Let's talk about the update 11 raid

[Shade]

Ok update 10 is done, has been done a while.. And should go live any day now.

So lets focus on what turbines actaully working on now - the first TRUELY high level raid in 2 years by the time it's released (Last one being ToD)

Given the insane developement time between new high level raids (2 years...), I think we'd all really like to see this one done right and provide us with a lot of playtime. We really don't want to another reaver (10min raid that we get al the raidloot for in a week)

What we want:
A shroud like raid. I think most everyone can agree Shroud was by far the best done raid. In terms of scope, length, design, mix of puzzles/combat, and overall challenge, Shroud and Module 6 in general was when imo DDO truely hit its peak and delivered us what we all really wanted. A long, fun raid, that provides us with a reason to go back time and time again.

How do we do this today, where players have so much more power and resources available to tackle whatever is thrown at us?

Heavily Tier the raid. Yea i know, this means more grind and blah blah that other mmos do. But lets face it, thats what we need. If we want this new raid to last us another 2 years until we get another one, it has to provide a reason to do over a lot.

How:
Instead of just the usual slew of difficulty settings were used to, where the monsters stats just go up a bit.. Make the raid truely harder in terms of tactics, player gear required, player skill required, and knowledge required to win as we go up the difficulty settings.

And mostly importantly - GIVE US EPIC. You absolutely cannot seriously be considering giving us the only new high level raid after waiting 2 years only to leave out a very popular difficulty setting. Get it in Fernando, it has to be done.

My idea to tier it:

Normal - defacto default difficulty for most players. Easy enough, beatable with fresh level20s without too much gear - but would present a major challenge to them. And likely require many runs to figure out the strategy to win. Runs with at least a few well geared veteran players could be rendered trivial, but oh well.. All the usual raidloot will drop on this mode. Tho not epic parts.
Thats what the next modes are for:

Hard - default veteran difficulty. Sersioulsy challenges well geared veteran groups. Taking along a few ungeared fresh 20s would be possibly, but definetely would pose a major challenge to those players. Everyone in the raid must be challenged, tasks must be provided that keep the players well split up and not allow a small core of players to drag along weaker ones. End Boss should be at least 3 major bosses at once, or major amounts of respawns that cannot easily be handled by 1-3 players.

To make this actaully worth doing, the rewards needs to be significantly better too. I'd say double chests. Meaning double raidloot at the end too.

Elite - For Top Tier veterans that have beaten this raid already many times on hard. Has new scenarios that require you not only to beat the same bosses you did on hard, with higher stats. But randomly provides extra ones that are insanely tough.. This will make guarenteed victories in top tiered guild runs never a sure thing, and keep things exciting, never knowing for sure if that uber-boss will appear.

In addition to the required additional strategy and stats.. Equipment would be pushed up by massively scaling the damage reduction of the boss:
Give him a weird arbitrary DR that our regular weaponry simply cannot handle.. Like Byeshks or Crystal. Set it to a high enough value to make it straight impossible without getting that weaponry - say 50 points.
The raid itself on hard should drop some of these weapons..
Thus the progression and tier'ing is created:
Do hard X times tell your geared for elite.

Rewards would be 2 chest slike hard, with slightly enhanced drop rate. and some more unique items otherwise not available on normal..Nothing too powerful, but things mainly designed to prep you for epic.

Epic:
Give us another titan/abbot. We loved those raids, and while we still love the current slightly toned down verisons, the initial shock was fun.
We want it to be impossible. We want to try anyways to proove otherwise. Set some required objectives taht simply require insane twitch timing, along with character stats thaht are near the maximum limits. It should be like a whole new raid on epic. Only for the truely epic geared players - The "best of the best" just as the entry window says.
In addition to the heavy boss DR from elite.. All trash monsters on the way to the boss would gain:
DR100/Epic
This would serve a block, preventing non epic geared players from even reaching the boss.
Now ofcourse epics weapons dont even actually bypass epic DR atm.. But that can/should be fixed:
Either give all current epics DREpic bypassing.... Or add this which you alreayd put in the game files into the actual game:
http://compendium.ddo.com/wiki/Item:...f_Epic_Strikes

And ofcourse also have enough foes with enough HP/resist to make killing them by casters possible - but simply not cost effective (would not be enough shrines to have the SP to do so)

Oh yea, and add this debuff to all players on entry on epic too:
Mneumonic brain hemorhage:
While under this effect, if you consume any item that provides mnenomic enhancements, your brain will expload.
(Drinking mana pots instantly kills you)

Those are my thoughts on how to make the raid fun for all player, and offer a lot of replayability in the same raid, thru difficulty settings being tier'd.

What do you want the new raid to be?

[Calebro]

All trash monsters on the way to the boss would gain:
DR100/Epic

I'm not even kidding, I laughed so hard that I think I pulled a muscle.

Oh yea, and add this debuff to all players on entry on epic too:
Mneumonic brain hemorhage:
While under this effect, if you consume any item that provides mnenomic enhancements, your brain will expload.
(Drinking mana pots instantly kills you)

But how are your 4 wizards 3 bards and 4 clerics going to keep you alive and buffed if they can't drink pots?

[sirgog]

Tiered yes, but not at all in the way you suggest.

I agree with casual-accessible on Normal, and brutal on the highest setting.

But as for 'you can't use any weapons not from this raid' - we actually have that silly mechanic in one quest in DDO. It's an unpopular quest and seldom run to completion above Casual.

Not to mention that some people would get the Elite flagging lottery over on their first Hard run, and others would not be flagged for Elite after 20+ runs.

Let players use the best equipment they have - and tune the raid around that, rather than irritating lottery mechanics like the Boots of Anchoring or the boring "DR/UpgradedDreamsplitter". And make the loot worthwhile for all content, not just for one raid.

[Dunklerlindwurm]

You forgot the most important thing.

How do you think can Turbine sell this pack to the major crowd if its...challenging ?

[sweez]

If you were the lead designer Shade, DDO would probably be the most challenging MMO on the market, and all twelve people playing it would be considered Gods Of Gaming.

[sirgog]

Oh and keep the hyper-randomness out of the harder fights.

Remember when Shroud was new? Groups going for server firsts on Elite recalled if Sagrata was present because he made the part at least twice as hard. Hell, some PUGs recalled at sight of Sagrata for the first two or three weeks.

Getting a completion should be about skill, not about 'we won the dice roll before any other group on the server, we were first to get no Sagrata and no fast movers and then not stuff it up later'. And no matter how it's done, some random combinations will be harder and others easier.

[8_Rath_8]

I like the sounds of this raid. The randomness of the elite boss encounter is a great idea to keep things exciting and challenging.

Oh yea, and add this debuff to all players on entry on epic too:
Mneumonic brain hemorhage:
While under this effect, if you consume any item that provides mnenomic enhancements, your brain will expload.
(Drinking mana pots instantly kills you)

This I can go along with as long as they give melees an energy bar which goes down with each swing. Once that energy bar is gone, they can still move but not attack.

Seriously, things go bad sometimes. Mana pots shouldn't be a planned tactic but there are times when they are needed. I agree that too many players these days can't seem to manage their mana but then again, too many melees can't seem to manage their health and survivability either.

I would be looking forward to this type of raid.

[mystafyi]

while i like some of your idea's presented here i am skeptical turbine even cares. F2P model showed turbine that casual = money. hardcore = dead game. I think your greatest challenge left will be finding another game with challenge.

[Sirea]

I just can't see why they haven't hired you already, Shade.

[Cardtrick]

But as for 'you can't use any weapons not from this raid' - we actually have that silly mechanic in one quest in DDO. It's an unpopular quest and seldom run to completion above Casual.

I'm sure I'm going to feel like an idiot when you tell me . . . but which quest are you talking about? The only quest I can think of that's usually run on casual is Prey, and that has no special weapon requirement.

As for Shade's suggestions . . . it mostly sounds good, but the DR100/epic suggestion is just bad. For all intents and purposes, that's an immunity, which I'm never a fan of. The normal DR 15/25/35 approach to raid DR already provides plenty of incentive to use a DR-breaker on higher difficulties. Also, restricting it just to epic damage is silly and elitist. The only non-DR breaking weapon it usually makes sense to use on elite in the current game is an eSOS, anyway -- and with your proposal that's going to break the DR.

Really, I agree with the spirit of the suggestions and with Shade's goals, but not the proposed methods. This part is solid, though:

What we want:
A shroud like raid. I think most everyone can agree Shroud was by far the best done raid. In terms of scope, length, design, mix of puzzles/combat, and overall challenge, Shroud and Module 6 in general was when imo DDO truely hit its peak and delivered us what we all really wanted. A long, fun raid, that provides us with a reason to go back time and time again.

How do we do this today, where players have so much more power and resources available to tackle whatever is thrown at us?

Heavily Tier the raid. Yea i know, this means more grind and blah blah that other mmos do. But lets face it, thats what we need. If we want this new raid to last us another 2 years until we get another one, it has to provide a reason to do over a lot.

[Khurse]

You realize that if they add Epic Damage to any Handwraps, it will end up with all Handwraps doing no damage at all to non epic mobs.

[aurum1]

Epic:
. Set some required objectives taht simply require insane twitch timing, along with character stats thaht are near the maximum limits.

All except the twitch. I don't own an xbox for a reason.

[curboUS]

I would love for some variation in the type of mobs that spawn so that the quest feels new longer and ofc variable spawnplaces, dont have to be that many - say 4-5 different settups, and 4-5 different spawnpoints should be enough.

Add some random inteferance on the path to endboss - say patrols, deadends (take other route), puzzles, traps etc.

Most of all try to avoid a Gezillion hp endraidboss that just takes a long time to kill as the main obstacle.

Almost most of all try to avoid things like '2 people busy 10 people afk' situations.

When splitting the raidgroup for say puzzles, make it so that the outcome in each split has a timeframe to comlete or loose some Major benifit (sliding scale - fast for max benifit and slow for none) rather than fail the raid.

What i am trying to say here is that imo it's time for a less predictable raid.

[Cardtrick]

You realize that if they add Epic Damage to any Handwraps, it will end up with all Handwraps do no damage at all to non epic mobs.

Ha! It's funny because it's true. The slew of handwrap bugs is a probably a lot more amusing to someone like me who doesn't play any monks . . .

[sirdanile]

Go for something like tod part 2 with tod part 1 "ambience" Read: Traps
That should be fun, though obviously flavored differently and having different mechanics... but difficulty wise...

[SableShadow]

What we want:
A shroud like raid.

The flow of Tempest Spine is better in my opinion, even though it's not a "true raid" (whatever that means).

Set some required objectives taht simply require insane twitch timing,

As long as they do their testing on public interwebs this time instead of on their own frickin' LAN again, sure.

Making an online quest absolutely depend on your ping, then balance it based on your testing on a LAN, is less than clever.

along with character stats thaht are near the maximum limits.

Or, even *harder*, require high stats across the board instead of a couple high and the rest dumped into the basement.

Things like cha/wis draining attacks on melee, str/dex attacks on arcanes, etc would make it much more interesting than yet moar "str + con = win".

All trash monsters on the way to the boss would gain:
DR100/Epic
This would serve a block, preventing non epic geared players from even reaching the boss.

Or the entrance could just have a slot into which one slides one's ePeen to open it.

Kidding aside, we already have Titan sigils/Abbott frames ... simply flagging on an item is fine.

If you don't want players running GS weapons, also fine ... add a tweak that makes them unusable during the raid, "enhanced shavarath effect" or whatever.

(Drinking mana pots instantly kills you)

Meh. Don't see the point. Just change pots so there's a longer timer on them; we've had enough suggestions for that in the past, just need to implement them.

<tiering>

Absolutely not. If you want the raid to last a while, it'll have to be epic only, so we can't run it at lower difficulties to figure it out so we can then go back and beat (the modified version) on epic.

[Junts]

FYI, shade, player weapons dont bypass dr/epic.

Not even the epic weapons.

Also, sorcs and wizards and fvs and clerics don't care about dr.

[Sirea]

FYI, shade, player weapons dont bypass dr/epic.

Not even the epic weapons.

Also, sorcs and wizards and fvs and clerics don't care about dr.

I thought Shade himself bypassed DR/Epic.

[Thrudh]

You say make it like the Shroud... I agree and disagree.

I say make any new raid like Part 2 of the Shroud used to be... where we had to split up to kill the bad guys...

Do NOT make another raid like Part 4 and Part 5 of the Shroud or ToD where you have one big boss monster that everyone surrounds and clerics cast mass heals...


The next raid should have 4 big boss monsters, with 1 of them being a beholder, and another casting mass dispel magic... Make it so we have to split them apart.

Let's allow all builds to shine, not just uber ****** DPS builds.

[Thrudh]

If you were the lead designer Shade, DDO would probably be the most challenging MMO on the market, and all twelve people playing it would be considered Gods Of Gaming.

If he was lead designer, there would be only two classes to play (barbarian and healer), only one way to win all fights, and this game would failed years ago.