I know that the new bazaar zone is currently bugged and has no mobs, but there is now enough that's known about how scaling will work for a little bit of feedback. I don't like selecting the difficulty level of an instance upon entering. I think it would be a lot better if they just auto scaled based on the level of the person that initiates the instance. That might mean making scaling zones solo/party only, but that would still be much better imo. Even if difficulty level is selected by players, it would be a lot better via NPC than just selecting on entry. The NPC could offer you a challenge and then send you and your group into an instance of the requested difficulty level. That'd be a lot more immersive than just having a bunch of clones in a menu. Also, I hope that the new bazaar zone has more or different mobs than South Midmaer Way. SMW is a decent zone, but it's just a giant quest zone with a few isolated pockets of mobs that are very far apart. If there's new stuff, great. If it's an exact clone other than scaling mob level, it's gonna be pretty bad for testing.
Went back in to check it out today now that mobs are in. I tried the extreme version and there was just a handful of timber wolves and grizzly bears with hundreds of thousands of hit points. Not trying to be a negative Nancy, but I don't understand why this is live at this point.
They're only worth 4k xp each too. At least fighting them solo that's all I got. super not worth the risk.
I really enjoy this. I have so far only bothered with the tier 7 (easy) version, but this is a difficulty I've been longing for for a while. It's hard enough that it isn't a cakewalk at my level, but I'm not getting destroyed, either. The mobs XP is decent enough, and the resource nodes have been bumped to tier 5, so that's worthwhile too. (Especially no that we get xp for meticulous.) The only complaint i have is I'd like to see some obsidian beasties thrown in here and there, since their carcasses are more useful than higher level ones, since they're basically the same that drop from low level version. Especially the deer, no reason they can't be obsidians.
Having listened to the Chris Stream, it seems like the "Extreme" difficulty was only a means to test out how far the top dogs would make it in this zone, those that are Adv lvl 130+. Mac says he got his ass kicked there, Fzol did too, but guess what, they had some fun. With those numbers, Chris will be able to tweak things to his liking, and deliver zones at a difficulty that people will enjoy. Cora Has been enjoying Easy Mode, Tier 7, just the kind of challenge he was looking for. I'll admit, They should have given the info to us right off the bat "Extreme difficulty will not be permanent, it is a test, enter at your own risk", but they didn't, and it causes confusion. Obviously this should have been on QA, which would have been much better, but they are still going in the right direction to give people of all levels enjoyable content, but also in a way that re-uses content, I think this is a great idea
Are the level scaled creatures just going to be a copy paste of existing creatures and then just give them more hit points?
I like the idea of scaling content and I'm glad they're working on it too. I just would like it to be done well, and I don't consider just having a bunch of nested clones on the map doing it well. This is a start, but it's super duper rough for something that's being announced as a big new feature in a release. I'm not 100% sure, but the stuff that I've seen so far was just existing mobs that were higher level with more hps and stats. I think that's fine, but I also think that having good high level content will be more challenging than just making stuff bigger and harder hitting. Mob difficulty isn't really linear, because you pass thresholds that make a big difference as you go up. For example, if a mobs melee attacks can one shot you, you can't beat that mob without kiting. Once you pass that threshold, kiting becomes the only available option, which is pretty lame.
They are higher level, but I think all they did was increase the stats on the mobs currently there. Weirdly, they drop appropriate loot for their level, but they give garbage for XP. Not sure if that was an oversight or a bug, but 2khealth mobs giving 450 xp is not cool. (I'm sure this is not working as intended.) Oddly, all the resource nodes have been upgraded to tier 5. But half of them don't work for some reason, you just get stuck in gather mode forever, and if you back out of it, you can no longer enter combat mode unless you leave the scene. That said, I think it seems the original idea was to upgrade South Midmaer. But they didn't want people flipping out over losing a scene they liked, especially since it contains a blessing a lot of people liked, so they cloned it. My interpretation of what was said is that when (if) they work all the kinks out, they will add this to other existing scenes, as well as all new scenes. I would hope that they figure out how to keep the original difficulty of old scenes as a default, with the new system layered on top of that. We'll see.
Went in extreme with four players. Killed a 150k boar, a couple 115k bears, few 96k mages. Got around 60k XP for our 30 minutes of fighting. Two thoughts. 1.) Scene is NOT for melee players unfortunately. High str mobs (everything except mages) cannot be stunned at all and can one-shot with crits. I had 2000 hp and could absorb a hit or two but not much more - not the 500 I'd have to absorb too do 100k+ damage to a mob Seems like a scene for ranged and mages only which is unfortunate. 2.) The time it takes even high level players to kill these mobs should be reflected in the XP. If it takes 30 minutes to kill let's say 8 mobs on extreme, those mobs should give crazy XP to make it worth doing. A few players at a 70% XP split would need 700k or so a mob to get the 8m that is attainable elsewhere. A party of 8 or 12 could kill faster but at a lower XP split. In conclusion, the zone is cool but there needs to be a reason to do extreme zones over other things. I shouldn't be able to get more xp on the other 3 difficulties (or MOST other zones) than I can get on extreme. @Elgarion
Chris mentioned he was gonna work on DR to make it so a tank could take 3 or so hits, requiring a dedicated healer, making healers and tanks necessary. For this I think he needs to also reduce kiting potential in a zone like this or it wont work, but hey, that's another subject (I guess). Getting DR buffed a bit will make things interesting, I can't wait to see this happen.
I think XP isn't working right. On Easy, 2k boars are only giving 450 xp. 1k Skellies are only giving 228 xp.