Feldon Kael Drakkel is making Contested Dungeons in EQ2 sexy again. With 15 names, and the largest zone ever added to EQ2 (it’s larger than Solusek’s Eye), there is a lot to live up to here. The zone is intended to be difficult, with loot somewhere between the hardest Velious instances and beginning raids. It’s a new way of approaching contested dungeons compared to The Hole, Karnor’s Castle, Sebilis, and Chardok which all struggled to keep our attention after a few weeks.
Players have been looking for an old school dungeon crawl and Kael Drakkel seems to deliver. It shows a new commitment to creating dungeons that aren’t irrelevant or abandoned after the first week of the expansion. This is the kind of danger and contested experience we haven’t really seen since Castle Mistmoore and Sanctum of Scaleborn and feedback both during Beta and since launch has been surprisingly positive, even from the most jaded raiders.
Kander took a leading role in designing Kael Drakkel, and seems cautious about making any major changes to it. This seems wise, as subtle changes may be all that is warranted here.
Slowin posted a Kael Drakkel Feedback thread on the public forums which has received some attention so we’ll quote it here:
Spent the better part of this weekend in this zone. Its truely an amazing dungeon. The experience gain seems about right and the difficulty is about right. The quests are enjoyable as well. For the most part this is a very well done zone but there is one major issue.
REWARD. We’ve killed something like 10+ named in this zone and saw one exquisite chest with a decent fabled charm in it. The rest were all legendary trash items that would only be upgrades for people severely undergeared for this zone. The group i was in came kitted in wing 3 gear and a few fabled DoV items and we all had near 200% crit and plenty of crit mit for the mobs. The amount of time it takes to clear the seemingly endless trash in this zone in order to secure a safe enough area to engage the named is simply not going to be worth the rewards given. Add on top of that, that if you wipe to the named you have to figure out where he respawned at and clear another 15+ trash mobs to try it again.
Other player feedback in the thread pointed out bugs in some of the named encounters and Kander says he has already submitted fixes. As for loot, portals, statue quests, and the faction grind, Kander had this:
Loot is being adjusted a bit. Fableds are coming up in drop rates a bit. Legendary loot is coming up a bit in quality, the fabled a tiny bit. Drops a tiny bit, nothing crazy drastic. Primal Velium Shards are being added to Kael Drakkel contested bosses, but NOT 100% drop. A few other things are being added.
Making the statue quests repeatable is not the worst idea. I had originally intended that. I would have to make them once a day or something though. Let me noodle that one a bit.
The factions are low right now for a reason. We want these factions to matter, you can buy nice stuff with them.
Kael Drakkel is set to allow up to 50 players before new instances are created, which means 7-8 groups can be running each version of the dungeon at once. The intention is for the zone to be competitive and challenging. As we have talked about before, the giants here are serious business, especially if you allow 2 or 3 to get near each other. Split tank or die!
Incidentally, you may have heard about a “Mandate” type effect on most of the mobs in this zone to prevent griefing of names. Well, cooler heads prevailed and this was dropped as it was not in the spirit of contested design. If you see a named, don’t let another group (or brawler) get to it first!
Again, so far there has been a lot of positive feedback about this zone. It’s not for the faint of heart, but if you are looking for serious challenge the likes of Nizara and Castle Mistmoore, roll up a group and go get hammered. 🙂
I’ve spent already countless hours in this zone. It’s amazing, the quests are fun and not terribly hard. The dungeon crawl is awesome. I don’t mind any of the detriments except the Song of Thunder uncureable that prevents healing on targets. But our tank is starting to use prevents and stoneskins with that detriment on a regular basis now. This shouldn’t even be a problem after he gets more upgraded gear for resists and hp.
It reminded me of EQ 1 alot. I enjoy the difficulty, I do agree at times tho some of the trash clearing to get to the named is a bit too much.
for me this have nothing to see with difficulty, they put double xp server week after week giving xp potion like candy.
Solo quest give reward way better than mark of manaar stuff, 2 min solo vs 3 month of group. You call that hard ?
Then put mob who hit hard because you give lot of candy. Look more a problem of itemization.
Contest zone are fail concept for an mmorpg unless you r doing pvp.
Working against other player is not as good as working with other player, that why i love public quest. And i bet that why they create closed instance.
You cannot compare gear for DoV vs gear for SF, I’ve done only one instance so far in DoV, and the experience was much like at the beginning of TSO for me when I first hit the level cap.
We managed to down all but two of the bosses we came up against, with more time we could certainly get the others down, but its going to take time. Which I think sums up this expansion, I think this one will give us a challenge for quite a while before it gets to farm status – if at all during its life.
E.g. TSO for non-raiders at least still had hard dungeons right until the end, heck, people were still wiping in Guk: outer corridors with SF raid gear, I know I saw some raiders doing just that 🙂
This contested dungeon sounds intriguing, but I just have waaaay too much to do right now, I’ll have to work my way up to it somepoint.
For gearing up, I prefer the controlled environment of instances. But for pure out-and-out fun, Contested Dungeons are a blast because every time you do them, you experience something different. Public Quests have their own benefits (once they are stabilized a bit), but they will not replace either Instances or Contested.
As ever the proof will be in the eating of the pudding,last years sex on legs was the hole,oh how wonderful that was blah,blah,sadly i suspect this one will go the same way.
Devs in all MMO’s,not just EQ2 seem to me at least to have lost the knack of making a dungeon one years after you will go into and still have fun i hope this one will be the one that’s different,i suspect sadly it’ll turn out to be another 5 minute wonder
Alan,
Yes time will tell. The Hole was touted to us as the next Sanctum of Scaleborn. The reason people were excited about The Hole was the all-you-can-eat XP buffet. Then they nerfed it to heck and there was no reason to run it. It was targeted as entry level. Even towards the end of Beta some people were telling me the Hole was a joke.
The reason why I did this article about Kael Drakkel is because of how much positive comments I read about it during Beta and on Flames and people are still playing it despite already having 300 AAs.
I’m not a hard core raider (well I do not raid high level yet), nor am I the sort of player who grinds XP in areas.
So I have a different perspective on the hole from some of the people commenting, to be brutally honest I do not care about XP gain rates much with content, I want adventure+fun and XP/AA/loot imo should be the icing on the cake, not the sole reason to run content. So from my perspective the hole disappointed because
1) It was neither hardcore only – it was designed from the start to appeal to small and full groups, so it could not stand on just offering XP gains (and it even failed here).
2) Nor was it fun (endless static mobs to grind through with the odd name to tank+spank, there is a wealth of such content already to grind through imo, but that’s my perspective since I find fun in other ways in EQ2 from some players).
3) Neither was it visually stunning (it was ok, but drab and lacked severely in a storyline, or at least it failed to communicate it to me when I went in there on several occasions).
I’ve suggested on the forums things that for me would improve it a lot, I would have liked instead to see
1) Random, dynamic content. How about adventuring through there and coming across a camp of some mob who have arrived there in a cavern off to the side. How about finding a dangerous beasty sitting on top of a treasure hoard? Traps like the splitpaw saga? The end result should be adventuring into the Hole meant a little bit of the unknown.
2) Patrols of mobs, make them come to life a bit more. The Roelik felt like they were just frozen in time as we hacked through them for example.
3) Beautiful crystal caverns, emphasise the dark+light (probably need GerminUSA’s lightmap updates though to make this work better). Audiably it could have given a better sense of being in caverns too.
4) Ring events we can kick off that tell a story via an event
All of the above would have made it a more interesting place for me at least 😉 Instead it was sort of like Sanctum of the Scaleborn but with slightly harder mobs, generic quests and a bit less storyline (communicated at least). I’ll have to see this new open dungeon though, if it matches up to the rest of Destiny of Velious then it will be good since I’ve noticed a general theme of more thoughtful design (encounters that require thought, mobs with abilities that need to be countered, random events, and more lore detail to zones) instead of artwork heavy copy+paste content.
Maybe I’ll get in there in a month or two’s time 🙂