Feldon Information about the upcoming Age of Discovery expansion has been few and far between, however SmokeJumper did take a moment to clear up how XP and loot will work:
Actually, you earn XP *and* tokens. The tokens are used to acquire items for any of your characters, not just the one you have currently logged-in. XP and tokens are awarded at the end of the dungeon run and based on a challenge rating system that should prevent exploiting. More on this soon.
As we heard at Fan Faire (which may, of course, have changed since then) is that there will be two vendors for DYOD, one selling armor/weapons/loot for your main characters, and one selling parts to add cool stuff to your own dungeons.
No additional information has been released about what choices there will be for DYOD Avatars (since you cannot play your own characters, you must pick one of the provided avatars), if you’ll be able to buy upgrades for them, etc.
Every day is patch day!!
Clearly meant for previous post 🙂
I hope there won’t be upgrades to buy for the avatars–that would turn DYOD into its own separate progression game hosted within the main one. Well, separate except for the fact that it provides rewards for the main one. Actually that sounds too familiar… LoN, Fortune League, etc.
DYOD sounds exactly like monster missions from EQ1 now.
Wow total epic fail from soe, who wants avatars, I want to run my on toons in dyid. Just another usless toold from soe probably have the same fate as bg, and df are now.
Frankly, this is one of the cooler things about this Extension Pa–er, Expansion for me. Finally, my inner Blofeld finds its expression…
I hated Monster Missions in EQ1. They played a significant part in my decision to stop playing EQ1, although of course I went back later.
I really hope this isn’t EQ2’s version. I don’t think it will be. I would, of course, prefer to do the dungeons as my own characters but so long as the choice of avatar isn’t tied into any of the ludicrous “lore” that we suffered with Monster Missions I can stand to play as a surrogate.
Here is the thing no one seems to get.
If we were able to use our own toons how in the hell could they come close to balancing it? You couldn’t because everyone’s gear is different, super hard for some would be super easy for other simply from gear and or class/ arch type.
Take that away and now everyone can do these zones on a completely even level. Now you can have a real competition for who can run this or that the fastest or with which types of avatars ect…
This opens the door for alot of things, but not being able to use our own toons may not be the popular choice, but if this is going to have any chance of working, its the only way tbh.
For leaderboards, true, Avatars would be the only fair way. But some people would rather play their own characters, instead of caring about such leaderboards.
They can already make instances scale with level. They have also shown they can make the same instance, at equal level, have different diffuculty levels. As the stats of all monsters, and the reward at the end, are going to be automatically generated, it is only a tiny bit of extra work to:
1) Allow player characters to be used as an alternative to avatars
2) Allow players to set a difficulty level, ranging from easy (solo gear) to very hard (raid gear). Or perhaps do this automatically based on the players total stamina from gear, which is pretty much a gearscore already.
Using avatars would give you a chance on leaderboards and the best rewards, while using a player character will give you different difficulty levels with the hardest having slightly higher rewards than the easiest.
@ Lemilla – If these dungeons were to reward raid gear, I think there would be a lot of outrage.
Personally, I would love to be able to use my Billy doll arena pet as an avatar! 😀