A suggestion about difficulty

[Invoker]

Its probably best to have solo areas, duo areas, and party areas, obviously with party areas providing greater rewards, but in quantity rather than quality.

Trying to balance only for party play just creates a gigantic arms race as players become obligated to cheese the game to make it playable whenever a suitable team can't be found for whatever reason, which given the nature of NWN going to be quite common. Designing every dungeon around the assumption that everyone is going to have a group at all times kind of undermines one of NWN's greatest advantages over tabletop; being able to play it when you can't get a group together. And realistically most people will party when they have opportunity to do so. There really is no reason to try stop people from soloing especially with a small community that spans a lot of different time zones.

But solo oriented dungeons produce the effect of all the mobs getting killed before you can even get to them and people asking "why I am I even here when the tank with the meta build can just mop up?", which makes them utterly unsuitable for party play, which will always be preferred when the opportunity presents itself. Which is why I advocate for making solo and party designated areas. It accommodates both needs well and makes it easier to balance when only one party size is needed to be balanced around per location. As for duo areas, it makes sense to have some especially in high epics since duos are probably the most common team type for obvious reasons.

That said, swarms do make soloing hard because of the sheer numbers of 20s rolled, especially for melee builds which are the best PVE builds right now anyway.

As for rewards like loot and XP its probably better to make the quantity the difference between party and solo areas so as to keep solo locations worth doing when there are no teams to join and to not disadvantage players who can't play at the best hours.

This is an interesting take.

Indulge me in a quick test, if you please, I want to see how much your perception differs from mine.

Let's take a few epic areas, Surface and UD:

- Frost Keep in the Cloudpeaks
- Graypeaks
- Oghrann Ruins Interior
- Forgotten City Part I & II
- Pirate Island
- Corm Orp Friendly Orcs
- The Vault of the Dead

Which ones of these would you consider "solo areas", and which ones "party areas"?

And, on the "melee builds best PVE builds" part...which melee builds do you have in mind? In my opinion, there are a wide variety of builds that work wonders at the moment, be it melee with magic, melee with consumables, melee with magic and consumables, archers, non-melee casters...Maybe I can come up with some ideas you might find interesting, if you want something different.

[Riddance]

From my experience on those locations, I'd say...

Frost Keep in the Cloudpeaks

That can be solo'able by epic characters

- Graypeaks
- Oghrann Ruins Interior
- Forgotten City Part I & II
- Pirate Island
- Corm Orp Friendly Orcs
- The Vault of the Dead

And those one definetly need a good party with dedicated tank and healer + 2-3 really good damage dealers to make life easier for first two

[Invoker]

From my experience on those locations, I'd say...

Frost Keep in the Cloudpeaks

That can be solo'able by epic characters

- Graypeaks
- Oghrann Ruins Interior
- Forgotten City Part I & II
- Pirate Island
- Corm Orp Friendly Orcs
- The Vault of the Dead

And those one definetly need a good party with dedicated tank and healer + 2-3 really good damage dealers to make life easier for first two

I see.

While the Forgotten City is a bit character-dependant for soloing, and the Pirate Island and Corm Orp Orcs are very long dungeons that love a party, I have to say...I am surprised to see the Oghrann, Graypeaks and Vault classified as such, because I recently soloed them (even though Graypeaks are a bit weird in that, since there can always be the 6x consecutive 20 rolls from the ninja triple Spear giant dealing 150 dmg/crit that can cause trouble...).

Which character do you play?

[Riddance]

Graypeaks and Vault classified as such

All I can say is that none of my characters are power builds. The only way Nicho can, in theory, solo Graypeaks is by never breaking stealth - and I know for good that his DPS will not be good enough to survive bosses of the location

Landar, also in theory, can solo Vault of the Dead, but only if Tymora smiles at him and give all undead there nat1s on saves vs disrupting mace. Otherwise it will be a very tough battle and he will run out of spells somewhere near mid of it

As for Ogharn Ruins and Forgotten City - never tried them, but from what I know they are hard asf, so was making my assumption from there

But of course there will be guys with builds that rock 250+ dmg per attack with no consumables to use, so of couse they can solo entire server if wanted to, so it's a bit of question whether such builds should be even considered in balancing questions. It's like... we are trying to tweak the gun range for guys with pistols and ARs, do we need to even think about guys who bring nuke to it?

[Invoker]

Graypeaks and Vault classified as such

All I can say is that none of my characters are power builds. The only way Nicho can, in theory, solo Graypeaks is by never breaking stealth - and I know for good that his DPS will not be good enough to survive bosses of the location

Landar, also in theory, can solo Vault of the Dead, but only if Tymora smiles at him and give all undead there nat1s on saves vs disrupting mace. Otherwise it will be a very tough battle and he will run out of spells somewhere near mid of it

As for Ogharn Ruins and Forgotten City - never tried them, but from what I know they are hard asf, so was making my assumption from there

But of course there will be guys with builds that rock 250+ dmg per attack with no consumables to use, so of couse they can solo entire server if wanted to, so it's a bit of question whether such builds should be even considered in balancing questions. It's like... we are trying to tweak the gun range for guys with pistols and ARs, do we need to even think about guys who bring nuke to it?

It's a valid argument.

Personally speaking, I think server difficulty should be calibrated on midrange builds, but not everyone's "midrange" is the same, conceptually.

For instance, I can solo some of those areas on a DC wizard and a Gish that many would consider quite underwhelming, but compared to your builds they might be very powerful.

It's not an easy problem to solve, without taking away fun and agency from some players.

[Fumbles]

This is an interesting take.

Indulge me in a quick test, if you please, I want to see how much your perception differs from mine.

Let's take a few epic areas, Surface and UD:

- Frost Keep in the Cloudpeaks
- Graypeaks
- Oghrann Ruins Interior
- Forgotten City Part I & II
- Pirate Island
- Corm Orp Friendly Orcs
- The Vault of the Dead

Which ones of these would you consider "solo areas", and which ones "party areas"?

And, on the "melee builds best PVE builds" part...which melee builds do you have in mind? In my opinion, there are a wide variety of builds that work wonders at the moment, be it melee with magic, melee with consumables, melee with magic and consumables, archers, non-melee casters...Maybe I can come up with some ideas you might find interesting, if you want something different.

I don't think any of them were intentionally balanced for a specific party size but idk. I would think that Frost Keep and Oghrann are, of those areas, the most suited for solo and probably because neither of them are actually CR 30. Greypeaks and Forgotten City seem to be best fit for duos though aren't that bad solo if they play into your character's strengths. To me it seems Skull Gorge and Pirate Isles are the best set for large groups though largely due to their length more than anything else really. As for Vault of the Dead, it is kinda all over the place in that the regular mobs seem to be not that bad for solo but the bosses all seem to be extremely dangerous warranting a party. Same thing with Lyran's Hold.

As for melee tending being strong, that is just what seems to be the case imo. Non-melee casters seem to tend to struggle with regular mobs and sometimes even bosses, except Warlocks which is why they seem to be so common. Archers seem to struggle with boss DR.

[Lambe]

Stop challenging solo players. Making areas harder for the solo build becomes a welcome challenge for those players who then find other ways to overcome the new challenge. I can't remember the last time anybody here actually complained about an area not being challenging enough, except maybe from asking for raid areas, but those requests didn't ask to change an existing area's difficulty. What they should have been given is a dungeon specifically to challenge them solo if they so wish. Like a trials tower or something like an Undermountain. Let them test themselves in that. Heck, give it an option of permadeath if you want.

[Ithilan]

There are so many build options, you cant balance anything for all of them. A DD will endure the mountain falling down on his rear and another build will blow up the things he cant.

It is a never ending cycle of rock, paper & scissor and we have some 100 extra options compared to just the three. Of the zones people listed in this topic, my cleric Emilia can solo them all, including Verona in Lyrans hold too and Skull Gorge. I have soloed the forgotten city on multiple characters too, it is all about the character build.

And no, it is not power builds like Riddance eludes to, it is just how builds are balanced around here, where a naked bard has the tool for most places in NWN2 because of the kit they come with and a fighter build with poor saves vs one with 40 in all and epic resilience will look like a peasant and a king too.

I dont mind group content, but I do not want the whole server to be group content because people loot in their cliques and get bored from their combined epic kill speed. Not everything has to be streamlined towards one philosophy, be it the MMO grind fest, the casual walking party RP style or simple D&D encounters rooted in lore and atmosphere over mechanics and extra designs.

I love Sel for making Lyran's Hold an actual dungeon rather than a singular room with a hallway. But some times it is nice to just have that dragons lair or lich mansion as well, with out an army that can rival the Lords Alliance on a good day. We have fallen into a design philosophy the past many years which is all about bloated PvE stats on more mobs, longer dungeons, less resting.. and in the end all people care about is the amount of chests, not about the social experience, RP or being challenged. That is why you have 5-10 man sized groups going pirates and skull gorge, but never find more than a few going elsewhere.

It is a convenience mentality at large, if you wanted challenges people would go to these places in smaller groups or on their own. A few do and try to test their limits, but more to see what they can manage on their own, because they do not have reliable team up options.

And with that I am not saying we should design things around solo players either, but theres a lot of advocating for more group oriented content coming from people who havent stepped into a wilderness zone in a group size less than five and I do not think thats a measurement for anything rooted in the reality of this servers average activity over this summer.

What group content and increase in challenge will do, is simply kill RP builds and streamline us back towards min maxed builds that we already have too many of and are mostly the ones I see wanting for more challenges, because they play in groups with cookie cutter builds.

[Steve]

IMHO, it seems impossible to have real, consistent and plausible challenges (difficulty) on BGTSCC, in NWN2, without a working system of random encounters based on both practical (build/CR numbers) and abstract (role-play, decision based actions) metrics.

Also known as the Dungeon Master in D&D!!

The current state is just number crunching supported by infinite consumables.

On that note, I stick around waiting for that epic challenge where I can put my PC’s 99 Diplomacy score to use!!!