Game progress speed

[Nipal]

misha is already L33 barely one week after starting playing, it is going way too fast than we thought.
we intended that the most active players should reach L40 in about one month. we would like some
feedback from beta testers about the game speed, is it going too fast in a general way?

and maybe you have notice too, pvp fights reduce pve cooldowns, so theoretically you can advance
even faster than now.

[Gabbin]

I didnt even know you could do pvp fights right now.  My Gear link in coli is locked and I have 0 coins to buy charms or boosters.  Do I have a hidden default/starter gear set?  I'll have to try and find a match.

Wasn't the expectation that the player be something like level 15-18 after just the first sitting?

You get a ton of xp from the campaign.  To the point where it feels like you level every or every other campaign fight.   I purposely stopped the campaign so I could go farm dungeons (and test the new ones) while I was still somewhere near their level.  If I remember, in closed-beta leveling didn't seem to slow down until about level 30, because it seemed like you were finally forced to go farm dungeons to continue (either for gold or charms, both of which are more plentiful now).

My initial reaction would be to drastically scale back campaign xp.  Slows down level progression and helps get people out to dungeons to work on skill and side quest xp.  Move some of heroic campaign charms out of the campaign and introduce them as the side quest rewards.

[Nipal]

wow, it never crossed my mind that locked gear menu tricked you into thinking pvp is not available.
it's way too tedious to start pvp if players have to farm all charms (and lose most of matches). so
we decided to give three default gears for them to try and they can be acquired after completing pvp
side quests. we definitely need a tutorial on this.

side quest xp seem to be way out of proportion. i do agree we need to slow down campaign so players
have time to farm dungeons.

[Leximus]

As I didn't play closed beta (but play E1 for years) I think the progress is on par with the time I've been spending playing E2 (think around 20-26h to get to lvl 26). Notice that the first 3 players on rankings (I am 4th) are all closed beta testers and already know the solutions to the puzzles. I also spent time reading the story.

As for coliseum, at first I didn't know if there was a starter deck. I tried to queue for coli several times (currently waiting for 1.5 hour in queue) but with no success. I assunme this is because of a small playerbase atm/ different regions.

[Nipal]

there isn't enough players for pvp during beta, better try find someone on irc if you wish to test.

[Qqchampion]

Based on my experience, it's a combination of factors. Like Gabbin said, the increased amount of charms and gold you get makes the campaign easier to do without farming. I think that's the reason most people aren't getting stopped so hard by Tyreph and other fights around that area like they were in closed beta. Honestly, though, I think the change to movement cooldown and the addition of sidequest xp are bigger factors. Doing almost all sidequests as they become available lets you stay a level or two ahead of the campaign for a long time, which makes it much easier to win fights even without the best gear setup. Likewise, move cooldown is a lot shorter at low levels now, so it's very easy to move around and farm several dungeons for sidequest xp over the course of the first couple days of gameplay instead of having to stay put for a few hours in between each move. I haven't seen how big the pvp cooldown reduction is, but I imagine it would compound this problem.

The game does seem to go by quite fast overall. I'm pretty much forcing myself to not run campaign chapter 7 for a while so I can run the dungeons thoroughly. Moving some xp out of campaign and into sidequests would be the biggest help, I think. Some more challenging sidequests that aren't just "get these items" or "kill this mob" would be a nice way to force players to learn new tactics and explore the game a bit.

[Toben]

I'm level 23 and I've only played like, twice. The sense I was getting was that I could basically level up as much as I wanted in however long I wanted to sit there in front of the computer and keep playing - but a big chunk of that was how fast the movement and dungeons reset, which I assumed (maybe incorrectly?) was set at an artificially-fast speed just for beta testing purposes, sorta the same way all phoenix feather stuff costs 1 feather right now. If dungeons/movement only reset once or twice a day it would slow things down.

Anyways, yeah, campaigns and sidequests give a lot of xp (I vote for crappier rewards for easy sidequests, and some harder sidequests [more like crazy achievements] that give decent rewards). I also feel like level progression doesn't slow down as steeply as it did in Estiah 1; the xp to next level increases each level, but not by a really large amount (maybe it gets crazier later on?) and so it stays pretty low even at the level I'm at. I also sort of feel like level doesn't matter much, at least so far - I'm mostly limited by my charm collection and my gold, level's really secondary. If you'd asked me to guess what the level cap was, just based on my feelings of how fast leveling has been and how "significant" each level feels, I would've guessed the level cap was intended to be a lot higher than Estiah 1's.

[Nipal]

it is our intention to speed up a lot low level contents so new players don't have to waste forever to
get a taste of the game (which is the case of e1). all cooldowns in open beta are the actual values
we planned for release, we seem to have overdone a bit.

the level cap is actually lower than e1, it's limited to L40 and extra xp is converted to magic find.
as toben said, level in estiah is quite secondary, your character's prowess depends mostly on charms.

thanks for your feedback, i think i have a general idea about how to slow the game down a bit.

[Misha]

For the record, I've done almost all the sidequests up until my level (exceptions are Geomancer Training and the Dusk Bloom dungeon sidequests, working on Hollow Lights now).

If you really do want to slow down progression, I definitely advise against completely removing available EXP.  Moving it from campaign to sidequests probably won't do a whole lot, but making some of the sidequests more difficult to get might work.  One thing that you could do is make new sidequests that actually make the player achieve something special rather than just collect a bunch of things or kill things or finish fights.  Something cool like the acheivements in Estiah 1 like doing a fight a specific way.  Then move some of the campaign EXP over there.

Could also move some of the EXP to skill ranks.  They seem to give pitiful EXP right now.

[Nipal]

we don't put much xp on skills/quests that are hard to earn because... 80% of players won't complete them.
the main intent of sidequests are to guide noobs through game contents, that's why they are so easy and
so rewarding.

we'll add optional dungeon achievements later, like the "you're doin' it wrong" ones in e1, but they won't
yield any xp. it's a planned feature called "challenge mode".

we won't remove completely xp from sidequests, but we'll nerf a bit or transfert them to skill achievements like
you said.

[Passionario]

Speaking of speed, is there a chance we could get a "Glacially Slow" battle speed setting?

Not all of us are from Violette's bloodline, you know...