Map feedback from week race

I plan on doing a shit ton of feedback from the last few races. I've put in many hours with duelist and I think there needs to be a major overhaul to the tree and I'll explain everything. It will take a while to type out but I'll try to have it tomorrow night, I have the night off to devote to it.

Two other things I want to talk about are maps and boosting. I'll use this one to address maps.

The drops are MUCH better now. Let's not get this wrong. Drops are much more consistent and everyone notices this. The issue is they are consistent across the board. A white map seems just as likely to drop a map (or more) as a rare map. It's all based on RNG so while IIQ helps, there's nothing firm about it. I literally ran a white 61 before the race by accident and got a 63 and two 62s, from a WHITE map.

I wrote this as a reply to the "Our view on map drops" thread but it's page 39-40 which I can't assume it will be easily seen.

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Moosifer wrote:

After doing a shit load more maps I'm not noticing a reason to do rare maps. I've done well over 10 60% maps, including a 110% and from all of them together I received a total of 1 map which was 2 lvls below the map I was running.

The solution to making rare maps worth it is when certain affixes roll together they get bonus IIQ. Having a map that lowers max resist, elemental weakness and extra elemental dmg (whatever source, personally, I think lighting should be way higher than the other two because of how it stacks. Fire damage can be curved by pots/high life regen. Cold, while brutal at times, you can still use pots. Enter a room with lightning skel and lighting arrow and you can get triple stacked then suddenly no more life in a matter of seconds.) is an insane map, even with over cap resists.

To make it even more appealing make these additives only apply when doing rare maps so people feel the need to alch maps rather than rolling 50-80% blues.

To add even more complexity, which I don't think would be worth the time it would take to code, make it so IIQ is related to the character stats. If a map has elemental damage, say fire and the character has 50% fire resist, the fire damage added more IIQ.

Since I wrote this my group did probably a total of 50 rare maps. All three of us ended quite broke. I'd say somewhere between 30-60 chisels, 20-50 alchs and 25 chaos. I personally had 25 alchs, 20 chaos and 15 chisels all wiped by this, Ceto was richer than I was, also got more map drops so I can't imagine how much wealth he dumped into it.

These maps kill our wealth and it's for the hope that we will get more maps to keep running. It worked in a feast or famine. We went yesterday doing only 63s and 64s, not awful but it's hard to really move up in the ranks doing lower maps, I heard Slayer was doing a few 69s at the same time. This morning we started having 65-67s pour on us. Then tonight we started back up to 62s, nothing dropping. I was down to my last 62 when ceto got back on with his insane luck and got us maps to get me back into the top 10.

It's too inconsistent. When I was doing blue maps I got the same amount over the long run as I did rare maps. The cost of a rare map is quite insane, especially late in races where alchs/chisels/chaos shoot up in price and people get greedy. I was offering a GCP for 3 alchs at one points, only 2 people were interested.

Pre-drop rate foolery people were stacking 75%-150% IIQ on gear then running 40-70% maps. If you want us to feel comfortable depending on RNG for map drops you need to make this possible through map IIQ. Make tough combos worth alot. Like I suggested in my quote above, something like a double stack (lower resist/added elemental dmg) gives 50% more to what they usually give, while a triple (lower resist/elemental weakness/added elemental dmg) gives 75%-100% more of their normal IIQ.

This way insane maps get into the 150-200% range and there's a real desire there to take the risk. For 100% I'm not doing cannot regen/temp chains/added cold dmg. It's not worth it. For 150%, I'm thinking about it. 200%, I almost can't turn it up. 250%? I tell global GG, if I don't make it out alive at least I have some maps to show for it.

If I KNOW there's a great chance to get good maps (+2 lvls) and alot of them, I'm in. If I run a 100% map and get nothing, it's shit exp (even a 69) because my speed is garbage and I wasted orbs on a map that I might has well have run as white and got the same results (maybe better, thanks RNG).

Like I said, general map drops are doing well but rare maps aren't worth it. I'm considering highly only doing blue maps the next race and saving my alch/chaos to trade afterwards to the poor winners who have none.

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Chris wrote:

This was a very useful post. Thanks.

The fact a single post gets the attention and response of the developers always amazes me and proves how much they care about their community. Nice post Moosifer and great work Chris and the rest of GGG.

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Desbris wrote:

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Chris wrote:

This was a very useful post. Thanks.

The fact a single post gets the attention and response of the developers always amazes me and proves how much they care about their community. Nice post Moosifer and great work Chris and the rest of GGG.

I was worried this thread was going to get buried like my last long feedback.

Thanks Chris. Prepare for a long duelist post. Trying to build motivation to start on it now.

I think the solution here is simply allow map quantity mods to be multiplicative with each other, Only with rare map. So say you have a rare map with a 40% mod, a 20% mod and a 10% mod, the final quantity is +84.8% or something like that.

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Moosifer wrote:

Make tough combos worth alot. Like I suggested in my quote above, something like a double stack (lower resist/added elemental dmg) gives 50% more to what they usually give, while a triple (lower resist/elemental weakness/added elemental dmg) gives 75%-100% more of their normal IIQ.

This way insane maps get into the 150-200% range and there's a real desire there to take the risk. For 100% I'm not doing cannot regen/temp chains/added cold dmg. It's not worth it. For 150%, I'm thinking about it. 200%, I almost can't turn it up. 250%? I tell global GG, if I don't make it out alive at least I have some maps to show for it.

While the whole OP in general is very well done, I think in particular this section is a fantastic idea and right on the money.

Great post moose. I saw your other post and wished it'd get more attention too. One point of emphasis that I think gets under-represented:

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Moosifier wrote:

These maps kill our wealth

We quite simply don't get to run high quant rare maps and build gear at the same time. We're forced to make a choice: maps or gear? You get to spend currency on one or the other. Simply can't do both at once.

In one case, I'll be spending too much currency on building items to afford high quant maps. I have to run <=63 blue maps for an income of rare items, the crafting grind. In the other case, I'll be so focused on getting to a high map level that I can't craft. Somewhere in between, I'm spamming low level blue maps just to save up a few alch/chaos so I can justify starting that high level map run. Choose how you wish to become broke.

At least I've never been in danger of running out.

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Progammer wrote:

I think the solution here is simply allow map quantity mods to be multiplicative with each other, Only with rare map. So say you have a rare map with a 40% mod, a 20% mod and a 10% mod, the final quantity is +84.8% or something like that.

I don't think this quite addresses the heart of the issue moose is driving at. Some mods don't have multiplicative difficulty; they shouldn't get multiplicative quant bonuses. Other groupings of mods definitely do feed back on each other; these should get considerably more bonus quant. It's about specific groupings of mods that buff each other severely.

The game needs some kind of a way to gauge actual difficulty of a particular combo of mods. Rather than just adding up hard-coded bonuses for each one.

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Zakaluka wrote:

Great post moose. I saw your other post and wished it'd get more attention too.

It's 8 pages in MS word. I don't expect many people to get through it. I'm actually amazed the 2 who commented did. I'm just hoping the devs see it, that's all that matters. I really really really want a crit tank that isn't a shadow.

I did it with staff templar (crit tank with reasonable DPS) 2 iterations ago. It works particularly well with staff templar, though, because of inner force. EE contributes, as do high availability of %crit nodes. CD is still scarce but that's not as important in a 2H build, where your primary damage component gets a +50% damage multiplier (thanks EE). The only holdback is getting suitable chest/staff with 5link or better. The whole build falls short if you don't have 5link on at least your primary attack.

In fact I'm finding that about crit melee: you need at least a 5-link to make the crit build a better choice than a normal +dmg/ias build. It's just difficult to get there; it's a tiered process. standard defensive build, respec slowly into more offense, then all at once do a massive shift out of your offense into crit. Gated/roadblocked/whatever you want to call it, but not impossible to get right.

My current project is just to see if I can make cleave work from south on the skilldrasil, under the new skilltree changes. In a defensive build. The whole thing still ends at trying to make crit work, and my analysis says it can, but I have always found roadblocks in the past.

I think the solution to maps is to greatly increase boss difficulty for all maps as well as give bosses a much higher bias for dropping maps, making it easier to acquire +2 map level maps from bosses while also making it such that, killing a boss is a big challenge and not something you may want to attempt to do on every map.