If you’ve been following along with our developer diaries so far this week, you know that we’re planning to make a lot of changes to combat and progression within the game. These changes are designed to make combat feel more engaging, create more time and space for tactical choices, and to make our content more accessible for small groups, allowing for players to team up with others organically while adventuring.
With these changes, NPC time-to-kill will increase and individual fights will be more about sustainability and resource management, rather than surviving insane spike damage. Grouping up will be to your advantage since you will be able to handle these enemies more efficiently and venture into areas with higher density and an overall higher level of challenge.
However, there’s a very big element that we need to address alongside all these other changes: the rate of experience gain and how players progress from level 1 to level 50 as an adventurer.
Feedback so far in Early Access
Our current leveling progression has been in place with only minor adjustments since the beginning of Early Access. During that time we have heard plenty of feedback from our players regarding the speed of leveling and where they are currently hitting a wall. While the general consensus is that experience feels pretty good from level 1-20, the rate of experience gain past 20 falls off a cliff. Interestingly, many players have also told us that in that 1-20 range, soloing is more effective than grouping for earning experience, and that one of the reasons things slow down after 20 is that they are being pushed into group content. Since we don’t want experience to be a disincentive to grouping (much the opposite), there are a few things we need to address there.
Upcoming Changes
First, with the updates coming in the spring, all our NPCs are going to reward much more experience per kill than they have in the past. This will compliment the increased time-to-kill. If a group goes from taking 20 seconds to kill an NPC (currently), to taking 60-70 seconds, the experience earned needs to increase proportionally as well. We would rather you kill fewer enemies in tactical fights where resources matter and get really nice experience per kill, rather than machine-gun through hundreds of NPCs focusing only on DPS and only get tiny blips of experience per kill.
Second, we are going to be adjusting the amount of experience required to level up, particularly at levels 20 and above. Our goal is a smoother progression as you level, with the grind not feeling as heavy until you get much closer to max level. Here are two abstract charts illustrating what we are generally targeting for level progression based on number of kills, both in the current game and after the Combat and Progression Update goes live. You can see from these that in our proposed model, leveling progression is much smoother and somewhat faster, with far fewer kills required at high levels than today.
Third, instead of zone-wide experience bonuses (ZEMs), we are exploring experience bonuses for NPCs in specific, more difficult areas inside dungeons and other challenging points of interest. The goal is felt risk vs. rewards, with groups incentivized to push deeper into these more challenging areas. Since these areas are designed to test the mettle of groups and players may not be able to kill enemies as quickly, it makes sense that NPCs in these areas should be worth a little more.
Fourth, as part of these changes we are slightly tightening the range of NPCs that can give you experience and the modifiers to experience gain that come from taking on things above or below your level. This means that, while NPCs overall will reward more experience per kill regardless of /con color, it will be even more lucrative to fight things that are at your level and above than it is today.
In Summary
With the updated progression formulas, getting to level 50 will still be an accomplishment. However, it won’t require the extreme amount of repetitive grinding that it does today. And more importantly, the best way to level up will be by tackling difficult and challenging areas, rather than steam-rolling tens of thousands of weak NPCs well below your level. We want players adventuring in Pantheon to be focused on exploring the world, overcoming challenges, having fun while they play and not being required to make a choice between doing that or leveling up.
When we open our Public Test Realm as part of the update, we will watch experience progression and evaluate player feedback very closely. It is important to us to get these aspects right before we deploy the changes to our normal servers, and so those of you who choose to participate on the Test realm can expect some tuning to occur before it is all said and done.
Next week, we are returning to talk about Skill Progression and Techniques, followed by Adventuring Mastery, Crafting Progression, and some things to support the Game Economy and Itemization.
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More from the Combat & Progression Update Details Series
Part One: Overview
Part Two: Unified NPC Templates
Part Three: Combat Formula Adjustments
Part Four: Kill Credit & NPC Spawning