Lost Dungeons of Norrath

Been saying this, and hoping for this for 2 years....LDoN turned eq1, and for a lot of people, the entire concept of an MMORPG into casual gaming...Sounds perfect to me for eq2, as casual players are their target base...the nice thing is, it gives the casual players a chance to play with the hardcore players...Sounds good for everyone, would be nice if they took up on this idea....

But... but... but.. they could also add in raid instances with this as well like the city writ raids... so it wouldn't necessarily be for the casual grouper... but also the casual raider too..

For me, LDON in EQ1 was probably my favorite expansion out of all of them, due to the fact that my paladin could actually get a group for a change. However, the problem I had personally was the fact that I had a ton of Mistmoore Catacomb points and quite a few Guk points, but to get Takish-Hiz points, I had to almost pay groups to go there. This was basically a result of the MMC and GUK dungeons being rather undead heavy, which meant that my paladin was easily getting main tank slots (even picked over fighters for it), but TAK, being summoned heavy, you pretty much wanted Mages and Druids for their summoned mob spells and banishes. The pain was that one of my two LDON spells was from the TAK runs for about 600 pts....and I never even got close to that total.
My daughter and I have discussed this a number of times, and we both agree that we'd enjoy the LDON setup immensely. But, if they do indeed base an expansion on this, it's my hope they won't repeat the above and make each of the dungeons viable for all archetypes to have an equal chance at succeeding.

Dylara@Crushbone wrote:

I think if they did bring the idea into EQ2, they should meld LDoN and DoN. I loved the variety in dungeons that LDoN provided, but hated that the points were restricted. But only having one camp with DoN and a limited number of wanted dungeons (Creator gets REAL boring after a while), was a huge disadvantage to the advantage that tradeable points gave. So a meld of a variety of flavors of dungeon as LDoN had, with points that could be used across them all, and ideally tradeable as DoN were, would be a great setup.

Gwyneth@Najena wrote:

I think LDoN & DoN instance types would definitely be a step forward in the right direction for eq2

For the record, in LDoN, the camps were NOT restricted per camp, but you had to 'prove' yourself at each camp before you could spend them at that camp. (Think of it like faction). For example, lets say you had earned 500 points at the NRo camp and 1000 points at the Everfrost camp, 300 points at Butcherblock and 200 points at the Guk camp. You would have 2000 points total. With those 2000 points you could buy: Up to 2000 points worth of items worth up to 1000 points at the Everfrost camp. (ie you could buy 2 1000pt items, or any other combo). You could buy 4 500pt items at the NRo camp. 6 300pt items + a 100pt item (or any other combos) at Butcherblock, etc... In other words, the points themselves WERE universal. They just acted like a faction counter to indicate how much you could see to buy at a particular camp. If anything, LDoN 2.0 (DoN) and LDoN 3.0 (TBS) were MORE restrictive than the original LDoN because their special currencies were not universal; you just had fewer camps to faction up at. (1 see-saw faction in DoN; ie you couldn't raise one without lowering the other, and 2 completely unrelated factions in TBS) In any case, I doubt we will ever see an LDoN style expansion for EQII; The LDoN format just doesn't really work well for an annual expansion and doesn't really provide enough hooks to hang stuff off of. As a free Adventure-Pack style I could almost see, but not as an annual expansion. (Doubt we'll ever see LDoN 4.0 in EQ either for that matter)

Bleh, I meant to say the items being restricted. I saw the inside of the Northern Ro instances way more than I wanted to. I loved the Guk instances but nobody ever wanted to go to Guk. So they should definitely have the items common to all camps, and if they have to add a bit of flavor in, just have a special item or two exclusive, not all the plate here and all the leather here, etc.

I would love to see a LDoN expansion. I agree though, there should be no raising of faction between the camps as it would greatly seperate what camps each class needs. I don't want to see another case where the beast spells can be bought in one camp but the healers needs another camp. Guess which one will win that argument

I would so love to see LDONs come back. They were so much fun!
It would be great if they could have solo, duo and then groups consisting of 3 to 6. We duo most of the time and the 3 group restriction was a little difficult sometimes.

As long as they don't make the mistake that was made with EQ1 and keep such an idea from ever expanding (i.e. they scale all the way to whatever the level cap would be in 10 years). Currently LDoN in EQ1 just stagnates past a certain level, and is never done. With the current level cap of 80, you cannot even do LDoN's. Mentoring would help that immensely, but there's just no drive to get a group together and do LDoN's even at the lower levels anymore. Add to the fact that you must have a certain amount of people just to start an instance, and it's sad how wasted the expansion has become over there. True, that is how the majority of EQ1 expansions have ended up--there's simply too much content for certain level ranges there.
All that aside, LDoN was one of my favorite expansions for EQ1, and I wouldn't mind seeing an EQ2ified version of the same expansion. Just please, please, please don't let it fall to the same fate as the EQ1 version has

Take a quick look at this older post I made on about the same subject:
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=376638
The basic idea was to use the far seas trading company as a central entity that would give LDoN style missions and rewards.
Good: All the faction is for one camp.It is suppose to make travel easier.
Bad: Only one real set of rewards per tier. Points earned in previous tiers can't be traded up. May make travel too easy.
Indiffernt: It is set at sea and would probably focus on costal areas. There really isn't any reason it couldn't add dungeon content in any area. This included an idea for group instances, solo instances, raid x2 instances, and raid x4 instances.
I think I'm going to look over the origional post and add more detail to some of the ideas. It really is/was a good idea.

I Would LOVe to have LDON based content. Dungeons that were randomly or partially randomly generated. Much like the first LDON stuff. Especially if the quests subjected you to either taking a line of stuff, or being sent from dungeon to dungeon.
It would be even more fun if perhaps one dungeon put you out near another, and related. They COULD get really creative with this.
I *Think* Splitpaw was a starter attempt at this. They could ahve done way better.

...

Lornick wrote:

your point holds no water. SOE always releases previous content with new expansions. The ONLY WAY you DO NOT GET previous expansion material is if you buy the game via digi-download.
Lesson for the day kids: Buy the retail. life is good. game on.

I Quit for 2 years and came back 1 month? ago. I couldn't find a single cd so i went to google and searched for EQ2 download. Station launcher came up. I installed t, let it search my computer, at which time it said now found, would you liek to buy? So i logged in, chose Give me Kunark and bought it. All over the place (when clicking it, when selecting ok to purchase, etc) it said "INCLUDES ALL Previous expansions and content..."

When it downloaded, i got everything. When i went back, it said i had 8 of 8 expansions and adventure packs...

So, purchasing online gives you everything too, just pay attention to what you are doing. Today's lesson for the Day kids is: Watch What the @)$(*@ you are doing.

I would love to see LDoN brought back, would see some grouping come back. As for where the base is, I dont care where it is I have all expansions.

AngusMcLachlan wrote:

When EoF came out there was a choice to purchase JUST EoF and not the whole package, you could buy the whole package from the digi-download site, but not from Sony at the time. It made quite a few people upset thinking they were getting the game when all they got was the expansion. Not to mention the price from Sony was about the same for the all-in-1 package from the other site.

I believe that the only choice now (since RoK) is a get-it-all option .. download or retail.

But .. back to the subject ... I'd love to see an LDoN type expansion! I do agree that the points need to be universal and there should be no real limits by camp (although I don't object to faction to get stuff at all).

LDoN would be awesome .. and the idea of bringing in the Far Seas Trading Company as the "camps" is good. I'd definitely prefer more than one set of gear per tier though! Maybe some consumables like the faction items from the city brokers?

I had left Eq1 prior to LDoN so have no idea why you all find it so intriguing. Basically you are running dungeon instances for points I assume? It's just not grabbing me - why was it so awesome?

Qandor wrote:

Having to dredge this up from memory, so bear with me.
You could start the expansion at level 20
5 areas:
Butcherblock for Mistmoore Catacombs (vampires and undead, mostly)
Everfrost for Miragul's Sanctuary (all the wierd a** creations there)
Commonlands Tunnel for Rujarkan Hills (orcs a plenty)
North Ro for Takhis Hiz (summoned mob heaven for mages and druids)
South Ro for Deepest Guk (Frogloks, live and undead)
Each area had 10 dungeon maps. There were four or five different types of missions you could select (collect X items, kill X type of mobs, rescue X - Find him, and get out, and beat the boss). Each mission had 2 difficulty levels (normal and hard). Each mission had set time limits (30 minutes to get zoned in, 90 minutes to complete the mission, if you made it to a certain point, if your timer expired, you'd get an additional 30 minutes to complete.) There were also 2 or 3 raid-level dungeon maps for each area, as I recall.
You'd get X number of points for different completions, based on level. Basically, it was 1 pt for a complete in 90, 1 pt for a complete in 120, and scale from there, with a set number for a 90 minute complete, and half that for a 120 minute complete. Points worked like faction for each individual camp, unlocking rewards based on the amount of points you'd collected from that camp. However, your total points across all camps counted for what you could purchase (think of the points as the currency to buy the items.) Your camp faction would never go down, but your spendable point total would. Also, there was a charm that you got that after so many missions at a camp, you could go talk to a certain NPC and advance the story and upgrade the charm.
Item's you could purchase were armor, other items, spells and augmentations (like adornments). Only certain spells were available at certain camps, which was the problem I ran into (I had a paladin spell at the NRo camp that acted a lot like the cleric Aegolism spell, an all-in-one HP/AC buff, but NRo was the Takhis-Hiz camp, and no one ever wanted to do that, so I never could get the blasted spell. heh)
That's basically LDoN in a nutshell, and Dragons of Norrath was set up similar to this, but limited to a couple specfic zones. It also put a lot of fun back into grouping. You could get a few friends together, run a mission or two, and get some pretty decent rewards. It was perfect for those people that only have a few hours to play and get something accomplished. You could also port between the camps, so if your group wanted to do something else, just hail the mage and tell them where you want to go.
More on topic, it was hinted in the most recent podcast that the new lore stories that are going up on the EQ2Players site might be related to the next expansion (as I thought when I started reading them). The first three talk about Guk, the 4th talks about Rivervale, and with more to come. Could it be that the next expansion might indeed be something along the lines of LDoN?