Boosted Invasion Returns

[Dark Mits]

I think they need to made some boss Eqs more tougher and impossible to clear within Eq up time. And made time limit to around 45-60 mins. So ti will hard to do multi-ship or maybe multi-account too.
With this SEGA can fix the drop rate to be better and fair for everyone that pass the Eq.

This sounds good on paper, but doesn't work in practice due to the wildly different group performances.

If an EQ requires 45mins to clear for the average non-expert random mpa, then an expert organized mpa would clear it in possibly 10-15mins.
If it requires 45mins for the expert organized mpa, it would be impossible to clear in a non-expert random mpa.

We have Deus's last phase as a means to judge that. The boss hp for the last 5-min phase was nerfed by 30% because failure rate according to Sega was too high. At the same time if I remember correctly, there were mpas who could clear the unnerfed version with 2mins to spare.

The best way to "prevent" multiruns is to put a hard limit per account. But this is unfair for players who do manage to clear it quickly. Ideal would be to implement a sort of cmulative penalty per run, so that it is still advantageous to run an EQ multiple times, but not at a linearly increasing benefit. For example, 2nd run has -50% total exp and -50% total items drop, 3rd run has -75% total exp and -75% total items drop etc. This way the chance of getting the ultra rare items is not affected, but the player does not get 100 xcubes per EQ, putting him at a great advantage over the newbie/noobie who only got 20 from his only run (and if he managed to clear it)

[isCasted]

I, personally, quit doing Dragon EQ long before its rewards became useless, simply because I realized that every fight goes exactly the same way. No strategy, no choice, no depth (pretty much like everything in EP5). Even when you're not busy repositioning, it's either you get hit or you don't, and that's just boring.

I also can't care about boosted PI anymore (boosted Loser, to be more specific. Nobody really gives a shit about Elder, right?). It felt refreshing back when it was first up simply because I was missing that kind of experience. Now, however, I can see that without significant speed boosts and improved attack duration/AOE/whatever it also boils down to just whaling with an occasional need to dodge after a while. Sure, buffed HP pool and ATK can compensate for our greatly increased DPS, but DPS is not the only thing that matters. Our own attack speed and mobility was buffed so much that choosing a correct set of attacks for every opportunity simply becomes meaningless. If, supposedly, you could land 2-3 attacks whenever a damage opportunity happened back in the day, nowadays you can land 7-9 without feeling a threat, and our greatly increased ability to respond to those threats (through longer iframes, cancel frames and especially block frames with things like Deadly Circle T-0 and motherfucking Charge Parry skills) greatly diminishes the value of those threats, regardless of how much more damage they actually deal.

When the EP3 rebalance happened, they knew it was going to break a lot of such valuable experiences, even if the intent of the rebalance was very clearly to improve the experience. While quests that have already been more about mopping up brainless shits like Elder and TD1-3 just had their HP values buffed during a transition to XH, Loser was given a special attention precisely because he wasn't meant to be a brainless shit. All of the new content, regardless of whether it had brand-new enemies or reused EP1-2 ones, had the new philosophy applied to it.
EP4 had a lot of buffs to players too, but it also did absolutely fuck-all to the old enemies. Neither enemies that were meant to be brainless shits nor enemies that weren't were adjusted in any way. The level of engagement hasn't dropped as radically as in EP5 for multiple reasons. EP4 rode the inertia of EP3 enemy HP buffs, because they were that ridiculously huge (except for Loser... because he got 1.25x HP and not 4x). That, and then there was also some sense of challenge from a brand new quest design philosophy that spammed you with cheap shots from all directions and telegraphed attacks obscured by lighting issues and other enemies. At the same time, a lot of the new balance changes also weren't there just for sake of balance and/or comfort - they actually offered brand new ways to approach old enemies. Some felt more satisfying, like IF-0; some felt cheaper and stupider, like DC-0 and Charge Parry.
As for EP5, it's almost all the way about adding more cancel frames, faster speeds, wider AOE, lower cooldowns, but barely anything that's actually game-changing for the older classes to make them actually feel fresh to compensate for lowered enemy danger level. And even when it did add things that felt fresh, old enemies are still incredibly slow and brainless, so it basically makes no difference whatsoever outside of select few encounters. And PI is definitely not one of those.

New enemies in EP5 are also boring. They aren't annoying and cheap like a half of EP4 enemies. There's just not a whole lot of ways in which you can approach them. They're clearly test dummies for Hero, and even then they're just test dummies. There's exactly 1-2 correct ways to avoid every attack, each one only has 1-2 attacks that they spam and there's no element of figuring out a strategy based on their composition. Dragon isn't much better than an average mob, all it takes is slightly better reaction time and patience to trivialize him. I have no hopes for Omega Loser for a simple reason that its gimmick is most likely going to be 1-2 extra surprise attacks that will not only improve literally nothing in terms of strategy, but probably even ruin whatever strategic depth was left there in the original fight after all the years of balance mutilation.

In some way, a relative success of EP4 was basically a miracle, and EP5 director wasn't as lucky. But there's another problem: the current directors' lack of understanding of what "gameplay depth" means is incredibly apparent in everything that's happening in EP5, and that is the driving issue that's really making people less tolerating towards its other faults, even if some those faults were present to a much greater degree in older episodes. Shame, because I have to give EP5 direction credit for fixing quite a few bugs and performance issues that have been plaguing the game for years. And Hero has a great value as a sort of a research experiment highlighting both how much better and how much worse the game could be in different ways.

[Kintama]

I, personally, quit doing Dragon EQ long before its rewards became useless, simply because I realized that every fight goes exactly the same way. No strategy, no choice, no depth (pretty much like everything in EP5). Even when you're not busy repositioning, it's either you get hit or you don't, and that's just boring.

I also can't care about boosted PI anymore (boosted Loser, to be more specific. Nobody really gives a shit about Elder, right?). It felt refreshing back when it was first up simply because I was missing that kind of experience. Now, however, I can see that without significant speed boosts and improved attack duration/AOE/whatever it also boils down to just whaling with an occasional need to dodge after a while. Sure, buffed HP pool and ATK can compensate for our greatly increased DPS, but DPS is not the only thing that matters. Our own attack speed and mobility was buffed so much that choosing a correct set of attacks for every opportunity simply becomes meaningless. If, supposedly, you could land 2-3 attacks whenever a damage opportunity happened back in the day, nowadays you can land 7-9 without feeling a threat, and our greatly increased ability to respond to those threats (through longer iframes, cancel frames and especially block frames with things like Deadly Circle T-0 and motherfucking Charge Parry skills) greatly diminishes the value of those threats, regardless of how much more damage they actually deal.

When the EP3 rebalance happened, they knew it was going to break a lot of such valuable experiences, even if the intent of the rebalance was very clearly to improve the experience. While quests that have already been more about mopping up brainless shits like Elder and TD1-3 just had their HP values buffed during a transition to XH, Loser was given a special attention precisely because he wasn't meant to be a brainless shit. All of the new content, regardless of whether it had brand-new enemies or reused EP1-2 ones, had the new philosophy applied to it.
EP4 had a lot of buffs to players too, but it also did absolutely fuck-all to the old enemies. Neither enemies that were meant to be brainless shits nor enemies that weren't were adjusted in any way. The level of engagement hasn't dropped as radically as in EP5 for multiple reasons. EP4 rode the inertia of EP3 enemy HP buffs, because they were that ridiculously huge (except for Loser... because he got 1.25x HP and not 4x). That, and then there was also some sense of challenge from a brand new quest design philosophy that spammed you with cheap shots from all directions and telegraphed attacks obscured by lighting issues and other enemies. At the same time, a lot of the new balance changes also weren't there just for sake of balance and/or comfort - they actually offered brand new ways to approach old enemies. Some felt more satisfying, like IF-0; some felt cheaper and stupider, like DC-0 and Charge Parry.
As for EP5, it's almost all the way about adding more cancel frames, faster speeds, wider AOE, lower cooldowns, but barely anything that's actually game-changing for the older classes to make them actually feel fresh to compensate for lowered enemy danger level. And even when it did add things that felt fresh, old enemies are still incredibly slow and brainless, so it basically makes no difference whatsoever outside of select few encounters. And PI is definitely not one of those.

New enemies in EP5 are also boring. They aren't annoying and cheap like a half of EP4 enemies. There's just not a whole lot of ways in which you can approach them. They're clearly test dummies for Hero, and even then they're just test dummies. There's exactly 1-2 correct ways to avoid every attack, each one only has 1-2 attacks that they spam and there's no element of figuring out a strategy based on their composition. Dragon isn't much better than an average mob, all it takes is slightly better reaction time and patience to trivialize him. I have no hopes for Omega Loser for a simple reason that its gimmick is most likely going to be 1-2 extra surprise attacks that will not only improve literally nothing in terms of strategy, but probably even ruin whatever strategic depth was left there in the original fight after all the years of balance mutilation.

In some way, a relative success of EP4 was basically a miracle, and EP5 director wasn't as lucky. But there's another problem: the current directors' lack of understanding of what "gameplay depth" means is incredibly apparent in everything that's happening in EP5, and that is the driving issue that's really making people less tolerating towards its other faults, even if some those faults were present to a much greater degree in older episodes. Shame, because I have to give EP5 direction credit for fixing quite a few bugs and performance issues that have been plaguing the game for years. And Hero has a great value as a sort of a research experiment highlighting both how much better and how much worse the game could be in different ways.

tldr; EP5 shifted the game from an RPG to a beat them all, it's like a final fantasy 1 party with the knight, the white mage, the monk and Bayonetta.

[isCasted]

Absolutely not at all what I meant. A more appropriate analogy would be like going from Bayonetta to Dynasty Warriors 9. Or, to be more generous and ignoring difficulty, from DMC to Furi. The RPG side of the game is pretty much irrelevant to my point.

[the_importer_]

EP5 is a visual novel with 2 EQ, 1 regular quest which is a repetition one of the EQ, 1 limited quest which was reusing assets of other episodes and a new limited quest which uses assets from that said EQ which is also a regular quest.

[wefwq]

They would have to provide greater bonuses than 200% rdr for that though. As it is, boosted PI is relatively more difficult and time consuming than other EQs that can drop 14*s.

Naturally they have to make the reward better so the effort vs. reward is in par with other EQs.

[Zorak000]

EQs were a mistake

there are so many bad interactions between their limited time nature, being the place where generally the latest gear is coming from, and general player progression, that I dont really know where to start.

failure conditions can compound the issue, but I guess that's why they started implementing the Rematch Quests. kind of a ducttape-and-paperclips way of trying to go about it, but I guess that's what I've come to expect from pscrew ever since psu

possibly the biggest issue this game has is just a general lack of information on sega's end. and the large amount of things a regular player could miss entirely if they weren't keeping up on everything since day one, or have friends who do so for them. even then I had a friend who had played katana braver for months, and never knew you could block until they were trying to clear the first set of floors of Heaven and Hell. Granted, that was before they added the training quests, but after going through them myself I can't help to think that they need to so something more with those. heck give individual class level-cap release orders that make you at least run them like hero has, maybe a bad example since there are still plenty of bad heros out there, but I'd say my point still stands.

like there will always be people who ignore everything and mash through all the tutorial popups and stuff, but I feel like sega could stand to help out a bit more by maybe just giving new characters all (regular) PAs and techs at level 1 so people can at least play with a weapon's entire moveset right off the bat, make gear skills automatically learned, idk.

EDIT: anyway back to the first point, they should have made EQs work somewhat similarly to how they got Buster Quests working: all EQs are just always available, you can run whatever you want a set amount of times in a time period, but you can recover those by helping some rando clear the EQ they wanted to run and you get some kind of alternate reward you could use for more endgame-y upgrades like exchanging them for affixing fodder units. I don't think they will ever do this, especially since they already implemented EQ triggers for Star Gems, but it won't stop my imagination from running wild I guess

[otakun]

The simple fact that the non EQ content dies so quickly after release destroys any argument against the EQ system. A decent amount of people still do old EQs while you could barely get 12 for any of the other content atm. Not saying the EQ system is flawless cause its far from that but I believe the EQ system is keeping the game more alive then not.

[Loveless62]

EDIT: anyway back to the first point, they should have made EQs work somewhat similarly to how they got Buster Quests working: all EQs are just always available, you can run whatever you want a set amount of times in a time period, but you can recover those by helping some rando clear the EQ they wanted to run and you get some kind of alternate reward you could use for more endgame-y upgrades like exchanging them for affixing fodder units. I don't think they will ever do this, especially since they already implemented EQ triggers for Star Gems, but it won't stop my imagination from running wild I guess

This is the way I saw BQs: as basically EQs on demand (TD EQs, no less). I am not sure why they seemingly died off. Maybe because it is the same EQ all of the time.

While we are on the topic, allow me to puke a couple of ideas that I had about EQs onto this forum:

1. Change the EQs to allow players to run them whenever they wanted, but impose a weekly run limit on them, say five runs a week (pretty much just like the run limits on solo XQs). I came up with this by thinking of how World of Warcraft's raid lockout system could be applied to PSO2, and I think it would look like this.
2. Allow teams to purchase EQ triggers with team points. This could be cool, but I would be worried about potential firestorms of team drama as team leaders and managers have to decide who can participate in 12-player MPAs, and when they would run the triggers. Part of the solution may be to make the triggers cheap or make the number of triggers available large (possibly increasing as the team levels up). This would need to come in combination with the already existing EQ system, since we wouldn't want to exclude players from EQs who were in smaller teams or who were not in teams at all.

The simple fact that the non EQ content dies so quickly after release destroys any argument against the EQ system. A decent amount of people still do old EQs while you could barely get 12 for any of the other content atm. Not saying the EQ system is flawless cause its far from that but I believe the EQ system is keeping the game more alive then not.

Say what you will about the current EQ system, it still more or less successfully draws people into multiplayer content.

[Kintama]

"This is the way I saw BQs: as basically EQs on demand (TD EQs, no less). I am not sure why they seemingly died off. Maybe because it is the same EQ all of the time."

Because going back and forth from campship to play the same content over and over and OVER is not enjoyable in the slightest, at least with free explores you had a sense of adventure going on as you never always knew what would E-Codes throw at you, with bq and the current LQ you ALWAYS do the EXACT same thing, which is fine once or twice in a week between other games, but sega expects you to do it dozens, even hundreds of time, which was never fine or acceptable and in my eyes at least unveils a deep misunderstanding of video games from the PS team.