Dungeon difficulties - do they work as intended?

Secret World Legends General Discussion
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Hello guys,

I would like to open a topic on the Elite Dungeons and whether their design matches the reality in game.

Let me start by saying I’m a new (returning) player of TSW / Legends. I did not progress much with TSW back in the day, but I’ve successfully managed to complete all until Transylvania.

Now, I started doing dungeons in Egypt and found a serious design flaw there.
I will try to explain it with gear levels. You finally make it to:

E1 - you’re excited to start doing dungeons, until you realize 90% of your team is super over-geared. You’re the tank/healer, you die and they kill the boss without you. You realize you were never needed at all.
You get robbed of the fun of dungeons because old-timers keep doing E1 for whatever reason and stomp the content. You feel like doing Story mode with 5 people.
E2 - you finally made it to E2, hoping that this time, you’ll play with equally geared players and will be allowed to have fun. You queue and… 4 hours later you realize E2 is dead.
-> You go back to E1, extending the agony of farm by farming poorer E1 distillates and becoming part of the problem above.
E3 - I don’t know… I don’t think I’ll ever reach it. I suppose it will be as dead as E2.

One time I got the luxury of queuing for E2 3 times in a row… with the exact same team mates. It turned out it’s only 5 people in this game who were interested in doing E2.

Now, I know that you old timers will probably disagree with me, dissect my post and find hundreds of reasons why what I’m saying is not right, it’s better that way and what not.

From the perspective of a new player, who’s gotten Patron and is excited to poor some time and money into this dying MMO, however, I find very few reasons to enjoy dungeons the way they are designed.

With Legends we were robbed by the fun/excitement of loot, but now new players are also robbed by the exciting of challenge.

I’m not going to even mention that a 6 years old MMO has 8 dungeons (pardon, 5 in a elite rotation). Most MMOs have more at launch.

I realize that a lot of you will say that dungeons are not worth it, the community doesn’t like it or getting new content is better, but there will be NO new content, if new players don’t have a reason to stick around and pour some money into the endless number farm this game is turning into.

Not having a viable PvP distillates farm option is another piece of content we do not have the luxury of having.

My solution: Check the numbers of players you’ve got and what IP level they are.
Introduce fewer tiers of dungeons and make the rewards more meaningful. Give a reason to players to do the Elite # they are meant to be doing. Lock the lower tier for people who go above the requirement (allow them to still run it via private group if they wish). Make sure all dungeons tiers are populated and players do not feel the game is dying in front of their very eyes.

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but it’s only a story-driven ARPG that’s barely a year old :crazy_face:

Anyway, yes, I believe if you want to run dungeons with random people via the activity finder, the system is probably FUBAR at this point, because the population, their aims and ten brackets (not counting story) are not matching well.

Whether this is intended or not (by Funcom), I’m leaning toward “yes, sure”.

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This pretty much sums it up for every person who is doing the dungeon circuits - Yes.

THIS ^^^ too many tiers in a low pop game and you know what? Even with their odd stats that seem to neither make sense, rhyme nor reason from where they come from or how they are measured and when of how many folk do dungeons in any of the groupings - they still have us separated into 10 different tiers. When 5 would clearly suffice.

And i would hardly call it story driven when it’s not driven by the release of any story at all - it’s the same story as TSW - nothing new but SA in 1 year for so called story - in fact LESS story if truth be told.
While the people left behind holding it all together are like the glue in it’s very seams are the folk clamming for the other dungeons to come back, more group content, group scens, RP group capabilities, PVP and all in all just more content so it at least matches that of it’s much loved sister TSW. The cash shop is up and running and clearly is serving it’s purpose for those who are using it - what about the rest of the players and how are they being served? Where is this money going to?

I feel your frustration i really do.
FC would OFC say “Yes” - when it’s clear the answer to your question is “No” - It’s said many times throughout the day.

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Okay, maybe I am missing something but how does Story generate money?

Players come, beat the story and leave without spending a single dime.

The players who pay are the players that level up gear, progress and actually engage in dungeons, lairs, scenarios and raids.

Patron is geared towards those people (with benefits giving keys, faster mission grind etc).
It’s not geared towards story.

Story is a great way to attract people, but they need to focus on player retention and refining gameplay is the way to do that.

Gameplay generates Funcom money, not story.

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Given the alternative would be admitting they did not actually think the elites system through, I’m sure Funcom will insist it’s working as intended.

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What they admit or do not is irrelevent.

If gameplay is not designed well, people will not stay and not pay -> killing the IP.

So they can either use the community to help them fix and balance game breaking matters like this or like many old timers, they can stick their heads in the sand, keeping telling people to run chat LFG groups or use private groups and pretend like there is no issue.

I’ve heard that they listen to feedback and I would understand if they say “we dont have resources to do that, but we will try to do something about it”.

Usually when higher ups want a certain thing, they might be missing important information.
Somebody has to fight the fight and make sure Funcom higher ups know why this game isn’t as profitable as it can be.

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As long as Funcom doesn’t admit there’s issues, your fight is pointless. So admittance it is pretty relevant, actually.

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I don’t have a fight, neither I own SWL or Funcom.

All I am offering is my input on the game’s issues.

I am sure there are people in Funcom whose’s jobs depend on SWL’s success. It’s their fight to fight, not ours.

Turning a blind eye to fundamental issues like this one will not help them with player retention.
People do not care about resources or excuses.
They either like what they see or they leave for something better.

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The issue of wildly overgeared players in E1 (and sometimes E2 but not as often) is one of the reasons I don’t play SWL nearly as much as I used to.

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We have too many Dungeon tiers and some adjustments could be made. If we took tiers 1, 3, 5, 7, 8 or 9 and making 10 a final challenge it could help. I also think there should be a cut off below Tier 5 for Q’ing so those still learning get the opportunity since a high lvl IP can cause issues for the team. Once you pass a Tier 5 dungeon it should lock you out below it unless you privately Q for it.

I know it’s been said over and over already but it would be nice to see the missing Dungeons and Raids added, we need a boost to the player population. It would also be nice to hear some information of if/when we can expect any new updates on content in the future. We’ve worked past this relaunch but we have less content then before and it’s very disheartening.

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We have one more lair and a whole Zone that didn’t exist in TSW.

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Sure. But overall far less repeatable content then existed in TSW

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SWL has two fewer dungeons, two fewer raids, and three fewer end game dungeons. (Also three fewer PvP zones >_>)

That it has new stuff TSW didn’t is fantastic, but it’s hard to argue that it actually has more content than TSW. It has a continuation of story line and a progress to add to that, so eventually it will become easier to say it has more content.

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More than that. HF, Fac, and SH can’t be counted as they only exist in Story Mode. MFA & MFB certainly, but also Penthouse is a mini-dungeon that was quite fun until everybody outgeared it. So that’s six fewer or if you really want to be picky, five and a half fewer.

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HF, Fac, and SH are the “three end game” dungeons. Admittedly, I forgot about Penthouse, though I can’t imagine how that would work without AEGIS.

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I’m sure they can figure it out. Besides, It should never have been removed in the first place.

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What? AEGIS?

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Give us AEGIS towers to use on UTA - then we won’t need AEGIS on our gear to grind, just use the correct tower at the correct time to disable the correct shield.

Just like what was shown to us during the AEGIS testing of The Orochi Tower.

It’s that - simple.

This avoids the need to grind any AEGIS at all but brings back instantly the reason for the filth having evolved as such posted below by Markel (we posted the same time) and brings back the possible use of it in places such as MF/A/B and also would bring back that missing story content as described in another thread.

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Mechanics cut from the old game.

You learn at the beginning of Tokyo that the Filth is evolving. They were gaining protective shields, and you could encounter them in one of three flavors:

  1. red / demonic - usually found on Oni-type mobs
  2. blue / cybernetic - usually found on Corrupted Orochi Tech mobs
  3. purple / psychic - usually found on Ghost-type mobs

And some mobs could have double shields.

To damage the shields, you needed to swap to matching controllers on your weapons. Your main hand and off hand could be different colors. Eventually, you gained an AEGIS shield of your own (when you met man-in-a-bunny-suit).

AEGIS was scrapped in SWL because most people found it too obtuse. And initially, it was. It was grindy and in the introductory mission to AEGIS weaponry, you were only awarded with three weapon controllers (one each). Eventually you wanted one of each color for your main hand and off hand. So six controllers all together. Later, the grind was cut down and they gave you all six controllers for the intro mission.

After the nerfs, AEGIS really was little more than a speed bump and easily ignored with mods that auto-swapped your AEGIS colors. AEGIS shields did add some interesting mechanics to the Manufactory dungeons, but it was mostly a thing to keep overgeared players from burning through boss mechanics.

EDIT: [rant] A lot of people also complained about the difficulty of Kaidan. IMO, they were going through Transylvania with crap builds. So by the time they got to Tokyo, of course, they were getting kicked in the teeth. So, AEGIS forced people to pay attention to builds and gear. You needed to be properly glyphed, no more slotting whatever random evade glyph you picked off the ground. No random “RP” builds unless you already knew what you were doing. I remember setting some people straight with proper builds and even full sets of gear and telling them to use auto-swap. After that, AEGIS suddenly became a non-issue and they could actually finish Kaidan by themselves. But none of this was really intuitive to the casual player… which is why it was cut. [/rant]

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When we got the Venice issue and we had the scenarios, it was told to us by the voiceover as we entered the program that this was to prepare us for Tokyo. (I think, it could have just said for field work with the council of Venice - or both)
I made my build for surviving Scenarios, i had 3 impairs, dashes and enough dmg to kill and the correct glyphing to survive. I gained all 3 achievements for the solo NM activities of the scenarios (amongst all the other duo and groups ones also)

This was the exact same build i used in tokyo and boy - what a difference compared to what i had for anywhere else in the game.