What balance of play are you trying to achieve for Phoenix?

I finally gave up on Uthgard a few months ago after struggling with the strict adherance to their chosen server setting.
I won't flame them for their choices (it is their server, and to be fair it is incredibly stable), but it requires a much too hardcore investment in time for someone who has grown up and has children to look after. The staff are also quite hostile on the forum, but I said I wouldn't flame...

My question is, what is the goal in terms of PVE effort rquired / reward?
Live servers have completely trivialised 99% of PVE, and it is barely recongnisable as DAOC anymore.

I hope there will still be some feeling of reward / enjoyment involved in the PVE side of the game? I have seen some of the early feedback, but it is hard to judge whether this is the experience as intended, or needs adjustment (easier or harder) in the views of staff.

I know some people just want to RVR, and get there as quickly as possible (and respect that), but whatever your preference, there is a huge amount of PVE in DAOC - some of which can be quite enjoyable, especially for the social aspect. I also enjoy RVR very much, but I don't mind a bit of PVE - especially at times when I don't have the luxury of giving 100% attention.

I am excited to Try Phoenix and to help in Beta testing, but would like to know whether I will "fit" here

Wed 11 Jul 2018 1:56 PM by

gruenesschaf

I'd split the pve question into 2 parts, leveling and high end / end game pve.

For leveling the only thing that matters is fun and that it is not tedious.

For the end game pve howerver, we have no intentions of making it trivial, at least not for the amount of people we optimize a given encounter for. We will try to stay close to the live behavior but will use a mix of patch level appropriate and current live behavior for those high bosses. Many of our bosses will likely be harder than they were in 1.65 to compensate for the much higher healing power and things link tinder boxes.
There are also likely quite a few encounter that nobody did back then, some of those will be reworked for a different group size or even entirely. With the feathers we really hope that the pve gameplay becomes a lot more diverse in terms of what mobs are actually regularly done.

Wed 11 Jul 2018 2:32 PM by wardie

Thanks for your response, that sounds like a good approach.

The feathers system is actually one of the only things that made me a little nervous - but that is probably because when they introduced a new currency on live it nearly always served to make a part of the game redundant. I am sure you will monitor the effect though.