Map Drops in The Awakening

thx for making me spawn haast against my will on an ele weakness map and that great reward: a -1 map. nice balance. urs sincere

PJSALT :'(

GGG does the developing, community just does the crying.

1.4 sounds more and more like a game I don't want to play. Good thing we still have another few months on live before it's forced upon us.

Currently map droprate is terrible. Why even worse? Why do you making leveling harder and harder? Why, GGG, why? My last expirience is 0 (!!!) 78th maps from 25 77th... And it seems to be like in old times before Atziri and Uber people will sell high tier maps 1:1ex or even more...

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drimsan wrote:

Currently map droprate is terrible. Why even worse? Why do you making leveling harder and harder? Why, GGG, why? My last expirience is 0 (!!!) 78th maps from 25 77th... And it seems to be like in old times before Atziri and Uber people will sell high tier maps 1:1ex or even more...

It's nothing but the illusion of difficulty gated behind a rare drop. This direction is anti-fun.

I too am mostly a solo player, and getting maps I actually want to run(standard) is already quite hard. Personally I love maps that you can easily fully clear, maps like mountain ledge, plateau, gorge etc. Players like me do those maps not because the bosses might seem easy, but because they are easily fully cleared(straight line), and it's mostly impossible to skip mobs.

I can do about every map, and don't really want to skip bosses...but the reason I do skip some of them is simply because they have a 1-shot mechanic. It's not worth the 10% exp to risk it.

Buffing bosses, and deciding the correct amount of map drops based on the highest tier of players is very BAD. The less equipped, non-rich and non-group players will only get harmed by this. If you really are going to buff all bosses, some players might NEVER do them again due to the risk. In my opinion, you should tone down the overpowered bosses, not buff the weaker ones. All this change will do is force weaker players to only 1 or 2 possible to do maps.

Personally I'd want to see a 100% guaranteed way to get specific maps. A merchant that sells every map 66-75 for 1c each in unlimited supply, or as mentioned above a full clear guarantees a 100% map drop of the same level as you are in. Something to always have maps, and the maps we find fun to run.

Another thing I highly dislike is limiting map drop levels in regular story content to the lowest level of maps. Example: Dominus should be able to drop maps appropriate for his level! This should be a zone level +2 from unique boss map level drop. (sane with carto boxes in story content)

The above 3 solutions would help ALL players of the game to easily sustain lower level 70(69-72) maps. Therefor allowing them to keep hoping rng will drop maps 1 or 2 levels higher, thus more easily opening up endgame maps for them.

Another change I'd like to see done to maps themselves is change their levels. Make it possible for map drops to be every level(66-78). For exampe: A level 75 tropical island, a level 73 mountain ledge etc, every map should be every level.

PS: Another thing that really really bothers me about this game, is reflect damage, I'd love to get that entire reflect mechanic removed from the game. It's just stupid, and it's actually forcing me to quit playing certain characters/builds. I like experimenting with builds, and some build cannot counter reflect. (At the very least, please change the reflect damage reduction ring to 100% reduced reflect damage, so there is atleast a sure way to counter it at the expense of a ring-slot)

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Laurium wrote:

GGG does the developing, community just does the crying.

community pays the bills

or do they?

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Chris wrote:

As you know, in The Awakening there is a new sequence of maps that will include many new types of maps based on Act Four areas. This new map sequence has different art (see my signature). We've also adjusted the levels of maps to be laid out better. The old maps still exist at their old levels, with the old art. They drop new maps.

Over the last few weeks, our balance team have been experimenting with various rates of map drops on the Closed Beta servers. The data collected has been extremely useful and has helped us decide various small changes to the map system that you'll be seeing in The Awakening.

There are three goals for our changes:

• For players to choose to play harder maps (by rolling them to have more and harder mods)
• For players to choose to kill the map boss (rather than occasionally skipping it)
• For players to find the highest tiers of maps challenging to complete and to sustain

On the Closed Beta, the drop rate for higher maps that we've been testing recently is lower than the live realm. While there are several mapping groups in Beta happily sustaining the highest tiers of maps, it took them a lot more effort to get there than it normally does. We want to bring this experience to more players.

Now that we've gathered the data we needed, we're planning the following changes:

• Increasing the drop rate of higher-tier maps so that it's closer to (but not the same as) that of the live servers.
• Making map bosses more challenging and more rewarding to fight. They will drop more items (and maps) than they currently do. Note that they will now be the only monsters that drop maps two tiers above the current map level.
• Magic/rare/unique monsters will be able to drop maps one tier above the current level.
• We will review map mods and make sure that challenge is rewarded with an appropriate level of additional item drops.

The change of having only map bosses drop +2 level maps is not intended as a strict nerf. Those bosses now drop additional items, so you should see more +2 maps from them. It's worth noting that +2 maps are a dangerous thing. They can cause players to get out of their depth - playing maps that are too hard for the items they currently have. We expect these changes to both help with this situation and to also provide an understandable way to have a chance at a +2 map: killing the map boss.

In addition to the map changes described above, we should note that Merciless Act Four is intended to be very difficult content. It'll provide a way to challenge your character without having to play in maps.

making maps and map bosses more challenging and difficult, while making a high map pool less sustainable, as a reaction to the ease with which your best players currently reach high levels is going to make the game at high levels more inaccessible, and frustrating for your average player.

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ant1cs wrote:

Still waiting for the day when maps can drop at any map level this would make the end-game 100x more enjoyable doing lvl 80 tropical islands and mountain ledges, YES PLS!

We need a "+ map level" mod!

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awave wrote:

making maps and map bosses more challenging and difficult, while making a high map pool less sustainable, as a reaction to the ease with which your best players currently reach high levels, is going to make the game at high levels more inaccessible for your average player.

True. And that's not even getting to the elephant in the room that getting bottlenecked by increasing rarity of map drops isn't an inherently fun mechanic.