The one QoL I want to see

I felt this would be appropriate to make this thread with official updates returning. There is one QoL change I'd like to see, and honestly IMO is LONG overdue as well, that being some form of exp sharing. Obviously, we have the emulation feature (which is very helpful) for assistance in leveling but the main issue with this is of course it makes the stage MUCH more challenging and doesn't work well for new players or fresh starts.

I'm not too particular in the implementation, whether it's in the Tavern you select a page of heroes and they all get equal exp to the hero that is out, or you can straight up just share the exp across every hero you have, or be able to pick and choose as you please. Leveling characters IMO has always been about as tedious and unfun as farming Ult gear and takes about as long too (In all honesty it takes longer). It makes early game an absolute slog and can be a massive time sink in both early and late game (especially late game).

I mostly wanted to request this because after seeing how nice the Hero Deck in DDA has been with simultaneous leveling (It's literally the greatest thing that's ever come to these games and I will absolutely die on that hill). Also, I recently started a full set of fresh in DD1 and having to basically stop everything with leveling all my characters completely breaks the flow of progression and with this game requiring players to have so many characters to progress it really just adds another layer of tediousness to the game.

I don't think I'm saying anything new to players, and emulation is still useful for gear farming, but it should not be required for leveling characters. I don't know if such a feature is even possible within the engine (of course I think I can speak for most that we don't need all the other Hero Deck features, just joint exp gaining). Leveling characters honestly killed my joy for this game more than anything else, it simply takes too long, is too tedious, takes too much going out of your way and it's something that HAS to be done.

Why not just ask for a full set of ++ gear ,pets and weapons while you are at it? 

If grinding xp isnt your thing then maybe DD isnt your thing either as this  is what this game is based on.

On 10/13/2022 at 4:59 PM, nelchrs said:

Why not just ask for a full set of ++ gear ,pets and weapons while you are at it? 

If grinding xp isnt your thing then maybe DD isnt your thing either as this  is what this game is based on.

*Edited due to most of the information being based on outdated inefficient methods and information that the proceeding comments highlighted. I appreciate the correction of information. Although, I still don't appreciate this particular comment, I will apologize for being overly rude to you.*

Edited October 16, 2022 by B33b3
Comment was inaccurate

Tavern defense has not been the best way to get XP since 2012. Tinkerer's lab gives you more xp per time spent, and newer maps also give you a lot of xp.
If you get all achievements as well you can get XP orbs from True Boss Rush which should take around 30 minutes with a group of 4 people and gets a character to level 100.

A bunch of people have spares of them laying around and trade them out for free

There's absolutely no need for you to go calling people clowns. It doesn't take literal days to get your characters to 100 if you're doing it somewhere efficient. You also don't need to grind to level 100, getting to 93 first then just playing the game with your characters out is a really good option too, since you can use ultimate gear from that level and that's halfway experience wise to 100

ratio

 

 

3 hours ago, B33b3 said:

Look my guy I've put in nearly 1500 hours into this game, and I've been here since 2011, I know pretty well what the game is based on and not XP grinding. Getting a character to level 100 requires 1,155,827,506 total XP, there absolutely no real good way to do this. The best stages to XP farm are not good stages for farming gear, so you have to run very specific stages with max characters (usually 4) hundreds of times to fully max multiple characters. So you literally are required to completely stop all progression in order to do a completely arbitrary task.

The best stage for farming XP is Tavern Defense, personally my best NMHC exp is about 40mil within 15 minutes. Since you seem to not be intelligent enough to understand that wanting simultaneous EXP gaining to lessen the endless multitier grind is somehow equivalent to asking for full ++ gear and everything else I'll lay it out simply and just give you the math on that.  That's about 29 runs per set of 3 (4) characters, which equates to 7 hours of in game counter time. Realistically you're looking at 7-8 hours of constant nonstop playing of the same map per 3 (4) characters, because the 4th has to be your DPS/upgrader because it's NM mode and that stage has 3 bosses to deal with. You could drop to insane but then you are only getting 15mil EXP, although cutting down to about 12 minutes but that's still 77 runs which equates to over 15 hours of nonstop runs. Survival all depends on starting wave and compounds the amount of time it takes significantly, so your time to XP ratio is likely not much better overall.

Now consider those numbers are only for 3 characters. At a minimum you should have at least 6 builders, one of each type, so you've now doubled your time and runs. Every new character you make requires this process again as well. Many people also have multiple DPS characters, a hero boost monk, a tower boost monk, some have 3 or 4 Jesters as well, that's 2 additional times you have do this process. So you'd have to grind this all out upwards of 3 to 4 times, and even more if you ever decide to make new characters. So you are looking at about 24-32 hours or 45-60 hours of nonstop Tavern Defense and literally nothing else, that doesn't even include Tavern Time or anything else.

Of course it does get even better because you don't even get good gear while doing any of this. So it's completely separate farm from gear farming. At least with Gear farming I can keep gear on hand that was good that I don't use anymore for new characters, there is no equivalent for XP. Even MMOs understand that once you go through the XP gind once it's not fun to do it again, it's even worse when you have do it multiple times over and it takes LITERAL DAYS to do. Grinding gear is faster and immensely more enjoyable because it actually has payoff. Grinding XP does not, it's just a chore.

In the base game this was never an issue. Ramparts could take you to level 60 in 4 runs, and since there used to only be 4 characters, it went fast. Which then if you could do Glitterhelm insane, or had a friend who could carry you, it took just 1 run to hit level 60. In fact you can hit level 70 in one run between the stage and the XP boost the Tavern Keep gives. So no XP grinding isn't actually what this game is based on, gear farming is. It's horrible unfun to be required to constantly have to completely pause all progression just to level up my entire character roster because they are all equally required, where as with gear farming I can literally farm for every character simultaneously no matter how many I have, and no matter what character they are. XP grinding to level 100 is literally less enjoyable than shoving needles into my eyes repeatedly, and making it easier/less god awful is in no way equal to just being freely given full end game gear you absolute clown.

It's unfortunate that you're not aware of it, but as Thales said, Tavern Defense is a pretty bad map to farm xp on.

If you do it on something like Tinkers Lab on campaign mode, you'll get some 70M xp per run, so that should get you to level 100 in a couple of hours (16 runs ish per set of 3, 4 if you can get someone else to host for you) as opposed to the days you would have to spend on Tavern Defense.

 

If you have ultimate defender, then there's always the experience orb which gets you to level 100 instantly, but people with ultimate defender tend to be past the point of needing to level characters in the first place so that's probably not as useful. 

You probably don't have true boss rush unlocked anyway, but I think it's worth mentioning that you can farm experience orbs in 20-25 minutes if you have decent dps gear.

 

There's also generally little need to level *all* your characters to 100 right away -- just going up to 93 (which is about half the way to 100) makes it so that you can use ultimate 93's, which is probably good enough.

In any case though, those days you may have spent on tavern defense have unfortunately been a big waste of time, because there's much much faster ways to do it.

Edited October 15, 2022 by T_bolt

Thats a lot of facts and figures about your own personal progression but im not one for that kind of thing as i just play for fun .

Fun fact though , level 74 builders are capable of 4k stats , which is sufficient to do a lot of stuff.

If you ever do need help levelling i spend a good bit of time on tinks lab and as long as you are respectful and can press g you are more than welcome to join.

 

On 10/14/2022 at 6:54 PM, Thaleskpl said:

There's absolutely no need for you to go calling people clowns. It doesn't take literal days to get your characters to 100 if you're doing it somewhere efficient. You also don't need to grind to level 100, getting to 93 first then just playing the game with your characters out is a really good option too, since you can use ultimate gear from that level and that's halfway experience wise to 100

I said that because he compared asking for EXP share to wanting full end game gear for free, which is no where close to what I was saying. Was I bit too harsh? Yeah probably, but I also find it extremely frustrating when someone goes to the most absolute extreme comparison when people ask for something to make a part of the progression slightly less tedious.

I am aware that you don't NEED every character to be level 100, Myth/Trans gear can get you 4k stats which good enough for the most part. Most of my main characters are about level 90+, I've not bothered to actually grind my builders to 100 because leveling is the absolute most boring thing in the game IMO.

On 10/14/2022 at 6:54 PM, Thaleskpl said:

Tavern defense has not been the best way to get XP since 2012. Tinkerer's lab gives you more xp per time spent, and newer maps also give you a lot of xp.
If you get all achievements as well you can get XP orbs from True Boss Rush which should take around 30 minutes with a group of 4 people and gets a character to level 100.

On 10/14/2022 at 7:19 PM, T_bolt said:

It's unfortunate that you're not aware of it, but as Thales said, Tavern Defense is a pretty bad map to farm xp on.

If you do it on something like Tinkers Lab on campaign mode, you'll get some 70M xp per run, so that should get you to level 100 in a couple of hours (16 runs ish per set of 3, 4 if you can get someone else to host for you) as opposed to the days you would have to spend on Tavern Defense.

I'm gonna be honest, I actually completely forgot that Tinkerer's was the other XP spot, although I've never personally hit that range of XP on my NMHC runs so I never bothered with it. Unless the XP from it got buffed after I already did the map, I can retry it at some point I suppose to see where I went wrong. At least Tinkerer's Lab actually can give good drops and rewards on NM so it has that going for it, still about a 4.5 hour trip though per set assuming you get best results of 70mil XP within about 16 minutes to hit level 100, or about 1-2 hours for level 90/93.

I've heard of True Boss Rush, but did not know that it gave that. I guess that takes away the need to re-grind out new characters for end game players, which is definitely a plus. I appreciate that knowledge.


However, I do want to say that despite Tinkerer's being a good late game power level spot it doesn't alleviate how absolutely dreadful early to midgame leveling is (which is more so what my original post was highlighting, However, I will fully admit I was incorrect on the severity of late game leveling on my other comment). I noticed how poorly done it was after doing my most recent fresh start. The way leveling works is fine for late game but early and mid game before you can actually do any of the good farming spots requires pretty hefty stats compared to what you will normally have to accommodate for the extra characters and the amount of time it takes it very disproportional compared to how long it actually takes your first character to hit 60 and progress through the main campaign. I also feel that players are very much disincentived from actually using multiple characters until they are forced to as well.

Some kind of XP share would greatly alleviate this issue if not completely remove it, of course it wouldn't fix it for players that don't actually make the other characters but that's not an issue you can really get around. Honestly, late game players would barely even notice the difference and would now only need extra characters for gear/reward farming. I do understand that I'm very much about 10 years late on this, but considering we still occasionally get new stuff to help new characters (Nessie pet certainly comes to mind) I don't think it's absurd to discuss.

I mean I also think that stages should really be re-organized to be based on actual difficulty again and in game hints and information given to players in game to guide them past the original campaign considering most guides and even the wiki is mostly broken links/images and outdated information.