Aspect of Sorrow wrote: ↑Mon Sep 07, 2026 11:09 pm
Ithilan wrote: ↑Mon Sep 07, 2026 1:32 am
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.
No one is sending a message about shifting the PW into a space that ostracizes the solo player. The experience and reward output however absolutely should be made considerably different from each other in addition to the experience being
less static and predictable in gameplay loop. Group content will not eradicate RP builds due to a heavier incentivization of broader skill & feat usage, nor would it change the state of minmaxing on the server which is preserved by people's insatiable need for ceiling numbers. What would change is that it's less advantageous to the solo player on a multiplayer PW to run an epic dungeon than it would to involve additional players and characters to reach content that is otherwise unavailable. That is to say what you experience in loot output for example at Graypeaks today as a solo wouldn't change. It would however if you gathered a party before venturing forth.
Group content, or the mentality many apply to it on here, is the death of RP. Vast majority of groups I see going into PvE content do not exchange a single line of roleplay for the duration of the dungeon rushing. Watching lords and ladies of the realm or the sophisticated wizard become a MMO keystone farmer for 30 mins breaks immersion for me.
It also seems reminiscent of diablo2 gameplay, where greed is the name of the game, people rushing remains and always acting like a loot goblin is so absurd.
And you start off by saying it wont ostracize then go on to complain about solo player advantages and how they ought be lessened and how the dungeon zerg mentality should be rewarded, despite the basic mathematical fact they already have a numeric advantage, both in the time it takes to clear said content and by sheer drop chance percentages being exponentially higher. If said group refuses to share with each other, thats on them, but since we dont have group loot mechanics and functions, decency is implied but not expected and people will be willing to trade and give things to the party member that actually uses said epic flail found in the chest by the wizard barely able to hold his own weight. I know, horrible solidary mentality, who would want that?
If you are saying drop chances will increase with party members, ill join the dungeon rush zerg fests again and try and dust off my diablo2 spam click to loot skills.
But we were talking more so about challenges than loot and the challenges get exponentially reduced with every added party member too, to the point where you cant scale a place to utilize the rogue, the wizard, the cleric and the fighter, when the fighter has epic resilience, is buffed by the party and runs through 8 traps with improved evasion kicking in and like addressed in other topics, death isnt a factor on the server, in a party you will get bloodstaunch restored to life with an expentancy of less than a minute in the fugue.
Adding more loot to group content is not a scaling of challenges, role play, build diversity, it incentivizes less roleplay, less challenge for more rewards, what an ActivisionBlizzard mentality. One thing it would do though, is allow RP builds to hide in the zerg fests which I do applaud, but I can not see this benefitting any one but tight regular groups of players and will probably contribute to more clique mentality than we already have.
If you said you were adding skill checks and mechanics that incentivizes group play in general, such as the few places on the server with high DC locks that are meant to encourage you bringing a rogue or similar (but gets picked by the bard with 1 skill in open lock), more locations that require rope, shovels, environmental hazards and difficulties, platform jumping with acrobatics and athleticism, scribing and linguistic checks in libraries, lore arcana on ancient runes etc. we would be talking group diversity and reasonable "increase in reward" designs, that favors a D&D experience and diversity. But mere scripts that spawn more mobs and drop more loot, is the laziest formula that is more reminiscent of a MMO grind mentality than the RP immersion that ought be at the core of every design on a server such as this.
But we circle back to the same issue, timezones, availability of players. Gradually making the place less desirable for people outside the US timzones with a job and a life.
