Epic Shroud! +6 Exquisite Xbow

[KillEveryone]

I invite you to elaborate more on what you'd hope to see, what you thought didn't work so well, etc. Good construcive feedback can only help.

I dislike blanket immunities. It stifle characters into either a mass hold monkey or a DC death. The rest of the schools don't get much use...conjuration for web but that is only one spell.

I don't mind seeing deathward casted because I have a chance at killing the divine before it casts it. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I may not.

I'd rather see critters buffed with FoM and Deathward and other stuff.

I'd also like to see those spells be dispellable by the players. As it is, dispel, greater dispel, and disjunction are worthless at the level you get them. Nothing really buffs but even when they do, their caster level is so much higher that we have no chance at landing it.

I'd like to see FoM added in so that wizards are not mass hold monkeys. This will add in some tactics.

Melee should also be able to land some of that tactical stuff and not rely on the arcane types tossing mass hold.

<<<<<<<Mass hold still trivializes content just as much as any mass death spell.>>>>>>>>

Weapons like curse spewers should have a better chance at landing in epics. They have such a low DC that there really isn't much point in having one. Melee types want the arcane to CC well and it would be good if the melee types also helped in that regard by lowering saves or spell resistance.

[grodon9999]

If you're referring to 'dial in your preferred challenge level' I think we might end up with this too, but we don't have it all sorted out yet.

Just no blanket immunities please, especially not the current one to AC.

[Darsith]

I hate to be the buzz kill, but no. I don't want epic shroud, I don't want any new eye balls bleeding powerful weapons. This will only allow the haves to get even more powerful. Then they can whine and complain until the game is ramped up to their level again.

I liked the idea of Cannith crafting, now I wish they would remove it from the game as they assume that every player is at level 150 the day after a crafting level is released. Some people are casual players that can't afford to spend millions of plat and hours and hours of time each and every day in there leveling up crafting.

to add some constructive feedback, leave the epics alone. But make a new difficulty, call it e-peen. All mobs will have DR 100/- with the final boss having DR 500/-. They will all have SR 9000+ and plaht device* for good measure (this will ensure the casters learn their place, after all that is what the majority of the forums want). This new difficulty provides nothing new except the satisfaction of overcoming a difficult quest. No new weapons, no new armor, no tokens or fragments. Just a good impossible to beat quest/raid. If there absolutely has to be something awarded, then have it recorded in the favor log so people can SS if they managed a completion.

*plaht device is Mentau's buff in litany that makes him immune to all level 1-9 spells.

tl:dr

please stop the power creep

[Solmage]

I hate to be the buzz kill, but no. I don't want epic shroud, I don't want any new eye balls bleeding powerful weapons. This will only allow the haves to get even more powerful. Then they can whine and complain until the game is ramped up to their level again.

Hilarious. Ramped...up...again. Heh. Ok, how about if we instead "downgrade it" to what it used to be before these evil epic quests and their loot arrived?

Don't worry, it wasn't that bad, it would just mean
- on average quests would have twice the enemies in them,
- they wouldn't care if you were alone or in a full group
- if you died once inside a quest, but managed to complete, maybe you succeeded on a net exp gain if the quest yielded good exp, but twice was for sure a loss. Die a few more times and hey, welcome to earning negative levels.
- creatures would have much higher hitpoints, much higher saves.
- negative levels and debuffs like that were permanent. Heck blindness remained even if you died. Better invest in them pots.
- So. Much. Stuff. I'm still forgetting.

By all means, let's stop the power creep and go back to the good old days.

[Grenada]

I got a item from the best dev ever, kabold, and this item is unique.

It is an epic item, but also a shroud item!
Oh and he also leveled me to 20!

just out of curiosity, could you upgrade the item too? (lit2 epic xbow ftw)

[Caseas]

I hate to be the buzz kill, but no. I don't want epic shroud, I don't want any new eye balls bleeding powerful weapons. This will only allow the haves to get even more powerful. Then they can whine and complain until the game is ramped up to their level again.

I liked the idea of Cannith crafting, now I wish they would remove it from the game as they assume that every player is at level 150 the day after a crafting level is released. Some people are casual players that can't afford to spend millions of plat and hours and hours of time each and every day in there leveling up crafting.

to add some constructive feedback, leave the epics alone. But make a new difficulty, call it e-peen. All mobs will have DR 100/- with the final boss having DR 500/-. They will all have SR 9000+ and plaht device* for good measure (this will ensure the casters learn their place, after all that is what the majority of the forums want). This new difficulty provides nothing new except the satisfaction of overcoming a difficult quest. No new weapons, no new armor, no tokens or fragments. Just a good impossible to beat quest/raid. If there absolutely has to be something awarded, then have it recorded in the favor log so people can SS if they managed a completion.

*plaht device is Mentau's buff in litany that makes him immune to all level 1-9 spells.

tl:dr

please stop the power creep

I dichotomically disagree with this poster.

Give us an even tastier carrot hanging from your stick and we will keep paying you. Greensteel is nice, Epic Greensteel is better. I want better, as do most players.

Call it pride, call it hardcore, call it whatever; I am not satisfied with Madstone boots being so low level compared to cap and being 'the best melee dps boots.' Bring on Epic Gianthold. Bring on Epic Everything. Epic Waterworks, Epic Korthos Island, and new Epic Content that isn't out.

New shinies for new ways to pimp out our characters and pursue the goal of conquering everything -- new challenges to smash our faces in in the pursuit of the Perfect Quest.

[r3dl4nce]

Playing a mmorpg pve based like DDO is having always new most powerful items to farm for and with them farm better old and new content.
DDO is already very casual-friendly (for example: 20th completion raid reward list)

I'd like to see a more action combat system, I'd like to see more difficult quest, not in boss having 10000000000000 hp but quest like Warforged Titan or Abott, in which the difficult part is not staying 5 minutes beating on the boss, but having good knowledge of the quest and having puzzle to solve, traps to avoid, and so on.
But this dream will never be true in DDO, and after 5 years I'm mostly bored by DDO combat, as soon as Vindcitus before and TERA after will be released in Europe, I'll give my definitive "bye bye" to ddo

[Buggss]

......Epic is dead and you have no plans of ever making it again. Dont have to keep telling us. Let us pretend in vain that theres still a chance..

I'd prefer it was personally, even though I have several items myself it's far too demanding a system and it splits the gaming community immensely.

Of course these who've spent their time to acquire said epic ings ain't gonna agree but I've always believed DDO's absolutely best feature is the randomness of its loot. At least the new crafting is eventually accessible by ALL players, not just those who can find an accepting group for epic questing and raiding.

[suszterpatt]

I dichotomically disagree with this poster.

Give us an even tastier carrot hanging from your stick and we will keep paying you. Greensteel is nice, Epic Greensteel is better. I want better, as do most players.

Call it pride, call it hardcore, call it whatever; I am not satisfied with Madstone boots being so low level compared to cap and being 'the best melee dps boots.' Bring on Epic Gianthold. Bring on Epic Everything. Epic Waterworks, Epic Korthos Island, and new Epic Content that isn't out.

New shinies for new ways to pimp out our characters and pursue the goal of conquering everything -- new challenges to smash our faces in in the pursuit of the Perfect Quest.

The problem is that epic gear has such great benefits that a fully epic geared toon and a first lifer who just hit level 20 aren't really in the same level range. Epics might be ok for people with only greensteel/raid loot and maybe 1 epic item, but we need proper level 21+ content for people with all epic gear.

[LordArkan]

Heh, never played Fallout, but it certainly looks close.

The beastie is called a Tarrasque in D&D.

The Deathclaws in the Fallout games were specifically modelled after the AD&D version of the Tarrasque. That thing actually looks intimidating, unlike the joke that was the later versions.

[Buggss]

The Deathclaws in the Fallout games were specifically modelled after the AD&D version of the Tarrasque. That thing actually looks intimidating, unlike the joke that was the later versions.

Nah I much prefer the 3rd ed. version:



Look at all them little guys running off!!

[Schmoe]

I invite you to elaborate more on what you'd hope to see, what you thought didn't work so well, etc. Good construcive feedback can only help.

I'm really not looking forward to a Crystal Cove-like approach for choosing the difficulty. It feels too generic to me, exposes too much of the underlying system mechanics, and leads to too much meta-gaming. I much prefer to have quests that are more hand-tailored to the range of difficulties they are supposed to be, I much prefer loot that is hand-tailored to be appropriate rewards for the given level of difficulty, and I much prefer character advancement along the lines of epic levels. I think it gives more variety to the game and creates a richer atmosphere.

I dread seeing something like the following:

"Run Genesis Point on challenge level 21, because that's the minimum level to get the gold shards you can turn in for a +8 fire damage crystal. You can get the extra +2 fire damage as an exceptional bonus from Stealer of Souls on challenge level 18 and upgrade your <Generic Weapon> to the maximum allowed of +10 fire damage."

In my opinion, Crystal Cove was fine as a one-off event designed to appeal to everyone, but as an over-arching game design? Yuck.

[anto_capone]

I invite you to elaborate more on what you'd hope to see, what you thought didn't work so well, etc. Good construcive feedback can only help.

Would like to see dynamic traps and enemy spawns, inherently making the quest different every time.

In crystal cove, the crystals didn't always spawn in the same spot, but the mobs seemed to spawn in the same place each time. Seems odd now that I think of it, the crystals in the cove were the only dynamic part of the game?

Maybe a supreme epic difficulty in which the quest is basically different each time.

First run attempt: zone in, buff. First room has 50 mobs raining meteor swarms and comet falls on all. Wipe. Recall, re-enter.
Second run attempt: zone in, buff. First room is empty, and has a chest! Empty chest springs epic trap, floor falls out and everyone falls in lava without a ladder out. Should have brought a rogue! Wipe. Recall, re-enter.
Third run attempt: zone in, buff. First room has a few mobs, and after a few minutes our heroes are victorious! But, whats in the second room...?

Right now, way it is, we all know whats in the second room dont we...? :P
Right now, it's 'the trap box is right here', and 'there are two casters in the next room, take them out first'.

I'd like a "super epic++ 'mind (insert four letter word)' difficulty", for when people are feeling adventurous.

Not sure how possible it is, but would be pretty cool. Hard as hell yea, with scaling rewards based on difficulty; but might be pretty fun.

[Shade]

Crystal cove to me was an utter failure in design as far as allowing difficulty scaling goes. It never allowed any. It was casual/casual/casual or casual. It gave us level scaling.. Entirely without difficulty settings. Not cool to remove 1 system to add in another less interesting one..

The current normal, hard, elite setup works great. It just needs to be applied to epic, so epic can be fun for a much larger varieties of players.

Did a detailed post on this here:
http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=307339

[Grieve]

With respect to difficulty on quests in general, I have a philosophy on the difficulty of completing a task that I carry over from something one of my college professors told me after handing back one of the most difficult exams I'd ever taken. He told us that he made the exam (task) so difficult that it would ensure that at most 1 or 2 students who excelled on the material would even get close to a perfect grade. His reasoning for this was to gain a meaningful understanding of how much the class had actually understood.

My thought with the DDO questing is make it so that those most difficult quests/raids of end game content have such a curve that even the most skilled team of player would only have a 25% chance of success due to what would be required to complete the task (ie. Time, Resources, Gear, & sheer luck). Yes this would discourage some people because then they will not be able to do some of what they used to, but it gives incentive to learn and progress in their level of play.

What I am suggesting has been seen in numerous other games and no I am not suggesting you do this with the current system, but if you were to add layers of difficulty, go for broke and make it insane. Also, couple game examples that have implented this type of difficulty setting that I am referring to are Doom, Wolfenstein: 3D, MassEffect 2, and Guild Wars (not specifically with settings, but with the difficulty of certain areas within the game, Domain of Anguish specifically).

[grodon9999]

With respect to difficulty on quests in general, I have a philosophy on the difficulty of completing a task that I carry over from something one of my college professors told me after handing back one of the most difficult exams I'd ever taken. He told us that he made the exam (task) so difficult that it would ensure that at most 1 or 2 students who excelled on the material would even get close to a perfect grade. His reasoning for this was to gain a meaningful understanding of how much the class had actually understood.

My thought with the DDO questing is make it so that those most difficult quests/raids of end game content have such a curve that even the most skilled team of player would only have a 25% chance of success due to what would be required to complete the task (ie. Time, Resources, Gear, & sheer luck). Yes this would discourage some people because then they will not be able to do some of what they used to, but it gives incentive to learn and progress in their level of play.

What I am suggesting has been seen in numerous other games and no I am not suggesting you do this with the current system, but if you were to add layers of difficulty, go for broke and make it insane. Also, couple game examples that have implented this type of difficulty setting that I am referring to are Doom, Wolfenstein: 3D, MassEffect 2, and Guild Wars (not specifically with settings, but with the difficulty of certain areas within the game, Domain of Anguish specifically).

You can't do that in a grind-based game where it takes you dozens-hundreds of completions of a quest/raid to acquire the gear you are looking for.

[Cyr]

I invite you to elaborate more on what you'd hope to see, what you thought didn't work so well, etc. Good construcive feedback can only help.

I invite you to open up one of the many lengthy threads that existed around the time of that event.

In short the scaling system was not a difficulty scaling system. It was set up to be casual/normal. That simply will not work for epic or other high level content. There is nothing worse then watered down endgame content and there has been far too much of that already thank you very much.

I had a suggestion a while back about a method of addressing scaling by having epics have different difficulties with VERY IMPORTANTLY stronger loot (not just modified drop rates) only available from the higher settings.

[TheDjinnFor]

Here's some suggestions I wrote up about a year ago (pre U9) - http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=272917 - the main change I'd make to them now is to give mobs a blanket immunity to area of effect death spells (while letting the single-target ones continue working).

Blanket immunity? No, that just leads to the same sorts of complaints pre-U9. We just need more variance in saves, HP, attack, damage, and attack behaviours. That alone should provide all the difficulty needed. Give about half the monsters in an epic quest deathblock. Give about 1/4th a dispelable deathward, and 1/8th an undispelable deathward. Do a similar thing with most other buffs, like TS, FoM, energy protection, etc.

Mix total trash mobs with zero immunities and low HP & low threat to the party with toughies that have full immunities and high HP & threat. Mix it up from there: give some no immunities to spells and high threat to melees, and give others lots of immunities to spells but no threat to melees.

In one quest, a max necro-DC wizard should be able to instant-kill many enemies, but never more than 75%, but there should be several enemies a low necro-DC wizard (say, 20 DC below) should be able to kill (maybe 25%). Have enough trashmobs and few enough shrines that spellcasters can't go mass wailing their way through the quest on auto-pilot, but keep them as trash mobs so that they don't make the quest excessively long or difficult for non-wizard groups.

What tends to happen with most quests is that they are either like Epic Claw, where casters have trouble wailing the scorpions and so will begrudgingly bring along melees, and Epic Last Stand, where they don't need help and melees are lucky to get a single kill each. Mix it up inside the quest, but make it more obvious which ones are trash and which are meant to test your limits.

[Scraap]

I invite you to elaborate more on what you'd hope to see, what you thought didn't work so well, etc. Good construcive feedback can only help.

A few general notions:

Items:

Greensteel customizability is highly sought after mainly due to the flexibility of the system. Your only real limitation is how much you can put up with running the same content over and over again.
Favor required crafting emphasizes running certain types of quests for certain types of effects. (Do note that I still disagree with the required grind for those effects, but more as a return on investment, note, than anything else. The basic notion isn't horrific.)

On that note, perhaps a system such as:
Tier 1- Base item with one item-specific mutation when made epic.
Tier 2- Upgrade from a general dungeon token pool adding a personalized effect. (slots, like we have now, basically)
Tier 3- Upgrade further via Quest Area effects. (So sands specific, or fens, for instance adding 2-3 options)
Tier 4- Quest specific effects.

It seems, to me at least, that that would give a better sense of progression, as well as be a bit more consistent with prior content systems without necessarily breaking whats already there.

Offense:
Mobs have more than just reflex, fortitude, will saves, ac and a HP bar, and several of the balancing tools for str vs dex builds that work everywhere else get gutted come epic. Time to revisit that stat damage resistance ward. It's not like whittling it down to the point of being able to get 1.5 damage is nearly as nasty as back when that would be crit x4+

CC:
Nothing made me sadder than the first time I mass persuaded epic mobs only to see them blink 5 seconds later and come to eat me face anyway. They don't deal nearly as much damage as we do, so it doesn't really speed up encounters much to have them turn on each other. Particularly not if you're planning on keeping a reward-per-kill mechanic in place.

Defense:
I'm going to take the non-mainstream view, and say that grazing hits as a general notion was a decent attempt, but ended up a bit flawed from the perspective of giving a wider range of AC viability and desirability.
Going back to the source material, with a -5 progression on each successive attack, that'd see a range boost of about 15-20 AC, with each of those 5 points knocking off an entire attacks worth of damage. Perhaps lowering their to-hit, and baseline damage, and adding an x2, x3, x4 ect for every 5 points they succeed by would serve to replicate the notion of 1 mob taking 1 swing representing several (mobs or swings, take your pick).
After revisiting that, I'd suggest running the numbers and seeing what you could do about the S&B situation in terms of damage input vs output costs. After all, shaving off even half the physical damage taken as a trade off for half the physical damage put out still nets you the same resource loss, but at twice the real life time. Factor in that it exposes you to always taking at least half of magical damage, and that aspect clearly needs more work. After all, you presumably want the style to be of use for more than just one person in a raid, right?

Hope some of that made sense. The coffeemaker's whispering sweet nothings to me.

[Thrudh]

A system similar to the one in crystal cove would be easier for the player to at least see/feel a more steady gear progression than farming hopelessly for that one rare shard, seal, or scroll.

This.

The Shroud was successful because you're always getting closer to your goal... You can see the progress with each run.. Even if you didn't get that last large devil scale you needed, you could sell the stuff you DID get and buy it...

Most raids are successful because of the 20th completion list... Even if you get skunked in the chest, at least you're making progress towards that next 20th list.

The epic system, you could play ALL day and be no closer to your goal. Reaver's Refuge system also failed at first because of this.

Please make systems that allow incremental progress, instead of "nothing for 40 runs", then "hurray you finally got lucky!"