So... Why is the Void a DPS Wall?

#52

You go from “attack the boss until it dies” to “alternate between culling the Shades population and whaling on the boss until everything dies”.

I’m not quite sure what’s supposed to be “strategic” about this.

… then why is it in a game that has no built-in way of making your own raid party and that was in fact built from the ground up with “no separation between players” as a core principle?

Finding better players to carry you is not strategy. Not even close.

It’s also ironic that you would criticize pets and praise LH in the same breath when most of your LH runs would have been impossible, or at least considerably harder, had your healers and buffers not owned high-level pets.

or a testament to the fact that it’s by default the only endgame in RotMG and that people will put themselves through anything for fame and white bags.

Shatts and Nest don’t require organization, they just require everyone to stick together and not try to rush or drag from several directions at once.

The beauty of Tomb is that, while coordination and proper tactics make it go a lot more smoothly, they are not an absolute requirement to complete the dungeon. You can complete Tombs in the dirtiest fashion imaginable or you can take the time to master all of their mechanics and do them as clean as possible.

It’s a dungeon that rewards all playstyles, instead of forcing everyone to clump up together into a big damage ball and roll over everything.

What makes you think he isn’t?

You didn’t need to make your already long post even longer by adding a ton of pictures, all for a “gotcha” moment that might completely fizzle out.

#53

Janus is the worst. It was late. I was alone in the castle. Fuck it. I clear it. Door to Janus opens. And you just can not beat him. No matter what. Now that’s some bullshit.
Similarly jerk around for minutes to get the minimum group to crack the stupid cristal. Finally cracks. Prisoner dies. Okay, let’s do dungeon. You enter it, nobody else did (or just some jackass didn’t bother) and you’re screwed again.
All this shit is terrible. Notice how the cristal itself is fine. It’s an exception, not the norm.

#54

My first proper Lost Halls experience was a public LH where everyone apart from me, 2/8 archer (spd and dex I think) with only a cbow and t5 quiver, and a knight who was levelling had nexused. It turned out that knight was a bloody amazing player and even though they had been levelling earlier they guided me through an entire LHs and Cult, and we beat it. Nice UBHP drop for me and vial and some pots for him. I thanked them for their help, which gave me the experience I needed to do any LHs. funny, since I’ve never completed a LH since.

However, I’ve never fought the Marble Colossus or Void Entity. Not once. In small groups (2-4 people perhaps) it’s too hard. Well, maybe not Colossus since I’ve never fought him, but I never hear a “void or cult lads” being replied to with “void”. I’ve joined the public halls discord but can never get into a bazaar quick enough to get in ahead of 150+ other players, my guild leader cheekily teasing me for being too slow. (@RealGmng…)

Honestly the way LHs is right now it punishes “casual” players if they want to do void for those whites or pots or whatever, and only the hardcore gamers who are always on when there’s a discord run and are always able to get in are able to even have a chance of facing void. Alternatively, those who are fairly lazy and once they get in they just walk along with the group. Casual in this case, what I mean is players who want to play the game without needing to join a massive external server or come with your 8/8 buddies with divine pets. Of course you’d need maxed (at least defense, dps stats or whatever) players with good gear, the dungeon’s pretty flipping hard. Cult runs are possible like this, although it’s very hard if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s definitely possible. Void on the other hand, it’s not hard, but straight up impossible.

I would be all for rebalancing the void to fit large groups and small groups since I could finally at least attempt the Void Entity fight.

even though I should probably stick to finally defeating Colossus first.

#55

Out of interest, what would people say to a mini/mega void option? hypothetically speaking, the idea is that if you don’t use a vial in the first minute, you could do a much easier void, with identical mechanics, but less minions, hp, damage (so basically a massive nerf), However, there would be much less change of loot, and life or mana is not gauranteed. Using te vial would open it like now.

#56

uh, what? ALl you have to do is get into a LH discord that’s not pub halls imo

Back when LHZ existed, all you had to do was pay attention when called to

#57

Hey everyone, I first want to say thanks for the valuable feedback and discussion in this thread!

I have not had the time to read all of it, but it means a lot to me that people are still discussing and interested in the dungeon so long after the launch of 2.0.

One of the goal of the rework was to make sure that Lost Halls (& Cult/Void) was a dungeon that could be experienced no matter the group size. On one hand that goal was accomplished, you can do Void with 4 people… but on the other hand there’s barely any incentive to run the dungeon and void from a Sentry when you can just easily run a key and guarantee a run through one of the many Lost Halls discord.

My time is more limited nowadays and I’m also working on something else already, but I do want to eventually go back one more time to Lost Halls and hopefully fix up the last few issues it might have including that, please note I’m not talking about something on a scale of a rework, but some changes to make the experience more accessible overall (that doesn’t mean easier however).

I have a few ideas on things I’d like to change myself but it won’t happen for quite a while and I will not be making any promises today due to currently not knowing the amount of control I’ll have over more changes to the dungeon.

But rest assured that I’m listening and am still committed in improving the dungeon and will take this opportunity to simply ask what are simple changes you’d like to see to the dungeon and why?
I’ll note the ones that i find interesting and will investigate the possibility of it happening once I finally tackle this.

Lost Halls isn't a great dungeon...
#58

-Can you try and make it so Crusades/Spooky can’t appear right next to spawn? It’s really annoying to have to abandon a public LH 10 seconds in because map generation decided to screw us over.

-Could you make more sprites for the status effect towers so that they’re easier to recognize? Keeping them purely color-coded like the Tomb ones doesn’t work when you have this many different status effects.

-This isn’t only about LH, but about how UGC views endgame content as a whole: stop trying to turn RotMG into a classic bullet hell. Stop making boss fights that have zero interesting mechanics and are just purely about precision dodging. You’re not playing to the game’s strengths, you’re only making its weaknesses more obvious.

#59

Without rotmg being a bullet hell, its a loot simulator. The game is supposed to be perma-death(which is what I consider its greatest strength), and with that comes dungeons that can possibly kill people.

#60

Precise dodging only works in single-player offline games. When you have to deal with tons of other player sprites running around, weird and unclear hitboxes as well as all forms of lag, dodging becomes a much more approximative affair.

On top of that, this is a MMO game with 15 different player classes. If the boss is just going to be a completely straightforward bullet hell, then class diversity doesn’t matter because what you do doesn’t change significantly depending on what class you’re playing.

It’s funny how Void is supposed to be the True Final Boss of the game while cult is this completely optional thing, yet cult is magnitudes more complex and engaging as a boss fight.

#61

afaik that should already be the case, does it still happen? I’ve never noticed.

#62
  1. Get rid of the vial
  2. Split the dungeon into two. marble chad, formerly LH, and cultist
  3. Look for good drop location of new cultist dungeon

This alone would already help a lot, and is very simple too. 8)

#63

Here’s my take on this:

Lol

#64

Yes, I was in one yesterday, 2x routes out of the spawn room, we went right, and there was a crusade in the corridor out of the first room… unless someone had superfast been rushing that direction and dragged it, but I don’t think that was the case as I was quite quick to join.

#65

At this point, if you boil everything down that far, even interesting bosses like Sans’ fight from Undertale or the battle against Souls of Cinder from DS3 can be reduced down to “alternate between attacking and defending.”

I did watch the Soul of Cinder fight; as seen here:

If I boiled it down to the player’s actions, all he “really” did was avoid taking damage, heal, and deal damage. But as you can see here, the boss is much more complex than that- the player was quite often cockblocked from healing using his flasks, and the player was putting some brains into it as to when to attack, when to heal, and when to dodge.

I believe this is a good boss fight. Next example- Sans.


In this boss battle, it’s more about the memorization and reflexes- There’s no particular grand strategy; just dodge dem bones and heal when you need to. This is quite different from the DS3 battle- It’s more heavily weighted toward reflexes. You could also boil this down to “dodge, heal and attack.”

However, after enough fails, you could also complete the boss via anticipation of his attacks.

Sans can be either combated through careful analysis, or insane reflexes and luck. Or a combination of all three factors.

Conclusion?
All bosses, whether good or bad, can be effectively be reduced to “attack” and “defend.” If all bosses could be analyzed like this, all bosses would effectively be the same boss with slight variations.

Also, I do agree with what you said about the Tomb.

#66

I’ve already said straight bullet hell fights were fine in a single-player offline game, so I’m not sure what point this is supposed to prove.

Again, comparing a single player game to a MMO does not work too well. Sure, you can summon help in Souls games, but it’s generally going to be one or two other players, not fifty.

Also, this is really not a debate you want to have. There are a metric fuckton of factors that make character building and combat magnitudes more complex in Souls games than in RotMG.

Since I don’t want to bore everyone with a giant essay, I’ll just say this: one of the Soul of Cinder’s phases is randomly selected among three possible choices. Watching only one video shows you only one of three possible ways this fight can play out.

That fact alone already makes it more complex than the Void Entity fight, and it’s barely scraping the surface.

Do not equate a fight that looks shallow because you don’t know all of its inner workings to a fight that looks shallow because there is genuinely nothing deep about it.

#67

Ok so I’ve never even successfully run a void, but I’ve been following this discussion a bit.

Why can’t we just split void into “hard mode” and “easy mode” like with lod? Players could somehow choose which they wanted through some mechanic (a fairer one than lod’s)

Then you’d have the current void (maybe buffed a bit) as hard mode, and an easier one that takes into consideration the player’s complaints of a DPS wall, bad/inconvenient design, etcetc, but drops less loot.

Feel free to rip this apart haha I don’t know much about void

#70
  • Making Crusades only spawn after ~5 rooms. While they don’t spawn in the first room anymore, their tendenct to “leak” into adjacent rooms can effectively negate this, and swiftly end a run due to the lack of space;
  • Making Crusades slightly slower, to give groups without (viable) Slow afflicters a slightly better fighting chance. Also an alternative to previous point, as it grants players more time to deal with them.

Those are the only really simple things I can think of at the moment.

As for the whole Void debate, I’m sure that with an organised group, they can be run fairly effectively.
Therefore, I don’t think of the enemies themselves being the issue, but rather how the dungeon interacts with the game. Having this requirement of skilled players and organisation is tough to find, considering that you’ll be hard-pressed to encourage people to attempt the Colossus - especially considering how the Cult’s loot is relatively more appreciated than the Colossus’.

That’s a dilemma on itself, too: give MBC good loot and people will complain how, with Void, Cult runs aren’t worth it; give Cult better loot, and you’ll have this situation we have now - no one wants to do the much riskier MBC fight publicly, since Cult is just more worth it.

#71

This will be last response on this topic:

Not all dungeons are intended or made to be soloable. Before pets were implimented in the game, the tomb was the definition of endgame content, and attempting to solo is just as dumb and unrewarding as soloing a halls now. It is true that it is literally impossible to solo void, but why should you be able to? Rotmg is a co-op game, and it is entirely within reason and power that DECA would make a dungeon that FORCES co-op in a game where co-op is rarely seen outside of voice chat channels.

A lot of dungeons from sprite worlds to tombs were not intended for pets and a MASSIVE horde, but instead with a moderate - small group and without pet. As a result, most of the player base is spoiled and lazy, and does not even want to attempt actual difficult content like the nest, the lost halls, or even the shatters with a small group. This is entirely the fault of pets, but it’s what we have to deal with. The login rewards and lazy events also contributes to the laziness of the average player of Rotmg - they think everything is free, everything should be easily completed with zero or almost zero effort, and they DESERVE everything because they ‘play the game a lot’. As a result, the average realm player is lazy and selfish because they do not need help from anybody else with the implementation of pets, so they leech dungeons and stopped, almost entirely, the co-op aspect of rotmg except for endgame content - which FORCES communication and organization, or else they will fail, and I applaud DECA on that. They did a good job, or as good as a job anybody could have done, making a dungeon that forces co-op.

You say that the halls stray from the aspect of the game that is ‘soloable’, and you say that all dungeons except the void is ‘technically’ soloable. Who intended those dungeons to be soloable? Did Wildshadow, Kabam or deca EVER say they even ENCOURAGED soloing in any dungeon? No, they did not, and that is for a reason. Realm of the mad god was, is, and always will be a mass online CO-OP game, and part of DECA’s duty is to force co-op even when there is non existant in the playerbase because of a mistake Kabam did. I think making void impossible to solo is definitely justified, intended or not. It forces some degree of co-op in a co-op game where co-op is so rarely seen.

I’m sorry this is a bit of a rant and may be wrong, but I’m tired of people who assume everything should be soloable in a co-op game.

#72

Seeing multiple reply regarding the crusaders, would it be possible to provide videos if you happen upon it? Not that I don’t believe any of you, but it would help setting the number down if I can see in action from where the crusaders spawned and how the players reacted to it.

While I’m at it here’s another question: What would make you want to run Void from a Sentry?

#73

Crusades can’t spawn in a room right next to spawn. Never seen it happen in a LH 2.0 so at least that might be fixed.

But they can still spawn basically anywhere else. I’ve had runs where we just started clearing the first room and a crusade came from the side, or runs where we cleared the first room and then immediately ran into a crusade in the next.

Mind you this was without anyone rushing and very soon after entering the LH, so they couldn’t have been dragged by anyone from far away.

Can’t record and play at the same time though, sorry.