Sheol of Souls - Endgame dungeon Idea [UPDATE 8/21]


#1

Hello there.

Have you heard of the Mountain Temple? Did you know there used to be plans for a second wing but it never happened? Well, not sure if that’s going to get a second wing officially by DECA. SO I decided to make one based off of the current lore we know about Xil and what happened involving the Mountain Temple, by making an endgame dungeon based in the Demonic Underworld.

Click here to enter the Sheol of Souls
XilsRealmLogo
Currently an 88 page dungeon fully complete (Excluding a single enemy) and detailed with all the sprites, Weapon stats, designs, unique loot, terrain and more. All sprites that are not credited are made by me, excluding any from the Mountain Temple, that goes to the DECA team.

Anyways, I would love to see feedback on this dungeon, as it took me well over 6 months to complete this great work, and I have poured my heart into making this the best It can be. I have already shown it to a couple discords with very positive feedback which has helped me refine some of the items to make it balanced, as well as my older post here on realmeye where I showed the items. Anyways, I thank all of you who read the dungeon concept and especially those who can leave me feedback and criticism on how to improve. This has been a solo project and it is bound to have mistakes somewhere along the line as well as ways to improve it.


#3

Overall: Wow. The tiles and stuff were very well done. Awesome artwork as well. Below are some things I would change, though incomplete because I have yet to read the entire thing.

  • I feel like Xil could use a grander sprite, since right now, he looks more like the “in between” of a large enemy and boss.

  • Remove the old tops. We’re doing endgame content for only the best stuff anyway.


Wanted to talk a little about that. You may or may not know that Japanese has three “alphabets”, but none of them are what most English speakers think of the ABCs. What the Japanese language often does when there is a word their writing system cannot pronounce is just go along with whatever sounds similar. This is not a Japanese-only thing – many Asian languages like Korean do this as well. For example, “France” would be pronounced “Huransu” in Japanese and “Purahns” in Korean. The term “Xil” would probably be considered the closest English translation of whatever name they came up with in the other language, so the absence of the “X” alphabet in the Japanese language doesn’t exactly matter.

But. I genuinely have nothing against your Greek theme of Xil’s fortress. I think it’s really thought-out, and if DECA covers this topic later, I’m in full support of it actually reaching the real game.


#4

Hmm, the dungeon is mostly amazing, don’t get me wrong, that’s the reason i’ll only point out the flaws, these mainly stem from the items, that some of them are a bit overpowered, and would powercreep too many current meta items mainly:

1 - Death Cap seems quite weak compared to other soulbeasts since it has no debuffs and is stationary with low HP making it fodder to long ranged weapons, for better crowd control it could inflict some debuffs that weaken players like silenced.
2 - Reality Slicer isn’t fit for a bullet hell permadeath game, its’ most threatening attack by far is really eaay to dodge and yet designed to nearly oneshot you, especially bad in the curse phase and with the clones, just one hit will kill anyone combined with other things, let’s not borrow bad design from Void Entity please, Reality Slicer could do more 400-500ish damage but be harder to dodge, like, fast, movement predicting slash, maybe have it be comprised of multiple weaker (but still strong) predicting shots, that way it’s more unique than just a slow near oneshot;
3 - While i appreciate an item that takes effort to use, the Bow suffers from a similar balance problem to Colossus Sword, sure, it requires skill to use, but once you know how to use it, there’s practically no reason to use anything else including Void Bow, it has the equivalent damage of 218 landing both shots and the explosion, also coming with far better crowd clearing and 7.2 range, if you know how to use it why bother using any other bow unless you’re in a tight corridor? Speaking of the explosion, plugging the math in you’ll find it actually only does about 5% of the weapon’s total dps, making it a rather minor thing when it has the potential to be really unique and a more standout part of the bow, i suggest making the explosion a higher percentage of the weapon’s total DPS, then nerfing either damage or range quite significantly or a bit of both so that this weapon doesn’t singlehandedly render every single shot bow like Void, Leaf, Doom and TShot irrelevant in the hands of someone who knows how to use it (Similar to ColoSword);
4 - The Guillotine Blade is balanced, but was your intent with this item for it to be a high DPS dagger? It’s actually quite the opposite having more range but doing DPS barely better than a Carved Golem Remains, just pointing out.
5 - Not a flaw right now but the wand will definitively need rebalancing to stay good when(if?) In-Combat comes out;
6 - The ST dagger is too similar to Queen’s Stinger, and partially due to being an ST and partially due to usually better damage would kick the latter down to an extremely niche weapon, a rework to solve both of these issues could be a unique but easy to implement effect, say, having the dagger be insanely strong compared to all the rest but permasicken you on equip?
7 - Ira’s Pendant could use a minor buff to put it in line with endgame, a minor one, really, say, bumping up the wisdom to 11 you could even lower another stat a little, specifically 11 and not 10 to allow for a really good wismod build for Sorc using Condu and Ritual Robe, just to give wismod which is usually underpowered some love.
8 - Ring of Styx on the other hand probably fits warrior a bit too much ironically, the defense on any class with armored actually makes it tankier than a ring of decades, the -4 attack doesn’t matter much with high att but the 10 dex matters alot with low dex, does this ring a bell? Yeah, warrior is already OP but would be even more with this one, same applies for any other class with armored really, recommend lowering the dex and def to 5 but removing the minus attack.


#5
  • do you have a full-sized map? it looks very nice and I’d like to see the full thing

  • the spare/kill mechanic is probably prone to greifing but having a positive and negative to both sides makes it interesting nonetheless

  • xil’s sprite is completely unreadable. I haven’t got the foggiest idea what I’m looking at


#6

Agreed on the Xil sprite. I’m no expert on spriting but this was what I was able to do.

As for the old tops… Shatters does it for all their bosses. If its really considered obsolete then it doesn’t need to be there, then that’s fine.

Yes I am quite aware. However when talking about this, I had a discussion with a few people who were fluent with the Japanese language to see what they thought and they all said that the word isn’t valid. Also as someone who knows a bit of Japanese myself, I can say that this is not the case. This is the case for all 3 alphabets.

Well, the suggestion seems good. The enemy isn’t finalized yet so things may change.

Honestly that might seem a bit better. I can update that.

Its supposed to be a difficult weapon to use. I did give it a prior nerf to its attack speed to help with its DPS but if people still think its too strong that could be adjusted. As for the proc I could double its effect to make it more noticeably useful.

The proc and the temporary slowing effect should make up for the reduced damage.

We’ll see when we get there.

Woah permasicken? No that sounds actually terrible. I could give it some other effect to make it stand out, but its mainly due to the fact that most dagger ideas have already been done.

Instantly make the UB wis ring useless xD. That would make it compete with the Geb Ring though. Perhaps it won’t be the worst idea after all. I’ll give it some thought.

I removed 2 DEX from the ring. Should balance it out, as it is going against the stats of the Bracer from the shatters while still being unique. Keeping the -4 attack to compensate though. Maybe try using the UT sword with this ring.

Firstly, the map exists, I just forgot to put it in the document. Secondly the mechanic is based on majority rules, just like the statues in the LoD, where whatever takes more damage will be the deciding choice. Since both the boss and the switch will have the same HP and Defense this will be fully be based on majority.


#7

I really like the st set, do you already have a skin for when you wear the full set?


#8

Bump.

Seriously, why is this idea not more popular? Probably the highest effort (good) dungeon idea in the entire forum and would blow any dungeon we have currently out of the water.


#9

I would need to check this out more, so don’t quote me on this, but I think that this dungeon idea had once been planned in concept for the game at one point, but got delayed/canceled.

Also, if you think this is amazing, you may like some of the Best of the Best ideas. I think almost all of those are pretty well thought out, plus a couple of other hidden ones. :slight_smile:


#10

This dungeon is amazing - I can’t believe it slipped my radar for so long! The fusion of mythology, extant ‘lore’ and highly original designs - particularly for some of the monsters - is brilliantly executed. I shall hope to read this in greater depth in future and perhaps offer some more detailed critiques!


#11

One more thing to consider, even if Deca does decide to make an official Mountain Temple wing 2, this idea can still be added, as long as you re-theme and resprite certain things.


#12

By the way, I have made some changes to a couple things in the dungeon concepts, notably changing the Xil sprite again, and adding the attacks to the Forgotten Wraith mini-boss. Still gotta make a couple more sprites, and most likely a Chironine resprite. Gotta really embrace the silhouette or not do it at all, and it just currently doesn’t work out.

Doesn’t have a sprite currently. Best to get a Xil/Final boss sprite that looks good before making the ST set.

Thank you for reading this! I’ve seen your own content and I think your ideas are just as brilliant. Maybe in the future we could work together on something in the future, who knows?

What I do know about the Mountain Temple Pt2 is that Beige currently has an idea for the dungeon, but it is currently not in the works. I still believe that he can work something good, but if he does release the second wing this concept is pretty easily interchangeable. It has more than enough original content to warrant a completely seperate dungeon in its own right. Though I would have to remove the MT ruins and change the appearance of some enemies/remove them, it would still work favorably well.


#13

So I glanced over the entire doc and this seems like a very well thought out dungeon concept! I, too, would love to see the second wing of the Mountain Temple actually added into the game.

Like I said, this looks really well done, but I have one concern. I’m not sure how I feel about having another dungeon in the game with a preset layout. The Shatters has a layout that is the exact same every single time and I think this contributes massively to the “cheesability” of the dungeon. If you are faced with the same layout every single time, the dungeon is going to be significantly easier just by means of not having to consider any of the possible randoms that could occur. I think this dungeon would greatly benefit by having more random generation elements with the terrain and overall layout of the dungeon. I’d really hate to see a great idea turn into a second shatters where people just skip over most of the enemies because the layout is the same every single time and the entire dungeon is telegraphed.

But yeah, keep up the great work! Had a blast looking through this idea and hope to see more from you in the future!


#14

Muahahahahahaha I have defied your wishes
Oh yeah sorry for bump
I read through this and it looks really cool I wish they would put this ingame


#15

:neutral_face:


#16

some of the tinctures that you have added will definitely not be allowed. why? simply because of o3. Celestial phase relies on the fact that you are silenced to remove HP regen and the effusion preventing that will just delete the difficulty of that phase


#17

(This dungeon was in the works before O3 was much of a reality, just so you know.)


#18

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