PT: Heroic Abyss and Heroic UDL

[Survivor]

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]

tbh I still wish this could be resolved:

MEGATHREAD: connection and registration issues

Whenever I try to enter any portal/loading screen on my main testing account (Guill), I get account in use and a 10 minute DC. I can only access the nexus.

For the first few minutes of this testing session this wasn’t the case, but after that it started.
I tried 7+ times to wait out the cooldown and try again, but every time it gave me a 10 minute DC upon entering a loading screen.

I tried making a new account and that one works the way it’s supposed to as far as I can tell, but if at all possible I want to get Guill back into a usable state because that’s the account I’ve been using since PT1 and has a higher-level pet, it also has a mheal/heal/elec pet.

It’s really hard to find any eggs on testing.

[Xaklor]

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.

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]

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

[Pentaract]

Please take my impressions with a pinch of salt - they are of course hyperbolic and deliberately orotund

What’s the point of being orotund on purpose?

[Pentaract]

After last month’s LoD/Shaitan/Library triple whammy it’s surprising to see content on public testing that’s so unpolished, but I’m not complaining. That y’all are considering heroic dungeons is a big development, and I’m glad the playerbase is getting a chance to test this out so early in the process – at least, I hope it’s early, and heroic dungeons aren’t close to being implemented soon.

I think these heroic dungeons are both misguided and poorly executed, and that adding them to prod would be a mistake. I’ll probably be repeating a few other posters, but here goes.

First of all, reskinning dungeons is boring. The enemies might be tougher, but they have the same shot patterns and most of the behaviors you’re already familiar with. (There are exceptions: slimes chase you now! Septavius has a new attack!) The accusations of copying private servers are obviously silly, but they’re appropriate in a way: copying existing content and just making the numbers bigger is a pserver hallmark, and it would be a shame to see that kind of uninspired design on production.

My experience in both dungeons was dangerous, yes, but also tedious. This is coming from someone accustomed to playing without a pet on prod, which in itself makes the game tougher (I recommend that anyone who wants to get better at the game go petless for a while). Simply buffing the enemies’ stats and disabling pets might be meant to reward the most skilled at maneuvering, but it makes combat more slow and punishing without making it more fun or interesting.

I like to refer to this VentureBeat post about difficulty and challenge. The heroic dungeons (especially abyss) are difficult – they are dangerous for maxed characters and hard to complete. But they’re not especially challenging – they’re mostly the same as the normal UDL and abyss, only you need to regen longer, so they don’t test your skills in new ways. This is one reason I think these dungeons are a step in the wrong direction: newer dungeons are already rewarding dodging skill (see final phase of thicket) without negating pets entirely and being uninteresting remakes.

Yet much of the game was balanced without pets in mind, and having hundreds of vit makes older content (like the OG abyss and UDL) trivial. That’s the only reason we’re talking about heroic dungeons at all: pets are a fundamentally game-breaking mechanic, making it difficult to balance content, and yet they’re too lucrative and integral to the game to be meaningfully nerfed.

It’s not an enviable situation for the devs, and a game mode that disables pets altogether in order to put players on a level playing field (for certain content) seems worth experimenting with. And I agree — I liked the petless arena event, and I’d support an NPE game mode — but heroic dungeons are the wrong way to do it. They are a whole can of worms:

• The game has become much more fast-paced since before functional pets were added
  • Requiring you to change up your playstyle in order to access new content is frustrating
  • Petless dungeons might appeal to the nostalgia of older players, but this will put new players off
  • This comes six years too late for most of the old-timers who wanted something like this, as they have likely either adapted to gameplay with pets or quit
• There is no way to adequately balance the loot
  • Slower, riskier versions of existing dungeons would require large rewards to be worthwhile at all
  • Greater potions on their own have not proven to be valued loot for endgame (see Nest), which means life/mana, UTs, and/or other special drops
  • Adding truly meaningful loot to petless dungeons will piss off the people who have invested heavily in their pets and/or don’t want to do them
  • Giving petless dungeon loot only a slight advantage over existing gear (what we are seeing now) will not make them worthwhile for most
• Existing problems with dungeon running will be enhanced
  • TP must be disabled or people will heroically leech
  • The difficulty, combined with an increased reliance on priests, will cause organized Discord runs to become the established way of doing the dungeon (see Lost Halls)
  • This is assuming anyone does them at all (see Nest, any public run of which will demonstrate that amazing white bags aren’t always enough incentive to stay through a difficult clear)
• They would not actually address any problems with pet balance because of their detachment from the rest of the game

I don’t have an easy answer for the pet issue (buff vit?) but I don’t see how heroic dungeons would make the situation any better.

[HyperInvox]

Heroic dungeons have no purpose, Literally just make an epic version of the dungeon instead rather than these half-arsed petless “harder” landfills.
Don’t be lazy, ya dummies.

[Mynamerr]

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 .

Also this is the reason why the Leprechaun can “no-clip” in the Sprite World.

He can also no-clip in regular abysses

[Puffagod]

I was just trying to be mildly humorous xP

[HorusKane]

Those dungeons have a No Pet feature activated by default. In addition, we have increased HP and damage of the monsters.

oof

thought this wouldve been a fun feature but they just disabled features and direct buffed the enemies

I really hope you decide to change this, as it doesn’t look like it’ll be a feature to come back for after all.

[Miista]

hi Miista here, 100 100 pet in normal game

i like the udl alot, but pls make the udl boss immune to stun, abyss is okay

the new dbow is nice, maybe add a small stat bonus like +3 att/dex/spd

the new dblade is useless, i feel no difference to the normal one, mabye make the gab between the shoots smaller

[Norton]

I dont mind heroic dungeons, but I strongly dislike the idea of releasing same items but slightly better. This is just dumb

[Rodrigopt]

I totaly agree with u, desnessecary

[Unicorn]

Wonder why they decided to go for the UDL instead of abyss, I thought most of the complaints were directed towards abyss but maybe I was misinformed.

https://youtu.be/Xgi5uuuvi00 (new udl, 2 new septavius phase, minions hurt less)

[itachiToT]

I guess one thing at a time. UDL is really fun I love it. I just hope it isn’t like woodlab or deadwater docks (once per realm). I want to grind these like grinding normal UDLs

[ThatsMyJam]

Adding truly meaningful loot to petless dungeons will piss off the people who have invested heavily in their pets and/or don’t want to do them

I disagree here, but probably because I’m a hopeless hopeful. I think people might adjust to the thought of getting a directly upgraded UT if they can grind out some heroic abysses. I’ve PTWd my divine to 100/100 and I still absolutely love the idea of pet disabled dungeons. Sure, maybe not ALL of them should be, but it’s okay to have them.

The difficulty, combined with an increased reliance on priests, will cause organized Discord runs to become the established way of doing the dungeon (see Lost Halls)

Don’t sell keys for heroic dungeons. Limit player count to 15. Easy.

[ThatsMyJam]

I strongly dislike the idea of releasing same items but slightly better.

[TPLink]

Some part of me believe the devs check this topics for feedback so… here we go.

• Loved the new phases and pattern shots of UDL boss.

• Loved that some enemies can add status effect (confuse, amor break)

• Really like the idea of a petless dungeon but fail to see why the mobs need to be so amped. Just the fact that it’s petless already makes it more challenging.

• Absolutely despise the idea of “more damage and hp” to make anything more challenging. It just makes it more time consuming and tedious. Especially considering it’s a dungeon we’ve had since forever (udl and abyss). This is a more serious note. I really wish Deca don’t fall for this trap. Increasing the damage and hp of the mobs do not make a dungeon more challenging. Just more time consuming. Increase the damage a little bit and add new features. In this topic - New Status Effect Concepts there is a whole bunch I’d love it to see in game. This can make things much more challenging and at the same time add new content and a lot of fun.

[Ancienther]

Every tier 13 weapon ever

[Norton]

ut items
tiered items

Ok buddy