New XP Curve and Level Cap (Loot & Survive)

I read some of the comments here and well... Looking at the numbers, the XP needed for levels is just fine, but the problem is in the utterly horrible amount of XP given by maps outside the campaign. I have no idea what the devs were thinking when they made it. I think they just blindfolded a trained monkey to get the numbers.

untill level 25 the leveling is ok, you play through the campaing on normal and hit anything around 20-25

then you are stuck, you do some free play maps for gear but this dont give much exp

provide us more exp for the higher difficultys, i play free play hard and i think it should give much more exp but no it doesnt.

so i have to farm betsy on easy to level up my chars and thats a pain in the ass >,<

im not satisfied with the current leveling progress, and bonus exp also dont work so its much harder to level up

I agree leveling slows down after 20-25, simply because Hard doesn't give significantly more exp than Normal.

After levling all four classes to 20+ and two of them to 30 I feel like giving a little bit of Feedback to the exp curve and the item power issues. 

The Campaign mode is made well.  I liked to play through the campaign. But after that started the struggle. I was playing with one to two friends. We had no Problem to clear FreePlay Easy after beating the campaign on Normal (We left Easy away). But from here the progression almost stalled. When we played a FreePlay Easy map we could beat we got loot  that was from worse to slightly better than the equipped loot. Levling was very slow, beating betsy level on campaign easy was by far the better way to get exp than trying FreePlay Easy maps and fail. We somehow still managed to go through FreePlay Easy and Normal and are currently at the Point of FreePlay hard. It's still hard. If we manage to beat a Level that requires ItemPower 102 we drop some items with higher itempower like itempower 105, but they are either inferior to the prior looted mythical Items with the proper stats or have the wrong stats. That's how it has been since FreePlay easy.

To not leave that only as a ranting Post I have some suggestions to make levling and item progression a bit better:

1. Greater Exp gains on higher difficulties, I think already enough players have mentioned that issue. I don't wanna grind Betsy on campaign easy just because the EXP is superior than from a hard map I can barely beat 2/3 times.

2. Greater ItemPower Gains in FreePlay mode. I don't wanna have a requirement of Itempower 102 to maybe gain Items with an Itempower of up to 105 wich means maybe the items will be better and most likely not.  If there is an itempower of 102 required make the drops 105-110 so that the itemprogression is at least a bit visible. Currently my Upgrades on level I barely manage to beat are like from 102 to 103 with stats like +1 Defense Power, wich feels like nothing at all.

Thanks for Reading that wall of Text.

your whole system is borked when it comes to several queues together.

free play easy :20-55 lowest ipwr needed = 18

free play med :52-93   lowest ipwr needed = 50

free play hard :100-149 lowest ipwr needed = 96

onslaught med : 85-105 lowest ipwr needed = 90

onslaught hard : 100-150 lowest ipwr needed = 110

incursion : 150-160 lowest ipwr needed = 145

theres no freaking consistency between these. You need higher ipwr to do the levels than what the levels drop. this is not the way in any of the free play or even incursion. 

 Why do you force people to go to onslaught to go to free play hard?

You need to lower the ipwr needed for the ones that are out of whack(free play hard,onslaught) and make those maps easier because the curve is pretty much a spike. which you can't touch unless you have gear from 1 of those maps.

also keep in mind. there is no way you can survive any of these solo unless your getting carried by a builder.

and that exp for all of these are just awful by a ton.

also. end game onslaught HAS AN EASIER onslaught than we get. WHY? HOW ? WHY!?

Remove the endgame easy and normal. they can do freeplay for that gear(this increases the player base in the free play queues and removes a duplicate)

last note. please for the love of god remove the xp gains per end of wave. make us get the xp from the mobs and not for ending a wave. this means we are rewarded by effort and not by requeueing or abusing the system to get into a x/x map to get the max amount of xp(would be 30k for betsy without doing anything (this is pretty much 50% of xp gained))

curve should feel more like 

free play easy :20-55 lowest ipwr needed = 18

free play med :52-93   lowest ipwr needed = 45

free play hard :100-149 lowest ipwr needed = 85

onslaught med : 85-105 lowest ipwr needed = 83

onslaught hard : 100-150 lowest ipwr needed = 98

incursion : 150-160 lowest ipwr needed = 145 (drops 140-160)

Also obviously reduce the difficulty to their respective ipwr levels.

This makes the curve way way way better than what you currently have.



The XP curve itself seems good enough, but some other aspects of the level cap adjustment seem a bit incomplete.  Skill spheres in particular - the old skill spheres still have their old level requirements.  This results in weird stuff like large spheres requiring level 24 to use, but the slot requires level 40 to unlock.

Advancement is very heavily biased towards the early levels.  All abilities and towers are unlocked by level 20.  Every sphere slot except large and uber unlock by level 30.  This makes for a rather boring trek from 30 to 50.

The boredom of no advancement is compounded by the brick wall that is free play hard.  I've heard talk about an XP buff for having a level 50 hero in the deck, so I figured it should be possible to reach level 50 using a single hero.  In reality I ran out of meaningful content around level 30.  Even free play normal required skipping some maps which I just couldn't beat.  Fortunately I'm playing solo in private games anyway, so lack of iPWR was not an issue.

I am hearing people talk about that the exp rewards are unbalanced. People say they get more exp on Easy Betsy than Hard. I haven't played much to see for myself, this is what I've heard.

Everyone has said it already. Leveling is painfully slow. There is no reason to go beyond Easy Mode Betsy Campaign as it gives the most xp in the game.

The xp is also very back ended meaning you get all your xp at the end of a round or the end of a map. It needs to be more uniform.

XP is in a much better place after the patch. I did a couple rounds of Liferoot on Free Play Hard this morning and got 90k to 100k XP each time. 

The exp per level ramps up too quickly, needs toned down.

Easy campaign betsy does not give the best exp in the game but it is the best for the amount of work you have to put in. that being said outside of the campaign the only map that i really like to do is liferoot. ever. even the early maps in the next difficulty up are harder than liferoot in the next difficulty up which makes no sense. so you end up doing liferoot forever until you finally get everything you wanted.

Exp is generally ok it is a little slow but not terrible. What makes it seem like it takes forever is doing 1 or 2 maps from start of the game to being finished with the game to get all things (eggs, money, exp, gear). The other thing is that gear seems to always be lagging behind in a large way. I have a level 40 in level 33 gear because i can't do the next set up yet. 

After giving it some time, I can confidently say that the level grind is too long and tedious. This is reinforced by the fact that we are forced to upgrade gear with stats we don't want just to satisfy an ilvl requirement needed to progress, and people bringing lvl 50 builders into every map to trivialize the whole process.

It is not fun at all to stand around for dozens of hours watching other people's defenses kill enemies for loot that will only gimp me.

Leveling past 40 was a chore (on the first character) there is no content to progress through after Free Play Hard which ends just before level 40... End Game Easy and Normal feel out of place. End Game Normal would be better off as Free Play Nightmare and set for level 40 progression and would set up fresh level 50s for End Game Hard...

I really didn't see the need for the increased level cap.  Level 25 was long enough to grind for pre-change, adding up to 50 just makes it horribly Korean MMO.  It takes ages just for one character.  Even with the exp bonuses leveling alts is just a chore.

@Valthejean quote:

I really didn't see the need for the increased level cap.  Level 25 was long enough to grind for pre-change, adding up to 50 just makes it horribly Korean MMO.  It takes ages just for one character.  Even with the exp bonuses leveling alts is just a chore.

They haven't smoothed out the XP curve yet, we'd probably be having a lot of changes in the future. Though I do agree that right now, having the capacity into reaching lvl 50 feels like a complete grind.

The campaign doesn't even take you to lvl 25, yet players are expected to reach lvl 50.

Though the developers haven't touched Endgame that much, so we can assume that most of the player base is Early to Midgame.

AFter latest patches (5.10?) It feels alright, you can make constant progress. Especially with additional XP from fixed Daily Missions ;)

I can play through endgame hard (23k exp) and pick up loot but to equip it I need to go back and farm liferoot forest in freeplay hard (167k exp) on 3 characters.  And that's after I already got one hero to level 50, who had to grind levels like mad. I guess this is mostly a solo play gripe, but I feel like you should be able to get decent exp in the map where you're looking for upgrades, and not have to take a step backward.

The onslaught hard gives about 650k exp an hour with 40% exp boost.

@mokn quote:

The onslaught hard gives about 650k exp an hour with 40% exp boost.

problem is getting there.. =/ I'm dying to get to lvl 40 with my huntress...

@mokn quote:

The onslaught hard gives about 650k exp an hour with 40% exp boost.

What kind of gear or partners you taking?  Thats a crazy amound of xp.   Are you doing a round of onslaught and then redoing the first round?

For me Grinding has been a complete nightmare, for starters I decided to pick my favorite class from DD1 the apprentice, which is apparently the same has pulling the pin on a grenade and throwing the pin at someone, needless to say by the time I realized I would need a squire to do jack in this game, I was level 30, deciding not to do campaign over (which may be why I experienced some of the peculiar things that happened while leveling) anyways long story short I would start the easiest level I could manage on my apprentice, build towers, generally play the game, then switch to my squire and go surf the web while my towers eviscerated the mobs. The things I noticed though which may have been implemented on purpose or may be bugs is how pathetically slow leveling was, on a Free Play normal map (somewhere in the middle of them because I couldn't get past some of the later levels namely Life Root Tree) anyways eventually I made it to level 10 on my squire and basically cheered because it took a good 4/5 maps on Free Play Normal to get to, long story short grinding the same maps, but this time from level 10-14 took a whopping 2 maps, and from there I went from 14-17 on wave 3 on one of the maps ( I'm not sure which one sorry ) and after that has been rather normal about a level or so a map if I stayed on my squire the whole way through. But one thing I noticed is there was always a massive EXP boost at one wave or the other, and these boosts albeit a godlike intervention to the grind, seemed to come at complete random times, sometimes it would happen on like wave 1/2 before any special mobs would appear, others would be at the end of the game ( which seemed normal ) and sometimes I would be in the middle of the wave and level twice, I'm not quite sure what was happening when these would happen but it may be a bugged line of code or maybe even some form of lag that would prevent EXP gain? I don't know either way the leveling has been almost completely random when its not excruciatingly slow.

Based on this thread, an on other games, I think the main issue is a person's valuation of time and their connection with the character's level to their progress.  Also, people tend to want to do trivial/safe content with a faster wave clear - as opposed to preemptively farming item improvements with slower clear/added risk.

Provided the content past the max level, a faster leveling curve actually doesn't hurt the replay value of the game.  Diablo 3 (albeit with its own issues) in its current state allows for players with resources to get to max level within an hour, and get with the main core of the game : equipping their character, and refining their build.  It makes it easier to integrate friends that are new to the game to current content, without the burn out.

There was a study done recently where workers at a company were offered into a company back savings plan.  Half were given basic information, and half were told that a majority of the staff were already taking part of it.  Surprisingly the people who heard their peers were taking place in the savings were less likely to enroll in the program. 

There is a pack mentality in regards to popularity, but this is only true if new participants feel that they have an equal chance at success.  It's kind of like trying to learn a sport from a club  where successful players have been produced.  It's true that the club is capable of making strong players, but do you believe that you have an equal chance at being as successful?

DD1 had similar barriers, but in the most recent iteration new players can become relevant as early as 74.  They can get to that level quickly, put on some transcendent gear and play with their friends.  They won't be the same as someone with refined sup/ult gear, but they won't feel useless either.

(tldr: People need to feel they have an equal chance to succeed/become relevant.)

i wanna know what you all are doing right!! i can barely get past the first 3 boards on free play normal with my lvl 30 apprentice and lvl 27 squire.  i may just suck i dont know . i am not sure what i am doing wrong but if i try life root normal mode free play i die instantly....they just over run everything i throw at them

@Aventinus quote:

i wanna know what you all are doing right!! i can barely get past the first 3 boards on free play normal with my lvl 30 apprentice and lvl 27 squire.  i may just suck i dont know . i am not sure what i am doing wrong but if i try life root normal mode free play i die instantly....they just over run everything i throw at them

What are you building and where?  Any particular type of enemy you're having trouble with?  What iPWR gear do you have and what stats on it?

28 Huntress, 27 Apprentice, 25 monk

Leveling feels dreadfully slow in the current build.  I won't be able to get a character to 50 unless it's changed.