Dungeons - making them unattractive for chest and ore logging.

[Chair]

Except Paush isn't a 'raid' tier boss. He just has a setup that necesitates a very specific way of fighting him. Which often doesn't take much longer than any other normal boss.

[Durvayas]

I was for once always of a mind that epic dungeons need to be "epic", as in a level 30 can't walk in there alone and turn it into a silent graveyard, With the various classes updates, the potential of the average character's fighting abilities are high, many classes get +5 weapons that pierce through DR, others get ridiculous damage (compared to the monsters in there), some get sustainability etc... I think dungeons need to be upped to match those changes.

Though it is certain that not all dungeons should be impossible to solo, there are times where you really can't build a party due to timezones, availability and other various reasons.

The best would be something like : Low - level tier dungeons, Mid - level tier dungeons, Low-mid epic tier dungeons, and high - epic tier dungeons.

The first two categories are fine right now, in my opinion, or if I'm wrong please correct me, but I've yet to see people complain about the low level content.

Low-mid epic tier dungeons should be, theoretically hard to solo for well, low-mid epic persons, yet possible to solo for high epic people, the rewards should be similar to what you find in say, Auril's temple, Very, very very very rarely high tier things, and very very very very often low tier things, with a slight chance of a medium tier thing. (A way to introduce the low epics to the runing system/ rune hunting. And a way to not make it too appealing that high levels would find it rewarding to circlegrind those dungeons repeatedly) And perhaps an extra low or mid tier rune straight on the boss's corpse if every party member is doing the same writ for that place for example.

Epic dungeons should be impossible to solo for even the most optimal of builds, and I would not mind for some places to be genuinely difficult and time consuming to beat. With naturally, adequate rewards that make up for the time spent. Perhaps two runic chests and a guaranteed mid-tier, probable high tier item directly from the boss's corpse.

While balance is important for the PvP aspect of the game, Bosses don't /have/ to be fair, nor do they have to be balanced, I'm all for more Paush scale bosses which encourage "Raids" rather than 30 secs mass bursty fights that end in a blink of an eye once every mage drops their dragons.

This would also serve in a way to build a certain seriousness about the environment we are in, as characters. You will see people joke about cutting Abazuur's head for the 750th time in a day, but never will you see someone foolishly go to solo Paush. There is a certain notoriety from such bosses, and in a world where everyone is capable of reaching level 30, it would make total sense for the world to have challenges very difficult to tackle for them.

Frankly, all I see this doing is pushing the meta more and more towards powerbuilding being an absolute nescessity, and contributing directly to yet more power creep and epics crowding lower dungeons.
This idea punishes casual players, players in the less played (especially australian) timezone who can't find parties easily, players new to the game who don't know building as an exact science, and makes Arelith LESS likely to be taken seriously, not more, as it WILL result in higher level PCs soloing midlevel content, displacing the people who are meant to be playing in those dungeons and forcing THOSE people to solo low level content. It will also make the mithril and adamantine markets go crazy and hit players with the catch 22 of needing top tier equipment to do epic content, but needing to be able to do epic content to get the materials for top tier gear. The result of THAT is absurd price spiking. Adamantine is currently holding at around 50-70k per ingot. What you are proposing would easily push it up over 200k per each. I don't think we want people spending almost a million gold on a suit of armor.

tldr: You just proposed a very impractical and bad solution to what is a relatively minor problem. Akin to shooting at a fly with a rocket launcher.

[-XXX-]

Paush is soloable - defeating him is just too much of a fuss (and rather tedious and boring at the same time) when considering the loot. Especially since there are much easier and more rewarding options available!
Fighting him also does not make much sense from the RP viewpoint (a Demon Lord in his own layer ought to be virtually omnipotent) ...then again, why have a boss spawn in the module that you're not supposed to fight?

I'm stating the underlined part to document (and reiterate) that making boss spawns more challenging isn't really a viable option. It just widens the gap between players who appreciate the mechanical aspect of the PvE content and players who approach the game in a more casual fashion.

[CptJonas]

Paush is soloable - defeating him is just too much of a fuss (and rather tedious and boring at the same time) when considering the loot. Especially since there are much easier and more rewarding options available!
Fighting him also does not make much sense from the RP viewpoint (a Demon Lord in his own layer ought to be virtually omnipotent) ...then again, why have a boss spawn in the module that you're not supposed to fight?

I'm stating the underlined part to document (and reiterate) that making boss spawns more challenging isn't really a viable option. It just widens the gap between players who appreciate the mechanical aspect of the PvE content and players who approach the game in a more casual fashion.

Well...there should be content for casuals....and content for powerbuilders....
You have plenty of that for casuals...you can go into any dungeon with any build as long as you have 5 people or so..
But on other part...there is no place where could even semi casual player with decent gear find any challenge in PVE...And thats a problem...

Why do we have so many "Epic" dungeons when moust of them can people solo with pure wizzard....and when you have any dungeon what isnt easily soloable...then its stil grindfest for more then 3 players....

Why you think all lvl 30 characters are atuned to Earth....bcs all they do is crafting and siting in towns....bcs there is no dungeon where you actualy find challenge on those levels....

If I dont count PVP, Lags, spawns on login, etc......My character havent died in PVE maybe since lvl 8 or so.....There isnt much threat for combat ready max lvl player anywhere....

[Sea Shanties]

Just about every one of those problems is inherent to a game where the dungeon is the same every time you visit. Once you beat a dungeon or boss once you can do it infinite times. That's why veterans will always get bored with PVE quickly and master just about anything you throw at them one way or another, no matter how difficult you make it. At least Arelith has the advantage of faction based RP to navigate which for long term players is where any real challenge is to be found.

I don't know if there is an answer to this short of roguelike randomized epic dungeons or DMs micromanaging encounters more, it's something we more or less have to accept as inevitable.

[Jack Oat]

words...and...ellipses...and...stuff...

OK William Shatner, you lost me when you tried defending what is blatantly against the rules, as well as generally poor dungeoneering and conduct. I haven't read past the first few posts where you Tactically Derailed the thread.



Going back to the main topic and NOT spiraling into a million other opinion based arguments that have little to do with the original post that Red Ropes made:

Yes. Discourage people from running through dungeons without clearing them. This one is tricky and I don't know the best implementation. Maybe don't spawn loot until the boss is dead or the room is clear or something? I don't know how possible this is.

Disable the ability for people to log off in dungeons altogether. This is the simplest way. I think this is best done by making it so that if they log off for more than a half an hour inside a dungeon, they're set back to the start of the dungeon. This way it isn't a free teleport to the top of Benwick or wherever you other people have your spawns, but it DOES mitigate the issue of getting to log in, loot, and log out. At the same time, putting a 30 minute window on it covers server resets/crashes/NWN "Enhancements."

[Disciprine Come From Within]

Content for Powerbuilders and content for Powerbuilders just means there is content you can't enjoy unless you have X build. And sometimes that is okay, but most of the time it's just irritating and not fun. Part of the issue is that NWN does have limited functions in some styles and sneaking/invisibility sometimes is a fun challenge for dungeons, just to see what you can get via pickpocket or how to set up battles in your favor with ambush focused characters and tactics.

That being said, some dungeons are easier to run than others for similar loot. And as someone who likes to go for runic chests, I have found a particular time of the day in a particular dungeon where I seem to have an 80-90% chance of getting something from that chest. So I run it. A lot. I've gotten really good at running that dungeon because of it. While I wouldn't be opposed to it being harder to navigate to the end to get the goodies, it's more irritating when I do run a particularly difficult dungeon and come out at the end with lackluster normal chest loot, no runic materials at all, and a sense that the reward to effort ratio was misplaced. I think the fears of a flooded market are a bit unfounded, and I'd rather see people do dungeons, get rewards that feel satisfying, and put some system to encourage people to go out and enjoy the sights rather than do a dungeon at a particular time because the odds are good that you'll get the reward you were doing these dungeons for in the first place.

In essence, if you want to really nerf the people running dungeons and skipping content, please fix the end result of those dungeons so that any party that does those dungeons gets a satisfying reward for the effort. While exploring dungeons can be it's own reward, we like loot too.

[Woper_The_Black]

Just make it so you can only do a dungeon once a day RL, along the same lines as writs. From a RP view, why would you want to go back into the same dungeon twice ? It won't completely solve the problem as in people will still do a circuit of different dungeons but it would address the constant same dungeon farming, otherwise just leave it. It's one of those areas where you'll never get a solution without hurting parts of the player base. As has been said already, players will farm/grind and sidestep situations to gain an advantage, so they get more loot. If you make it the half hour thing they will just go to another dungeon, or wait the half hour and do it again.

[Dirac]

I think the title should be changed to something like, "Dungeons - making them more attractive than just running chests and ore". Or is the official stance here that the players are broken and need fixed? Give them something else profitable and fun to do with their time and they will do that. If you keep adding mechanics that make things boring and tedious, then why should anyone play here?

[Babylon System is the Vampire]

A pretty big misconception going on in this thread is the automatic assumption that it's "easier" to have a group. That varies dungeon to dungeon, boss to boss, and party composition to party composition, but in general I think it winds up about the same if not a bit easier to solo. You get better experience in a group, and more gold alone (though that is somewhat mitigated if your party composition isn't totally borked), but those are the only things definite.

In general I solo stuff more then I don't when out in the dungeons because I hate the grind, want to get it over with as fast as possible, and gathering groups takes time. If there was a system that made getting together with like leveled folks easier, I would much prefer to go with groups, but I don't really have a suggestion on how to go about that.

[Sockss]

As much as this idea might seem flavorful, it'd only incentivize players to circlegrind different dungeons (like Avernus with its continually respawning encounters for example) as the dungeons tend to vary both in the frequency of spawns as much as in their size.
And while this could be streamlined to support the idea, ultimately encounter variety would suffer as you'd inevitably end up with the same set of encounters varying only with their skin.
Furthermore, there is also a certain "gambling" variance aspect to the runic chests which many players seem to enjoy.

Another thing to consider with regards to dungeon design is the resource concentration - some dungeons contain not only runic chests, but also adamantine veins positioned right next to those.
So in essence, you get to "double dip" by completing certain dungeons, but not others. This is yet another reason why players opt to excessively grind some dungeons while disregarding the other potentially viable PvE venues.

You'd just simply cap the upper limit.

This would also still be random.

E.G. at an arbitrary number of dungeon kill points and when the boss is killed you'd spawn at the upper limit of a dungeon. So for say, illithids, you'd get an arte chest and 2 top tier veins. What those veins are and what's in the chest is rng, same as now.

Only terrible players who cheat by boss logging wouldn't have the dungeon kill points and would instead be met with nothing when they killed the boss.

People would need to do the dungeon rather than skip past it.

Of course this only fixes the economy in the very long term as it's already very common place amongst certain players, resulting in huge stacks of things.

[Reallylongunneededplayername]

Just do the following;

Give certain dungeons;

-Max lvl cap.

-min party size

Sample; spires I would put a max 22, min partysize 3.

Certainly cause it is a contract dungeon.

[Jack Oat]

Just do the following;

Give certain dungeons;

-Max lvl cap.

-min party size

Sample; spires I would put a max 22, min partysize 3.

Certainly cause it is a contract dungeon.

If you're referring to Aurilites, that's both one of the few Surface dungeons that scales into Epic levels and also can be ground through mid- even into upper-epics. The mobs there scale well.

The other issue with this is that it, again, punishes the casual player who may not have good playtimes to find people to grind with but who still wants to go through a dungeon.

[Subutai]

The other issue with this is that it, again, punishes the casual player who may not have good playtimes to find people to grind with but who still wants to go through a dungeon.

Not even just casual players, but players who have party-dependent builds. Healer-path clerics, AAs, and quite a few other builds that can be extremely powerful in a group would be really severely hampered by getting cut out of lower-level dungeons. It would force them to only be able to do anything when they can have more or less the full party complement to do anything at all.

Even if we wanted to emphasize the need for a powerbuild more than we already do (I don't think we should), this would punish players who play support roles, and we definitely don't want to force people into builds that can all do solo PvE all the time.

[CptJonas]

I think you dont get it guys....

Everyone is talking about powerbuilding being isue in PVE...
And I am like..What?
There is no reason or need to powerbuild in PVE....
You can do like 95% of game content with even many Pure builds...Where is powerbuilding in that?

Only reasons why people powerbuild are...
For PVP...
For love of big numbers, powerfull characters, and building in general...

[Durvayas]

As much as this idea might seem flavorful, it'd only incentivize players to circlegrind different dungeons (like Avernus with its continually respawning encounters for example) as the dungeons tend to vary both in the frequency of spawns as much as in their size.
And while this could be streamlined to support the idea, ultimately encounter variety would suffer as you'd inevitably end up with the same set of encounters varying only with their skin.
Furthermore, there is also a certain "gambling" variance aspect to the runic chests which many players seem to enjoy.

Another thing to consider with regards to dungeon design is the resource concentration - some dungeons contain not only runic chests, but also adamantine veins positioned right next to those.
So in essence, you get to "double dip" by completing certain dungeons, but not others. This is yet another reason why players opt to excessively grind some dungeons while disregarding the other potentially viable PvE venues.

You'd just simply cap the upper limit.

This would also still be random.

E.G. at an arbitrary number of dungeon kill points and when the boss is killed you'd spawn at the upper limit of a dungeon. So for say, illithids, you'd get an arte chest and 2 top tier veins. What those veins are and what's in the chest is rng, same as now.

Only terrible players who cheat by boss logging wouldn't have the dungeon kill points and would instead be met with nothing when they killed the boss.

People would need to do the dungeon rather than skip past it.

Of course this only fixes the economy in the very long term as it's already very common place amongst certain players, resulting in huge stacks of things.

An idea thats kind of a spin off of this.

The loot does not spawn unless the boss is killed.

The boss does not spawn unless 'X' number of mobs are killed.


Thus, you can't boss-log to just kill the boss. You have to actually clear the dungeon to get the boss to spawn in the first place.

I'm not sure how this affects resource collection. Perhaps adjust certain dungeons to have treasure rooms where the room is only accessible via boss dropped key, and put the mithril and adamantine back there? My understanding is that mithril and adamantine were being overly farmed and thats why the ore randomization system went in, perhaps it could be reverted and these metals could become normal nodes again with this solution.

Lesser metals, namely gold, silver, arjale, and below, should spawn as per normal now.

[AnselHoenheim]

Why don't add a simply feature that, at least, one boss has already in the settings? Lock the runic chest - grandiose veins - epic loot behind locked doors that can only be opened with a key that the boss must drop, and destroy the key after the door has been opened, that would mean either a proper re-balance from each boss from each epic dungeon to escalate properly and turn them into real challenges, specially those that can be solo'd at the moment.

[ReverentBlade]

I think sneaking through dungeons should be a viable strat. Its a staple of D&D that not everything needs to be overcome with violence.

It should be possible to set it up so that the chest is spawned by stepping on a trigger. This trigger can then be set up to appear in one of several locations throughout the dungeon, pseudo-randomly. Ideal places are corridors or bottlenecks that must be passed to go through the dungeon.

Now you have to do the bare minimum of at least walking through the whole thing to get the loot.

[Kalopsia]

What if skipping spawns in a dungeon would result in the boss being surrounded by more enemies instead?

Basically “skip the entire spawns and you’re gonna face 40+ foes AND the boss simultaneously to get the treasure.”

[Baseili]

I like the idea of having to meet certain critera to access loot/loot rooms though it does eliminate stealth as an option which is pretty bogus for stealth classes, however that could be alleviated by adding content designed around the use of subtley.

Take a heist for example, say breaking in to the vaults of banehold or the bank of cordor (not the actual player storage of course) which would require non-combat skills like needing pickpocket to steal a key, persuade/intimidate to gain access to otherwise inaccessable rooms, bluff to send guards into other corridors etc. There could be multiple routes with lower rates so casual players arent left out but groups that could access all routes would have more overall chances.
That'd give something for everybody.

[Iceborn]

Paush is soloable - defeating him is just too much of a fuss (and rather tedious and boring at the same time) when considering the loot. Especially since there are much easier and more rewarding options available!
Fighting him also does not make much sense from the RP viewpoint (a Demon Lord in his own layer ought to be virtually omnipotent) ...then again, why have a boss spawn in the module that you're not supposed to fight?

I'm stating the underlined part to document (and reiterate) that making boss spawns more challenging isn't really a viable option. It just widens the gap between players who appreciate the mechanical aspect of the PvE content and players who approach the game in a more casual fashion.

Well...there should be content for casuals....and content for powerbuilders....

Hi. I am two days late to say:
NOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Nooooooooooooooo!
No!

The PvE content of the modules should never be balanced around meta-building.
There are people that like to play UTTERLY OPTIMAL characters, and good for them, but this is still and it will always be a roleplaying server. All content should be built to encourage roleplay, not to foster a "mechanics go first" mentality.

That is not to say dungeons shouldn't have a little of a challenge, but raising the bar on the mechanical difficulty will also force more people to build their characters from an entirely mechanical standpoint AND lock the people that don't out of more content in the modules, content that may be already hard to reach and deal with without a proper group.
See: Manor of Mourn, Lowerdark, Deeper Dark, Burning Shores.

Thank you.

[JubJub]

There simply is no way to make things fair for casuals and meta. If you make Paush so tough no one can solo him then the casuals will get murdered, if you make it so casuals can have a chance then the mega builds can solo kill it. If you make it so anyone wanting loot has to have a rogue with 80 lock pick skill then you are going to have a lot of upset people being unable to get loot at the end. There is also a fine line between making a place such a pain to get to and so hard that no one wants to go there and making it too easy t where it gets farmed constantly. Some of the best dungeons imo are the most under used simply because people feel the risk vs reward isn't there (like Minmir Manor) and if you boost the reward then it becomes like the auril temple or orclands and farm city.

[Let Love In]

I'd love to have a dungeon in four short installments. Like, maybe four smaller dungeons that each give a one use key and then a final dungeon that uses the four keys and destroys them. Then people who just can't commit to really long dungeons can kind of do them in stages. And it wouldn't make them any more appealing to epic players, because it would probably take more work in total.

[Cortex]

On the topic of PvE, casual and power builders....

PvE difficulty has always been an interesting subject to me. When I made mobs for Arelith, I always wanted to make them difficult but fair for the average player, while keeping it relatively easy for certain builds and or skilled players. Using Maurs as an example, they were designed with a decent party in mind, a tank, DPS and a mage of below average skill should be able to clear the dungeon with enough dedication.

I did that with the mindset that while Arelith is a game, it's not a hardcore competitive game, where roleplay and mechanics hold hands. If PvE difficulty was made harder, a portion of the player base would as they say "git gud" to try and accomodate, those players tend to be people who play other "hard" games and are used to it, but another portion would struggle. Those that are not in it for a hardcore PvE difficulty, but to tell a story.

To make any dungeons where it takes a squad of skilled powerbuilders would only serve to gate content behind advanced builds/skill, and would take away the experience from many players.

[Aelipse]

I think the discussion about the difficulty of dungeons is a philosophical one. As was stated more than once; whatever you do, you will either make the game super easy for power builders or super difficult for casuals.

I'd like to get back to the original problem, and that was exploiting the mechanics of the game, from logging off and camping at bosses to sneaking or running past mobs to get to the chests quickly. I have spent almost a decade on a different server where getting loot was extremely hard, impossible even without a proper party and players had to be mechanically discouraged from exploiting the game's mechanics. I want to mention a couple of ideas that have been used and really worked there, and might be perhaps some inspiration for mechanical changes here:

1) Anyone who logged off in a loot location would not spawn the loot after logging back on. Such a character would have to leave the area and then come back again to trigger the treasure spawn again. Granted, this was in 1.69, way before the crashing frequency got /enhanced/, and such a rule would suck big time for people who crash a lot, and the ratio of people crashing to people camping would have to be taken into consideration here.

2) Most boss dungeons had a system of levers, pressure plates or puzzles that was necessary to trigger to even get to the boss monster. This was introduced to force people to form groups of a specific minimal size, but in theory could be also used to make players push this and pull that before they are allowed to the boss room, and would pretty much wipe out camping by the boss itself.

3) Multiple monsters with keys, out of which each one would have to be used to gain access to the chests. We had a gorgeous Duergar mine boss dungeon, where you had to defeat the prison master, the wizard, the leader of the clan and the golem construct in order to get to the treasury. Even better, you had to kill one mini-boss to even gain access to the next one. Running through or camping was absolutely out of the question. Here on Arelith there could be an alternative option of opening the chests via skill thus making it possible for pure rogue classes and such.

4) Some dungeons had specific areas that automatically dispelled any invisibility / greater sanctuary effects. Add a handful of monsters with permanent true seeing and you have a system that actively discourages running through invisible / sneaking past monsters. Doesn't have to be all of them, the stealth chars should still be allowed to sneak past a portion of the dungeon.

On an almost entirely unrelated note, I think that if Arelith doesn't implement mechanical changes to encourage the desired way of gaming, and instead will ban players who do not play according the ideals of a roleplaying world, there should be a transparent and publicly accessible ban list on the forums. Not to bash the players who have been banned, but to provide a clear insight for everyone on who has been punished, for how long and for what.

The way it works now without any official info from the admins, there are rumours spreading throughout various discord chat rooms, some information might get twisted, and in the end it looks like the admins are punishing only some people selectively, making them disappear as the Big Brother would do to the inconvenient people in 1984. Would a ban list be possible on the forums?