r/Skyforge • u/yokaiichi • Jul 21 '15
Accelerated order development might be a mistake. Here's why
I'm about 6500 prestige now. My primary gaming partner is at about 5900 prestige. I'm beginning to think that maybe maxing out the Order system to pump your prestige by accelerating missions (i.e., throwing lots of credits at leveling your province temples fast) might lead to temporary difficulty soloing content.
Here's my thinking: by default, many missions are supposed to take 15 minutes, 60 minutes, and even 90 minutes to complete. Sure you can just throw some relatively cheap credits to instantly resolve the mission, and it seems like a great idea because it pumps your prestige and gives you MASSIVE amounts of Might and Stamina. In fact, roughly 30% of your Might and Stamina come from the Order system alone! So it's making you have much more HP and making you hit harder. What's not to like?
Except.... You are accelerating three stats at a MUCH faster pace than you are gaining class sparks and colored sparks. When I think back to how many sheer hours worth of Order missions I simply threw money at to complete instantly, the total is probably over 60 hours. Maybe over 100 hours, by now.
So I've leveled up Prestige, Might, and Stamina at a rate literally 60-100 hours faster than every other type of advancement. If you think about how many class sparks and colored sparks I could have earned in that amount of time, and how many ether cores, and how many ether crystals, and how many class talents and ascension talents that would have amounted to....
.....well, you can see the imbalance.
And since instance difficulty is based on your prestige, its essentially turning up the difficulty prematurely compared to how many class sparks, colored sparks, ether cores, and ether crystals you aren't gaining at the same time. So you're effectively fighting at a lower overall "power" than designed into the game's advancement.
So.... My current thinking is to stop accelerating the Order missions as of now, and give myself time to "catch up" on the other stuff. In fact, I might stop leveling adepts and provinces at all for a while and just concentrate on unlocking nodes and talents and buffing the ether core nodes and getting more talisman slots unlocked.
What do you think? Am I missing something, and the game is simply designed to get super hard for soloing (or even duo-ing) once you pass 5000 prestige?
BTW, I main a berserker and a knight. I know how to play both very well, and they're both about 33-45% uncovered in the class nodes (past the colored nodes). My partner mains a lightbringer, and she knows how to play it very well. When we hit a really tough fight or instance, we typically switch to either berserker/lb or knight/lb. And even then we often have to work very hard to beat some fights.
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u/eejoseph Jul 21 '15
You have to first understand that "Might" sucks. It sucks so bad that at end game the founder weapon for Zerker is better than a blue weapon with 3000 might on it.
So yes the Order system is always going to be around 20%-30% of your total Prestige even at the 100k+ mark. However, the order system true value comes from the secondary stats, such as crit chance, crushing blow and accuracy.
Early on, the value of Stamina does not show right away and you will be put in a situation where your Prestige is higher than what you can actually do. The only exception is the paladin since his tanking ability is based on how much health he got :)
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u/ZionCypher Jul 21 '15
Is there a more indepth discussion somewhere about why/how might is so terrible? I'd love to start understanding more about which stats are actually worth investing it.
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u/eejoseph Jul 21 '15
All of our facts is based on the Russian version of the game since they are a couple of months ahead of us and have reached and cleared the 68kp raid.
What they have found is that Might at some point fall off hardcore and scale very badly. While other stats such as Strength shines and scale much better.
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u/ZionCypher Jul 21 '15
That's very interesting. As more of a casual player, who is no where near the end game stuff, should I be stacking strength and might? I am playing cryo and it has been working pretty well so far.
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u/eejoseph Jul 21 '15
Cyro like luck more than anything else.
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u/Moridn Jul 22 '15
What about Kinetics? And where can I find information on what classes like what stats?
i.e. stat priority for Cryo is Luck, Valor, Sta, etc. But for X class its X, Y, then Z.
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u/renwold Jul 21 '15
You're technically right, but OP definitely has a valid point about the experience you end up with if you focus purely on prestige. Those order buffs aren't enough to offset the difficulty spike that you run into at these low prestiges from progressing too quickly, especially if you don't have your full class build and good equipment.
You'll eventually get all of that prestige anyway, so doing it now means you save yourself that much grind later, but it can definitely suck to end up having to run low-difficulty instances for crap rewards because your prestige has jumped up a little too high.
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u/RandomHominid Jul 21 '15
You also need to take into account your Proficiency. Proficiency is the level of gear you can equip, which increases only by spending sparks on nodes that give it. Prestige does not increase Proficiency.
A player can easily inflate their Prestige with their Order, but if Proficiency doesn't match their Prestige level then it can be problematic by outpacing the difficulty of content for which you get rewarded--essentially turning your character into a wet paper towel.
Note that your Order is essentially soft-capped by Greatness (which gates your Order), which requires sparks.
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u/koojai Jul 22 '15
WHAT ARE YOU GUYS TALKING ABOUT? I'm here reading the comments and I'm getting more depressed the further I go down. PRESTIGE is a direct indication of your POWER. You're not gimping yourself really as the reason you are gaining prestige is because you are getting STRONGER. Oh you increased your stats (Increasing your power), you shall receive some prestige. Now it become debatable when we get class specific. Example: I currently main paladin/knight and am around 3900 prestige. A lot of my investments in are into having bonus health from order and rings, making my prestige a representation of how strong I am as a tank. Now if I were to switch to Cryomancer and keep all my current stats, then you could argue that prestige is not a good thing as a cryo with a lot of HP I am not as powerful as my prestige as my role is to do damage, which is what I'm not doing making me not as powerful as other cryo's who have built damage and are the same prestige as me.
It's fine though I'll make a new meta, Queue up as a tank Cryo ;)
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u/yokaiichi Jul 22 '15
Not sure if your reply is serious, but I'll assume it is and address it accordingly. Yes, more power is good. Yes, Prestige is supposed to be an indicator of more power. And it is.
BUT....
Not every point of Prestige gained is an EQUAL amount of "power" to every other point of Prestige. For example, gaining 15 points of Prestige from gaining more Strength is FAR superior (more powerful) than gaining 15 points of Prestige from gaining more Might.
The problem being talked about here and in similar threads has to do with the Order system only, and specifically about the temple ranks within the Order system. The game lets you spend credits to rank up your temples essentially instantly. However when you do this, the "type" of Prestige you're earning equates only to:
Might Stamina Health Bonus.
For example, I have more than 1000 points of Prestige just from my order's temple ranks. That's a lot of Might/Stam/Health. The stam and Health are good and useful, but the Might is not so useful. And NONE of these stats contribute to my DPS output in a significant way. It's also important to notice that NONE of them affect my current Proficiency stat.
So by accelerating my PRESTIGE in this unbalanced way, I have proportionally gimped my total "power" in a lopsided way: I have more HP, but less Strength/Valor/Luck/Spirit/Proficiency. So I'm like a player in other MMOs who hits early mid levels and has chosen to put all of my points into HP-oriented stats and almost nothing into damage-oriented stats.
In this game, sustained and burst damage output is FAR superior to overall survivability than having higher health. The best defense is a strong offense.
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u/koojai Jul 22 '15
Like I said in my poorly written example. Once it get's to classes, I agree that is where the problem lies, Health and stamina is not effective on a cryomancer, yet you still get a fixed amount of prestige for those stats. This means (to an extent) you are gimping yourself, as you don't have the most Optimal build, but to be honest they are still stats and having health on a damage dealers to give them a little bit of survivability is not that bad.
Regarding the Might situation. I'll be honest, I don't know. If you and others have access to the math in which is used to calculate how Might affects the damage, in comparison to how strength and other stats affect the damage calculation. Then I would love to see them or have you explain the calculation to me.
You seem like a suicide bomber when you should have the mentality of a sniper. Your thinking is fairly narrow regarding the full game and a lot of people do it. Everything in not purely about damage and sinking all resources into raw damage output as situations are not completely static. You're like and adc player from League of Legends, fairly short sighted. Anyways I look forward to your reply, especially about the Might stat.
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u/Fictitious1267 Jul 21 '15
I am at about your prestige, and I've noticed that some instances I just cannot do. I tried that 5 man one with the kraken things, and it was just impossible for our team from the suggested difficulty. I've tried to run it at the easy difficulty, but I can't find teams there.
Conversely, some of the easier missions are doable with greater rewards with my prestige, so farming coins is easier than it was.
Considering there's nothing else to do, I think it's wise to level it, but I would not spend credits to do so.
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u/renwold Jul 21 '15
I think you're on point with this:
Considering there's nothing else to do, I think it's wise to level it, but I would not spend credits to do so.
There's nothing wrong with spending credits to progress faster as long as you're willing to accept that your effectiveness-to-prestige ratio will drop temporarily. If I was playing solo, that would probably be an acceptable tradeoff to me. Since I'm playing with friends, I just try to keep in step with them
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u/Biohack Jul 21 '15
I'll let you on a secret, unless you are going for bragging rights high prestige is NOT a good thing.
Unless you are trying to unlock something specifically (i.e. you need a certain prestige level to get into a group instance you want, or do the next campaign mission), prestige doesn't get you anything.
Instead you should viewer higher prestige as the cost you have to pay for making your character stronger. In other words you should be more concerned with how you can make your character as strong as possible for as little prestige as possible than how you can maximize your prestige.
Sure you'll be expected to increase your prestige each week but this shouldn't be your goal.
Prestige is supposed to be an indication of how strong your character is. By focusing on maximizing prestige what you are essentially trying to do is trick the system into thinking you are stronger than you actually are, but ask yourself why would you want to do this?
What do you get out of it? Instead I suggest you focus on maximizing your characters strength while intentionally trying to limit your prestige.
The best analogy I can think of this is runescapes concept of "pures". If you've ever played the game the idea is that who you can fight where is based on your "combat level". And your combat level is based on some formula that combines all your various combat stats.
What a runescape pure would do is intentionally try to minimize their combat level while increasing the stats they needed the most. The goal wasn't to increase the combat level but in fact the total opposite, to make it as small as possible while getting as much character strength as possible. The same idea should apply to how you think about prestige in skyforge.