New-ish player feeling completely screwed by 3.0 gear update (bug?)

Game Discussion
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Someone please correct me if I’m not understanding.

I made a hero of every class last year (levels 5-20) and tried them all out/farmed Follower crystals but have mostly focused on a single main (level 50). All my characters use the same gear. I don’t have any Mythics or any of the other stuff people are talking about.

I was under the assumption that upon 3.0 being released, the way Hero Scrolls would work is that my gear would be converted into the appropriate scroll levels based on my gear but those levels would be capped by the level of each hero in the same way gear levels are capped (i.e. a level 40 sword on a level 10 hero would still be a level 40 sword, however it would only provide stats as if it were level 10).

Instead, it seems scroll levels were applied in a completely disastrous way–they were converted based on the hero level at the time of conversion, and do not update as I level those heroes like a cap would normally work. This means that instead of all my heroes having level 35-40 scrolls like my main does, they’re stuck with level 5-20 scrolls and even when I level them up, the scroll levels do not raise.

What this seems to imply is that I have to farm over half a million gold and shards, and hundreds upon hundreds of glyphs, just to get my characters to the same scroll levels. The part that is absolutely wild is that it seems that if I’d leveled all my heroes to level 50 before the update, I would have gotten all these levels for free–why on earth was this not communicated better?!

I understand that most people here are very much endgame players who probably already had everyone at level 50 so please, PLEASE tell me this was an oversight or a bug with the way conversion was intended to work. It feels completely hopeless to even attempt to want to work on other characters. I really thought that all my characters would have been given the same scroll levels and just had the stats capped.

If I had known this was going to happen I would’ve leveled them all up beforehand; the promise however was that the update would not put me in a worse place but I feel completely betrayed by that statement–sure, numbers-wise I’m not worse off but in terms of future progression I’ve been handicapped by probably a year now.

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I am afraid the conversion cap was a hard one, and not a soft one. Nowhere in the gear rework explanation was it said that the battle scroll levels would update upon leveling up the heroes, although it isn’t surprising to me that you understood it that way, since that is the way gear worked before. So I am sorry to say this wasn’t an oversight nor a bug, but something completely intended from the devs.

Now, this is something most of us are clearly against. Gear was usable with any character, meaning that you just needed one lvl 50 build and you could use it with any character. Making battle scrolls character dependent is in my opinion a bad decision that will prevent players from fully enjoying the different classes, one of the best aspects this game had. I understand that now having a lvl 50 battle scroll means all your gear is lvl 50, so they probably have decided to do it this way to “balance”: they allow us to upgrade the level of all our gear at once but only for a single character. I am not sure the change is so nice.

Let’s put myself as an example. I use 3 main builds with all 7 characters. In total, I am using 3 weapons, 11 armors and 11 accessiries. So for the cost of 48 weapon glyphs, 176 armor glyphs and 176 accessory glyphs I could have everything I wanted at lvl 50, and use it with all characters. Now, after 3.0 for that same price I would get:

  • 1st character’s 3 battle scrolls to lvl 50
  • 2nd character’s offense scroll to lvl 46, defense scroll to lvl 49, accessory scroll to lvl 50
  • 3rd character’s utility scroll to lvl 46
  • The rest of scrolls and characters only to lvl 35.

Therefore, if I was a new player starting post 3.0 I would be getting a much worse deal since I could only use those 3 main builds fully with a single character.

Therefore I believe the balance is way off, asking for the equivalent value of 7 whole sets of lvl 50 gear for each class is way too much since there are many gear pieces that are usually shared between builds. I trully believe we should be getting account-bounded battle scrolls that soft capped at the level of each character (but went up together with character leveling until reaching the max scroll level for that account). However, if devs aren’t happy with that, I believe the glyph cost for each battle scrolls should at least be cut in half (1 lvl 50 whole gear set = 2 characters with max level battle scrolls).

I apologize in advance to the devs, and specially Jeto, because I am afraid that until something is done regarding this issue I will keep insisting and pressing the matter once and again, no matter how unbearable I may become. I love the 3.0 gear rework, I believe it has really great aspects but also many other aspects that make players’ experience worse. So while thankfull for the nice aspects and defending the hard work devs are making, I won’t rest until making sure players are getting the best game all of us deserve.

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I definitely appreciate that they were trying to simplify things but if this is truly the implementation they want to go with then that’s just awful. And this is just the scrolls aspect; I read the whole rework thread and can’t even imagine how people much more in the endgame than I am feel about the gear issue. Thankfully I was still at Rare/Epic on most of my gear but I feel for the people who invested tons of materials getting gear to Legendary and now it’s not even upgradeable to Mythic?!

Thanks for committing to pressing the issue. I came over from Gems of War for a more casual, less grindy experience and up until now it’s been that way but I just refuse to do a massive grind for every single character. I think soft-capped, account-bound scrolls make perfect sense unless they want to massively increase the drop rate or shop stock of crafting materials.

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It’s so so expensive to level scrolls. I can’t imagine new players sticking around once they reach that wall, for ONE character, then realize they would have to do it for all characters. It’s too daunting.

I hope this gets addressed. It’s quite scary to me in terms of game health and continued existence.

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Indeed. Reaching lvl 50 battle scrolls with one character is already a daunting challenge (it took me a year to get an all lvl 50 build) , but doing so for all characters is just plain impossible.

It may be that the devs are trying to make the game closer to the previous PQ games where you took a class and just stuck to it. However, this would be a mistake since the game has been clearly developed and balanced for using all classes freely. Removing this without rebalancing the whole game will just hurt players and reinforce the general feeling that the reworks are making the game more grindy and difficult and less enjoyable.

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These are my feeling on the subject: