Needs a major ingredient exchange change

[Uska]

No

[BigErkyKid]

I have counted the chests in part II. I found 7 small chests with ingredients only, and IIRC one of the end chests had ings.
http://ddowiki.com/page/Secret_of_th...rs%27_Stockade

Part III has less chests, unless I missed some.
http://ddowiki.com/page/Assault_on_t...he_Slave_Lords

Thanks for the answer. So at 8 chests (7 small plus end) x 5 ingredients per chest this is 40 per run.

In order to craft a full item:

= 600 Legendary Broken Shackles, 600 Legendary Chain Links, 600 Legendary Broken Collars, 200 Legendary Staff Splinters, and 100 Shattered Symbols of the Slave Lords.

There are discrepancies between the items, so I am just going to focus on the 600 ones and say you get the rest for free from rounding error.

1800 between shackles, chains, and collars. At 40 per run, that's 1800/40=45 runs.

it is way more than LE raiding, but I guess this can be soloed, so there is that.

Does this number sound accurate to you guys (the ones who have ran the content)?

[Blastyswa]

Just got done doing all three quests on LE, endfight for pt3 was pretty good actually requires some communication I enjoyed it, but in needing 400 of said ingredient for an augment is too unreal considering you only get 3 from a chest at a time. If it was 3 on normal that'd make more sense because then it would be around 9-12 on LE which would make farming it worth it. If you get 3 on each difficulty you give the player no incentive to run a higher difficulty which is a shame because it's much more enjoyable on said difficulty. Cut the cost of augments to 200 to make it a decent grind still, but a much more reasonable one too and I grind out all my gear, but this is still to unrealistic which leads me to believe the devs don't understand the grind of ingredients like say in shroud or toee because if they did it wouldn't be this bizzare. Change the number of ingredients needed and amount dropped on LE and it'll be all good. The quests were great though, great variety in mobs and mix of puzzles and traps. Nice job on that

Agreed. Me and some guildies were discussing this, and agreed on a number of about 60-70 hours spent in the quests per item, making it 300-350 hours per 5 piece set. Assuming it's about 90 days until the next update, that would mean spending about 4 hours every day just grinding that quest (I say grinding because at the point, it's not fun and I'm not playing the game, I'm just grinding it) in order to get 1 5 piece set; I was originally planning to make 15 sets, one for each of my characters, but given that would take over 5,000 hours (About 2/3 of a year spent just in those quests, further limited by chest ransack) meaning that if I wanted to get all 15 of those sets completed within a year, I'd have to spend 16 hours a day running that quest; not even 16 hours playing DDO, or selling loot off, or running raids or guildy runs, but just 16 hours in those quests.

If this update is released as is, there will be some initial grind for named items before everyone realizes what a massive time sink this new crafting system is, and then all these quests will go the way of restless isles. Personally I hate the quests in this update anyway, because they take an incredibly long time and require absolutely no skill to complete any part of them (On my warlock, I did not even heal for a vast majority of the quests, and I didn't even need to use shining through; that mean's I was taking less than 160 damage per 2 seconds, the current form of these quests is insanely easy) but spending a mandatory hour in a quest to receive 1/60th of the mats required to make one item is just insane, and any with jobs/a life outside of DDO won't have the time or the patience to play this content much at all.

I wouldn't say the crafted loot is on the same power level as a 5 piece LGS at all, especially given that the set bonuses for melee/defense are pretty bad; the niche I was picturing for this loot looking at it previewed was as something to wear on alts that was less grindy than a 5 piece LGS set; at the moment this set is MUCH worse for the grind (With 1 hour LE runs getting 300 codex runes a run, a full LGS set would take 66 hours or so, which is about the same time it takes to get an inferior Slavers set) and the only niche for it is people who have some type of adversity to Legendary Shroud. I'd recommend cutting the amount of time spent in quests to make a fully upgraded item down to 4-5 hours, making it 20-25 hours per 5 piece set. This would mean, even for someone spending 3-4 hours per day on DDO, it would take about a week to make a set. Sure this mean's one-toon wonders would be "done" with the new content in the first week, but designing the content specifically around those people by making it take a full 3 months to make a full set excludes anyone with more than one character/a life from being able to take full advantage of this gear; one-toon wonders should, and do, use 5 piece LGS sets anyway because they're superior to Slaver's sets, and Slaver's sets should be something more easily accessible for alts/casual players to give a somewhat decent gearing option that isn't inferior (Using named loot and random loot only) or a huge time sink (LGS). Making Slaver's gear more reasonable on drops would actually give this content more longevity overall, because while the players with only one character might be done with it very quickly, multi-character players and casual players (casual players being more inclined to be premium than ViP, and so buy the pack) wouldn't have to be so intimidated by hundred/thousand hour time sinks that, for someone who can play <20 hours a week, would mean spending months or years getting the gear they want, by which time either DDO will have shut down or the gear will be invalidated by new updates anyway.

[Blastyswa]

Thanks for the answer. So at 8 chests (7 small plus end) x 5 ingredients per chest this is 40 per run.

In order to craft a full item:



There are discrepancies between the items, so I am just going to focus on the 600 ones and say you get the rest for free from rounding error.

1800 between shackles, chains, and collars. At 40 per run, that's 1800/40=45 runs.

it is way more than LE raiding, but I guess this can be soloed, so there is that.

Does this number sound accurate to you guys (the ones who have ran the content)?

That seems accurate enough. The problem is though that when I soloed part 2, I was somewhat in a rush and so mad zerged the entire quest as much as possible, sprinting through it at the highest speed I could manage without having things like sprint boost or barbarian movement speed. I took very few wrong turns, killed bosses within about 15-30 seconds with ruin combos, skipped every shrine, instead just chugging pots since it was on lamma, and only really stopping to pick up loot from chests. After about 45 minutes to an hour, I was just past defeating the hobgoblins at the barracks/kennels/outpost, and had to log off due to time constraints. Based on that, for warlocks that don't spend any time at all fighting anything (I invised quite a bit, and when I did get DA everything died within 1-2 bursts) this quest takes about an hour or more to run, putting it at 45+ hours to craft a full item (45 runs). For a build that doesn't have the AoE potential of warlock, or for a player that isn't zerging at the maximum speed possible, this is longer. A full set, even with completely zerging, would therefore take 200-250 hours to make, which spread out over 3 months (the time to the next update) means about 2.5-3 hours a day spent just running these quests, or basically doing a daily run through the entire chain every day. This also ignores chest ransack, which would either extend the time taken to make a full set, or require toon swapping, presumably to an inferior toon to your main one which mean's slower completion times. In addition, I wasn't really seeing 5 mats consistently in chests; much more often I was seeing 3-4.

[BigErkyKid]

45+ hours to craft a full item (45 runs). .

I am not going to run these quests 45 hours to get an item. Everyone is saying that they are basically just easy, and yet we are expected to run those quests back to back for so long to get an item.

No. If it goes as is, I won't do it, same as I didn't do the now outlived ToEE, or I am not doing LGS for more than a few items.

I just don't trust the devs with power creep, so anything that requires above the 20 runs mark with certainty is ignored.

A proposal: make it way harder, still have several quests spread out (so if you fail to complete you won't bash in the screen) and increase vastly drop rates.

Personally, I won't bother otherwise. I cannot imagine how people who got several ToEE sets are feeling right now, and I certainly don't want to join the ranks of the burnt by power creep.


Thanks for the detailed answer!!

[MasterKernel]

Thanks for the answer. So at 8 chests (7 small plus end) x 5 ingredients per chest this is 40 per run.

I've run all of the parts from end to end and it's a lot less than 40 per run. I've got ~3-4 for completing all 3 parts for the majority of the collectables and 25 for several of them. (Sadly, Lamannia is down and I can't give the exact names.)

The point that everyone miss is : it's not 7-8 chests that will give different collectables for players, it's 7-8 chests and each of them will give you only one [of the same] type of collectable ~3-5 per quest.

[BigErkyKid]

I've run all of the parts from end to end and it's a lot less than 40 per run. I've got ~3-4 for completing all 3 parts for the majority of the collectables and 25 for several of them. (Sadly, Lamannia is down and I can't give the exact names.)

The point that everyone miss is : it's not 7-8 chests that will give different collectables for players, it's 7-8 chests and each of them will give you only one [of the same] type of collectable ~3-5 per quest.

Thanks for the clarification. Either way if there is no change, as I said I won't be doing anything that requires >40 runs. I understand they can produce extremely low amounts of content, but this is too much of a joke.

[legendkilleroll]

Its hard to create a grind currently

Without some sort of timer, it can just be ran over and over

Plus with most quests being made soloable, the ridiculous feature of multiboxing just messes anything up, when someone can have 5 extra pullers

Cant see how it can be balanced

[BigErkyKid]

Its hard to create a grind currently

Without some sort of timer, it can just be ran over and over

Plus with most quests being made soloable, the ridiculous feature of multiboxing just messes anything up, when someone can have 5 extra pullers

Cant see how it can be balanced

Difficulty gating.

As I understand there are chest at different points in the progression of the quest. At the 25% mark there is an opt chest, and so on.

Make it so hard that people typically just make it to a 50% or so mark (and hence only loot half the chests), and then increase the drop in a chest as a function of how far along it is.

The reason why drop rates are so bad is because they increase the longevity equation by simply having low drop rates:

Longevity = number of chest pulls * time to pull a chest * chance of making it to the chest.

Right now we have chance to make it to the chest ~ 1, and time to pull the chest quite low, so they can only increase longevity by increasing the number of required chest pulls. But this is not a given, they can increase difficulty and hence affect the time to pull a chest and the chance of making it to the chest. For me the best kind of difficulty is not the time to pull one, rather the chance to pull difficulty. Otherwise it is a perching + pulling fest, where people just slowly clear the quest. Not so difficult, just annoying.

As an aside, the reason why multi boxing is possible is because regardless of scaling the quest is so "Easy" that you can afford to have several toons just piking.

PS - I really hate having to loot MANY times a chest I can get to in a trivially easy way. At that point it becomes a mindless time sink.

[legendkilleroll]

Difficulty gating.

Would be nice and a change to whats been happening the last few years

But already have someone complaining there is traps, if its made really hard there will be the forum section who have taken it upon themselves to speak for the casual playerbase saying its not fair that we cant get the best stuff etc

[BigErkyKid]

Would be nice and a change to whats been happening the last few years

But already have someone complaining there is traps, if its made really hard there will be the forum section who have taken it upon themselves to speak for the casual playerbase saying its not fair that we cant get the best stuff etc

Forum* is the keyword. Because IG I don't see much support for that.

As I said, I have absolutely no interest in running that content for hours on a fotm build while talking about whatever BS in guild channel.

If that's how it plays out, I am just opting out. People not playing is people not spending, and I am sure they have metrics on how popular ToEE is.

[Cantor]

Would be nice and a change to whats been happening the last few years

But already have someone complaining there is traps, if its made really hard there will be the forum section who have taken it upon themselves to speak for the casual playerbase saying its not fair that we cant get the best stuff etc

All content is available on roflstomp normal if that's what those players want. I don't understand why there is a crusade against challenging content. They don't even make tiered loot anymore and quests with heroic option are not even a favor concern.

[Blastyswa]

All content is available on roflstomp normal if that's what those players want. I don't understand why there is a crusade against challenging content. They don't even make tiered loot anymore and quests with heroic option are not even a favor concern.

Yes, I would like to see running the quest only on LN get an item within about 10 hours of gameplay, LH within about 5 hours of gameplay, and LE within 2-3 hours of gameplay (Basically a single run through), but for scaling to be removed in this quest (Like raids), and difficulty to be increased to the point that an LE completion is non-feasible on any build, including Sentinel Warlocks, Trees, Furishuris, and Shiradi Spammer's.

[Cantor]

Yes, I would like to see running the quest only on LN get an item within about 10 hours of gameplay, LH within about 5 hours of gameplay, and LE within 2-3 hours of gameplay (Basically a single run through), but for scaling to be removed in this quest (Like raids), and difficulty to be increased to the point that an LE completion is non-feasible on any build, including Sentinel Warlocks, Trees, Furishuris, and Shiradi Spammer's.

First look I thought these game hours were a little low, but 10hrs of gameplay on normal probably means about 25 runs.

[lugoman]

Never said taking a year was ok with me, something taking that long for one person doesnt make it the same for another.

DDO has in recent times made it easier for the larger audience, alot of people can easily get what they want from a new quest within the first few days, if acquiring gear is made for the casual type what do the other types have to do? There has to be things in place for other players, i dont expect the game to be made to suit my needs but if there is something like this that takes alot of runs, atleast i know it will last longer than a week.

Oh, I dont know, how about game enjoyment? People constantly whine about the game not being a challenge then demand more loot to run EE. Just run EE for the challenge you all have been begging for.

If this grind is on par with the TOEE grind then I think my DDO days are numbered. I know a few who have made TOEE sets only to quit playing afterwards. I think that type of grind is bad for the game. It keeps them playing for the short term but they quickly burn out and stop playing.


And yes, I do want everything given to me, I dont want to "earn" anything. I want to start a level 1 toon with all the game loot in my bank! [that was sarcasm btw] Just because someone doesn't want to run 500 quests to get an item doesn't mean they want everything handed to them. Just requesting the grind be reasonable to the average player who cant play 8 hours a day.

[Blastyswa]

Never said taking a year was ok with me, something taking that long for one person doesnt make it the same for another.

DDO has in recent times made it easier for the larger audience, alot of people can easily get what they want from a new quest within the first few days, if acquiring gear is made for the casual type what do the other types have to do? There has to be things in place for other players, i dont expect the game to be made to suit my needs but if there is something like this that takes alot of runs, atleast i know it will last longer than a week.

The problem is that a lot of content is being designed around 40 hours a week players with 1 uber completionist character and no alts. Balancing loot around that standard doesn't really work all that well, because a lot of players don't have that amount of time, or they have alts, or both. Not every player wants to log in for 8 hours a day and spend that entire time running the same quest to grind out an item, and repeat that for 3 months until the next update comes and they have to repeat the process. Higher longevity content should be fun to repeat and contain things that are useful, but not a must grind; for example, this content takes a long time, and I'm already sick of it after 2 run-throughs on Lammania.
Regardless of the drop rates, assuming they become at least more reasonable than they are now, I plan to make at least 1-2 of these items for each of my toons; I already planned Constitution/Resistance/x/Quality Constitution items for basically every character I have, as well as an item for their main stat. If the loot drops are designed around that uber completionist character grinding 40 hours a week for 3 months until the next update comes out to get his 5 piece, then I might can manage a 3 piece on one character in that time; my other 14 characters will be left using mostly outdated raidgear and account bound gear because of the insane time commitment.

Make the goal that people who can only do 15-20 hours a week are able to complete 10 5 piece sets within about 3 months without having all 15-20 hours of that time spent in the quests. Heavily alted players will take longer than 3 months to get all their items, but that's fine, that extends the longevity of the raids. One toon-wonder's will go on a 48 hour binge session of nothing but Slavers, finish their set, and then proceed to post on the forums how easy the game is and that they need more endgame content. Those players are the one's who will inevitably just get back to TRing anyway, and balancing around them will result in a majority of the playerbase being excluded from crafting loot from this content. With 10 5 piece sets within 3 months playing maybe 2-4 hours a week in Slavers (Which honestly is about 1 run) casual players would be able to acquire gear for their main, average players would be able to acquire gear for several alts, and one-toon wonders would acquire the gear they'll use for 2 levels every life and keep TRing.

[legendkilleroll]

Not sure where this content being made for players who play lots of hours is coming from

Last update was 3 quests, two of them took 10mins, other was longer with opt but unless you wanted the best mythic it wasn't long til you got the item

Update before was anniversary with one quest, again very short

Before that was raids, unless you buy new timers doesn't matter how many hours you play, cant do raid for few days

About time was a longer quest again

[Blastyswa]

Not sure where this content being made for players who play lots of hours is coming from

Last update was 3 quests, two of them took 10mins, other was longer with opt but unless you wanted the best mythic it wasn't long til you got the item

Update before was anniversary with one quest, again very short

Before that was raids, unless you buy new timers doesn't matter how many hours you play, cant do raid for few days

About time was a longer quest again

The issue isn't the duration of the quests, it's the duration of the grind, although I personally hate super long quests myself. The quests themselves may take an hour or two to complete the entire chain, which is about the duration of something like ToEE or Extended Haunted Halls with opts, but the quests feel much more repetitive because it's basically the same enemies throughout (As opposed to ToEE with different nodes or Haunted Halls with tactics based minibosses) and the mechanisms for progressing are the same (use autotarget to find a few levers, and repeat that process for an hour). I usually don't have 2-3 hour blocks of time to play DDO except on weekends, which is the situation of a lot of other players too, so quests like this limit how much a lot of players can play them.

I'd be fine with all of that except for the fact that not only are the quests long and repetitive, but they have to be ran over and over in order to get all the mats you need to make items. The issue, I repeat, is not that the quests themselves are long, but that the ingredient drops are too low for the time it takes to get those ingredients. Long quests are fine, although they eventually go the way of slavers/ToEE/Haunted Halls and get run very infrequently, but long quests with low drop rates are exceptionally boring and time-consuming if you're just running them to get items.

Also, u29 raids had the major upside of being designed to bring back alts through BTA runes and ingredients. If you're a one-toon wonder, the 3 day timer is an issue, but with 15 characters I haven't had to say "I can't run that raid, all my characters are on timer" since pre u29. Raid Timers if you have alts then become "Oh, let me get a raid timer quick so I can bring my chest blesser instead of my thrower", instead of bringing raid timers to be able to run the raid at all.

[Vooduspyce]

Here's an example of a full item.

This is complete? Wiki says 5 total attributes... prefix, suffix, extra 1, extra 2 and slot. Did it get changed or am I missing something?

[SealedInSong]

The reason why people use the word "grind" is because it's a BAD connotation.

A game should be fun, not grinding at a millstone.

Particularly when a game is as old as DDO, with dwindling players, limited development resources, and loot that gets outclassed every update, making something a grind is essentially the least intelligent thing to do for the game.

What's good is a balance of reward, investment, and FUN.

No. This is the most powerful loot in the game.

Make it grindy.