The Problem With The East

[raderak]

It's too damn easy. That's it. Sure High Peak can be dangerous but after the Vor Armory it's smooth sailing until then. You can still die of course but the difficulty drops off drastically at that point in the game. So in a nutshell what this thread is about is advocating for buffing the East, but I shall also include my glorious suggestions.

Just to clear this up really quickly, I know adding new content takes time and am simply offering suggestions. This will be free of any anti-Yeek rhetoric (possibly free of rat lich lore pls)

The problem with the East is that there simply isn't enough stuff to murder... er explore. A lot of places have one or two floors only. And there aren't a ton of locations. At least it feels that way in comparison to the West. Adding more floors would both lengthen the East and increase the difficulty by giving people more chances to screw themselves. Adding new locations is the obvious suggestion but that probably takes a lot more work (not including lore and shtuff).

Another possibility is giving the bosses of all zones some love. The boss (orc guy) in Vor Armory could summon orcs, or have an aura that strengthens the orcs around him. Briagh the sandjoke could be made to be at least possibly threatening. I'm not sure if it's just me but that worm was always really easy and never made me feel threatened or even insecure. Possibly make him summon Worms that Walk or have some spawn naturally in his lair. (Maybe give some mobs in the east the ability to throw boulders?) The orc prides are not bad but honestly aren't as diverse as I personally wanted. The ones without the slime pit are pretty similar other than the enemies within. Not because they all aesthetically look identical but other than the enemies nothing separates them. Having prisoners in the necromancer pride would certainly separate it from the others. For the dragon pride there could be poop everywhere because those things must poop a lot. I mean honestly, how do they clean that up? There must an entire legion of orc janitors.

EDIT: Also you could just bump the scaling for all the mobs in the east

[ZyZ]

For the dragon pride there could be poop everywhere because those things must poop a lot. I mean honestly, how do they clean that up? There must an entire legion of orc janitors.

For me it is rather obvious that dragons poop in designated places and then all this s... is vaporized by dragon's fire breath

[raderak]

For the dragon pride there could be poop everywhere because those things must poop a lot. I mean honestly, how do they clean that up? There must an entire legion of orc janitors.

For me it is rather obvious that dragons poop in designated places and then all this s... is vaporized by dragon's fire breath

The smell that would produce could probably be classified as Eyal's first attempt at chemical warfare.

[Chopkinsca]

I have yet to make it very far into teh East (the rare times I make it there.) Therfore, I can't really comment on it. I'll be back here when I'm a pro at the game

[Davion Fuxa]

I'm not sure I entirely agree on it being too easy - Vor's Armory and Briagh's Lair are necessary for a return trip to Maj'Eyal; we don't want them to be too hard so players can get back. I'm not necessarily against making Briagh or his zone harder but it should still be easier compared to the other dungeons.

In regards to the Orc Bosses, I'm not sure they are necessarily too weak; moreso that the other enemies in the zone aren't really all that strong. I'd be fine with mostly leaving the bosses alone and just making the instances more interesting to explore and more dangerous to battle against.

As for more zones - that would likely be nice. You don't get a lot of zones with the Embers of Rage campaign outside of those directly involved with the campaigns plot; making Var'Eyal an all around very dull continent.

[Micbran]

Imo just remove braigh. The east is enough of a slog. Prides need one less floor on each one with increased chance for vaults and HP needs to be less damn long. Like 7 floors. Does anyone seriously fight the stair guardians outside of normal mode?

[anonymous000]

I am not at all sure about whether the problem with the east are about the level of difficulty / about the zones themselves. As I see it the main problem about the east is, once you get to the east, character growth becomes relatively stagnant, and this takes most of the fun out of the game. This was worse in the old versions where Prodigies does not exist.

I have toyed with this idea: Right now we have a number of underused prodigies. The thing we want to do with the underused prodigies may not be to buff them (which could be possible), but to move them to a new mechanism (let say Specials) where you can take one Specials every 5 levels beyond 30, meaning you would have 5 Specials at level 50. In terms of actual execution, it does not necessarily mean we want to move some prodigies to Specials, we can just make things up to fill the Specials. This opens up a lot of build choices while making the late game less of a chore.

[ster]

so you want the east to be impossible, as well as daikara and anywhere with rats raterak?


briagh/vor:A are fine, they're extremely difficult (vor:A is so on any mode as orc casters are one of the few things that don't care much about difficulty) but also short enough not to be offensive. ardhungol is gonna get revamped one day for the spider campaign and is usually worth doing since the drop is good. flooded cave is worth doing but i'm burned out at that point, shadow crypt is suicidal.


prides+eruan are the worst thing about the east as they are much easier than the content before it, due to the spike in player power from having a 2nd prodigy and merchant randarts. eruan in particular has literally nothing that can threaten an endgame player as even the randbosses it makes are pathetic; maybe the horror infestation from EoR could come earlier?

anyway, prides take too long and are easy. i don't have any great ideas other than to cut each of them down by a floor or so or to make the lobbies actually threatening (grushnak being the exception) since they currently only have 1 randunique and a bunch of trash mobs which feels pretty weak for endgame stuff.

oh and chop some floors off high peak too

[Dopaminka]

What Micbran, ster and Dfuxa said, Briagh isn't the problem (and for some classes he's tricky enough), the length vs challenge in Prides is.

[dadito]

-2 floors to high peak
-2 floors to dreadfell

-1 floor to prides (or make something similar to grushnak pride)
-1 floor to reknor
-1 floor to alt maze
-1 floor to sandworm

Anything "optional", leave as is

Of course, adjust xp/loot/challenge levels accordingly

[ster]

-2 floors to high peak
-2 floors to dreadfell

-1 floor to prides (or make something similar to grushnak pride)
-1 floor to reknor
-1 floor to alt maze
-1 floor to sandworm

Anything "optional", leave as is

Of course, adjust xp/loot/challenge levels accordingly

This but cut the 2nd floor of temple of creation and 1 from ardhungol too, currently they're "soft-optional" because spydric rod and naloren trident are too good to pass up on

[Sheila]

-2 floors to high peak
-2 floors to dreadfell

-1 floor to prides (or make something similar to grushnak pride)
-1 floor to reknor
-1 floor to alt maze
-1 floor to sandworm

Anything "optional", leave as is

Of course, adjust xp/loot/challenge levels accordingly

Don't quite agreee on alt maze and sandworm but I guess they're rather long, otherwise heavily agree on the level cutting.
Keep in mind escorts in dreadfell and reknor though.