Occult Glance Rate v Reward

I’m unsure if this is intended or not, but the glance rates for occult are 1 elite-level higher than the granted rewards for odd levels; ie.

  • glance-rate = same as elite- (wave + 1) / 2
  • reward = same as elite- wave/2

This wasn’t really noticeable to me until I started doing E9 and E10 (waves 19 and 21 respectively). Wave 19 has a glance rate identical to E10 dungeons and old-scenarios, but only gives E9 rewards. Wave 21 has a glace rate higher than E10 (which I’m assuming corresponds to whatever E11 would have been), but only gives E10 rewards.

It’s very easy to test and reproduce. Parse your results on any occult high enough for your character to glance. Add the parsed glance rate to your character sheet glance rate and lookup the elite-level for that glance-rate here: https://tinyurl.com/Gearycraft (upgrading tab). Same thing with rewards.

You’ll notice glance rate and reward don’t match for odd levels.

Loot is equal to final wave / 2 rounded down, eg doing 19+20 yields E10 loot while also requiring E10 level glance reduction. If you consider each OD elite level to consist of two waves this makes sense. Doing only 19 means you failed E10, and receive e9 rewards.

Negative. Doing only 19 means I succeeded at 19/E9 at got E9 rewards. There’s no expectation of doing 19+20. In fact, considering the reward scheme, you are outright punished for doing more than a single wave at a time: N x singles yields FAR more distil xp than N x consecutive.

It doesn’t make sense to label waves by their glance. Most people don’t parse and wouldn’t know 19 had glance for E10, but everyone can see the rewards match E9, thus 19 is E9.

If I head out shopping and return with a moped, you don’t call that “failing at shopping for a car”. It’s called “buying a moped”. Same thing for other endeavors. If you do something with a known result and obtain that result, that’s success and what you actually got is what everyone will use as a determiner for what you did.

IMHO, reward and glance should always match.

The main reason for doing multiple waves is that a single wave doesn’t give a weapon/talisman distill drop.

I see your point here, but there are dungeons for those. Most people do scenarios for glyph distillates and doing 1 wave is the most efficient way to farm those (if you are not very short on MoFs). The signet dist is a nice freebie over glyph distillates.

Once you start on Legendary items, you’ll see the need to follow strict xp/time. It takes 30~40 days to level ONE legendary glyph from L1 to L20, assuming 8x single wave 17~21 repeats per day. Double waves earn 2/3 the xp of 2x single waves.

There are 9 glyphs for 9 months of nothing but solo occult and some side missions if you want to cap your glyphs in the most time efficient manner … or 6 months to cap the vital glyphs (hit & 5x crit). That’s a LOT of occult that I definitely do NOT want to double for less xp, nor do I want to glance @ E11 rates when the reward is only E10.

Once you hit IP 1000, you can rather easily do one red level/day if you just use your keys and do your set of challenges along the way. 36% of a level from doing a set of faction missions (twice or thrice on weekend days), another 36% from doing three S&D scenarios (because they are much more relaxing than OD and you’ll want that 100 E10 scenario achievement anyway), plus empowerment crits and whatever you get from dungeons and lairs/regionals.

On top of that, you can use your daily 12k MoF for whatever activity you like.

Glyph xp is by far the easiest to come by.

I’m already using Legendary items, and I can see the option to go for the optimal grind path, yes.
However, as I often don’t have the game time to run dungeons, I find it useful to be able to pick up weapon and tali distills too. I’m fully aware that the path I’m following is not the fastest, but I’m having fun, so meh. /shrug
I could grind my glyphs harder and faster, but I’m quite content to play according to my own personal needs. I’m not alone in that.

This has diverged from the initial bug report, but to continue the segue – ya, as long as you’re having fun, I won’t knock it. The best MMO player is the one that shares their fun with the game – makes everything nicer.

The points that stick for me is that there is some expectation of doing extra waves and that somehow makes it OK that the glance rate doesn’t match the granted rewards for odd levels.

BTW, what Svella outlined would take me 8~12H versus the 90~120m I spend doing 8x occult + 8 sides. I’d LOVE it if I could log on, hit the queue and instantly run dungeons and burn all my keys. The reality is more than 2H in queue for one dungeon – never pops, so no point in trying. I can’t handle the ratio of “trying to do stuff in a group” versus “actually grouping” that this game imposes.

Honestly, occult saved the game for me. I was about to punt it because S&P was so absurdly boring, time-consuming, easy, and unrewarding. Once I cap my hit glyph, I’ll have to decide again if I want to continue or punt it. I’ll likely keep going at least a little bit into critical glyphs, but unless truly drastic changes are made to promote grouping, I’ll leave for a game that VERY strongly incentivizes and supports grouping over solo.

Things such as shared bank (so I can join a cabal), wider chat (so I can hear about groups while in a solo instance), queuing for group while doing solo instances, and 2x+ the xp rate of what’s possible solo – ie. things that I’m certain FC will never do. Fast lively PvP is something I miss, too (another non-solo MMO activity).

I agree about the bank space per character being pitifully small, but to be fair, there are plenty of custom channels to hear about groups already - if you’re not in a cabal then that’ll reduce the number of callouts you hear for sure. Personally, I use alts for bank space, and have a spare free account to allow myself to trade between them without needing someone else acting as a mule.
In terms of xp rate being double that of solo play, isn’t that already achieved via dungeons? Yes, it can be a real pita getting a group at some times, but the rewards from running them are better by far than simply soloing.
Queuing for groups when in a solo instance would be nice, specially as it can be a really long queue.

On paper that looks like a really trivial™ thing to fix. The group finder already allows you to stay signed up for Shambala while doing dungeons or scenarios.

AKA probably an utter nightmare irl :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s not the size so much as the lack of intercharacter item & mof transfer for alts. Most of my space is taken by golem drops for museum atm. I could burn them up, but the museum UI is so painful, I’d have to be crazy bored to actually bother with it.

This one I’m not so sure about; the only globals that I know of are “event” and “sanctuary”. LFG and MB announces almost never use those. Are there others?

Occult = 12K xp in 5m or 2400/m. Using gearycraft’s table, best typical xp/min for a dungeon is from E9 repeats @ ~2200/m. More anecdotally, chatting on sanctuary, I hear a great many people say they’ve also given up on dungeons and haven’t run one in months. That implies the reward isn’t enough to motivate people to try and overcome the huge (mostly UI) barriers.

OTH, Svella’s comments about 1k IP hit on something I’ve been wondering about. MMO populations collect at the cap, which is E10 here. My chars are all E7~E8 doing E9~10 in occult. When I do reach E10 in IP, I’m curious if the dungeon queues will suddenly be lively due to more people at that point.

And, another queue fix that won’t happen: eliminate E-levels and auto-scale rewards and stats FFXIV-style so that newbies and capped can effectively group together – huge increase in queue population and more fun helping newbies without the “deer hunter” effect. Here, there would still need to be extra flavors, though, to represent the mech changes. I’d toss story & e1, keeping e5 & e10 styles.

Minor queue changes are possible: eliminate the healer requirement unless the players in queue check a box saying “need healer” and add a bonus to entice scarce types to queue up; eg. if you’re a tank and the queue is held up from lack of tanks, you don’t need any keys for that run. The queues must flow!

Currency’s actually quite an easy transfer - buy aurum on one character, sell it on another. It’s not instant sadly, (unless you’re willing to drop one or two MoF per aurum,) but with a bit of time, it’s easy - I normally set up the sell orders overnight.

There’s noobmares too (though I don’t know how active that is atm,) and theres channels you get invited to after grouping with people. It’s not exactly an endless supply, but they are out there.

As you pointed out, the xp from occult is only that good when solely grinding glyph xp. For talisman and weapon xp, you’re far better off in a dungeon.

In terms of dungeon difficulty, ironically SWL’s predecessor TSW had elite and nightmare modes - pretty much in the same kind of idea you’re suggesting. The problem was that (even with more dungeons available) it wasn’t enough to hold players attention as item progression was well past the point where the difficulty was trivial.

My aim in the FFXIV-scaling would be to greatly increase queue population (which is why FFXIV does it and it works great there). Right now it’s spread across 10 elite levels for 1/10th the queue depth we could have. With scaling, you have everyone in the same queues. Increasing difficulty would be fantastic, too, but is somewhat of a side-benefit compared to simply moving the queues along. The goal is 2~3m in queue at most; games becomes unhealthy when queues reach 5m or more.

Auto-scaling players to the dungeon also has the benefit of handling the problem of power-creep (deer-hunter / one shot, one kill) with static dungeons. Here, it’s somewhat uncool to go back and help newbies. It becomes you solo’ing the dungeon while they watch.

Slow and taxed; taking days to transfer mof at a decent exchange rate isn’t very friendly. I suspect this a deliberate ploy by FC to try and increase aurum buys, though. Having Au might lead to spending Au. If someone gets a taste of a nice Au buy (even if it came from mof), I bet they’re more likely to put real $$ into it at some point.

As long as we’re chasing the thread of game changes, might as well bring up other Aurum issues. IMHO, all aurum buys should be tradable/sellable on AH. And, I’d add tradable patron-tokens. Ultimately, it all comes from au/$$. This would increase demand for au-items, profit for FC, and (hopefully) get us more dev-time for a nicer game.

Instance scaling’s a tricky one tbh. Many players find that it reduces the feeling of progression, as you can have a proverbial legendary knight taking the same amount of time to kill his target as the lowly squire. The current tiers feel bad enough with the grind time, that wouldn’t be reduced, it’d just be even longer before you got to trigger additional mechanics that challenged you. There’s plenty of threads about that subject already.

That massively depends on your social group. I know loads of people who regularly help new players and lower elite dungeons, but yeah, the power levels are such that it’s less about the fun, more about the loot. Having said that, I’ve done runs in groups who have stripped or bought lvl 1 greens to make themselves more bracket appropriate - it all depends on who you play with.

Slow OR taxed. Atm there’s 1 MoF difference in the price for sale & purchase requests. Tbh, half the time when I transfer MoF to another character, I end up actually making a profit, just by being patient.

The balance of what is available for $ and what isn’t has to be one of the hardest calls for developers. Get it wrong and the repercussions can range between there not being enough for whales to buy and your game being branded as P2W.
Putting it all on the AH is a tricky one. As it is, essentially everything you buy with aurum, you could also get for MoF - because you can buy aurum with MoF. The only stuff which you can’t sell on the AH are (most of) the cosmetics, as they go straight into your wardrobe/pet stable. I’m guessing that by patron-tokens you mean subscription time, and yeah, it works in other games, though I don’t know how much the price would inflate, given that there are plenty of people sitting on massive stockpiles of MoF.

There’s already big demand for the cache weapons & talis, but that’s not necessarily boosting SWL’s profits.

They’ve priced themselves out of all sales there. I bought some at first thinking that, like most F2P, the caches would net a profit – whoa, BIG mistake there. They’re literally overpriced by at least by a factor of 100, perhaps even 1000. Compare expected $$ to mof rate for any cache and you end up with something like $20k to get any particular epic item.

The only reason I can think of for this is that they put “progression” distils into those caches and the one thing MMO companies don’t want is fully capped players. The answer is to put progression into separate caches and adjust Au prices to make typical AH mof pricing profitable. Until that happens, though, you’ll just have people giving bags a try, then permanently punting them.

After my little trial, for instance, I won’t ever EVER buy anything from FC that’s random. Not this game, not in the next game, not ever. Direct buy or GTFO. That’s how bad of a deal FC’s randoms are.