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The progression layout of Dungeon 4

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Jumbo

Hosted Project GR
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Hello Zwieb.
With the addition of the dungeon 4 soon (we hope) being brought to the public, I would like to take some time to make a suggestion regarding the progression layout of Dungeon 4. With progression layout I mean the way in which players kill the bosses, do quests and get items in a certain order.

Here is my suggestion in steps:

1.Attunement quest.
I have already made a suggestion like this before, but to refresh your memory (or if you didn't read my earlier post): To even enter Dungeon 4, players will have to complete an attunement quest. This quest's objectives are most importantly to kill some of the strongest pre-D4 bosses and thereby getting a quest item. This could be gargoyle, Brood mother, Hill Giant and the bosses in D3. The quest shouldn't necessarily require players to kill all these bosses, but I'll leave it up to Zwiebelchen to decide which and how many. With the quest delivered, the player is given access to D4.

2.First boss:
First boss HAS to be defeated to even get to see the rest of D4. Sorta like a gate warden. There is no way to avoid this fight if players want to enter D4.

3.Kill all D4 bosses to spawn the final boss:
This is auto-explanatory. All bosses in D4 need to be killed before players can kill the final boss in the dungeon.

Additional notes:
a. Gear:
I believe the gear required to effectively beat the first boss in D4 should be at least the best in slot in the current pre-D4 version for ALL players. This means that even with 3 players who have some D4 gear, playing with a guy in full greens, will have great difficulties in killing the first boss. Of course this is hard to balance, and people will probably be doing it anyway, but the point is to reduce the amount of boosting involved in D4. D4 is, in my opinion, not supposed to be a walk in the park. Poor players should simply not be able to do it, while the average player, if having decent gear, should be able to complete most bosses. Only people with best in slot gear should have the power to kill the final 3 bosses.

With this approach D4 will be something for all players that like Gaias. Players who constantly dps even though they are supposed to heal their groups and tanks who cannot keep aggro will not be forgiven when entering D4. But neither will good players who haven't geared up properly yet. Also the D4 update will last a lot longer than with a more standard, average challenge which people complete in a few hours.

Drop rates on the quest items for attunement:
A final note on the attunement quest. In my opinion, don't make the quest item drop 100%. Instead, make it something like 50% so as to force the players to spend just a little longer time on it. This, in turn, will show people all the bosses pre-D4 (those that you Zwie pick that is) and this will especially be good for D3 which can currently be kinda neglected.
 
There will definitely be an attunement quest for D4. But it won't involve D3 content. Backtracking is no option if you have no mechanics that actually support it.

About D4, the general layout is pretty much set into stone already and it's more or less what you suggested:

The first boss serves as a gearcheck encounter with a strict enrage counter that can only be beaten with a group that has at least an x amount of total DPS.

There will be 1 more boss on the starting island (that can be bypassed). Then there's a number of 2 optional bosses on the second island that can be killed in any order (and again, can be bypassed). However, the final island is gated and all 3 bosses on this last island need to be killed in order to get access to the last boss.
Killing all bosses in the entire dungeon also spawns 1 of 4 random elemental bosses.

So in total, you have:
1 + 3 + final boss that have to be killed.
1 + 2 + 1 random boss optional.

I didn't want D4 to be too linear in progression, that's why there's optional content. If players have to slaughter every pixel in the dungeon to approach the final boss, things could get very nasty with disconnects or desyncs.
Just imagine you fight 2 hours through this dungeon just to get the final prey and BOOM, disconnect...
And from all the bosses that are planned in this dungeon and the sheer size of the area, you can expect a complete dungeon clear to take at least those 2 hours.
With an average battle length of at least 5 minutes per boss, you will take 5*9=45 minutes just killing the bosses alone, no trash or wipes involved!

If you just need a particular boss, then you can bypass roughly 50% of the content to get there faster.


The random boss will not drop any equipment, but some special boost items (kinda like the shade giving a permanent skill point) and some cosmetical items.
 
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Jumbo

Hosted Project GR
Level 19
Joined
Jun 22, 2007
Messages
1,314
This is great news Zwieb!
Actually I have a suggestion regarding balance: Release a non-save version first for players to test and give feedback on bosses. This will work exactly like the beta version for the current content.
 
This is great news Zwieb!
Actually I have a suggestion regarding balance: Release a non-save version first for players to test and give feedback on bosses. This will work exactly like the beta version for the current content.
There will be both a beta version for 1.2B and for the D4 release.

Also, there will be a special mini release version for the skill changes and the appearance changes to heroes as soon as I'm done with the models and skins.
 
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