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Alright, long post, let’s go! TL;DR/Conclusion at the bottom of the post as per usual.
First, let's define what I mean by feast or famine for those who aren’t familiar with the term.
Feast or Famine: This is a term you may hear in relation to concepts like snowballing, win-harder or lose-harder mechanics. Basically the game falls into a binary of doing well leads to doing better; feast, or doing bad leads to doing worse; famine.
In this post I’m going to lay out what I think is a major problem facing Dauntless. It isn’t limited to a single Perk or Mechanic, though there are some particular offenders. Instead it’s a phenomenon that has come about because of a number of mechanics that hit the same beats. These are typically designed to reward good play, or game progress, but all come together to produce a significant negative effect where none individually is bad for the game. In the end, this negative effect has a knock-on to the community as well. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
What we should aim for
To talk about what the problem is let’s talk about what things would look like without this problem. Now, obviously this is going to be a drastic simplification of complex factors, but what the hell:
So, this is the dream: better skill directly corresponds to better performance. Improve your mechanics and you’re rewarded with more damage, more damage uptime and faster clears. Reality and ideals rarely match up though, so the reality in a well balanced game might look more like one of these:
Not idealised but perfectly good relationships
Here we can see curves that are the same rough idea but differ in whether skill progress means more at low or high skill, or if you have skill breakpoints. Breakpoints are situations where small skill improvements lead to large performance reward. This includes examples like: reaching the point where you can beat trials and get new items, being able to get in and out a bit faster so you can get one more attack in, or when you go from dodging most attacks to reliably dodging all attacks.
What we have
Now, the biggest breakpoint in Dauntless is flawless play; the point where a high skill player can reliably dodge everything. This is obviously going to be a huge bonus in any game where you can choose between offense and defence in your build. You no longer need any defence and can therefore focus fully on offense. So, flawless play in any game is going to be a major break point:
Flawless play unlocking more offensive options in builds
This in itself isn’t too bad. Flawless play requires a good amount of skill and deserves reasonable reward for it. The issue is that that’s not the only reward that you get for flawless play. In the name of risk vs reward a number of perks exist in Dauntless that reduce your defences to improve your potential performance. Flawless play obviously means there is no risk involved and these perks; Rage, Wild Frenzy, their activator Discipline, and even Berzerker are all simply better offence options. This all expands the gap of this breakpoint:
Flawless play unlocking offence options that compromise your defence
But we can’t talk about perks that reward flawless play without mentioning the most blatant of them all: Predator. For the flawless player this takes all the other advantages they’ve got from their skill and adds a large, effectively unconditional, damage boost. Expanding that breakpoint again:
The breakpoint of full meta flawless builds with predator
Now, we’ve been looking at the player and specifically the damage part of the equation. But, there are some other impacts on players and difficulty here from flawless play. For example, flawless play negates almost all defensive choices like elemental matching. Another example is that means that additional damage from behemoths just isn’t a viable way to make the game more difficult. But, let's pivot now and consider the other side of the equation; the training dummy behemoth.
One of the key tactics in a lot of high skill play is staggerlocking a behemoth; chaining together effects such as interrupts, staggers, part breaks and shock procs to keep a behemoth in a downed state. This is conditional, of course, on being able to deal enough damage to break a behemoth part or trigger a stagger before the first wears off.
The breakpoint as it stands means that the flawless player is going to be significantly more capable of achieving this kind of tactic due to their much higher damage. Once you can reliably, or close to reliably achieve staggerlocking, you can push yourself past the breakpoint by using Overpower. Overpower as a perk rewards you for staggering and staggerlocking a behemoth by providing a huge damage bonus, which strengthens the player's ability to staggerlock the behemoth. This just serves to expand that breakpoint as it rewards players dealing a lot of damage with the ability to deal even more damage:
The breakpoint all considered
The major issue with all of this is good play being rewarded, in addition to being its own reward. Flawless play should be good because of the fact you don’t have literal down time when you get hit and you don’t need to build defences. However, perks like Predator just give you even more damage. Staggering a behemoth gives you a stationary target to free hit on and Overpower means you get not just a static target, but a big damage bonus. This all comes together to create a huge breakpoint and a huge divide in how the game is played.
Primals
I’m not going to beat a dead horse discussing Primals but I want to make three quick points; two about the existing breakpoint and one about a different divide.
Point one; healing suppressors mean nothing to the flawless player and only punish the players that need to sustain. For the fact they take damage, they have to accept higher behemoth damage and an attack speed increase that means they are likely to be taking even more damage by being hit more.
Point two; with the primal behemoths not having any defensive buffs, bar the suppressors reducing player damage, they are just as staggerlockable as regular behemoths. Our high skill players, on the high performance side of this breakpoint, need only to interact with the primal mechanics for as long as it takes to begin a staggerlock and then can finish the behemoth as if it was a regular behemoth.
These two both enforce the flawless breakpoint further by focusing the difficulty of the new content on being more difficult for our non-flawless players. Point three; the primal slayer skill path mitigates a lot of the impact of primal suppressors, meaning that the balance for them is rather wonky and your more experienced players can mitigate a huge amount of the difficulty of this content.
Escalations
This theme of more experienced players being able to mitigate the difficulty of content isn’t exclusive to primals. But it is a form of Feast or Famine again, especially when more mechanics like this exist in the game, and it forms a divide between new or casual players and experienced veterans.
So, how do Escalations feed into this? Well a key example is the way the Frost Escalation tree mirrors the Faction:Past tree and also mitigates the mechanics of the encounter. The main issue, however, comes from the way Escalation trees over-reward the player as they are completed. This feeds back into Frost Escalations as more player damage, which directly improves frostbite control in almost all instances. That in itself is another issue of Feast or Famine.
But how do Escalation levels empower you? Three different mechanics:
- Raw Power - up to +100 (the equivalent of 5 levels of weapon skill)
- Power Boosts - Up to +15% multiplicative damage damage resistance per round, stacking per completed round, up to 60%
- Amp Upgrades - Harder to quantify, but still a significant upgrade, even more so in frost escalations
Together this leads to the massive swings in difficulty that make Hard Escalations incredibly difficult to new Escalation players even at the recommended level 18 or higher. However, it makes them as easy as low to mid single digit weapon levels, at least for Frost Escalations, once the Escalation has been levelled.
A Game Divided
So, what binds these Feast or Famine mechanics together? They all divide the community. High skill and average players, late game and beginner players. Because, to the surprise of almost no one, high skill and late game go hand in hand and tend to form the same elite. The way that the mechanics of Dauntless come together to divide the game very naturally support elitism within the community. How this elitism manifests is varied; it can be new players being told that the content they struggle with just isn't that hard, that they are using bad and weak builds if they haven't hit the flawless breakpoint, or being shamed for inefficient builds when frankly the game itself doesn't give them the tools to know better (but that’s a post for another day).
Overall we have a problem with a veteran community who are playing the game from one side of the divide completely disconnected from the players on the other. Inherently these are the players who care about the game the most, post the most, say the most to devs, who will volunteer their time and effort to playtests and give in-depth feedback. This is where problems can occur: if your most vocal feedback group is disconnected from the average player base then this divide, changes that make it worse, and the inherent problems that have led to it won't see advocacy and we risk the problem becoming worse. Content being released targeted purely at this elite and being inaccessible to the average player will receive vocal gratitude, but ultimately will stagnate the game for your average player and drive them away.
Conclusion (TL;DR)
Dauntless has a number of mechanics that produce huge breakpoints on player skill and progress, to the point of dividing the game between two completely different feeling modes of play. This has a negative effect on the community dividing it and fostering elitism. Because of the way player engagement works, this risks feeding back negatively into the game design, due to this elite being the most vocal group.
Skill should be its own reward and failure its own punishment. Right now too many mechanics focus on over-rewarding players for good play or taking "risks'' and these need to be addressed. Builds should not all converge on the same constellation of low health modules to produce reasonable damage. Damage should be accessible to all players rather than having almost every single significant damage source in the game locked behind Feast or Famine mechanics.
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