No Dungeon Alert: Thoughts?

[BloodSkye]

I'm a new player, and I have seen a couple of dungeon alerts - green and orange - but I don't know what triggers them or what affect they actually have. What are the specifics on Dungeon Alerts?

[Dyesalot]

From what I am seeing its if you try and bypass mobs it will trigger an alert. The more you bypass the higher the alert goes.

This sucks for certain quests like hmm its something to do with stealing a gem from kobalds (lvl 3-7 I think). You are not allowed to kill the kobald prophets until you steal the gem back. This means that unless you have some pretty serious sneaking skills you will wind up trailing most of the fricken dungeon around until you get the gem.

Trying to eliminate the other mobs and not hit the prophets is pretty hard. Its easier to just run trailing a pack of screaming kobalds throught the dungeon hitting levers etc.

I ended up running at half speed being harried till I got down to the gem then let the killing begin. You can try running in circles or into a room and lose some of them that way but overall its rather silly. Your pretty much using one AI fault in order to bypass the DA issue.

I can see having certain quests revamped as DA does not work with them at all. If you rely on a hirling to get around then write this quest off altogether. Its not like you can tell your hirling not to hit the prophets.

[Thrudh]

I don't dislike the concept of DA but I do have problems with it. I doubt voicing them in a thread like this will do much, but I'll do it anyway.

The reason I figure it's not much use is that I'm sure the Devs see a thread bemoaning DA and roll their eyes and avoid reading much, since the majority is a gripe about "punishing" a play style or arguments about lag still "existing".

Due to my play style I'm seldom harassed by DA, although it does happen, and when it does I'm usually in a guild group and we're counting on it happening and prepare ourselves accordingly for those brief intervals of "hampered" combat until we kill enough to lower the alert.

However, my biggest problem with it is that it is a universal system which apparently can't be individually tweaked to accommodate some old quests that DA should not be triggered due to the encounter "script" of throwing Mobs at the players while attempting to deal with a Boss. Most specifically Threnal protecting Coyle and POP endfight with Mobs phasing out and still counting towards DA and being "unreachable" thus "unkillable" and sticking the encounter at an elevated alert level with no way to lower it besides "toughing it out" and finishing the encounter.

Normally, I'm not one to quibble too much one bugs that affect a few quests. However, in this case I feel that "breaking" a few quests is a few too many.

With all the time they had to develop DA (I'm assuming they had plenty of time since it was developed during the content drought we went through last year) I found it a major oversight to not be able to selectively tweak DA to give it appropriate thresholds for old quests that were not designed with DA in mind.

Apparently all they can do is change the parameters on a "global" scale and not tailored to individual quests. Therefore the "universal" parameters may work for a majority but not for all quests, particularly old quests.

Thus Turbine should really make it a priority to allow some sort of individual tweaking or turn off for specific quests- I mean how is it really possible to "zerg" and "leave mobs alive to eat up resources" in Threnal when all you can do is protect Coyle and have to kill the spawns. Or POP's final fight?

Turbine really should have found a way to fine tune it better. Allow code to switch off DA in inappropriate encounters.

Of course that's easy for me to say, since I don't have their code to look at.

But it is very disappointing to think that some quests are just "broken". And the fact that they are just a few means that they are a low priority, especially as it really seems there is no way to individually change a quest's DA thresholds when the universal parameters are not appropriate to the encounter.

Long-winded but that's my feeling on the general matter.

Good post... Much better than the typical "When I play exactly the way I've always played, I get to red-alert pretty fast and that sucks"

[valharan01]

DA needs to go. But it won't. The dev's are all about punishing playstyles. Glancing blows and mobs with +100 to hit are there to punish the AC builds who sacrifice damage and other things to get that AC. DA is there to punish the zergers who were finishing dungeons with a very long tag in 11 minutes.

This game has changed from a place to let your imagination fly and create a funky build, an off the wall character to a place where you have to be a square peg to fit in the square hole the dev's create.

DA is just another in a long line of forced playstyle changes that make DDO a far inferior product than it used to be. This game is about choices not taking them away I hope the dev team can eventually remember that.

[JOTMON]

The dungeon alert is a pain in respawn zones. Some quests are much worse than others.
Coalescence Chamber being my prime example.

We had someone fall in the worst place to fall (essentially have to rerun the first half of the quest), and proceeded to catch back up to us.
We were getting green harried by that point as the trap had been sprung in the upper level.

The one that fell spawned bats on her way back through = instant red harried for the whole party.
We were red DA until we back tracked and killed the bats where she died because of being harried.
Having the party split up to do different area's is a DA nightmare.

Tighter localizing of the dungeon alert, faster recovery when within range of the mobs, or adjust the DA scaling is needed as the red zone is detrimental to the gameplay.

I understand the reasoning of the DA to prevent preople from running past every mob until they rebound and killing the end boss then completing to get all the XP for minimal gaming experience. Unfortunately the fix is coming at the cost of playability.