delete the east

[Razakai]

Note that Shibari is reworking some caster stuff. Better egos and prodigies, changing melee scaling so it doesn't invalidate spells, stuff like that. And the junk problem would be solved a bit by shortening the East, as not having 4 floors of vaults and trash mobs would mean much less items to comb through.

Some random ideas for what new-prides could be. Like someone said earlier, seeing as your character is near-complete at this point, the endgame here should be challenging, unique and interesting stuff that lets you show off your character's power rather than slogging through 17 floors of trash mobs like you've been doing all game.

Grushnak
Let's go all in on the orc military theme. Floor 1 could be 'outside' the pride - a wide open field with a fortification leading inside. Minimal LoS blockers outside of a few trees, and the 'walls' would have plenty of orc archers that would be out of LoS of you, but still capable of pelting you with arrows. Maybe even orcish catapults that'd do time-delayed projectile attacks so you can't just hide behind a tree and rest. Force the player to go through a narrow chokepoint with orc melee blocking it with archers to the side etc. Maybe even a destructible gate to slow you down.
Floor 2 could be a small floor like the existing 'guard room', as it's quite challenging having a bunch of elites and randbosses in a small area. Maybe expand it a little, but it fits the theme and doesn't take too long. Could stick a few more rooms in that lock you inside each time, make it a nasty gauntlet of close range melee mobs led by orc rares.
Floor 3 can be the boss. Grushnak is kinda dull, he's just a giant bag of life/armor that hits hard. Seeing as the theme is military, this could be a 'council' style boss fight that represents the various flavours of Grushnak Orcs - Grushnak himself as Bulwark, a Berserker boss, an Archer boss and a Rogue boss. Killing one of them would enrage the others, healing them and giving them talents themed around the fallen boss.

Gorbat
Rather than buildings, seeing as this is the dragon/wilder pride let's have it take place outside. One floor, just a giant mountain range style place like Daikara, but with narrow bridges acting as guarded chokepoints. Stuff like dragon nests as mini-vaults, the eggs would drop loot but summon randboss guardian dragons. Could put them around the area as well as pseudo-traps, make sure you dont destroy em with incidental AoE or you'll trigger angry dragons. Can do a variation on the thunderstorm event here, where periodically you might get targeted by flying dragons for flyby breath attacks if you don't keep moving, or have them land. Having the prides force people to keep moving to some degree varies the gameplay, as the best way of playing in 99% of situations is to rest to full after every single mob and play ultra-cautiously.
The boss floor is basically Rend from Blackrock Spire. It'd take place in a dragon training arena/feeding pit, at first you'd just have waves of hatchlings, but it'd ramp up over time to drakes and wyrms of all sorts of elements. Plus orc dragontamers, support orcs that'd hang around at the back, not attacking but heavily buffing and healing dragons and applying nasty elemental resist debuffs on you. Gorbat is supposed to be a super wyrmic, so have him appear riding a multihued dragon as a single unit with a mix of wyrmic and dragon attacks, dropping him to 50% would split them into wyrmic+dragon with a full set of talents and life. Pretty nasty encounter.

Vor
This could be several floors, but each of them would be quite small. Each would get a random elemental theme which'd influence the mobs and unique effects, arcane/fire/water/air/earth. E.g. the fire theme would spawn faeros and pyromancers, shifting high-damage lava pools and other such hazards. Probably expand the Vor npc set as well with geomancers/tempests/arcanists.
Vor himself could have an expanded skillset with all 5 archmage elements. At life % intervals, he'd become immune and immobile, summon an elemental crystal that'd be somewhere annoying to reach in the area and force you to go hunt it down and destroy it. While he'd be immobile, he'd be able to do stuff like delayed AoEs, damage fields, debuffs, summoning elementals etc based on the crystal. As his life drops, he'd summon more and more, finally summoning all 5 crystals right before death.

Rakshor
One big level that's a little like crystal forest/sludgenest. You'd be constantly harassed by endlessly spawning waves of undead, seeing as the entire level is one giant blob of bones and raw materials after all. A number of orc necromancers would be around the level, and you'd need to kill them to stop the spawning and drop the shield blocking the exit. Each one would be weak, but on death spawns a nasty undead boss with a high chance of being one of the unique bosses for Rakshor like titan etc. Each necromancer killed would up the quality of the undead, so at first it'd be ghouls and stuff and by the end you'd have to move fast to avoid horrors and liches.
Rakshor himself is supposed to be frail but smart, so rather than engaging you in a straight fight you'd have to chase him as he throws up bone walls and summoned undead, forcing you to stop to destroy them to clear the path. Meanwhile the exit you came in from would have a creeping wave of blight following you that'll stack up and kill you if you don't move fast enough. Eventually you'll reach him and he'll pretty much be a slightly harder necromancer/corruptor as he is currently, the real 'boss' would be getting through the swarms of undead elites before the blight gets you.

[RandomKesaranPasaran]

Bring back Breeding Pits. It's shame that such a clever and unique idea was removed because the vocal minority of players don't like it.

I too associate clever and unique with a bad, boring zone with bad, boring enemies and a bad, boring boss that people only did because it was a bandaid to the orc patrol problem (and because it was free loot/exp for even bad players). Nothing of actual value was lost as a result of their passing, and bringing them back won't actually make the East more interesting.

You should read the lore. It has value and should be in the game.

I did read the lore, actually.

It's beyond the scope of the discussion, so I'll simply say that I disagree and move on.

Cool pride stuff

At a glance, Grushnak/Gorbat sound fine for the most part, Vor I'm neutral on, Rakshor... well it's undoubtedly distinct from the others but I dunno how much I like the boss fight concept, as it reads like Charred Scar 2.0.

[Micbran]

Grushnak and Gorbat sound a lot like what I was thinking, though you seem to be taking more of the pre-determined map route (which is fine since it has the potential to be really interesting if done right). Not a fan of the elemental resist debuffs but I guess as long as they're capped at like 20% they won't be too bad, I'm just worried about there being so many status effects that removing one literally does nothing.

Can do a variation on the thunderstorm event here...

Any mention of the thunderstorm event triggers me, so no.

I'm all for making the prides bosses more interesting...

Vor himself could have an expanded skillset with all 5 archmage elements. At life % intervals, he'd become immune and immobile, summon an elemental crystal that'd be somewhere annoying to reach in the area and force you to go hunt it down and destroy it. While he'd be immobile, he'd be able to do stuff like delayed AoEs, damage fields, debuffs, summoning elementals etc based on the crystal. As his life drops, he'd summon more and more, finally summoning all 5 crystals right before death.

but this just sounds annoying and unfun. Maybe just make the crystals spawn at life intervals and give Vor some pretty decent bonuses rather than straight up making him unkillable. That way, the player is still incentivized to kill the crystals and will probably want to, but if possible they can burst down the boss.

Rak'Shor does sound interesting (as long as it isn't charred scar 2.0), especially the hunting the necromancers part but I feel like there's going to be an overload of popcorn mobs for that zone. Maybe some way for the little dudes to all combine into a big flesh mass or something so that the player actually feels rewarded for having good AoE damage and they aren't just rewarded with "spending less time in the middle of a bunch of insignificant undead," at least for the start until you kill most the necromancers. Then I guess how difficult it is just depends on what talents they have (since if they have bane of confusion its going to be - annoying) and how fast they spawn for the difficulty.

But overall, sounds great, I knew you had a google doc (or at least a bunch of ideas) hiding somewhere!

[Razakai]

You could probably do semi-random maps in some cases - like for Grushnak the fortification can be fixed, but the outskirts and the bit inside can be randomized a bit.

Yeah new-Rakshor is a bit Charred Scar-ish, but we don't have that many things like it in the game at the moment that really encourage gotta go fast. It'd be a bit different in that at set points you'd have to spend time destroying a few undead to bring down a bone wall. So rather than just blitzing through with a movement and ignoring everything like CS, it'd be a series of minibosses with a soft time limit (the creeping blight wouldn't be instakill, but it'd stack slowly you can't indefinitely heal through it). Can spice it up a bit further with necrotic 'traps' and other hazards as you go.

Speaking of Gorbat, the mountain idea prob needs some sort of unique twist to it, otherwise you've just got a pretty standard zone with avoidable egg 'traps' vs the more unique other ones. For the boss fight, the idea I was thinking of was that the tamer adds would do a short duration debuff plus their buffs, so they'd act as a priority target to focus down, rather than another debuff to spam and cleanse.

For Vor, the boss idea is that the immune phase would also kinda be a breathing room - while channeling he wouldn't actually attack you directly, it'd be stuff like him spawning fire fields under you, aether breaches, slow moving lightning balls rather than Archmage+Unstoppable. But yeah having him just get buffed and placing a crystal near-ish you would also work, just make them relatively easy to destroy and encourage you in a 'softer' manner by supercharging his talents while it's active. vs the first version, where they'd be a bit more awkward/tanky and you'd have to run to them while navigating elemental bullet hell.

Rakshor has the start of a good idea for that with their unique undead horrors, so can tweak those to match the zone design rather than being forced to use regular undead. It probably make sense to primarily use horrors rather than random stuff, both for gameplay and theme reasons.

[Micbran]

Just some random things I missed from last post and some things that the ghost of the forums brought up in no particular order:

Gorbat is supposed to be a super wyrmic, so have him appear riding a multihued dragon as a single unit with a mix of wyrmic and dragon attacks

1.) i thought gorbat was a summoner since wyrmic rares/randbosses are... quite weak.
2.) aren't wyrmic and dragon attacks the same thing?

For the Grushnak, I hope there's no randbosses on the first floor, I'd rather not be stuck in a forcibly bad setup like that AND have to fight a randboss. Or three. Then you can have a bunch of barracks rooms on the second floor with however many randbosses you want. The arena fight sounds like it would be also quite rough if its just a flat circle with no way to break LoS on some of the enemies because this "Archer boss" sounds worse than archer rares.

back to Gorbat again, the flyby dragon sounds utterly pointless since all you have to do is move every so often to rest or just use stuff like regen infusions to heal up and wait for other resources to come back up. Mostly what I'm getting at is that it sounds like a pointless nuisance (same with Grushnak Catapults but those are only outside the fort so it shouldn't be too bad).

Hopefully the Vor floors are small (since there's 5 of them), maybe slightly larger than the current Grushnak Barracks?

As for Rakshor, the more I look at it the more I hate it, its like a worse charred scar. Also the undead races will have a tough time with them (not that anybody cares about them). Hell, Undead would have a tough time with your current iteration of Vor as well since no movement infusion.

I'll probably brainstorm so other iteration of Rak'Shor later, since I dislike yours so much.

[Jarinex]

Perhaps the blight could not effect the undead races? That might help perhaps.

Overall I like the ideas you have presented Razakai. With tuning and balance, I'm sure it would make the east much more interesting.

[anonymous000]

Bump this old thread as I am curious to know what other people think of the east in 1.6. A lot of observations and suggestions in this thread are made especially true in 1.6.

I heard enemies are made denser in the prides. I don't find it so but the enemies in the prides now have much higher HP, resistance and armour. Together with the AI change (which I don't consider as a bad thing) I find the prides are effectively made denser because they are now much more difficult to be killed.

I just tried to clear the Vor pride with a solipsist in Nightmare, and it was a terrible slog. I don't have full stun resistance and I find I am frozen for like 7 turns more often than not, because it now takes quite a while to kill multiple cyromancers scattered around different spots (and it seems the cyromancers are casting Ice Storm more often now? But maybe it is because they are stronger than before due to the new level scaling, and that there are more of them).

Level 3 took forever to clear, and now I know why level 3 took so long to clear, it is because Vor had been keeping Invisibility on and casting stuff all along, and I was not even aware of it. It was only until there are 1-2 orc mages left then I start to realize Vor had been tagging all along. At the end I just ran away because I could not even to locate where he is (his frequent teleporting does not help)

I think it is not just me who finds enemies scaling a huge issue in 1.6. I like every other changes in 1.6, but this scaling change kills it for me, and this is especially worse in the east.

[RandomKesaranPasaran]

Enemy density in the prides seems to be about the same as it always was and I haven't noticed -that- much of a durability increase (although admittedly I haven't paid close attention, particularly where the higher difficulties are concerned). However the point about Vor Pride being made more obnoxious now is one I completely agree with since you can get into situations where something like a dozen or so mages teledrop on you (assuming they don't teleport -you- into some hellworld mob) and will gleefully chainstun/freeze you with Burning Shock/Freeze/Ice Storm/Biting Gale runes which is ridiculous, my experience on doing Nightmare with an Oozemancer was less obnoxious than your Solipsist's but it still felt like a monkey on a windshield in that while it wasn't going to kill me I couldn't see anything except the monkey and it left me wondering why anyone thought full stun resist/Spine of the World needed to be even more overcentralizing. And yes, I realize that you can get full stun resist quite easily now, which just makes it a gear tax instead.

Someone will probably tell me I'm overreacting to this and maybe I am. But honestly getting covering in a million status effects by generic mobs is one of the lamest things about ToME's lategame and Vor Pride has jumped to worst offender in my opinion.

[GlassGo]

OK, I'll post it here too, since it looks like better topic filled with delicious ideas (from whixh I very much liked Razakai's idea about pride where you don't have time to rest fully, since sometimes it feels like a cheat - you burn all of your resurces in couple of turns, and then rest thousands of turns so you can demolish the next group of enemies who just mindlessly waiting for you).

When I'm before arraving at Far East I feel my desire to play game suddenly dissapears.
I often drop character there at 42 lvl, even before going to Reknor.
And if I gathered will and cleansed all ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥t orc prides from which only Grushak is difficult and thus interesting (and the rest are absolutely identical and different tiles and enemy types doesn't save the day), I then often lose my willingness to play before High Peak because it's not difficult - I rarely lose characters there, but its enormous and incredibly boring (at least it was like that on Nightmare, and I got enough of High Peak there so I rarely even try it on Insane).

What I have in mind for long time, it's a suggestion to you Dark God - make some kind of Plot Elevator at the first floor of High Peak, that could bring you right to the Duo Mages in final fight or at the last floor of High Peak. Better so make a quest in order to activate it.
Make a strong enemy boss or something like that so it won't come for free and will require EFFORTS from player to skip Most Boring Part Of The Overall Good Game - I mean High Peak.

Thus player will have a choice - to grind if he desire it, or to skip if he very much desire it.

Cons - it doesn't fix everything, and looks like temporary solution.
Pros - it does looks like Fix That Should Fix Every Bad Thing won't arrive anytime soon, so my solution doesn't take too much effort to implement it, except maybe lore part. Make some hard boss on the way to 10 floor or Mage&Mage - something akin to Hipostasis of Entropy. Or it can be ACTUAL Hipostasis of Entropy itself lol - this thing looking for energy, so it can do with it its nasty entropy business, so it probably looked for energy sources and noticed Mage&Mage doing their business, and like got a portal there or at least some sort of window to get close look on them.
Phew!

[Micbran]

all this did is make me realize i hate reknor more

thanks for bumping this i guess. 1.6 vor pride was mankind's largest mistake.

[darkgod]

The 4 prides are heavily reworked for 1.6.1. Smaller levels, different layouts for each, some unique features in each, vaults are in sublevels to help with lag,...