Discussing Heroic Dungeons

#1

First of all:
I think the whole concept is stupid.

“Heroic” dungeon?
What’s heroic about it and what is the point of them really?
I’ll tell you: It’s really just a cash-grabby way of getting players to spend gold/money.

I haven’t played for a long time, but seeing how many chest events and lazily thought out content is being added to the main game, it’s pushing me to stop playing.

When I first started playing this game back in '011 or 12 it was majorly different.
Never would I have dreamed that they would add these Heroic dungeons or anything like them to the game, and prior to release I though it could be okay, but upon further inspection on the Wiki and Youtube videos on it I’m actually really disappointed in Deca and the direction the game is heading as a whole.
I feel like Epic dungeons and Private Servers are to partly to blame for this, but the main contributor to such a bad idea is Deca themselves for making such a poor decision to add them.

Because of the addition of these badly designed ‘new dungeons’, now we’re getting players who want a direct upgrade to good UT’s!?

  • I already strongly disagree with the drop table of the two Heroic dungeons (one of which has yet to be released), due to the fact that the UDL drops the entire ST set with a higher droprate and the Abyss drops a D-Blade that has a higher fame bonus…?
    Not only is this bad item design, but it’s now making things too easy and I believe it’ll get stale very quickly.
    Even the fact that (I’m probably wrong) the Doom Bow doesn’t even get a Heroic counterpart in the same fashion that the D-Blade does makes me very displeased with these dungeons.

I think the idea should be retracted, rethought and reimplemented when it’s actually original and well thought out. What’s the point of Heroic dungeons when you can just make more original epic ones. They’re based on a similar premise anyway, where they’re direct upgrades to another dungeon and follow a same theme (though Heroic dungeons have exactly the same enemies with different behaviours and damages (talk about creativity).
I believe all Epic and Heroic dungeons should be rethought and redesigned to become more interesting.

- Crawling Depths: Very interesting boss mechanics with the eggs and all, but in reality it’s a pretty boring dungeon.

- Woodland Labyrinth: Interesting multi-layered boss, but the main dungeon falls short of being interesting and designed well at all (nobody runs it like a normal dungeon).

- Deadwater Docks: The main dungeon is badly designed and enemy behaviours make it so lower level players can get killed easily, the boss has a few phases but is really uninteresting and still gets steamrolled.

Anyway, moving on from that tangent.

The ‘New Content’ Deca has been adding falls short of being satisfactory and now I’m beginning to dislike them because of it.
Currently we have a few dungeons that were supposed to be released from ages back now (The Nest - Rework, Lair of Draconis - Rework, Cursed Library, Goblin Lair - On hold (why!?) and probably some other one I’m forgetting about.

These Heroic dungeons could’ve been so much more and brought so much more items, mechanics and lore to the table, but in reality they’re just unimaginative, and that’s a real shame.

Anyway, enough about what I think about them, what are your thoughts on them?

  • What do you like?
  • What don’t you like?
  • If you could change 2 things, what would they be?
Heroic Abyss discussion
#4

Sorry for the disruption! My mistake.
This is different from the Heroic UDL topic so should remain separate.

#5

People ever thought that Deca isn’t releasing new content is because they are working on Unity and adding new content/mechanics on Flash would be unnecessary.

#6

This is wrong.

On a flash client a dungeon is specified by its sprites and xml files. The same goes with a unity client (as Deca hinted at).

Porting a client doesn’t mean each dungeon has to be ported individually. Instead it involves porting game mechanics, control, sprite rendering etc. From Deca’s last newsletter:

They’re not talking like “We ported udl; next will be snake pit!”. Instead, it’s about high-level features like damage registration and enemy spawn.

#7

Lol. What a bad excuse. Unity XD

I like the dungeon. We just need new whites and sts from that heroic UDL

#8
  • No pet
  • every enemy is a dps wall
  • Just scrape the idea, you can’t just “scale up” a dungeon naively without much balancing changes. Cheap & lazy.
#9

Contradiction?

#10

Huh, i thought the port was complicated for how of a mess the Flash client is, i thought that translated to the xmls as well, apparently that’s not the case.

My mistake.

#11

To be fair any porting is complicated since no two platforms are identical. But the flash client isn’t messy – flash the platform itself is.

#12

I think the Heroic dungeons are fine as they are. The way that they are dropped- from upgraded UDL portals (ignoring the o2 drop), it makes sense that the dungeon would be very similar. (And the Abyss portal from the same place too…) BTW Wlab ddocks and Cdepths (even Nest) are EPIC dungeons, not heroic dungeons. (Nest used to be called epic hive too)

#13

Well, I agree with you… Mostly. Is nice that pets are not allowed (I think those are game-breaking, nobody asks for hp anymore, and that kill the co-op spirit.). But come think of it, maybe they should have just completed the epic dungeons. And perhaps some of the new epics could have been easier, drop from normal gods etc. Dunno.

As for the fame-boosted reskins, they should be rarer drops. Or maybe these dungeons should have a low player count, as to force dudes to cooperate.

I guess Deca can still make improvements on this, its a fresh new thing that could go very well if the comunity is heard.

Edit: Just noticed your name, Redox. I see you’re a man of science.

#14

I am certainly not a big fan of how the Heroic Undead Lair was executed and released. Slapping a 200 gold price on the unlocker comes off as incredibly greedy; I understand they had a patch and made the unlocker drop from the UDL and the portal from O2, but having the unlocker sold for gold was entirely unnecessary. The only ideas I really liked from the HUDL were the mana and hp regeneration orbs that could drop from enemies, wouldn’t mind seeing this get recycled for a decent project, pets being disabled, and the new shot patterns for the boss. I definitely wouldn’t mind those patterns being added to the normal Septavius with some tweaks. An actual epic Undead Lair would have been awesome, the recently released epic dungeons actually had some thought put into them.

#15

These were all made years and years ago and served their purpose as extremely difficult dungeons. Obviously everyone is op af nowadays so they all get steamrolled.

I agree completely with you on heroic dungeons, it’s just a lazy design.

#16

Yup I do agree that they are lazy.

I do like the unique behaviors heroic sept has, especially those blasts that look like they are gonna go in a straight line, but curve halfway through. they are annoying tho.

I don’t like the rest of the dungeon tho. enemies, while not being as bullet wall-y as they were before, can still be quite a hassle. No new enemies, which is really disappointing. no new boss :confused: . It generally feels incomplete, which was my initial thoughts in testing, but I brushed those aside since I thought it was a work in progress, not something near completion.

I say they put me on the dungeon design and coding team, even though I have barely have any experience with coding and my dungeons are “Balanced”, kek. Deca also needs to rework this at some point tbh, especially the portal sprite since it’s weird to see it since it literally clashes with every portal sprite in the game.

#17

those are all UGC projects btw, if you want them to happen then deca aren’t the ones you should be complaining about.

although it is a mystery to me how in the world this got pushed to prod. in the closed testing stage everyone said it was a bad idea, in the public testing stage nearly everyone said it was a bad idea again, and now it’s on prod most people still say it’s a bad idea. not really sure what was going through their minds when they decided this should get pushed, and conveniently they don’t work weekends so we won’t find out until long after the damage has been done.

#18

Please report here after getting their side of the story. I can’t think of any reason besides obvious cash grab. Whether you like the concept or not it’s clearly a premature release. It’s like they’re desperate for money.

And why is Sileeeeex the lead on the project? No offense but his other dungeon (temple) was poorly received. It’s still mediocre after the rework.

#19

I like the idea they have in a certain pserver about the boss’s hideout, which is just a more difficult boss fight.

#20

depending on what it is I might not be able to. ideally they should make a public announcement instead though.

probably because that’s his job.

#21

So literally Puppet Master’s Theatre and Puppet Master’s Encore then. Or just Oryx Chamber and Wine Cellar.

Haven’t done one yet, but the idea of remaking the exact same dungeon with just beefed-up numbers doesn’t seem very appealing.

#22

Nobody’s ever happy about anything. If you don’t like it, don’t do it.