What do you all think about the idea of having ‘Heroic’ or even ‘Mythic’ difficulty leveling? For example, enemies might have half again as much hp and damage but give out 10% more xp.
This would be for those who want to really test themselves and their character while leveling.
From level scaling, we’ve seen that Blizzard has the ability to make it so each player sees the same enemy but different stats, damage and level. As such, why not use that?
Wouldnt you achieve the same thing by not wearing any heirlooms and only leveling with the darkmoon buff?
iron man challenge. thats mythic
Well, you would have to adjust the xp gained based on the difficulty. The harder you get, the more xp you would gain, that would be my contribution.
Right now, I think stuff is too easy at the lower levels.
A self-imposed challenge is rather different from a difficulty setting - for example, I’m doing a Ironman challenge on Fallout: New Vegas now, on top of setting everything to max difficulty.
The players shouldn’t have to work hard to make things tougher if they want them.
They should just revert the XP change they did awhile back.
could only apply to outdoor mobs.
But its an MMO, that level of freedom of choice is meant to be on you.
Wait, so you want it to be easy for things to be tough? Sounds counter to your ideals. If you find taking off armor too difficult then I cant help you.
I wouldn’t expect a big boost to XP earned myself for fear of abuse. It’s more of a ’for-fun’ thing in my eyes.
How much XP do you get from killing mobs, compared to quest rewards, while leveling up? Or were you going to buff quest reward XP as well?
If you just buff XP from mob kills by 10% while increasing their HP and dps by 50%, all you’re doing is increasing the time to kill them and maybe the time between fights to do things like eat/drink to restore mana/hp. So, in 3 minutes you might kill 10 mobs for 1000XP total in normal mode while in “heroic” mode in those same 3 minutes you would kill maybe 7 mobs for 770XP total.
Maybe just your numbers need tweaking but at least the way you describe it wouldn’t encourage me to flip the switch to “heroic” mode while leveling.
It should be on toggle. I think, that’s what they are looking into already.
Again, that’s a self-imposed challenge, which is cool and something I wouldn’t mind doing, but not the same thing as actually making the game itself harder.
As stated earlier, Blizzard has already set up automatic scaling based on ilvl and level. A simple toggle would be comparatively simple.
All this would do is bring up the entire “bullet sponge” argument for WoW mobs. Increasing mob health and damage is boring and isn’t challenging. All it does is increase time to kill.
A number of issues would have to be addressed first. Leveling right now is chaotic because of scaling. I wouldnt want them to start putting in anything new till they fix the old.
Like gear reward layout. Since you can choose whichever zone you go to most zones arent built around that, still tied to the linear progression of going to zone A to zone B and so on. So if you make the “wrong” choices on zones you could go an entire leveling bracket without a gear upgrade for certain slots.
And even then the items have only been buffed on a scale, not actually reworked so an ilvl 60 reward from Duskwood would still be inferior to a ivl 40 reward from Burning Steppes as the Duskwood one might not even have green stat bonuses due to being, historically, from an early level zone.
Fix leveling to actually work as advertised then I wouldnt mind adding onto it.
Just level naked with war mode on. That would be a real challenge.
Based on my Mythic+ experience, I disagree with that. Numbers matter because they can turn a meaningless mechanic to a meaningful one, or necessitate a change in strategy.
Quite a few leveling enemies have a couple mechanics. They’re just too weak number-wise to matter. Who cares if they cast a guaranteed crit buff area if they can’t hurt you enough for that crit to matter?
How about this idea, somewhat related to the OP’s idea:
Let XP = k*[(DPSmob/DPSplayer)*(HPmob/HPplayer)]^A
No need to scale mobs on the fly, just distribute mobs in different zones and the more-challenging the mob is to the player the more XP you get. XP never goes below some minimum base value no matter how trivial the mob is and the rewards are tuned to scale to give the better-than-average player the shortest path to leveling up as pushing themselves to the limits of their skill – that is, the more difficult the fight, the more XP/hour you get assuming you don’t die.
Then you can get rid of all the level scaling rot and quest exp might go down pretty low but never to zero. The player is free to seek as challenging open-world content as they choose. If they find they’ve bit off more than they can chew, they can go to a different zone and quest there.
ETA: To keep people from cheesing this, the DPSplayer and HPplayer are calculated by the gear on them as well as in their bags, so they don’t get a mob down to 5% and start taking off gear to lower those numbers right before the kill. The quest EXP rewarded as well as the quest gear rewarded would be based on these ratios as well.
I pose this one a lot on my streams. Heirlooms with mythic affixes. Its random each week and changes how mobs respond and behave. None of that stupid more health crap though. Mobs need to be challenging without being idiotic. Tyrannical and fortified are stupid. Tyrannical less so because it does force you to pay attention more, whereas fortified is “here is a wall, now go away”.
But things like necrotic, extra abilities, etc. Forcing you to change up how you interact with the world around you is one of the things I’m arguing to improve leveling content. (Of course this will give you more EXP…a lot more. Challenges are pointless without rewards after all)
Or they could have leveling systems similar to PoE, with a different sort of “affix” every time you level a character. Then you could have difficulty levels based off of that.
There is definitely a difficultly curve if you go from 110-120 with full heirlooms.
It’s actually quite fun, you have to use cooldowns much more and pay attention.