So, how do I go test it? Because if they’re scaling based on DumbOx’s ability, maybe that’s not the best test.
Looks interesting, at least.
I look at it from a different perspective. While progressing through the Elite tiers in Seek and Preserve, did you ever encounter a situation where the tier you were playing was too easy but the next tier was too hard to finish reliably? Or were you ever frustrated that you didn’t have the Item Power to advance to a higher tier but your build was more than capable of handling it? And then there are those who have long ago acquired gear that surpasses the Item Power of Elite 10 who breeze through scenarios with no challenge whatsoever to keep them engaged long enough to grind out their glyph XP. Occult Defence gives players the opportunity to give the next wave a chance and test the limits of their gear, build, and skill with incentive for better rewards and no harsh penalty for failure.
During the first phase of testing, I played a duo scenario with a partner where we finished Waves 9 through 18, the difficulties for which are scaled for Elite 5 up to Elite 9, wearing gear intended for Elite 6. It’s liberating to discover how far we can press on without being artificially limited by Item Power. Everyone is given a choice for how long they want to endure and how much effort they want to invest in a scenario.
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No I don’t believe any on the scaling would have been based on any one persons performance or ability in the beta. There’s perhaps a model that they would have tweaked the numbers on here and there based on data collected but that’s about it. Also testing is not at all like the good old days you gotta wait for that special call now 
You indeed have to get invited for a testing. Otherwise you can not test it before it’s live.
I can assure you however that tuning is not made based on ”one player’s skills”, but with a feedback of multiple betatesters who ranges from super casual players to the ”min-maxers”.
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I’m guessing you can still get rewards even if the scenario lags you out or crashes.
If so I favour this as an improvement over current scenarios.
Well like I said, it’s several linear parts at different slopes. The best fit over the entire thing is still an exponential curve.
Personally I cleared every scenario tier as soon as I hit the IP without even speccing into healing, hammer dps was excessive enough. So being able to ramp up to arbitrary higher levels is nice. I’m not quite as fond of it being timed spawns still though. That format makes it a very sharp cutoff of “you survive” to “you fail” when you go from 101% of necessary dps to 99%.
Also don’t really like the mob to boss hp proportions, same as scenarios - the bosses become hard at a much lower level than regular mobs and I don’t find that fun. The new scaling mission bosses are only possible cause their damage is way detuned compared to scenario bosses.
From my experience, the bosses in Occult Defence rarely posed much of a threat, unlike in Seek and Preserve. The one time I recall having difficulty was with a vampire boss who cast Lord of Reins (Is that the right name?) while a Strange Attractor Mutator was still on the field, who was pulling me into the AoEs that provide a significant leech heal to the boss every time I took damage from them. I quickly learned to stay nearby to the stones for cover to prevent being pulled into the damage fields. Even in this situation, it merely extended the time it took me to clear the wave.
To be brutally honest; this looks horrible. I dislike the whole idea behind it and this isn’t going to get me to play.
Story. That’s what I want. Not wave after wave of trash mobs. And I won’t even get started about ‘challenging content’, because I’m totally not that kind of player; I like stuff as easy as possible.
Tbh, if that’s what you want (and you’re not alone in that), then no scenario type is ever going to really appeal to you. Just as people who only wanted more scenario types or dungeons didn’t feel awed by the release of South Africa. It’s pretty much impossible to make everyone happy with every release /shrug.
Hopefully we’ll be seeing more story content soon, I’m looking forward to the next zone!
The bottom line is that story content is not very sustainable. No one will ever deny that it is this games strongest feature but what is the return for investment? A story release much like SA takes a good amount of time well say 3-4 months for the sake of numbers. Even for the most hardcore story lovers out there that look into every detail that’s maybe a week of story based gameplay and then your gone. Or a day for those that like the story but really just want to enjoy it at face value. I think what you’ll see going forward is a cycle of story/repetitive challenging content. The repetitive challenging content keeps the general playerbase engaged long term and amounts to more players spending money and funding the development of the content you are interested in. I know probably none of that matters to you and your just interested in getting what you enjoy out of the game which is a fair call but it is part of a larger picture, unfortunately free story content doesn’t really make Funcom a lot of money.
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There’s ways to give story content more replayability. Unfortunately Funcom hasn’t really done much with those options. SA had a little bit of replayability, but for me personally it didn’t; I didn’t like the look of the clothing sets, I didn’t care for any of buyable rewards. If there’s stuff that piques my interest I’ll happily grind for it, but unfortunately (for me) SWL has been on quite a ‘silly’ and/or ‘supernatural’ streak when it comes to their clothing designs. I like my stuff more normal. Rooted in reality. I’m never, ever, ever going to walk around dressed like a bug, or a mummy, or some weird spaceage person lost in time.
I guess I’m just salty because of the decisions made with regards to the direction of SWL’s content since it launched. The only thing that’s still worth a damn to me is the story.
To be honest, I think this IP would be better as a single player RPG. Maybe even an episodic SPRPG. It being an mmorpg doesn’t add any value to the IP and its setting.