Grinding in PvE has remained almost entirely stagnant for about as long as I've been a part of this community. I can name off nearly every major change right now since I began (which was around September 2014.)
1. The EXP earned from monsters was, overall, greatly increased (this occured about a year ago, so, very old news). This made grinding way faster, but, the method of grinding didn't change at all.
2. A few new dungeon types were added. (Forests, deserts, castles). This made PvE a bit more interesting with the added variety. (this occured a long, long time ago, though, probably about a year back?).
3. Monsters were given a handful of class skills in an attempt to make them a bit more interesting. I won't comment on how effective this was. To this day, though, Spectres and Shamans don't seem to realize they have invocations. Oh well.
4. 10* items were added, giving incentive to hunt all types of monsters for their rare drop.
Nowhere in all of this, though, has the 'best' way to get through PvE changed, at all. In the beginning, Evoker naturally was the de-facto fastest clearer (at least since it was introduced, but, I can't really speak on what happened before my time). Lantern Bearer used to be second-best until its costs were jacked up (and Hexer was introduced). The thread I posted when these forums were first put up still applies to this day, and Dev already knows Evoker will pretty much always be the 'best' for PvE.
My point, is that there should be options for grinding in PvE that don't solely reward your ability to clear large amounts of mobs at once. Suggestions have been made in the past to allievate the tedium for the majority of people, like new prefixes, (one of which was essentially what I just suggested, by Chaos no less).
To clarify, some of the issues with grinding as it stands are--
1. Clear times are vastly imbalanced between certain setups, driving people to only ever go for the fastest methods, which, in turn, result in people turning to those who run the most optimal setups for clearing PvE, else be forced to take much more time to obtain the same result.
2. A vast amount of content is restricted to running dungeons for everything you need. Even things like certain ingredients and materials can only ever be found in a chest, though, recent updates have slowly added more ingredients available to be bought, and farming has provided a means to produce some, but, a good number of things remain only available from chests in dungeons. Not to mention obtaining most items in the game, you need to go through a dungeon, which leads me to point 3.
3. Item generation is a complete shot in the dark. Every mob you kill will roll for literally everything in the game that meets its rarity standard, the same goes for chests. This makes finding specific items extremely difficult, even if it's a low rarity item, due to the sheer density of the items on the table to sift through. Crafting is the obvious solution to this, but there are other possibilities.
4. Monster battles in general remain the same from 1-80+, all that changes are the numbers, and a handful of skills some monsters get.
As for possible solutions...
1. Offer alternatives to the current grind to accomdate different playstyles, and not just cater to setups that can efficiently clear large groups of monsters. Anything from laplace requests, to singular, powerful mobs, that could give rewards that'd offer another route to grind through levels/mura and what not. Both of these things have already been suggested in the past, even.
2. Have more ingredients and crafting materials available in NPC vendors, and/or offer ways to generate the materials outside of dungeons, akin to farming. Maybe a mine that isn't full of monsters for ores, as an example.
3. More crafting recipes. That'll solve the issue of finding specific items for a -lot- of them, it's just a matter of which ones should be craftable. The black books were a step in the right direction that was sadly never taken again.
4. More skills for monsters to utilize after a certain point, maybe. Or perhaps even monsters that only show up after a certain level is passed. Who knows.
The most egregious issue out of -everything- in PvE, though, is the fact it's -exponentially- more time-consuming if you don't have access to the more efficient methods of grinding, which for the most part, means running Evoker whether you like it or not until you can grab a friend who runs Evoker so you can not run Evoker and grind as what you actually wanted to level as. There really shouldn't be such a huge gap between clear rates, yet it's remained for over a year now. And, as has been stated numerous times in the past, the answer to this is -NOT- to cut down on what the current best method is. It's, as I've stated already in this post, to offer alternatives that are on par that other setups can accomplish.
So, I, as a player, am -begging- for SOMETHING ELSE that can offer a means to grind without resigning myself to the grind mage train express for the next eternity. Black Beast attacks were a nice addition, but the EXP is usually just enough for a single level, maybe two, per raid. Level-based EXP is good though. But when it only comes every 3 hours, well, you're gonna be waiting for awhile if you're banking on that. Fishing contests are nice, and the rewards are neat too, but, the same with the beast attacks, it's only gonna come every IG day, and not everyone can stick around to participate all the time. I'll say I like the EXP payout from it, though (the mura reward is dreadful but that's a whole nother topic). World events like those are steps in the right direction, but, the issue is -they aren't reliable-. Meaning if you want to grind any other time...well, have fun if you're not an Evoker, and can't ring up your Evoker buddies to bail you out.
Need be, I can get into specifics for materials and recipes and what not, but, there's so many to list it'd take me forever, and I don't even know if that'd be necessary.
So...thoughts from everyone else on this? How do you feel about grinding as it stands?
"[url=http://neus-projects.net/viewtopic.php?p=12158#p12158 Wrote:Trexmaster ยป Fri Feb 12, 2016 7:02 am[/url]"]So...thoughts from everyone else on this? How do you feel about grinding as it stands?
I'm wondering why arena bosses aren't giving EXP at all. There's no reason for them not to when it might help close the gap between melee EXP gains and Evoker EXP gains when training day rolls around.
I'm wondering why, in a role-play setting, characters are encouraged to actively seek monsters out rather than avoid them. Monsters are stale because you're encouraged (and in many cases forced) to fight thousands of them just to do what you want to do with your character. Giving them more skills isn't going to fix that, because after the first few times you've seen it... what's the point? It's too bad though, because you're going to have to see it over and over and over, because rather than it being an occasional thing, you're shoved into seeking it out. It's like a magic trick. It's cool the first time, but forcing someone to watch it over and over, without reprieve, is torture.
And most of all, I'm wondering why grinding is such a large factor in a role-playing game when it's neither fun nor encourages role-play. I've personally felt that it was always in the way of doing anything meaningful, because even if you aren't grinding, many other people will be. It's not enough to be done, everyone else has to be done too. Someone putting in a ton of work to hit level 60 isn't going to make them a better role-player for it, and it isn't going to make them any funner to role-play with. I know I've said it before, but I don't really care about notions like "people should have to put in work to make their character strong." Watching someone I'd like to role-play with grind for hours is not preferable to having them actually role-playing with me and developing our characters in a more meaningful way. It's a time-sink for them, and it makes me feel robbed because the end result is going to be the same; we're just going to have to wait longer for it.
On the topic of lnet requests, I was meaning to do this as part of one of the 10* updates one week but never found the time because it ended up being a lot more work than I thought it was on paper. Now that I've managed to hit a period where I don't have any outstanding issues I need to tackle (as far as I'm aware, event tools was the last thing I said I'd look at afterwards), I can probably do those for the upcoming update. I could also see these lnet requests being relevant post extension by making them reset every time you do so.
I'm also looking into developing some more static dungeons that are more interesting to explore. I won't go into too much detail at the moment, though.
As for the topic of Evoker being so much better at grinding than everyone else, some of these suggestions are alright. But how do you actually tackle the problem of Evokers being quicker at it than everyone else? Nerfing Evoker damage would be one option. Another option would be to introduce more variety in encounters so that one element in a big area doesn't always work (IE, varied resistances).
You could throw on little bonus EXP modifiers to battle like a melee bonus or no AoE bonus, you could make certain stats factor in to how much EXP you get (such as SKI; this would have the effect of throwing gained EXP out of whack on an individual basis, though, which could be undesirable for a group of friends). You could make most of the EXP from a dungeon be from the boss (although this wouldn't really help things; the dungeon clear bonuses still exist, and Evokers would technically be able to clear dungeons more rapidly than other classes. It'd also introduce an issue of everyone ignoring all floors but the bottom one, if the EXP is significant enough to negate a clear bonus's usefulness. Mind you there are ways around this, too.)
There are a lot of different ways you could tackle this sort of problem. What's the best one? I don't know. Maybe re-examining the purpose of a dungeon is one option. Currently they're used to get EXP and items.
1) Leave things the way they are.
2) Make dungeons more about hunting items; introduce new content that is more focused on EXP and is less about how fast you can do it and more about just doing it.
3) Introduce out-of-battle skills/actions that let you get a leg-up out of battle, such as inflicting damage before it begins, similar to traps, or forcing enemies to start stunned, or such. (This still leaves the issue of Evoker being able to kill them faster than anyone else in the actual battle, though.)
4) Re-examine the severity of monster elemental weaknesses to make them less impactful.
5) Make AoE/long-range spells have some trade-off or reduced effectiveness so Evokers and Hexers don't murder everything on the map before they're put in any damage.
6*) Introduce more quests, lnet requests, and static areas that offer opportunities to earn EXP/rewards. (This is starred because this is already something I am working on, so.)
Feel free to discuss. I'm not opposed to making changes at all and would like it to be an enjoyable or tolerable experience, which is my response to Zakizo; grinding is such a large factor because it's a necessary wall for progression, because SL has always been 'a game that benefits positively from roleplaying' than 'a roleplaying environment that benefits from game elements'. I've always enjoyed the balance of the two rather than leaning heavily one way. We could eliminate levels, grinding, item hunting, and all those factors completely for the sake of roleplaying, but I think that would take a lot of shine away. It would for me, at least.
I don't think that 3, 4, or 5 will help the situation. The issue isn't that Evoker/Hexer clears too good.. It's that the other classes simply don't perform as well against 8+ enemies. Evokers/Hexers can simply kill 8 enemies, all in about the exact same amount of time (Round 1 or 2 usually) because of the way large scale AoE attacks work. While 'nerfing' that would seem to solve the issue, there rises another one in it's place.
The Grind is horrendously worse now. The only way to offset The Grind being harder now would be to give increased XP. What does that do in the end? Well it still makes leveling super fucking difficult, but it does a few different things. If we increase the XP gain for hunting, we still run into the issue of 'muh evoker kills it faster'. Fight Clear bonuses, for the people that don't use certain things could be a step in the right direction for The Grind. Winning by only using Physical Attacks (No spells, essentially)? XP Modifier. This would have to be applied to the entire party, so the entire party might be forced to try something like this. I like the idea of SKI factoring in for how much XP one gains, but we still hit another issue there.
"Certain classes get little to no skill. Are they inherently worse for leveling?"
This raises an entirely new problem. Tank Builds with no SKI just start falling off because it takes longer to grind (though the benefits are sooooo damn good). I think there was a thread, some time ago, for leveling. It encouraged people to level up by making certain classes have... "Experience Modifiers". With Evoker and Hexer having the smallest modifier at 1x, iirc. It went up to something like 2.5x or 3x with some melee classes (BK I think was one of them). It might seem like it might make parties level up at different rates, but it used the lowest party XP modifier. Have a team of BKs grinding together? Everyone gets 3x or something like that.
There are a lot of options for The Grind to 60... and while I think making it obsolete would be nice so that we can have characters that we're actually proud/happy of.... It also takes away from the game. The Grind is one of the biggest walls in the Game's fun. If it isn't you who's grinding, it's someone you're wanting to RP with (( STARING AT YOU PAPA JOHN AND FERN ))
---- Rambling about the problem as I see it, probably not a necessary read. The quick summary is that LE caused problems ----
I'm not advocating the removal of all the systems that make SL2 a game, I play SL2 over other games precisely because it also functions as a game, so don't worry. My problem isn't with levels, item hunting (barring certain things like craft materials that I really feel there's no reason to restrict to dungeons), or even grinding... no, there was a time when none of this actually felt as out of control as it does today. I hate to say it, but someone has to: this seemed to happen when Legend Extension was added. Grinding was always... well, slow, but there was an end to it. I do realize that I complained endlessly for a system that assisted with remaking a character to be added, but Legend Extension goes beyond that.
What I initially had in mind was a system to remake a character without deleting them because grinding became impossible due to RNG shenanigans, but Legend Extension guarantees that most people will reset at least once. Not only that, but because the gains keep stacking up, they constantly feel the pressure to reset again and again to get the most out of their character. This probably sounds like a problem that powergamers should just have to deal with, but ultimately everyone suffers from it when their friends are too busy grinding to interact with them. Whether it's you or not, if someone you know is doing it, you're paying the price.
The reason I believe this wasn't a huge problem before LE was this: Before LE you could remake, but there was no boost from it. There was no guarantee your stats would be better (whereas now, since you grind from level 1 with promos, it's almost as good as guaranteed the first time around), and there weren't as many ways to game the growth system. Because there was no real incentive to remake, people simply grinded until they felt their character was 'viable.' And that felt reasonable. Though the grind itself felt painfully slow, there was an end in sight.
Now, after the whole movement to get EXP boosted to lessen the pain of grinding... let's say it's become 2x faster (this is an arbitrary number so I don't know how accurate it is, but it works for this example). Seem good? It would be if we were in pre-LE days, but since you'll probably end up performing LE on most of your characters at least once, that boost is canceled out, and you'll still spend just as much time grinding, if not more-so. Now let's say for your build you want +5% to STR and SKI growth. But the grind the first time around was painful, so you take Deja Vu... whoops! You only had two ink. Now you have to grind a third time unless you want to sacrifice one of those growths. It may seem like the mindset of a min-maxer (and it is), but that's the norm in SL2 now. And unfortunately as stated, it's not only the min-maxers who suffer from it, it's the people who are left twiddling their thumbs waiting for them in largely deserted areas.
---- Hopefully things get more constructive at this point ----
As for how to fix this... LE has done its damage, so I'm not sure if reworking that system is an option. If it is, removing promos on reset and changing ink to be obtainable via another method instead of resetting your character would greatly help, but it would cause a huge power gap between characters created before and characters created after. The only way to alleviate this would be to give base classes comparable growths to promos. I'm not sure how appealing that idea sounds to anyone else, but it has a nice ring to it to me. People don't even keep bad stats when they come from promos, they're certainly not going to when they go through an initial grind with base classes. That means, currently, base classes having low growths is cosmetic at best and, while potentially frustrating, still futile at worst. Nothing of value would be lost.
An additional idea is to change ink to be obtainable through the same method as RP EXP currently is, but much less frequently. And if done this way I would recommend it only count if someone else is within range to hear the say/whisper/emote, because as it stands people seem to abuse the RP EXP system to the point where I almost regret suggesting it (and I'm sure they'd find a way to make me regret this too, but I'll cross that bridge if I get to it). I don't really feel too strongly about this suggestion, the main thing is just taking ink away from a character reset. How they're obtained beyond that probably won't matter much.
Finally, on the topic of bonuses obtainable through ink, they could stay the way they are now, but that would still result in people feeling compelled to reset. It may be worth changing the aspects to something not growth-related at all. An example: When you take the aspect, the base stat of the aspect you took scales up by the percentage, rounded up. For example, if you had 50 base STR and took Axys Al, your base STR would increase by 3 (2.5 rounded up). This wouldn't affect characters made before the change, so it would be up to them whether they want to keep their current stats or use the new system. The point of this isn't to change the scale of benefits from the aspects, but to remove the desire to "remake" for them, as the player would already know what they're getting before they took the aspect in the first place.
It's just one idea, but I think things would calm down considerably if the current "eternal grind" situation is addressed first and foremost. That can't be done without adjusting legend extension. Again, I'm not sure how appealing any of that sounds to anyone, but I definitely want to hear opinions and/or alternatives.
I came into this thread fearing yet another idiot powergamer going "PVE is too easy because I min/maxed and did 50 LEs and I want normal enemies with 10000 hp at high levels because I kill everything in 2-3 turns and fuck everyone who isn't as broken OP as me" I then noticed Trex started the thread, and Trex is not an idiot. Crisis averted. I am 100% on board with making PVE less of a boring slog and less of a lottery.
I do need to say this about LEs, though: It makes impossible builds possible. For example, if you want to be a Str/Wil character, absolutely nothing has both growths until promoted classes. So not only does it actually let people actually play classes efficiently (Bonder especially, since it's got weapon skills and 35% str despite the base class having 0% Str, wasting 1/3 of your total available levels just on unlocking it) but it also lets people who get RNG screwed not need to completely delete and remake their character (especially in light of the twinking rule *gagging noises*) So I completely believe LE to be a neccessary evil. There's a lot of IC options available through it, like corruption, vampirism, etc, which is also cool. So keeping promos available at level 1 post-LE is a definite must, unless we get a large selection of new base classes with more varied growth spreads. And if someone wants to grind endlessly until they get 80 base on a 105%... well, that's their choice, and their suffering. Not a fault of the LE system. I've actually made characters who turned out so decent the first time, I never LE'd at all, AFTER the implementation of the LE system. (Not to mention... remaking instead of LEing =- losing all your recipes, mirror shards, etc, remaking is actually a pretty massive sacrifice!)
The downside comes with things like noncombat characters needing to LE for LE bonuses on crafting levels and the like. I mean, REALLY!? Are you freaking kidding me!? LE should be an OPTIONAL BONUS, not a LITERAL REQUIREMENT, like it presently is to be able to even get a 50% chance on crafting some Black Book items. *strangles SL2 as a whole for making everyone 100% required to do combat unless they only sit around talking and nothing more*
Don't get me wrong. I understand where you're coming from. But even a non min-maxer, non grinder like me finds the LE system to be a literal requirement for some of my characters, even though most of mine are more purey social RP oriented and never even hit 60 at all! So yeah.
Back to your main points, though, I'd actually totally be in favor of raising base class growths. Anyone with any knowledge about Martial Arts knows the basics don't suck; they're an important fundemental you build on. The impression some people have that base classes need to suck is hilariously laughable. (Seriously, if I had a dollar for each time I'd seen people complain "It's a BASE CLASS SKILL, it's not supposed to be good!" I'd be able to buy a new gaming rig!) A promoted class is just a more specialized skillset to be used alongside the basics (as seen by the promoted class getting all the base class skills) and are not supposed to completely replace them. So as such, there's no real reason to make base class growths suck as much as they do.
I'm torn on your LE growth bonuses becoming an increase in stats suggestion, though. Let me explain my worry. Take a 20% Will class whose passives are very much of benefit to mages, like Umbrals or Papillions, for example. As someone who's missed 3 97% growths in a row with Lady Luck, well, let's just say the RNG can go choke on a big one. Presently, 100% growth vs 95% growth (the best a 20% will growth class can presently manage with and without that LE bonus) could mean the difference between 64/64 or the difference between 64/40. While many who are already over 100% growths (such as Liches) would no doubt love this change, I think many people may prefer the simple guarantee of not missing stats versus getting bonus stats, and it could serve to create a larger power gap between races.
As for the Legend Ink suggestion... I'm all for anything to not need to regrind to 60 just to get a catalyst for an enchant >_
Would quests or lnet requests that grant legend ink but can only be completed once per character help this issue? I don't want to negate legend extending as a desirable action but I understand that there are a lot of points worth the stuff now, so. I wouldn't be opposed to giving a few quests that grant it to help you get a leg up.
Quests and stuff that give Legend Inks? Oh you have no clue how good that would be.
So long as these inks cannot be used on Divine or Vorpal enchants (for obvious cheesing reasons).
Well, they'd probably have to be available upon first hitting 60 or first LE, because that's when you get the Legend Journal to use them, so I don't think it would matter what you can spend them on. If you can 'cheese' to 60 with a new character just for a quest that would take even more time, then go you. You deserve it.
I say, the easier it is to make the character you want, the better. Maybe with every few additions to LE, toss out a hard quest or two with inks attached.