So, hear me out. As much as most anyone else, I want to be done with my tome-grinding for the week in, well, as little time as it takes now, and I like having content that I can do in under 30 minutes.
But... that greatly restricts what opportunities we have to make our dungeons entertaining for most players if we have to keep them easy and short enough for even the lowest-skilled players to almost always complete in... under 30 minutes.
I'd therefore like to open up what can be done with modern dungeon designs, as to be appealing to more than just a relatively small portion of the casual end of players, without losing the ability to experience them in bite-sized chunks. So here's the spitball idea:
Future dungeons, where likely to take a party of average skill, gear, and seriousness greatly more time to complete than dungeons thus far, may instead meet the requirement for a daily bonus roulette off a single wing (effectively, a boss) of a dungeon. Tome-rewarding weekly challenge logs may request these dungeon's completion, but never will you be required to undertake such lengthy content day-to-day.
Moreover, these dungeons will be scaled to your party size and role allotments (at least as base difficulty, if ever we add on harder reiterative modes), which can vary from 2 to 6 (allowing up to 4 DPS, 3 tanks, and 3 healers, though obviously not all at once). This is largely to allow for continued progress after more time-constrained (or irritable) players leave and to somewhat aid queue times. Finally, tomes (or Key Items, such as the readable books in Gobul Library or notes in Dusk Vigil, which would be automatically converted into tomes upon exit) are now dropped from the trash and bosses themselves, including first-timer bonuses; apart from the weekly challenge logs and perhaps some certain Relic paths among others or the like later on, there are no bonuses for full completion.
That's all. The idea is simply that we could, in the future, start to pull dungeons out of the stale rut they're in now, but still enjoy them as bite-sized content insofar as they affect day-to-day gameplay. Players can take on the content as a 60- to 90-minute run, or just take it a wing at a time.
Assume whatever applications of Echo, or boss prep via farming mobs that drop useful Key Items, or whatever else allows for time to be exchanged for ease so most players can finish the content eventually, but not easily. Think of it being somewhere between pre-nerf Amdapor Keep and pre-nerf Pharos Sirius, but with more ways to break through the hard walls to progress.
Continue reading...
But... that greatly restricts what opportunities we have to make our dungeons entertaining for most players if we have to keep them easy and short enough for even the lowest-skilled players to almost always complete in... under 30 minutes.
I'd therefore like to open up what can be done with modern dungeon designs, as to be appealing to more than just a relatively small portion of the casual end of players, without losing the ability to experience them in bite-sized chunks. So here's the spitball idea:
Future dungeons, where likely to take a party of average skill, gear, and seriousness greatly more time to complete than dungeons thus far, may instead meet the requirement for a daily bonus roulette off a single wing (effectively, a boss) of a dungeon. Tome-rewarding weekly challenge logs may request these dungeon's completion, but never will you be required to undertake such lengthy content day-to-day.
Moreover, these dungeons will be scaled to your party size and role allotments (at least as base difficulty, if ever we add on harder reiterative modes), which can vary from 2 to 6 (allowing up to 4 DPS, 3 tanks, and 3 healers, though obviously not all at once). This is largely to allow for continued progress after more time-constrained (or irritable) players leave and to somewhat aid queue times. Finally, tomes (or Key Items, such as the readable books in Gobul Library or notes in Dusk Vigil, which would be automatically converted into tomes upon exit) are now dropped from the trash and bosses themselves, including first-timer bonuses; apart from the weekly challenge logs and perhaps some certain Relic paths among others or the like later on, there are no bonuses for full completion.
That's all. The idea is simply that we could, in the future, start to pull dungeons out of the stale rut they're in now, but still enjoy them as bite-sized content insofar as they affect day-to-day gameplay. Players can take on the content as a 60- to 90-minute run, or just take it a wing at a time.
Assume whatever applications of Echo, or boss prep via farming mobs that drop useful Key Items, or whatever else allows for time to be exchanged for ease so most players can finish the content eventually, but not easily. Think of it being somewhere between pre-nerf Amdapor Keep and pre-nerf Pharos Sirius, but with more ways to break through the hard walls to progress.
Continue reading...