Big Gnomes, Big Problems - Feedback request

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Augur, Mar 15, 2013.

  1. Augur Developer

    Happy EQ anniversary to everyone! (Technically a day early, but close enough!)

    I hope you're enjoying all the new content we added to the festivities in-game this year :) As we talked about in our livestream yesterday (embedded below if you missed it!), there are a ton of new missions for you to play during the celebration, most of which were designed by you at Fan Faire.

    The mission I built for the anniversary is a little different, because I built it to be level-agnostic (players of any level can group up and have success playing together) without using shrouds. That meant I needed to use a lot of specific mechanics to funnel damage inputs and outputs to standardized levels. The implementation was an experiment for us, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on how enjoyable you think the end result is.

    The mission is "Big Gnomes, Big Problems" which starts with a quest in Steamfont Mountains.

    Please be completely candid in your feedback. Did it work? Did you hate it? Are you interested in seeing more level-agnostic content like this in the future?

    Thanks!
    Augur

  2. Dendrophobic New Member

    Ok, we just completed this mission on Xegony...

    Here is the breakdown (possible slight spoiler):

    The DT mobs at the first stage are a bit overkill and have line of sight almost the length of the zone, we were forced to drag corpses and FD bounce to first checkpoint.

    The script works on the first session w/ the traps by the entrance, but the traps are semi-buggy and cause the trap to activate anywhere from 20-50 times, causing a rare amount of particle lag (the giant yellow beam) and spam lag that sometimes locks you out of the DPS timer to attack the skeleton (in that round). If you're looking at the trap and the script spams multiple locks -- it can even crash weaker computers.

    It seems the only visible working traps after the first round are located back by gnome-city and after the first round, one of them disappears, leaving only 1 trap to pull skeletons across the entire zone to trap (also bugs and scripts 20-50 times).

    Finally, the aggro settings for the skeletons is a bit sketchy -- in part due to the array of 'helping' NPCs that don't really have any purpose besides to steal your aggro and prevent you from getting a mob into a trap. Also, the gnome skeletons are a pain since they are unkillable/untrappable -- forcing you to ignore them or kite them (ignoring can cause deaths).

    We found that porting your group w/ evac or succor resets health meters -- which is essential since you have nearly 1 million HP.

    The overall idea of the mission is very cool and fun. I especially like the mixed potion bags of tricks and the giganticism beam (great pics) -- but the reward (Metamorph wand: diseased rat) is not worth the 4 + hours we had to deal with due to multiple bugs and scripting errors that we had to find ways to work around.

    You might want to take a look at the points I mentioned and apply a ninja-patch, we were the first to complete the mission on Xegony and won't be recommending it to anyone until a patch is added for the traps spam.

    Thanks for the quest.

    Cheers,

    ~d
  3. Riou EQResource

    Mission was pretty long, but that seems to be the case on like all the anniversary ones.

    It seems bugged where you need the Ogres at the Gates pre-quest completed to even zone in, saying "go" while in the task to try to zone in only gives the "accompany" request phrase block of text instead of zoning you in, not sure if that was intended or not
  4. SpamFactory Augur

    seems intentional. the achievement window says the pre-quest is required
  5. Tobynn Augur

    While I understood that I was to dodge the giant seers and sneak my way to Ak'Anon, I certainly wasn't expecting to get the equivalent of a death touch when they spotted me. The Sheriff's comment if you lose your invis come back and see me made me think fail to be sneaky = try again, instead its actually fail = exps loss and good luck trying to get to your corpse. Might as well just lobby summon and rez. That was a rude awakening.

    The first engagement of skellies with traps outside the gates of Ak'Anon, and again with the two skellies attacking the Sheriff at zone-in, and also the final wave outside Ak'Anon, all three of these fights totally disregarded my settings for particle effects. As the fight is against HUGE mobs, the spell effects fill the entire field of view and as a result those three phases were quite simply a horrible experience. Change it so my particle effects settings are obeyed.

    As mentioned above, the mission freaked out on me during the trap fight and I was spammed literally nonstop with the yellow text across the screen, as well as chat text emotes, indicating the skellies were vulnerable!! The text spam is accompanied by the particle effect spam. The graphics spam was so violent that Windows went belly up with a blue screen crash blaming the display driver. I rebooted, logged my toons back in (I was 3boxing this), and attempted to re-enter world. As the task was still active, I re-entered in the midst of the still ongoing violent spam. I couldn't even quit the task the lag was so severe and framrate was down to nil, so I ended up just opening Task Manager and shutting down EQ process x3, and went afk a while to give Return Home a chance to refresh. Started up a new mission and didn't experience that freak-out second time around.

    Then after spending far too many hours, in two instances, attempting to complete this mission, I finally did finish it, popped open the chest, and found my reward ... the booby prize. Unstable Clockwork Launcher, a clicky suicide pet that explodes on its target for a whopping 1125 dmg. I can use it to kill a rat next time I pass through the Qeynos newbie yard. Extraordinarily terrible risk v. reward.


    I did like the level-agnostic concept. Coming from someone who detests monster missions, that's saying a lot ~
  6. smash Augur

    Have to say that I dislikes it. First of all, all your normal powers = gone.
    Second, you may not be in a shroud, but it is really a monster mission, much the same that was in voa, in sepulcher,
    Where you do those amount of damage.

    I did not have problems with DT mobs at first stage, not sure which ones you mean.
    bunnies, just aggro them, and swap to burning bunny
    skeletons zi, put to trap.
    skeletons at windmill, giant form get them vulnerable
    named, ate a poisoned rat, but same as other.
    north, 3 skeletons(1 a named), kill first 2, then named, use of giant form and named split parts off)
    2 shady kill relative slowly with giant form get splints of 1 and you get strike power on them
    5 skeletons at zi, pull to trap.
    named, did not finish, the gnome skeletons spawned too fast

    did not pull skeletons to zi of alk for trap, was not necessary
  7. Riou EQResource

    It only to mentions to "Request" it though
  8. br3333nt Journeyman

    Hate it.

    The bunnies were neat.

    The DT mobs in the next stage were too much. Massive aggro radius, and basically lost 3 sets of corpses. Not fun at all.

    I have no desire to see what the rest of the mission is like.
  9. Shang Augur

    Takes way too long to complete.
    Rouan likes this.
  10. keggulist New Member

    would love to finish this however like the above posts,

    1=the particle effects cause window to it self and go ld over and over
    2= dots dont land on the giant skeletons
  11. Augur Developer

    Thanks for the feedback so far.

    I'll look into the trap spam that's causing crashes. If it's happening that frequently, it is a bug and will be fixed.

    Particle effects are forced on the vulnerability procs because knowing when that procs is essential to succeeding in the fight. I'm going to leave this as is for now, and see if fixing the trap spam bug will resolve most players' concerns with it.

    I'll confirm the range of the DT mobs on Live. It was actually fairly small while testing. It's intended that you cannot simply run straight to the gate. You're supposed to observe the skeletons' movements and plan your route accordingly. But because the penalty is so harsh, I'll look at the aggro range and see if it should be reduced further.

    For those reporting 4+ hour completion times, what elements are taking the most time? Are the fights in general taking too long, or what parts are requiring multiple attempts?

    Thanks again for feedback. I'll update here this afternoon with reports after testing these on live.
  12. Augur Developer

    I had to curb DoTs in the zone because they bypass the technical restrictions that limit damage (and instead apply the huge damage drop every single tick, killing the mob really fast). Instead, I made it so that whenever you cast a DoT on a skeleton in the zone, it does a small instant spell dmg on the mob (proccing the big damage boost). DoTs are still extremely efficient damage.
  13. Uxtalzon Augur

    Once we spoke to Neringa, the potion effects don't seem to have any effect. If they did, yet again, the game is too damn vague for anyone to discern their meaning. Everyone wanted to be big, the healer was useless because healing is completely useless, and the mystery effect didn't seem to do anything.

    Giant skeletons attacking the sheriff - everyone started dying once limitless gnome skeletons began spawning by the dozens. I trained off the big ones and everyone began to kite. I moved the big ones to Ak'Anon gates and the traps worked, so we took them down there.

    Once the final wave came, it was just a gigantic wave of frustration. The skeletons were so big it was very hard to position them on the trap (only spawned in one place), and every giant skeleton began spawning little gnome skeletons. Melee classes only provided a 1 million damage proc (or something like that) while my nukes could do 32 million. It was like this throughout the entire fight.

    So melee classes were screwed royally, forced to tank little skeletons and die horribly with pitiful damage to contribute, but casters could do far more damage from a safer distance. Just epitomizes the disparity between ranged and non-ranged yet again. As for the reward, it was a kick in the teeth... a stupid pet rat illusion. Only one of us even had the ability to summon a pet! /sigh

    So to summarize the issues with this event: melee have it the hardest, as usual. Spell nukes > all. Gnome skeletons spawn too much, do too much damage. Neringa's spell effects are too unknown (stop making things so freakin' vague!). Too many giant skeletons on the final wave.

    The only enjoyable part of this task was being gigantic, and if you die while a giant, you can summon your corpse to lobby and it remains huge so you can throw it in the middle with all the AFK fools.
  14. Uxtalzon Augur

    Forgot to add, nobody wanted to be giant when we had to kill giant skeletons using traps... because we couldn't avoid seeing the enormous FPS lag from the particles when the traps went off. Luckily none of our computers sucked enough that it made any of us crash.
  15. Tegila Augur

    you lore-grouped all the augs together???? poor move. no other anniversary set of augs has ever been this way, every one of them you could loot all 4 in the missions if you so wanted to, now there's even less reason to repeat once you have the one you want
  16. Tobynn Augur

    That particle effect is accompanied by yellow text splashed across the screen, a chat text emote, and a short duration buff named Strike Now! Yes, knowing when the mob is vulnerable is key, but that vulnerability is being communicated in four different ways simultaneously. Drag all three skellies onto a trap at the same time and behold the nuclear particle effect explosion. The graphic spam is just way, way too much, particularly since the particle effect is mapped on those enormous mobs so it easily overwhelms every bit of your field of view.

    Regarding the seers: First time through it, I wasn't aware of what was about to transpire, so I ended up making three corpses, and then two more corpses trying to fetch the first three, and then another corpse still trying to retrieve the others ... finally I just said screw it. Summoned all to lobby, rezzed up and ran back to the mission zone. Having learned the penalty for failure was multiple deaths, I was quite methodical and sneaky second time around, and had no problem getting safely to Ak'Anon. The seers do not have line of sight agro, and most certainly will not agro from across the zone. The agro radius on the seers is fine just as it is. Perhaps change the Sheriff's dialogue or the text in the task window so players have a clear understanding that being spotted = no chance of survival.
  17. Enizen Elder

    Not the same mission, but Piestro's day off, is hideous.....
    -----Cinexa----- likes this.
  18. Tegila Augur

    poor piestro, analogous to reality? heh
  19. Falos Augur

    I myself do not particularly like monster missions, nor do the people i tend to associate with. I'm sure some people like it but yeah.. everytime i see a monster mission in new content i instantly sigh disappointed. The premise of the mission is cool though, just wish it wasnt a monster mission.
    Tegila likes this.
  20. Tegila Augur

    only monster missions ive ever done more than once, sicne igot dragged through half a dozen dains years and years ago, were boomerangs cause they were kidna fun. but not another class/level jsut playing tag with boomerangs. idk why anyone would want to play a toon that has nothign to do with their own, by force like this. sure we may shroud to soemthign for some reason but it's never necessary to accomplish soemthign, MM's are if yo uwant that achievement/reward and its jsut blah. only reason OMM's were so popular were bc ppl make huge xp and plat off them repeatedly, soon as yo utook THAT away no one did them anymore (i never did but 1 once and hated it too)