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Scaling of Tower of Nightmare needs to be readjusted now that the content is dead


crepuscular.9047

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Personally, I still think Towers of Nightmare could use some serious rework/balancing. Just did a public run, we got to floor 3. We wiped with 10-20 people to a boss. Nobody wanted it to give a second chance. So everyone just left. Maybe it's me, but I felt like I just wasted an hour.

 

And apparently 10-20 people felt the same. They got demotivated to give it a second go and/or don't find the content fun and went to do something else. I don't understand any reason why not to look into this. Hell, make multiple difficulties to please the whole community. Or make public a tiny bit less hard. I don't know what the solution is, I do know there is a solution out there.

I do have one suggestion:

- When you slowly progress through the floors, you have to push in further and further doing events. If you die, you have to walk of shame a (long) way to reach the group. There is a high chance you will die again because everything spawned before reaching the group. So I would suggest to clear mobs a little bit once certain events are done, this to make it easier for people to catch up with the group if they died.

Edited by GroteDwerg.4752
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Besides the question if adjustment of scaling is needed:

 

  1. I can greatly recommend all players to play content when it is new and hot. Especially for living world content. If you care about achievement, try to get them within 6 months after the release. You will quickly find groups, you will quickly find fellow players who need that one achievement that you are struggling with.
    Ofc, this cannot always be done. If you start playing now there will be a lot of older content. Most of it is still very much active but some is more or less abandoned.
  2. What would really help is a weekly incentive for players to play a certain chapter or map. The return to ... achievement series just before the release of EoD did just that. It gave existing players a reason to replay old content for new rewards. Open world needs more of this. Players keep playing the same fractals and raids because these have long-term rewards to go for. Perhaps a reward system following the flavor of the week could guarantee to get old areas active again.
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For the LWS events, there are LWS3 and LWS4 dailies (not sure if there are IBS dailies) that cycle through the various maps.  That usually result in enough people showing up to do the open world achievements (meta, or kill champion/legendary bosses).  Though it can be several days before the map you care about is up for the daily.

I don't think anything like this exists for the LWS1 maps.  But the other thing is that for Tower of Nightmares, I'm not sure even if such things did exist, that the rewards would be good enough to get people to do it - that is a bit longer of an instance, so for those that care about GPH, may still fall below a lot of alternatives.

 

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I recently had to do this for season 1 and it was a nightmare! One thing FFXIV does really well is move new players through the story that's heavily linked to dungeons and raids. They do this with their auto LFG tool. There is never a shortage of veterans running new player (sprout) through a 10 year old dungeon or raid because it is heavily incentivized with rewards. Its It's a ccx win win nee players progress and older players are rewarded. Honestly dangle a daily black lion key for a daily and I think players would sign up for it! It's so easy to get in an unranked pvp LFG queue. These mandatory meta events should be treated the same way.

Edited by Xperiment.6923
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I tested it few minutes ago to check if it is still possible. Nothing has changed. The tower is still soloable pretty easy compared to other groupcontent. Nobody expect to do it solo. But when ppl not able to do it with 5+ the problem is clearly on the player.

The game is already designed, that most of the groupconent can be done by a fraction of the intended group size (if not solo at all). I dont see why it should get softened up even further.
It will just end up in the Zaithan fight one day, when all u have to do is 1-1-1-1-1 or the game ad an option to play and win itselfe.

Iam pretty sure this issue wont happen at all when ppl try to understand the game and take a moment after something went wrong to get a better understanding of gamemechanics instead of run to the forums and demand to make it "easier".

Edited by dexer.2173
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Saying you were able to solo it without much of a problem doesn't really fix the problem.

Players come in all different skill levels.  While it may be reasonable to say that low skill players shouldn't be able to do raids or T4 fractals, I am of the opinion that most everyone should be able to do story content (though I guess this isn't really required for the story).

Also, there is a big variation in different classes/builds, and telling players to level and gear up a different character in order to do that content is probably not what most players actually want to hear/do.

I had a similar issue last night playing the Forging Steel party/group instance (vs the squad).  No one else is playing it.  That at least seems to scale somewhat decently for a solo player, but still makes for a long instance.

And Anet actually learned that lesson once from the final story of the base game.  Originally you needed a party to complete the Arah dungeon in story mode, and at some point they changed it because people were not able to get into parties.  One would think they wouldn't repeat the same mistakes.

 

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Well, I ran into an instance the other day that did the entire Tower by pure chance. So ToN isn't dead content, thankfully. But it can definitely use a buff to rewards since it's necessary for story progression to partake in ~8 events (iirc, it triggered for me in the middle of Second Floor when I last managed to join a longer run while working on the story).

On 3/19/2023 at 4:40 PM, TheQuickFox.3826 said:

What would really help is a weekly incentive for players to play a certain chapter or map. The return to ... achievement series just before the release of EoD did just that. It gave existing players a reason to replay old content for new rewards. Open world needs more of this. Players keep playing the same fractals and raids because these have long-term rewards to go for. Perhaps a reward system following the flavor of the week could guarantee to get old areas active again.

This got me wondering, would the LWS1 stuff improve if ArenaNet added a Season 1 daily system?

  • Day 1: Scarlet's Minions events in Gendarran
  • Day 2: Twilight Aetherpath
  • Day 3: The Tower of Nightmares
  • Day 4: The Twisted Marionette
  • Day 5: Battle for Lion's Arch

Kind of hard to do a lengthy amount of them since there's only really two "maps", and since Scarlet's Minions Invade! meta was butchered into something so simplistically trite... unless we add in Southsun Cove to the rotation as well, it's hard to hit 5 even including TM and Aetherpath.

On 3/23/2023 at 2:31 PM, dexer.2173 said:

I tested it few minutes ago to check if it is still possible. Nothing has changed. The tower is still soloable pretty easy compared to other groupcontent. Nobody expect to do it solo. But when ppl not able to do it with 5+ the problem is clearly on the player.

The game is already designed, that most of the groupconent can be done by a fraction of the intended group size (if not solo at all). I dont see why it should get softened up even further.
It will just end up in the Zaithan fight one day, when all u have to do is 1-1-1-1-1 or the game ad an option to play and win itselfe.

Iam pretty sure this issue wont happen at all when ppl try to understand the game and take a moment after something went wrong to get a better understanding of gamemechanics instead of run to the forums and demand to make it "easier".

Your skill level must be higher than the average player. If you do raids regularly, then yeah ToN won't be a huge challenge at all. Most players aren't that skilled, as evident by ArenaNet's own statement of metrics back when Drakkar world boss came out (iirc. they said something like 10% of players accounted for 80% of the DPS in the boss fight on average).

I believe myself above average, but even on my best professions I can't beat the Nightmare Chamber bosses - especially if the RNG is unlucky for me and I get a tough fight.

Which is one of the tricky things with balance for ToN. The bosses are not equal and it's total RNG to quality.

Edited by Konig Des Todes.2086
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On 3/27/2023 at 9:28 PM, madSimon.7283 said:

As a returning player just jumping into the living world, this content soured me on the entire game.

It's a good introduction for new players on what to expect for the most of the group content released during later episodes and likely going forward as well.  If all that they care about is the story, there's nothing to worry about with perhaps some hiccups during LS2.

Edited by mythical.6315
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9 hours ago, mythical.6315 said:

It's a good introduction for new players on what to expect for the most of the group content released during later episodes and likely going forward as well.  If all that they care about is the story, there's nothing to worry about with perhaps some hiccups during LS2.

When they come to expect that they will continue having to do effectively-dead group content for the story, new players may quickly leave again.

And in their current iterations, both the Tower of Nightmare and the Battle for Lion's Arch are effectively-dead content, while being required for the story.

The same may also happen to the Gyala Delve meta eventually.

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