Update: Marks of Power

This idea is really really bad...if you log on at 3 AM on the villian side and there is not enough decent people on to run large group content, you just can't progress...if you wanna play you have to do something that does not progress your toon....

This game is really starting to rub me the wrong way...

AB is harder than wave, but wave speed feat and fighting all the bosses up is harder. What made wave hard was pug groups trying to keep 1 and 2 bosses up and range dps becoming unbalanced

How is "play value" in jeopardy exactly if there is very low percentage gear dropping from a raid that is stronger than the vendor gear. Doesn't that mean the longevity of the DLC is based on that rather than on Mark progression. I just can't understand how taking away content is the best course of action

Have to disagree with you on this. A regular Paradox run is still harder then an A&B run....The reason being...drumroll please......ONE SHOTS

Or yall might know them as Happy Feet and Warrior lol

But to get the best gear from Origin Crisis you needed to have bosses come in the center for certain pieces. So not only is it harder but it also rewards less useful pieces compared to Assault & Battery and only on completion of the final room compared to Assault & Battery's completion of any boss.

This is definitely the way to go. Keep the Same set of Marks for the Small Group DLC and the Large Group DLC and then switch. Especially, if one of the three new raids will be uncompleteable for many leagues/groups when it first drops.

Also, to enhance replay-ability you might consider adding a golden rare item to more raids and make it scale with your gear and Cr level. People still run Prime and AB for the gold helm and ring, long after the marks became irrelevant. If those items scaled, there would still be groups running those raids every day. Add unique, super-rare Armour item drops in old raids to increase the carrot for seasoned vets. You might hate the Themyscira Alert by now, but if there was a 1 in 1000 chance of getting Wonder Woman's Shield, a gold weapon, you can bet there would be people running it everyday.

The counter solution to the current one is either grouping of small and large group content (which creates problems of wanting to run small/large group B for small/large A gear but be unable to) or increasing gear costs (which creates problems of smaller group players earning the gear much slower). You can make an alternation of option 2 by putting a CR minimum on each set of gear but you wouldn't solve the issue at hand: there would be too much content for a single set of gear, but it would be a better alternative to option 2.

None of the options above address the use of Replay Badge speed. A weekly mark cap keeps everyone regardless of how they obtained the marks on the same playing field progressing at the same relative speed. They can play whatever they choose to play and buy whatever set of gear they want. If they have a single day to play they can use Replay Badges to get to their cap. They can still use Replay Badges for gear (either close to or exceeding vendor gear) that drops from the content.

I know that Loche said this cannot happen in the time remaining so I am not going to ask for it before the launch of the DLC. However I would propose that once the DLC is launched that Amazon Fury Part 1 content is changed to Marks of Power (giving people time to grind out/purchase styles using Marks of Fury if they want to) and put a weekly somewhere of, say, 100 which is roughly what each type of DLC can over you a week without resetting. This will give you 2 pieces of gear a week, 3 pieces of every 2 weeks (given average pricing). This is no different compared to what Amazon Fury Part 1 offers now (with bonus marks included, etc.) and what Halls of Power Part 1 will offer (again with bonus marks).

Sure a weekly cap limits how much you can accumulate in a week... but isn't the whole point of the initial change to enforce the lifespan of a particular DLC? This does that, keeps variety, addresses Replay Badge use for marks and keeps everyone on the same playing field for current tier giving players a consistent experience (instead of after 1 week being put in groups of players with the highest gear and possibly removing the difficulty from the content for players that may have wanted it).

P.S. I predict I will get the same 1-2 likes but there are reasons other games do this as a choice to throttle progression; it will actually throttle progression with no loopholes.

Sore has the best idea in this thread. Please devs heed what he says before it is too late. I really do not think your reasoning for splitting marks within the tier is of sound judgement. The reason being:

Considering all of T5, there were 5 Solos, 3 Duos, 5 Alerts, 3 Raids and 4 Bounties (throwing the WOTL weekly solos in with that). Cumulatively you could earn 265 marks a week if you ran all the T5 content you could each day.

Comparitively in T6; AF has 5 Solos, 2 Duos, and an Alert. Running this each week nets you 112 marks. Maybe a couple extra if you get an additional mark here and there instead of gear.

Add in T6 HOP. 2 Alerts and 3 Raids. Roughly 134 marks a week.

You guys haven't made the gear any cheaper so i really don't agree with your logic behind this.

If you would implement Sore's idea we would be able to accumulate somewhere around 246 marks / week and the amount of content available for the tier would be in the same range as every other tier aside from T4. Then just make the next DLC start T8 and a new mark for use. This also balances the content for both small group and large group players.

Wow really? That's actually some really cool info

Maybe this was your experience. However, A & B was completed by many, many people on day one, period. It offered no challenge whatsoever. The Scion of Ion gear was vastly superior to Traces in Time/Time Traveler. Furthermore, the Vestaments was even better. I disagree with your thought here. The community made that hard because they forgot that Trolls should always be doing CC. A & B was visually gorgeous, however offered no challenge.

I can't believe how many people still let the Sentry do the cha-cha on their faces... LOL

Spytle provided the same info in that thread you were participating in yesterday:

I didn't beat wave the first day, but I beat it within the first 2 weeks, with like 2 t4 2 t5 vendor pieces and the rest green gear, but when I beat AB I was almost fully pink, with a lot better weapon. I don't think I would have been able to beat AB with the same gear I beat wave in. Like I said a regular wave run is easy, trying to keep bosses up or speed feating it is harder than AB, but not the regular run. I would say nexus last boss is harder than the tyrant

Mepps mainly provided information about tweaking DLC structure and went in an opposite direction saying Raids (8-Man) do not equal the time spent creating other pieces of content. Spytle said it takes nearly the same amount of time. In that aspect they are almost contradicting themselves.

Both were new pieces of information.

Mepps said the time spent creating one raid does not equal the time spent creating three pieces of other content. He also said "It takes roughly the same amount of time to create any one piece of content." That is the same thing Spytle said; there was no contradiction.

Personally I'm put off by the change. It's not like it's a huge kick in the nuts, and I can see how it will be a better money earner and it'll slow down the rate at which ppl can gear up so as they are not crying 'bored' as fast, but for me I replayed t6 a lot to make sure my two main toons were all 92 both roles with 100 marks saved up to buy in to the new gear day 1 of release and now that's all for naught.
I guess the decisions made and at least i know now what to expect in the future, but yh right now I do feel a little short changed.

It was completed on day one because it was released at the end, where Dox was at the beginning with bugs galore. AnB has better built strategy that challenges the mind, while Dox had a lot of one shot mechanics that punished a player with lower reflexes and causes problems with the group.

If both were released at the same time, we would see that Dox would be more of a challenge due to the gear on taking a hit from a random blue ball from a sphere fountain, but the level of entry for AnB is lower, so the struggle would still be there. Especially in the last room.

Complexity of skill for the instance: AnB
Challenge to stay alive: Dox

From the amount of people that ran Survival Mode, I would say that not a lot of people like the stay alive challenge that Dox gave, though there are some that do love that kind of thing.

I doubt that. Given if the devs put any effort into making a raid with actual high quality raid mechanics, it would definately take more time to create compared to 1 solo open world mission.

The open world instances are separate from solo instances. The open world area is akin to an instance, not each individual mission. The solo instances we get through the on duty menu are what they mean to require approximately the same effort as raid instances. I'm sure it varies based on mechanics to a degree, but creating the environment is where much of the work takes place from what I understand.