Feldon Dungeon Maker “Play as a Character” has arrived on Test for the second time, but with a totally new Level Agnostic mechanic that turns the concept of Mentoring on its ear, by interactively adjusting the damage and heals of grouped characters in real time. The claim is, that a level 30 and level 92 will be able to group together, heal, buff, and do DPS effectively. And careful reading of the June Update indicates that Battlegrounds will soon inherit the same Level Agnostic mechanic, so proper testing of this functionality on Test is a good idea.
From Maevianiu on the EQ2 Forums:
Hello!
We just added playing as your character in Dungeon Maker, but it is with a twist! Dungeon Maker dungeons are now “Level Agnostic” as in your level doesn’t matter much when in there. Players who are any level can group with players of any other level and fight side by side against the same monsters!
How does this work? Essentially you are fighting the monsters as if they are your level for each combat calculation. Are you a level 30 healing a level 92 player? Then the heal applies as if you were level 92 but that same heal will apply to a level 30 as if you were your normal level 30 self.
The con of monsters does matter, and monsters that con yellow, orange or red will be more difficult for players of all levels while grey, green and blue monsters will be less difficult for players of all levels.
This is a big change, and we need your help to get it tuned in! If you guys could make some dungeons and try playing them as your characters of various levels and maybe some groups with players of different levels that would be very helpful!
When posting feedback please format it something like this:
Maevianiu from Test Server level 84 monk, 135AA Dungeon: Devland by Gninja
Overall: Was pretty easy, this character handles large pulls very well and this dungeon fit the bill for that.
Encounter 1: A single white con no buffs, very easy
Encounter 2: Three white cons, difficult but doable had to use a cooldown to complete.
Encounter 3: Very difficult, a very large group of white cons used all cooldowns but completed.
Encounter 4: Moderate, a single very buffed yellow con.
Encounter 5: Very difficult, and took me two tries to break. It had 3 very buffed yellow cons.
I ran like 4 dungeons and hated every second of it.
Mostly because the mobs’ movement is totally bollocks, they jump you in group of like 8 enemies and surround you like a damn robot army. It just looks sooo stupidly scripted.
The fights in DM are often hard, you have to really pay attention or one mob group can kill you off. The XP you get out of it is a JOKE, it’s tedious, and I rather run Chelsith 10 times or whatever or mentor down and visit some old instance instead of this DM crap.
maybe they can make it better, but right now… the stuff I can buy with DM marks is also not worth it – except the quiver maybe and the mount.
@Nyna
How many mobs you get jumped by has more to do with how the person who decorated the dungeon set it up and less with SoEs design. There is no ‘scripting’ in the dungeon maker dungeons. If the creator is careful with mob placements (with the intent to make it fun and doable for players) it shouldn’t be hard to pull from 1 to 3, maybe 4 mobs, tops, at a time.
Just to back up what Mermut says, there is no weird mob scripting in DM dungeons. They just have basic agro/asist radii, which can be tweaked a small amount by the dungeon creator.
The problem is that since the lack of useful tools has deterred a lot of the people who were originally excited about making good, immersive, involving dungeons, dungeon making has fallen largely into the hands of those who just want to make hyper-efficient “mark run” dungeons. For some reason that I don’t claim to understand, this usually involves stacking mobs on top of each other, usually in groups of four to eight, resulting in a highly tedious, repetitive series of large pulls. I assume there is some particular Avatar that’s good at handling these, allowing for fast mark farming. I always zone out if I go in one of those by mistake so I don’t really know how it’s meant to work.
I’ll try and get over to Test and give this new version a run over the weekend. The last iteration of play-as-your-character was dire, much worse than the Avatars (which I rather like and hope are going to be left in as an alternative) but the new version sounds like it might work.
It’s the dungeon-making tools that need this degree of attention, though, not the dungeon-running ones.
Just when you thought soe had done everything they could to kill off BGs, here is the final nail in the coffin.
So, now my lvl 39 toons get to fight against lvl 92s with all their extra spells, aas, epic buffs… even if they manage to balance damage from raid and mythical weapons (which they wont ofc), the extra spells will mean the end of t4 BGs.
Hard to believe anyone who plays the game thought this was a good idea, so it must have come from SJ.
Well I seriously doubt their plan was for everyone to level lock at 39 for the battlegrounds. If this makes the battlegrounds usable for all levels this is a good thing right?
I guess they brought it BACK to test, because it was there before. And just as bad. Total hell for a 20 pally. Must have died about 50 times.
Adding this to BGs is a bad idea IMO. I don’t do PvP and have only participated in 1 BG before, but I still have to take the PvPers side on this issue. If there is no difference in your level, what is the point of leveling up? This is what I fear will cause the doom of GuildWars2, and it didn’t work out too well for City of Heroes either. Letting lowbies group with endgame toons to do content geared towards the endgame players’s levels, can be seen as cheating by some of us and ruins the purpose of a level system.
Welcome to EQNext. You will be charged accordingly… 🙂
Right now the ‘play as yourself’ in dungeon maker is not working well. Mobs auto-attacks are hitting for 3-5 times more then equivalent mobs in overland zones hit, at least for the toons I’ve tested on (22, 33, 45). I’ve heard it works fairly well for capped toons, though I haven’t tested that yet.
@Mermut I’m glad to hear someone is testing it outside of the capped level ranges. Historically, SOE has done a poor job with level scaling at the lower levels, (sometimes being too easy, sometimes being way too hard), but it rarely gets noticed until the code goes live.
The level agnostic “feature” is definitely messed up. Lower level characters can barely survive what would be considered an unchallenging 2 or 3 mob pull. The avatars would be lucky to survive more than one mob at a time, which is a far cry from how they currently are on live. I agree with Mermut, mobs are auto-attacking far too hard.
If anyone here wants to hop onto Test Copy and test it, I published a dungeon called “The Test Copy Arena” under the Chardok category. The first half of the dungeon is (compared to how I’d design a dungeon currently on live) very bland and simplistic, the most basic of challenges. The second half that I added tonight is more akin to a light-to-moderate difficulty in my dungeons on live. I’m guessing the second half will make lower levels and avatars a smear on the floor and may actually give well-geared 90+ chars a bit of a challenge.