A sneak peek at Update 24’s dungeons … and beyond

[EllisDee37]

This game will NEVER have an end game like Cetus wants. Its just isnt that kind of game and never will be. So...

I disagree. There was a clearly defined and robust endgame pre-MotU, I think, with tons of epic quests, several epic raids, and a bunch of high level heroic raids that still offered some challenge and some desirable loot for endgame players.

[Enderoc]

I would like to see a 12 man raid like the airship battle in three barrel cove where only the players arm the artillery and repair the ship as a precursor to going into the raid...maybe even taking the airship through the demonweb...which would unlock airship access for those who complete it inside evening star. Maybe a quest chain where the rift between worlds brings conflict and alliances with the monsters found in both worlds as it starts penetrating both.

[LeslieWest_GuitarGod]

I disagree. There was a clearly defined and robust endgame pre-MotU, I think, with tons of epic quests, several epic raids, and a bunch of high level heroic raids that still offered some challenge and some desirable loot for endgame players.

Those raids and epic quests still exist. I dont remember a time when I saw the majority of "end gamers" state the above... It was always, TOO EASY, or OK DID THAT now what... either way, at the end of the day, there is no way Turbine will be able to churn out enough challenging new content for a player like Cetus.

So, Id like to see an end game where the majority of those that reach levels 27-30 feel a challenge. That said, if we were to have another difficulty setting above EE, then maybe we can start talking about providing challenge to long time players and even Cetus. I would be all for that.

[Ayseifn]

Those raids and epic quests still exist. I dont remember a time when I saw the majority of "end gamers" state the above... It was always, TOO EASY, or OK DID THAT now what... either way, at the end of the day, there is no way Turbine will be able to churn out enough challenging new content for a player like Cetus.

So, Id like to see an end game where the majority of those that reach levels 27-30 feel a challenge. That said, if we were to have another difficulty setting above EE, then maybe we can start talking about providing challenge to long time players and even Cetus. I would be all for that.

The desirable loot is the part you're missing not just the challenge. Nothing here looks like something I'll want to be wearing once the cap goes up so no point in farming. Better off just TRing over and over until I get bored and quit, heck I just took 3 months off because I hate TRing and would prefer to chill at cap farming items.

[IronClan]

Those raids and epic quests still exist. I dont remember a time when I saw the majority of "end gamers" state the above... It was always, TOO EASY, or OK DID THAT now what... either way, at the end of the day, there is no way Turbine will be able to churn out enough challenging new content for a player like Cetus.

Just because you can always find someone complaining (about everything) doesn't mean there wasn't a solid end game there, their own Ex developer stated that they made a mistake by outstripping old end game without a new end game in place.

You are just arbitrarily saying "it can't be like that again" when it can be, if they were willing to. Just like you're saying arbitrarily there's no way they can churn out enough content... They can if they're willing.

For starters they could do the "old raid revamp" people have been suggesting over and over for the last couple years.

Update all the old dead raids without all this "inventing new stories and redoing textures, NPC's/dialogs, and re-inventing the loot to be different" thing they love to do. Make +5 items have a level 30 +10 version, with 3[W], and other end game relevant affix values... give the mobs X times more HP level 30 appropriate offensive and defensive values, give traps relevant damage values and saves, and be done with it. Instead they spend time making Air ships in 3BC that no one sees because barely anyone runs that content, because it's irrelevant to people who have had their fill of ETR'ing which judging by how empty the game is becoming, are most people. Instead of adding Lady Vol in and getting the girl who voiced Anna to do a terribad Lady Vol (teenie bopper Vol?), just update the numbers of the old raid. Instead of working on scripts and AI and story and making Abbot into an easy arena beat down, just tweak the original to have relevant values.

VOD
HOX
LOB
MA
Titan

All dead raids, unused content that could be polished up without new stories new texturing, new AI or scripting, or crafting systems. and polish up some of the lack luster VON5-6 and CitW loot and boost the mob's a tad in those two while they're at it.

Then if desired leave Shroud and TOD for later for a full story "reboot" like they did Orchard.

To say it's impossible is massively wrong, in fact it could be accomplished by an intern with a set of rules on post it notes to follow as he batch edits the item and mob data bases of each raid.

"make CR19 800hp mobs into CR40 8000hps"
"make new version of +5 ML20 items into +10 ML30 items"
"seeker 6 becomes seeker 12 on new version"
"Strength +6 becomes +11"
"flaming 1d6 becomes Flaming blast 3d6 (or whatever)"

The problem is not that polishing loot and Mob CR's takes forever, the problem is that making new voice overs, new stories, re-texturing, making new AI for new fights, takes almost as long as just making new content... SO they might as well just do that. Their pride and their sense of "we can do it better than the previous Devs" hubris keeps them from doing the most SIMPLE basic revamp that would give us a huge end game. Imagine having 9 raids to do instead of 3?

Fly me to boston give me access to the data base files and I'd polish 2 old raids per week, while sleeping under Maj Mal's old desk, and surviving on mountain dew and Pumpkin spice iced coffees.

[MangLord]

You just mentioned all the reasons why casuals will not like the update, but those of us that like challenge need to have a bone thrown to us after the last few updates that transformed the game and completely geared it to casual players. Yes, if done right, the next update might have an inkling of challenge. Some of us are happy about that.

I'm definitely not casual, just annoyed by the choices of enemies designed to make our gaming seem "harder" when it's really just "more irritating".

In reality, a room full of beholders is not more challenging, (fully expecting a wave after wave quest of Taken with jaunty caps peppered with beholders for "challenge" for the fashion show quest in the update. #superyawn) it just becomes an exercise in who has farmed more pale lavender ioun stones. A casual who hasn't farmed any has no chance, while a pro that might have 2-3 on tap will just cheese/yawn/whine the day after the update. EE (in general) is largely a study in who has good DPS with enough twitch skills to jump out of a surrounding mob and pop a quickened self heal when they see their red bar drop below half. I'd much rather face a clever puzzle (without crutching on copy pasting the wiki solution into my bio) than relying on gobs of farmed gear and buffs to get me through every quest on autopilot. Buff, punch, punch, heal, punch is pretty much lowest common denominator gaming.

I love challenge, but if the challenge is destroyed by farming gear to beat it, then it really wasn't a challenge at all. A real challenge that couldn't be beaten by wiki would be a complex, random puzzle. Imagine how awful that would be for pros watching our blitz time out while forced to spend 10-15 minutes working out a randomized puzzle with no easy wiki solution.

Worst case scenario would be a quest where NPC dialogue is randomized and you actually have to read what the NPCs are saying and respond correctly to advance. I can already see Garbage Pail Kids Adam Bomb caricatures detonating all across midwest suburbia.

[MangLord]

"make CR19 800hp mobs into CR40 8000hps"

Seriously, this one thing would make worlds of difference for performance. Instead of blasting out modest 30mbs connection speeds with a screen full of weak mob spawns every few minutes, how about we introduce one or two very tough enemies for the party to deal with instead? Epic Spinner of Shadows does a great job with a few bad-ass Hezrous for the party to deal with, rather than 100 stupid spiders lagging out the instance every few minutes like Thunderholme wilderness with 50 skeletons on screen at any one time, and lagwiping every time you have more than 6 people in the instance. I've never heard of anyone lagging out in SoS. No wonder the Thunderholme raids are notorious for lag. The theory there is that the more junk you throw at players the more fun they'll have, until the home servers or third party service providers can't keep up with the demand on upload/download speeds and no one has a good time. Has anyone from Turbine every tried to play HE Friends in Low Places with a full party from home? I guarantee you won't be able to finish this quest with a full party of capped toons on normal people 30-40mbs connections because everyone will lagwipe every time with the massive amount of mobs constantly being processed. Interesting concept but terrible design for a game reliant on internet connection speeds.

[LeslieWest_GuitarGod]

Just because you can always find someone complaining (about everything) doesn't mean there wasn't a solid end game there, their own Ex developer stated that they made a mistake by outstripping old end game without a new end game in place.

You are just arbitrarily saying "it can't be like that again" when it can be, if they were willing to.

just like you're saying arbitrarily there's no way they can churn out enough content... They can if they're willing.

Of course there was an end game, there always was. In todays DDO however, "willing" and "able" are two completely different worlds. They CAN NOT churn out enough new challenging content for the hungriest powergamers. Thats just the way it is. We are going to have to accept that.

But, they can for the majority of us. That's the part I think you missed.

They had no choice but to strip out the old end game because they didnt have the staff, nor the time, to do it any other way. They needed to make the game more accessible for more people. They achieved that. That was bound to **** off longtime players. TR and Epic systems were put in the game to enhance replayability. But in doing so they've stretched the rubber band so far out wack its amazing they've kept the game as solid as it is.

DDO is still a great game. In fact its probably a better game than its ever been before, minus the lack of challenge. However putting out legendary content like Temple of Elemental Evil just great news.

As they begin to form this new end game for DDO, I hope to see them really churn out new content. However, that alone wont be enough. I believe Turbine should take a close look at their ingenious difficulty settings system and create a new level above EE. DDO actually has a unique ability to attract casual and powergamer because of their variety in difficulty settings. This is where I think the devs need to spend some time.

All this is just my opi of course...

[LeslieWest_GuitarGod]

To say it's impossible is massively wrong, in fact it could be accomplished by an intern with a set of rules on post it notes to follow as he batch edits the item and mob data bases of each raid.

"make CR19 800hp mobs into CR40 8000hps"
"make new version of +5 ML20 items into +10 ML30 items"
"seeker 6 becomes seeker 12 on new version"
"Strength +6 becomes +11"
"flaming 1d6 becomes Flaming blast 3d6 (or whatever)"

The problem is not that polishing loot and Mob CR's takes forever, the problem is that making new voice overs, new stories, re-texturing, making new AI for new fights, takes almost as long as just making new content... SO they might as well just do that. Their pride and their sense of "we can do it better than the previous Devs" hubris keeps them from doing the most SIMPLE basic revamp that would give us a huge end game. Imagine having 9 raids to do instead of 3?

Fly me to boston give me access to the data base files and I'd polish 2 old raids per week, while sleeping under Maj Mal's old desk, and surviving on mountain dew and Pumpkin spice iced coffees.

I agree. We are saying the same thing here. The type of thing you are talking about here is exactly what I mean by adding a tougher difficulty setting across the board. Neverwinter is a prime example of how NOT to do respawns. DDO in its darkest day is leagues better in this category. Jacking up the quality of the mobs/bosses on its own EI (Epic Insane) level would be brilliant. I dont think they should just boost on EE though. I think they need to ADD a new setting, adding more challenge for us long time players while offering the same difficulty settings for the large majority of players.

LOL! About that plane ticket... 2 re-polished raids a week by yourself??? Thats some strong Pumpkin spice iced coffee yer drinkin' there!!

[IronClan]

I agree. We are saying the same thing here. The type of thing you are talking about here is exactly what I mean by adding a tougher difficulty setting across the board. Neverwinter is a prime example of how NOT to do respawns. DDO in its darkest day is leagues better in this category. Jacking up the quality of the mobs/bosses on its own EI (Epic Insane) level would be brilliant. I dont think they should just boost on EE though. I think they need to ADD a new setting, adding more challenge for us long time players while offering the same difficulty settings for the large majority of players.

LOL! About that plane ticket... 2 re-polished raids a week by yourself??? Thats some strong Pumpkin spice iced coffee yer drinkin' there!!

I've done enough Mod'ing of games to say with confidence that I could probably do 1 a day. We're talking about increasing values of the 7 or 8 named loot items in a raids database. and usually 6 or 10 mobs types As simple as changing hex values or integers, No creating new art, no new AI scripts, voice overs, new textures, new NPC dialog.

This is what Chaos blade looks like in a DDO item database(or a fair approximation of it) somewhere in Turbine land:
1234(Item ID), 20(minimum level), +6(Enhancement Bonus) 2d8(damage dice) +0(the +[W] value) 1234(prefix ID) 1234(Suffix ID) 1234(special ability) 1234(other unique affixes) 4(slot color 4 means red) 0(additional slot color 0 means none)

The ID's point to static affixes (True Chaos 1d6 is a static value in a database full of prefixes it has an ID string) you change 1234(prefix ID) to 4321(prefix ID) and suddenly every new Chaos Blade comes with that prefix instead of 1234, lets say 4321 is the ID of Absolute Chaos 3d6... so I've upgraded it, by pointing to the more powerful version of the prefix.

Now we turn the +5 into a +10, the ML from 20 to 30, +0[W] becomes +3[W], Anarchic Burst to Blast, True Chaos was just changed to Absolute Chaos, Vampirism to Greater, Vorpal to Sovereign, and Red slot becomes Purple and Red.

Now hit "save as" and email it to who ever is in charge of Q/A since MajMal went across the hall to LOTRO and get them to read over changes to make sure I didn't turn eSoS back into a X4 multiplier "by mistake"

[Tarinia]

Snip "Update 24 will round out the year with new quests, new Festivult cookies, and a new event that centers on something we can all agree on: looting chests! We’ll be continuing our work on the Anauroch Desert (in the Forgotten Realms), planning for Sentient Weapons, and developing another Classic Dungeon like the Haunted Halls of Eveningstar. We expect these to be something you’ll see in the first half of 2015. We’re pushing out the level cap for now to make sure we have plenty of questing to support your journey through the highest levels of DDO. Hitting level 30 will be a big milestone for DDO, and we want to put it out when the timing is right, and make sure its design keeps up with the way you, the players want to play DDO. "

Looks like this is the confusion

The letter is later out by Update but, the future plans are all crammed into this bit with U24.

So do this mean we are still getting Anaurock in the future?

The Event will it be ready soon?

Yes, you are totally right- in the old producer letters it was always stated, that Turbine will develop Anauroch AND a new classic module (now named ToEE) AND lv30.
So why should be there a decision between them- they have promised and should developed both as soon as possible or are resources shorted again and the VIP charges not?
Best regards
Tarinia

[nibel]

Those raids and epic quests still exist. I dont remember a time when I saw the majority of "end gamers" state the above... It was always, TOO EASY, or OK DID THAT now what...

IMO, this is mostly because DDO is no longer an alt-haven like it was when the cap was 20.

Before, even a first life character could be amazing at high-end epic quests. The number requirements were not too high, and we really benefitted from a diverse group formation, to the point that almost everyone had a handful of alts to "cover gaps" if needed: A cc-wiz alt, a rogue alt, a healer alt, a tank alt, etc. You had to gear all those characters, and most gear or ingredients were either unbound or BtA. So you could bring your healer to play an eVoN and pass down the SoS shard you looted to your DPS barbarian, or get your CC wiz into TTT and pass the Midnight Greetings shard to your rogue. The game allowed everyone to play with any character they might have and reap their rewards account-wide, with very few exceptions (once you crafted an epic item is was bound, the few BtC items out there, etc).

Since MotU and the introduction of Epic Destinies, only people with A TON of free time can reasonably have alts and expect to run high-end content. This have the tendency for most people to have one single uber character, with all past lifes (since they are focusing in a single character, why not?^), all btc gear, only have to craft one or two items of the crafting systems (TF weapons, shadow armors, dragon armors, etc)... and the system is still designed with the underling thinking that we have ten alts to spread the love.

That is why so many people now get to the new quests, farm them to the death, and asks for more. Because they are not playing to challenge themselves. They are playing for the loot (and there is NOTHING wrong with playing for the loot), and once they have the loot, they get bored.We have plenty of challenging content out there, people just don't run them. Cannith Challenges are still hard to six-star most of them. Titan still requires a ton of coordination and is a raid where raw power is meaningless. Ditto for Abbot. And all failing, there is always self-gimping for challenge (build a flavor character, never access your TR chace, build a new character in a new server, etc).

[DarthCaedus]

The Temple of Elemental Evil.

Yep, we will be creating our own version of the original, classic Temple inside DDO. We’re very excited about adapting one of the most famous modules in Dungeons and Dragons history, and we hope you are too.

In the meantime, though, we have a date with insanity. Hope to see everyone this weekend on Lamannia for a preview of Update 24!

Do we travel to greyhawk to get there?

[DarthCaedus]

I disagree. There was a clearly defined and robust endgame pre-MotU, I think, with tons of epic quests, several epic raids, and a bunch of high level heroic raids that still offered some challenge and some desirable loot for endgame players.

It was nice, but there weren't many people participating in endgame on a regular basis.

[Uska]

Do we travel to greyhawk to get there?

Looks like sort of but no village or glimpse into the world

[Cetus]

Those raids and epic quests still exist. I dont remember a time when I saw the majority of "end gamers" state the above... It was always, TOO EASY, or OK DID THAT now what... either way, at the end of the day, there is no way Turbine will be able to churn out enough challenging new content for a player like Cetus.

So, Id like to see an end game where the majority of those that reach levels 27-30 feel a challenge. That said, if we were to have another difficulty setting above EE, then maybe we can start talking about providing challenge to long time players and even Cetus. I would be all for that.

Look, I'm not sure why you lost any hope that a healthy endgame can emerge in DDO. I suspect that the lack of things to do at endgame is partially the reason why the population is thinning. Along with no advertisement, the game is far from what it used to be in terms of just getting a 12 man group together for a raid.

I gave two simple guidelines for the devs to make "players like cetus" happy.

1. The loot that drops on EE should not be attainable on any other difficulty or AH. If you want EE loot, you must run EE. You can call this tiered loot, but mythic/epic is also a way of tiering loot.

EE needs to have worthwhile carrots.

2. Elimination of raid bypass timers and the inclusion of 16 hour timers for big adventures like ToEE. This will make this stuff last a lot longer.

[Qhualor]

Look, I'm not sure why you lost any hope that a healthy endgame can emerge in DDO. I suspect that the lack of things to do at endgame is partially the reason why the population is thinning. Along with no advertisement, the game is far from what it used to be in terms of just getting a 12 man group together for a raid.

I gave two simple guidelines for the devs to make "players like cetus" happy.

1. The loot that drops on EE should not be attainable on any other difficulty or AH. If you want EE loot, you must run EE. You can call this tiered loot, but mythic/epic is also a way of tiering loot.

EE needs to have worthwhile carrots.

2. Elimination of raid bypass timers and the inclusion of 16 hour timers for big adventures like ToEE. This will make this stuff last a lot longer.

3. Disable duping

[Kaiserkreuz]

Still no update to other named Items from older pack to have augment slots and increased weapon dmg to be in concise with with current loot gen.

Still no update to range power for range users?

Still no melee power for Two Weapon Fighting?

Hmm why is there no Epic Destiny feat for Sword and Shield style of melee combat?

[EllisDee37]

the old producer letters it was always stated, that Turbine will develop Anauroch AND a new classic module (now named ToEE) AND lv30.
So why should be there a decision between them

Because of all the layoffs at Turbine.

[EllisDee37]

2. Elimination of raid bypass timers and the inclusion of 16 hour timers for big adventures like ToEE. This will make this stuff last a lot longer.

I'm starting to lean toward EE-only loot, if only because thinking about the pre-MotU endgame, a big part of that was epic gear, which of course was only acquirable by running epics. A similar mechanic would have to be EE-only loot. It's simply not endgame if you can get the loot on EN.

So how about two loot tiers: Epic (EC, EN and EH version, all the same) and Mythic (EE version.) Or whatever you want to call them. The non-EE version is what would drop in 20th lists for raids. Meaning to get the really good stuff, it has to drop in a chest, and it has to be run on EE.

As the second part of the plan, raid bypass timers only bypass EN and EH. It won't let you go in on EE until your 66 hours are up, even if you use a bypass. But you can blast though on EN (or EH) using bypasses to farm 20th lists as frequently as you like, keeping in mind that 20th lists drop the weaker tier loot, not the EE loot.

I'm thinking the idea is to blast through the raid a bunch of times using timers to get to 20th lists in order to kit yourself up with the weaker tier loot, then once you're squared away with that you can then start farming the Mythic versions on EE at once per 3 days.

Would something like that be workable?