Have there been Dungeonmaker changes I should know about?

Discussion in 'General Gameplay Discussion' started by msgnomer, Nov 23, 2013.

  1. msgnomer Active Member

    I've been away for several months and I just had a rather frustrating experience trying to make my way through my own Dungeonmaker dungeon.

    This dungeon was completed more than 1 1/2 years ago and made the Hall of Fame June 29, 2012. I had extensively tested it with several different avatars solo and with a partner. It was quite doable with a bit of thought with all of the avatars. ...back then, that is.

    Now, no matter which avatar I try, I simply can't get through the dungeon. Is there an explanation for why this might be happening? The dungeonmaker board disappeared, so there might have been something over the months that I missed. On these boards, a search turned up nothing.

    I put a whole lot of effort into terraforming the landscape and carfully placing and scripting the mobs. If there is something changed, I'd consider unpublishing and losing my accumulated likes and ranking, just to scale down the mobs to make the dungeon playable again.
  2. Mohee Active Member

    People exploited the dungeon maker, so they've upped the difficulty a ton.

    :D
  3. msgnomer Active Member

    Thanks, but ouch. OK. That explains it, but why the big grin! I was kind of afraid the increased difficulty was the only explanation. I wish I could rebalance my dungeon without losing my ranking and all my likes. :(

    I worked so hard to group and script encounters. I guess bumping down the difficulty would be the way to go, if I can. Lot of work to get it right again though. Sigh.

    Sadly, if I do this and it still works that if you get one like it goes back into the hall of fame, it will go from page two to the very end of the list with one like and be lost forever after. So the choice might be between unplayable or unfindable. Bah!
  4. Mohee Active Member

    yeah didnt mean the grin, meant sadface. because dungeon maker could have been awesome, it had potential, but like a lot of things, SOE has given up on it. And after it got exploited like crazy, now there's no incentive for people to run it. They still haven't updated or added any new rewards for dungeon marks either. sad
  5. Meaghan Stormfire Well-Known Member

    Typical SOE over reaction. People exploited the dungeon maker so they "fixed" it with the usual sledgehammer.

    People used it for fast leveling... So what? That affects me how? Exactly none.

    Oh wait, now a days we want people to buy level 85 toons, can't have crazy fast leveling for free.
    Feldon likes this.
  6. Sambril Well-Known Member

    The 'fix' to dungeon maker was actually a fix to how multiple items with the experimented procs Augmented Smite and Augmented Blessings work. It used to be that the chance to proc would stack, so that with enough of them it would be 100%. So people would go into a dungeon filled with mobs stacked on each other and when they attacked they would take damage from the smite while simultaneously healing the player - high reward for no risk. They were changed so that the chance to proc does not stack, but additional items increase the damage or healing effect. So these days most of the old exploit dungeons are instant death to anyone entering.

    They also changed how vitality was used in dungeons so that it is used up in a similar way to regular fighting, it used to be that it could be exploited to increase the experience from dungeons.

    However from what you describe your dungeon was an honest effort and not one of the exploit dungeons, which never worked with avatar play anyhow, so you should still be able to play it with either an avatar or playing as yourself.
  7. Dulcenia Well-Known Member

    When CoE was released the experimented gear that proc'd heals and aoe.....you could have a level 20 run the dungeons without having to swing a sword. Mobs were dying from the aoe and healing you in the meantime. There were a lot of brand new 95s from that little "oopsie". Both the dungeons and the proc's were adjusted after that fiasco.
  8. msgnomer Active Member

    Some of this additional discussion has be confused now. My dungeon was definitely not an exploit dungeon, but it definitely got bumped up to where encounters range from difficult to impossible. If I understand the comments about the change, it sounds like the changes only were to how a characters equipment worked in a dungeon. However, I'm noticing severe increased difficulty with several of the avatars.

    I wonder if there was something in my desgin method, and maybe a less well-known dungeonmaker change, that caused my dungeon difficulty to change as a side effect.

    I used a lot of effects items to bump groups or individuals up or down. For instance a spider cave had a bunch of little very weak spiders and one big bad spider. A group of gnolls had a group of three with two average fighters and a strongre captain gnoll. I had some individual encounters with bumbed up mobs. Stuff like that throughout. It varied a lot, but the encounters were in groups of one to three except for the half dozen little spiders that had the maximum down arrow effect on them. I used the effects that bumped up or lowered level and also effects that added charaacteristics.

    I haven't yet found an avatar I can get very far through the dungeon with and using my own character is even worse (she's 71 Berserker/92 carpenter outside and not uber geared). The two wolves at the door at the beginning hit for half the avatars health and the only avatar I could find that could survivie that was one that could effectively keep them stunned enough to just not hit her. If she survived that then a single snake further along could knock her back so often she couldn't get a hit off. If she made it past that and few similar encounters the first group of three gnolls were just impossible.

    If I could figure out why this happened, I'd do the work to fix it. It was supposed to a story based fun challenge not a deathwish. But from the explanations above (that the change was to how people's gear worked and not the dungeon itself) I don't see how it could have changed. But it did. :confused:
  9. Gudum Active Member

    Doesn't sound like your dungeon was geared toward the experimental gear, since it was made so long ago. There have been several changes over the last 1 1/2 years, such as limiting the number of targets an AOE can hit (something like 6 or 8) to address an earlier exploit. Some of the gear stats are quite different now, in or out of DM, and the level-agnostic system when using your own toon has its own quirks. I've always had more success using a very well geared level 20, and level 10 was really a killer before they took out the ability to get in on tradeskill level.
  10. msgnomer Active Member

    I can appreciate devs listening to (some of their) customers and adding the ability to use their own characters in dungeons. However, in this case, it sounds like it destroyed what had started out as a great feature addition to EQ2. The Dungeon Maker was not originally designed to accomodate people's characters and the balance issues that insued seems to have been it's downfall.

    I can appreciate RPers wanting to use their characters, but I have a suspicion it was the uber geared characters that created the downfall. It's a shame SOE caved on this and added the ability to use your own character. A compromise would have been to retain the character's skin and give them a set of abilities that corresponded to their characters archetype or even class. Oh well.

    I wish they'd give the designers a one-time chance to go in and rebalance their dungeon without losing their all-time ratings. Also they could have a new layout and another competition that might help revitalize a very cool feature of EQ2.