Hey Funcom,
since you changed the achievement system in a way that leveling gear can be detrimental to the user experience, could you please provide a way so one can destroy equipment and permanently reduce the “stored maximum IP” ?
I’d suggest a NPC in Agartha who unequips every item, clears the buyback list, resets all the “must be done at maximum elite level” achievements and then sets your stored maximum IP to 0.
Hmmmm? Wait what? Isn’t this almost like starting a new character? Why would anyone opt to destroy all there gear to be 0 IP again? You can’t possible be suggesting an IP reset without losing all your equipment because that would make most achievements trivial. Are achievements even hard at max IP? I know I did all the ne DA achievements at max IP quite easily. Achievements are meant to be challenging? Right?
I lol’ed. There’s already a way to do it: create a new account. It’s free. 
No, it isn’t. I don’t have it in me anymore to gather all the lore again or do the museum from scratch, collect the clothing from the events again and all that.
However, recreating a few talismans so I can have a good life at 1099 for the rest of my existence for the upcoming story seems still achieveable.
Sure, but you’re one of those KSR lamers. For the melee people, some things become increasingly more frustrating with higher elite levels. Not insurmountable I guess, but I have better things to do than waitng for several stars to align so that a thing isn’t an exercise in frustration.
I just want to make sure of something: are you saying you want to be able to grind content designed to make your IP go up while never actually making your IP go up?
Because that looks to me to be what you are asking for: doing DA at a lower IP than your current one so it’s easy. Except DA is there to make your IP go up.
Not to mention, story never had any kind of max IP check so far, and probably never will.
For starters most content that your refering to which well say is easiest to complete the achievements for with KSR currently will be balanced far better around all weapons post patch. I personally don’t see the option to delete gear in order to lower IP being very popular for most but that’s just opinion.
If I could suggest a better way of obtaining the same desired results I would suggest they could place an object like that which was used to activate master planner in TSW to activate achievements for a given IP level. So say you enter DA at E10 even though your E17 you could activate this item provided your current IP was at E10 or less. Increasing IP before finishing the DA run would remove the achievement buff.
This of course feels like a lot of design work for a team that’s currently mostly focused on fixing the tanking and healing meta at this time though.
It’s certainly one way to achieve the desired results, but I’m not sure if it should happen tbh. Part of the way that content like DA scales isn’t just about the amount of damage, but how complicated the fight is. So for example, you can go from the first boss having 2 active modules on e10, to 4 modules on e15+. Those additional modules can increase the difficulty significantly. Being able to reduce the difficulty level that you’re used to doing removes a certain amount of challenge from the achivements.
You can also then manipulate your ip so that you optimise your stats for that encounter. So if you knew you weren’t going to use aoe, you could remove your nemain, or your ultimate signet - or remove a second hit glyph to help reduce your ip. Technically you’d still be within the lower ip bracket, but you can often get quite a wide variety of gear levels inside an ip bracket.
For example, when I was going from e9 to e10, if I had all my gear as legendary lvl 1s, I’d have had worse stats that I did with my mythic talismans, but legendary weapons and glyphs.
It all gets very complicated and gameable if you allow players to downrank themselves.
Oh I totally agree. That was sorta the whole point I was trying to make. To implement it effectively would be complicated and resource consuming or perhaps straight up impossible if trying to avoid some gear manipulation to make the achievements easier but I assumed that would have to be allowable to make something like this even feasible. Personally I think the idea in general is unnessesary but of course I also think the idea of deleting gear to lower IP is even more strange.
no, assuming I could “restart IP” (won’t happen, I know), once I would reach my desired IP goal, I’d stop upgrading altogether, removing the need to run any of that repeatable content.
So then what’s even the point if you won’t run that content? Because it sounds like you want to be able to do that very content at the level you want, but then you say you don’t want to run it at all.
There are a bunch of achievements/etc. for running “hardest available content”, she just wants that to mean E10, not E17. For example the Tank Commander can only be run at the highest IP you’ve reached.
Personally I think DA achievements are the ones where I was capable of getting them at E12 when it was added, but now I’m E15 and I do less dps proportional to boss hp, and can’t (eg.) complete a run in 7 minutes or less. So I don’t have the achievements cause I leveled up too much before they got added.
I’m sorry, because I’ll be very blunt, but honestly I don’t see how else to say it:
Achievements are meant to be difficult, that’s why they’re achievements. Making them easier is not the point.
Now, I agree some cheevos are harder to get for some weapons compared to others (blood and boomstick come to mind). But there is a balance patch coming that should help with that.
While playing my alt, I found out that these “must be done at maximum elite level” achievements are much, much easier at E11 than they are at E17 (using almost the same melee setup).
So, instead of feeling punished by having leveled the gear (mostly before they introduced this type of achievements), I want to have fun again.
Feel free to call it “cheesing” or whatever, this is a game and not a sport, so I give a damn about the “challenge”. Hence, my ideal point would be the aforementioned “1099”, to have insurance against the “at least E10” clause.
I agree with you that you shouldn’t feel punished for choosing one setup over the other, especially since it ties into the whole unbalance currently going on.
But can I suggest you try the beta to see for yourself if things will get better after the patch, before bringing the idea up again? If only because things should change for the better, and maybe solve the issue without the need for something as drastic as what you’re proposing.
Seconded, as some things I couldn’t do before with the weapons and gear of my choice are definitely do-able now with a little build “wriggling”, and a fight I hated initially is actually now fun.
I don’t know why everyone is chiming in on this and some talking down to the OP. If the person doesn’t want to be 1752 anymore and this is their idea, and you think or know it won’t happen, what is the point in saying anything?
Not sure what to draw from your post.
I shared some of the misgivings and concerns of the OP initially, and that was alleviated by testing it out. All I want to do is encourage people to test, particularly people like @Svella who have been long term players in the Secret World with its ups and downs and versions.
Some interesting ways to look at the topic posted also (@Drenneth’s, for example) that might be ideas that the devs haven’t considered.
Sure, but you’re one of those KSR lamers.
I lol’ed; I guess you didn’t know Drenneth is quite a well-known blade user in the community.
Admittedly I did use KSR but there comes a point where you just give in. Sounds like blade is back on the menu after this patch though! Been really enjoying the mechanic and it performing nicely from what I’ve tested this far. Considering this isn’t even a DPS balance specifically I think the concerns about not completing achievements with IP requirement will be far less of an issue in the future.
I don’t know if it’s generally representative of the retuned E-levels, but it was easy to see her from the difficulty selection screen, so I looked at the Templar in Rogue Agent’s hp across the set of difficulties.
Current live E13 (what I run on my E15 character cause I can kill Rhys Delacroix in 2 buff phases most of the time) is halfway between E16 and E17 post balancing.
I might go back later in the week and check Rhys’s hp is on the same scale, but that obviously takes an extra 5 minutes of running around per level.
Only standout oddness here is E12 is too close to E11 and far from E13.
Other than that outlier making E12 better than its neighbors, every level above E10 gives you more xp per hp (meaning it’s now xp/time efficient to run the highest level, instead of best to run E9)
Maybe E12 is when you’re supposed to go from 5 crit 2 crit power 1 hit, to 5 crit 1 crit power 2 hit glyphs, so they wanted to compensate for that 15-20% decrease in dps?
Going off a spreadsheet source for the current live scaling, it is
E6 - 34.02%
E7 - 29.38%
E8 - 20.15%
E9 - 20.6%
E10 - 37.05%
So, smoothed out a bit there too, but less absolute change.