So, the community at large has now had a chance to play around a bit with heroic adventures. The reviews have been mixed, to be sure, although I think a lot of that is more on the technical side (some of them can be very buggy) than the actual content. What I'd like to focus on in this thread is less how the existing set of HAs can be improved (that is, the ones in Bixie Warfront and Dead Hills), but more on what the community would like to see done with the HA technology. As a huge fan of LDoN, HAs had me really excited since their announcement, and honestly I've had a lot of fun with them. They're not without fault, but what gets me excited isn't so much that the Dead Hills and Bixie Warfront HAs are the best content of all time, but more that they have this new format to produce content with. So, I'll start with a brief plus/minus review of HAs as I see them currently. +Slightly different experience each time, just like LDoN. +Consistent rewards for every single run in the form of currency, with randomized rare "bonus" spawns. +/- Relatively low difficulty, how you view this really depends on what kind of experience you want out of an HA. This is also likely due to this being tier 1 of a new expansion. -Currently there's relatively few branches to choose from, and these branches don't appear to sub-branch from eachother. -The current HAs are tied to storyline quests and tend to get very repetitive as a result. -They're only really built for one length of time (45 minutes~). Some things I'd definitely love to see in the future: 1. Reintroduce traps/chests and make them meaningful, even though they aren't mob encounters I believe these add a lot to the dungeon experience. LDoN's problem was very poor implementation, the chests usually weren't worthwhile and the traps were poorly tuned. Chests would, for instance, be a great place to put collectibles or valuable tradeskill goodies. 2. Difficulty settings. Ideally with a large enough pool of possible branches in an HA, you could preselect a setting that resulted in a larger amount of "hard" objectives or "easy" objectives. The technology is obviously already well-built to support this, since even the end currency rewards can be easily tied to what objectives you've completed. 3. "Long" HAs intended as a 2-3 hour time investment instead of a quick run, obviously these would eventually involve going through an entire zone, instead of a small segment like current HAs. I mentioned it in another thread, but my ideal application of the HA would be something like this: The intent here is to create an experience that varies each time, but isn't tied heavily to a specific storyline and thereby becomes boring much less quickly. So, what kind of things do the rest of you think could be done with the HA technology?
I love most of the HAs.. I sure wish my group could do them in 45 mins. We are lucky to finish in under 3 hours (if we finish). I guess it all depends on your play style / gear lvl.
I'm a little disappointed in it so far. The missions are supposed to scale but the gear is min level 100, what the point of anyone not max level doing them? I'd like to see the named in the missions drop something aimed at the classes in the mission. I've been doing these with a caster group and so far all we have seen are berzerker, beastlord and Shaman/necro items. Yes I know it is all/all gear but the wrong heroics make them worse than T4 RoF gear. If they have the technology to look at the group levels they should have the tec to look at the classes and get the mobs to drop something useful for someone. As to your points 1. There are already trapped chests you need to use LDON trap spells on. 2. These are supposed to scale, I'd like them to look at the gear or the flags of the players and adjust accordingly. 3. They can make some missions last a couple of hours as long as they are not required for partisan tasks. That said their 30 min mission took me 3 and half hours.
I'm curious, what is your group make-up and gear level? I've yet to have a mission that is, as a whole, overly difficult, although there are some bad steps. Well, I believe they're supposed to scale with how full the group is as well. Less people = weaker content. The gear issue is hit or miss for me, it isn't a great system for those in full T4 RoF, but for those below that it basically creates a mini-tier wherein you get equipped in random T1 CotF crap...and then you can, if you want, camp for "perfect" gear. I think requiring all gear drops to be for classes in the group would take away from that, but it'd be a good choice for a longer-term reward (IE, the end of a long mission has guaranteed class-specific loot).
Firstly, what don't you like about it? Secondly, what do you want to see HA technology used for? This thread is to discuss how they might evolve, not for everyone to critique one particular idea.
Wish there were more 30 minute ones instead of just 2 of the 17, so you can form a group get in, then be done in bite size pieces like that, makes LFG and such easier being so fast that there isn't a huge time commitment barrier.
if you have to get to max level to even see what an expansion is about the whole thing seems shallow and people wonder why they bought it. HA's are nothing like ldons because they were mainly announced and many can't do them properly. Either say the expansion is level 100 or also announce the things other levels can do. ldons weren't near this limited in group level range.
This is a good point. If HAs are very scalable it'd be good to see at least one of them expanded down into the lower levels. The loot would likely be very generic though, since they're unlikely to want to create detailed loot tables for 10+ tiers. That said, I'd call the current ones 97+ content, perhaps 95+. They're certainly not all-levels content, but then again neither is CotF.
