Announce post #2895: New dungeon - Beneath: The Nightmare of Jox

Autoposter

<pre>10/28/2018 at 0:33
Razmael, the Synthesist
Everyone
New dungeon - Beneath: The Nightmare of Jox

And that's a wrap for the event! This releases our first instanced 'dungeon' where you have to fight through several bosses and normal 'trash' NPCs. Beneath: the nightmare of Jox.

Varian knocked the great Leviathan unconscious during the recent events and sealed it once more with a barrier of divine energy. Jox and the Nightmare are now one and the same: to quell one is to quell the other. Adventurers must form into groups of three (for any more than that risks disturbing Jox) to delve into the Nightmare and quell the horrors that lay within it.

The entrance to the Nightmare can be found at room 50798 and you can TOUCH BARRIER to enter. To join the instance of your group leader, you need to TOUCH BARRIER <leader> after they have gone through - similar to operating Xaanhal.

Inside the barrow, before the entrance, you can find glyphs you can also TOUCH to receive some clues to the mechanics of each of the bosses. These can be found at v49980 and v49981.

Once you have defeated the final boss, a pillar of warped flesh will appear. Everybody in your group should TOUCH the pillar to receive nightmarish momentos - a new currency for the dungeon shop that will eventually open. This is a 'virtual' currency - it has no physical item and cannot be traded but you can see how many you have on CURRENCY REPORT.

And that's about it - good luck! A help file will follow sometime soon with more information.


P.S. if you missed the event, remember you can use the GLOBALS command to review what happened. We'll be leaving the full history in there for some time, likely until the events post is done.

Penned by my hand on Kinsday, the 10th of Lanosian, in the year 476 MA.</pre>

Toz

The final blow proves too much for a massive, abhorrent monstrosity, who expires, pitifully.
A disgusting, slimy pillar of warped flesh grows out from the ground.

First! >_>

Rhyot

Hows the experience gain?? I keep getting told its rather crap comparatively speaking.

Toz

It's not for xp, it's to actually have a challenge/enjoy mechanics. You can't just run the autobasher and expect to win!

I love it, a lot. And I hate bashing.

Benedicto

Toz said:

It's not for xp, it's to actually have a challenge/enjoy mechanics. You can't just run the autobasher and expect to win!

I love it, a lot. And I hate bashing.

And the joy of getting to do stuff as a team that isn't PK. I'm definitely excited to see this develop more in the future.

Stine

Bring on the 5 man and 10 man iterations. 

Toz

25 man flex raid dreg waves when?

Zaila

Anyone who knows me (or just looks at my honours) will see how much I don't usually enjoy or care about bashing.

And this was super fun, I loved it! 

Diogen

I'm super glad you guys are enjoying it. With the risk of being flogged, I can say our hope is to bring more content like this in the future. Some parts of Beneath were pretty challenging to design, but I know that I learned a lot from the process.

As always, your feedback and criticisms are greatly appreciated moving forward so we can work to improve this and any future content.

Belgarion

I really do love this. This is exactly the sort of thing that I want to see more of coming forward. This sort of thing really brings a little bit of the combat that comes with pvp to the pve structure. Having to coordinate together and such. I don't see why, after Daimoxoth, we couldn't have a few mobs that could need certain afflictions able to be caused to them, or for certain entities/powers to be used to win against them. If you are talking 3-5 people raids, with multiclassing, you should be able to guarantee that is available, could create a desire for people to have different classes even. I had a lot more specific stuff in mind, but suddenly got tired and might outline my thoughts more later, meh

Church

Big agree on all the comments praising this addition - this is not only something fun to do, but you guys managed to leave behind something from the event that makes it feel like we're continuing to help keep the world safe through the lore of this dungeon. Fantastic work all around.

The next logical step is, of course, procedurally generated dungeons and randomized bosses!

Stine

I really enjoy Beneath. It may be my favorite content in the game currently. Please make more like this. That said, I have a few questions:

1) What is the general difficulty level supposed to be comparable to? It feels like the amount of people experimenting with and/or running the content went down significantly compared to the start of the event and the first few days thereafter. This may be expected as it was brand new and shiny, but it feels way more than normal. It's only been 15 days, but since the implementation of the speedruns and keeping records, the amount of people completing runs is 24 unique and 11 of those have only done it once.

2) Are you (@Razmael/@Diogen) still watching the progress of people running the content and considering further changes? Are you happy with the way it has gone so far?

Thanks in advance! Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask, but I am genuinely curious about the results thus far!

Diogen

1) The mechanics are the main source of difficulty, so I'm not sure it can be compared to much of anything. When we were testing, we used level 100 characters without any artifacts or special outside buffs like chocolates/blessings; so that's what it was initially balanced around. I'm not too surprised that activity went down; I think a large part of this may be incentive-based. It is probably undesirable for an average player to complete challenging content more than once for a reward they aren't particularly interested in. We might add some new rewards to encourage more participation.

2) Yes, we are still watching. That 8min 42second speedrun surprised me greatly. I was anticipating <20mins at peak performance, but never considered <10mins as a possibility.

I am considering further changes. Right now, I'd say I'm the least satisfied with the colossus and fragment fights. The fragments were never meant to be facetanked 3v3 in the same room, so I might adjust it so that it's more difficult or impossible to do so with new mechanics. The colossus on the other hand only has one core mechanic, which can be brutal to unprepared or underbuffed characters, and a breeze otherwise.

Overall we're very happy with the reception so far.

This all said, we are looking into new content and I'd personally rather see more dungeons sooner over intensive redesigns of existing content. Thanks for the questions and I'm glad you're enjoying it.

Rhyot

Just ran the dungeon solo (up to the monstrosity) and I have to say, it was rather fun. A lot more interesting than just mindnumbing bashing. That said, my only bah humbug is the requirement of a group... but that's more of a personal problem as I roleplay a character who refuses to hunt with anyone except one person.

Objectively speaking though, 11/10 on the dungeon. Looking forward to more dungeon content being mad.

Toz

I soloed it all the way through!

Toz

1) I'd like the fragment fight to be looked at again, maybe. Trying to split the three of them up proves...difficult? Impossible? You wind up running all over the place chasing your tail, and facetanking them 3v3 is still the 'best' strategy to do, to ensure they all die at about the same time. Without spoiling (or trying not to) the trick, they don't listen for long and have a habit of running off/running back over and over.

2) Can the new colossus mechanic have some kind of line indicating it's doing it? Walking back in is a huge risk right now because it might be doing it AGAIN, and then you just get deleted. Alternatively, more instance-wide lines?

3) Xaanhal/Beneath share an instance timer. Can this get added to COOLDOWNS or something, so you can tell before you assemble a whole group and then find out one person was a derp and bashed Xaanhal like 45 minutes ago not naming names @Arbre

Arbre

;;

Diogen

@Toz

1) I looked into it. Fragments were indeed breaking off a bit more than I intended. I significantly reduced the checks on how often they'll run away. Note that there will always be at least one guaranteed flee.

2) I added an area message when the colossus begins to channel its instakill.

"The sound of grinding stone accompanies a feeling of cold tension within the nightmare." for your triggers.

3) We'll look into it.

Toz

Diogen said:

@Toz

1) I looked into it. Fragments were indeed breaking off a bit more than I intended. I significantly reduced the checks on how often they'll run away. Note that there will always be at least one guaranteed flee.

2) I added an area message when the colossus begins to channel its instakill.

"The sound of grinding stone accompanies a feeling of cold tension within the nightmare." for your triggers.

3) We'll look into it.

Thank you for these changes. I just went through again and it was mega smooth, stuff made sense and worked well.