PVE Adventure Scaling

SotA has a vast world to play but many lower-level scenes are quickly obsolete due to the rapid leveling people can do if they choose. At AL 110, it was recently assumed that I was a new player which was pretty crazy to me as I have 1000+ hours in... I just choose to not grind XP. Have I? Sure I did some rounds in UT in the past and have done one CP session but I try to keep it to a minimum. It is a choice I make because the content I like to play I want to remain challenging to me and feel like I progress at a somewhat "normal" pace. If I can kill a red dragon in 30 seconds what fun is that? What fun is that to my party? To some that may be fun, but I personally want my battles with something like a dragon to be epic and I want them to continue to be epic no matter what level I am at. The most exciting gameplay I have experienced in SotA was based around large parties of lower AL players trying to bring down an ancient dragon, battling daemons, or running the ruined keep. It was hard and we died a lot... but it was fun.

I would like to propose the optional scaling of adventure scenes and content based on the AL of the player party (or just the player if they are not in a party). In addition to open/party/private, create a scaled mode. For scenes not in scaled instancing they can stay as they are now. For scenes that are entered in scaled instancing, I would like to propose the following:

1) Scale the complexity of the scene (ie the mob HP, damage, resistances, attacks, everything deadly to the player) based on either total AL of the party or individual AL if the player is solo. This way even Tier 1 scenes can be challenging (assuming they can be entered with an instancing mode) and rewarding to an experienced player. With the new complexity calculations in place on whatever is deadly, use the current Tier-to-AL for the scene as the base of 1 and then scale accordingly with total party AL or solo AL. A Tier 1 scene could become a Tier 10+ if the party AL was high enough.

2) Scale the loot and XP based on the scaled complexity, so the greater the challenge the greater the reward.

Obviously a lot to flesh out there and its no easy undertaking. Wanted to get the crazy out of my head though and bring out some discussion on the topic. I know @Chris has mentioned scaling in the past so something like this may not be outside of the realm of possibility.

 

Had an additional thought on this on my drive home. In theory the buff/debuff system already has access to the stats that need to be modified based on AL. So... instead of implementing a new scene instancing mode (lots of work) what if when the enemy goes aggro it applies a buff based on the total AL of the party attacking it (or the AL of the solo player). This would offload the scaling to an individual enemy level and could hopefully leverage an already existing system (ie the buff system) to implement the scaling. The buff could also have an icon below the HP bar of the enemy that we could hover and see the AL buff details.

 

One way they did this before was to cap players instead of boosting mobs. So entering a Tier 1 scene would cap you to a specific adventurer level, with skills scaled proportionally. It was workable, but needed a lot more work before it would be *the* solution.

 

Greetings all
I remember playing WOW and they would have Scenes that were instanced instead of open that would level to the level of the highest player in group or of the individual. This made each one of these areas playable and if you grouped with higher level players you could see what a real fight was like or pick up some great loot . It did mean that it would have to be created and populated based on calculations but you could go back and replay the area as your level grew. Not sure what the game cost in performance of servers or loss of public interaction meant but I was willing to revisit areas even though I was now a high level player.

I know Port does this for some scenes but mostly for quest progression but the tech is there.

 

Another option would be to just change some of the lower tiers to tier 6-9 zones. My thinking is this would be a really easy fix(I may be wrong) as I assume it would just be bumping up the levels of the monsters in those zones. We have loads of wasted stunning zones.
it would be good to have the CP's be different levels, I see no reason for them all to be the same level. Changing some to easier content would prepare people for group work.