2024-09-09 16:52
#0
Had a chance this weekend to try a handful of the new encounters and requested testing points to give a better pass at feedback.
Encounters
Manticore
The Manticore fight was a very good fight with awesome mechanics. The more you push at it, the more you're punished. This fight doesn't require, but benefits from teamwork and strategy. It's not a hard fight if you approach it correctly, but it is still challenging.
Phased bosses are fantastic to fight. They offer something outside of a target dummy as an enemy, and when you down them you feel like you actually beat something. I heard numerous people cite this as the best fight in UO, currently, and I see why.
Veylara
This boss was on the opposite side of the spectrum for me. Out of the new rotational bosses, this is my least favorite. It has no interesting or fun mechanics to speak of, unless you count the mana drain, which isn't a fun mechanic. Secondly, the health pool is so large that it's more of a painful grind than a fun battle.
Drops in Encounters
I heard it got lowered, seems like it got lowered. I was one of the ones calling for drop chances to be pulled back. However, the complaints are endless about not getting drops and people are starting to become a bit defeated. I, personally, feel like they're close but maybe they feel too low simply because they were too high before and we're comparing that.
Dungeon Outposts
We were able to give Dungeon Outposts another try. However, the experience wasn't any better than previous attempts. Here some overall takeaways:
- You start in the dark. If you forgot a NS potion or forgot to have a mage on your team, good luck.
- The arrows on the ground are helpful in theory, but feel more like an afterthought to help guide players in a poorly laid out battleground.
- The layout is one of the biggest issues with the battleground.
- Capture points are cool in theory and work in a majority KOTH fashion. However, with the number of people who actually seem interested in playing, you generally end up with 2v2v2 at best. To capture a point, you'd need to kill opposing people before you even think about capturing it due to how long it takes and how quickly the capture progress resets.
- Pets can attack you, but you can't attack pets. Not good.
- At the end rocks fall and you all die. Even if you win. I didn't verify whether or not my armor durability takes a hit in Dungeon Outposts, but if it does that's a massive issue.
Overall, I'm sorry--these are not fun. I don't know anyone who would participate in these. There are some posts out there with some suggestions, but they're major changes. As they are now, I don't know what to suggest to make these fun.
The Quaderact
We tried this again to be able to provide some more feedback on this encounter. Here are some overall takeaways:
- When you complete the encounter it lets you know that you've brought honor to your guild. Awesome, how so?
- There is a scoreboard at the end. It notes that point were rewarded. What are the points for? What is my reward for doing better than then next person or guild?
- The damage breakdown is cool, but whats the relevance? If this is a DPS dummy, having that damage breakdown more visible throughout the fight would be significantly more helpful.
- It helps complete guild objectives, which is nice. But is that it?
Ultimately, we fail to understand the point of this fight outside of a DPS dummy that helps complete some guild objectives. Maybe there's something we're missing? But as far as we know, everyone we've talked to has had the same experience.
Quest Boards Post GM
One of the things we'll have to do throughout the life of the server is house upkeep and guild house upkeep. Currently, we have to go back and kill spiders, bears, ghouls and crates. Mindless and boring to say the least. Then we get rewarded with a message saying we get no rewards.
Something we've been tossing around is the idea to have a new set of rewards available to you post GM that offer some more desirable rewards. Maybe it's gold, maybe it's battle supplies (regs, bandaids, potions), who knows. The rewards can be reflected by the difficulty of the encounter. And these are encounters that could reflect your GM status. Go kill 10 elder gazers in Hythloth. Go kill 8 Lich Lords in Deceit.
These are quests that could pull GM players into the depths of dungeons to kill harder enemies and participate in regions they likely wouldn't otherwise. It's questing, but it's different than the grind you participated in up to GM and it's more reflective of your character status. Just a thought.
