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From Lairs to Dungeons to..... Flowers?
gek1956
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild Users Posts: 0 Arc User
It comes down to choice.
"Dungeons" as a special mission type are just a continuation of the "Lair" type missions first brought out in Champions online. The unique archetypeless character system in CO gave players the ability to combine skills and powers from ALL character classes, and as you might imagine player characters became very powerful and robust. A good 'build' in the hands of a capable player could solo most any of the game's signature monsters or villains. Such a potent player character presents a challenge to any GM, let alone FIVE of them. But since it was an MMO, for form's sake Cryptic came up with 'Lairs' to get players to team. Many of the storylines and the valuable XP contained therein could not be completed without finishing these 'Lair' missions.
To do this they would fill the lair with a mega boss, a mini-boss or three and about a dozen rooms or so full of an excessively large number of otherwise regular game mobs on steroids (draysha if you prefer
). These mobs had between 4 and 10 times the damage and hit points of their ordinary counterparts.
Sound familiar? YW.....
Much of the player base, myself included, viewed lairs as a chore. The level of challenge offered was far offset by the sheer tedium of grinding through all that meat. Loot was mediocre, but early in the game you had to do it just to get to your max level. Later game updates offered alternatives because of the unpopularity of the lairs themselves. Lemurians, the high level mobs at launch, have 2 lairs, and I would wager that not more than a couple of thousand players have completed them both since the game opened. Since you didn't HAVE to do those two to get to 40, getting up teams for them was very difficult.
Which brings us to today's NWO dungeon delves. Same tune, different song. Don't ask me why they brought back something that more people disliked than liked. Cryptic at its best is capable of brilliance, maybe they just got in too big of a hurry. It seems to be their achilles heel. But this time they decided to use a carrot instead of a stick to get players into them and put in that big fat chest with a good drop in it. Plus, not one, but TWO bonus Ad rewards, Rhix's daily and the usual hourly 1k. Throw in hasty and careless construction, rife with respawn and collision bugs, and in no time at all the farmers and exploiters took over.
The market is flooded - T2 prices are low, low, low. So along with the first big update comes…. THE BIG FIX. Bans, BOP and nerfs. Here is my question. Why punish the players? Players who with the notable exception of the exploiters, are not responsible for this problem. Even worse, this 'quickfix' is riddled with bugs, like Unstoppable, which instead of helping save you, now helps you get killed. People are mad, some quit, but many, many more just balk and refuse to do the content. T2 stuff is nice, but you can get by with much less gear in any other phase of the game besides the dungeons themselves, so why bother?
It looks to me like the cure was worse than the disease. So for me, with my playstyle, it’s a no-brainer. I didn't enjoy this type of content in Champions, and I don't enjoy it here. Whack on the boss, grind up a spawn, whack on the boss, grind up a spawn, rinse and repeat - BORING. And that's with a good team. With a poor team, like a bad draw PUG, throw in a few faceplants and a couple of quitters and it gets closer to torture.
Not to mention running in parties of exploiters, many of whom would actually quit and strand your short group in the dungeon or kick you if you didn't cheat like they wanted you to. Sometimes I could get with a good team, but now too many of my friends have either left or just balk at the idea. Since I didn't really want to do the DDs any way, I really don't mind. I didn't do them much before. And I don't do them now.
BOP is a tool of force. If you want T2 gear now, you are supposed to go get it yourself, one character at a time. I hear the game telling me "Wake up donkey, it’s not just the carrot any more, now we've got a stick, Get 'yo butt into that dungeon, NOW!!"
……………..PARDON ME, I WILL NOW INTERRUPT THIS MESSAGE WITH A BRIEF RANT
Maaaan… puhLEEEZ! Don’t treat me like some dumb animal, I’m a paying customer. I didn’t cause this problem. Nerf my toons, make my friends so mad I can’t get em to play with me anymore, and you want me to do what? Go where? Why I oughtta…
…………….OKAY, OKAY, THAT’S ENOUGH.. NOW, BACK TO THE MESSAGE
This is a game. A leisure time activity. I do not enjoy running those old rehash design dungeons. They are not fun to me even when you succeed with a good team. I’m not gonna do them as things stand, and there’s a lot of other people in the game who feel just like I do. They don’t have to speak, their actions are speaking for them. The only people happy with the dungeons as it stands are the established runners, who seem to be expecting a T2 windfall of scalped Ads for the rest of their natural gaming lives. It takes all kinds.
Faulty design concepts are like the war in Iraq, easy to get into hard to get out of. In spite of all the gnashing and whining about a patch, getting in a hurry to resolve this might just break the endgame all over again, so don’t. Just as in Champions, there are many other really fun things to do in NWO to keep me around for a while.
Oh yeah, about the flowers… they were nice, but until you REALLY fix what’s messed up here, my wallet is closed for business.
"Dungeons" as a special mission type are just a continuation of the "Lair" type missions first brought out in Champions online. The unique archetypeless character system in CO gave players the ability to combine skills and powers from ALL character classes, and as you might imagine player characters became very powerful and robust. A good 'build' in the hands of a capable player could solo most any of the game's signature monsters or villains. Such a potent player character presents a challenge to any GM, let alone FIVE of them. But since it was an MMO, for form's sake Cryptic came up with 'Lairs' to get players to team. Many of the storylines and the valuable XP contained therein could not be completed without finishing these 'Lair' missions.
To do this they would fill the lair with a mega boss, a mini-boss or three and about a dozen rooms or so full of an excessively large number of otherwise regular game mobs on steroids (draysha if you prefer
). These mobs had between 4 and 10 times the damage and hit points of their ordinary counterparts.Sound familiar? YW.....
Much of the player base, myself included, viewed lairs as a chore. The level of challenge offered was far offset by the sheer tedium of grinding through all that meat. Loot was mediocre, but early in the game you had to do it just to get to your max level. Later game updates offered alternatives because of the unpopularity of the lairs themselves. Lemurians, the high level mobs at launch, have 2 lairs, and I would wager that not more than a couple of thousand players have completed them both since the game opened. Since you didn't HAVE to do those two to get to 40, getting up teams for them was very difficult.
Which brings us to today's NWO dungeon delves. Same tune, different song. Don't ask me why they brought back something that more people disliked than liked. Cryptic at its best is capable of brilliance, maybe they just got in too big of a hurry. It seems to be their achilles heel. But this time they decided to use a carrot instead of a stick to get players into them and put in that big fat chest with a good drop in it. Plus, not one, but TWO bonus Ad rewards, Rhix's daily and the usual hourly 1k. Throw in hasty and careless construction, rife with respawn and collision bugs, and in no time at all the farmers and exploiters took over.
The market is flooded - T2 prices are low, low, low. So along with the first big update comes…. THE BIG FIX. Bans, BOP and nerfs. Here is my question. Why punish the players? Players who with the notable exception of the exploiters, are not responsible for this problem. Even worse, this 'quickfix' is riddled with bugs, like Unstoppable, which instead of helping save you, now helps you get killed. People are mad, some quit, but many, many more just balk and refuse to do the content. T2 stuff is nice, but you can get by with much less gear in any other phase of the game besides the dungeons themselves, so why bother?
It looks to me like the cure was worse than the disease. So for me, with my playstyle, it’s a no-brainer. I didn't enjoy this type of content in Champions, and I don't enjoy it here. Whack on the boss, grind up a spawn, whack on the boss, grind up a spawn, rinse and repeat - BORING. And that's with a good team. With a poor team, like a bad draw PUG, throw in a few faceplants and a couple of quitters and it gets closer to torture.
Not to mention running in parties of exploiters, many of whom would actually quit and strand your short group in the dungeon or kick you if you didn't cheat like they wanted you to. Sometimes I could get with a good team, but now too many of my friends have either left or just balk at the idea. Since I didn't really want to do the DDs any way, I really don't mind. I didn't do them much before. And I don't do them now.BOP is a tool of force. If you want T2 gear now, you are supposed to go get it yourself, one character at a time. I hear the game telling me "Wake up donkey, it’s not just the carrot any more, now we've got a stick, Get 'yo butt into that dungeon, NOW!!"
……………..PARDON ME, I WILL NOW INTERRUPT THIS MESSAGE WITH A BRIEF RANT
Maaaan… puhLEEEZ! Don’t treat me like some dumb animal, I’m a paying customer. I didn’t cause this problem. Nerf my toons, make my friends so mad I can’t get em to play with me anymore, and you want me to do what? Go where? Why I oughtta…
…………….OKAY, OKAY, THAT’S ENOUGH.. NOW, BACK TO THE MESSAGE
This is a game. A leisure time activity. I do not enjoy running those old rehash design dungeons. They are not fun to me even when you succeed with a good team. I’m not gonna do them as things stand, and there’s a lot of other people in the game who feel just like I do. They don’t have to speak, their actions are speaking for them. The only people happy with the dungeons as it stands are the established runners, who seem to be expecting a T2 windfall of scalped Ads for the rest of their natural gaming lives. It takes all kinds.
Faulty design concepts are like the war in Iraq, easy to get into hard to get out of. In spite of all the gnashing and whining about a patch, getting in a hurry to resolve this might just break the endgame all over again, so don’t. Just as in Champions, there are many other really fun things to do in NWO to keep me around for a while.
Oh yeah, about the flowers… they were nice, but until you REALLY fix what’s messed up here, my wallet is closed for business.
Post edited by gek1956 on
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We have skirmishes, which are a tad shorter.
We have the daily repeatable Feywild stuff.
I am anticipating the return of the Call to Arms event.
I would like to see a wide selection of level 60 skirmishes be made available, as well as a reworking of the dungeon delve event so people don't need to rush through it, (maybe X DD tokens per day or something).
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But I DO agree with the O.P.
'Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.' Terry Pratchet The Thief Of Time
Genre is irrelevant. All genres have grind. This is more about Fun, balance, and repeatability. And what I described was a more than anything else a chain of negative actions and reactions.
There is so much more to this game than just the big dungeons. Foundry is my favorite. Think you're BAD? Try the Crucible Challenge.
Do you know the richest player in game I know of for sure is a Foundry author? Good ones get tips. I have personally tipped for over 20k AD since I started playing..........
But let me get back to my original point about the exp. Here is the problems with our current 2 day 0-60 leveling system.
1. Players are not given enough time to truly learn and understand how to play their class.
(thus leading to the many failed PUG dungeons runs)
2. Players level so fast that they often simply cannot experience all the aspects of the game.
(I've out leveled skirmishes and dungeons by simply trying to complete all the quests lines so that I can get the quest for the dungeon I've just out leveled)
3. Once Players hit level 60 the only other thing left to do is try and get the epic gear which you need to do the epic dungeon runs to get.
(which of course no one will take them on if they're not exp and have a high GS)
Not to mention that it creates a circle of stupidity, no one wants to do PUGs because of the fail players and the players are fail because they have no time to learn their class. And then you add the bugged and broken dungeons on top of that and you're pretty much left out in the cold if you're a solo type player and then you come here to complain about it only to have a bunch of players tell you to "join a guild".
Sure, grinding a dungeon 20 times to get a single piece of good gear may make some players feel great but it's also going to make some players feel like giving up. Also it doesn't help when the boss drops something really good that only your class can use but of course you don't get it because everyone else greeds on it so that they can sell it to get AD so they can buy another piece of gear they need.
P.S. the recent addition of blues dropping seemingly non stop from normal mobs have made running the lower level dungeons almost pointless unless you either want higher level pants and shirts or you just want to get that quest off your list. Which BTW, I can only imagine how well players will do in the epic versions of the dungeons when they never bothered to try to normal versions.
rather than the steriotypical executioner. and since non crits got a dps bonus I feel buffed.
I do hope they do more call to arm skirmishes and various events
I love them I enjoy the sharendar experience.
if dugeons are to lairs than skirmishes are to alerts which is VERY popular in CO.
Probibly why they hesitate in brining them here on a large scale.
they fear noone will do anything other than queue for skirmishes.
I understand they wanted to make epic look a bit more rare which is why they made it BOP
but people do need something that's good for resell to players to feel their time is well spent
so ive suggested maybe drop crafting recipes for cosmetic items. nothing new
just Fashion outfits based on gear so people can have the illusion of mixing gear and casual
and maybe some things we see npcs wear that aren't going to be "zen sets"
Dropping recipes will make them sellable to crafters so this will instantly fuel the AD/zen economy
grinders get AD, crafters get stuff to craft and will buy prof packs, rpers will buy more dyes to color them
everyone gets more variety in appearance, everyone is happy.
http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?483891-Idea-Craftable-Fashion-Objects
I think we can just condense this to GWF RULES!!!! FTW!!
Unlike CO, your primary point of comparison, the players aren't "forced" to run the delves. It's an OPTION. I as well as many from our guild enjoy the delves every once in a while; we run a weekly guild event for them, too. We have fun while doing them casually. So since we're in a trend of speaking for an unspecified "large number of other people" here, I'm gonna say that "there's a lot of people in the game who agree with me" as well. :P
As for BoP - yeah, that was a mistake, it should have been in the game from the start
Fast leveling does tend to stack a lot of ungeared rookies at LVL 60. But you are not obligated to sit on that one toon and grind it to death. You get TWO character slots for free, more If you start the game with a pack. Just taking two characters to LVL 17 in Leadership will earn you enough ADs to buy 500 zen for 2 more slots. It will take you about a month if you are diligent with it. This is over and above your dailies etc. These slots are hands down the best buy in the zen store. You have 50 max slots per account. Spend just a little more time and It won't cost you a DIME of your money to get some experience in with each class. This will make you a better player faster than anything else. Take it from me by your fourth or fifth mature character you will appreciate fast leveling
My favorite content in the game is in the Foundry. At LVL 60 drop rates for runes and enhancements are better , and they give you LVL 4s - several per mission. You are running solo, no need/ greed . Its all yours. Boss heavy missions drop from 4 to ten of these an hour. 20 or so of thes minus fusion losses give you a LVL6 enhancement. There's some money
DON"T FORGET GOLD. Yeah, that stuff. The OTHER main currency. Greater ID scrolls are 125 zen on the store. some times less on the AH. Its not worth one to ID a green drop. For example You can, say, buy a horse from the mount vendor and usually get around 4k AD for it on the AH. So lets say 1 gold = 800 zen or 6 ID scrolls plus change 6 greens sell for 60 silver IDed 1 silver unknown.This is why people leave them on the dungeon floors.They are just a zen trap.
But 6 IDed blues sell to the vendor for almost exactly 2 gold. TWICE the scroll cost. Not only that but you get just about as many scroll drops as you do blue drops. So every 6 really makes you 2 gold,( 1600 ADs worth) That's a LOT of potions and if you have extra, buy something you can auction for ADs. I rarely put these blues on the AH any more, some sell very well.. so watch want you dump, but blues give you money from equipment, where before there was NONE. Think about it.
The truth is, running simple quests these days pays a LOT better than it used to.
Help Me out here if you would. Shortly after CO went FTP I got very heavily involved in Eve Online and really haven't played much CO since. I NEVER made Just a plain Silver AT. I got my LTS for CO in the beta and all 6 of my main toons there were golds.
( Best 200 MMO bucks I ever spent. You know they are STILL giving me my 400 zen every month.
Do you know how the silvers performed in the lairs, or whether or not they made any changes in them to accommodate the more limited ATs?
Because from what I could see, even at high diff, except for some off the trickier boss fights like Andrith, the lairs never pushed good gold builds any where near as hard as these epics push teams here. Don't get me wrong, we had our share of faceplants, but nothing like here. Mainly because there just weren't that many gold squishies, and you could change build and stance at button press.
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Going back to dungeons and dragons online, if they could take the LFG system off of it, the reincarnation system, and the raid system...this would be one of the best MMOs out there. As is, it has a ceiling implemented on progression that is not hard to achieve. When players hit that ceiling, they get tired of logging in and basically not having anything to do except grind some AD to upgrade their rank 8 enchant to a rank 9, which really doesnt make their toon better due to diminishing returns and the only slight stat increase.
EDIT: what's wrong with the SUMMER FESTIVAL? what else did you expect from a festival? Go kill the summer spirit of evil summer? I think it's a nice OPTIONAL variation from the usual grinding/levelling.
Bring in a guild allows you to play GG. But shouting "Anyone for MC" in your guild chat won't bring you better results that shouting in the general chat. Out of the maybe 20 lvl 60 guildies online at the given moment, how many won't be in a DP already, or soloing their FW dailies, or just connectiong for professions and invocation?
From line #1 we knew you were a gwf.
Also, during the last call to arms skirmish my guild queued it 24/7. Fun stuff.
This one?
17 Common
Deliver Metals
Consumes: 3x [Mining Claim]
8h
1,200 Rough Astral Diamond
Last time I bought Zen with AD I needed more or less 200k. Your lvl 17 leadership task needs to create first some [Mining Claim]. For a casual player who connects once a day, that will be three slots to create the [Mining Claim] through the Raid Enemy Mines task -which incidentally is a rare one - and two for the "Deliver Metals" task. That's two months to get the 500 Zen.
Of course they didn't push golds as much as epics push teams here.
The vast majority of golds are freeforms, and freeforms are generally designed to bring everything they need to perform well with a high degree of survivability. A team of characters so endowed is going to be very well off.
You can't cherry pick the design of your class here to have everything you need in one package. The best you can do is optimize what your preselected set of abilities gives you... like a silver... rather than overpower yourself to a high degree.
But, that's to be expected, due to difference in genre. In the comics, there are plenty of characters (especially in DC) that bring everything they need to the table, and some of them have a wonky assortment of powers that could only be simulated by something like freeform. In the fantasy genre, not so much.
Hey look here I kinda like herding chickens on a pig. And its fun just to sit there by the campfire and watch the troll-a-thon below. usually endless chatter in local too. Go to the fridge, grab a cold one and chill out, The game will still be running tomorrow. Better yet, hang out there while blogging here in an open browser window O_O
Foundries, it's either with story/content or quick farming, you cannot have both. Ok you chose a farming one. 4 drops per hour, now how many do you need to fuse a lvl 6 one, at 60% and 40%? Not 20, more like 40. Ten hours of foundry farming. Now selling the enchants, yeah sure. Rank 6 silvery, 8k. Rank 6 azure, 18k. That won't make you rich. Also, what are you slotting into your gear if you sell your enchants?
You do realize that even the life of an adventurer doesn't mimic the covers of D&D novels for the entirety of their existence, don't you? They do have down time, where they socialize in taverns and such. They also had a period of youth were they weren't out adventuring and were doing more mundane things they may still have a fondness for.
These kinds of festivals fit well with medieval like societies which much of the Forgotten Realms seem akin to, and it's not entirely unlikely that some characters may enjoy social activities reasonably applicable to their culture. Those characters that don't enjoy such events are free to continue adventuring as per usual.
As such, I find your evaluation of the festival to be myopic and your depiction of it groundless.
I have yet to step foot in the summer festival area as I don't care for pig companion or mount. I don't run around telling everyone else how stupid I think it is, I just don't participate at all because I don't find it enjoyable.
We are definitely dominating, and we are always about to win.
That was a legitimate complaint, that wasn't so much lag but a design error that caused a lot of problems for many when each battle ended. Once that was fixed up the event ran quite well. The other things you mention are examples of complaints with questionable merit to be sure.
Its an aggregate. BY THE TIME 2 toons get to LVL 17 They will make enough to buy 2 new slots. I actually used 2 inactive new characters in PE to do just that, So I can state it as a fact.
One is a male dwarf, the other is a female dwarf. We are BREEDING..... MWUHAHAHAHA...
It seldom takes me over 25, you only need 5 successes which means at 60% - 40% you should have right at 5 failures. Simple math, and remember failures in the second round count for 4. I think 1 time it took me over 30. Remember you only lose 1.
And LOL, I think after you've farmed it a few times story content is moot
You can farm the crucible when looking for a good fight, and it's fun too. Don't try it with your DC. :P
And That's one of the reasons I brought it up. Teams here are much more brittle with squishie members and often must depend on pots and cooldowns to stay intact. Now as I have pointed out to everyone here I don't do DDs every day. Iv'e probably only got at about 30 or 40 epics under my belt with notable failures at the high end. But just from that. I can see that experience, gear score, and practiced teams count for more than just about anything else.
What I'm curious about is whether or not Cryptic adjusted these lairs for sake of the silver AT players. Did they really understand how knife edge the balance was. It doesn't take much in this game. Since I get a lot of LVL4 enhancements, its easy for me to bring a lower level toon up with complete gear changes rather than picking through loot and patching it up. Green one slot gear is cheap on the AH.
In COH it was every 6 LVLs . In CO I could do it every 5 LVLs with LVL 5 mods as I was making most of the gear myself with my big toons. But in NWO, when your green gear gets 3 or more levels behind, you really notice the difference in DMG in vs DMG out. So I try to change more often, and 4's have to do because I'll need the 5s later. I'd rather sell the good drops - one of those can pay for the whole next out fit.
When you work it like this, you can FEEL the difference. In NWO little things count for a LOT more. Few pots for a level after the change turns into several every mission 3 levels later. The line is much finer than in their older games. Combine this with the sheer brute challenge model this content is based on and it makes the job of balancing much too touchy. Small tweaks can have very amplified consequences. I think its safe to say this is not a good thing.