The Honour Quests are ok for those that are into puzzle solving but what about those that just want to hunt and bash mobs?

I think introducing dungeons in the game would open up more variety in what to do, the rewards will be commodities/gold/power to the org's nexus/an honour line/karma/a fully imbued item/huge amount of experience and what not.

To access to the dungeon, the players would start a chain of quest right to the point of entering the dungeon itself. To make things interesting, the dungeon maze would be randomly generated whenever it resets, same as the Dairuchi Honour Quest in guiding the tamed rockeaters.

The difficulty of the dungeon will be the same level as Astral so no one could solo it.

The mobs would be numerous as well so groups are a must, dungeons will also require a bit of puzzle solving to continue deeper.

Once the dungeon is finished, everyone will return to the entrance with the dungeon sealed and won't be accessed for 1 Lusternian year.

So what do you think? A good idea or no? Any idea that needs revising?

One dungeon that had to be opened by a quest, involved high-level bashing, and changed its layout every time the first quest was done sounds like a good idea; it'd have to be worked into the lore somewhere (maybe somewhere in the Undervault?) If you're talking about instancing, though, I think that's very unlikely.

Muud sounds pretty close to this concept; the only thing it doesn't really have is a changing layout. It would be pretty annoying if it did.

Eh. The way Lusternia makes you need a group is either supermob scaling or requiring a ridiculous crit rate and hoping you don't get picked by too many mobs at once and instagibbed. It just doesn't seem like IRE is set up for a really satisfying PvE experience of that kind.

Instanced would have worked well if everyone wants a go but since this is persistent, I don't know how the coders would get it to work in a MUD game, it'll be hats off if they manage to pull that one.

Yeah, I was also thinking somewhere deep in the Undervault and defeat an avatar of Kethuru or something, depends how Estarra write down the Dungeon Lore.

EDIT: Stupid internet

That exists? At all?

I enjoy raiding in WoW, mostly. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot more entertaining than Lusternia's. Lusternia makes things harder by increasing the damage or making the afflictions more annoying, but you still just blast it until it dies. There is no way to work as a group. We don't have tanks or healers, we don't have mechanics where you have to move, we don't have a way to step up the burn as a tradeoff for resource management. We shoot things, they die. Sometimes they do annoying afflictions.

I don't think many people come to IRE games because of the deep and engaging player vs monster experience. Our quests are awesome and beat the hell out of anything else I've seen. Our politics and PvP are top notch. But the PvE outside of quests is horrible, for the most part, mostly as a simple limitation of how the game works.

Agreed.

Plus, only being able to do this dungeon once an IC year? That's a pretty long time, and I doubt they'd consider it worth all the effort if it's only going to be done that often.

First off, a graphical game like WoW and a text based game like Lusternia is vastly differently. Where a graphical game requires you to react to events based on either sound or graphical cue or even both, all Lusternia have is text.

And given the options, a textual event could force you to:
1. Move a fixed direction.
2. Do a specific emote.
3. Kill a specific mob.
4. Die. (Really?)

And, given the limited way where the event could be presented (Note: Text only), everything can be learnt and triggered in a single day. It would simply be too much work for something so easily circumvented.

I thought I remembered Jeremy Saunders talking about instanced dungeons in one of his ustreams.

Also, I think Tears of Polaris is going to let you use other abilities, not just damaging ones, against mobs. If it ends up happening there and working, it could happen here.

Granted, IRE games are a different breed of MUD's altogether: they excel within the scope of player-based economics, politics, and various systems of conflict. For all that it's worth, I still crave the typical "dungeon crawl" in either the Rogue-style or mini-boss/boss presentation; I always loved the Majormud its approach to the "group" dungeon quest.

How about a "deep abyss" area added to the UV (much deeper and more exotic than the illithoid prison) for this purpose. Rather than give a temporary bonus only visible through the defense line, I would love to have an "+1 item of thwacking" that I could wield, wear, and otherwise showoff. This could be more like a class-based item equiv of the org quest, or resent upon QQ.

Something like this could satisfy the occasional desire to dungeon crawling while staying within a Lusternia framework.

Many of the extra features that ToP will have are possible because it was built from the ground up to include them.

As far as dungeons go though, it seems like there are a few ways that you could use mob progs to make the boss fight more than just sit around and blast away. Though crits can create issues, if it's possible to get mobs to react to low health and do something before they are actually slain (sure you could do it when they are actually slain but the slain line would be icky) then stages could be created that can be worked through. Such as Kethuru stopping his noming to shout "IMMA CHARGIN MAH LAZER" before killing everyone still standing in the room or the like.


Plus adding events in along the way can improve things. Things that happen as you're exploring that you react to rather than a series of tasks that you perform.
Once implemented such zones could see expansion through smaller building projects. Either simply adding more rooms with their own little events if the dungeon layout was constant or by adding more sections if the zones could be randomly generated from sections rather than singular rooms.

Both would actually be rather interesting though I could personally see the latter being a plane or a bubble... in astral space perhaps.

Having mobs able to do more stuff than just damage and afflictions could also be interesting, such as timed instas, mana, ego or affliction based instas, team attacks, the whole deal.

I really don't think players would want to suddenly have polyhedrons not only assisting as-is, but pulling off timequakes. Or Supernals using Judgment.

Or Trueheal.

Maybe I am wrong in that, but I think if PvE was akin to combat, people would find bashing impossibly hard without a full-fledged combat system (and, as a result, become hugely uninteresting to 80% of players). Would people really enjoy aetherbashing if the denizens started behaving like ships?

Make it for some and scale experience to match. Like a "boss battle" sort of thing.

My interpretation was that there would only be a few of these intelligent mobs, and you could only get to them if you were actually looking for them (i.e. doing the dungeon). I'd be totally keen on an area of aetherspace with pirates or other beasts that acted more like ships, sure. Just so long as we only encounter them when we go hunting for them.

I always thought a reverse scenario would be fun.

For example, what if the goal wasn't to kill as many denizens as possible, but instead to just survive as long as possible before being bashed yourself.

Let's look at Night of the Living Dead as an example. Take 10 groups of 30 fairly difficult mobs and force each group to move in unison towards a central area, with the intent of entering it. Give players the means to fortify that area and prevent or slow the movement of those mob groups. For every movement that every mob group makes outside of the defended central area, the player gains experience relative to the number of rooms they have fortified. So, you basically gain experience just for existing in this zone. Now, over time, increase the difficulty of surviving in the zone; that is, reduce the means available to the player to fortify their area, or increase the area they must defend, or increase the power/number of the mobs chasing after them.

What you end up with is bashing without bashing; a sort of survival-horror instance that gives a break from "point weapon at denizen" and shifts the focus to doing other things - maybe not more interesting things, I suppose, but different things that we're not yet bored with.

I dunno, this just seems like it's going to end up being along the lines of aetherhunting but dangerous, you have a group standing there blasting away with the "slivvener/s" in this situation being the person who is actively trying to manage the fortifications.

Though I had wondered about smaller scale survival encounters in a dungeon zone where waves of enemies could spawn, sure it's not changing pve but this is battling against mooks so it doesn't really need to as the purpose of the encounter is more to introduce an element of danger to the dungeoneering or as a prelude to an actual boss fight.

Also the idea of having experience awarded simply for being in the zone seems unlikely as it could be gamed. (Chuck a newbie at the heart of the defenses seems possible).

If it was a whole area of mobs teaming you with huge afflictions and instas, no, of course not. If it was single mobs that sometimes cast Chasm and you had to move, it would be interesting. There's already mobs where having a system is really handy (anything that spams afflictions or afflicts with multiple afflictions at once) but are doable without. You don't have to give them a crazy offense, just have them maybe do something more interesting now and again. If you could afflict them with some subset of afflictions, you could do things like a huge damage spell you had to interrupt by proning them somehow (or moving before it cast), or an instakill you could interrupt. Or even just something that was really nasty, but telegraphed before hand so you could shield through it. Maybe something that calls for help, and if you don't kill it soon enough, you get mobbed. The key, though, is making it add to the fun and not the annoyance. If you have things call for help, make them easily killable, for example. That way you have to pay attention and focus them down first, but don't have to beat your head against a wall to do it, like with something like life-drain mobs that are simply not fun.

Also, even if it was uninteresting to 80% of the playerbase, that doesn't mean it wouldn't get used, if it was worth it. You just have to watch about making it a huge disparity between people who can do it and people who can't. I mean, there are plenty of honours quests that only 20% of the players will probably ever do, but you keep adding more because they're really fun for those who like to do them.