So I decided to stay away from giving my opinion on GU47 until I had a little while to let the changes sink in. Overall I'm relieved to find that its not the game-ending fiasco a lot of people were stressing over. I'm surprised to find myself in favor of the stat-flattening although I do have a quibble or two about the current state of acquiring marks. One of the aims of stat-flattening (along with keeping lower players more in-line with higher ones) was to make content 2 tiers below a character's current tier less trivial and more challenging. In that you have succeeded. The problem is that when it comes to balancing game difficulty in MMOs, risk vs. reward should be the number one concern. GU47 increases the risk, but completely nullifies (aside from feats and general goodwill towards lower players) the reward. Helping out of the goodness of your heart is all well and good if you enjoy it, but the dev team should be looking into ways to develop incentives that encourage more high level players to want to assist lower ones. At CR117+ I'm trying to figure out why I want to run yet another AnB, especially when now that the content is harder (marginally), I'm getting no marks whatsoever AND I have all this new stuff to work that will help strengthen MY game. So constructively I have three possible solutions that could encourage higher players to help lower ones while at the same time doing something to reward us for out efforts. 1. Diminishing Returns Since one goal of stat-flattening is to make content 1 and 2 levels lower than current still give a challenge, I submit that there should still be some diminishing returns for doing content 1 or 2 levels lower than your current tier. It could still generate marks of victory, just not as many. As an example, Current tier alerts would give the normal 5 marks. -1 tier alerts might give 3 marks and -2 might give just one mark. That way its still much more economical to do current content but you also get something for lower stuff. 2. Tier Suits This one is my fave, but might be the most complicated to implement. Since we're dealing with jumps of 3 tiers, your toon could have a fully geared-out armory for tiers 1-3, 4-6, and 6-9, ect. So long as your suit's CR remained below the cutoff CR you would technically be running content at appropriate levels. This would give every alert/raid/op in the game from the Batcave to the Happiness Home relevance. It would also do a lot to promote groups. I can see how so much content would make gearing up easier at higher levels but perhaps you could scale mark requirements on armor to be more robust to counter the abundant relevant content available. So a chest piece would still be 60 marks at T1 but perhaps there would be a gradual increase as the tiers escalate so at T7 a chest would run somewhere around 100 marks. The specifics aren't important for this convo, but the idea has merit. You would also have to allow us more armories in our bases but I've been a huge proponent of this regardless of GU47. 3. Set Content Range This means that we have a set amount of mark-relevant content for us at any point in the game. You could do it by a hard number of content instances, or you could allow some deviation by using episodes to cycle it. The best example I can think of is the current end game. So HoP2 has given us T7 content to gain marks. Currently by jumping past a hard 116 CR it wipes out all t6 content. I propose to make this more gradual than it currently is. So using this example, AF1 content would now be trivial, but the rest of t6 would not. Next episode would see the trivialization of HoP1 and so on. Again, mark cost on armor might have to be adjusted to encourage replays, but it would make content matter for much longer. I'm sure a lot of this has probably already been discussed, but I wanted to throw my thoughts into the ring. Either way, I'm enjoying the new stuff!
