grace has been sorcery, which requires at least some materials we don’t have stored in our boxes for endless amounts.
I know, I restarted just prior to 3.0, but even then I don’t think any meaningful progress on the BP could be made without dedicating time to it. I’m not saying it should completely auto-complete of course, but my guess/feeling is that it takes a concentrated effort currently. It’s possible if one plays an hour every day they can complete it - but you can’t do it by playing, say, 4 hours twice a week.
I’m pretty fast as players go and I get about one level per 45min if I do so by completing 4 to 6 of the easy to medium ones with the exp multipliers. 60 levels, that’s 45 hours, over 90 days, that’s 30min every single day for the entire 90 day run. If the player played only two days a week that’s a total of 26 days over the season. That’s almost an hour and 45min every single day that he plays in order to complete the pass - assuming the player takes a break - we can call it 2 hours even. And that’s two hours of mind numbing repetitive busy work often the same things he had to do on the previous day. Now assume that the average player only plays 2 or 3 hours for each of these two days a week… That’s nearly his entire game time used up on that pass. Are my numbers wrong here?
Well yeah but you probably either used admin powers or hyper-focused on it, right? Neither is wrong, but they don’t constitute ‘playing normally’ either.
Yeah, if my estimates are right and its 30 or 40 hours to complete the BP then 10 or 12 hours a day would do it in three days - or does the XP boost not work like that? But I think only very few people play like that. I also think almost all the ones who do are here in the forums too.
Not sure why I’m seeing people talk about paying attention to which challenges get x10 exp multipliers.
That’s not how they work. You get five x10 multipliers a day and they apply to the first 5 you turn in so you CHOOSE which ones get it by completing them.
On top of this they carry over to the next day if you don’t use them so you can ignore challenges or not play a few days and not lose them.
I was ignoring them most of the week and had 20 of them saved up then spent 2 hours yesterday burning through them doing only rare or legendary tasks and went up 15 BP lvls in that 2 hours that way on an official server.
You get five boosted challenges per day - typically one or two high-xp ones (epic or legendary), and three low-xp ones. The boost lives through rerolls for any incomplete challenges, and you can bank some of the multipliers from one day to the next - I’m not sure about the exact workings regarding carrying multipliers forward.
So on average you get maybe 2 levels’ worth per day - IF you make sure to complete challenges every day.
Which is not difficult if you CAN play every day, maybe every other day. But you still need to actively work the BP to
manage that, only a little of it comes from just doing what you normally do, and some of the legendary challenges especially can take a while to complete (unless one ‘cheats’).
The main thing is that the challenge needs to be active for progress on it to happen - so even if most of the challenges are things you’ll do sooner or later, odds are you’ll do them at a time they weren’t active, so no credit for you!
I am reserving judgment on how viable completing the BP is in general, but my guess so far is that if the goal was for it to happen naturally, it fails.
Only if you bank them. If you do the challenges every day, next they apply to your five active ones - some of which will invariably be low-xp ones.
Interesting. I have been mostly doing mine so haven’t had much opportunity to bank any. But it appears to be way more efficient to bank a bunch and then only do the epic or legendary ones. That does change things in so far as ‘catching up’, which is good.
Singleplayer
Admin Mode
Slomo 4
I even created a mod that changes the Khari War Axe damage to 50000, to be able to oneshot bosses. But the same can be achieved with server settings.
And then rinse and repeat the 70 XP or 150 XP challenges.
I believe at one point they mentioned you can save them for 4 or 5 days before they cap?
This would mean 20 or 25 would be the cap for saved multipliers.
I make only x10 challenges and got lvl 20 by now. Can’t think of making 20-30 x1 challenges to get 1 more lvl.