LET'S TALK: Challenges

[Riggs]

And just because it is here.

Air elementals auto knockback no save no roll no defense is also whack and OP.

Getting a roll to avoid being knocked DOWN is nice - but you still get knocked BACK even when you save. Bad.

[Ninety]

farming for epic tokens is nice. that was one of my major complains was the cost of slotting everything jsut takes forever. If TRing ever gets easier, this will definitely be nice for TRing as well.

however on the non-epic token turn in side of things, some of the non-epics have such a low reward that it's tiring to run. Thinking picture portals here. I had a 2400 score run, and recieved about 300 rewards.

also some of the saves of the level 20 challenges are harder than the regular epics.

[xTethx]

I'd like the challenges if you could actually slot the epic items.

[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.

[AMDarkwolf]

I wonder.. are these really discussions, or a random thread popped up just to appear 'as if we care'?

Ive gone over the other 2 and this one and I think I saw a dev comment ONCE out of like 15bashillion pages.

If its a discussion i think you should take part in it beyond the first 'tell me what u think' post.

If you show some interest in your own thread/question, you may get MUCH more responses and a lot more helpful constructive advice/input.

[voodoogroves]

So, I kinda like them. However ...


They are rarely run. For things that are there 24x7 and essentially a good dozen different quests, they simply are not run. I've got a guildie who, because of the token/whatever mechanics, basically never runs them (he's premium). They are just too much hassle to coordinate. I think the premium and free mechanics are a herring and really don't contribute meaningfully. I don't bother with the VIP tokens and I trash most oft he things I get from kills simply because the inventory space is more important than the noise.

Rewards are nice, the turn-ins for other things are nice as well (tokens, fragments, potions, etc.) This appeals to me as it means I can always be working towards some real goal. The ingredient turn in is handy, but honestly ... too many freaking different ingredients. There's what ... 12 challenges (basically) and about as many ingredients, etc. Ingredient overload.

Couple these two and the challenges essentially require a spare inventory slot in and of themselves.

[oradafu]

First, I'll comment on the current Challenges, then I'm move on to what I hope to see in future Challenges.

With the current Challenges, the main problem is the repetitiveness of the Challenges. The Vault was just 3 Challenges on 4 different maps another nothing more. The gimmick of different objectives or mobs was just too thin. Vault should have been released as 3 Challenges on 3 Maps with I'd say no more than 2 variations for each Challenge. Also, I'm not sure why the Epic Challenges were separated from the regular Challenges except for maybe coding for the Epic ingredient. So what we got was the same thing repeated several times cluttering the map.

Cluttering the map is a minor issue, but if you do it in a group, you get alot of "which one is it?", "oops, I stepped into the wrong one", etc type situations.

Finally, for the cost of the pack, there was not enough items in the pack. The pack cost the same as the Necro4 bundle, yet the items offered were lacking. There was no healer item and only one docent. Additionally, not all melee style weapons were offered, such as the lack of quarterstaff for acrobats. This pack would have been an ideal place to place a new dwarven axe and other overlooked weapons.

There's other things, but the above seem to be my biggest complaints about Vault.

===

What I expect in the future...

First, let's look at some currently in game quests that can have Challenge type variations. As much as several people hate these quests, a Challenge that is similar to Kobold Assault, Devil Assault and Sinister Storage. This would seem like a no brainer to me since the concept is simple: wave after wave of mobs and each mob increasing their CR until the player is dead. Let's see how long a player/group can last in such a condition with no time limit and no shrines.

Another no brainer would be a Challenge similar to Stealthy Repossession. Objectives could be to not be noticed, not to kill certain mobs, killing fewer than a certain number of mobs.

I like the suggestion that someone pitched about a Challenge based on Blown to Bits.

Puzzle based challenges would be a nice change up also. Perhaps you fight a mob to get to a locked room where you need to solve a puzzle to advance. Rinse and repeat. This could be a good way for people to get familiar with puzzles already in the game. How many types have you had someone say "I'm not good at puzzles" in the Shroud. Well, now you have a place where you can practice/teach without needing a raid group.

I'll probably post later with more ideas.

[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).

[Ganolyn]

I wonder.. are these really discussions, or a random thread popped up just to appear 'as if we care'?

Ive gone over the other 2 and this one and I think I saw a dev comment ONCE out of like 15bashillion pages.

If its a discussion i think you should take part in it beyond the first 'tell me what u think' post.

If you show some interest in your own thread/question, you may get MUCH more responses and a lot more helpful constructive advice/input.

They have been quite active in the Enhancements thread. More so than in any other, so I hope that activity continues.

[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.

[BananaHat]

My two cp:

The challenges are nice in that there is a sense of progression once you figure out how they work enough to get a completion. "Huzzah! Assuming I don't screw up, I can farm this item in about 9 hours!" sort of progression. Soloing/Duoing (which is what I've mostly run them on) seems fairly workable, but larger parties have yielded even higher ingredients/time when people actually contribute to the challenge, which is a good thing as it encourages grouping.

I will say that I completely and utterly hate the Rushmore mansion. Why? The stupid crest doors. Example: First crest door, need 1 monkey. What do me and my wife get before the monkey finally shows up after 5 minutes? About 5 of every single other crest after breaking everything in the area and killing lots of guys (we ran out of time trying to find more monkeys for other doors too). Being held up in a certain area by something so unlucky makes the entire quest entirely too luck based. I do not feel like I am making progress in the quest so much as just getting really lucky and getting the crests I need. Am I worried about the boss difficulty? I wish, I can hardly ever get far enough into the mansion to find them. Even when I did complete, the returns were very poor for the time spent in the mansion. I am probably missing something major about the quest though.

At this point however, I have decided not to run all Rushmore mansion challenges, I would much rather farm another one of the challenges twice as much than run that horrible challenge.

Here is my suggestion:
"To further thwart you, Rushmore has smashed up most of the crests that control his security doors. You may be able to assembly the fragments into a workable piece however and there may even be crests he missed hidden about the mansion."

Have the picture illusion guards drop 1d3 crest fragments and allow 10 fragments to be used as a skeleton key for any crest. The whole crests would be a bonus and allow you to progress faster. This change would alleviate the "I just spent the last 7 minutes of this quest trying to get the one crest I need to progress and now I'm out of time" issue.

[k1ngp1n]

For me its an entirely psychological element: there is no feeling of progress, only a timer. For this reason I eschew Kobold Assault and other quests of its like (eDA included - its boring to me).

[moops]

I have to admit, that I didn't want to do these because I don't like this kind of gameplay

BUT

I started to jump in with my guildies, and I find many of them quite fun to play. The story line could be a bit stronger tho.

[bhgiant]

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

+1 for the forum reference

[slimkj]

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?

I don't see why you have made the distinction around gameplay so many times - every element of the game involves gameplay. Or do you mean "the combat system" or "quest design" or both? Or something else?

Generally speaking, I've said before one of things I don't really enjoy about them but here it is again with some other bits.

• Defined goals with small incremental steps. I prefer the random chance as at least there's a chance of an early pull and beating the odds. Here there is no chance, only (usually too) small steps. For the longer challenges that can put potential time to acquire an item into a "not worth the sustained effort" category for me. Hence I've not run them much at all. I'm a gambler I guess.
• Map size / back & forth design - some of them feel like blatant running timesinks.
• Inflated HP of boss mobs - same supposed difficulty-increasing design I dislike wherever it features in game. It feels littered in a concentrated area in these though, perhaps because they are a smaller set of a subtype of gameplay. Slower =/= more challenging
• Cove fatigue - some of them are just simply too much like Cove which, due to Point 1, I tired of very quickly. At least with cove you got something worth spending if you didn't complete or failed an objective though.
• I think the concept of short burst activity over longer questing and being more solo-friendly is what I was expecting and found some of them longer than I can run most quests, for poor xp/min and loot that is too far in the distance to be enough carrot (see above)

Some positives;

• Short challenges are ideal whilst waiting for friends or if you have little time and can be soloed.
• Rushmore's Mansion is nicely designed, apart from the size, and the wonderfully silly buffs can make it more variable (and hence more tolerable in repetition)

That second list is shorter than I'd hoped, I like to try and be balanced most times. Sorry I really can't think of other positives now, but I'm sure there must be some. It's been some time since I ran them and of course negatives tend to stick with us better.

In short, they tick too many of the staple MMO tricks boxes to be of interest to me even short-term. If I were not VIP I would not buy the pack, even if it were half the price. I tried them briefly because they were there.

Not sure that's what you were after given the heavy hints at gameplay oriented feedback but as I don't really understand that frame of reference, it's what I've got.

[MaxwellEdison]

I've only recently started running them at all (tried 4 different ones each with no more than 5 runs so far) so can't form a solid opinion. My main toon is my monk so my preferred type of quest is one which allows me to run directly at a group of enemies and wail away at my keyboard like a bad actor pretending to type until I'm surrounded by a pile of corpses and candy. Some of the challenges appear to fit this mold and make me glad. Others do not.

Some friends and I are going to try out leveling new vet-status toons exclusively through challenges so I'm sure I'll have more varied complaints in the future. I will say my time in Cove made me focus extensively on a self sufficient character though as anyone who is not is no more than a soul stone in waiting who makes the challenge harder.

[fuzzy1guy]

Redacted

[Sgt_Hart]

Take Extraplanar mining + Lava caves. Same Dog, Different ends of it.

How about...

1.) Get kobold to point X. Give 'em 8 torches by the start, but make the party run a kobold to a point in the dungeon to win. This shift's the priority and mechanic a bit I'd say.

2.) How about a mansion-like challenge with the objective to sneak past / avoid the spawns?

3.) How about a challenge to (Literally) herd kobolds to a collection point. Simple to code: GetNearestPlayerCharacter, Face 180, Move 10 feet. On a heartbeat, or however you guy's do reoccurring AI events.

4.) Next weird Idea: Kobold Assault redux. OK, not KA, or weapon shipment, but a similar wave-based Hold Point X. To ratchet up the diff, make it "Keep X alive"

5.) Prey on the hunter, Redux: A race in Randomly generated maze, Hell make each party member "ring the bell" to end it. Start with 2K points, and drop one per second until its 1st rung. Each ring = 1 more second until next tick. When all have rung: Victory. Admittedly, this'll mostly be loved by solo'ers.

6.) Haywire Redux: a "grab the money and run" quest. Hell make a "steal the dragons horde" And give the party a literal horde to fill their inventory with loot. Do it in a box, let 'em pull **** until they have no inventory slot left, and give 'em 15 items more than that. The challenge? 2 minutes later the dragons home, and chasing. Make it nasty enough so that its run-or-die and award points on how much (Platinum value)loot the party manages to get to the scoring point. Give player's the option to turn in treasure for double (its otherwise) score value. Fluff text: House Cannith wants to spite the dragon.

7.) I'll see what more I can dream up, but I (And I suspect a good many others) were thrilled to hear about challenges, and a bit less impressed with the... variety or different tasks.

Still, let's be honest, you guy's have most of these mechanic's already.

[Spoonwelder]

I have only run Picture Portals - twice - two wipes.....so discount my notes based upon that.

First - there are never any LFMs up and since I don't know the quests I don't want to lead one and the two times I did the leader was just ok but didn't give very good instructions so we failed. So bad taste for the challenges so far....

Second - the loot just didn't really get me going - looked on the Wiki and saw undead and dragon stuff....not high utility in my mind vs. the level of grind required. That is what I simplified it to on a glance - so I haven't seen a real need to run the quests....but if someone says hey this one item is best in slot for X build(s) then I will look again.

Third - which builds from the first - I got these tokens - and wanted to use them to help in the quest but it was absolutely unclear to me as to how to use them (and the leader was no help either) - frustration set in at that point because trying to figure something out that seems like it should be simple by yourself in a timed quest != fun.

Fourth - grind - I don't like grind ie. doing the same quest 100 times to get something....heck I haven't even finished 4 loops of Litany to flag for Abbot on a single character....getting a sigil frame filled only happened by accident on a TR that ran each quest 3-4 times for XP. As you can see 3-4 times through something is about my limit. That said I have no idea how much grind is involved to get good challenge loot - but it smells like grind, looks like grind....maybe even tastes like grind.

That is all.

[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.