Really love the heroic dungeons guys! As someone who started the game almost 8 years ago, it made me feel like I was actually back in the old days again where there was no pet to support me and the dungeon itself actually felt like a danger rather than just being something I could breeze through in 2 minutes and be done with, and bringing along friends made it actually feel like 2011/2012 again. Would love to see these in-game, thanks a ton for them! The more things in the game that nullifies pets the better imo.
PT: Heroic Abyss and Heroic UDL
Gensokyo
#98
Honestly i don’t find too much fun on Heroic Dungeons, it just feels like the exact same dungeon with few behaviour differences, higher damage and petless. And just beats the purpose of Epic Dungeons, while both Heroic and Epic Dungeons’ objectives are to make harder version of already existing dungeons, Epic just do it wayyy better than Heroic do.
And i find no reason at all to run these dungeons for the same UT with just 1%+ fame bonus and faster shot speed, what’s the benefit anyways? Other than Doom Bow, I don’t see a real “buff” on any weapon with 100% RoF.
I mean, i see the idea, i supposed they are going to be rare drops over the normal dungeon drop to give better rewards, but feels lazy, and for someone who has played during Wild Shadow times (no pets to make the game subjectively easier), the Heroics are way too hard, even compared to these times.
Too much risk for so little reward.
TNSN
#100
ancient’s shots move faster, but that is so similar to the original it doesn’t matter.
a buff in DPS or something else would make running these actually worth it
DragoSpell
#101
I feel like malphas still needs some work and the whites would go nice with resprited bullets.
RMGnoob
#102
lol @ the people saying this was stolen from some server. The idea of new content that’s just a harder version of the base game has been around forever. Does nobody remember the Elder Realms meme?
Even the idea of making harder content that forces you to go petless has been around since functional pets became a thing.
There’s nothing original or new about it, and that’s precisely why I hope this is Deca trying to see how people like the concept and not a lazy attempt to make generating new content easier by making reskins of already existing dungeons.
For all their flaws at least the Epic Dungeons introduced new mechanics compared to their normal counterparts
Now if I’m looking at the concept of petless dungeons by itself, I don’t see anything wrong with it. If anything it’s going to encourage people to actually care about team composition and stop trying to solo everything all the time.
The problem is that it’s probably going to encourage using alt characters and organizing via Discord even more.
The other problem is that the loot needs to be worth it. I really doubt anyone is going to bother going petless just for a Greater Potion.
Linkcat
#103
On my first Abyss attempt I dragged the entire first room and immediately got cornered and died. On my second attempt I cleared it. You managed to perfectly capture the feeling I had when I first tried to do Abysses on a fresh 20 necro in 2010, but as an 8/8 instead. It was a little easier on Pally. I actually had to dodge and play smart instead of being carried by my pet as long as I didn’t stand right on top of the enemies. It’s clearly meant to be done in groups but you can solo it if you want. The characters that were given to me were too strong for the Undead Lair, but I imagine it will have a similar effect on less potted characters. The bosses were a bit of a grind solo, and the rewards need to be better for the risk you take.
Overall, this is some of the best content that I’ve seen from you guys. I would love for this concept to be applied to an entire realm. It would make godlands fun again. If this does expand to more dungeons and the like, you should have vit and wis drastically increase when there have been no nearby enemies for 10 seconds. Waiting around for bars to refill in dungeons was one of the flaws Realm had before pets.
Haxings
#104
Let’s just hope these dungeons are subject to change and look more like the Forbidden Jungle to the Secluded Thicket or the Spider Den to the Crawling Depths (Not that they are bad but they definitely aren’t the best that Deca can do)
Proct
#106
My friend just dropped an Ancient doom bow, its pretty much the exact same thing but with 7% bonus tho
Gensokyo
#108
I’m sure that’s because of the nature of the “galaxy” tiles, unlike actual black tiles (borders of the map, for example), which are unpassable by any means even by enemies, these tiles actually count as tiles for enemies to be close to, atleast, an example would be enemies spawning in Hermit’s setpiece deep water.
Also this is the reason why the Leprechaun can “no-clip” in the Sprite World.
Survivor
#109
The monsters in the Heroic UDL give way too much exp for this level of difficulty.
If it’s going to be a hard-to-access dungeon that’s not really an issue, but still.
Having slimes stalk you like these do makes them a lot easier to deal with too.
Survivor
#110
tbh I still wish this could be resolved:
It’s really hard to find any eggs on testing.
Xaklor
#111
actually that’s wrong. there are no tiles behind the walls regardless of whether or not it uses the special sprite world background (the machine uses it too). the stars aren’t tiles, they’re a background (they don’t even appear if you have Hardware Acceleration on). they don’t have a specific definition like a regular ground tile would, like so:
<Ground type="something" id="some other thing">
<Texture><File>the answer</File><Index>42</Index></Texture>
</Ground>
instead it’s a single tag that gets put somewhere else. I don’t know for sure why lep can no-clip sprite world, but if I had to guess I would say it’s a combination of ridiculous speed an no walls. the hermit works because it’s set to spawn in the unwalkable tiles to begin with, if the hermit ever somehow wandered outside of the unwalkable water he’d get stuck and unable to get back in. the ghost minion getting stuck in a wall is a separate issue I assume, probably similar to the issue the Nest used to have with bees getting stuck in the walls that had to be cleared out for the chest event.
Textbook
#112
I got beat to the bug report! Here’s a video of the little reality-warping ghost guys, they can accumulate over time and I’m not sure if they eventually despawn or what.
https://gfycat.com/ornatespotlessharpseal
So I’m going to preface this post with: having most or all of your changes in a mode intended to increase the difficulty of the game be just cranking up the damage numbers the enemies do and the hp the enemies have is always not a good way to do it. It’s a problem that plagues many games (Skyrim, some of the Kingdom Hearts games such as Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, arguably Borderlands 2, to name a few) and in many cases while it does add more challenge, that challenge may not be as fun as a properly adjusted and balanced for (hard!) difficulty mode. You may disagree. That is ok.
But I think that both of these new dungeons feel too much like “base dungeon but we just cranked the numbers up”. The changes added to the dungeons other than just upping numbers (I can list them: some shots now having status effects they didn’t before, white demon in regular abyss rooms, boss maybe being slightly different) don’t really stand out, and don’t change the overall feel of the dungeon (other than perhaps the ghost bombs in the UDL inflicting confuse, and the UDL boss itself which I will talk about later).
There’s a lot of potential with heroic dungeons: dungeons where you don’t have a pet to keep you topped up on hp and mp. But there’s not really any new shot patterns or new behaviours to learn, and I was really hoping the heroic dungeons would add some variety.
It was mentioned earlier on in this thread that heroic dungeons have a lot to live up to considering Cursed Library and new LoD were the last new dungeons to be shown, and those are really really fun dungeons that I don’t think the new heroic dungeons live up to at all.
Let’s start with Heroic UDL.
I don’t find this dungeon very challenging. It might be if you’re rushing; I haven’t tried rushing it actually so I’m going to refrain from commenting on that, maybe it’s a blast if you rush it, who knows. As it currently is when you’re clearing it, it’s just tedious. Enemies have more HP, so they take longer to kill. But they also aren’t more dangerous or exciting to kill, because the enemies have the exact same behaviour as in the regular UDL. It’s just more punishing if you do get hit, but the shot patterns and enemy movement patterns, as in regular UDL, aren’t particularly difficult to dodge.
I’m not sure why the skeleton mages do like 11 damage with their slow green projectile. For something so well telegraphed, you’d expect it to do some decent damage. In comparison, the reaper’s shots, which we’re familiar with from regular UDL as being shot out pretty fast, do 75 piercing with each shot! Even one of those too close to you is really bad news, and incredibly punishing even if you did have a pet. It could definitely be balanced a lot better.
Septavius himself is both not particularly hard and also a damage sponge. I would describe the boss as really tedious.
The minions are the main threat during the boss, but they’re not too hard to dodge as you can circle to avoid them. If they do hit you, however, there’s more inconsistency in terms of difficulty in dodging a shot vs the lethality of said shot; the large, slow, well telegraphed purple shots do 40 damage each, while the sick/bleeding shots that are pretty bad news in a petless dungeon seem to be quick, sword-like shots from the minions.
Since the new fight doesn’t change the actual behaviour of the boss very much at all, we still have the problem where Septavius can just sit on top of players, especially melee classes, and one-shot them except now with the higher damage on those shots they’re extra dead. If you’re not getting sat on top of, the shots still travel slowly and are easy to dodge, and effectively that phase of Septavius works the same as the regular phase equivalent.
I think it’s kinda interesting how heroic Septavius has its quiet shots better telegraphed than the regular one (because they’re easier to see). I wouldn’t mind that getting changed on the regular one too.
Now to Heroic Abyss. I find that this dungeon is pretty hard, but not in a way I enjoy.
Firstly, a small grievance of mine is that you can spawn into the dungeon kinda close to a hallway and get an unpleasant surprise. That doesn’t seem to happen nearly as often in the regular dungeon, though I can’t quite say for sure.
This dungeon is hard because everything does huge amounts of damage, to the point where it’d already be challenging with a pet, and this dungeon is petless. You can peek a room, take some shots that you can’t really dodge because the warrior brutes’ shots move way too fast or because the enemies were right at the entrance and they just shotgunned you in the brief time you were in there before you backed up. If you’re not on a class that can heal with its ability, you’ll likely have to sit there and wait for your natural vit to heal you, which is pretty boring. You could go on ahead, but if you’re too low you really risk just getting popped.
The white demons added to the dungeon don’t make the dungeon much harder. If anything, they seem to be the preferable spawn because they’re easy to take out, they just take a while to, and their shots don’t do as much as anything else in the dungeon (unless you’re jugg’d/have high enough defense, I guess).
Trooms are a lot more common, which is neat and what I’d expect from the heroic dungeons. However, once again, only the hp and damage numbers appear to be changed. They’re not hard.
The thing about abysses is you can sometimes get some pretty rough room generation. I died one time doing this dungeon because I peeked a room, a bunch of warrior brutes were near the entrance and chased me, and there wasn’t actually any room to circle to kill them safely in the room previous (and as I said earlier, their shots move fast and most of the time outspeed you moving backwards). I’m not quite sure what I could’ve done there on an archer; paralyzing doesn’t stop their shots, you’re dead/going to have to nexus if you try and circle/strafe into the lava in the room, and you’re dead/going to have to nexus if you walk backwards or forwards. That’s actually where I just gave up trying to clear the dungeon normally and I just threw rogues at them until I got to the boss.
The hardest part of the abyss boss were the enemies from the rest of the dungeon occasionally leaking into the boss room. If heroic Septavius was an exercise in patience, heroic Malphas is an entire workout routine. He does the same 4 phases from regular Malphas over and over again, and at most the shot speed on some of the projectiles is a bit faster.
You can actually also cheese the boss; you can literally just hide behind a pillar and you won’t get hit as long as you move away when he tosses one of those red star things, making this trivial to complete even if you suck at dodging (it’ll just take a while).
I don’t think the loot is worth the time, though this depends on how the heroic DBow and the heroic DBlade end up. The pots and gear aren’t really worth it. It feels like the pots and gear were balanced more towards a game where events didn’t happen every week and you couldn’t just plop your character down in USSouth while you did homework until someone popped a dungeon and you get to finish up your homework waiting for someone to rush the dungeon then just steamrolling the boss with 95 other people.
If you clear these dungeons, it’s definitely not worth the time because the hp on the enemies is far too inflated.
If you rush, it’s pretty dangerous, and not as viable as just taking advantage of events. And even if rushing these is your cup of tea, other than the whites the best you can get are the equivalent of 2 pots (4 pots for abby) and some tops (I think these drop up to tops, going off of some of the screenshots I’ve seen?).
I really like the idea of heroic dungeons being petless dungeons, and I think there’s a lot of potential there. Overall, I just don’t think that taking the same old dungeon and cranking the numbers up is a great way to do it, and I hope this isn’t coming off too harsh. If it’s going to borrow from pre-existing dungeons, it shouldn’t borrow the majority of it; it should change stuff up. I think new LoD is a great example of this even though the difficulty might not have changed as much; take a dungeon players know inside and out, and shake it up while still keeping the essence of the original dungeon (using the same enemies, and giving them different behaviours that call back to what they used to do, but not as a carbon copy). I believe that something like this can be pulled off while also making the dungeon itself more difficult. New LoD was such a happy surprise, and I’d like to feel the same way towards the heroic dungeons as well.
edit: holy frick I didn’t realize how long this post was