Creeping Death

Suggestions to "spice" up the quest:

Hidden Door with good DC for Rogue/Arti to find to bypass one of the locked doors. You can add some spiders or traps in the "bypass" to make it entertaining

In the Pillar Pit - Add some chaos orbs as well as the oozes. If chaos orbs won't work - please add shroud blades.

In the end fight - Add one of Harry's [Arraetrikos's] Lieutenants to the end, make him drop an optional chest for more chances as the named loot. You could even randomize which one is in there with the Kobold.

I liked the quest, just needed more spice and less Ooze.

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Originally Posted by Nohbob

Thank you kindly for the feedback. Sorry to hear that you had some frustrations playing through the dungeon, and as the guy that made the dungeon, I can understand a few bits may be prone to a bit of frustration.

Below you will find a partial list of things I am evaluating for changes:

• Will look at the number of oozes spawning across the dungeon, and limit the ones at the bottom of the pit.
• Doors will no longer be cheesable
• Will look at stating, specifically the SR on the Kobolds
• Will look at the lighting in the pillar room.
• Will look at the XP rewards for the dungeon.
• Will look at the Trap Damage
• Breakables will be breakable

I will continue to evaluate the feedback in this thread, but thanks again for posting.
Noh

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Did the quest solo on EE, I copied my level 28 Paladin/Fighter/Monk 16/2/2 in Divine Crusader and ran it with him set up exactly like he is on live.

Maybe my DPS will go up massively from level 28 to level 30 but I feel like they have way too many hit points compared to the damage they do. It took me almost an hour to get through the quest, I was never in any danger of dying, it just took forever to beat the kobolds and arcane oozes down. (I was using dreampiercer against the oozes, a better high level two-handed ooze beater might help some but here are no other epic level choices that I can think of.) The quest should have taken half the time, I came very close to quitting because of how tedious it was. Or you could let Mortal Fear work and it would likely lower the frustration level :p

The oozes in the pit should de-spawn after you pull the level. Once you've pulled the lever there's no reason to go back down and kill them, but if you don't they contribute to dungeon alert for the rest of the quest. (I ended up having orange alert every time I hit an encounter after the pit)

I find jumping puzzles annoying but at least if i did it in a group only one person has to actually pull it off. (It wouldn't be shroud flagging if the quests iddn't have some annoying mechanics. ;))

XP was awful considering how long it took.

Some more shrines would be nice, maybe one after each rune, I burned through action boosts pretty fast trying to speed things up and used 4 sp pots.

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Originally Posted by Krelar

Did the quest solo on EE, I copied my level 28 Paladin/Fighter/Monk 16/2/2 in Divine Crusader and ran it with him set up exactly like he is on live.

Maybe my DPS will go up massively from level 28 to level 30 but I feel like they have way too many hit points compared to the damage they do. It took me almost an hour to get through the quest, I was never in any danger of dying, it just took forever to beat the kobolds and arcane oozes down. (I was using dreampiercer against the oozes, a better high level two-handed ooze beater might help some but here are no other epic level choices that I can think of.) The quest should have taken half the time, I came very close to quitting because of how tedious it was. Or you could let Mortal Fear work and it would likely lower the frustration level :p

The oozes in the pit should de-spawn after you pull the level. Once you've pulled the lever there's no reason to go back down and kill them, but if you don't they contribute to dungeon alert for the rest of the quest. (I ended up having orange alert every time I hit an encounter after the pit)

I find jumping puzzles annoying but at least if i did it in a group only one person has to actually pull it off. (It wouldn't be shroud flagging if the quests iddn't have some annoying mechanics. ;))

XP was awful considering how long it took.

Some more shrines would be nice, maybe one after each rune, I burned through action boosts pretty fast trying to speed things up and used 4 sp pots.

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Oozes never seem to be dangerous just annoying. Maybe the ooze template needs to be changed. If arcane oozes did force damage then it would go thru prr/mrr right?

Less # oozes but more danger?

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Originally Posted by maddong

Oozes never seem to be dangerous just annoying. Maybe the ooze template needs to be changed. If arcane oozes did force damage then it would go thru prr/mrr right?

Less # oozes but more danger?

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The kobolds weren't dangerous either. ;)

But yes while I felt like everything's HP was too high for the amount of threat it posed, if the danger at least matched the HP that would be better than the boring slog it is now.

So either keep the damage the same but lower mobs HP or keep the HP the same and increase the damage. (or some sort of compromise between those two extremes)

If they do another preview round and get the guide working I may try it again at level 30 with some epic green steel to see if that at least makes it go faster.

Hi i have not played any of this.

I am looking forward to update 29.

My one thought this weekend was that since it is a shroud expansion, it should have 1980s references to metal in there:

Rainbow in the dark
Running with the devils

etc.

And so i am very happy to see
CREEPING DEATH!

good job.

Went in on LH with a shuriken thrower. Died once when you first encounter the cube ... it was like "Don't touch the cube it might kill you!" "What cu.." DING *analfragged*

Apart from that I didn't use any healing at all - I did take a lot of time however. Endfight was extremely cheesy ... just jump up on that ledge, activate Archer's Focus stance, activate auto-attack, win.

Considering the horned devil. I used a good weapon ... didn't break the dr (i guess i woulda needed a good+silver, not just good only), but the dr wasn't so bad - even for shuriken, so I didn't bother to switch to my crafted silver+good shuriken, and just killed him with my already equipped LGS weapon (pos+air+pos)

Overall very easy, but also a kinda fun design. Totally enjoyed running and exploring it! Just having to wait on the slow cube to finally reach each of the activated sigils was kinda boring - maybe we could unlock the next part as soon as each sigil is lit? (instead of having to wait for the cube?)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Krelar

Did the quest solo on EE, I copied my level 28 Paladin/Fighter/Monk 16/2/2 in Divine Crusader and ran it with him set up exactly like he is on live.

Maybe my DPS will go up massively from level 28 to level 30 but I feel like they have way too many hit points compared to the damage they do. It took me almost an hour to get through the quest, I was never in any danger of dying, it just took forever to beat the kobolds and arcane oozes down. (I was using dreampiercer against the oozes, a better high level two-handed ooze beater might help some but here are no other epic level choices that I can think of.) The quest should have taken half the time, I came very close to quitting because of how tedious it was. Or you could let Mortal Fear work and it would likely lower the frustration level :p

The oozes in the pit should de-spawn after you pull the level. Once you've pulled the lever there's no reason to go back down and kill them, but if you don't they contribute to dungeon alert for the rest of the quest. (I ended up having orange alert every time I hit an encounter after the pit)

I find jumping puzzles annoying but at least if i did it in a group only one person has to actually pull it off. (It wouldn't be shroud flagging if the quests iddn't have some annoying mechanics. ;))

XP was awful considering how long it took.

Some more shrines would be nice, maybe one after each rune, I burned through action boosts pretty fast trying to speed things up and used 4 sp pots.

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You say the mobs have to many hp and it took you to long to SOLO the quest on EE....

The expectation that you can easily solo a quest on EE is stupid!
Quests are designed for group play. I would rather have them make the quests even harder so you acctually NEED a group.

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Originally Posted by Eldried

The expectation that you can easily solo a quest on EE is stupid!

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I don't have the expectation that it should be easy. But this was not hard it was just tedious.

It should either be harder or, if they don't want to make it harder, it should be less tedious.

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Originally Posted by Krelar

I don't have the expectation that it should be easy. But this was not hard it was just tedious.

It should either be harder or, if they don't want to make it harder, it should be less tedious.

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There is no scaling in Legendary Elite, so if you brought 5 more players, the quest would be finished 5 times faster.

If they made it less tedious for you to solo a LE quest, then it would take like 2 minutes for a full group.

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Originally Posted by Thrudh

There is no scaling in Legendary Elite

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Are we sure about that?

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Originally Posted by Krelar

Are we sure about that?

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He should know, he tested it on Lamannia.

(not)

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Originally Posted by Krelar

Are we sure about that?

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From U28 release notes.

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Monster autoscaling for level 30 quests has been removed, and monster stats for level 30 quests have been manually adjusted. This applies to any CR 30 quest (Level 28 quests on Elite, for example.)

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I have not tested on Lam, but I've soloed Necro IV on epic elite and grouped there as well, and the monster numbers and stats seem the same when soloing and when grouping, so it appears to be true.

As an aside, this is where I get my skepticism about the posts complaining that the monsters in the new quests are too hard. We had the exact same threads about Necro IV on epic elite, talking about how monsters one-shot people, and how it's totally unbalanced, so I went in there and discovered that the forum was wildly over-exaggerating again.

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Originally Posted by Thrudh

From U28 release notes.

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My understanding is that is different from the scaling based on party size.

They used to have code that would auto generate monster stats based on the dungeon level so they didn't have to create stats for all the monster from scratch every time. With U28 they stopped using that code and started stating them by hand to better balance things.

As far as I know party size scaling is still in effect.

EDIT: Found a relevant quote. Vargouille specifically mentions scaling based on quest level and difficulty but does not mention party scaling. Now it is possible that that was included but I don't think it is a given.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vargouille

• Any changes are going to be primarily noticeable on Epic Elite, and barely noticeable on Epic Normal.
• For years there's been a sort of behind the scenes in-code "autobalancer" that's automatically adjusted many monster statistics "on the fly", based on quest level and difficulty.
• We want to get away from using this, as with higher and higher levels the automatic scaling does things we don't really want it to, and it means the literal data files are not representing the actual strength of the monsters. This makes it harder for us to get a good read on exact monster strengths, etc. So in the future, at least, we're not going to use this tool, which will make things simpler and faster for us to create and balance monsters (and not surprise new team members with monsters that are stronger than they actually statted them).
• These were all done using very precise math, so we know what the autoscaler was doing. We just want to eliminate that extra step going on. So we've turned off the autoscaler for Level 30 quests (on Normal), and we fixed the non-scaled, static monster values to what we wanted them to be (we basically did the math the autoscaler was doing already).
• We did take this opportunity to intentionally lower some numbers. In particular, saving throws for many monsters are going to be quite a bit lower. Some hitpoints have gone down as well.
• Yes, there is a chance that the large amount of changes could include errors. Your attention to monsters and feedback is considered very helpful here!

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Krelar

My understanding is that is different from the scaling based on party size.

They used to have code that would auto generate monster stats based on the dungeon level so they didn't have to create stats for all the monster from scratch every time. With U28 they stopped using that code and started stating them by hand to better balance things.

As far as I know party size scaling is still in effect.

EDIT: Found a relevant quote. Vargouille specifically mentions scaling based on quest level and difficulty but does not mention party scaling. Now it is possible that that was included but I don't think it is a given.

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Ah, you may be right. So maybe there would be more monsters, and then having a full party would not make it 5x faster.

Another thing is the legendary ward. IIRC this is part of a lvl 31 thing where mobs get -50% damage and deal 50% more. However at lvl 30, you should be negating that.

Fun quest. Problems I found; lots of trap box's didn't open up, but were disarmed.

Trying to figure out how to open the first blue barrier you encounter on the second level. Its behind the red blob, the first time you see it on the second level.

I completed the quest, several times, so I am opening up the regular blue barriers. You need to look for the blue barrier that I am talking about.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nohbob

Thank you kindly for the feedback. Sorry to hear that you had some frustrations playing through the dungeon, and as the guy that made the dungeon, I can understand a few bits may be prone to a bit of frustration.

Below you will find a partial list of things I am evaluating for changes:

• Will look at the number of oozes spawning across the dungeon, and limit the ones at the bottom of the pit.
• Doors will no longer be cheesable
• Will look at stating, specifically the SR on the Kobolds
• Will look at the lighting in the pillar room.
• Will look at the XP rewards for the dungeon.
• Will look at the Trap Damage
• Breakables will be breakable

I will continue to evaluate the feedback in this thread, but thanks again for posting.
Noh

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Don't want to beat you up too badly, but I hate this quest with a passion. There are a few interesting mechanics, but the majority of the quest is to beat down relatively non-threatening creatures that have a ton of hitpoints.

Tried to solo this on Heroic elite on my level 18 guy (15 fighter/3 paladin), so I was one level above the quest. This is a TR character, so I had decent gear & stats.

Slogged through (and it was a slog) to the end fight and had the boss at half health. Retreated out of the room to clear out a few oozes and the boss bounced.

This was after an hour of trying to beat this quest and having killed over 200 mobs, each of them with way too many hitpoints (and every single ooze splitting on death).

Just rage-quit at that point and recalled to repair all my gear. 5 items were permanently damaged.

That's not fun. It's not fun to have my gear permanently broken. It's not fun to stand in the middle of a bunch of mobs for 5 minutes each fight spamming cleave and great cleave. It's not fun for the mobs to do very little damage and have a ton of hitpoints. It's not fun for me to do very little damage because I have to swing a greatclub of everbright since it's the only weapon that won't break. It's not fun for a quest that's only giving out about 15k to take over an hour to run. It's not fun to have the end boss summon infinite oozes (so now I have to use my crappy everbright club on him too. Joy.) and start causing dungeon alert. It's not fun to have the end boss bounce when he's at half-health.

I've learned that this quest is necessary to flag for legendary shroud, so I guess I'm going to have to play it again at some point. I'm hoping that I can convince my guild to let me pike at the entrance.