430 CR 700 SP! What now?

One thing that this game lacks is the late late game. After reaching max CR in any episode you run out of things to do unless you want alts. But arts play such a large part so why create a alt without having artifacts on them? We need something to do once we hit max CR. Once people hit the max CR the general population starts to fall off rapidly until the next episode. We should try to as a community come up with more methods of keeping players playing even after hitting the max in a EP. Currently the only thing that I can think of is unlimited scaling alerts getting harder and harder. And maybe even add some kind of of ranked system or leaderboards to it.

700 SP isn't max... What can you do now? Get more

That is not fun and burns players out, to grow a game lets propose a way forward.

Well, you asked. But welcome to the forum, where every other post is someone trying to figure out what you are proposing, just to be met with crickets. Good luck though!

Kind of agree. I am to the point where all I care about is more source marks to collect every feat and style I dont already have, for more SP...

After I use all of my marks, there's not really much else to do with them other than buy more allies and buy vendor gear to sell on the broker to make in game $.

Well you have yet to experience the feeling of any sort of progression that doesn't happen till at least 1200sp. The clamp starts to fall off at 1200sp per point. the idea was for us to never reach that point though. so if I were you I would be looking forward to a revamp very shortly

We need more specific information to make any viable suggestions. Do you mainly play regular content, Elite or Elite+?

If youre doing anything than E+, theres always the next difficulty to chase. I get that its not everyones cup of tea but thats the best option right now. The main problem is that the content we get is made for a 4-month cycle but due to staff shortages, this is currently not possible. If we would get shorter cycles of episode releases, many desires of players would vanish in terms of content requests.

I wouldn't mind a more grindy approach to an episode but it has to be fair, so no replay badges involved at a certain point or else its going to end like it was back then when CR was the only thing that mattered with players kept maxing gear in the 1st week and then stopped playing after a month - if not even earlier.

Something i proposed a while ago could fit right into what we could need to invest more time into Dcuo while making it feel worth while after an episode is finished in terms of basic feats and vendor items for basic progress.

Immortal Gear | DC Universe Online Forums (daybreakgames.com)

800sp. duh. /semi-sarcasm

Yeah, I'm just running seasonal to stack buff consumables, running stabilizer and checking broker to see if prices of artifact catalysts are high enough to warrant selling some.

You'll soon have a new base design to fill.

Personally I do Elite+ And its difficult at first but then starts to just turn into a farm once you get a group that can consistently run it at max CR. To grind skill points is unrealistic. I do agree with what you were saying about the replay badges. I understand the game wants to make money but they should do it on cosmetics not so much on paying to win. Artifacts are already way to hard to level up without spending $$$ on. Which doesnt make the game that appealing to new players coming in. I think there was a study that showed it takes roughly 3 years? To get a artifact from 0-200 with the nth metal from in game as well as catalyst.

I dont know who made that "study", but i can tell you that its not accurate. Ive been playing for less than 2 years, with a premium account (without buying any xp from the DC Store) and i have 3 artifacts at 200, and like...5 at 160-180 (just on my main toon, my 3 alts have just 120s). And the last time i upgraded an Artifact was when Ebon was released. Meaning, i got all those arts in even less time.
And right now i could have even more than just 3 at 200, have enough xp to lvl a few more, but im just waiting for a double xp bonus.

I agree but are developers really open to the idea of skill-based pvp? Maybe having a high win lose would add lots of competition to a skill-based mode.

The only way i see E+ get more replay value with the current systems in place is by increasing the amount of mechanics or make certain mechanics more random. Something that stands out in that regard would be the random deviation from wonder woman on her spinning path during the 1st encounter in Cte+. That often gets someone killed because its not how she usually behaves. Another example would be the magical orbital strikes from Zatannas version on the final encounter that are easy to miss due to their size and lack of visibility. Also, because they have no orbital-like animation its much harder to realize what killed you even after checking the combat log.
The problem is that - although these things make the instance in some cases longer - they dont make the instance more enjoyable and make it a lot more frustrating to those that would otherwise barely manage to get through it.

Doing something as a set team or with the majority of group members not changing makes even the hardest content much easier. From the Dev perspective it must be sort of like feeding an insatiable beast with mechanics which is impossible to please for the long runtimes of these episodes.
The only way of ensuring a longer satisfaction for Elite+ players is a much higher base difficulty like we had with Swe+. The initial difficulty was way over the top, but after the 1st nerf it was doable but still extremely hard. However, many player didnt even attempt that content until the next episode hit, which should really only be a thing for hard feats in my opinion.

So, although i would love Swe+ difficulty content, many more would not. Creating a raid with mechanics that stay interesting for 6 months is impossible, even if we get two raids at once. One will always be the easier one which gets farmed, while the other is around for feats and then gets ignored by most. (Eg.: H.I.V.E. Reborn E and The Machine E or Pano E and The Escape E)

However, if we get the announced 2 raids next episode but with a delayed release from one another, it could work out similar to how we'd experience 2 episodes in 6 months. The second raid would drop after the Episode is active for some months with items that exceed our current ones - but not all - to not make vendor purchases entirely pointless.

If we look at the Roadmap, the following episode after the upcoming one is "only" five months apart.
We'll see what happens but i believe stretching content releases in that way would be more effective than trying to please all players at once for a shorter timespan.

All they have to do is put enough time,effort,thoughts into raids and it will be more longterm engaging like they used to be no need to stretch anything,6 month for a episode is already stretched enough people want and need and deserve quality content with all the feedback they are given and past raids it shouldnt be too much to ask for.

Would you play twice as much (and spend twice as much money) if we get two raids at once for 6 months or would you play maybe 2 months one raid and another 2 when the next one gets released within the same episode window?

I am currently playing Destiny 2 a lot. And with their newly added ingame Lfg system i enjoy finally raiding since i was never invested enough to join a Clan and be active enough for Raids or to build relationships over there.
Their raids are beautiful, partially mechanically astounding and emphasize a lot on teamplay and set-up while not relying on fixed roles such as Tank Heal or Troll.

Guess what, the only reason these raids have just slightly longer longevity is because of loot-locks that can't be cheated with replay badges and randomized weapon perks which would equal to randomized gear stats in Dcuo.

This system would obviously not work in Dcuo but my point is that even a developer with a budget of at least 10x as much as Dcuo (I don't know how much each company invests into raid development) and easily 10x more Devs working on those projects, it's still seemingly impossible to create something that pleases everyone and even more impossible to keep it fresh or interesting in the long run.

They started altering the loot-pool for older raids, so they became interesting again - but only until you got the weapons you wanted. Something like that would be equal to adding more feats in older Raids in Dcuo.

All in all its just impossible to create raids without procedual generation to keep things fresh for longer. Even with that it's not guaranteed to get the desired outcome if the tile-sets dont have mechanics tied to them so its only a visual difference. IF they have mechanics tied to them it's another challenge to balance them well enough so players don't quit when encountering a specifically difficult tile-set.
And all of that still results into making content for at least 3 raids shoved into one just to keep it around for longer while we could simply get 3 raids in the same time they took to create that one more interesting raid.
All of that ends in the dilemma of hit or miss when it comes to development. Remember the outcry of overusing the Metal timeline with their bosses during the Dark Knights Episode? Imagine instead of Swe for 6 months, we had that Raid around for 3x as long as that. 1,5 years of Metal-style raid. Anyone who disliked that would not come back until the next raid comes out which can also be a hit or miss once again.

But how will we expect engaging longterm content if they are mostly about our DPS output? The DPS feasting show needs to stop or the mechanics are meaningless we will nuke,burn through it given that they also dont like to do balance changes of even the biggest outliers it shouldnt be a surprise why we overpower everything they put infront of us and why all feels like non engaging.

We can sometimes skip entire mechanics with burn or speed them up so much they become meaningless and or easyier to predict, if they were to reduce the damage then the groups can actually feel the intented challenge It will be tough to provide us engaging longterm content unless they start either 1. balancing the game or 2. design content with it in mind that we have too much dps output and dont allow that to effect the outcome and or influence the percieved difficulty of raids to the extend it does.

The raids also offer no to very little challenge for support rolls its mostly again about the 5 / 8 DPS in the group good luck providing engaging content if they dont take care of the basics and think we are all DPS and want a elite raid to be 10 - 15 minutes speedrun first week of its release on content thats supposed to last months and keep us engaged for that time, thats not engaging nor long term feasible.

Elite is the new N.
There is no doubt about it. Its been cried too long an too loud about it that the devs dropped the bar so low that E is N now and E+ is maybe E, plus a little extra.
You can tell by simply looking at how much damage mechanics do in E. Most of them arent even killing you anymore, which used to be THE E definition - avoiding one-hits with knowledge.

The whole balance topic is for another day but overall its kind of true. While E content gets overwhelmed with our best possible damage, E+ difficulty almost requires artifact swapping to not feel dragged out with healthpools so large you would fall asleep with a basic 1 2 3 4 might dps rotation.

Having a focus on support roles is also something i have been requesting for a while, although it also comes down to artifacts for these roles. Phr has been beyond OP since its launch. Page of Destiny is also very strong, although just a slight nerf in uptime should be enough to get that in line. Trolls... i mean just take away our ability to swap artifacts and you instantly see many gadgets players passively nerfed. (Not saying they should do this, but it would help in that regard).
Tanks are the only ones without broken OP artifacts besides Lazarus pit water maybe and even that doesnt always work and also slightly nerfs you while it is inactive due to it only providing some meaningless base stats. Manacles are in the same ballpark as page for healers i'd say.

I liked the focus on Tank difficulty during Swe+, but the need of 4 tanks due to 4 sub-bosses was a bit over the top.
I liked the focus on Healing during Pce but that was before Phr was a thing and Page just launched, so many didnt want to waste their resources immediately on it.
I liked the focus on Trolls during *ERROR*

It would be nice to get something like the puzzle section from Clocktower for Trolls but in a boss fight. Essentially doing a side-objective while still keeping up debuffs and power. On the other hand... we all know how well DM N/E puzzle is going with random queues, so maybe its not 'that' great of an idea.

So overall i agree with you when it comes to Elite content but not E+. N is laughable and should simply take the spot for event. It doesnt matter if youre upscaled in event or N, its just a walk in the park either way without any artifacts, allies or augments.

I dunno my main toon is 430 CR, has more than 5 arts to 200, 730+ SP but when running the Subway duo if my partner messes up the mechanics (especially if PUGged) it can be a wipe. So that just tells me I have to get even gooder because I should be able to just one shot everything right? If you’re not able to 1shot everything you’re not endgame you’re just beginning.

What they do is try to get top damage in raids. For years, and I day, they got top damage? Okay, what now? Leaderboard?

I know you must be talking about elite or E+, because on regular, in the extremely rare case my PUG partner goes down, I finish the boss myself. The one time I had some one quit after knocking themself out the first time DaBoom blocked, I waited 30 seconds after finishing everything up to Ebon, gave up waiting for another player, and finished Ebon myself. And that was <423 CR, <200 SP, and no arts over 80.