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

#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.

#74

That’s alright, thanks a lot for the feedback.

Fixing this shouldn’t be too much work albeit a bit messy, I’ll just need to settle on the minimum amount of room away from spawn before Crusaders or Spectral Sentry can spawn which was mostly why I was interested in videos so I could check how long it takes for people to react to that type of attacks and how far back people get pushed, but if you’ve got some experience of surviving that type of ambush that can also work.

#75

you are right, but I’ve never had a guild decent enough. And I met strangers sometimes, but without communication is hard, not everyone can type “crus” meanwhile escaping.
But I remember the first runs of the lost boys, I liked them cuz we runned in really few ppl, but we knew how to do it. We used discord, few ppl, Anyone was able to talk. Less ppl, better.

#76

I’d say at least 3 or 4 rooms but I’m not 100% sure.

Well, yeah. When a dungeon is straight-up bullshit like Shatters, people don’t feel like risking their characters there.

Leeching and laziness don’t come from pets, they come from the fact that this game was designed with zero boundaries between players.

I’m all for calling leeches out, because it’s a stupid behavior (seriously, why would you boot up a game if you’re not going to play it??? makes no sense), but at the end of the day, who’s the most responsible? The people who created this game as a failed social experiment? The multi-million dollar company that sat on their asses and didn’t improve the game? Or a bunch of literal children who don’t know any better?

#77

I genuinely agree w/ your take on how… realms, which are usually laidback, go batshit insane as soon as you start a halls, relative to taking castle/O1/O2. Even if you just take a trix w/ the relative ease of rushing lost halls (heck, even I’ve learned how to rush them!), one wrong teleport and ur fuckin’ dead, kiddo. I don’t want to say MBC is hard (it’s not exactly rocket science) but it’s manageable. It takes having your head screwed on straight though, that’s for sure. It’d be nice if they could only have like, one sentry per server at a time and have it announced so it was a little bit more of an event, sure as fuck for those looking for one and to make it hopefully that bit more cohesive w/o “hey guys we’re a discord and if you co-operate, we’ll make this easy as fuck”, but… yeah. My only issue is that as is, nest is far worse of a clusterfuck, both for the event, which is somewhere between jade/garnet statues and people who somehow die to ice spheres, and for the dungeon that never seems to end.

@whutS yo small sentry runs sounds wonderful, can I join?

@RMGnoob wdym by “a failed social experiment”? afaik wildshadow merely created this as a response to a design tourney using specific assets, got third and realized “holy shit, people are actually playing this thing?”, while it more-or-less spiraled out of their hands, kabam fucked it up and the rest was history

#79

Unfortunately just quit the game and gave my account to a friend. Idk if they do small cults/voids anymore was really fun but a lot of my group of friends in game have gone their ways after I quit. You can ask the current owner of the WhutS account if you like though.

#80

this alone won’t fix anything, but it could help in combination with something else (not that I have suggestions for “something else” atm): give the sentry a decent chance to drop the vial of pure darkness.

even if you somehow convinced randos in a realm to go to the marble colossus instead of the hideout, without a vial you still can’t do void. getting the vial requires that you convince these bozos to do a public LH twice, and once is hard enough. you probably can’t get away with just using one of your own from a previous run because the discord servers control the vials of their members, punishing those who use vials acquired from the discord outside of the discord’s runs (unless this rule got phased out while I wasn’t paying attention or something).

lore-wise I realize this probably isn’t satisfactory, but if you want sentry voids to become a thing giving the players the tools needed to make it happen should be a good first step.

#81

The last time I experienced an early Crusade, my attempt to slowly circle the room ended in a flashing Nexus thanks to being blocked by a bunch of Soldiers whilst Armor Broken.

I think about 3 rooms is a pretty good minimum. Will try to record some public LH if I find one.

#82

I have, we were 15 at the start of LH and 13 and the void’s death. In your defense we were all experienced with small voids but we had no RL, no voice chat at all. Void is hard if you don’t know what you’re doing, else it’s a breeze.

You’re also severly underestimating how good players are, groups don’t lose half of their players to MBC survival. If you dodge slow and pet stasis, there’s nothing to worry about - and if the group starts with 80 players, you’re probably using pub halls which is filled with priests.

How many voids have you completed so far?

#83

out of curiosity, how did you get those 15 people together at the sentry, and how far in advance did you plan this run?

no VC is promising, but if you still had to use discord text channels or something like that to arrange the run it’s still not quite “normal circumstances”. this is especially true if you also used out-of-game chat to organize things like which classes you’re bringing or which corners you’re assigned to.

#84

When you get down to it, this game’s core design is basically “How would players react to a MMO that’s the exact contrary of other MMOs in every way?”.

Raid parties and separate instances? Let’s put everyone together.

Max level takes forever to grind? Set max lvl to 20 and make it reachable in a matter of minutes.

Death is a slap on the wrist and you can keep the same character forever? Permadeath.

Either make it a typical RPG or a hack’n slash? Bullet hell.

In the end, it failed. Players came en masse because of how addictive the formula is and because standards for the f2p market are abysmally low, but they didn’t react positively to the core design decisions and instead we get shit like leeching, ruining public dungeons, etc.

#85

@Diamondest @RMGnoob I agree with most of what you both say about laziness etc. - only thing you’ve not mentioned is hack client allowing players to be almost utterly careless as to their actions, with nice autonexus letting them go on again and again and again with the anti-coop playstyles. If this is ever reigned in, players will simply have to go back to the more cautious strategies that benefit the group, because after the 3rd 4th 5th death ‘trying’ to be that one guy always rushing too fast into the next room, activating shit, maybe the message hits home, or you quit, either way the next dungeon will be improved from the other players’ points of view.

Are you writing this from the future, if so can you tell us the date you are on so we can optimise our Rotmg strategy to not have any leftover loot pots by then. :smile:

#86

This is only for the worst groups.

SBC starts a run with around 40 and ends with 30 after void.

It’s not that hard.