Mobhunter on LDoN

[Akaran_D]

http://www.mobhunter.com/article.jsp?ar ... -399121834

Just to preface all of my comments, despite what some of you might have thought, I did not get into the LDoN beta because I write for Mobhunter, in fact I had signed up early on after the first announcement just like anyone else. If I hadn't of been in, they would have let me in for the press tour obviously, but I'm just getting it out of the way that I played in the beta from the start. And yes, I was told it was fine to talk about it, and take screenshots.
I had gotten some advance notice of the tour itself, but it was Tuesday before I got any details, and unfortunately the details included having to play a level 25 character. Not that I have anything against being level 25, I just was under the impression that we could use any character, and I of course wanted to play my own character. Since I still desired to play a warrior, I created a warrior and /betabuffed myself to level 25. This command basically copies that level of character over your slot. It isn't entirely an exact science since it seems like they have stored copies of people from live servers that they copy over for different level ranges.

As it turned out, the level 25 warrior was drunk at the time that Sony came by and lifted characters of that level. Further, his equipment was poor at best, with banded everywhere. After much debate, I decided to think outside of the box and play another character class. The clearcut choice of course was a necromancer, my one true love.

So I made a character and then buffed him up to be a level 25 necromancer. His equipment was a bit better, but it was not quite up to the level I desired. I ran to the plane of knowledge and began my diabolical twinking plan. First off, I had made an enchanter on the server, so I skimmed over and lifted every possible item that my baby necromancer could use. Then I made a wizard, and did the exact same thing, scoring some choice equipment in the process. Then of course I had to check the magician out, which exceeded the wizard in spitting out the sort of gear that a true twink needs, also the mage had some fun stuff like an Amulet of Necropotence and Puppet Strings. Last but not least, I made a level 65 necromancer to just pick over what he had and once again, I was not dissapointed again, netting a few very nice pieces.

It took me about an hour to get ready, but finally I was set. The time came along and I was supposed to send a tell to Absor to get summoned to join the adventure. So I sat and waited and waited and waited, the time came and went and it was 10 minutes after and I began to wonder if I had the wrong day or what. Then, Absor did a serverwide message asking for me to send him a tell, turns out he was on the entire time just invisible!

So I was summoned to Everfrost where there was a group of people, some familliar names included. Absor started off by covering the basics of how you get adventures, and the nature of how many there are. He said I could take screenshots, and I did so here is what your group sees, after the group leader has picked out and accepted an adventure.




The time to enter is the limit of time you have from the time the group leader accepts the adventure, til the time you must have started it. 30 minutes is a lot of time, more than enough to get to the start location, and get ready. Next I glanced at the changes made to the merchant window. Not very interesting except that you can see the dungeon types that haven't been talked about before.




After reviewing those and answering some questions, we all ran off over a few hills to the Miraguls Menagerie zone in. Out front there were stacks and stacks of corpses since that is where they get spit out if a players corpse is in an instance when it shuts down.

We entered the zone and it's pretty much how the screenshots indicate it would be, icy. We started clearing and was pretty chaotic, it sort of reminded me of how an actual level 25 group would operate, no assist, no structure, just chaos. But even so we were generally ok although Absor was throwing out complete heals left and right later on.

I don't want to sound too negative about the expansion but in essence the dungeons are room of mobs, followed by more rooms and halls of mobs. You have 90 minutes currently to complete your adventure and it isn't so much about exploring and having an adventure than it is about not going the wrong way and finding a dead end and wasting time. For the most part there are dead ends that don't really affect you but there are some that if you go down, will pretty much mean you will fail the adventure.

So, we moved from room to room, hallway to hallway, clearing things. At some point I remembered I had snagged holgresh elder beads off the 65 necro, and I began to use them to direct us. Further, I used my Puppet Strings from the magician and got a pet better than my weak necromancer level 24 one.

Along the way we found a few boxes. For some reason and this is apparently a bug you couldn't cast normal spells on them and the Lockpicking/disarming spells apparently required a Cloth Cap as a reagent. Generally speaking from my previous experience, you get the cloth caps from inside the boxes, so it was a chicken before the egg issue. Two of the three boxes we messed with were trapped and did go off with some nasty spells. We killed those two open and they both had nothing, and the last one I think was picked by the rogue and also had nothing.

Finally I located the boss, Frostweaver and we headed that way. He wasn't much more difficult than anything else and also had.. nothing.




Afterwards we went out and see that we had earned 2 adventure points. All we could buy with that were no drop stones that Absor said let you move from camp to camp amongst the different dungeon types.

He also answered a few more questions in particular he said that raids were effectively the same, with everyone getting points. During our adventure there was one drop, an augmentation drop that either did nothing or didn't state what it did.

Like I said above, I had been in beta well before this and seen how the dungeons and such work, but hadn't and still haven't really seen the item side of things. I'm not apt to talk about things I haven't seen for myself so I'll discuss my view on what I saw.

First of all the absolute top notch thing in the expansion so far that I've seen are the character models, the new ones. The art people in this regard have done exceptionally well this expansion as they did in the planes of power.





As great as they are though, models should NEVER be the best part of an expansion.


Probably the next thing for me is the technology. It is nice in a lot of ways to be able to go and get a group, which probably will be easier than in the past because of the way it's done with just a few locations.


Down somewhere below all that is the fun factor for me. Now, maybe my expectations were set a bit high in particular when they stated that each dungeon was not generated randomly and instead was made by hand by a designer. Of course it is hard to measure fun and it's different for everyone but for me it's actual adventure and immersion.


For example, while it had been said before in interviews and I even asked Absor during our tour, if there were any really, different (named) mobs than the same ones room after room and he said yes. I have not seen any named creatures that weren't the last boss and target of the adventure in all my time in beta.


This isn't helped by the fact it felt like I was in a cut and paste dungeon. By that I mean that it seems that the dungeon was made from pre-made dungeon pieces simply fitted together into a certain order. They aren't random, I mean someone had to work the cut and paste, but you'll see the same rooms and hallways repeatedly as you go through.


Basically there is no flavor to the zones. When you walk into a room of goblins, they're just goblins, and nothing interesting is going to occur, just pull them and kill them and they are pretty much the same as any other type of mob in the zone.

Which leads me to the overall point that the time limit is dumb. The goal here in these places is in essence to rush, to race to complete the goal, and in that regard many people might not notice or care that they just stepped into the same room as they left fighting the same mobs they just fought.

For me, I suppose I envisioned hand designed actual adventures, that are both challenging and entertaining. I can almost forgive the cut and paste nature of the rooms, IF the rooms themselves had anything interesting going on. By interesting I mean, named creatures, small one group events, puzzles and other scripted things. In essence, the idea wouldn't be for players to fear going down dead ends, but that they'd WANT to go everywhere in a dungeon and find everything, and then afterwards, they'd want to do it all over again.

I would say here that I would think that is what the designers would have wanted but because of the nature of instances, you can't have a lot of complicated scripted things going on, but then I come back to the fact that everything that would take no extra resources isn't there, and everything is so bland and uninteresting, so I really don't know, I mean these are the same people who came up with the Rathe council. From what I saw tuesday, it seems the beta is more about testing the technology and the basic functionality of the different instances for different level ranges, and not about does this suck or not?

Another concern I had from the start was the high end difficulty levels, and I brought this up with Absor. Previously, with a full group of level 65s, very well equipped, the hard risk level, was trivially easy and the normal risk level, well, I didn't really need heals on hard, imagine how normal was.. I had feedbacked repeatedly amongst my other concerns, that they should add another risk level. When asked if they were going to add another risk level Absor said no, but they did say that things were still being tuned at the high end, and I haven't had a chance recently to see for myself.

That all being said, I don't think the expansion is bad really, I think it has more to do with my own expectations of what an adventure would be, and what the expansion offers. For example another one of my gripes is the entire, get points to buy loot idea. I may be old fashion but I prefer to get my loot off of corpses or out of chests, rather than playing some carnival points game.

I could really go on and on about my issues and concerns, some of them valid some of them simply speculation. In the end everyone will have to decide for themselves. The expansion tries to be everything to everyone and it is likely to suit a number of people, but so far what I've seen it does little for me.

Discuss!

[Voronwë]

i will buy it just for the Mistmoore dungeon.

[Lexien]

Thats what i was thinking too..

I hope we get to see Mistmoore finally

[Voronwë]

[Akaran_D]

Yeah, just adding a MM dungeon ensures that a very large number of people will be buying this. ;0

[Lexien]

Thats from the old school days tho.

He didnt show up much often i bet this is one of the rare SS of him hehe.. i took soo many screeshot over the years and they were all deleted when i changed machines or just had to format..

Wonder what hes gonna look like with new models hehe

[Voronwë]

Thats from the old school days tho.

He didnt show up much often i bet this is one of the rare SS of him hehe.. i took soo many screeshot over the years and they were all deleted when i changed machines or just had to format..

Wonder what hes gonna look like with new models hehe

he wont look like a Dark Elf in BLighted =). yeah this was from the Crystal Claw of Veeshan GM event. So GM could make him look however he wanted. it was certainly cool to be out pulling and all of a sudden see "Mayong Mistmoore" on tracking ^^.

[Balalalalalamon]

yeh guk's ok, frogloks are getting old though heh. the new mistmoore zone's gonna be leet, wtf are the item "themes"?