PvE is already a cakewalk. Buffing gear to make PvE even more of a cakewalk is nonsensical. Most players seem to complain about the lack of difficulty.
Yes, classes aren’t well balanced but that is for PvP strictly. What needs to happen is for PvE to become more challenging and have more endgame content.
Increasing monster health does not make the game more challenging. Is destroying a dummy made out of wood any more challenging than destroying a dummy made out of varnished wood? No. They are still dummies.
Also, having more endgame content does not mean that ToS suddenly has to ‘show all their cards’. The ‘gone fishing’ is a good start for endgame content. To me, proper endgame content are activities that can be done when there is no more progression and only farming.
Here is a list of some farfetched ideas (but ideas nonetheless to give a gist of what I’m trying to get at)
- Companion breeding
- NPC relationship(gifting, questing, etc)
- ‘Horse’ Racing
- Bingo
- Jousting Tournaments (for Cataphract and Lancer classes only)
- 7 Day costumes earned from minigames
- Dividing players into two factions: (Demons and Tree-huggers) and have PvP only maps in the world rather than just Team Battle Maps)
- Have players compete for ranking in Demon/Tree-hugger faction, each with their own perks
What buffing gear does is essentially the same thing as either raising Monster HP or lowering Monster HP: it just modifies the time to overcome a threshold. It does NOT make the threshold any more difficult to cross.
Think of it as walking through ankle-level mud vs walking through ankle-level water. Its not more difficult. It just becomes more or less tedious.
What needs to happen is for monsters to become more ‘intelligent’ (aggressive) and organized. Thus, I propose the ‘Monster Centurion’ idea.
Similar to how the Centurion would have functioned in-game, with formations and buffs, there ought to be elite monsters with the same capabilities. Monster centurions should be able to organize local monsters into formation to attack the player and give buffs to those in formation.
While non-centurion monsters without a centurion monster around would act the way they normally would, a centurion monster ought to be aggressive.
The goal is to not only create a more immersive experience but to also create a more challenging experience while being faithful to the lore (somewhat). It just doesn’t make sense that a whole bunch of monsters who are supposedly terrorizing the people would just stand around and wait to get smashed.
This leads into the second idea: Demon and Tree-huggers
The premise is that the world is engulfed in chaos and the players have to fight against demons and their monsters.
But the problem is that the players never get to experience this ‘fight for their life’. Although it is quite impossible to just suddenly implement a system of which faction controls which territory on the current map, there ought to be a separate set of maps for this sole purpose of faction fighting.
The goal of faction fighting is to:
- Have players experience the actual war for the Tree
- Serve as endgame content
Being part of a faction should also mean being given a position and rank according to the player’s standing within the faction, not their level. This could mean that daily quests would have a larger part to play rather than just another pointless activity: daily quests can count towards faction contribution and increase a player’s standing.
But what should the benefits of faction ranking do for a player? Rather than have a stipend and some other buffs, it should be oriented towards the faction wars. Ranking should:
- Allow certain players to direct the flow of battle (ie which place they should attack next)
- Designate certain guilds to protect certain maps (like giving land to nobles)
- Control AI soldiers (a better insertion point for classes like the centurion. Rather than involuntarily drafting players into formation when none are present, a centurion-like player can opt to bring along AI soldiers set in formation)
- Where to garrison soldiers and how many should garrison a map.
- AI Soldier drafting
- Budget management
Again, I know some of my ideas can be considered far-fetched but I hope that it gives an idea about what endgame content should aim for. And endgame content certainly shouldn’t include buffing armor and such. That’s not even a band-aid solution. That’s like applying a band-aid to a part of the body that isn’t even injured and leaving the wound open and festering.
PvP balancing should come after endgame content is included. Why? Because people who look for PvP content are often people who can’t find anymore non-PvP content to deal with. Also, many games have the problem of fiddling around with classes all too often.
In fact, fiddling around with classes will often last forever. There will always be a complaint about some class or skill being too overpowering or too under powered. Some of these claims are legitimate, some are not. But the point is that it is pointless to attempt rebalancing classes when so many people are asking for more things to do other than PvP as endgame content.
What keeps players from leaving and attracts new players isn’t just events. If a game doesn’t have the depth, then a game should expand horizontally.
Where depth is something like Path of Exile with the numerous stat tweaking, gem combinations, etc and horizontal expansion is something like including a mini-game that is not really related to the core game. Just for laughs, imagine if there was a tetris-like minigame in ToS or a balloon popping mini-game or even tic-tac-toe.