Remove the mob aggro and hit caps?

[battlewraith]

54 minutes ago, tidge said:

 

The *only* reason to rush to 50 was that HEATs got unlocked by having a level 50. Obviously this wasn't a thing *until* HEATs showed up.

 

I'm still not entirely sure what the motivation to rush to level 50 is on Homecoming. I can sort of appreciate a player wanting to see what a full level-50 kit can do, but I've never really bought into the argument that goes like "I'm bored with pre-45 content... so instead I want to run level 45+ over-and-over-again."

 

Wrong. Once pvp was added in 2005 there was a subset of the player base that needed to get characters to 50 asap in order to participate in lvl 50 pvp. 

On HC, my personal motivation to make new characters is to get them to 50, get them enhanced and set up with incarnates, and then run the build on harder difficulty levels to see how well it performs. Occasionally I'll run a character at lower levels, but it gets boring very quickly.

 

This isn't an argument for anything. It's a statement of preference. It is in no way significant whether someone like you can relate to it or not.

[tidge]

16 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

 

Wrong. Once pvp was added in 2005 there was a subset of the player base that needed to get characters to 50 asap in order to participate in lvl 50 pvp.

 

I... guess? The map-herding via Unai was a thing in Issue 1. Kheldians were in Issue 3.

 

To the point made by @Greycat... There wasn't that much of a reason to rush to level 50 in the early days of Live. The biggest motivator for me was the extra power picks and all those extra slots. We didn't even have the same considerations for Enhancements back then.

[battlewraith]

8 minutes ago, tidge said:

 

I... guess? The map-herding via Unai was a thing in Issue 1. Kheldians were in Issue 3.

 

To the point made by @Greycat... There wasn't that much of a reason to rush to level 50 in the early days of Live. The biggest motivator for me was the extra power picks and all those extra slots. We didn't even have the same considerations for Enhancements back then.

 

If you're talking about roughly the first year, yeah I didn't feel this urge to rush to 50. In fact, it took a long time for me to hit lvl 50 on my main. However, the end of that first year also probably marked the steepest decline in server population. By 2005 most of the people I had been actively teaming with were gone. Whole sgs I knew left en masse for other games. So imo it's a distortion to say that there was no reason to rush to 50. If you were very invested in the game, probably not. Realistically though, a lot of people got bored with the content and moved on, particularly when expectations of what your $15 a month was going to get you turned out to be unrealistic. 

[Psyonico]

So, back on topic… I’ve just gotten back from a stint on ESO where, it is common for tanks in dungeons to just run past mobs, straight to the bosses (when a boss fight initiates, everyone gets teleported to the boss.). I found this very boring, but at the same time incredibly annoying.  First; it meant that you either sat around waiting (if the tank was nice enough to even tell you that’s what they were doing) or you just straight up died right away.  Secondly, it meant that most boss fights would pause part way through to fight the string of enemies that finally caught up to the tank.

I find this play style to be incredibly tedious, and I have no interest in mimicking it in HC.

 

[Uun]

1 hour ago, battlewraith said:

If you're talking about roughly the first year, yeah I didn't feel this urge to rush to 50. In fact, it took a long time for me to hit lvl 50 on my main.

The live server devs changed experience progression several times during the life of the game. As I recall, they changed the amount of xp granted by mobs at various levels at least twice. Not sure if they also changed the amount of xp required per level. I was unable to find patch notes for this so not sure exactly when it occurred, but leveling was MUCH slower during the early years of the game. It was common to exhaust all your contacts at lvl 35-39 and run out of content.

[tidge]

1 hour ago, Uun said:

The live server devs changed experience progression several times during the life of the game. As I recall, they changed the amount of xp granted by mobs at various levels at least twice. Not sure if they also changed the amount of xp required per level. I was unable to find patch notes for this so not sure exactly when it occurred, but leveling was MUCH slower during the early years of the game. It was common to exhaust all your contacts at lvl 35-39 and run out of content.

 

I definitely remember doing a LOT of street sweeping (in Brickstown, FF, and then PI) at certain points. I don't explicitly recall the changes to XP-granted, but I remember debt being a terrible obstacle. I still feel a twinge whenever I see the University in Funders Falls, as that was the area I had done sooo much street sweeping in!

 

Larger spawn sizes was always one of the reasons to spend time in Hazard zones, assuming they wouldn't murder you.

[Uun]

41 minutes ago, tidge said:

I don't explicitly recall the changes to XP-granted, but I remember debt being a terrible obstacle.

I did find the debt changes. Debt was reduced in I5 (in-mission debt cut in half) and I6 (debt cap cut in half).