Pretty much the entire staff feels that the Codex of Power has been a bit of a failed experiment. What was once meant as something for people to slowly accomplish (and that was expected only a few people would do) has become a near-necessity for a new player to get him or herself into a raid guild. Ironically, perception has it that even guilds that are in tiers that were released before CoPower even existed, require at least some time spent into CoPowers.
Even worse, the CoPower is boring as all hell. You just kill massive amounts of things, watch the little thing tick up, and gain uninteresting, base power bit by bit. Of course, this power increase is so big that it needs to be done prior to some AAs, and nearly all other tomes.
So the question is not whether or not we want to keep the CoPower, it is how should it be dismantled, and if something should be put in place for people who want to exp into infinity that is not a tome that is anything near required reading.
Proposal 1:
CoPower goes away. Instead, we have three tomes: (The names do not matter yet.)
Codex of Battle: 20% Melee, Pet Melee and Ranged Damage. Same AA count as 1.6 old CoPowers.
Codex of Healing: 20% Healing increase. Same AA count as 1.6 old CoPowers.
Codex of Evocation: 20% to all damage spells and songs. Same AA count as 1.6 old CoPowers.
When the change goes live, we delete all CoPower and reimburse everyone who has done a CoPower their experience that has gone into it (most likely via a bunch of right click tokens). It is then up to the player to use their previously earned experience on all three new tomes, or to pick one or two new tomes and have some experience left over.
Most classes will only need one or two of these tomes. Even better, new players will be able to tackle the tome of most potency to their class first, instead of having to slog through all 5 old tomes to get their needed 20%. A guild looking for a druid will care first and foremost about the healing tome, and although the druid may want the evocation tome in the future, it is not an automatic prerequisite for high end raiding.
Proposal 2:
Get rid of CoPower altogether, reimburse all experience, and welfare the 20% to something else.
This is currently what I am leaning toward. Right now our best idea is put the 20% increase into specializations, and to make it so those specialization bonuses only kick in at 65. For instance, lets say all specializations are capped at 200 until level 65. We then make every 3 or 4 AAs or X tome exp give 1 specialization point. Each specialization point between 200 and 250 gives ~.4 bonus to all the old CoPower attribute corresponding to the specialization.
This means that you still gain the 20% slowly, but you do it in a way concurrent with normal AAing or Tomeing.
Alternatively, another idea to welfare the 20% is to put it into actually killing things. Utilizing the new "hard event" flag we used to give boss mobs experience bonuses, we have each new boss mob killed increase your overall power by some increment up to 20%. This way, players will get their old CoPower increase slowly as they kill more and more difficult mobs. Perhaps something around .1% per mini, .2% per boss and .5% per zone boss. With this, the power increase is still there, but it is no longer something new players will have to do to get into a new guild. Instead, it is something the new player gets as he experiences more and more raid content.
Proposal 3:
Who the hell knows. Outline it in your post if you have a good proposal to dismantle the CoPower iron raid curtain.
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Once CoPower is dismantled, we have another question we have to ask. Do we want to try to find a way to satisfy the original point of the CoPower. That is, do we want a place for experience to go no matter how much experience you have already gotten. The answer to this very well may be no - since any incentive that would make the time spent worthwhile would sooner or later make the new system a "must have" just like CoPower became. Further, remember that when we hit 3.0 a bunch of new options open up to us, such as leadership AAs and other things that are not directly power correlated - which may make us want to wait on adding a new system in now.
If the answer is yes we do want a new system - it is safe to say there can not be a raw character improvement benefit from it. So what sort of reward would be doable? Although this is much less important than fixing the CoPower problem, I am happy to hear your thoughts on it as well.
Be constructive!
Even worse, the CoPower is boring as all hell. You just kill massive amounts of things, watch the little thing tick up, and gain uninteresting, base power bit by bit. Of course, this power increase is so big that it needs to be done prior to some AAs, and nearly all other tomes.
So the question is not whether or not we want to keep the CoPower, it is how should it be dismantled, and if something should be put in place for people who want to exp into infinity that is not a tome that is anything near required reading.
Proposal 1:
CoPower goes away. Instead, we have three tomes: (The names do not matter yet.)
Codex of Battle: 20% Melee, Pet Melee and Ranged Damage. Same AA count as 1.6 old CoPowers.
Codex of Healing: 20% Healing increase. Same AA count as 1.6 old CoPowers.
Codex of Evocation: 20% to all damage spells and songs. Same AA count as 1.6 old CoPowers.
When the change goes live, we delete all CoPower and reimburse everyone who has done a CoPower their experience that has gone into it (most likely via a bunch of right click tokens). It is then up to the player to use their previously earned experience on all three new tomes, or to pick one or two new tomes and have some experience left over.
Most classes will only need one or two of these tomes. Even better, new players will be able to tackle the tome of most potency to their class first, instead of having to slog through all 5 old tomes to get their needed 20%. A guild looking for a druid will care first and foremost about the healing tome, and although the druid may want the evocation tome in the future, it is not an automatic prerequisite for high end raiding.
Proposal 2:
Get rid of CoPower altogether, reimburse all experience, and welfare the 20% to something else.
This is currently what I am leaning toward. Right now our best idea is put the 20% increase into specializations, and to make it so those specialization bonuses only kick in at 65. For instance, lets say all specializations are capped at 200 until level 65. We then make every 3 or 4 AAs or X tome exp give 1 specialization point. Each specialization point between 200 and 250 gives ~.4 bonus to all the old CoPower attribute corresponding to the specialization.
This means that you still gain the 20% slowly, but you do it in a way concurrent with normal AAing or Tomeing.
Alternatively, another idea to welfare the 20% is to put it into actually killing things. Utilizing the new "hard event" flag we used to give boss mobs experience bonuses, we have each new boss mob killed increase your overall power by some increment up to 20%. This way, players will get their old CoPower increase slowly as they kill more and more difficult mobs. Perhaps something around .1% per mini, .2% per boss and .5% per zone boss. With this, the power increase is still there, but it is no longer something new players will have to do to get into a new guild. Instead, it is something the new player gets as he experiences more and more raid content.
Proposal 3:
Who the hell knows. Outline it in your post if you have a good proposal to dismantle the CoPower iron raid curtain.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Once CoPower is dismantled, we have another question we have to ask. Do we want to try to find a way to satisfy the original point of the CoPower. That is, do we want a place for experience to go no matter how much experience you have already gotten. The answer to this very well may be no - since any incentive that would make the time spent worthwhile would sooner or later make the new system a "must have" just like CoPower became. Further, remember that when we hit 3.0 a bunch of new options open up to us, such as leadership AAs and other things that are not directly power correlated - which may make us want to wait on adding a new system in now.
If the answer is yes we do want a new system - it is safe to say there can not be a raw character improvement benefit from it. So what sort of reward would be doable? Although this is much less important than fixing the CoPower problem, I am happy to hear your thoughts on it as well.
Be constructive!