High and low lvl players in the same location

Grati, that lines up with what I found related to L2.

The main 'issue' I see is that the only way to have weak 'waterfall stats' (because these almost by definition affect mobs too) and still 'no scaling on mobs' is to hard clamp some of the Attack and Defense values.

Basically, Ashes wants your 300 damage ability to do 300 damage to a level 20 and a level 30, as I understand it.

Specifically:

There won't be any damage dampening due to differences in levels in either PvP or PvE.[18]
If I have a skill that does a thousand damage to a target of equal level I don't want my skill to do zero damage to a target that's five levels above me. [18] – Steven Sharif

Now obviously this is an extreme example (leaving some flexibility as always, Steven is good at this), but basically.

If you do 300 damage to a level 20, you will probably do 300 damage - (influence of CON and DEF stats) to a level 30 as long as you can guarantee the hit.

This would imply that you must do some other stuff to prevent a level 30 mob from being killed just as easily as the level 20. General options are:

"It hits way harder and is probably more accurate"
"That Influence of CON and DEF is large" (unlikely given the goal, even considering that Steven might have meant PvP)
"It has so much more HP that the fight is extended and you have to do the same thing more times."
"It has much more evasion so you can't guarantee the hit."

Spreading these out and doing only a moderate amount of each will generally be easily cheesed. Hits way harder? Dodges more? Bring a bunch of Accuracy Spec Rangers.
Tons of HP? Bring more healers, fight longer (it may be inefficient ofc, but the point is that the solution to dealing with the challenge of it is simplistic).
"It has much more evasion." - Too many solutions to count, and strictly speaking this turns out a lot ilke 'just has tons more HP'.

It doesn't really matter of 'at level', 'above me', or whatever. The point is simply that without level based scaling, it is too mathematically hard to make something that is only 2 levels stronger than 'the average' actually not feel 'very much the same'. That was the real reason, I feel, that I could kill 8+ mobs solo in Alpha-1. It was definitely MORE dangerous, stats alone will do that, but it doesn't require adaptation.

As for how this relates to your topic, therefore, and Strevi's point...

Depending on which of those is true, and the way Gear gives survivability, the gap between high and low level players will either be large, or clamped to be small with no corresponding similarity in PvE. I guess Ashes could be one of those 'you can play solo up until level 30 but will not really survive/manage to level solo after that', though.

Azherae wrote: »

It doesn't really matter of 'at level', 'above me', or whatever. The point is simply that without level based scaling, it is too mathematically hard to make something that is only 2 levels stronger than 'the average' actually not feel 'very much the same'. That was the real reason, I feel, that I could kill 8+ mobs solo in Alpha-1. It was definitely MORE dangerous, stats alone will do that, but it doesn't require adaptation.

Depending on which of those is true, and the way Gear gives survivability, the gap between high and low level players will either be large, or clamped to be small with no corresponding similarity in PvE. I guess Ashes could be one of those 'you can play solo up until level 30 but will not really survive/manage to level solo after that', though.

What if the difference came from a "switch" you could turn off with tools? A lvl25 mob has 1k hp and you hit it for 300 with ability A.

A lvl35 mob has 1.5k hp (cause imo high lvls should at least get thicker), but also casts 2 buffs on itself. One buff doubles its hp, the other increases its speed which makes it atk faster, dodge better and defend/parry better too (if it has a shield or can parry). You could remove its buffs with a buff cancelling spell, but then the mob shouts to its comrades and you're now fighting several of these buffed dudes (and buff cancelling has a long cd), or you could use hp% cutting abilities (or augments) and kill it before it can kill you, or pretty much any other debuff that relates to the mob's buffs.

If by lvl25 a player has the basic amount of skill points to get any of their archetype's tools, high lvled players can add points to those tools to specialize them against those kinds of mob/player buffs or augment them in ways that might counter those buffs in some other way.

In other words, scale the mobs' complexity with lvls instead of just their base stats, pretty much in the same way as players would scale up in complexity. I'm like 90% sure that Steven will just tell the devs to scale mob hp with lvls, so at the very least mobs will require a shitton of damage at higher lvls, and your "same" atks will simply do less % dmg to them.

Players will grow in hp and other stats too, but probably a bit slower. And gear will just bump those stats a bit with each tier. But if you're lacking that gear, the lowbie's attacks will still get a good chunk out of you.

I don't remember if this feature was in L2 from the early versions, but at least at some point mages' abilities could "fail" against a high lvl enemy and do half (iirc) dmg. I think this was done mainly to counterbalance the absolute O fucking Pness of mages in L2, but I personally dislike this mechanic and would prefer just better ways of countering that archetype.

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How quickly can you get to max lvl in GW2? How quickly can you get a base gear set that would let you kill the majority of mobs in the game?

From what I've heard GW2 is a very horizontal game. You get to a base lvl of power somewhat quickly and then you do any and all the things in the game w/o much problems. Ashes is not going for that kind of design. You'll have to level up for 150++h to reach max lvl. You'll have to kill open world bosses, that will be contested by other people, if you want to get best gear. Ashes is way more vertical in its design, so it'd be really hard to just copy GW2's ideas.

@Azherae btw, I'm almost sure you've already seen this, but I just reread my first comment on this page and I think I should've clarified which "stats" I was talking about there.
https://lineage.pmfun.com/list/stat

I was talking about the STR/CON/etc stats and not the atk/hp/def ones. So when I said that L2's stat growth was slow, I meant that you'd only get single digits of those STR-like stats which would then influence the direct stats of the character (as shown on that site). And with gear providing p.def AND some big letter stats, a ton of your char power would be coming from gear.

I just wanted to make sure that I was clear on that point, for your data. Too paranoid about miscommunicating

NiKr wrote: »

@Azherae btw, I'm almost sure you've already seen this, but I just reread my first comment on this page and I think I should've clarified which "stats" I was talking about there.
https://lineage.pmfun.com/list/stat

I was talking about the STR/CON/etc stats and not the atk/hp/def ones. So when I said that L2's stat growth was slow, I meant that you'd only get single digits of those STR-like stats which would then influence the direct stats of the character (as shown on that site). And with gear providing p.def AND some big letter stats, a ton of your char power would be coming from gear.

I just wanted to make sure that I was clear on that point, for your data. Too paranoid about miscommunicating

Got it, thank you.

And yes, those are the ones I was assuming were going to be quite weak. Looking at this matches my information, but I think when I originally found this page a while back I disregarded it due to going over it too fast in the outputs, since it actually doesn't say 'Lineage 2 stats' anywhere, and you have to actually look at it visually to know its an L2 page and not an original Lineage page (if you're not familiar with the games).

Azherae wrote: »

And yes, those are the ones I was assuming were going to be quite weak. Looking at this matches my information, but I think when I originally found this page a while back I disregarded it due to going over it too fast in the outputs, since it actually doesn't say 'Lineage 2 stats' anywhere, and you have to actually look at it visually to know its an L2 page and not an original Lineage page (if you're not familiar with the games).

Yeah, L1 was even less popular in the west than L2 was, so pretty much any "Lineage" page usually just means L2, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

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Nope I support mob distribution design where max lvl people just shouldn't be around truly lowbie farming grounds. But I think that a 20lvl difference should still give a chance for the lowbie to kill a high lvl player, if high's gear isn't of a super high tier.

And if it is of that tier, that player should have enough content on their plate that they don't waste time running around flagged lowbies. BUT! There'll be situations where guildies might be on their lowbie alts or have lowbie friends. And then those lowbies start a fight with other lowbie people and then want to come with the mains (or call their high lvl friends), which then makes their enemies do the same and soon enough you have a hugeass guild war on your hand with dozens (or even hundreds) of people fighting.

That was one of the funnest parts of L2, especially when you already reached a certain lvl of progression and decided to farm something on your alt. If flagged lowbies are fully protected against highbie hits - none of this can happen.

And if there's just random highbies going around and killing flagged lowbies - their reputation will be shit. And the game is kinda built on player reputation within their node/guild/social org. Players can address the problem of this situation themselves.

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Not fully true. I want the game to promote cross-lvl cooperation, but the respective locations for low and high lvl players would be still different.

And when highbie do get content in lowbie locations (as I described in this thread) - it'd be for cooperation rather than fighting flagged lowbies.

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It's gonna be rare if the highbie sees the lvl (or at least approximation) of the flagged character. Why would you risk getting flagged in foreign lands when there's no reward for it? Obviously some people might do it "just cause", but those would be even rarer.

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Except that ladder doesn't really work. One side might not have intermediate lvls in their guild. Or the lowbies friends are all lvl50s already (a quite often occurrence).

The lvl50 should be able to kill a flagged lvl20 character because it's a flagged character in the game. I could agree to a "your flagged state stays longer if it was initiated by hitting a flagged lowbie". Then the risk for the highbie is higher, while the reward is still non-existent.

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Except I'm against people making a shitton of alts I want the game to limit the validity of that action as much as possible. Mainly because I've played the game with alts and this pvp for years. It's never fun for the newbie to fight against an alt. It's also never fair either.

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They'll just get killed. And if they return - they'll keep getting killed. If they're wearing their good gear - that's decay that they need to pay for, while they're just wasting their time on useless pvp.

And the event I described usually involves highbies in an almost immediate matter. Ashes would probably take longer to get other highbies to the same location, but still. If one side has friends/main of a higher lvl - they'd call them and kill the other lowbie once. If that other lowbie has their own highbie friends - it's now a high lvl pvp interaction and if lowbies are so weak that they can't contribute - they're not involved.

If the other lowbie doesn't have highbie friends - they either leave to another location of come back and stop flagging up, at which point it's gonna be a risk/reward decision on the side of the dude with highbie friends. Does he PK the other lowbie or not. But, in this case too, it's now a situation that's separated from highbies.

But I made another thread on this topic, cause I do think that there might be a good solution to this.

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Yeah, I don't like it either but writing out "high lvl players" each fucking time got real annoying.