LET'S TALK: Challenges

[MadFloyd]

This topic should prove interesting.

As you all know, U12 saw the release of a new type of content - Challenges.

I would like to get your thoughts on these - preferably in a constructive manner. I’m specifically interested in gameplay feedback.

For those who do not enjoy this type of gameplay, can you elaborate on why?

For those of you who do enjoy playing them, what aspects do you enjoy?

General feedback is encouraged, but again, please limit feedback to gameplay and respect other’s opinions. I expect this to be a very polarizing subject.

Thanks in advance.

[Ganolyn]

Oh boy, here comes thirty pages of complaining about Air Elementals!

[bhgiant]

Oh boy, here comes thirty pages of complaining about Air Elementals!

+1 for the forum reference

[nibel]

At this moment, there is only one problem on challenges to me: After you craft what you want, there is no reason to keep farming ingredients. The golden stars challenge is nice too, but I doubt many people are going to keep trying improve their time after getting the 6-star rating once.

[sirgog]

At this moment, there is only one problem on challenges to me: After you craft what you want, there is no reason to keep farming ingredients. The golden stars challenge is nice too, but I doubt many people are going to keep trying improve their time after getting the 6-star rating once.

There's plenty of reason to keep running some - flawlessly executed 8-minute runs of 21 Extraplanar Mining: Buying Time or five-minute 25 Lava Caves: Time is Money are the best Epic Dungeon Token per minute ratio in DDO, excluding stealthed epic Claw.

[Riggs]

There's plenty of reason to keep running some - flawlessly executed 8-minute runs of 21 Extraplanar Mining: Buying Time or five-minute 25 Lava Caves: Time is Money are the best Epic Dungeon Token per minute ratio in DDO, excluding stealthed epic Claw.

Some of the runs are very good for ingredients for a short amount of time.

Other ones - you collect the same amount, or more crystals - or spend 30 minutes in Rushmore trying to find crests and killing masses of stuff and several bosses and then get a measly 200 ingredients.

It seems that getting stars has little to no effect on how many ingredients you get - some say they do but havent seen it yet and few can actually confirm it rather than rumor.

Makes running them even less cooperative when some people want stars and many do not - and stars = less ingredients because you are spending time doing other things than collecting crystals or whatever.

[sirgog]

Some of the runs are very good for ingredients for a short amount of time.

Other ones - you collect the same amount, or more crystals - or spend 30 minutes in Rushmore trying to find crests and killing masses of stuff and several bosses and then get a measly 200 ingredients.

It seems that getting stars has little to no effect on how many ingredients you get - some say they do but havent seen it yet and few can actually confirm it rather than rumor.

Makes running them even less cooperative when some people want stars and many do not - and stars = less ingredients because you are spending time doing other things than collecting crystals or whatever.

The ingredients are calculated like this:

First you have a base score - e.g. the number of crystals in Lava Caves. Say you've acquired 190 crystals.
Then this is modified by the difference between the highest player level and the difficulty setting. e.g. if you are doing 21 Time is Money with level 20s, you are 1 level under quest level, which is +10%. 190 + 10% = 209. This is the score that shows up on your screen at the top.
Then, each challenge has a multiplier. Rushmore seems to be 12% of your score. Lava Caves seems to be 61%. Kobold Island might be 13% or so. You then get this number of ingredients (61% of 209 is ~130).

Note that stars have nothing to do with it, and some of the star objectives seriously sabotage your score (e.g. 'Send Kobolds through teleporters 200 times'.

How different is that from any of the (fill in the blank) Assaults? except you get tokens along the way?

The focus of Rushmore runs is optimizing speed killing of trash mobs. Killing Phantasmal Hounds in 8 seconds rather than 10 makes a big difference in a 23-25 run, whereas killing Smiling Sam in 90 seconds rather than 110 makes a much smaller difference to your performance overall.

I'd rather a future challenge where boss combat is the focus instead of trash combat. Classes are *moderately* balanced in anti-boss performance, but no class without Energy Drain can match the performance of Energy Drain classes against 8k+ HP trash.

[Kinerd]

Then, each challenge has a multiplier. Rushmore seems to be 12% of your score. Lava Caves seems to be 61%. Kobold Island might be 13% or so. You then get this number of ingredients (61% of 209 is ~130).

The last time I measured they were 11% for Rushmore, 75% for Lava Caves, 14% for Kobold Island, and 65% for Extraplanar, in all cases truncating. It is a little odd they truncate because the level penalty/bonus rounds, but they do. This was at least a month ago, so it's conceivable the rate for Lava Caves came down.

[Shade]

The ingredients are calculated like this:

First you have a base score - e.g. the number of crystals in Lava Caves. Say you've acquired 190 crystals.
Then this is modified by the difference between the highest player level and the difficulty setting. e.g. if you are doing 21 Time is Money with level 20s, you are 1 level under quest level, which is +10%. 190 + 10% = 209. This is the score that shows up on your screen at the top.
Then, each challenge has a multiplier. Rushmore seems to be 12% of your score. Lava Caves seems to be 61%. Kobold Island might be 13% or so. You then get this number of ingredients (61% of 209 is ~130).

Note that stars have nothing to do with it, and some of the star objectives seriously sabotage your score (e.g. 'Send Kobolds through teleporters 200 times'.

The focus of Rushmore runs is optimizing speed killing of trash mobs. Killing Phantasmal Hounds in 8 seconds rather than 10 makes a big difference in a 23-25 run, whereas killing Smiling Sam in 90 seconds rather than 110 makes a much smaller difference to your performance overall.

I'd rather a future challenge where boss combat is the focus instead of trash combat. Classes are *moderately* balanced in anti-boss performance, but no class without Energy Drain can match the performance of Energy Drain classes against 8k+ HP trash.

Not exactly.

They changed it up quite a bit in the last cpl patches.

Now kills add to score in every challenge. Even the collection ones.
1 trash kill = 1 point
1 orange named = 5 points
1 red named = varies:
rushmoor bosses - huge, 600+ points
common reds in extractor - 10
cloudgiant in caves - 15

Then in collection crystals = 1 point. Tho in an epic, since its 21+ min, thats +10%, so:
Green = 1.1 point (it does count fractions)
purp = 11
progenitor = 110

And yea your ingredient reward is a percentage of your score. Though it varies from challenge to challenge, not just map to map.. EG: Collosal non epic is ~75%, collosal epic is 100%.

Also in rushmoor, monsters are worth a bit more, but still very litte. Seems to get up to around 1.5 to 2.5 points a kill in the top epic ones, +score modifier.

But bosses are worth like I said 600+ (spiders worth less, maybe ~100)
Opening gates are worth ~80 points

So if you ONLY kill all bosses and open all gates youll have 3000 + 1280 = ~4280 base score on lvl20. Most of the best end scores posted are only in the 4400 to 4800 range, so actaully killing trash monsters has extremely little effect on your ingredient reward.

So actually in rushmoor, is you want the best ingredient over time ratio, the best strategy is to ignore all the trash monsters using mass invis, and go straight for the gates and bosses.

[nibel]

There's plenty of reason to keep running some - flawlessly executed 8-minute runs of 21 Extraplanar Mining: Buying Time or five-minute 25 Lava Caves: Time is Money are the best Epic Dungeon Token per minute ratio in DDO, excluding stealthed epic Claw.

Ah, right. Epic tokens. I tend to ignore any epic on DDO because of my alt-holism. Good point.

[whereispowderedsilve]

This topic should prove interesting.

As you all know, U12 saw the release of a new type of content - Challenges.

I would like to get your thoughts on these - preferably in a constructive manner. I’m specifically interested in gameplay feedback.

For those who do not enjoy this type of gameplay, can you elaborate on why?

For those of you who do enjoy playing them, what aspects do you enjoy?

General feedback is encouraged, but again, please limit feedback to gameplay and respect other’s opinions. I expect this to be a very polarizing subject.

Thanks in advance.

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=357415

Mr. MadFloyd not my thread but check that out, especially what Kinerd has to say!

I have a group of peeps that run the challenges a lot 4 the cool stuffs & to crunch the epic mats into epic tokens.

I like it cos it's a change of pace from the normal. Some tweaking does need to be done though which Im sure other people will touch on forthcoming!

Keep up the great work!

/offtopic Can we plz get the shared bank window back to being resizable? That would be super awesome! :P! !

[Zess-wolf]

air elem...just kiddin, mainly i think there are 2 points i would like to comment on:

-Kobold island objectives(difficulty/DDO store only) ; Some of them are achieved by requisitions only, which i dropped just one in since challenges were released(and i play them quite often), also they are really hard, making more than 2 stars almost impossible.

-Pack price(related to first topic), ok they are really valued, but i think it was over valued, i did bought the pack, but on sale only, and i regret sometimes(some lapses...if you get what i mean)...


Besides that, nice quests for free time ;D keep up with this!

Just my toughts,

Zess

ps:The air eles too...

[EnjoyTheJourney]

I like the challenges, and I like being able to pick out items in advance that are useful and reliably available.

I'm not experienced enough at them to provide detailed feedback, but I can suggest that you pretty much need mentoring or ddo wiki access to figure out how to do them -- or quite a bit of patience. I went the "wiki" route, but wasn't entirely comfortable doing it; in general, I like being able to figure out what to do without having to do external reading or invest a lot of time just on the "puzzling through" part. Perhaps better in-game tips for the challenges would help newer players not give up in frustration.

Don't make them more complicated, if you do similar things in the future.

[Targonis]

If you look at them, the challenges are really three types of challenges on four maps. As a result, you will get a lot of feedback from people who don't care for one of these TYPES. In general, I like the challenges, though I HATE Kobold Island: The Disruptor.

One thing I would like to see would be to make the exchange be for a 2:1 of any one of a tier to any other of the same tier. Going on the same exact sequence from Rushmore's Mansion going from there means that if Rushmore's Mansion is your preferred challenge, you MUST then do 3 exchanges in some cases to get what you want, and that is NOT good(unless Rushmore's seems so much easier than other challenge types that it should be that way).

[Gimpinator]

Mr. Floyd, in my opinion, the challenges are a joke. You took an interesting and fun event (dungeon) that we see a few times a year, for a fixed amount of time, cloned it ten-fold, and then crammed it down our throats. I think we can all admit that Crystal Cove is probably the best dungeon in DDO, however, the short time window forced a lot of us to get down to business when the event came around. As a result, most of us are burnt out on crack cove.

The challenges have potential, however, your team need to be more creative and original if you're going to release content like that. I have a high tolerance for repetition, pain and blurred vision, but it only takes a few runs of these challenges to send me packing. If I could have it my way, they would be removed entirely. Sorry I cannot be more constructive; Thinking of challenges causes my blood pressure to raise to unhealthy levels.

[NXPlasmid]

Mr. Floyd, in my opinion, the challenges are a joke. You took an interesting and fun event (dungeon) that we see a few times a year, for a fixed amount of time, cloned it ten-fold, and then crammed it down our throats. I think we can all admit that Crystal Cove is probably the best dungeon in DDO, however, the short time window forced a lot of us to get down to business when the event came around. As a result, most of us are burnt out on crack cove.

The challenges have potential, however, your team need to be more creative and original if you're going to release content like that. I have a high tolerance for repetition, pain and blurred vision, but it only takes a few runs of these challenges to send me packing. If I could have it my way, they would be removed entirely. Sorry I cannot be more constructive; Thinking of challenges causes my blood pressure to raise to unhealthy levels.

Crystal cove best dungeon in DDO? Really? Better than Gianthold, better than Amrath? Better than the Siegebreaker series? Are you on crack? Crystal cove, not unlike the challenges has some very excellent loot for a relatively small expenditure of time comparied to other named loot or epic loot. The first few days of CC was awesomely fun and hilarious with the kobald voices, super fun for the first few days... Very repetative after that.

The problem I see with the challenges is basic structure is the same for all of the challenges and it gets to be very repetative and boring quite quickly. To be honest, I can't imagine anyone being happy with more of them based on the mechanic currently employed, it's really been run into the ground, and by making artificer unlocking dependant of doing the challenges many many times, you should be prepared for a massive you know what storm if you try to release any others that aren't completely totally and fully different. This is because, for those people who really don't like them all that much, they will be resenting having to repeat them so many times to get that favor....

Personally, I am less against the challenges now than I was right when they came out, mainly because at that time I had just run the cove for 6 days straight and thought "yeah, never have to run that junk again"... well I found out that wasn't the case at all. The loot is quite nice, so I hold my nose and run them and I want to unlock Arti. T

My advise for future challenge releases.. only a couple per update.

[sirgog]

Edit: Rethought some of this. Post 246 has my feedback now. Leaving this regardless.



First thoughts: I didn't like them much at first.

With experience: These have really grown on me. So much fun to zerg, and they can be really tough (4-starring Lava Caves: Time Is Money solo on 25 was... intense, five of the most fun minutes I've ever had). And you have made some really, really impressive boss fights in them.

But:

- They are brutally punishing of toons that are not self sufficient. Many players build characters (stereotypical Barb without Silver Flame pots, etc) to do one thing and do it well. Challenges don't work well for those toons as so much of them is 'Hey Numot, you split off from the group and kill kobolds for parts' or 'Myrmidral, answer that "Incoming"' etc.
- The scaling encourages metagaming group size around prior knowledge of the challenge. Time is Money I always solo, duo or trio for this reason. Short Cuts I want a full group for.
- Mob HP is nonsensical on 24/25. A supergeared character (one 25 is designed for) might do 30% more DPS than a modestly geared 18-20 (what 21 is designed for). So mobs should have 30-40% more HP, not 100-300% more. I think the scaling of damage players suffer from 21 to 25 is perfect. As a rule of thumb: If players are kiting mobs rather than killing them, something is wrong. Likewise if the most effective thing a melee can do is UMD Enervation scrolls on mobs, again something is wrong.
- Mob HP also scales too much with party class makeup. The Cloud Giant in 20 Time is Money seems to have less HP when in a 3-player all melee group than when I've soloed it on a Wizard or Sorc.



One suggestion: Allow raid groups to attempt challenges (with further scaling). Then instead of sending off 1 character to deal with an 'Incoming' in a 4 player group, we could send two Barbarians AND a Bard or Cleric in an 11 or 12 player group. That lets the 'I do one thing and do it well' builds be useful in challenges. You have solo to raid scaling tech in the Cannith Manufactuary.

I'm not sure what your intention was re. underlevel (17-19th level) toons in 21-25 challenges. You gave the challenges XP and put a 'soft lockout' of 'you must have a 20 in your group to enter' rather than a raid-timer style 'hard lockout', indicating you want characters to be able to attempt 21-25 challenges pre-20, but getting in to them requires a 20 in group. Can I suggest changing this to a hard lockout of level 1-16 characters, and letting 17-20s in freely (possibly with a warning to 17s, 18s and 19s that 'this is an extreme challenge intended for level 20 characters, you can try it if you dare').


Another thought: Combat is DDO's strong point. The non-combat mechanics of Challenges effectively remove 1-2 players from combat throughout the challenge. IMO a future Challenge that is *pure combat* against bosses has real potential. For example, think of fighting a toned-down Harry and 3 of his Lieutenants at once - the Lieutenant auras buffing the pit fiend as well. Primary star for killing the Pit Fiend before time expires, and another for killing all three Lieutenants within 30 seconds of each other, then another for killing the Fiend first, then another star for no player deaths, and a final star for not using a rest shrine that is in the arena.

[Riggs]

- They are brutally punishing of toons that are not self sufficient. Many players build characters (stereotypical Barb without Silver Flame pots, etc) to do one thing and do it well. Challenges don't work well for those toons as so much of them is 'Hey Numot, you split off from the group and kill kobolds for parts' or 'Myrmidral, answer that "Incoming"' etc.
- The scaling encourages metagaming group size around prior knowledge of the challenge. Time is Money I always solo, duo or trio for this reason. Short Cuts I want a full group for.
- Mob HP is nonsensical on 24/25. A supergeared character (one 25 is designed for) might do 30% more DPS than a modestly geared 18-20 (what 21 is designed for). So mobs should have 30-40% more HP, not 100-300% more. I think the scaling of damage players suffer from 21 to 25 is perfect. As a rule of thumb: If players are kiting mobs rather than killing them, something is wrong. Likewise if the most effective thing a melee can do is UMD Enervation scrolls on mobs, again something is wrong.
- Mob HP also scales too much with party class makeup. The Cloud Giant in 20 Time is Money seems to have less HP when in a 3-player all melee group than when I've soloed it on a Wizard or Sorc.



One suggestion: Allow raid groups to attempt challenges (with further scaling). Then instead of sending off 1 character to deal with an 'Incoming' in a 4 player group, we could send two Barbarians AND a Bard or Cleric in an 11 or 12 player group. That lets the 'I do one thing and do it well' builds be useful in challenges. You have solo to raid scaling tech in the Cannith Manufactuary.

I'm not sure what your intention was re. underlevel (17-19th level) toons in 21-25 challenges. You gave the challenges XP and put a 'soft lockout' of 'you must have a 20 in your group to enter' rather than a raid-timer style 'hard lockout', indicating you want characters to be able to attempt 21-25 challenges pre-20, but getting in to them requires a 20 in group. Can I suggest changing this to a hard lockout of level 1-16 characters, and letting 17-20s in freely (possibly with a warning to 17s, 18s and 19s that 'this is an extreme challenge intended for level 20 characters, you can try it if you dare').


Another thought: Combat is DDO's strong point. The non-combat mechanics of Challenges effectively remove 1-2 players from combat throughout the challenge. IMO a future Challenge that is *pure combat* against bosses has real potential.

yeah, scaling is really whack.

Each level up adds a lot more than one level of challange and hp and monster stats it seems.

And if you have to split up in a lot of them to handle kobolds on the line, getting crests, killing, defending etc - anyone not self sufficient becomes really limited in usefulness.

[NXPlasmid]

Another thought: Combat is DDO's strong point. The non-combat mechanics of Challenges effectively remove 1-2 players from combat throughout the challenge. IMO a future Challenge that is *pure combat* against bosses has real potential. For example, think of fighting a toned-down Harry and 3 of his Lieutenants at once - the Lieutenant auras buffing the pit fiend as well. Primary star for killing the Pit Fiend before time expires, and another for killing all three Lieutenants within 30 seconds of each other, then another for killing the Fiend first, then another star for no player deaths, and a final star for not using a rest shrine that is in the arena.

How different is that from any of the (fill in the blank) Assaults? except you get tokens along the way?

[Kushiel]

...and have not stepped foot back in one since; and am very unlikely to up until (if) I absolutely have to do them for enough favor when the time arrives for me to do my Artificer lives.

1) I hate timed missions in general, but especially where timing is extremely tight.

2) The dungeon had some sort of specialized semi-corporeal critter in it (or something like that) that made them as annoying to fight as scorpians, wraiths, umbrals, and ogre magi... not always 'there' when I loosed an arrow, or gone after I'd already cast and 'wasted' sp. And as usual they all moved so much faster than me, had better AC/HP, and never failed a casting attempt, nor had "bad facing" nor ran out of SP.

3) Yet another new recipe-driven mechanic to collect and inventory (if I'd enjoyed it enough to keep trying).