Labyrinth Changes

[Bobster]

I'm not sure how many people read the patch notes, but I thought I should clarify a bit:

Many bosses will either have multiple adds, a patrol of mobs, or both. This is intended behavior. Many bosses in Labyrinth can no longer be farmed by a duo or trio unless they are excellent players and have either healers or plenty of CC. Also, many mobs will patrol around the Labyrinth, such as sentries, golem guardians, wandering clockworks, even flying demon bat dogs and undead drakoran. It is only a bug if:

A) Non-boss patrols hit for boss-like damage.
B) Patrols aggro you through the floor or wall(ex: skittish mechanization aggros you through the wall while you're in another room)

These changes are meant to make the Labyrinth feel more difficult so that two players cannot go down to the bottom and kill the hardest bosses. Please leave any feedback you have in this thread.

Thanks.

[Graveen]

for me this is a nice thing.

just, i think we must be careful not to interfere with game balancing (ie difficulty to make quests in laby, like CL quests, or simply difficulty to travel into laby) (this is only an example as for now CLs quests are not implemented).

[Tolakram]

I don't like aggro through floor or wall. Seems to me we should be able to check z (on server side) and make an educated guess when we should aggro or not.

In the meantime could you reduce aggro range so they do their job but the player has to be fairly close? Maybe it doesn't happen that often so it's not a big issue?

[Bobster]

I've seen it happen with one patrol I've added. It was the first one I added to Laby, and I had set the aggroRange to 1250 as a test. It aggroed a player through the wall, so I toned it down to 600. I haven't seen it happen to anyone else yet. If it does, I've asked all players to submit a report with their loc and the mob that aggroed them.

[PhantomBuddha]

I've had some catastrophic wall agro in several other zones that I've played around in, specifically Spindel and Cursed Tomb. Both are small, tightly woven dungeons in some areas, so I didn't bother reporting it at the time. I'll be taking another pair of alts through soon, so maybe I can keep track in case they are deemed fix-worthy.

Honestly it adds an element of 'omfg' randomness to an already interesting/challenging dungeon so it wasn't entirely a bad thing =)

I know zero point zero zero about coding/database stuff in DOAC, so pardon if this is a really stupid question, but is there a way to check for line-of-sight between the potentially agroing mob and the actual player model? I thought I read somewhere a looong time ago that part of the stealth detection portion of the engine was based on that premise, but I could be mistaken.

[Etaew]

There is something we could do to add line of sight checks for mobs in dungeons, similiar to the way we "hack" guards.

For guards we send a packet to the target client, we make that client run the LOS calculation, and then send the result back to the server, which then tells the NPC to attack. This isn't so desireable for three reasons really, first the amount of packets being sent around, secondly some clients missread, or manipulate the LOS checks, and thirdly they would only apply to the first in the area, so if the closest player to the NPC was out of view, any other players that may be in view, but not closest would be ignored, unless we sent packets out to all of them as well, and do it on a first come first serve basis, but then you are advantaged if you have a lower ping to everyone.

I don't actually mind this way of doing things, provided we added it for mobs in dungeons only, although how we would do it without changing the core I don't know. I don't really want to enforce this on other servers, unless we added a server property.

Anyway the reason we have to make a game client run the LOS calculations is because the server doesn't know about maps, only the client does, this is why we also have no real pathing data. Of course a pathing and LOS check system can be written, but would take far too long and too many resources for it to run well or be worth it.

[PhantomBuddha]

That is...very clever! I can't say it was a big enough deal to warrant the work that would go into it though.

On an unrelated note, are SI dungeon zones supposed to be active/functional? I forgot to submit a but report that one of them was completely empty of mobs, but if it isn't 'supposed' to be working I won't waste the time =)

[WisdomConners]

These changes are meant to make the Labyrinth feel more difficult so that two players cannot go down to the bottom and kill the hardest bosses. Please leave any feedback you have in this thread.

Thanks.

No offense but this seems to be penalizing players unnecessarily for not being able to find someone to group with. Definitely not a good thing in my book for a server with such a low population. Just my opinion.

[Bobster]

These changes are meant to make the Labyrinth feel more difficult so that two players cannot go down to the bottom and kill the hardest bosses. Please leave any feedback you have in this thread.

Thanks.

No offense but this seems to be penalizing players unnecessarily for not being able to find someone to group with. Definitely not a good thing in my book for a server with such a low population. Just my opinion.

We're talking about what should be end-game content. So far, you can still farm the SI Epic Dungeons. We have to make some gear difficult to obtain so that people will play here longer.

[WisdomConners]

These changes are meant to make the Labyrinth feel more difficult so that two players cannot go down to the bottom and kill the hardest bosses. Please leave any feedback you have in this thread.

Thanks.

No offense but this seems to be penalizing players unnecessarily for not being able to find someone to group with. Definitely not a good thing in my book for a server with such a low population. Just my opinion.

We're talking about what should be end-game content. So far, you can still farm the SI Epic Dungeons. We have to make some gear difficult to obtain so that people will play here longer.

Well I don't personally think that's the effect you'll end up getting with the current setup. Now if the population was large enough to support people getting groups to go get this stuff in the Labyrinth, it would be a different story. As it stands now I don't even want to bother fighting my way down with just me and my bot and I've tried getting people to come with me. From what I've been hearing in broadcast chat the drops aren't even apparently dropping anyway. I think that you guys should be focusing on doing things that will bring in a population before you go making things so hard that soloists are driven off. Just my opinion. It's your server and it's free. I can't complain but If I can't get decent gear I personally won't be staying long.

[Tolakram]

Well I don't personally think that's the effect you'll end up getting with the current setup. Now if the population was large enough to support people getting groups to go get this stuff in the Labyrinth, it would be a different story. As it stands now I don't even want to bother fighting my way down with just me and my bot and I've tried getting people to come with me. From what I've been hearing in broadcast chat the drops aren't even apparently dropping anyway. I think that you guys should be focusing on doing things that will bring in a population before you go making things so hard that soloists are driven off. Just my opinion. It's your server and it's free. I can't complain but If I can't get decent gear I personally won't be staying long.

Is this an opinion shared by others? Personally I want everyone to stay, but we can't please everyone. I would like to see more players post their opinion on this. If drops aren't dropping correctly and are reported they will be fixed.

As far as mobs and equipment goes:

We are trying to make some content that is tuned for groups. If we tuned everything for solo play then people who prefer groups will get bored and leave. There is no happy one size fits all solution to this problem. What's your overall concern? What keeps you playing every day? Are you having fun?

[stealth215]

Well I don't personally think that's the effect you'll end up getting with the current setup. Now if the population was large enough to support people getting groups to go get this stuff in the Labyrinth, it would be a different story. As it stands now I don't even want to bother fighting my way down with just me and my bot and I've tried getting people to come with me. From what I've been hearing in broadcast chat the drops aren't even apparently dropping anyway. I think that you guys should be focusing on doing things that will bring in a population before you go making things so hard that soloists are driven off. Just my opinion. It's your server and it's free. I can't complain but If I can't get decent gear I personally won't be staying long.

Is this an opinion shared by others? Personally I want everyone to stay, but we can't please everyone. I would like to see more players post their opinion on this. If drops aren't dropping correctly and are reported they will be fixed.

As far as mobs and equipment goes:

We are trying to make some content that is tuned for groups. If we tuned everything for solo play then people who prefer groups will get bored and leave. There is no happy one size fits all solution to this problem. What's your overall concern? What keeps you playing every day? Are you having fun?

currently what helps me have fun atm is being able to get good items by myself, it's hard to find a group and i don't have much time to invest in some big thing (and i go afk often ) so being able to do something with my main + bot is nice...i'd say that adjusting bosses to 3-4 people wouldn't be too bad, something that could help with this is finishing instances, then maybe making our own instance dungeons (using current made layouts, but customizing mobs/drops). an idea i got from Hellgate which is 100% instanced, adjusting difficulty based on groups and solo, when in a group though you got drops more often

[WisdomConners]

Personally I WANT to stay. Storm is the only really good PVE server around in the FreeShards but the lack of population makes getting good loot groups just damn near impossible. Like Stealth, I too have bout's of AFK. Mine are due to health issues which even if I had a group, wouldn't make me very popular with them for very long. I've said it before elsewhere, I'm a PVE player. The end game for DAoC for me has always been about the loot I can get. The only thing that will get me to RvR is a campaign of warfare where keeps are being taken for an end goal of something like capturing a relic or what have you. I don't RP farm. Never have and never will.

At least on Live Server with my ML's and CL's, I was able to solo/bot named mobs in the Labyrinth and DF and a couple TOA areas all by myself and when I couldn't I could get a group if I was patient. I solo/botted at least half of my artifacts on my Sorcerer/Cleric duo. Confuse is the Sorcerer's best friend!

As for the loot drops. I've farmed a couple named in Dartmoor for items listed for Sorcerer, Theurgist, Friar and Cleric for hours and some of them never dropped a thing. My Theurgist got a Greater Staff of Storm without the usable Crack Buff charge and the mob who was supposed to drop Sorcy staves just dropped coins and ROG. I've had no luck in the Labyrinth getting much of anything at all. Running into roadblocks of 20 mobs that you have to clear just to get past a point in a hallway makes it impossible to solo/bot much past the hub! I can understand not being able to get to the bottom Boss but seriously? Needs some adjustment.

[Tolakram]

At least on Live Server with my ML's and CL's, I was able to solo/bot named mobs in the Labyrinth and DF and a couple TOA areas all by myself and when I couldn't I could get a group if I was patient. I solo/botted at least half of my artifacts on my Sorcerer/Cleric duo. Confuse is the Sorcerer's best friend!

That raises a good question. Shouldn't mobs that are soloable on Live also be soloable on Storm?

But then what about enhanced group encounters? Should we make them or will that lead to complaints too? Is it just the fact that we are different from live or are you looking for us to tone down every encounter to make it solo or duo-able?

I prefer PVE too, but I'm not the decider here, I'm only trying to guide the conversation.

[WisdomConners]

No I don't expect to be able to Solo/Duo Legion or the Dragon or any enhanced group encounter. That would be silly, but I should be able to solo/Duo the same named mobs I can solo/duo on Live. As far as enhanced group encounters go though, I think they should wait on making those particular types go live if you're talking about adding content. For now they should focus on fixing bugs, a no brainer, and adding content that will draw in more population so that enhanced group encounters are more feasible.

And concerning Named mobs, I really think there should be some sort of guaranteed unique or special items being dropped from each kill. They're named mobs for crying out loud. I watched someone in broadcast chat who'd been farming Named mobs in labyrinth for, he said, hours and not getting any of the good drops that the mobs were supposed to drop. That was pretty much my own experience from farming Named mobs in Dartmoor. That's just wrong.

And just on my own personal wish list. I'd like to see more Glowing, Proccing and Buff Charged items dropping. Greater Staff of Storm should have a Mana Regen buff on it and currently mine does not. Face it. ROG items are ok, if you're leveling, but once you're level 50. You want/need items that make your character uniquely your own with some fine stats and special effects on them.