Rade

Doing runs with friends is usually more fun than running it yourself. Being an overgeared player and having the chance to show off a taste of higher level content to your friend and carry them through it while they work toward 90 can be fun. By raising the level cap, you'd be removing a possible experience from players that can be enjoyable. The only thing to be gained from restricting it is that players who don't want to deal with low level players will be saved a few moments of explaining to new players why they should not join. Not to mention quick battle has stat restrictions on par with S3 raids already anyway, and if you're doing non quick battle runs, you can set your own stat restrictions.
For a more technical reason for why the level restrictions shouldn't be changed, and probably the reason why they didn't change them with Rise: bracelet gems. Bracelets are content that opens up and becomes available to help improve your stats at 80. Functionally, it doesn't make any sense to have a player unlock gear at 80 but be unable to do the battles that reward that gear until 90. Sure, people can buy them off the marketplace, but it doesn't make sense in the player experience. You could argue that they could bump unlocking bracelets back to 90 as well, but then you're nerfing players in the 80-90 range (albeit not by much), which is completely counter to all the design changes implemented with Rise, and players already have enough new complexities being thrown at them at one time for reaching 90 with composite materials, season 3 raids with actual mechanics, material synthesis, and component dismantling. It does not make sense to change the level ranges on this stuff while trying to help new players break into the game.

Hero mode is (at least currently) only available on fights that were previously raids, so as for the elite mobs, those are gone. The attack speed increase on bosses was also removed. Many of the mechanics that were dumbed down or removed for normal mode are present again when you run them on hero mode; for example, Cromm has his conflagration phase as well as the statue and clone summons. Not sure exactly how the stats are buffed up, but it's enough that it will be a reasonably long and moderately challenging battle with higher end 90-95 gear, as opposed to the 20 second annihilations they are on normal difficulty at that point.

The main benefit from hero mode (aside from having something to play that doesn't take 5 seconds to beat) is the hero boxes that drop. There's a chance of getting departure licenses from them, which let you do extra runs of battles past their usual limit, with no hard cap as far as I'm aware so long as you have more licenses to use. I haven't seen any evidence of having a chance at other more valuable drops when running on hero yet, so it seems like the drops are the same, but it's still a possibility. When you're at max level, you won't be able to run the older missions and get gold for them unless it's on hero because of the level penalty. On Havan, a normal run took me under a minute to solo and I got about 6 cores and no gold, while a hero run took me about 7 minutes to solo and I received 7 cores and 66k gold. A solo I did on my Lann using the freebie 90 gear took somewhere around 30 minutes, so it can go quickly with a high geared party, but will take a long while at entry 90 levels.

Basically, while the hero mode runs themselves are more time consuming, they're the only option for those runs to still give their raw gold (double the original value), and they give you the opportunity to rerun valuable limited battles like Dullahan and royal army raids if you're a bit lucky with the boxes. It's a bit situational, but there's certainly value to doing runs on hero mode over normal mode, and it's the only way to run pre-S3 content in a manner that gives a comparable challenge to its pre-Rise state now.

Quick battle is pretty great overall, but there's a couple of areas it's lacking in, and I think a few small changes would greatly improve the flow and availability of getting into battles.
1. Let players create quick battles while in pre-formed parties. People are going to want to create battles with it with their friends for the sake of the extra core and extra convenience anyway, so by allowing this, you prevent people running into the problem of getting kicked or leaving because of the host trying to get their friends into a run. Similarly, have the option to replay battles available so that people who want to quickly farm content don't have to reselect the mission after every run.
2. Since the raid category is gone and there's now an entire page dedicated to just royal army, why not have that page show available hero mode runs? Hero runs are the only non-S3 group endgame content right now, and there's no easy way to find and sort them out from all the normal mode battles currently. Additionally, have a checkbox option to list battles that currently have parties up first. There's no reason to make people have to scroll through a dozen pages of missions with 0 battles available just to find one mission that has a party getting formed.

Zaeadras wrote: »

KenshinX wrote: »

Moo, Moo!

how many normal boats are made after rise
how many people are even going to look for a normal boat
I'd rather not sit around waiting for an hour trying to play the newest dead content because my concept for Endgame doesn't conform to their sideways mentality
not to mention if i remember correctly the very act of having a full party in quick battle gives another Core perfect win more model

also lets be honest the proper way to "gear a character" is throwing all of the money at the game and Praying to RNGesus that you can have a +15 weapon so you can be semi relevant in a 4 man party until they sell enhance stones for safe upgrades till +17 for 100$ each attempt

Enchant your gear. Use material synthesis on your weapon's composites. There are plenty of cheap, viable scrolls that will boost your crit and/or balance without any risk of destroying your gear now. Master, deadly, sentinel, resistant, force, sparkling, petite, and more, all available on the MP for 700k or less (east server prices), often less than 100k. I'm sure you can easily pick up a bunch by running some of the old S2 raids as well. You can easily farm the materials for enhancing composites for extra crit and balance as well, although the raw gold cost can become prohibitive.

Do Ein Lacher and get the titles. It got nerfed with Rise; while it can still be quite a challenge, attack and defense are irrelevant, and you're also able to select missions outside of the daily rotation to do with reward coupons to get the last bit. If you're actually playing the game and not just throwing your wallet at it or expecting to get things within 5 minutes, it's actually not difficult at all to get from where your gear is to where those entry requirements for Dullahan are set.

As things stand, you only need a +15 if you want an easier Neamhain run or want endgame bosses to die in 1 minute instead of actually having something to fight, in the game's current iteration. Sure, they're overpowered, but for the most part, there isn't a point because there's nothing that really allows you to take advantage of that power. And all the changes to the game's systems with Rise have made it easier for non-paying players to get up to +15 as well. There's still something of a wall with the value of having runes to get to +10, but they're adding runes to the seal shop in the near future, and anyone who's been around and actually playing would end up with plenty of boosts to use from events. I have literally dozens of runes to use and I don't think I've bought any since 3 or 4 years ago.
TL;DR - if you're actually playing the game and paying attention to the different avenues of progression available to you, you really won't have a very hard time hitting those requirements with a modicum of effort.

If returning materials after destroying resurrected gear is no longer a thing, then I think they really should remove the limit to items only being resurrectable once. There needs to be a path of progression for people to eventually get a piece of gear to +15; the current system gambles all your progress and every other unique benefit you've placed into the gear once you've used that first attempt. The biggest thing preventing this from being feasible before was the fact that it could allow a potentially endless supply of drops from returned materials, but if that's gone, there's no longer any monetary gain from booming, and the heavy AP costs themselves are more than enough of a penalty to provide the needed risk from failure.