Page 1 of 1
Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Wed May 09, 2018 7:54 am
by Maladus
There are a couple transitions in the Underdark Ruins (East) area. Next to the Manor with the Crinti High Priestess there is a rope leading down into a passage with some rather nasty baddies. Immediately upon climbing down you are ambushed by a rather large pack of them. What’s worse is that if you are down long enough, another pack at the top of the rope awaits you, only this time some of your party might fail the climb check leaving only a few outside to fend for themselves.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Wed May 09, 2018 1:48 pm
by afreshstart
You can help your party members climb using a rope.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Wed May 09, 2018 2:55 pm
by Maladus
I'm not providing feedback about the climbing rope...I think it's fine as it is. However, it just never feels good to come out of a loading screen and suddenly get ambushed by 7 - 8 enemies. It means that you have to quickly start attacking with no way to plan your attack, and even in a normal transition between areas, some of your party can load into the area slower so you don't have the full strength of your group. In some cases this leads to the needless death of one of your party members since you may be in an area that you wouldn't normally go solo, and some of the more difficult encounters can easily kill you in one round of combat.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Fri May 11, 2018 7:36 am
by Xarge VI
That danger of ambush is present in every dungeon and I think it's fine and realistic as you can counter these ambushes by investing in stealth skills.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Fri May 11, 2018 10:10 am
by nobs3
(Personally I would like to see more dangerous dungeons and spots with a higher chance that parties will have to retreat; to support a culture that retreating and getting away alive is a good adventure too.)
For this specific spot: That kind of “trap” is well balanced IMO. It is more a “warning”. Because the danger, that might await you in the next room(s), is much higher.
If you survived that “welcome spot” long enough that the NPC above respawn then your party should foresee the danger and think about a tactic who climbs up first (maybe not the best climber).
I understand that this spot might cause frustration but personally I think the excitement it has granted for quite some time now ranks higher.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Mon May 14, 2018 7:03 pm
by Maladus
I am sorry but I’m going to have to flatly disagree. There are a number of factors that are out of the players control that makes enemies sitting in transitions a bad thing all around. These things include latency, which varies wildly depending on your location and internet service. What if the server crashes immediately after transition? Now there is a chance that you will load into a zone full of enemies with no wards and no guarantee that your party will be there to back you up?
Furthermore, it’s not reasonable to expect every character to invest points into stealth. Not only would it waste skill points if you are investing into cross class skills, but some characters wear heavy armor so points invested into the stealth skills would be working against a hefty penalty from the armor.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Mon May 14, 2018 10:04 pm
by susitsu
...The first "danger" you speak of is a crowd of mobs tied to dungeon far lower level than the Crinti, and precedes a pure looping area of mobs that are for grinding straight to level 30. The second should also be tied into that looping once you're strong enough to face the fishy boys below-which, if you can kill the spider boss in the Crinti, you should be able to handle getting beat down by a few of those before going "oh god we do not have the AC and hp for this, but we survived."
Furthermore, the rope with our fishy boys? Ive done many hundreds of loops to never, ever have them spawn on the rope and coming back down? You definitely know there's a boss spawn up that way.
Not only that, the fact your party members can help you up does mean and the only area lacking in lots of space to RUN AWAY IF YOU NEED TO BUDDY is the monstrosities if you decide to run for the bridge, but if you really, really need to run away from those...you could always just outrun them through the door, outrun all the spirits pretty easily, and just skip even going into aggro range of the spider boss as you run right to the portal which pops you out in the Ruins again.
If you really have to run, there's ways to make space, and I'm not even mentioning the fact that your mage should be invisible anyway.
No matter the class and issue you name-it's like saying every single transition on the server should be 100% safe, and my counter is why aren't you carrying invis pots?
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Tue May 15, 2018 12:49 pm
by Sockss
Most risk from dungeons comes with transitioning into an area with enemies that spawn on top of you - espescially if you've got a slower machine for nwn. Or if you're playing a low AC caster with a summon.
I dislike it as well and don't think this sort of artificial difficulty is a good thing.
That said the reason it hasn't been looked at is it's probably quite a lot of effort to fix - the spawn system in general doesn't seem to be very customisable, what with the high location and pack make-up variance and unreachable spawns it regularly creates.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Tue May 15, 2018 7:06 pm
by ActionReplay
Yeah the spawn system just spawns anywhere with walkable tiles and does not support regions we can exclude from the area to have spawns. I think it was looked at before not sure if much came out of it.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Thu May 17, 2018 9:55 pm
by Maladus
susitsu wrote: ↑Mon May 14, 2018 10:04 pm
...The first "danger" you speak of is a crowd of mobs tied to dungeon far lower level than the Crinti, and precedes a
pure looping area of mobs that are for grinding straight to level 30. The second should also be tied into that looping once you're strong enough to face the fishy boys below-which, if you can kill the spider boss in the Crinti, you should be able to handle getting beat down by a few of those before going "oh god we do not have the AC and hp for this, but we survived."
Furthermore, the rope with our fishy boys? Ive done many hundreds of loops to never, ever have them spawn on the rope and coming back down? You definitely know there's a boss spawn up that way.
Not only that, the fact your party members can help you up does mean and the only area lacking in lots of space to RUN AWAY IF YOU NEED TO BUDDY is the monstrosities if you decide to run for the bridge, but if you really, really need to run away from those...you could always just outrun them through the door, outrun all the spirits pretty easily, and just skip even going into aggro range of the spider boss as you run right to the portal which pops you out in the Ruins again.
If you really
have to run, there's ways to make space, and I'm not even mentioning the fact that your mage should be invisible anyway.
No matter the class and issue you name-it's like saying every single transition on the server should be 100% safe, and my counter is why aren't you carrying invis pots?
All I’m hearing is a lot of justification for bad design, but in this case if there is no way to fix it as has been explained then I will just need to be prepared.
Also, yes, in an ideal world 100% of the transitions in the server should be safe.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Fri May 18, 2018 1:08 am
by Nitro
susitsu wrote: ↑Mon May 14, 2018 10:04 pm
No matter the class and issue you name-it's like saying every single transition on the server should be 100% safe, and my counter is why aren't you carrying invis pots?
I would actually like it if every transition was safe, because an invis pot isn't going to help me when the game hiccups on a loading screen and I'm down to 50% HP getting destroyed by a spawn of mobs before I can even see my character.
Unless you're suggesting to chug an invis potion
before every transition in hostile areas, in which case that's just needlessly complicated (and silly) design to have.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Fri May 18, 2018 6:43 am
by ActionReplay
I understand this can be annoying. The spawn system is VERY old and not much has changed on it. This is however something I can bring up with the other devs and perhaps Mitheras (Who probably knows this particular code the best) can have a look at it.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Fri May 18, 2018 7:28 am
by Maladus
Honestly I believe that this may be an issue that can be suggested to Beamdog since it sounds more like an engine limitation, and could likely be fixed in a more elegant way on their end than with what someone can do by fiddling with the code to find a work-around.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Fri May 18, 2018 12:06 pm
by nobs3
I am not sure about this bad design and bug things - concerning that particular place.
Since everytime you climb down that robe (I have done it with my characters more than 50 times) you find nearly exact the same spawns in the same area.
And in my opinion it is the perfect place for them. And the difficulty is well balanced.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Sat May 19, 2018 1:34 pm
by Iceborn
ActionReplay wrote: ↑Fri May 18, 2018 6:43 am
I understand this can be annoying. The spawn system is VERY old and not much has changed on it. This is however something I can bring up with the other devs and perhaps Mitheras (Who probably knows this particular code the best) can have a look at it.
I never even considered that the spawn system by itself could be changed.
If we could have less transition spawns dropping on us, that'd be great.
Re: Underdark Ruins - Transitions
Posted: Tue May 29, 2018 4:40 pm
by NoOneOfConsequence
A small hijack to this thread, although I'm not sure what good it will do.
It's extremely frustrating to be killed while loading a transition because there are mobs spawning, attacking, and damaging my PC before I have a chance to see what's happening - much less react to it.
From the perspective of a newcomer to this place, unpreventable deaths such as these are a large turn-off to continued enjoyment.