Working on the belief that Dungeons should mostly be an end-game task - currently they’re trivial to end-game players, despite being allegedly scaled fights against upgraded ‘bosses’. I suggest that they’re pushed somewhat harder to borderline broken - and that all four enemy troops in the battle are upgraded, not just the boss character.
Some examples, using green day as a theme:
Forest Dungeon 1: Dragon’s Glade
Sylvan Troll (upgraded Forest Troll), spell cost -1 mana, spell creates 2 extra green gems, third trait Ancient Bark reduces skull attack damage by 60%
Queen Anariel (upgraded Lady Anariel), spell creates 1 extra green and blue gem each, third trait Elven Spirit gives all allies +3 Magic stat
Primal Dryad (upgraded Dryad), spell gives doubled Life and heal effect and creates 1 extra green gem, third trait Primal Link gives +1 to green, yellow and brown mana
Ancient Sylvanimora (upgraded Sylvanimora), spell explodes two columns and has +50% damage, third trait Crushing Vines deals 3 damage to all enemies when either player matches 4+ gems
Forest Dungeon 2: Grove Of Corruption
Ancient Gloom Leaf (upgraded Gloom Leaf), spell steals life as well as armour, and gives it to all allies, third trait Thorn Shield prevents skull attack damage and deals 100% of it back to the attacker
Blighted Imp (upgraded Autumnal Imp), spell deals double damage and destroys double number of gems, on death effect buffs all allies, third trait Blightfall deals 3 damage to all enemies when either player matches purple or red gems
Twisted Seer (upgraded Green Seer), spell also creates four green gems, and mana drains the enemy it entangles, third trait Vigilance also gives her full mana at start of battle
Tainted Rowanne (upgraded Rowanne), spell also creates seven each of brown and purple gems, third trait Undergrowth deals 3 damage to all enemies when either player matches green or yellow gems
Forest Dungeon 3: Caverns Of The Wargare
Elder Fenrir (upgraded Fenrir), spell affects all allies instead of one and is boosted for Wargare types as well as Beasts, third trait Wild Spirit also protects all allies from mana drain
Ancient Guardian (upgraded Totem Guardian), spell creates five extra gems, gives Barrier to Beasts as well as Wargare, third trait Ancient Curse deals 5 damage to all enemies when any enemy casts a spell
Primal Wulfgarok (upgraded Wulfgarok), spell damage increased by 50% and it always devours a random enemy, third trait Primal Wargare gives doubled bonuses and also applies to Beasts as well as Wargare
Verdant Guardian (upgraded Forest Guardian), spell cost -3 mana, gives Barrier to Wargare as well as Beasts, third trait Lord Of The Wild also buffs Wargare and also protects all allies from poison, disease and entangle
Note in all of the above I have mixed in something to make these teams impossible to simply loop against… now I wonder how hard they’d actually be… well people are always asking for a real challenge…
Would need to consider the impact on crafting resources of battles being (much) harder. My intention isn’t to gate crafting completely away from lower tier players (well, not completely)… but right now the rewards are earned roughly by farting near your device, as the battles are so trivially easy…
2. Repeatable Battles
Dungeons could/should be repeatable, either:
increasing in difficulty, like Challenges, going up to five stars, with increasing rewards as they go; or
simply repeatable once beaten once, but with significantly reduced rewards.
Having difficulty levels (enhancing stats at each stage) might help address any concerns about preventing people getting the daily crafting rewards with the far tougher battles as per part 1 above.
i just want to highlight that i disagree with the statement that dungeons should be mostly an end game.
due to the amounts required to ever craft something sensible, and the speed new mythics are released with, i believe at least one dungeon per day should be doable by early game players who try hard enough, and 2 fungeons for the mid game at least
I had expected a new game mode with Dungeons. This is basically just three battles.
At the minimum, I had expected to have to fight waves of minions, just from the boss being around. Where you’d have the boss swap in and out for some turns, stealing mana from it’s minions, where you couldn’t get a mana drain in before its ability. Something more dynamic, and hopefully making the movement and knockbacks useful. Perhaps borrowing the movement and charging times from Galatrix.
Of course I expected the Soulforge to involve a new game play mode and not just resource collection too.
I’m basically disappointed with the “New Game Modes,” so I don’t think it matters how you try to change those troops around.
If dungeons are endlessly repeatable for crafting materials in any reasonable quantity (even 100 shards!), that will encourage players to spend all their time in the dungeons. This runs counter to the developers intent to place limits on how frequently one can craft. It also runs the risk of players burning out as they thrash the same team over and over again for meager rewards.
I kinda agree, but would like to see something more done with this mode, which could have been much more than the trivial click to collect fest that it is now - without also utterly screwing over lower tier players.
…cos this is so different to the Explore or even PvP activity that we all do day in day out? Hmmmmm…
I think the Dungeons are adequate as they are.
If they are repeatable, then no crafting materials should be in subsequent run throughs, with exception of souls of course.
Finally, my disappointment with Dungeons is that they weren’t what I thought they were going to be. @Sirrian had mentioned on several occasions that he wanted to have battles against ULTIMATE BOSSES where each “troop” was actually a part of the boss.
For example:
BOSS: Ultimate Dragon
Troop 1: Head (spell causes fire dmg to all and explodes gems)
Troop 2: Body ( massive dmg to a single target)
Troop 3: Wings (cleanse and heal)
Troop 4: Tail (stuns and give extra turn)
This is what I thought was coming down the pipe…
Would have been epic…
Based on the few non-end-gamers we have on the forums, it sounds like they’re pretty tough for early/mid-gamers. I think the main issue is that the final boss isn’t hard enough. It should basically be:
On top of everything else I need to do every day in this game, I don’t need to spend 30-60 minutes slogging through epic dungeons to get 1% of the crafting materials I will need to do something interesting with the soul forge. If the difficulty is going to increase dramatically to make dungeons more “interesting” then the rewards need to increase proportionately. If not the crafting materials, then gold, trophies, glory, etc. If there is going to be an epic dungeon, then it needs to be a weekly item, not daily.
I can deal with a 5 minute chore (as it is now) with the existing rewards.
I’m wondering if the dungeons would be more interesting if we couldn’t access any Kingdom’s Bonuses… Like, they are secret places with wards/magical runes preventing external magic/support from the outside world.
Speaking of wards and such…
What if the dungeons were “warded” in such a way that only particular troops were allowed to enter with the hero?
This would require careful construction of specific teams which HAVE to include the HERO. We could even go so far to specify the HERO CLASS required for entry?
I’m all for ways to make that HERO important again…
If you want fights that are have actual, meaningful interaction that has the player thinking about the next move, making the enemies more “threatening” will never do this. The proposed changes here bring these teams more in line with the “lauch nukes” meta PvP invade and defense teams. They need to be defensively stronger first and foremost, not just all plowable, and immune to all forms of instakill across the board. Everything suggested in the original post suffers the same problem as PvP does now - they get the upper hand first, I lose. I get the upper hand first, I win. But now adding even more threatening options. Even less agency. Your “anti-looping” traits would not stop exploder chains or any similar options, nor the use of multi-kraken troll, nor would it take any of the more effective chains off the table (v/j/m). It would mitigate the effect of careful looping, the kind that requires some thought, off the table as well as making the battles literally impossible for low level players because they just take too much damage trying to do anything because of “anti-loop” traits. Looping was never the thing that made things “too easy” so long as they required focus and thought to maintain. When I was early on in the game using a treant/mercy/valk/terraxsis on Warlord IV challenges without any kingdom bonuses and only a few traits takes careful planning, and was very satisfying to be able to pull off. It is when you can one cycle the enemy team with a one-match mana start that it starts to become a problem, and when you can do it without carefully examining the board after reach move, its too much.
Same problem. Retry until the AI doesn’t get get a favorable board. Losses beyond your control, wins barely need thought. This is not in any way a meaningful difficulty increase for those that are already finding these trivial.
As much as I’d like diamonds to make their way into other aspects of the game, having an infinitely grindable dungeon as the only source would, as I’ve said in other threads, overcentralize gameplay to the point of burnout. Yes, we get a lot of “samey” options and endgame PvP, and yes, explore is nothing but a brainless grind once you have an effective team, but the fact remains that you still have a choice. You don’t get zero gold from exploring - about a quarter to a third as much would be closer to accurate. You don’t get no rewards from treasure maps, just below baseline PvP when both are tallied. You don’t get zero traitstones from PvP, you just don’t get the ones you might want right now (functionally zero as you are closer and close to finishing, though). You can get trophies and souls from arena instead of explore. PvP is the central game mode because it has the most favorable reward spread, but it is a relevant choice until the point where you are capped. Adding in even 100 shards to a repeatedlble dungeon with the way they are bottlenecked now would make it so strongly dominant that Dungeons would be seen as the only viable option… In addtion, while PvP and explore are “samey”, saying that they are literally the same thing every time would be hyperbole. Generally, you have to look at the board and be aware of the enemy team comp for at least two moves.
I also agree with everything said here. I can’t afford another daily activity hook that takes upwards of 15 mins - I’ve already pushed my guild wars battles back and will be switching to off color PvP teams probably (though I’ve been saying this to myself for a while). If dungeons were something that was weekly in the first place and I could choose to distribute my time within the week toward them, even an extra two hour activity bump basically required to move forward at all would be kinda pushing it. Dailies are a chore (literally and figuratively), and at the moment, these are not optional for maintaining a collection. And we could be getting even more daily things down the line.
A weekly “ultra-mega-boss” might be interesting. Then we can add a huge amount of difficulty (which I would again prefer to be daunting defensive stats, immunity to getting instakill, something that negates a specific gimmick, and some gimmick that must be overcome) to make it a long haul battle - looping would still work, but it would take a very long time, and spawn looping and exploder chains would be driven to the point of critical fail before that happens. I definitely don’t want to play like this all the time, but it is a nice change of pace. Restricting team comps goes a long way to at least making a choice.
I agree even more. Early gamers lost a lot of earning potential from tasks at the low end. Taking dungeons off the table as well would leave them with almost. I believe that all dungeons should be completable by midgame, especially since you can’t gem bounty unless you finish the dungeons. Long term crafting rewards for a <7 or <10 task guild that can only do 1 or 2 daily dungeons look terrible, and they already lost a ton of “forward collecting” resources they can use to build collections. I hate that pretty much 99% of the game is still “shotgunning and hope” with regard to being able to build collections (and by proxy, having access to new troops as content, essential for long term engagement). It is still, for the most part, you need to open so much to get the thing you want randomly that you end up getting so much other stuff you didn’t want at the moment with no need to chase it at a further point down the line.
An excellent idea for making their difficulty a bit more consistent between all players. Upping my daily activity requirement would be a concern if all the rewards remained the same. However, at the time being, though, even with this, a lot of them would still be kinda trivial. My low level account has only magic and attack kingdoms upgraded and can trivially complete dungeons with teams that make little use of magic or attack. Maw still works in nearly fight, as does kraken, kerberos, deathknight, trolls, and exploder chains with a durable lead (traited gorgotha). Not to mention Fizzbang. Lowering my attack and magic functionally makes the battles longer in the same way my suggestion at boosting their health would, but with a way higher than median baseline for traits that deal with stats or damage.
Ultimately, while I was hoping for a much more dynamic experience, it now boils down to that I basically feel required to do this in order to progress in the game, no alternate option. This is the same concern I raised when a “new game mode” was announced. With everything bottlenecked the way it is, I kinda need this to not take up half of my available playtime for the day when I also need to farm more than I did prepatch to mitigate lost resources and reach the same baseline. Besides, these hugely “challenging” boss fights would get really old when you realize you are fighting the same ones every week.
I agree with you, and I also disagree. There’s already a big daily commitment to this game and I just don’t want any more. More variety and length of dungeon battles is all well and good but I’d be happy to see them left as a 5 minute distraction towards creating something eventually than a massive time-sink.
I thought the soulforge was going to be a new minigame. Not just in the minigame menu, but an actual new mode (like treasure maps), where the only way to obtain those new resources was by playing that mini game.
However, it’s not a new mode/game at all… which is slightly disappointing.
Not “Make Dungeons Great Again”, but rather “Make Soulforge Fun Again”
Why not add a big bad ass community boss with ridicoulous health and attack where everyone need to attack him to kill him and you get 1 week to kill him then everyone who participate win rewards and everyone could only attack 1 time every day
