Thoughts on new LoD


#1

I’m sure that many of you have run at least one LoD since the rework, and I am curious of what you think about it. Personally, I believe the rework is something that LoD really needed, but it isn’t quite hard enough imo. I consider myself to be a rather bad player, yet I had very little difficulty dodging and surviving in a LoD, in a small group, which was down to me and 2 others for Feargus and the Wyvern, and I was on a lvl 19 archer, using only a t5 armor until after feargus, when i got hippo. @Seelpit also shared a similar story, being in a LoD on a lvl 12 paladin, also unpotted with mediocre gear (check the death thread)

Anyways what are your thoughts on the new LoD?


Why is LOD loot still bad?
#2

I think it’s fine, LoD was not meant to be endgame content and the rework definitely made the fight a lot more interesting and more accessible to melees which is what matttered to me.


#3

The dungeon revamp is pretty sick imo. The fighting is a tad bit more challenging then before. The green dragon isnt nice anymore. Overall the new LoD is great and thank god no more chest and pillar leechers. although its not melee friendly imo


#4

New lod is just amazing anyone who says otherwise is just a dried out coconut. Dungeon makes melees x10 more viable than before they are good at the minion phases and although you cant get one shot vs before its a bit sketch if you’re not careful. Same trade of with ranged its harder in the survival phase but easy when you’re killing the boss. Its harder than old lod but more balanced. Great Dungeon design sprites mechanics everything.


#5

Does anyone know if Battle for the Nexus was updated with the new green dragon, or is it still the older version of the green dragon?


#6

why would it be the new one


#7

i think its quite an improvement from its last iteration. Leeching is decreased and the dragons aren’t just pinatas especially Limoz. Honestly it kept me on my toes and had a noticeable amount of people nexus because of how much more challenging it was. Truly turned into more of a bullet hell.


#8

Biggest problems I have are not with the actual dungeon per se—it seems fine, not too tough, although perhaps a bit harsher for newbs than the old one?—but the way the reworking was handled, to all intents it is simply a whole new dungeon, literally everything was changed, except for the loosest connection of theme, being still ‘five dragons in a dungeon’. Entirely unlike how the Ice Cave rework was handled, which I thought was almost the ideal way to do such a thing, keeping most of the original concept but fixing the duff parts.

There wasn’t even an attempt at fixing the old Lod simply by doing things like replacing chests with direct loot (to compel players to participate), tweaks to Feargus to be more melee-able (since without Csword it was really tough), and the DPS method of choosing order. That should’ve been done first, let it run like that for a bit and see how it worked. But instead Deca threw it to the player designers seemingly saying “just do something with this, whatever you like”.

Don’t get me wrong the dungeon itself seems alright from the few I’ve done, the designers clearly have skills and a vision for what the dungeon should be, and I do like some of it! But if the simple fixes had been done, and the energy that went into the rework applied to a new dungeon, we’d now have two good dungeons to enjoy instead of only one.


Anyway back on topic with specifics:
I am not a fan of the sprites changing, too ‘cartoony’ now?’. Ivory in particular looks like a fat dinosaur or something. Which isn’t to say it’s bad, only what’s the point in changing it. Same as when they kept messing about with item sprites. Just leave the old things as they are (unless broken) and use new designs for new enemies. (The fact they had to change the design of the Mark should’ve raised a little question in their head whether they were taking it too far from the existing design, IMO, though I like that it matches at least).

The spinny animation effects seem a little jarring and intrusive vs the rest of Realm’s design, but that might be just because it’s new.

Them changing back into statues at the end of each fight, and the loot appearing away from their death site doesn’t feel satisfying somehow, like “have we actually killed them?”.

I don’t like the teleporting thing, the original had at least some (very) mild sense you were within in a dragon lair going along the tunnels to fight them, then portal upstairs (or down) to the wyvern lair sited above/below to disturb Ivory. Now Ivory is trapped in the altar, so wouldn’t it be a good thing to be let out? “Thanks for releasing me! Now I’ll kill you!” huh?

And I don’t really like how the focus has changed to have them be fire/water/earth/air, that seems a bit bland versus their names “Plague Bearer”, “The Defiler”, “The Demented”, “The Wicked” that weren’t really tied to the elements like that, and the classic thing is for the green dragon to be poison not earth, and obsidian/black fear, not air. Though maybe I’m just brainwashed by D&D style mythology here.

Anyway! The whole thing a bit reminds me of a movie that’s been through too many rewrites so the plot doesn’t make sense. It would all have been better being a new dragony dungeon IMO.

Thanks for making it through this mild rant and sorry if I got any details mixed up, I didn’t do many yet because why wouldn’t you release it as its own special update, instead of bundled in with Motmg when we’re off farming other things, sigh! Here’s a dragon fighting a wizard. :mage:::fire::dragon:


#9

Don’t want to make an in depth comment about everthing you mentioned, but in general I do agree. Especially with all the sprite changes. (Got to say that I hate the billions [excaturated] of reskins of every item aswell, but that’s off topic…)

I did enjoy the dragons turn into statue parts, but that’s just preference I guess since it doesn’t really affect anything.
The sprites on the other hand are god awful. It just isn’t pleasing to do the dungeon (for me atleast)… it looks way to cartoonish for me aswell.


#10

This is a great post overall, but this bit in particular speaks to me. Some of the changes don’t even make sense, like the red dragon’s fireballs are now super washed out and desaturated. When have you ever seen dull-looking fire? The old fireballs were perfect and it reeks of a change that was made for the sake of “these are MINE now” instead of actually looking to improve the dungeon.
(edit)
Another thing is that the visual contrast within the dungeon is pretty bad, I’d have to run it again to pick out specific examples but I had issues with attacks blending into the terrain. I want to say it was during red and black in particular, but I can’t commit to that.

One thing missing from your post which still annoys me about the dungeon is that it still drops absolutely nothing. The loot doesn’t seem to have been touched at all, which makes even less sense than in the original incarnation because the bosses are now long, complicated multi-phase fights. They give a little bit of fame which is nice (old lod literally gave zero fame) but it feels bad to solo them and get a pbag. IMO it wouldn’t be out of place to guarantee spd from green, vit (or dex) from red, wis from blue and maybe def from black.


#11

It quickly became apparent that lighter changes like this weren’t going to cut it at all. The original fight designs were just… bad, if you can even call it design. There were no central concepts, the XML was half broken, the inheritance system was janky and ineffective, and the overwhelming majority of shot patterns were just wide omnidirectional blasts of loads of different projectiles being spewed around with no rhyme or reason. (“Fun” fact: Remember how the LoD used to be super deadly during Oryx lag and would kill people in seemingly impossible ways? That’s because the dragons spouted such a stupidly high amount of projectiles at all times that it actually surpassed the old projectile limit and caused a bunch of internal problems as a result. It was that bad.)

I had fairly minimal involvement with the new LoD beyond the conceptual stages, so this isn’t an attempt to be defensive about it. My point is that there wasn’t much of an attempt to salvage the original because, to be perfectly honest, there was nothing to salvage. The inheritance system is perhaps the most compelling of any dungeon gimmick in the game but it was completely squandered in its old form. Every fight was a repetitive mess at best and internally broken at worst (Nikao in particular was unbelievably busted).


#12

Ooh I definitely agree with your point about the sprites changing - the dragons were fine as is and I personally found the old wycern a lot cooler and more unique. Moreover, a lot of the new tiles and projectiles seem really overshaded and don’t really fit the rotmg style.


#13

I’m still mad about how they did this years ago - lots of the st’s looked better IMO before the change and I still love the old morning star.


#14

I agree with the above - I stopped doing (old!) LoDs entirely pretty quickly after I took a few steps back and looking at it.
Imo, the changes made were (for the most part) necessary ones: making the inheritance system the focus, giving the dragons actual phases, and removing the easily griefable dragon callouts (which were bandaid-fixed with black beeing forced first…alas).

However, I do agree that the sprites may bee a little over the top here and there.
While they don’t look bad, some of the old designs could have been salvaged, I reckon.
That, or maybe it’s that they stray a tad too far from Realm’s style, to some extent? Idk, I’m not the visual artist here =w=


#15

I don’t care much about the dungeon’s fights (other than the fact that they’re pretty fun).
But…

Why change the Ivory Wyvern’s sprite? You know what, I’ve ranted about this a million times before, and I’m not doing it again. All I have to say is that it’s a hideous walking lizard thing.


#16

You make absolutely no sense.

You support a beework but you support the new LOD.

The new LOD has the exact same problem as the Nest.

It’s bad.

Any change that takes away the open world fluidity of realm is a step in the wrong direction.

We’re trying to put the Realm back into ROTMG. Kiddforce is just a big jerk who keeps taking that away.

Go into a realm. Watch what happens after a Roc Dragon spawns.

It’s very clear that the amount of people doing LODs has gone down significantly.

Ultimately, the dungeon now has a skewed risk/reward ratio just as bad if not worse than the Nest.

It’s amazing people like this.

Outside of a few people doing it for novelty, no players will be running LODs.

This forces Deca to make them worthwhile with events.

And the crappy cycle of keys, event discords, USS, and cries for melee nerfs begin again.


#17

No, it absolutely doesn’t.

The Nest has many more flaws than the current LoD - lack of HP Scaling, inconsistent yet rampant use of status effects, flying Ice Spheres…
Honestly, the only thing that I think might hold people back from doing LoDs is the current loot table - which, in truth, I’m not too familiar with, as I’ve done too few prod-LoDs to give an estimate for the droprates.

Before the rework, anyone who’d taken a few steps back and thought about each of the fights would’ve though “yeah, nah, boring”.
Now, each LoD has potential to differ from a previous one you did - a slightly different experience each time, while still having the same base.

And on this - the LoD is far easier and more structured than the Nest. Again, I can’t vouch for the droprates, but I don’t really see why you’d pass up.


#18

Haven’t done a new LoD so I can’t vouch for whatever changes they made to it (considering the current design philosophy for boss fights, I’m going to assume it’s terrible), but the reason why people flocked to LoDs before was because they could just leech their way through at least 80% of it (100% if Ivory got Slowed or insta’d).

I don’t see why that should have been kept in the game.


#19

I haven’t played the game in about a month now and even I can guess why that happened based on the criticism in this thread:

Risk vs. Reward (which to bee fair is a problem with the nest): Drop rates weren’t changed

No leeching: People are lazy. Has nothing to do with the nest

Difficulty: While I don’t know how hard exactly the new LoD is, it’s probably more challenging than the old one. Has nothing to do with the nest

MotMG. People are busy grinding MotMG items instead of doing the LoDs.


#20

Best Dungeon in the game.
It’s the most intelligent dungeon design, since rotmg was created.