Level 90+ maps

[blp.3489]

As I was running around various maps leveling a character I realized that it was kind of fun playing on a map that's at higher level than your character, you have to be a little more careful and skillful rather than easily trouncing almost everything without much effort. I think it could be great fun to have some maps that were scaled to above 80 difficulty to provide more challenging content for those that want it. Rather than putting development effort into new maps that not everyone would want to try, all you would need is some mechanism that takes you to a parallel reality version of Tyria where the maps/creatures are scaled to a higher level. You could reexperience starter zone maps where you need to keep on your toes or get clobbered by the enhanced enemies.

It would be a really inexpensive way for Anet to reuse existing assets to provide a large dollop of "new" content. They could decide for themselves how much effort, if any, they wanted to put into adding novel new twists. Although I never saw the "Old Lion's Arch" I've heard a lot about it, perhaps in this alternate universe it wasn't destroyed and is still there. Maybe the HoT maps could be reverted to the old versions before the difficulty was scaled back. Of course there should be new achievements for completing these new maps, including a new world completion achievement.

[Sirius.4510]

Kind of like GW1's "Hard Mode"?There might be some interest in this, but I'm a bit concerned about the "damage sponge" trend making it more tedious than challenging...

[Dayra.7405]

The more general and less effort way would be to give you an option of directing the downscalling algo to scale you down a bit more.Currently it's you are 2 level higher than the mobs after downscaling, why not an option to scale you 1-10 level lower than mobs, i.e. you can choose to be downscaled to 70 on lvl 80 maps. And maybe it can boost your MF and cash drops a bit if scaled down.

[Super Hayes.6890]

@Dayra.7405 said:The more general and less effort way would be to give you an option of directing the downscalling algo to scale you down a bit more.Currently it's you are 2 level higher than the mobs after downscaling, why not an option to scale you 1-10 level lower than mobs, i.e. you can choose to be downscaled to 70 on lvl 80 maps. And maybe it can boost your MF and cash drops a bit if scaled down.

I would love something like that. An adjustable level down scaling sounds great.

[Game of Bones.8975]

@Dayra.7405 said:The more general and less effort way would be to give you an option of directing the downscalling algo to scale you down a bit more.Currently it's you are 2 level higher than the mobs after downscaling, why not an option to scale you 1-10 level lower than mobs, i.e. you can choose to be downscaled to 70 on lvl 80 maps. And maybe it can boost your MF and cash drops a bit if scaled down.

Sorry to say, but that would be a pain in the ass.It's one thing to change a character's level, but now you have to think about the equipment, trinkets, armor, and weapons that are all Lvl 80.

[Pacificterror.7805]

@Game of Bones.8975 said:

@Dayra.7405 said:The more general and less effort way would be to give you an option of directing the downscalling algo to scale you down a bit more.Currently it's you are 2 level higher than the mobs after downscaling, why not an option to scale you 1-10 level lower than mobs, i.e. you can choose to be downscaled to 70 on lvl 80 maps. And maybe it can boost your MF and cash drops a bit if scaled down.

Sorry to say, but that would be a pain in the kitten.It's one thing to change a character's level, but now you have to think about the equipment, trinkets, armor, and weapons that are all Lvl 80.

Another way to approach this could be scaling down the power and durability of your character - basically handicapping yourself. I've played games where you can do the same in exchange for better or slightly better drop rates - and also scale your character the other way with worse drop rates.

[mercury ranique.2170]

The level of the foes determines the power/armor/hp/etc.This does not need to be a level 90+ map. You are asking for maps with more challenging fights. HoT offers this. For additional challenge you can solo the group content. If you want more challenge, run with limited gear (e.g. blue only)

I do not see why there should be valueable dev time used to create yet another niche that can be done in a much easier way

[Antycypator.9874]

Fighting anything 6 or 8 lvls above your character is almost unkillable. Glancing hits, no crits, you die in 2 hits.It's not about level, but balance. Increasing damage is not an "hard mode", it's just annoying. You can experience some fair difficulty in Drizzlewood Coast (blinds, CCs, immobilize, not 5k damage per hit).

[Abelisk.5148]

I would like a map similar to FFXIV's Eureka or Bozjan Southern Front where there is a micro-progression system. You start at the bottom and work your way up with multiple parties over the course of many days. Unlike Eureka, I would enjoy if the activities weren't fetch questy, though. I'd imagine metas becoming unlocked the higher level you go would be exciting. The rewards could offer completely new items, skins, tonics...mount skins?

Another difference between FFXIV and GW2 is the platforming, gliding, etc. There is so much potential in such a concept IMO.

Mounts could also be disabled at the start, and slowly unlock the further you go. The mastery skills are irrelevant in such a map, instead the map offers its own "mini mastery tree".

[Danikat.8537]

They basically did this with HoT (and to a lesser extent other expansion and living world maps). The level requirement is the same but the enemies are designed to be harder and to need more specific tactics to defeat, including things like some which are only vulnerable after you use CC skills to break their defiance bar, or more vulnerable to ranged or melee attacks so you need a variety of tactics to beat them all.

Some people really enjoy it, some hate it but I think that's partially due to some combination of the level 80 boost and experience from other MMOs making new players think they should boost a character to 80 and head into expansion maps right away with no experience playing the game, expecting their level and free boost gear to carry them.

Alternatively you can already make any existing maps harder by using weaker equipment, or nothing except weapons. I think all greens or all white quality equipment are the common choices, but you could of course experiment with different combinations of rarity and level requirement to find one that's right for you.

[Ledha.9640]

Level scaling can always have some bad repercussions.The best way ? Have a HM version of maps, with all monsters being lvl 80, all normal monsters being veterans, all veterans being elite, with rewards being scaled up for lvl 80 players. Every day, a different HM map of all area (krytia, ascalon, shiverpeaks, etc) can be played by peoples, so you'll always find players doing the events, and changing the map every day will break the monotony.

[voltaicbore.8012]

It might work with the proper reward structure, but if the reward is merely "the fun of having a challenge," I'm certain it will fizzle out quickly and prove to be a total waste of dev time. It's a lot like "player-driven content" - forums, reddit, and mouthy content creators all love it, but very few players actually seem to. Which is not surprising, because such schemes always devolve into the same handful of highly skilled/organized/have-the-most-time players and guilds dominating things. The "fun" of working with limitations like always watching your back, living under the rule of some tryhards, or just plain old harder combat for the sake of harder combat... yeah that fun wears off quickly, or never even exists in the first place for a ton of players.

However, with the right rewards, this idea could certainly work. BDO recently did this, where they released a new type of server where previously one-shottable trash enemies in mid-level zones got super dangerous (basically now you are the one-shottable trash). They also massively increased the rewards for running around in those zones, including very specific weapons to work for. I can only judge how well it works from observing my guild and those up-scaled zones during peak hours, but by those measures it seems to be very successful.

[Nilkemia.8507]

No. Raising an enemy's level above you (and allowing them to breach the level cap at that) is easily one of the cheapest, laziest ways to make something harder to fight/kill, and not in any good way.

[Dawdler.8521]

Uh, do I remember PvE wrong or isnt there already mobs above level 80? This method is nothing new for GW2.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Dawdler.8521 said:Uh, do I remember PvE wrong or isnt there already mobs above level 80? This method is nothing new for GW2.Normally there are no such mobs, but higher level spawns could appear in some highly scaled events. And they were an absolute pain - i still remember, during the destruction of the LA arc, molten alliance bannermen veterans dropping banners for an AoE 30k+ damage (with champions doing way more). And those were level 84 mobs.

No, i don't think level 90 mobs oneshotting you with any and every attack would be fun at all.

[Teratus.2859]

Bunch of us have supported a "hard mode" form of Gw2 as well but it's really unlikely to happen in any form that would split the player base between identical maps..Anet have gone out of their way to avoid that for a long time, even the Megaserver thing is the opposite and got more people playing together rather than split apart on different instances of the same map.

That said I do believe it is possible to get that hard mode experience in Gw2 without splitting the maps, although how we get it is the question.

The best idea I've come up with in the past is some kind of optional player debuff that activates when you toggle hard mode on.How I imagine it to work is when you have hard mode on you get a special debuff that slightly reduces all outgoing damage by a set amount while decently increasing all incoming damage by a set amount as well.It might also slightly nerf your self healing and sustain capability while massively nerfing your incoming healing from other players.(this would have to be a thing due to guilds being able to just stack healers and help HM players cheese content)It also changes the maximum duration and stack size of your boons as well so for example, Might won't be able to stack past say.. 10 or 15 stacks on a player in Hard Mode.They could also maybe change it so that players in HM are lower priority for random healing AoE and boons as well.

The trade off for using Hardmode though would be a huge boost to all of your account bonus's (Gold find, EXP gain, Karma Gain and Magic find)While the Hard Mode effect is active you would have significantly better drop rates on rare and exotic items as well as gold/money but only upon killing enemies and defeating boss creatures.Opening loot bags and containers would not be effected by the Hard Mode buff effect, however there would be a new Ascended/Legendary tier of loot bags and container drops that would be quite rare to find and could only be found by killing champion and legendary creatures in Hard Mode, these containers would always provide high tier materials and items when opened as well as potentially new rare account bound rewards and would not be able to be sold on the trading post.

The last element of the Hard Mode Buff would be Kill count and Death Penalty.In Hard Mode the more things you kill, the more your account bonus's are boosted up to a new cap point, killing stronger variant creatures, Vets, Elites, Champs etc give larger boosts.But the same applies for your Death Penalty, repeatedly dying will tank your account bonus and unlike Normal Mode you will only enter Down State once per fight/death.After you've been downed once the next time you are downed within a set period of time (say 10 mins) it is an instant death and you suffer a hit to your account bonus's.Dead HM players also cannot be revived from death by other players either they must waypoint to revive themselves at an increased waypoint cost or use a Revive Orb.They also do not show on the map when in a defeated state either.

Something like this I think could work for Gw2.. but it would have to be very very refined, it would be far too easy for a player in HM to just cheese things by letting players in normal mode do most of the work etc so Anet would have to find ways to prevent that sort of thing.

First issue would be some method to stop people from being able to swap in and out of Hard Mode on the fly.. like waiting for a Legendary bounty to drop to low health before turning HM on to abuse the higher rates.. this kind of thing would be a problem so there would probably have to be some kind of restriction like only being able to turn on Hard Mode while you are in a major city or something. (but you can disable it in the open world)

Another Restriction that may be necessary would be that players in Hard Mode would not be able to Join players in other instances through the Squad menu's..A hard restriction but I feel this might be necessary due to how easy it would be for HM players to abuse bounties and meta events etc if they were able to easily jump into populated maps half way through these fights.You may however be able to avoid this restriction though if it was set up that HM players could only gain credit/rewards for a event if they were involved before a certain point.. like they had to be present before a boss lost a third of it's health or something.This is a tricky issue but one that would need to be addressed to avoid severe abuse.. otherwise this whole HM debuff concept just doesn't work.

[Danikat.8537]

@Teratus.2859 said:Something like this I think could work for Gw2.. but it would have to be very very refined, it would be far too easy for a player in HM to just cheese things by letting players in normal mode do most of the work etc so Anet would have to find ways to prevent that sort of thing.

Lots of good points in that post, but I picked out this bit specifically because this is my concern with a hard mode buff/debuff as well. I could see it easily ending up like the early days of GW2 when magic find was like other attributes - gained though using equipment which boosted it. Players would build sets for maximum magic find (which meant their character was weaker) and then try to make sure they were playing with people who weren't doing that, so the rest of the group effectively carried them through the content and they got higher rewards without contributing as much towards completing it.

The other problem is that if it's a simple debuff - decreasing your damage and increasing the damage you take - it doesn't really make things harder because the mechanics of the fight are the same, it will just go on for longer. It's the same effect as 'HP sponge' bosses which can be very simple to beat but they have very high health so you have to keep doing what works over and over. There's a little bit of extra challenge in there because the longer the fight goes on the more chances there are for something to go wrong, but it's rarely more fun or interesting to do.

Between the two I think it might be better to keep any 'hard mode' restricted to instanced content, like the options already available with higher tier Fractals and CMs in Dragon Response Missions. That way everyone knows going in that they're doing a harder version, instead of finding out during the fight that everyone around you has made it harder for you by deliberately debuffing their characters for higher rewards so they can't contribute much to completing it, and there's more opportunity to actually add more complex mechanics, adjust timings and things like that to make it more of a challenge instead of just the same thing going on for a bit longer. In GW1 it worked because everything was instanced, but I don't think there's a way to do that in open-world persistent maps shared between people who want to play hard mode and those who don't.

[Teratus.2859]

@Danikat.8537 said:

@Teratus.2859 said:Something like this I think could work for Gw2.. but it would have to be very very refined, it would be far too easy for a player in HM to just cheese things by letting players in normal mode do most of the work etc so Anet would have to find ways to prevent that sort of thing.

Lots of good points in that post, but I picked out this bit specifically because this is my concern with a hard mode buff/debuff as well. I could see it easily ending up like the early days of GW2 when magic find was like other attributes - gained though using equipment which boosted it. Players would build sets for maximum magic find (which meant their character was weaker) and then try to make sure they were playing with people who

weren't

doing that, so the rest of the group effectively carried them through the content and they got higher rewards without contributing as much towards completing it.

The other problem is that if it's a simple debuff - decreasing your damage and increasing the damage you take - it doesn't really make things harder because the mechanics of the fight are the same, it will just go on for longer. It's the same effect as 'HP sponge' bosses which can be very simple to beat but they have very high health so you have to keep doing what works over and over. There's a little bit of extra challenge in there because the longer the fight goes on the more chances there are for something to go wrong, but it's rarely more fun or interesting to do.

Between the two I think it might be better to keep any 'hard mode' restricted to instanced content, like the options already available with higher tier Fractals and CMs in Dragon Response Missions. That way everyone knows going in that they're doing a harder version, instead of finding out during the fight that everyone around you has made it harder for you by deliberately debuffing their characters for higher rewards so they can't contribute much to completing it, and there's more opportunity to actually add more complex mechanics, adjust timings and things like that to make it more of a challenge instead of just the same thing going on for a bit longer. In GW1 it worked because everything was instanced, but I don't think there's a way to do that in open-world persistent maps shared between people who want to play hard mode and those who don't.

Yeah a lot of what you said there are also doubts I have about the concept as well, why it would be such a difficult thing to implement in the open world.I do believe it could work.. but yeah it wouldn't be easy even with a simple concept such as a buff/debuff effect, and it would have to be heavily refined to ensure minimal methods of cheesing and abuse existed in it.

It's a very good comparison to make with the old magic find sets, it is quite similar when you put them side by side and i'd almost forgotten about those.Perhaps reducing the outgoing damage is something to avoid entirely, especially when you factor in enemies that have time limits.Although I would still think increasing the incoming damage would be necessary to give that HM experience validity.. you need something to entice you to avoid damage as much as possible.Forcing players to deal with mechanics is the thing I believe to be key there, while it's true players are familiar with them already I would also say that for a lot of people they flat out ignore them a lot of the time because they don't pose much of a threat.Stack and Smack tactics have been pretty much the go to in a lot of content in Gw2 and people often get around mechanics by doing this as they just blow up with boons and healing spam etc so they can just stand there in AoE and ignore most of the damage coming in and get revived quickly if they do happen to go down.

If HM players were set up in the way I suggested I don't think they would be able to do these stack tactics so much.Taking more damage, boon duration and stack caps, massively nerfed incoming healing from other players, instant death upon being downed twice and a reasonable hit to their account bonus's every time they are killed in combat.I think that's enough of a handicap to really make these mechanics actually threatening to them and make them reconsider just standing in the AoE like normal mode players can.

I don't disagree that it's a lot easier to stick to instanced content like CM's etc but they just don't give that same Hard Mode experience that people had and loved in Gw1.I think there will always be a some kind of demand for Hard Mode in the open world because of that, Gw1's hard mode was just too much fun I guess :)

[blp.3489]

I like the idea of using magic find adjustments to rewards. In the simplest case if you had some factor F that was multiplied by the percent P of the damage that you did, your magic find for the loot from that creature would be boosted by F * P. So you don't benefit that much if you don't contribute. You could also get a boost for the amount of healing you performed on a player multiplied by the damage percent that player contributed. For boons you could have a table for the amount of boost multiplied by the damage done. The result wouldn't be perfect but it would somewhat address "leaching" off other players other than the base loot you already get.

[blp.3489]

I agree that just increasing health pools and/or damage per attack is not the most interesting. I would like to see the creatures be more like players with a wide variety of skills being used so you don't know exactly how they are going to attack and have to watch for and react to tells. Too many creatures are one trick ponies with a single predictable method of attack. It would be more challenging if they had several possible attacks and combos. I also prefer a more complicated adversary than one with some arbitrary set mechanic ala some of the current champions. Higher level creatures such as veterans, elites, and champions would have a larger number of skills instead of just more health and damage. Feel free to economize on development time by using existing player skills.

[Konrad Curze.5130]

Equip all white gear, no runes/sigils

There you have it, the challenge you want, without wasting valuable dev time

[Xanadrine.4352]

Are you telling me we are going to 90? GG wow made me go to 100 that was a slug of a run across 24 characters, at least they squished every one down to 50, going 120 would have killed the game. Why do they have to raise the level cap? 5 levels maybe okay but 10 more.

[blp.3489]

@Zuldari.3940 said:Are you telling me we are going to 90? GG wow made me go to 100 that was a slug of a run across 24 characters, at least they squished every one down to 50, going 120 would have killed the game. Why do they have to raise the level cap? 5 levels maybe okay but 10 more.

No, the original idea was to raise the map level without raising the character level to provide more challenge.

[ugrakarma.9416]

this already exists,if u click on some mobs on HOT they are lvl 82... i guess Drizzlewood are lvl 85, if u notice is hard to "solo" a pack of 4 or 5 charrs in Drizzlewood with non-meta or just pressing 1, they hit a bit hard on your HP. probably the POF awakened are lvl 85 too.

this is not just on new map descriptions, they just drop "lvl 80" on map zoom.

[mindcircus.1506]

@Danikat.8537 said:

@"Teratus.2859" said:Something like this I think could work for Gw2.. but it would have to be very very refined, it would be far too easy for a player in HM to just cheese things by letting players in normal mode do most of the work etc so Anet would have to find ways to prevent that sort of thing.

Lots of good points in that post, but I picked out this bit specifically because this is my concern with a hard mode buff/debuff as well. I could see it easily ending up like the early days of GW2 when magic find was like other attributes - gained though using equipment which boosted it. Players would build sets for maximum magic find (which meant their character was weaker) and then try to make sure they were playing with people who

weren't

doing that, so the rest of the group effectively carried them through the content and they got higher rewards without contributing as much towards completing it.This exactly what happens now but without the MF buffs. Players expect other players to carry them. Watching Arcdps during any meta event will show generally 5-10 people in every 50 person squad doing 80-90% pf the damage/boon output. The vast majority of players in open world meta events are contributing very little and earning max rewards.The difference is the MF scammer was being sneaky, the low-effort Open Worlder openly says "what does this matter?... we still won!... your complaints are BAD FOR THE GAME!!!!!"