[NOTE: any numbers mentioned are completely arbitrary and do not suggest as to any actual values that should be used.]
I’ve never finished a season as I get tired of the current method of glyph leveling, it’s painfully tiring, uneventful and boring. I suspect many players do what I do and just push through the requisite areas just to get to the pedestal for the abysmal level of XP. It’s also the reason I’m no longer making a 2nd or 3rd character, the thought of running NM dungeons to level glyphs turns me away.
I believe there is at least a slightly better way of accomplishing this. Taking hints from Season of Construct in the way the seneschal stones were leveled. By picking up construct stones of varying types, you were able to level them all at varying rates. Apply this same thing to glyphs.
(Remove the “magic”/“Rare” versions as I have never seen any build recommend magic glyphs for anything. Rather, have the glyphs level from magic to rare to legendary. We have legendary ‘things’ elsewhere, why not these? While this aspect of changing glyphs will take a serious rework, it’s not the highest of priority on my requests)
With the current glyph setup, break down their max level, either currently as XP towards glyph leveling or what ever units makes sense.
a. As you move through the NM dungeon, ‘parts’ of any arbitrary glyph will drop and will be automatically picked up like most resources. These ‘parts’ will be a percentage of 1 level of a glyph, say 1%. They would drop from chests of varying degrees, from elites and bosses. (What the exact value is, I’m not going to do the math because I’m sure there is more to it than anything I can surmise.) So it would take 10 “parts” for a glyph to reach level 1 just by picking them up. With the sheer number of different glyphs, I suspect that they would all level at different rates, as expected. The percentage value of these parts will also be determined by the NM dungeon level.
b. You reach the NM dungeon boss, should they keep the pedestal, you receive x-number of neutral parts to be applied to any glyph, much like we currently have with XP, and depending on the NM dungeon level, will determine that amount received.
The benefit I see from this, is after you max level the 4 or 5 glyphs you wanted to start with on an initial build, should you want to do a new build requiring new glyphs, those will already have been leveled to some degree. Some may be relatively low to start, such as only level 5 while others may have leveled to 20. The one caveat would be that no glyph can be max leveled in this manner, the player would still have to apply x-amount of parts to a given glyph at a NM pedestal to have it reach max level. Doing this would also give benefit to players, possibly, wanting to clear an entire level, kill everything, open everything. Maybe not.
I think this could make the glyph leveling process a bit less annoying painful, at least to me as I would be able to look at the listing of glyphs and see some level of progress made on them.
Should they add these “parts” through other areas of the game, not really sure. Anyone masochistic enough to level every single glyph will never have a reason to do NM dungeons after that, as far as I can see, may be it doesn’t matter either way.
Anything that’s played for “completion” of something (as opposed to being incorporated in the “baseline” gameplay) is a problem (or at least a potential problem)
Well, since we’re at it - I’ve kinda preferred even more radical approach regarding the NMDs
All NMDs drop a few/several already-leveled glyphs at completion (but the max. amount of level you can get is the difference between your and mob level)
Then the next thing that remains to be done is kinda separate which Glyph drops more often in which region so people can “soft target” instead of complete RNG (for ex. Cold-based/Shadow-Based stuff drop in FP, Lightning/Barrier-based stuff in Scosglen, Fire/Overtime-based Glyphs in Dry Steppes, e.t.c.)
That change will do a few things:
1 - NMD reruns won’t be a chore (it will be a milestone)
2 - People will wanna try help/trade/assist one another
3 - Individualizes runs (perhaps you wanted build X but got a very good glyph for build Y, perhaps can change your experience/build and try again)
And the game will feel much less of a chore slog and more of a “try overdo your last run” type of a game tbh
Multiply that by 6, then consider that all that time there was nothing else you got (I mean you get a compass ?, but you don’t get gear), it’s almost all about a Glyph XP upgrade run
Well in s5 you dont worry about glyphs at all. Farm highest horde your build allows with rank 1 glyphs, mw to +4-8, build up gears and head straight to nmd 100 with ancestral awakening. 1 run = glyph 1 - 12
The system is being revamped. I believe we will have levels being acquired by completing certain challenges near the d3 runes. Perhaps the glyphs will be locked and released by completing the pits. We will have legendary glyphs.
-Maybe we’ll find them in 3 levels, magical rare and legendary. We’ll see… but the game is going for do everything anywhere, but that’s more advantageous here. I don’t mind doing NM, I particularly like them despite their Negative affixes are not much of a challenge.
I think your system is too complicated. We do have a glyph problem. Magic glyphs do need to go so you are right there. I do like the idea of legendary glyphs. What could really fix this is that glyphs are just account bound items. You level a glyph to 21 and its done for season. All your characters for that season can use it. EZ PZ.
Legendary glyphs dont have to always be better but could be game altering items like uniques could.
Conversion Glyph - Legendary Sorc Glyph
Radius 3 at LV 1 to 14, Radius 4 at 15 to 20, Radius 5 at 21
Choose a rare node in radius to give a large X% boost to. X goes up as glyph levels.
With 45 int in radius change your frost skills to fire, your fire skills to lightning, and your lightning skills to frost.
belfry zakara and ghoa ruins are like 2-3mins a run and if you get an awakened one its just gravy. less than an hour and max glyphs. no idea why people think we need to change glyph leveling
For real. Why don’t glyphs just level up as you kill monsters? Why do I have to unlock the boring strongholds every time? The stronghold thing really gets me. I’m not sure what they were going for with those. If you try them too early they are kind of hard, but then they are trivial. Once they are trivial, it’s not even worth going out of my way to walk across the empty open world to go unlock them. They weren’t even fun the first time, there’s better ways to add a little bit of lore and story into the game than something irritating like that.
This genre never needed so many conversations and cut scenes either. Simple quests and story beats doesn’t mean the game can’t have some deep lore delivered in other ways. The books and notes you pick up are great, because they don’t stop the gameplay. Open world quests are bad. They should be randomized and relatively rare, and able to appear in dungeons, open world, during helltide (which would juice them up). The rewards should be substantial and potentially anything on the entire loot table. When you see a quest NPC you should be like, damn, cool! Same thing with loot goblins. If a loot goblin doesn’t drop a double or triple GA or an uber, it should drop a phat stack of mats or gold, and maybe they could be slightly more rare if that was the case.
Elites and big elite packs should drop more loot and be competitive with helltide chests. Helltide should have a literal tide of mobs and more bosses should spawn than the blood maiden based on personal kill count and that of all the active players. Players should be trying to fight the hardest content in helltide they can because the harder content should build a meter faster for spawning a juiced world boss in the helltide that drops a metric ton of loot.
Modern Blizzard is creatively bankrupt and they need to hire some idea people.
or make glyphs account-wide so when you level one to 21, multiple toons can use it. this will encourage potential experimentation with other glyphs which can lead to more builds.
They said something about it already, for the expansion should be present new legendary node and glyph, anyway for me the only problem that at now have the ND is this, they should offer also favor for the whisper of three, we can be forced to play a normal dungeon to get 5 favour, if you make something like, every ND level 1->50 give everytime 1 favour, ND level 50->85 give 3 favours, and ND 85->100 give 5 favours, the number obviously could be tuned better, just to explain the point, you will make in this way ND more a farmable activity that can actually compete with Helltides and Hordes.
Even the boss summoning material that we get are unbalaced at now, we get way more stell compared to hearts, so in this way the the three of whisper will be more worth with the ND give you favour, and you will balance also the mats, at now in my inventory have 75 shard and 20 eggs, and i do quite a lot of whisper for the hearts.
Your main suggestion (something like glyph pieces etc.) is basically a variant of “more glyph XP”. Since XP rate is arbitrary, the devs can increase or decrease it with or without this additional interaction. ‘Pieces’ etc might reduce tedium by giving the brain something else to interact with, but probably won’t reduce it by much.
I think the core system is tedious & needs a revamp. The main problems are:
Running NMDs consecutively until max level glyphs is still the most efficient use of time, and gets extremely boring, and
The way XP is put into them is extremely tedious & relies on a very weak placebo effect (see below).
My topic here outlines the problems and 3-4 possible “total revamp” solutions. They include:
Move glyph XP to the background, so the weak placebo isn’t a factor, and XP runs are more efficient.
Get rid of the stand completely. (I think this is more important than it seems on the surface.)
XP pool to allocate at the time of our choosing.
Move XP to glyph nodes instead of glyphs.
Various synergistic XP bonuses involving paragon board setups, yielding new leveling builds & strategies.
Repeatable challenges (T100+) for account-bound glyph/glyph node “respec” mats.
Duplicate glyphs add XP (similar to your idea - but specifically as a way to keep NMDs prioritized).
The placebo is the fact that glyph levels 1-14 and 16-20 are fake. So the XP you’re pumping manually is adding fake levels to each glyph. Subconsciously, there’s no way most people aren’t viscerally dissatisfied doing this, even if they haven’t put their finger on what’s going on exactly, which is that glyphs actually go from level 1 to 2, and from level 2 to 3, but those 2 upgrades are divided into 14 and 5 parts, respectively. It’s a very bad system design… I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it except in the worst gacha.
I don’t think it matters if they add new glyphs, Legendary glyphs, etc., since the core loop needs a revamp to not feel tedious. What would matter is if they kill the fake levels… if they add variety of ways to level up the paragon system (see linked topic for explanation of why NMDs wouldn’t become obsolete)… if they got rid of the stand… and if they added a modest way to benefit alts (I can do without account-wide level 21 glyphs, it’s not even needed to break the monotony).
Level 62 alt with level 21 glyph(s) equipped = would require balance changes, I’m pretty sure the devs would struggle to find a simple solution (so not likely to happen).
They could be equipped with their power levels locked behind character level - but that would introduce a new, arbitrary cap where there wasn’t one before.
But too tricky for these devs either way IMO… they’d need about as much time to implement it as they would my own suggestion - which has the benefit of taking a sledgehammer to the whole loop itself, and getting rid of a fatally flawed design component (manual allocation of fake levels, and the stand itself).
i don’t know if bounties were enjoyable? but maybe every nmd should have a group of unique that is linked to it that you can target farm (glyph xp can go either to fill that meter or fill a glyph, once its maxed out, it drops one of the uniques in the pool or mat (zir/ice beast etc)
I doubt this will happen, but I do agree with you. Rather curious what their changes to the paragon board will be. Next week my friends, we’ll have some answers and probably even more questions.
Considering the fact you can deck out a level 35 alt with mythic uniques and ancestral gear, I don’t see a problem with having level 21 glyphs at the appropriate levels.
You’re also hindered by how many glyph slots you can unlock at lower levels. Realistically speaking, unless you’re building a horrible paragon board, you won’t have access to the majority of your glyph slots until you’re 85+ and in WT4.
Eek. Dunno if there’s a fun way to pull this off. There’ll always be around 20 NMD’s… some of them will clash with strongholds no one wants to do again - and a fixed unique drop is either going to be trash, or it’s going to compete with other sources. Once you’ve found the unique, you’ve no incentive to keep farming that particular NMD.
Boss mats, fine I guess. But they already drop pretty much everywhere… hasn’t improved NMD’s reputation.
IMO NMD’s already have their “thing”: tons of XP + monster scaling + glyph XP. All they need to do is re-imagine how glyph XP is earned, down to the physical interaction with the glyph itself & the stand. Huge QoL can come from just a few tweaks.
I guess it boils down to what they consider “appropriate levels”… the point is, right now what determines glyph power is a set period of grind. If they gave up on “WT3/Sacred” gearing phase (I’m not sure that was deliberate, or if they stumbled into it & went with the flow)… they haven’t yet given up on the forced paragon grind. That’s really it - it’s not about power per se. IMO they have no idea what power will actually look like until about a week into each season, when the player base does the actual testing.
We’ll see if they “slide into” dissolving part of that paragon arc - no predictions here.
On the whole, there are several ‘solutions’ to the glyph/paragon problem that I would consider a failure of imagination… at the top of the list is big XP buffs, i.e. simply “shortening” the grind. The goal (once the system exists) should be to make the grind engaging & rewarding. Making 21 glyphs account-wide is essentially capitulating bc they couldn’t come up with something fun. A handful of us nobodies brainstormed some definite improvements - I don’t see how AAA game devs couldn’t come up with a way to overhaul the system.
I still can’t believe this studio met over a period of XX years, saw:
x5-8 glyphs
level up twice
cut up the two levels into 20 fake segments
have the player manually pump XP into the fake segments for no benefit 95% of the time
have them repeat it 100 times per character
…and thought, “Perfect. Release that.”
There’re obviously many ways to improve this without mostly scrapping it.
