Ulfheim could use some QoL

I love the new Ulfheim scene and want to go there more often and do the Dragon Tooth quest(10x quest xp!) but unfortunately it's hard to find anyone doing it and literally the last 3 times I tried to do Ulfheim, I was thwarted -- I wish there was some way around these frustrations without opening room for exploits.

- Game crashed while doing the Barbarian Hall right before the dragon spawns - when I rejoined the party, I was at the scene entrance, with no easy way to get to them - I did not want them to have to stop their fun, so I just left.
- Joined a LFG but didn't get enough people so it disbanded. This is tricky, since there is a 'sweet spot' of maybe 4 people in a party but they need to be really powerful and specific roles since it takes too long for everyone to kill, skin a dragon and get a tooth, and wait for a respawn ; people start to bail.
- Wanted to do the Dragon Tooth quest and mentioned similar in Guild chat - some guildies were doing Ulfheim! I joined the party but they were already a few fights deep, and getting to them solo was too hard for me, so I just left them to do their thing.

IMHO the respawn timer on the Dragon and waiting for the reset of the Barbarian Hall fight before the dragon respawns is enough of a limiter for the current rewards - maybe the gate locking mechanisms can be disabled so unlucky people or latecomers can run through the scene more easily to rejoin their team.

TLDR; Please make the mechanics in Ulfheim less painful for people to do the dragon quest.

 

I understand the mechanism why the final room door has to close and lock people IN, but really think there should be a vine for stragglers/new party members to participate.
Same deal with the 3 wave events, they should just stay clear once cleared, its not like anyone goes back out and redoes them as they are just a means to an end.

 

Could just use some kind of gadget like an elevator or rope that you can lower for someone else to climb up. They already exist in some other zones.

 

My guild and i went there a few days ago. In a group of 9 or 10 people. 4 of them relatively new to the game. If your group size is big enough you can be sure that one of them falls through a gap in the final bridge down into the first wave area.

As there is no way to open the gate for the poor souls, parts of the gruop have to go down there, finish the wave and run up again. Some people have problems with jumping over the gaps in the bridge or jumping in general, it could be a short hitching/lag, plenty of reasons to fall down.

We cleared the first wave 3 times. Of course every time we reached the final Bridge again the people were getting more nervous because no one wants to fall down and add another 15 minutes to the run.

We lost our nerves when at the fourth attempt another person fell down (4 trys, 4 different peolpe fell). We left. Surely some to never go there again. So that was more than a hour with next to no outcome for anyone and we didn't even see the Dragon.

Maybe the easiest solution would be to close the gaps on the last bridge. The other 2 are not the problem imo. People can catch up to the rest of the group pretty fast if they fall through the first or second bridge. Or maybe a lever or vine that appears when the first wave has been cleared once? Or the elevator that @Lazlo suggested.

 

TBH, I've never understood the reasoning behind that last bridge. All it adds is grind and frustration to the whole event to the point that I literally will not go there any longer.

Surely the dragon adds enough chlorine to the group pool that people that shouldn't be there can't get there. Having to drop down and fight your way back up for the Nth time because someone fell or lost connection just adds salt to the wound and time to the encounter.

 

a previous idea:

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...ether-if-someone-falls-to-their-death.161760/

 

Its frustrating because we're all off doing Ulfheim, someone new logs on, wants to come - sorry, can't, we'd have to reclear the whole way here which takes 20 mins due to waiting on waves and unless they want to solo their way through all of it (assuming they are able to) there's no guarantee everyone else wont be 'done' by the time they do it.

Sannio, maybe a mechanism by which party members already inside the final room could summon a party member by stepping on a _thing_.
There's actually a LOT of places in the game where the ability to summon someone, kinda like a reverse teleport scroll, would help matters - like with people getting stuck, or that one party member who just cannot for the life of them make that jump. There'd have to be a cooldown on it of course or things could get silly, but I've seen other games employ this mechanism either via an actual skill players can learn (maybe put it in the Focus tree) or an item that you can use to summon targetted party member to your location but with a long cooldown on it. Back in Vanguard there was a /rope command that could be used at short distances to help party members get up cliffs and such, but wouldn't work for cross-scene zoning.

The easiest thing to do would probably be to just make it so that the first three 'wave events' stayed clear once cleared the first time, unless you clicked something to reset it. That would allow players to optionally kill more bandits if that was their goal, but the default would be this is defeated, move on. Then new party members would just need to get to the final door and wait 1 round. Or do the opposite if you don't want 'defeated' to be the default state, let players click something that blows up the gates until the scene resets. Dynamite!!!

 

So basically, you want them to add the ability for 1 person to run through the Ulfheim scene, all the way to the final Dragon battle, and then that player can then start summoning people to the final battle? Don’t see that happening.....

 

You are a true hero!

Thank you so much

 

So what is stopping someone for keeping a character at the end all day, bringing alt after alt after alt to feed them 400k exp each day....? The difficulty was impressive and this will dumb it down. It will be exploited. No more intent on making sure the party is cohesive and safe when travelling through. The 2 easy mode buttons will make this zone a joke now when before, it was perfect.

Please put a timer on the teleporters to prevent this.

Also removing the bridge trap is sad. Whats the point of removing it. Why not just teleport me straight to the tooth and loot it without any difficulty at all if you are on the path of making things easy mode?

 

400k isn't exactly a huge amount of xp these days.

 

Its actually 800k exp; 400k adv and 400k producer and that is EXCESSIVE.

But you said it best; "these days."

This game is is falling apart.

 

This is where things generally break down. There are the random disconnects that make doing this encounter painfully slow but the primary cause is people lagging out, being bad jumpers or just bad luck that makes this a place I wouldn't go to any longer.

Thank you @Sannio for making these changes.

 

You often have such valuable input, but it is difficult to make use of it when you frame each problem as an existential crisis. Can you help with more specifics like you did in the post before this? The new scene changes are pretty amazing given what we had before there, but i'm sure it can be tweaked with some help from folk like you and others in the community here.

 

Not sure what you mean. Everything is being made easier patch after patch. The scene was perfect and didnt require any changes.
The excessive exp part can be discussed here:
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...as-trivialized-95-of-the-game-content.163168/
Its pretty obvious by looking at history what this all means.
Goodbye, im done fighting against an ocean of pitchforks.

 

Just had a crazy idea for the frustration of having to kill and skin a dragon for every party member looking to do the quest...

... what if the dragon tooth quest item was moved to an NPC that spawns after the dragon is defeated, like the NPCs that spawn for the bounty slip, survey ticket, and prayer card? That way, everyone in the party just needs to speak with the NPC to get the quest item, instead of having to skin a separate dragon for each member?

Then the NPC will despawn when the dragon 'resets'.