Renown Catchup & New Players

[Pantheaeu-area-52]

This topic is something that I was discussing on the General Discussion forums today and the way the Renown catchup is done right now is not adequate for a new player getting into the game or someone swapping Covenant.

New Player:

• They are not able to use the 40 renown item as they have not been there before
• In order to engage with the game they must be ~60 renown in order to have appropiate levels of Stamina
• You get 3 renown instead of 1 below 40, and then 1 each time

These 3 are the big ticket items.

3 renown means that you need to obtain at least (3x14) + 19 renown individually before you can even engage with PvE or PvP content as you’ll be too squishy otherwise. This catchup should be increased.

Imo, this should be something akin to ~5 renown for the first 40 (reducing the amount required to 6) and then 2 until 80. I don’t see any compelling gameplay hook to gatekeep player power for a system that is not being iterated on.

Why should players be doomed to Torghast in order to catch-up

The covenant campaign should also be completely optional at this point. As mentioned in the Timegating thread:

@Pantheaeu-area-52

Example 1: After 9.0 the Covenant were somewhat unified, the stories had come to their conclusion and in 9.1 they worked together. The world of 9.1 is now different from the world of 9.0 however if you create a new character now, you have a mix of both stories and you cannot progress into the current world until you have hopped through what is essentially a time machine story.

MMOs evolve, yet our worlds only evolve when our characters have had the experiences.

Likewise, a new player may opt to do the Covenant Campaign and the gear (and Conduits) it rewards is invalidated by open-world loot. Is there any potential to scale the item level up of these? It’s great that Catchup gear mechanics are added with each new Season but the Core story is something a new player will experience and should be rewarded appropriately for their time.

[Worldpvp-nerzhul (Worldpvp)]

Yeah I think when most people think catch up they seem to forget about how timegated new players are to catch up to relevant content. I totally understand the earning place of a new expansion but if someone joins 2 patches in and starts fresh I think if they could and this is a big could put you in at 40 instead of 50 to experience everything and catch you up as you hit 60 would be pretty great.