Discussion - Quest - Schemes of the Enemy

[KookieKobold]

Deep inside the Cannith Manufactory, the Syrania Conduit Floor contains important information that would allow for House Cannith to lock down portions of the Manufactory. Unfortunately, both the fanatics of the Lord of Blades and followers of Toven d’Cannith are also trying to get that information.

Enter the Syrania Conduit Floor and find the valued information but beware that both sides will try to stop you just as they would stop each other. Additionally, the Syrania Conduit Floor is not without defenses of its own.

After running this new adventure, please use this thread to provide feedback on the quest.

[samho]

Just done this one on normal solo, took me a while, and still missing one optional.

The first thing I've noticed is the DM voice for this one haven't done yet (and it's the only quest I've done so far).


Most of other puzzle didn't take too long to solve, but nicely done the large scale one. Also, the shrine on the large scale puzzle part is brilliant! However, the 'ladder' part on the beginning is a little bit tricky (took me a while to figure out). I would do it on harder diffiuclt later on to see if I miss anything behind.

[Khurse]

Blowing up the power generators just before you enter the end room seems a bit too easy considering the in game suggestion is that it's easier to do the puzzle than blow them up.

I took a look at the puzzle,figured I'd leave it until I'm running with friends and tried to blow them up.
20 Wizard with disintegrate/frost lance/polar ray took each of them down in a few seconds on normal.

[BananaHat]

Oh sure, just because a warforged follows the Lord of Blades, he is a fanatic. Pure racism.






Do these quests play different if you follow the Lord of Blades?

[dTarkanan]

There's a bug in the dialogue of Lena that grants the quest. The second to last prompt, my only dialogue option besides 'ending' is "Any idea how he makes the taken?" Which comes from the harbinger of madness chain.

[Gobbothegreen]

Oh sure, just because a warforged follows the Lord of Blades, he is a fanatic. Pure racism.






Do these quests play different if you follow the Lord of Blades?

Nope my FvS had to kill them all like everything else, even got called house cannith dog like everyone else

Raid will be even more fun if you get to encounter the LoB, really having your FvS or pally fight against their own "god" classic......

[Nagantor]

There are a few quests where you get unfriendly statements about Drow wheter you play one or not. Bad style? Sure.

[Shade]

By far the best quest of the 3.

Altho i havent ran the others much on normal (just skiped to elite), pretty sure its the best in terms of scaling , friend mentioned 1 end chest on normal.

Check out the end chests on elite:

Chests. Count em.. hehe very nice scaling.
UI to see the party we had.
Scorecard

Full pug grp i didnt know anyone in it.. But all did a great job. Bossfight was even somewhat challenging. Tho i think if we had run norm.hard before and knew what to do it wouldnt of been much of one.. Could use some tweaking for sure. Earlier optional in the quest is 9000x harder heh. ( I somehow managed to figure out the puzzle real fast so we skiped that)

Will post some more detailed feedback later.

[Angelus_dead]

There are a few quests where you get unfriendly statements about Drow wheter you play one or not. Bad style? Sure.

The Drow in the Eberron setting all hate each other, outside of their immediate families.

[samho]

By far the best quest of the 3.

Altho i havent ran the others much on normal (just skiped to elite), pretty sure its the best in terms of scaling , friend mentioned 1 end chest on normal.

Check out the end chests on elite:

Chests. Count em.. hehe very nice scaling.
UI to see the party we had.
Scorecard

Full pug grp i didnt know anyone in it.. But all did a great job. Bossfight was even somewhat challenging. Tho i think if we had run norm.hard before and knew what to do it wouldnt of been much of one.. Could use some tweaking for sure. Earlier optional in the quest is 9000x harder heh. ( I somehow managed to figure out the puzzle real fast so we skiped that)

Will post some more detailed feedback later.

Speaking about scaling, I just duo Weapon Shipment with a friend on elite to see why they add more chest on elite couple hours ago... then realize it's a hell lot of fun for the second half part of Weapon Shipment now

[GeneralDiomedes]

It would be nice to have another Iron Defender graphical variant, or even make a feline version.

[Jaid314]

It would be nice to have another Iron Defender graphical variant, or even make a feline version.

i vote for one that looks like the razor cat. coolest looking summon in the game imo... too bad by the time you can get one, it's pretty much useless

[lopkon]

Played on normal with a lvl 20 WF FvS ~ 20 minutes compleion

pros:
+ it can support both: dungeon crawler feeling and zerging, which is very nice
+ nice amount of puzzles in the quest, still wondering about the one before the end fight, just killed the two machines in the end (nice to have the choice)
+ nice amount of optionals (xp + chests!)
+ Endboss is nicely done, his name is fun
+ choice to use a puzzle in endfight is nice (I like the kind of puzzle too)
+ only quest of the three wish might have a very nice xp/min | chest/min ratio if known
+ fast exit close to endfight

cons:
- no challenge at all
- had problems finding the trigger for the end fight, maybe it was just me, but took me like 5 minutes (mostly trying to make the puzzle wheels movable though)

[Fecerak]

The Drow in the Eberron setting all hate each other, outside of their immediate families.

Really? I'm pretty sure that they hate their families in FR, but maybe that isn't the case in Eberron then...

[charredrex]

Really? I'm pretty sure that they hate their families in FR, but maybe that isn't the case in Eberron then...

Eberron was more tribal in nature as far as Drow go, not quite the same as the Forgotten Realm Drow, which is why we also see so many of them above ground also.

[Shade]

Speaking about scaling, I just duo Weapon Shipment with a friend on elite to see why they add more chest on elite couple hours ago... then realize it's a hell lot of fun for the second half part of Weapon Shipment now

wep shipment has more chest on elite now?

[Aerendil]

Bug: The power relays (on the 2 towers with the climbable ladders) - after being destroyed still seem to be considered objects for the purposes of collision detection.

Had to run around the outside of the room to get back out.

[Zorack00]

I attacked the door, oh god, they're everywhere. EVERYWHERE!

[Seikojin]

I attacked the door, oh god, they're everywhere. EVERYWHERE!

My bad, did that too. LOL I think the spawns there should change. Either as enemies die for X minutes, or something else outside of 5 every so often. Red alert real quick. Plus the cannons. It says in DM dialog that they should stop coming, but they never end! LOL

[Shade]

Ran all the quests on elite, in a full group and 2 man.

Heres my detailed feedback - mainly on elite, as yea normal really isnt for me.. Quick 1 to 10 ratings first:

Look and Feel: 9/10. The new monsters all look very cool and the dungeon is well designed with a nice non-linear feel. Good mix of platforming, side paths, optionals and multiple ways to win. My favourite of the 3.
Challenge: 5/10. On elite its by far the toughest of the 3.. That said after you figure out the puzzle, it's still really lacking in challenge. Encounter size is better then the other quests too, but again far too many shrines.
XP: 7/10. Seems reasonable since this quest can be complete extremely fast on normal I believe if you know what to do on the puzzles. Takes a bit on elite, ~40 min going slow, ~30 if you keep a good pace.
Loot 9/10. This is the standard by all other quests should be judged. Great named items, Lots of chests. Awesome scaling with the huge variance in amount of end chests. (1 normal, ? hard, 7 elite)
Replayability: 7/10. Decent but not great:
- Decent xp per min
- Excellent loot per min
- Multiple ways to win
- The named items here have a very high drop rate, so trivial to acquire
- The various ingredients that dorp in the adventure area for kills, do not drop in the quest itself.
- No epic. Really.. Still no epics after all these months. So disappointing. Would of been so much better to add replay value.

Challenge expanded about why it's lacking:
1. The monsters have terrible saves.
The party included a palemaster with a decent, but not exactly maxxed necro DC of 40 (max sustainable is 45, max temp is 50)
Similar my barbarians stunning blow DC was about 42 without a stuning weapon or special str buffs i didnt use. It landed 95% of the time vs everything but the paladins.
So pretty much this happens: Encounter 10 monsters, 1 wail of the banshee.. 8 die.
The only 2 that ever survive are the bladeworn paladins and the odd watcher bot (which i believe is immune to instadeath)
If any get lucky enough to save, the cleric/favored soul/wiz gets them with a finger/implosion/destruction and aside from the paladin, the encoutner is over in the blink of an eye.
Now the bots have 100 hp.. so they die in 1 swing anyways.
The paladins have huge HP on elite, around 10k.. But there damage output is really not thretening and they don't cast any spells, so aside from adding some legnth to the encounter and a bit of extra required healing, they dont add much challenge.

To add insult to injury: While all the casters are having fun insta kill everything left and right.. They did make sure to slow down melee by making several things immune to smiting. Yes specific immunity in place, even tho everythings HP was well above the 1k mark to stop its insta kill portion anyways. Just means less dps for melee that use smiting weapons pretty much.

This quest isn't as bad as the others in this area tho, as the respawns during the major fights can severely drain mana pools using insta kills.

2. There is a shrine every 5 steps..
So all this constant insta killing going on with wild abandon wouldn't be so bad if there was any sense of resource management needed in these quests. There just isn't. The shrine are plentiful and constant, even on elite. I'd suggest taking all but 2 shrine out of this quest (one at the start and one before the boss fight is plenty), for elite only. near the end for example:
Shrine (turn it on by spining the wheel).. 2 monsters to kill (power relay).. then imdiately another Shrine. Lol a bit much. At least there aren't rez shrines within running distance like blown to bits. (there is one at the start, but its out of range from the main battle room)

3. The end boss is a bit squishy.
He's basicaly a big magefire canon with some cool mechanics. I really liked the fight, but it was over long before it started to become a major challenge. A quick fix would be just to up his hitpoints and increase the dog spawn rate to be similar to the other optional fight, to make it a sort of DPS race to take him down before your overwealmed. Right now, the spawn rate is easy enough to deal with by a single player, while 5 others fight the boss.
That or send someone with evasion to figure out the puzzle (we couldnt figure it out) and yea it seems you need evasion to head down bottom at the end room here.. 100-150 damage electric floors with no disable option we could find. Not sure how you constantly evade a floor tho with evasion tho lol, but yea it works.. Our monk worked on it for quite a while.