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Bashing After Crits
This has been discussed before on Discord and in passing on the forums, but I think it's an involved enough issue to warrant its own thread. The introduction of talents - critical hits in particular - has had a negative effect on endgame bashing because the legacy endgame areas were designed without the sort of DPS players now achieve. With max crits each area can support one basher, leading to a total of seven concurrent players bashing if I'm being generous. In practice, though, only Ixsei, Usum Usutti and New Dikamazi are regularly cleared by anyone, as the others are widely considered not worth the effort due to increased risk and/or low mob counts.
One solution I've seen suggested is to have new areas be high risk because of wandering aggro mobs. We already have these (Jelle, Gnomon) and it's easy to see that this isn't a solution at all because, as I said, they aren't regularly cleared. Adding new areas that present the same challenge people are already avoiding would be a waste of time. Changes can't be made to existing 'worthwhile' areas without negatively impacting pre-75 players, though, because Ixsei and ND are where most people go for their last 10 levels.
In my opinion, I think the best way to move forward with new areas taking into account the higher DPS we achieve would be to lower the TTK. If mob HP and XP gain were scaled up to match the TTK and XP/M of pre-criticals bashing, the area would both be a viable alternative to the overhunted areas we currently have and probably be able to support more than one person at a time.
Also, none of this is intended to be me saying 'this is what you should work on' so much as 'these are things that should be taken into consideration if/when any work is done on new areas.'
One solution I've seen suggested is to have new areas be high risk because of wandering aggro mobs. We already have these (Jelle, Gnomon) and it's easy to see that this isn't a solution at all because, as I said, they aren't regularly cleared. Adding new areas that present the same challenge people are already avoiding would be a waste of time. Changes can't be made to existing 'worthwhile' areas without negatively impacting pre-75 players, though, because Ixsei and ND are where most people go for their last 10 levels.
In my opinion, I think the best way to move forward with new areas taking into account the higher DPS we achieve would be to lower the TTK. If mob HP and XP gain were scaled up to match the TTK and XP/M of pre-criticals bashing, the area would both be a viable alternative to the overhunted areas we currently have and probably be able to support more than one person at a time.
Also, none of this is intended to be me saying 'this is what you should work on' so much as 'these are things that should be taken into consideration if/when any work is done on new areas.'
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A side benefit to longer fights would be that it would allow for more options in terms of bashing route. A few of us have talked about our preference for more complex rotations to freeze/flaw routes that are just one ability on repeat - and while there's a whole other conversation to be had there - the short fights we have now make complicated setups even worse. Longer fights would give us room to experiment and readdress that whole issue.
I do wish that other areas were reworked to be made worth visiting, however. Places like Deisk that are a pain to get to and are cleared in minutes with ridiculously long respawn times are no good, same with places like Jelle that are far too hazardous to even consider hunting there.
That doesn't get us anywhere near where we need to be. Increased spawn rates and slightly higher mob counts in existing areas are as helpful as a bandaid on a gunshot wound.
For reasons I already stated, we can't make the sort of changes necessary to places like Ixsei and ND without fucking over the sub-75 population. Jelle and Deisk could be tweaked to what I'm suggesting though. Side note regarding Jelle, it's almost not bad once you have 20 crit, I bash it regularly and there's one other person who does, judging by the piles of corpses I occasionally find. The issue is that the vines' windup is still 4s or less and does 7k+ damage, making any lag instant death where it isn't in other areas.
Increased TTK plus experience to match would somewhat help the phenomenon where crit bashing has homogenised bashing rotations, and certainly get endgamers out of the levelling areas. So I support this.
BUT
Zoe's also pointed out that various areas exist but aren't really worthwhile. Only one class really has a tool to make jelle and northern usum worthwhile. But even beasts with smash are risking more to hunt these areas, and it's slower XP because of the need to be cautious, use smash and still retreat at times.
Proposal 1:
Increase XP of mobs that are more dangerous in groups.
Proposal 2:
Designate some existing unused areas to be scaled up to endgame status as per Zoe's proposal
Proposal 3:
Consider, over time, giving all classes some form of crowd control for pve. I don't mean smash. It could take different flavours without homogenising classes.
This doesn't need to mean Jelle and Usum. If the xp was just a little bit better, and more classes could handle groups, these would be balanced for 70+ as is.
There are a number of very cool areas that are just not worthwhile these days if trying to level fast, which the newbie challenge has encouraged (Anemoi anyone?) They've been eclipsed by better, safer places.
That's a shame and why not take areas like this and upgrade them to endgame status?
Bots also... these are slower to kill despite having lower HP and hitting harder. If that's the bot status quo now, maybe bump the exp?
Which is kind of what your thread is about: more challenging AND rewarding endgame PvE. Yes, it is also working with crits as they currently are, but maybe the idea could also encompass rebalancing/tweaking of crits a bit also.
A massive down-tuning like you suggest would also be a good work around, if not outright improving them. Really the entire thread comes down to - 'Critical hits have had a terrible effect on the PvE environment in their current implementation (I don't consider that debatable, I consider that factual), so here's one suggestion on how to fix that but I'm open to others.'