Dewyn
Retired Staff
- Joined
- Oct 23, 2014
- Location
- dewyn#2005
The development and balance teams have been discussing this for some time, and we've decided that this is an issue that should be pitched to the general population:
Dungeons.
I personally have never seen anyone in favour of them; the experience-to-health/time-to-kill ratio is terrible, and with the exp required to max now sitting at 650,000 (this is the config on Herotest anyway - as opposed to the 120,000 it used to be), leveling takes far, far longer than it ever should have to.
The original idea behind the current exp rates was that it should take a "casual" player two weeks to master a class, although the definition of "casual" isn't exactly clear. A number of us were opposed to this; such leveling only really works with MMORPGs, where there's something to do at all levels as well as a variety of items to collect and gear up with. Leveling on a Minecraft server is essentially fighting a health bar, except in the case of any mob with an arrow attack, in which case it's like fighting a health bar that will murder you in a couple of shots. Skill damage also doesn't scale, making leveling casters extremely tedious. EDIT: what777 has informed me there is scaling on skills, but he says that it is at roughly 3% per level, which still is nowhere near enough for the health pools these mobs have. A fireball that does 180% more damage is, between mana costs/cooldowns, still going to be inferior to a melee class left clicking a few times.
The current idea behind dungeons is for players to work through them, leveling until they're strong enough to progress by defeating the boss of their currently unlocked dungeon tier, but this has frankly not been executed well. Instead of a gradual progression curve, players just rush to left-click the boss to death - there is no actual physical progression through the dungeons, and there is no MMO-type scaling or difficulty that would prevent a level 1 player from taking down a level 60 mob simply by way of tenacity - then move on to the next tier, up until Tier 6, which seems to be the only remotely viable form of leveling at the moment.
At the moment, Common mobs at Tier 6 give ~350 exp, Elite mobs give ~800, and Bosses give around ~3000. By comparison, the exp it takes to reach level 11 from level 10 is over a thousand, and the mobs in the Tier 2 dungeons - meant for levels 11-20 - only provide exp numbering in the tens, not nearly enough to level at any reasonable rate. I must add that this exp scales rapidly from only requiring ~10 exp from levels 1-2.
The point is, leveling is essentially an incredibly tedious task that has been dragged out over a ridiculous period of time, and if you want to level any non-melee class alone, be prepared for an extra-long grind.
I'm not going to approach the topic of MythicMobs. Kainzo is not willing to bend on this, so for now at least, they're here to stay. I'm working on a smarter mob plugin right now, but that's for another time (^:
I will say - we've agreed that the currently configured MythicMobs are very dull; they're numerically unbalanced, having thousands upon thousands of health and dealing damage disproportionate to their health pool (200 damage a hit for a player with a 1k health pool is 20% - a level 60 scaled 300-damage left click to this mob with 25k health is 1.2%), and they only use a single, very dull skill, which is a slow homing "fireball" that is avoided by stepping over any one-block-high obstacle.
In addition, the "dungeon world" breaks any sort of immersion going; in order to level, all you must do is port or warp to spawn, turn around, then walk into a small nexus with some portals. There's also no more open world pvp, as nobody really has a reason to explore or head to specific areas apart from scouting out a potential base or town location. Yeah, we have castles, but those are isolated areas, and they aren't dynamic, nor are they fun; the biggest town with the most experienced PvPers takes the castles when they're online, and the locations don't move or provide any challenge if there are no other players present.
It also seems to confuse new players, plenty of whom we've seen trying to build/explore in the dungeon world and getting confused about it.
To summarize:
We've agreed that we want dungeons removed, but we thought we'd ask the players first.
The alternatives would be to return overworld leveling, including swamplands. Dungeons should be relegated to the realm of supplementary content, rather than mandatory leveling areas; their primary incentive should be level-specific drops, plus things like trophies (boss heads, special furniture pieces, possibly a very limited selection of pets, etc) and resources.
In addition, to help further world PvP, we discussed bringing in automated events such as these:
(Rifts is a plugin I wrote for mcConquest whereby large structures will spawn at random at regular intervals, spawning mobs and actively fending off attackers; players should flock to these locations for rewards, currency and exp, sparking pvp between groups looking for them.)
Other plugins to draw players to world locations, such as the old /hunt plugin, would also help increase world pvp.
ALLOWING DARKROOMS IS NOT A SOLUTION.
@Kainzo @Admins @Balance Team @Coders
Dungeons.
I personally have never seen anyone in favour of them; the experience-to-health/time-to-kill ratio is terrible, and with the exp required to max now sitting at 650,000 (this is the config on Herotest anyway - as opposed to the 120,000 it used to be), leveling takes far, far longer than it ever should have to.
The original idea behind the current exp rates was that it should take a "casual" player two weeks to master a class, although the definition of "casual" isn't exactly clear. A number of us were opposed to this; such leveling only really works with MMORPGs, where there's something to do at all levels as well as a variety of items to collect and gear up with. Leveling on a Minecraft server is essentially fighting a health bar, except in the case of any mob with an arrow attack, in which case it's like fighting a health bar that will murder you in a couple of shots. Skill damage also doesn't scale, making leveling casters extremely tedious. EDIT: what777 has informed me there is scaling on skills, but he says that it is at roughly 3% per level, which still is nowhere near enough for the health pools these mobs have. A fireball that does 180% more damage is, between mana costs/cooldowns, still going to be inferior to a melee class left clicking a few times.
The current idea behind dungeons is for players to work through them, leveling until they're strong enough to progress by defeating the boss of their currently unlocked dungeon tier, but this has frankly not been executed well. Instead of a gradual progression curve, players just rush to left-click the boss to death - there is no actual physical progression through the dungeons, and there is no MMO-type scaling or difficulty that would prevent a level 1 player from taking down a level 60 mob simply by way of tenacity - then move on to the next tier, up until Tier 6, which seems to be the only remotely viable form of leveling at the moment.
At the moment, Common mobs at Tier 6 give ~350 exp, Elite mobs give ~800, and Bosses give around ~3000. By comparison, the exp it takes to reach level 11 from level 10 is over a thousand, and the mobs in the Tier 2 dungeons - meant for levels 11-20 - only provide exp numbering in the tens, not nearly enough to level at any reasonable rate. I must add that this exp scales rapidly from only requiring ~10 exp from levels 1-2.
The point is, leveling is essentially an incredibly tedious task that has been dragged out over a ridiculous period of time, and if you want to level any non-melee class alone, be prepared for an extra-long grind.
I'm not going to approach the topic of MythicMobs. Kainzo is not willing to bend on this, so for now at least, they're here to stay. I'm working on a smarter mob plugin right now, but that's for another time (^:
I will say - we've agreed that the currently configured MythicMobs are very dull; they're numerically unbalanced, having thousands upon thousands of health and dealing damage disproportionate to their health pool (200 damage a hit for a player with a 1k health pool is 20% - a level 60 scaled 300-damage left click to this mob with 25k health is 1.2%), and they only use a single, very dull skill, which is a slow homing "fireball" that is avoided by stepping over any one-block-high obstacle.
In addition, the "dungeon world" breaks any sort of immersion going; in order to level, all you must do is port or warp to spawn, turn around, then walk into a small nexus with some portals. There's also no more open world pvp, as nobody really has a reason to explore or head to specific areas apart from scouting out a potential base or town location. Yeah, we have castles, but those are isolated areas, and they aren't dynamic, nor are they fun; the biggest town with the most experienced PvPers takes the castles when they're online, and the locations don't move or provide any challenge if there are no other players present.
It also seems to confuse new players, plenty of whom we've seen trying to build/explore in the dungeon world and getting confused about it.
To summarize:
- Dungeons do not provide a rewarding, satisfying or fun leveling experience.
- Fighting mobs is essentially left clicking a health bar that occasionally deals 1/5 of your health as damage.
- The splitting of dungeons into their own worlds pretty much removed any world pvp or exploration aside from castles.
- Bosses are a major pain in the ass, having tons of health, way too much damage and not much in the way of drops. What little challenge there is can be easily removed by any class with a mobility skill and a ranged attack; in the palace (t6), for example, a Beastmaster can just grapple up onto the side of a pillar and shoot the iron golem boss with no repercussions.
We've agreed that we want dungeons removed, but we thought we'd ask the players first.
The alternatives would be to return overworld leveling, including swamplands. Dungeons should be relegated to the realm of supplementary content, rather than mandatory leveling areas; their primary incentive should be level-specific drops, plus things like trophies (boss heads, special furniture pieces, possibly a very limited selection of pets, etc) and resources.
In addition, to help further world PvP, we discussed bringing in automated events such as these:
(Rifts is a plugin I wrote for mcConquest whereby large structures will spawn at random at regular intervals, spawning mobs and actively fending off attackers; players should flock to these locations for rewards, currency and exp, sparking pvp between groups looking for them.)
Other plugins to draw players to world locations, such as the old /hunt plugin, would also help increase world pvp.
ALLOWING DARKROOMS IS NOT A SOLUTION.
@Kainzo @Admins @Balance Team @Coders
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