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.
I, as a player, like the idea of Codex of Power. I am still unsure of why the staff feels they are a "failed experiment". If the staff is surprised by the fact that people have drive to reach objectives that make their character more powerful then I guess it should just been seen as a learning experience. This should be seen as a positive because people like to play your game, in large periods of time. There will always be the hard core group of people in ever MMO that will eat up content like it is nothing. Developers will sit back and be amazed that people already killed / finished said content as the group of hard core players buy more socks.
Balancing the game around this Hardcore group and casual players might just be impossible. So don't feel bad that there is a false barrier of exp needed in able to do content. This is simply untrue and it's a problem the players have, and has nothing to do with the staff.
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.
I hate to say it but grinding out the five Codex of Power tomes is equally boring as grinding the 350 - 500 aa's (depending on class) before Codex of Power and the 80+ tomes after them. Getting exp never changes.
This is the reason that Citadel of the Claw was such an amazing zone. The zone broke so many group exp "rules" that seemed to be set into stone. Citadel of the Claw was actually difficult. Players had to pay attention and there was a great deal of mobs that had different abilities.
I also LOVED the fact that the place holders of named mobs had similar abilities to the names themselves. This was a way to learn the named fights before even seeing them.
What I am trying to say is. If you wish to make getting exp less "boring" simply by changing the name of the books you put exp into; it isn't going to work. You have to make fun content to kill.
Of course, this power increase is so big that it needs to be done prior to some AAs, and nearly all other tomes.
I very much disagree with this statement. The power a character gets from AA's is far greater then they get from the Codex of Power (the terms of exp vs power ratio). I also can not think of one class that would wish to get Codex of Power finished before their AA's, other then very poor quality AA's such as stats. I would even go as far as saying Innate Metabolism 3/3 is worth getting before starting your first Codex of Power for every single class.
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.
This Proposal seems like just a waste of time. All this does it help some classes a great deal when at the same time "penalizing" other classes just because they are not such a cut and dry class.
Clearly a Rogue would love this Idea. They would simply finish their "Codex of Battle" and now do 95% (a total random guess) of the DPS a full 5/5 Codex of Power rogue would do with only having to grind out 1/3 of the exp they previously had to do.
Now let's look at classes like Bards, Rangers, Paladins... These classes would have to still do all three of them simply because of the class they picked when they started the game.
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.
This just sound like you giving Codex of Power to players for free just because they are playing the game.
I am sure you know this but currently you only get specialization points when completing a level or an AA. I guess making it so you get 1 specialization point per x exp even when you're filling up tomes wouldn't be a hard fix.
The only problem I have with this idea is a problem I currently have with the Tomes after Codex of Power already. There is simply not enough tomes for "Melee DPS" classes to be that excited about.
When looking at a list of all the General tomes in the game it isn't hard to see that they are much more helpful to caster classes then they are melee.
I will save you the time and not make a list of what ones are better for casters over melee because I think it is simply very clear. I am only guessing that this happen because melee dps can get weapon as they raid and casters can not. I feel a better way to have fixed this problem would have been putting more Elemental Damage on caster weapons.
I would like to see tomes that are geared toward melee one day. Something like a Tome of 1H Slash Mastery that will increase the damage with a 1H Slash weapons for 2% each rank.
Currently if you make Codex of Power free as you exp other tomes you will eventually see Melee running out of the desire of exp their character faster then casters. Melee would end up doing caster tomes that do nothing for their class just to finish up their "Hidden Codex of Power". I guess you already do see this problem however Codex of Power does a nice job of keeping it hidden a bit.
My post is already getting too long. Sorry that I am terrible and English just wanted to put in how I see the game.
