(Minor correction: Arcane reservoir guards get aggro and keep it for the single hit that almost inevitably kills them.)
Seriously. Since mod 6, a strongly worded letter will kill them. Devs, any chance at making them a bit more useful? I'm only glad there is no achievement for keeping them all alive!
Even companions have a real hard time staying alive since mod 6. I have R11's and R12's on a powrie and I still have to take great care to keep her behind enemies.
Harper Chronicles: Cap Snatchers (RELEASED) - NW-DPUTABC6X Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
Feedback: Quest: Howling Demons This daily quest's second encounter is poorly placed. First, it requires too much travel. Second, the encounter circle spawns with a wolf pack inside the perimeter, and a troll pack walked in mid-fight. These extra enemies are low level, so they aren't difficult, but they are annoying.
Feedback: Quest Howling Demons DC 70 IL 2540 Long ride to the upper part of the peak for the 2nd quest though you aren't drawing aggro on the way so that makes it easier.
Didn't realize that the quest instance is shared so that made it pretty trivial when another player dropped in.
Quest doesn't seem to stop the random monster cycle so you get low level monsters wandering through the middle - not sure is that is intentional or not.
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instynctiveMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,885Arc User
Taking a study break, so I thought I'd give preview a spin. I opted for "cyan", as it's easier to read than "blue".
FEEDBACK: If you're going to scale the encounters, please scale them up more. I'm on my 3.1k ilvl GWF and the ONLY damage I took was when I wasn't paying attention to Linu's radius spell. I was also one-and two-shotting everything. I'm on a mediocre GWF build (I always place behind other comparable ilvl GWFs on "Paingiver"). I still feel that monsters and other bad guys should scale based on ilvl. That would give you the most control over how strong these things can get.
AI on monsters seems rather.. slow, throughout. It shouldn't take two or three hits on a monster for it to "wake up". In my case, it was "wake up, time to die." Monsters should be super aggresive, especially demons.
Another annoyance was what I feel to be an excessive use of quotation marks in names. Bob "Illithid Scourge" Jones and George "Slaverkiller" Smith. For Mod 7 is was the excessive use of the word "adventurer". For Mod 6 it was the excessive use of exclamation points.
Throughout the chapters, I felt as though I spent more time traveling than "adventuring". This was the same issue I had with the Salvatore quests... back and forth and back and forth. I'm certain that this is a time gate sort of thing, but it really interrupts the overall flow of the quests, just like in the Salvatore ones.
The "go here and kill this" and "go here and kill that"... I don't like it. I've never liked quests like that. None of my characters are hired assassins. They are, as the SH NPCs point out every fifth or sixth word, adventurers. They (well, *I*) like the exploration and finding riches and gear and lore and new places.
On the campaign screen, you've blocked out "Defend the Sword Coast" with a highly pixelated icon. Even though I was able to figure out what it said, you may want to disable the tooltip if you're wanting to keep it a secret.
Chapter 1 Cutscene shows scores of demons. But the actual battle is with only a handful. Let us fight what we see in the cutscene. This is reminiscent of the "oh HAMSTER!" moment the first time I ran "Protecting the Portal".. if you're going to show a lot of enemies, then we need to fight a lot of enemies. This battle should HURT.
The inability to use mount here was a little annoying. As was the backtracking. And, like @two30 pointed out: "if I had my VIP sign post, I probably would have exited, and messed up the quest."
I wasn't paying much attention to the Fairy HAMSTER Trails, so can't really comment.
Chapter 2 Will Drizzt and Minsc be conversing throughout? That's rather D3 of you. On the other hand, it is nice for NPCs to be fleshed out a little more.
Chapter 3 Shouldn't have to travel from Mantol-Derith to Protector's Enclave in order to travel to The Chasm. Likewise, leaving The Chasm puts the player back in PE, just to turn around and travel to Mantol-Derith. This is inefficient.
During the dialog with Lans, second paragraph says "happy Seems like you have a cleric with you..." Don't forget to remove "happy" before this goes live.
Lans Thuliaga's "Spinning Strike" marks the ground as red... perhaps it should be blue (cyan?) to differentiate between his attack and the monsters' attacks.
There should be some banter between Linu and the Balor before the fight ensues, to flesh out the story some more. Unless, of course, the Balor is of lower INT. If that's the case, then it should immediately attack. You should also make better use of their wings and have them "propel with unnatural speed and agility" into the fight.
Interlude: Your Legend I have an issue with this, especially from a role-play point of view. None of my characters would presume to "send word of their heroics" to anyone. I'm sure I'm not the only one who plays characters with some semblance of humility. A simple re-wording from Bruenor saying "I've sent word of yer heroics to Gauntlgrym and one of me battleragers would like to join ye. blah blah blah"
You may want to include wording in the description that you mean the "Aid Bruenor Battlehammer" on the Maze Engine campaign screen.
Please check the "Collect Rewards" XP amount for collecting the battlerager. 151k XP seems a bit.. much. Also, the battlerager is a lackluster reward, especially for older level 70 characters. I haven't have a green companion in ages, and the +55 LS and +55 Recovery are essentially useless.
Big Trouble in Neverwinter Included in the drops that I received were a Many Arrows insignia and a Level 14 Belt.
Graphics are being screwy with shadowing again. Up to this point, it's been fine. This also happened after Mods 6 and 7. I feel that I shouldn't have to readjust my graphics settings for every new mod.
And now I'm stuck. I have 1/5 "Placeholders" for "Repel Demons". Is this a time gate? Do I have to do four more dailies (ie. wait four more days) to get the 5/5 "Placeholders" to continue the story? Or do I have to repeat the first few quests (which is not going to happen, BTW.. I'm really tired of running over the same old ground...)? If it's a matter of doing four more dailies, it will take me 6 months to finish this, since I'm pretty certain I won't remember to run the dailies every day.
Honestly, at this point, I'm not super thrilled with what's in store for Mod 9. As mad as I still am about the lack of Foundry support, I went into this playtest with an open mind and gave it a fair go... but... doing it once will be enough for me. My alts will stay in mothballs and collect dust and Leadership RP. I wish that I could share in the enthusiasm of the Dev blogs, but this "mod" is just not going to do it.
Another annoyance was what I feel to be an excessive use of quotation marks in names. Bob "Illithid Scourge" Jones and George "Slaverkiller" Smith. For Mod 7 is was the excessive use of the word "adventurer". For Mod 6 it was the excessive use of exclamation points.
This is actually D&D lore for how "Goliaths" (the race that Lans is) refer to themselves; they have their name, a nickname, and a tribal name.
On the campaign screen, you've blocked out "Defend the Sword Coast" with a highly pixelated icon. Even though I was able to figure out what it said, you may want to disable the tooltip if you're wanting to keep it a secret.
This is a bug that's already fixed internally. Our UI artist was quite sad it went out like that.
Chapter 1 Cutscene shows scores of demons. But the actual battle is with only a handful. Let us fight what we see in the cutscene. This is reminiscent of the "oh ****!" moment the first time I ran "Protecting the Portal".. if you're going to show a lot of enemies, then we need to fight a lot of enemies. This battle should HURT.
Good point! I'll see what I can do to make that opening fight feel a bit more impressive.
Chapter 2 Will Drizzt and Minsc be conversing throughout? That's rather D3 of you. On the other hand, it is nice for NPCs to be fleshed out a little more.
This (and other examples to come) was me testing the waters of our new mini-contact system. If you all like it, we'll do it more!
Chapter 3 Shouldn't have to travel from Mantol-Derith to Protector's Enclave in order to travel to The Chasm. Likewise, leaving The Chasm puts the player back in PE, just to turn around and travel to Mantol-Derith. This is inefficient.
During the dialog with Lans, second paragraph says "happy Seems like you have a cleric with you..." Don't forget to remove "happy" before this goes live.
Lans Thuliaga's "Spinning Strike" marks the ground as red... perhaps it should be blue (cyan?) to differentiate between his attack and the monsters' attacks.
There's another boat that can take you directly to the overworld map to get you to the Chasm. We've received this feedback internally and the problem (I believe) is that the Underdark overworld map is directly in the way of the path to get to the regular overworld map. I'll be making a fix to this.
We have the other issues with Lans fixed internally. I'll see what I can do about some banter between Linu and the Balor. We're close to locking down our text for translation but I think I can sneak a line or two in.
Interlude: Your Legend I have an issue with this, especially from a role-play point of view. None of my characters would presume to "send word of their heroics" to anyone. I'm sure I'm not the only one who plays characters with some semblance of humility. A simple re-wording from Bruenor saying "I've sent word of yer heroics to Gauntlgrym and one of me battleragers would like to join ye. blah blah blah"
You may want to include wording in the description that you mean the "Aid Bruenor Battlehammer" on the Maze Engine campaign screen.
Please check the "Collect Rewards" XP amount for collecting the battlerager. 151k XP seems a bit.. much. Also, the battlerager is a lackluster reward, especially for older level 70 characters. I haven't have a green companion in ages, and the +55 LS and +55 Recovery are essentially useless.
Good point! I tweaked the text to give the player more humility.
Graphics are being screwy with shadowing again. Up to this point, it's been fine. This also happened after Mods 6 and 7. I feel that I shouldn't have to readjust my graphics settings for every new mod.
Can you either post here or send me a PM with your system specs? I can get this to our graphics guys (top men) and see if they're aware of the issue.
And now I'm stuck. I have 1/5 "Placeholders" for "Repel Demons". Is this a time gate? Do I have to do four more dailies (ie. wait four more days) to get the 5/5 "Placeholders" to continue the story? Or do I have to repeat the first few quests (which is not going to happen, BTW.. I'm really tired of running over the same old ground...)? If it's a matter of doing four more dailies, it will take me 6 months to finish this, since I'm pretty certain I won't remember to run the dailies every day.
We have Bruenor give out 1 daily a day. All of the overworld quests have 2 potential areas they can take you, while the instance quest has multiple different companions that can help you. The campaign is split up so that you get directed quests every other campaign tasks (Aid Bruenor, Locate Vizeran, Gather Components, Destroy Maze Engine) and repeatable quests in the others. Every time you move up a "tier", more repeatable quests are opened up. So Repel demons has 3 repeatable quests available, Defend Neverwinter has 6, etc., up to 10 for "Defend the Sword Coast".
Thank you for taking the time to write up all your feedback! Sorry I wasn't able to address all of your points, but hopefully this helps.
Sean "Commander Ander" McCann - Content Designer
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instynctiveMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,885Arc User
edited February 2016
Amazing feedback and communication, @commanderander .. thank you. :-)
PS. I commented on your wall. I've got a DxDiag.txt to send you... but I can't initiate the PM. :-)
Just got home from work and read the latest feedback. Here are some random thoughts:
(I went with a slightly lighter blue that is a bit easier to read)
I like the NPC banter, but I think the text should somehow either persist for longer or in a small separate log with portraits or something. If I was fighting and wasn't really paying attention, I'd miss the text. Of course, the audio didn't match, which doesn't help, but it still seemed like the dialogue should somehow persist without having to constantly turn NPC chat on and off again. Storytelling is important and welcome!
Something instynctive said about adventuring has me thinking about other adventure games I've played in the past (my age *will* show here). A huge part (perhaps the most important part) of adventuring is discovery -- not only of locales, but everything else along the way. I think my first memory of adventuring wonder in a computer game was discovering "xyzzy" -- there are few simpler and cooler things than a magic word!
In Eye of the Beholder, you had a staple of adventuring: secret doors and concealed buttons. Imagine if a small adventuring zone had some secrets that you could discover. Now, imagine if the secrets that it could reveal were chosen randomly from a larger pool. Now, imagine if whatever those secrets had inside also varied (maybe a monster? maybe an NPC? Maybe a magic mirror that took you somewhere else?)
I'm beginning to digress, so let me try to pull this back to the campaign: wouldn't be cool if part of the campaign involved a longer-term quest to do/find/accomplish something, where the way to do it wasn't always the same from character to character? I'm talking about something where it's not always spelled out where to go or what to do, but you have to piece clues together.
I've only done the first day's batch of the campaign as I don't want to spoil the surprise for myself. I place great value on the thrill of discovery! One piece of advice I can give is, don't ever create a zone, no matter how small, without giving it side areas with at least something interesting. Maybe put in some lore, or a hidden monster, or a -- wait for it -- clue to something else, but always put in something. It isn't adventuring if the path in front of you is linear. Adventuring is going in a direction when you're not sure which path to take and where it might lead.
Harper Chronicles: Cap Snatchers (RELEASED) - NW-DPUTABC6X Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
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adinosiiMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,294Arc User
Not sure what is going on, but I posted feedback on Chapters 4 and 5 earlier today, and got a message that it needed review by a moderator ... not sure why, but I really don't feel like typing it all back in if it doesn't appear.
Hoping for improvements...
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torontodaveMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 992Arc User
As mad as I still am about the lack of Foundry support,
Quoted for truth.
@commanderander if you want me to play your foundry quest, you're gonna have to play mine.
If you can't give the users a reason to play my foundry, you're gonna have to play it. =D
[Don't think I'm being a pain, You wanna see pain? Go look in the Xbox thread. Poor @strumslinger and @yetweallfalldown. The console kids are tearing them new buttholes. ;D]
NW-DSQ39N5SJ - 'To Infinity, and BEYOND!' - Spelljammer Quest. Skyships, Indiana Jones moments NW-DC9R4J5EH - 'The Black Pearl' - Spelljammer! Phlo Riders and Space Orcs
Thanks for all the fish.
Hustin1, those are some great points about adventuring and discovery. I'm a huge fan of that myself, and we started doing that a bit in Salvatore with hidden achievements, and we have more of that in the Maze Engine campaign. My personal favorite is one that requires getting clues from several different hidden areas and NPC's in and outside of the campaign. I won't spoil anything further than that, but let's just say I'm looking forward to people cracking that and seeing what that triggers.
I would love to hear more about what people think about the hidden achievements in the campaign, most likely when it goes live since there's a lot. More hidden achievements were put in to the Maze Engine specifically because I saw people reacted positively to the previous ones (and I also love doing them).
Hustin1, those are some great points about adventuring and discovery. I'm a huge fan of that myself, and we started doing that a bit in Salvatore with hidden achievements, and we have more of that in the Maze Engine campaign. My personal favorite is one that requires getting clues from several different hidden areas and NPC's in and outside of the campaign. I won't spoil anything further than that, but let's just say I'm looking forward to people cracking that and seeing what that triggers.
I would love to hear more about what people think about the hidden achievements in the campaign, most likely when it goes live since there's a lot. More hidden achievements were put in to the Maze Engine specifically because I saw people reacted positively to the previous ones (and I also love doing them).
Some issues you might run into then is how many quests are tagged as lv 60 (or lower) in the system and so "new quest" markers on NPCs don't show up for lv 70 characters. This is easily seen in how annoying it is to figure out which person you need to speak to get the daily ToD lair quest which is needed to complete the Common Cause quest. Or as a level 70 trying to do quests in drowned shores, you need to talk with everyone until you start remembering who gives out quests. This makes content that is intended to be replayable very annoying. So having to go talk to a lv 60 npc in a multi npc clue hunt could be very hard if there is a visual indicator for a lv 60, but not a lv 70.
I have a number of characters that i know I never finished the race/class quests for but since it is so difficult to find where to start/pick up these quests again since I have leveled past their start point level I have abandoned any thought of doing them since spending hours on the forum/wiki trying to find information on this stuff is just a pain. Also, i can't replay any of that content. I have no idea anymore what the GWF class quest was like and starting a new character specifically to do it again is not that appealing.
Which leads into my next point. I bet i missed quests as i leveled to 60. But if I walked into Hotenow or Ebon Downs as a lv 70 i have no idea if i missed a story line quest (or dropped it deliberately 18 months ago or something) since none of those people provide "new quest here" visuals. I understand that from a design perspective it is supposed to help guide people through content and keep things from being too distracting but now i am at lv 70 and I have no idea what i missed. Extra side quests like the rose gathering one in the Chasm will get skipped if i go back there to complete the main story line since there is no notification that he has a quest for me and he isn't mentioned at all in the main story line. That nice little love story that becomes practically non-existent from my PoV and that is sad. There is a ton of great content from 1-60 and much of it is hard to/impossible experience or replay once you level past it.
And then there is the (off topic but relevant) bug with one of the mod 8 storyline secret achievements. The title "police's drunk orcs" seems to be impossible to get. Killing the drunk orc where you get the "sober orc" title does nothing and nothing else in the chapter seems to trigger it either. So either this is broken somehow or the people who did figure it out have said nothing on the forums.
Guild - The Imaginary Friends We are searching for slave labor, will pay with food from our farm!
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adinosiiMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,294Arc User
edited February 2016
My earlier feedback on chapters 4 and 5 has not shown up, so here is a redone (shorter) version of it - I have no idea what triggered the "Requires moderator approval" message the first time.
First of all - chapters 4 and 5 caused me to revise my opinion of the Maze Engine campaign - revise it upwards, as they are pretty nicely done.
I could only do chapters 4 and 5 after 5 rounds of dailies. I have complained about the problems with the dailies before, so I will not repeat that here. I went through chapters 4 and 5 with a TiL 2800-something DC. This is higher than the 2600-something I used for the first 3 chapters, but that simply reflects my own progress the first 5 days after I reached level 70.
Now for the feedback - it is quite positive - a change from the ****storm over the three issues that are really upsetting your players these days (the non-returning dungeons, the Xbox TB fiasco and the banning of innocent players selling very expensive items) No, I'm not saying a good Mod9 will compensate for those issues, but there are at least a few bright spots in the current atmosphere of negativity and hostility.
First of all, I was really happy to see more locations appear on the underdark travel map. It did appear a bit too "empty" previously. I was also very pleased to see brand new areas, instead of having to go through recycled old areas. In general, the areas were nicely done, but it would not hurt to add a little bit for players who like to explore. Yes, I did find one piece of lore, but that's it - not a single resource node, for example.
First zone - the dragon's lair
Visually the zone looked good. No issues whatsoever.
The jumping puzzle was interesting, but I must admit that after getting insta-killed so often that I had run out of injury kits (no VIP injury immunity on Preview), I gave up and took the shortcut. I assume it is possible to jump across, and I will certainly try it on live, but it is absolutely not trivial.
The "speedrunning" was fun. Silly, and made no sense story-wise, but fun, and yes...I loved getting the "Faster than ...." title, so good job there.
The jumping was however the only part of this zone that was even remotely challenging. The fights, in particular with the first few groups of wyrmlings were annoyingly easy and Lich Zalia was not really a challenge either for me - maybe it would be a challenge for a "fresh" level 60 player, though.
Second zone - the tower
The zone looked fine - the fights were a bit tedious, but not a challenge at all until I reached the two Demons, Xolion and Hezrax. Those guys actually managed to hit me for 25% of my health or so, as I got trapped in the red zone. I was bit careless, I admit - I had gotten used to the enemies being so easy that I didn't really need to pay much attention to them.
My main complaint about the zone is actually the "partner" I got - Drizzt. I mean, he is supposed to be a hero, while I am just a no-name DC - not even a DPS class, and yet I massively outdamaged him. That just felt....wrong. Poor Drizzt is going to need some professional counseling to recover from the emotional trauma of discovering that he is essentially useless.
Third zone - the demonic siege battlefield
Nice looking area, everything worked as it should. The two demons at the end looked like cousins of Xolion and Hezrax, so I was a bit more careful - which meant that they hardly managed to hurt me at all, and the fight was over very quickly. Bug: The battlefield is an open outdoors area. There is no reason why you should not be able to summon your mount here - in particular after killing all the demon groups you may have to go across the whole area to the bosses. Yet, this behaves like an indoor area, with no mounts. Please consider fixing that.
BUG: In Nature's Defense can't be completed The quest "In Nature's Defense" directs to Mount Hotenow and to interact with a specific tree ("Press F to Defend Heartleaf's Garden"). Interacting with the tree moves the character to a different and wrong quest called "Howling Through Skyhold" at Pirates' Skyhold, and completing that quest then teleports the character back to Mount Hotenow and the tree. "In Nature's Defense" doesn't complete.
I had the same bug with "In Nature's Defense" as @meirami.
Feedback: Chapter 4: Adventurer's of the Lost Artifact I really enjoyed this quest. The jump into the shaft, the jumping puzzle and the dragon-breath gauntlet were all lovely.
instynctiveMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,885Arc User
edited February 2016
I'm obviously overlooking something, but I'm not finding any additional quests as @commanderander mentioned above.. but I did the daily in Pirate's Skyhold.
FEEDBACK: The waterfall was beautiful. Please leave that accessible. I hope you put something in there... a chest, a node, a mimic.. something.
I loved the fact that I could fall and DIE. DEAD! I then ran through the whole area with yellow arms because no VIP, and no injury kits. lol
Today's ACT: Big Badguy:
Me:
And for contrast, my Purple Yeti:
Yesterday's ACT: The Balor:
General Fury:
Havstir:
Me:
My Yeti:
So why did I include my companion's ACT? To illustrate that a purple, but otherwise average, defender was out-DPSing the Balor, Havstir and General Fury, and he came really close to the DPS that the Cloud Giant Captor was doing. If I have time this afternoon, I might take my DC through Mod 9 material to see if her striker companion can out-DPS everything.
I'm honestly not trying to be the guy who wants everything on 11, difficulty-wise, but over the past two days, I've taken under a million points of damage.. nearly half of that damage was from "Madness"...
FYI: my DR is 21.5% and Deflect is 13.4%. Not exactly the tankiest GWF out there. :-)
I hope this all helps.
(Special thanks to @hustin1 for the awesome blue color.)
Some issues you might run into then is how many quests are tagged as lv 60 (or lower) in the system and so "new quest" markers on NPCs don't show up for lv 70 characters. This is easily seen in how annoying it is to figure out which person you need to speak to get the daily ToD lair quest which is needed to complete the Common Cause quest. Or as a level 70 trying to do quests in drowned shores, you need to talk with everyone until you start remembering who gives out quests. This makes content that is intended to be replayable very annoying. So having to go talk to a lv 60 npc in a multi npc clue hunt could be very hard if there is a visual indicator for a lv 60, but not a lv 70.
I agree, this is annoying. The Maze Engine campaigns are, beneath the hood, flagged to scale to player level, which means Bruenor should always have an exclamation mark over his head to let you know he has a quest. I don't believe we can do anything to fix that problem for Module 9's launch, but I can talk to our UI team to see if there's anything we can do down the line to address this as a quality of life issue.
And then there is the (off topic but relevant) bug with one of the mod 8 storyline secret achievements. The title "police's drunk orcs" seems to be impossible to get. Killing the drunk orc where you get the "sober orc" title does nothing and nothing else in the chapter seems to trigger it either. So either this is broken somehow or the people who did figure it out have said nothing on the forums.
This is on my list of things to fix before Mod 9's release.
Bug: The battlefield is an open outdoors area. There is no reason why you should not be able to summon your mount here - in particular after killing all the demon groups you may have to go across the whole area to the bosses. Yet, this behaves like an indoor area, with no mounts. Please consider fixing that..
The quest "In Nature's Defense" directs to Mount Hotenow and to interact with a specific tree ("Press F to Defend Heartleaf's Garden"). Interacting with the tree moves the character to a different and wrong quest called "Howling Through Skyhold" at Pirates' Skyhold, and completing that quest then teleports the character back to Mount Hotenow and the tree. "In Nature's Defense" doesn't complete.
Well, that's scary! Thank you for catching that, I'll make sure we nip that in the bud.
@instynctive, thank you for the numbers! Internally I've made a tweak so that all enemies that you'll be fighting will be 1 level higher than you. I'll be interested in seeing how much of a change this makes. The balancing act with this is going to be delicate, given that it can be played between level 60 and level 70. There should be a patch note when that change goes live. Now, I don't think it'll totally solve the issue of things being super easy at 70, but it should help a bit.
Sean "Commander Ander" McCann - Content Designer
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instynctiveMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,885Arc User
@instynctive, thank you for the numbers! Internally I've made a tweak so that all enemies that you'll be fighting will be 1 level higher than you. I'll be interested in seeing how much of a change this makes. The balancing act with this is going to be delicate, given that it can be played between level 60 and level 70. There should be a patch note when that change goes live. Now, I don't think it'll totally solve the issue of things being super easy at 70, but it should help a bit.
I'll be sure to provide numbers after the update.. same character, same companion... that should give a good basis on things.
If you guys could scale bad guys to ilvl, or even ilvl range, for Level 70 characters, that would solve so many problems, like difficulty, as well as "power creep" and reward level.. As an example:
Not sure how that could be handled in parties.. maybe take the average of the party and use that?
When I've brought this up in the past, people have said this system could be "easily exploited" but people taking off armor to knock down their ilvl to get the "easier" bad guys (but smaller rewards!).. honestly, if they do, that's on them and they have no room to complain about how everything is "too easy".
I can't imagine that doing a simple ilvl calculation before a dungeon or even just before every encounter would take up too much processor power... but a system like this might really give you guys some breathing room between mod releases.
It could probably also somehow apply to PvP as well... but I do't PvP, so I'll stay out of that.
Balancing by item level is certainty an interesting idea. However, with our current timeline to release Mod 9, any attempt we'd make to set up such a system would end up being rushed, unbalanced, and ultimately either not fun for everyone or only fun for a small amount of people.
That being said, there isn't anything wrong with the idea. It's something I'll bring up with everyone else and see how people feel about it, but I can't make any guarantees that we can act on anything within the future or if it will end up going anywhere.
Sean "Commander Ander" McCann - Content Designer
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instynctiveMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,885Arc User
Balancing by item level is certainty an interesting idea. However, with our current timeline to release Mod 9, any attempt we'd make to set up such a system would end up being rushed, unbalanced, and ultimately either not fun for everyone or only fun for a small amount of people.
That being said, there isn't anything wrong with the idea. It's something I'll bring up with everyone else and see how people feel about it, but I can't make any guarantees that we can act on anything within the future or if it will end up going anywhere.
I like the idea, and not just because it's mine. ;-)
There is such a HUGE difference between a Level 70 @ 2k ilvl and a Level 70 @ 4k ilvl. I know you've seen the proof of that in the "Dungeons are too easy, I just solo'd eToS one handed with a 56k modem" videos.
Like I said.. it would help the "power creep", it would prevent folks from soloing T2s (for awhile), and rewards could scale up as well... some bigger RP and/or enchantments.. a chance to have 142/3/4/5 ilvl gear drop. And just when content is getting "too easy", suddenly the player hits the next bracket and gets roflstomped.
Until the Foundry is fully supported again, this would be a huge step towards "infinite content". Sure, we'll still be running the same dungeons for now, but at least the difficulty level should pretty much keep up with the power creep. And depending on the rewards, that should be good motivation for players to keep improving.
Sorry for the thread derail.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
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matiagronxMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 251Arc User
Balancing by item level is certainty an interesting idea.
It is not just an interesting idea, its an ESSENTIAL part of designing this game's difficulty and it should have been implemented from the start so you would have completely AVOIDED all the complaints regarding difficulty, you would have kept the BiS players quite happy cause they would have the appropriate difficulty and rewards for the content. I simply cannot believe how essential design details are totally ignored from developers, and after almost a year since Item Level was implemented you wait for a friggin post from someone who loves this game to propose it. Its outrageous to say the least. Despite the constant changes in developer staff, there is simply no excuse for this continuous ignorance towards simple game mechanics. We all understand than above your head you have a few terrible, terrible humans, that make annoyingly ignorant decisions, but somehow this HAS GOT TO STOP and there HAS TO BE SOME INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS with this game's design and mechanics.
Feedback: Chapter 4 & 5 I completed the next batch of story quests today and was mildly surprised! The jump into the long shaft, escape from the dragon and the jump challenge was interesting and innovative. These are exactly the type of things you need to make the content entertaining and distract from the fact that you are still walking a tube and kill stuff every now and then.
Not sure you can change that, but one minor note is that it feels weird to see multiple dragons on the side at once when you are in fact only running away from a single one. Takes away from the atmosphere. OTher than that: Kudos.
Challenge remains an issue overall, but have to say that it didn't feel as boring simply because the story was enjoyable.
I ran into the same issue as others that Nature's Defense in Mount Hotenow was not completeable.
Balancing by item level is certainty an interesting idea. However, with our current timeline to release Mod 9, any attempt we'd make to set up such a system would end up being rushed, unbalanced, and ultimately either not fun for everyone or only fun for a small amount of people.
That being said, there isn't anything wrong with the idea. It's something I'll bring up with everyone else and see how people feel about it, but I can't make any guarantees that we can act on anything within the future or if it will end up going anywhere.
One thing worth mentioning about iLvl is that it doesn't take some really important things into account. Take my main, for example: Thia is quite possibly the tankiest HR on the entire server, with a base DR of roughly 64%. Her iLvl is 4.2k, but to the best of my knowledge this doesn't account for the R12 bonding runestones on her chicken, the three Loyal Defender items, and the R12's on those. The point is, character capabilities can still vary widely even if the iLvl is identical.
Harper Chronicles: Cap Snatchers (RELEASED) - NW-DPUTABC6X Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
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torontodaveMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 992Arc User
I like the idea, and not just because it's mine. ;-)
There is such a HUGE difference between a Level 70 @ 2k ilvl and a Level 70 @ 4k ilvl. I know you've seen the proof of that in the "Dungeons are too easy, I just solo'd eToS one handed with a 56k modem" videos.
Like I said.. it would help the "power creep", it would prevent folks from soloing T2s (for awhile), and rewards could scale up as well... some bigger RP and/or enchantments.. a chance to have 142/3/4/5 ilvl gear drop. And just when content is getting "too easy", suddenly the player hits the next bracket and gets roflstomped.
Until the Foundry is fully supported again, this would be a huge step towards "infinite content". Sure, we'll still be running the same dungeons for now, but at least the difficulty level should pretty much keep up with the power creep. And depending on the rewards, that should be good motivation for players to keep improving.
Sorry for the thread derail.
I don't like the idea. The stronger my character gets, the harder the enemies are? Why bother getting stronger? ;D Will the rewards for lvl74 enemies be greater than the rewards for lvl70 mobs? ;D
The foundry is where the content lies. hashtag holy grail. ;D
edit: SORRY FOR HIJACKING THE THREAD! I apologize! I really do. That's why I edit'ed this post, instead of making a new one.
On the matter of Maze Engine testing: Similar to the foundry, the maze engine only exists on preview, so playing it, wouldn't net me any rewards. Since we get no rewards for playing the foundry, players often tell me "I dont give a HAMSTER about your foundry." Quid Pro Quo, Since I get no rewards for playing on preview, "I don't give a HAMSTER about your beta testing."
Said with a smile and a grin of course, and no offense other than a hearty jibe. ;D
[If you want me to beta test your stuff, You can play my Foundry and ill give you my best testing. ;D ;D]
double edit: for real though. You play mine, I'll play yours. It's the only way us Authors get any plays, it's only fair.
Post edited by torontodave on
NW-DSQ39N5SJ - 'To Infinity, and BEYOND!' - Spelljammer Quest. Skyships, Indiana Jones moments NW-DC9R4J5EH - 'The Black Pearl' - Spelljammer! Phlo Riders and Space Orcs
Thanks for all the fish.
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instynctiveMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,885Arc User
The foundry is where the content lies. hashtag holy grail. ;D
Agreed... however, with all the issues in the Foundry, it's hard to deliver quality content, in spending more time on work-arounds and other problems. If bad guys (and rewards) were scaled by the player's ilvl, at least re-running campaigns and dailies, players would still have something to work towards.
Hi guys, I understand that balancing things for item level is an important topic, but let's please keep this thread focused on Maze Engine campaign bugs/feedback.
Feel free to start a new thread if you want to continue the discussion about the power level/balancing. Thanks!
Sean "Commander Ander" McCann - Content Designer
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instynctiveMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,885Arc User
I took another run through today, this time paying more attention to, well, everything but combat.
***** BUG The new Mount System "ate" my green Demon Sled from the Winterfest. When I right-clicked on my Winter Wolf, I had an "Open box..." option (perhaps this should read "Add to stable"..?), which dropped it into my stable. I had no such option on my Demon Sled. I chose "Equip", and the sled vanished.
I think this has been brought up before.
***** FEEDBACK Howling Demons The long run to and from the combat areas might be a little excessive... especially surrounded by level 42 monsters... perhaps the long run could be "bolstered" with scaled up monsters..? Cultists? Because you've already used both hatches on the skyship, perhaps make the ship's wheel interactable, or perhaps a portal elsewhere would work to drop the players onto a third Pirates Skyhold map that has not only the challenge quests, but scaled up monsters as well.
My concern here is the amount of running back and forth with nothing to do... I feel that players will grow too bored too quickly with that.
***** BUG Aid Bruenor I took a new character in, and got the quest from Sgt. Knox. As I as headed to the travel gate, I noticed the Neverwinter Guard Recruit had an exclamation point over his head.. so I talked to him and was able to accept the "Aid Bruenor quest again (see journal screenshot below).
I checked with a few other Neverwinter Guard Recruits, and was not able to get it again.
***** FEEDBACK Chapter 1: In Defense of Gauntylgrym Removing the invisible walls... both where the bridge is supposed to extend, and along the sides of the bridge once it's extended. Also, on either side of the.. platform.. why not push the invisible walls back to the stone walls? There's a lot of cool-looking assets back there. Also, if access to those areas is allowed, the steam should do damage.
A death plane in the chasm would be fabulous. I was able to "parkour" all the way to the edges of the map on my TR. Not the visible sections, but the far extremes (screenshot album here: http://imgur.com/a/hNedM).
After talking to Linu, the Fairy HAMSTER Trail leads back across the chasm, towards the demons.
Also, for continuity's sake, the demons should still be behind Linu's barrier. It seems to me that a demon would have no problem just flying over the chasm.
***** BUG Drizzt took up position inside a giant's corpse (see screenshot).
***** FEEDBACK Chapter 2: The Sword of Justice Mounts are allowed in the Fiery Pit during EE, and should probably be allowed now.. although I found that the map will allow intermittent mount use.
Lucas Shaneway III: Is he hurt? How did he get hurt? Does he need help? Did I miss any sort of mention of him at the beginning of this quest? He seems to be randomly placed.
Chapter 3: The Depths of Madness I love Linu. Always have. I hope that you're going to have the same VO actress for her.
Things were going fine on this one until I activated the holy symbol by the fountain. Halfway through the fight, Linu decided to go on walkabout and headed back up to the gate. It was easy enough to keep fighting the mobs while moving with her protection spell, however, once she stopped near the gate, the monsters all .. stopped. They wouldn't enter her protection circle.
Being out in the madness (as I showed in my earlier post) does a LOT of damage. I like it. However, it ended up killing me. Not a huge deal... Linu waited patiently outside the gate, so when Lans and I got back outside, she continued on our journey.. and stopped at the holy symbol by the fountain. I had to activate the holy symbol again, and fight the spawns again. Not a huge deal, just not sure if that's WAI.
Bug: Quest: Demonic Siege Dragon Hoard Coffers should not drop from the demons in the Demonic Siege. Presumably they are dropping as a result of copying the map from the Siege of Neverwinter event. This bug is mostly inconsequential, so I hope it's simple to fix.
Feedback: Quest: Demonic Siege It's nice to revisit this map, but we should be able to ride our mounts in it. It's a large outdoor map. When it was part of the Siege of Neverwinter event, we could ride our mounts. Why not now?
Feedback: Achievements I completed "Gauntlgrym Delver", "Imix Researcher", "Hot Feet", "Demon Archaeologist" and "Faster Than an Ancient Red Dragon", "DeVir Admirer" successfully. The Chapter 4 achievements were the most fun, but the lore achievements are nice too. The description of Imix Researcher is slightly misleading because the lore from Lucas Shaneway isn't required for the achievement.
Feedback: In Nature's Defense Tomorrow's daily quest is "In Nature's Defense". Unless this quest has been hotfixed, it will mean another setback for testing the campaign. The time-gate between Act 2 and Act 3 already seems long. This bug makes it worse. Oh well, you probably don't control the preview patch schedule.
I played through the first 3 chapters and the first daily quest, and encountered no game-breaking bugs - but a few minor annoyances (see below) Overall, the campaignn seems fair. The boons are reasonable (some useless as always, but others are useful and the repeatable campaign rewards are nice. However, I founds things a bit too easy. I am far from being a BiS player and there was not really a single really challenging flight in the first 3 chapters - General Fang and the Storm giant were trivial - I did not feel like I had accomplished anything after defeating them.
Without having played it myself, since this is content available starting at level 60, they do have to beware of making it too difficult. Levelling players have complained about struggling with fights like Candelaria in the Salvatore quests, which are pretty trivial at 70.
This is more a matter of classes, paragons and feats, i ran it with 5 i think characters all bellow lvl 70 and some classes had absolutly no problem, and it was doable with all, a bit or less harder, what probably happens is new players using wrong powers for each situations etc not dificulty.
Comments
Even companions have a real hard time staying alive since mod 6. I have R11's and R12's on a powrie and I still have to take great care to keep her behind enemies.
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
This daily quest's second encounter is poorly placed. First, it requires too much travel. Second, the encounter circle spawns with a wolf pack inside the perimeter, and a troll pack walked in mid-fight. These extra enemies are low level, so they aren't difficult, but they are annoying.
DC 70 IL 2540
Long ride to the upper part of the peak for the 2nd quest though you aren't drawing aggro on the way so that makes it easier.
Didn't realize that the quest instance is shared so that made it pretty trivial when another player dropped in.
Quest doesn't seem to stop the random monster cycle so you get low level monsters wandering through the middle - not sure is that is intentional or not.
FEEDBACK:
If you're going to scale the encounters, please scale them up more. I'm on my 3.1k ilvl GWF and the ONLY damage I took was when I wasn't paying attention to Linu's radius spell. I was also one-and two-shotting everything. I'm on a mediocre GWF build (I always place behind other comparable ilvl GWFs on "Paingiver"). I still feel that monsters and other bad guys should scale based on ilvl. That would give you the most control over how strong these things can get.
AI on monsters seems rather.. slow, throughout. It shouldn't take two or three hits on a monster for it to "wake up". In my case, it was "wake up, time to die." Monsters should be super aggresive, especially demons.
Another annoyance was what I feel to be an excessive use of quotation marks in names. Bob "Illithid Scourge" Jones and George "Slaverkiller" Smith. For Mod 7 is was the excessive use of the word "adventurer". For Mod 6 it was the excessive use of exclamation points.
Throughout the chapters, I felt as though I spent more time traveling than "adventuring". This was the same issue I had with the Salvatore quests... back and forth and back and forth. I'm certain that this is a time gate sort of thing, but it really interrupts the overall flow of the quests, just like in the Salvatore ones.
The "go here and kill this" and "go here and kill that"... I don't like it. I've never liked quests like that. None of my characters are hired assassins. They are, as the SH NPCs point out every fifth or sixth word, adventurers. They (well, *I*) like the exploration and finding riches and gear and lore and new places.
On the campaign screen, you've blocked out "Defend the Sword Coast" with a highly pixelated icon. Even though I was able to figure out what it said, you may want to disable the tooltip if you're wanting to keep it a secret.
Chapter 1
Cutscene shows scores of demons. But the actual battle is with only a handful. Let us fight what we see in the cutscene. This is reminiscent of the "oh HAMSTER!" moment the first time I ran "Protecting the Portal".. if you're going to show a lot of enemies, then we need to fight a lot of enemies. This battle should HURT.
The inability to use mount here was a little annoying. As was the backtracking. And, like @two30 pointed out: "if I had my VIP sign post, I probably would have exited, and messed up the quest."
I wasn't paying much attention to the Fairy HAMSTER Trails, so can't really comment.
Chapter 2
Will Drizzt and Minsc be conversing throughout? That's rather D3 of you. On the other hand, it is nice for NPCs to be fleshed out a little more.
Chapter 3
Shouldn't have to travel from Mantol-Derith to Protector's Enclave in order to travel to The Chasm. Likewise, leaving The Chasm puts the player back in PE, just to turn around and travel to Mantol-Derith. This is inefficient.
During the dialog with Lans, second paragraph says "happy Seems like you have a cleric with you..." Don't forget to remove "happy" before this goes live.
Lans Thuliaga's "Spinning Strike" marks the ground as red... perhaps it should be blue (cyan?) to differentiate between his attack and the monsters' attacks.
There should be some banter between Linu and the Balor before the fight ensues, to flesh out the story some more. Unless, of course, the Balor is of lower INT. If that's the case, then it should immediately attack. You should also make better use of their wings and have them "propel with unnatural speed and agility" into the fight.
Interlude: Your Legend
I have an issue with this, especially from a role-play point of view. None of my characters would presume to "send word of their heroics" to anyone. I'm sure I'm not the only one who plays characters with some semblance of humility. A simple re-wording from Bruenor saying "I've sent word of yer heroics to Gauntlgrym and one of me battleragers would like to join ye. blah blah blah"
You may want to include wording in the description that you mean the "Aid Bruenor Battlehammer" on the Maze Engine campaign screen.
Please check the "Collect Rewards" XP amount for collecting the battlerager. 151k XP seems a bit.. much. Also, the battlerager is a lackluster reward, especially for older level 70 characters. I haven't have a green companion in ages, and the +55 LS and +55 Recovery are essentially useless.
Big Trouble in Neverwinter
Included in the drops that I received were a Many Arrows insignia and a Level 14 Belt.
Graphics are being screwy with shadowing again. Up to this point, it's been fine. This also happened after Mods 6 and 7. I feel that I shouldn't have to readjust my graphics settings for every new mod.
And now I'm stuck. I have 1/5 "Placeholders" for "Repel Demons". Is this a time gate? Do I have to do four more dailies (ie. wait four more days) to get the 5/5 "Placeholders" to continue the story? Or do I have to repeat the first few quests (which is not going to happen, BTW.. I'm really tired of running over the same old ground...)? If it's a matter of doing four more dailies, it will take me 6 months to finish this, since I'm pretty certain I won't remember to run the dailies every day.
Honestly, at this point, I'm not super thrilled with what's in store for Mod 9. As mad as I still am about the lack of Foundry support, I went into this playtest with an open mind and gave it a fair go... but... doing it once will be enough for me. My alts will stay in mothballs and collect dust and Leadership RP. I wish that I could share in the enthusiasm of the Dev blogs, but this "mod" is just not going to do it.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
Thanks for the feedback. Here are some points that I can comment on: This is actually D&D lore for how "Goliaths" (the race that Lans is) refer to themselves; they have their name, a nickname, and a tribal name. This is a bug that's already fixed internally. Our UI artist was quite sad it went out like that.
Good point! I'll see what I can do to make that opening fight feel a bit more impressive.
This (and other examples to come) was me testing the waters of our new mini-contact system. If you all like it, we'll do it more! There's another boat that can take you directly to the overworld map to get you to the Chasm. We've received this feedback internally and the problem (I believe) is that the Underdark overworld map is directly in the way of the path to get to the regular overworld map. I'll be making a fix to this.
We have the other issues with Lans fixed internally. I'll see what I can do about some banter between Linu and the Balor. We're close to locking down our text for translation but I think I can sneak a line or two in.
Thank you for taking the time to write up all your feedback! Sorry I wasn't able to address all of your points, but hopefully this helps.
PS. I commented on your wall. I've got a DxDiag.txt to send you... but I can't initiate the PM. :-)
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
(I went with a slightly lighter blue that is a bit easier to read)
I like the NPC banter, but I think the text should somehow either persist for longer or in a small separate log with portraits or something. If I was fighting and wasn't really paying attention, I'd miss the text. Of course, the audio didn't match, which doesn't help, but it still seemed like the dialogue should somehow persist without having to constantly turn NPC chat on and off again. Storytelling is important and welcome!
Something instynctive said about adventuring has me thinking about other adventure games I've played in the past (my age *will* show here). A huge part (perhaps the most important part) of adventuring is discovery -- not only of locales, but everything else along the way. I think my first memory of adventuring wonder in a computer game was discovering "xyzzy" -- there are few simpler and cooler things than a magic word!
In Eye of the Beholder, you had a staple of adventuring: secret doors and concealed buttons. Imagine if a small adventuring zone had some secrets that you could discover. Now, imagine if the secrets that it could reveal were chosen randomly from a larger pool. Now, imagine if whatever those secrets had inside also varied (maybe a monster? maybe an NPC? Maybe a magic mirror that took you somewhere else?)
I'm beginning to digress, so let me try to pull this back to the campaign: wouldn't be cool if part of the campaign involved a longer-term quest to do/find/accomplish something, where the way to do it wasn't always the same from character to character? I'm talking about something where it's not always spelled out where to go or what to do, but you have to piece clues together.
I've only done the first day's batch of the campaign as I don't want to spoil the surprise for myself. I place great value on the thrill of discovery! One piece of advice I can give is, don't ever create a zone, no matter how small, without giving it side areas with at least something interesting. Maybe put in some lore, or a hidden monster, or a -- wait for it -- clue to something else, but always put in something. It isn't adventuring if the path in front of you is linear. Adventuring is going in a direction when you're not sure which path to take and where it might lead.
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
@commanderander if you want me to play your foundry quest, you're gonna have to play mine.
If you can't give the users a reason to play my foundry, you're gonna have to play it. =D
[Don't think I'm being a pain, You wanna see pain? Go look in the Xbox thread. Poor @strumslinger and @yetweallfalldown. The console kids are tearing them new buttholes. ;D]
NW-DC9R4J5EH - 'The Black Pearl' - Spelljammer! Phlo Riders and Space Orcs
Thanks for all the fish.
I would love to hear more about what people think about the hidden achievements in the campaign, most likely when it goes live since there's a lot. More hidden achievements were put in to the Maze Engine specifically because I saw people reacted positively to the previous ones (and I also love doing them).
I have a number of characters that i know I never finished the race/class quests for but since it is so difficult to find where to start/pick up these quests again since I have leveled past their start point level I have abandoned any thought of doing them since spending hours on the forum/wiki trying to find information on this stuff is just a pain. Also, i can't replay any of that content. I have no idea anymore what the GWF class quest was like and starting a new character specifically to do it again is not that appealing.
Which leads into my next point. I bet i missed quests as i leveled to 60. But if I walked into Hotenow or Ebon Downs as a lv 70 i have no idea if i missed a story line quest (or dropped it deliberately 18 months ago or something) since none of those people provide "new quest here" visuals. I understand that from a design perspective it is supposed to help guide people through content and keep things from being too distracting but now i am at lv 70 and I have no idea what i missed. Extra side quests like the rose gathering one in the Chasm will get skipped if i go back there to complete the main story line since there is no notification that he has a quest for me and he isn't mentioned at all in the main story line. That nice little love story that becomes practically non-existent from my PoV and that is sad. There is a ton of great content from 1-60 and much of it is hard to/impossible experience or replay once you level past it.
And then there is the (off topic but relevant) bug with one of the mod 8 storyline secret achievements. The title "police's drunk orcs" seems to be impossible to get. Killing the drunk orc where you get the "sober orc" title does nothing and nothing else in the chapter seems to trigger it either. So either this is broken somehow or the people who did figure it out have said nothing on the forums.
We are searching for slave labor, will pay with food from our farm!
First of all - chapters 4 and 5 caused me to revise my opinion of the Maze Engine campaign - revise it upwards, as they are pretty nicely done.
I could only do chapters 4 and 5 after 5 rounds of dailies. I have complained about the problems with the dailies before, so I will not repeat that here. I went through chapters 4 and 5 with a TiL 2800-something DC. This is higher than the 2600-something I used for the first 3 chapters, but that simply reflects my own progress the first 5 days after I reached level 70.
Now for the feedback - it is quite positive - a change from the ****storm over the three issues that are really upsetting your players these days (the non-returning dungeons, the Xbox TB fiasco and the banning of innocent players selling very expensive items) No, I'm not saying a good Mod9 will compensate for those issues, but there are at least a few bright spots in the current atmosphere of negativity and hostility.
First of all, I was really happy to see more locations appear on the underdark travel map. It did appear a bit too "empty" previously. I was also very pleased to see brand new areas, instead of having to go through recycled old areas. In general, the areas were nicely done, but it would not hurt to add a little bit for players who like to explore. Yes, I did find one piece of lore, but that's it - not a single resource node, for example.
First zone - the dragon's lair
Visually the zone looked good. No issues whatsoever.
The jumping puzzle was interesting, but I must admit that after getting insta-killed so often that I had run out of injury kits (no VIP injury immunity on Preview), I gave up and took the shortcut. I assume it is possible to jump across, and I will certainly try it on live, but it is absolutely not trivial.
The "speedrunning" was fun. Silly, and made no sense story-wise, but fun, and yes...I loved getting the "Faster than ...." title, so good job there.
The jumping was however the only part of this zone that was even remotely challenging. The fights, in particular with the first few groups of wyrmlings were annoyingly easy and Lich Zalia was not really a challenge either for me - maybe it would be a challenge for a "fresh" level 60 player, though.
Second zone - the tower
The zone looked fine - the fights were a bit tedious, but not a challenge at all until I reached the two Demons, Xolion and Hezrax. Those guys actually managed to hit me for 25% of my health or so, as I got trapped in the red zone. I was bit careless, I admit - I had gotten used to the enemies being so easy that I didn't really need to pay much attention to them.
My main complaint about the zone is actually the "partner" I got - Drizzt. I mean, he is supposed to be a hero, while I am just a no-name DC - not even a DPS class, and yet I massively outdamaged him. That just felt....wrong. Poor Drizzt is going to need some professional counseling to recover from the emotional trauma of discovering that he is essentially useless.
Third zone - the demonic siege battlefield
Nice looking area, everything worked as it should. The two demons at the end looked like cousins of Xolion and Hezrax, so I was a bit more careful - which meant that they hardly managed to hurt me at all, and the fight was over very quickly.
Bug: The battlefield is an open outdoors area. There is no reason why you should not be able to summon your mount here - in particular after killing all the demon groups you may have to go across the whole area to the bosses. Yet, this behaves like an indoor area, with no mounts. Please consider fixing that.
Finally, after going through chapters 4 and 5, I have updated my post on the impact of Mod 9 http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter/#/discussion/1211832/the-impact-of-mod9-a-prediction Now, I am not asking for feedback on that, but you really might want to consider some of the issues I mention there.
The quest "In Nature's Defense" directs to Mount Hotenow and to interact with a specific tree ("Press F to Defend Heartleaf's Garden"). Interacting with the tree moves the character to a different and wrong quest called "Howling Through Skyhold" at Pirates' Skyhold, and completing that quest then teleports the character back to Mount Hotenow and the tree. "In Nature's Defense" doesn't complete.
Feedback: Chapter 4: Adventurer's of the Lost Artifact
I really enjoyed this quest. The jump into the shaft, the jumping puzzle and the dragon-breath gauntlet were all lovely.
FEEDBACK:
The waterfall was beautiful. Please leave that accessible. I hope you put something in there... a chest, a node, a mimic.. something.
I loved the fact that I could fall and DIE. DEAD! I then ran through the whole area with yellow arms because no VIP, and no injury kits. lol
Today's ACT:
Big Badguy:
Me:
And for contrast, my Purple Yeti:
Yesterday's ACT:
The Balor:
General Fury:
Havstir:
Me:
My Yeti:
So why did I include my companion's ACT? To illustrate that a purple, but otherwise average, defender was out-DPSing the Balor, Havstir and General Fury, and he came really close to the DPS that the Cloud Giant Captor was doing. If I have time this afternoon, I might take my DC through Mod 9 material to see if her striker companion can out-DPS everything.
I'm honestly not trying to be the guy who wants everything on 11, difficulty-wise, but over the past two days, I've taken under a million points of damage.. nearly half of that damage was from "Madness"...
FYI: my DR is 21.5% and Deflect is 13.4%. Not exactly the tankiest GWF out there. :-)
I hope this all helps.
(Special thanks to @hustin1 for the awesome blue color.)
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
@instynctive, thank you for the numbers! Internally I've made a tweak so that all enemies that you'll be fighting will be 1 level higher than you. I'll be interested in seeing how much of a change this makes. The balancing act with this is going to be delicate, given that it can be played between level 60 and level 70. There should be a patch note when that change goes live. Now, I don't think it'll totally solve the issue of things being super easy at 70, but it should help a bit.
If you guys could scale bad guys to ilvl, or even ilvl range, for Level 70 characters, that would solve so many problems, like difficulty, as well as "power creep" and reward level.. As an example:
Character ilvl -> Monster Level
1800 - 2000 -> 70
2001 - 2500 -> 71
2501 - 3000 -> 72
3001 - 3500 -> 73
3501 - 4000 -> 74
4001+ -> 75
Not sure how that could be handled in parties.. maybe take the average of the party and use that?
When I've brought this up in the past, people have said this system could be "easily exploited" but people taking off armor to knock down their ilvl to get the "easier" bad guys (but smaller rewards!).. honestly, if they do, that's on them and they have no room to complain about how everything is "too easy".
I can't imagine that doing a simple ilvl calculation before a dungeon or even just before every encounter would take up too much processor power... but a system like this might really give you guys some breathing room between mod releases.
It could probably also somehow apply to PvP as well... but I do't PvP, so I'll stay out of that.
Cheers!
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
That being said, there isn't anything wrong with the idea. It's something I'll bring up with everyone else and see how people feel about it, but I can't make any guarantees that we can act on anything within the future or if it will end up going anywhere.
There is such a HUGE difference between a Level 70 @ 2k ilvl and a Level 70 @ 4k ilvl. I know you've seen the proof of that in the "Dungeons are too easy, I just solo'd eToS one handed with a 56k modem" videos.
Like I said.. it would help the "power creep", it would prevent folks from soloing T2s (for awhile), and rewards could scale up as well... some bigger RP and/or enchantments.. a chance to have 142/3/4/5 ilvl gear drop. And just when content is getting "too easy", suddenly the player hits the next bracket and gets roflstomped.
Until the Foundry is fully supported again, this would be a huge step towards "infinite content". Sure, we'll still be running the same dungeons for now, but at least the difficulty level should pretty much keep up with the power creep. And depending on the rewards, that should be good motivation for players to keep improving.
Sorry for the thread derail.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
I completed the next batch of story quests today and was mildly surprised! The jump into the long shaft, escape from the dragon and the jump challenge was interesting and innovative. These are exactly the type of things you need to make the content entertaining and distract from the fact that you are still walking a tube and kill stuff every now and then.
Not sure you can change that, but one minor note is that it feels weird to see multiple dragons on the side at once when you are in fact only running away from a single one. Takes away from the atmosphere. OTher than that: Kudos.
Challenge remains an issue overall, but have to say that it didn't feel as boring simply because the story was enjoyable.
I ran into the same issue as others that Nature's Defense in Mount Hotenow was not completeable.
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
The foundry is where the content lies. hashtag holy grail. ;D
edit: SORRY FOR HIJACKING THE THREAD! I apologize! I really do. That's why I edit'ed this post, instead of making a new one.
On the matter of Maze Engine testing: Similar to the foundry, the maze engine only exists on preview, so playing it, wouldn't net me any rewards. Since we get no rewards for playing the foundry, players often tell me "I dont give a HAMSTER about your foundry." Quid Pro Quo, Since I get no rewards for playing on preview, "I don't give a HAMSTER about your beta testing."
Said with a smile and a grin of course, and no offense other than a hearty jibe. ;D
[If you want me to beta test your stuff, You can play my Foundry and ill give you my best testing. ;D ;D]
double edit: for real though. You play mine, I'll play yours. It's the only way us Authors get any plays, it's only fair.
NW-DC9R4J5EH - 'The Black Pearl' - Spelljammer! Phlo Riders and Space Orcs
Thanks for all the fish.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
Feel free to start a new thread if you want to continue the discussion about the power level/balancing. Thanks!
I took another run through today, this time paying more attention to, well, everything but combat.
***** BUG
The new Mount System "ate" my green Demon Sled from the Winterfest. When I right-clicked on my Winter Wolf, I had an "Open box..." option (perhaps this should read "Add to stable"..?), which dropped it into my stable. I had no such option on my Demon Sled. I chose "Equip", and the sled vanished.
I think this has been brought up before.
***** FEEDBACK
Howling Demons
The long run to and from the combat areas might be a little excessive... especially surrounded by level 42 monsters... perhaps the long run could be "bolstered" with scaled up monsters..? Cultists? Because you've already used both hatches on the skyship, perhaps make the ship's wheel interactable, or perhaps a portal elsewhere would work to drop the players onto a third Pirates Skyhold map that has not only the challenge quests, but scaled up monsters as well.
My concern here is the amount of running back and forth with nothing to do... I feel that players will grow too bored too quickly with that.
***** BUG
Aid Bruenor
I took a new character in, and got the quest from Sgt. Knox. As I as headed to the travel gate, I noticed the Neverwinter Guard Recruit had an exclamation point over his head.. so I talked to him and was able to accept the "Aid Bruenor quest again (see journal screenshot below).
I checked with a few other Neverwinter Guard Recruits, and was not able to get it again.
***** FEEDBACK
Chapter 1: In Defense of Gauntylgrym
Removing the invisible walls... both where the bridge is supposed to extend, and along the sides of the bridge once it's extended. Also, on either side of the.. platform.. why not push the invisible walls back to the stone walls? There's a lot of cool-looking assets back there. Also, if access to those areas is allowed, the steam should do damage.
A death plane in the chasm would be fabulous. I was able to "parkour" all the way to the edges of the map on my TR. Not the visible sections, but the far extremes (screenshot album here: http://imgur.com/a/hNedM).
After talking to Linu, the Fairy HAMSTER Trail leads back across the chasm, towards the demons.
Also, for continuity's sake, the demons should still be behind Linu's barrier. It seems to me that a demon would have no problem just flying over the chasm.
***** BUG
Drizzt took up position inside a giant's corpse (see screenshot).
***** FEEDBACK
Chapter 2: The Sword of Justice
Mounts are allowed in the Fiery Pit during EE, and should probably be allowed now.. although I found that the map will allow intermittent mount use.
Lucas Shaneway III: Is he hurt? How did he get hurt? Does he need help? Did I miss any sort of mention of him at the beginning of this quest? He seems to be randomly placed.
Chapter 3: The Depths of Madness
I love Linu. Always have. I hope that you're going to have the same VO actress for her.
Things were going fine on this one until I activated the holy symbol by the fountain. Halfway through the fight, Linu decided to go on walkabout and headed back up to the gate. It was easy enough to keep fighting the mobs while moving with her protection spell, however, once she stopped near the gate, the monsters all .. stopped. They wouldn't enter her protection circle.
Being out in the madness (as I showed in my earlier post) does a LOT of damage. I like it. However, it ended up killing me. Not a huge deal... Linu waited patiently outside the gate, so when Lans and I got back outside, she continued on our journey.. and stopped at the holy symbol by the fountain. I had to activate the holy symbol again, and fight the spawns again. Not a huge deal, just not sure if that's WAI.
I hope this is helpful.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
Dragon Hoard Coffers should not drop from the demons in the Demonic Siege. Presumably they are dropping as a result of copying the map from the Siege of Neverwinter event. This bug is mostly inconsequential, so I hope it's simple to fix.
Feedback: Quest: Demonic Siege
It's nice to revisit this map, but we should be able to ride our mounts in it. It's a large outdoor map. When it was part of the Siege of Neverwinter event, we could ride our mounts. Why not now?
I completed "Gauntlgrym Delver", "Imix Researcher", "Hot Feet", "Demon Archaeologist" and "Faster Than an Ancient Red Dragon", "DeVir Admirer" successfully. The Chapter 4 achievements were the most fun, but the lore achievements are nice too. The description of Imix Researcher is slightly misleading because the lore from Lucas Shaneway isn't required for the achievement.
Feedback: In Nature's Defense
Tomorrow's daily quest is "In Nature's Defense". Unless this quest has been hotfixed, it will mean another setback for testing the campaign. The time-gate between Act 2 and Act 3 already seems long. This bug makes it worse. Oh well, you probably don't control the preview patch schedule.
Bit annoying, as I thought this was supposed to be a solo-focused campaign.