Standardize Totems & Totem Podiums

Port is currently on the path to create individual rooms for each type of encounter (Lich, Troll, Kobold so far)
I would like to see a system where dungeon rooms can be converted to podium enabled "encounter" rooms that will have a "generic" podium to place ANY kind of totem into.
This way a player can pick and choose which spawns to place where. If the conversion recipe could be applied to any room, then the options are much greater when it comes to being creative with dungeons.
There is so much promise with PMDs i hate to see it not optimized by pigeon hole coding.

 

That is exactly right.

Cypher Black

 

Agree. Seeing how this was being implemented really took the wind out of my sails. In the early discussions about dungeons I thought that the above was how it would work, that you'd get a room, and you could put a totem of -anycreature- in it, and if you put a totem there, you couldn't put other deco to avoid fish-in-barrel stuff. That was a promising dream full of possibilities.

Making it so "this room" can only have "this mob" kind of...I dunno, for me anyway, defeats the entire purpose. Oh look, kobold room ahead. No surprise. Not even any story really. No originality just everyone with the same dozen pieces stringing them together in a different order. Couple that with the non-player-dungeon variants being far more lucrative, it kind of diminishes the appeal of creating, or exploring, a player dungeon for combat purposes anyway.

 

There would be problems if you could do any kinda of totem. Not all mobs are the same size and came move to the same places. Imagine the troll totem in the rotunda. It is just not big enough and could probably be easily exploited by ranged avatars. That said, being able to choose from a selection of totems for a particular room would be good. Maybe even more than one as long as they acted cooperatively. The dungeons are still in their infancy so I would expect we will get more control and more options as the tech matures.

 

@kaeshiva

But for the same role-play reasons I have this issue with the whole podium/totem system to begin with.

Like you said, the reason a lot of players want to create dungeons is to tell stories with them. This might mean leading players to the crypt of some ancient lich. But how the whole dungeon is set up frames the storytelling, and if you have a podium with a tiny lich statue in the front of every lich room it makes it too obvious and artificial and interferes with your ability to tell a story.

 

This makes sense to a point, but there's a troll in Epitaph with the same sort of layout as the rotunda room (ie, upper balcony) - when you shoot the troll from up there, it resets because of the anti-perch code or whatever. I would expect monsters in dungeons to behave in a similar manner to prevent players building 'abuse scenarios'. I don't see a problem with a troll stood in the middle of the rotunda. If you ran up the stairs, it would just leash.

Even if there had to be some restrictions (ie, large monster vs. small monster totems) it would be far better than now, though.

The RP element is a whole different ballgame.

I can see two reasons to build a player dungeon apart from it being a large deco project.

1: To create an interesting adventure scene replacement with the sorts of mobs you want to fight either for yourself or in creating an adventure tailored to a specific group / friend / etc. Like a new-player gauntlet or whatever.

or

2: To tell a story, and lead a player through a narrative driven process.

(and some crossover/variation of these, I guess)

The current implementation of totems is not fit for either purpose.
The 'string of same rooms in different order' creates very little appeal from dungeon to dungeon. I can see someone just putting 10 troll rooms in a row and using it to farm trolls. And they're in the exact. same. room. If you could vary the rooms, you could at least make up some sort of story about stumbling into the ancient troll city or SOMETHING, kinda hard to do if its...sameroom...sameroomagain.

For story dungeon purposes, the totems are indeed distracting, but worse, they give absolute predictability. Oh, I'm in a lich room. I'll never guess what I'm going to have to fight!



Honestly I was hoping for a lot more freedom in the build/spawner layout to create something truly unique. The way this is looking, that is not possible unless there is a change of direction.

Lets go farm hilt for 50 hours to get a rotunda dungeon room blueprint that I can put in my basement to fight the -same exact kobolds- that show up in the first room in hilt...? Or invest hundreds more hours to make them slightly higher / more difficult kobolds with the same crappy loot? Why would I do this?

 

@kaeshiva

Yea, I agree with you, your post pretty much sums it up.

Personally, I think the storytelling aspect is the more popular reason that players want dungeons which is why I'd emphasize it, and why I think the devs should pay attention to it.

'Gauntlet' dungeons will have use for player events, but otherwise, I don't think you're going to find a lot of players randomly going from dungeon to dungeon just to seek out challenges. In the case of the player event, the event creates the pretext. In absence of that, players are going to need a different pretext to go into dungeons, and that will generally be player-created quests.

In any case, you're right its pretty much the same issues for both scenarios.

 

It’s not the same Kobolds found in Hilt. It has the higher tier Kobolds and Grenade guys. That’s just with the level 1 totem. Just FYI.

 

I think this can be also be addressed by having a door that unlocks when all spawns (and/or monsters from other rooms that has moved to current room) is killed.
It would simplify configuration.

 

Interesting.

So Tier 1 dungeon spawners have a minimum advisable adventure level? Spawning mobs that are higher than you find in normal T5 scenes? I mean, building a dungeon for newer folks seems out, if that's the case ?

I assume that these don't drop the same loot/money/etc. as the similar grenade wielding kobolds that you could go kill in Skrekk/Krul/etc.? I suppose there's some potential for if you levelled it really high to get kobolds of a level 'beyond' what exists in the wild...but how hard would those need to be? , depends how severe the loot adjustment is for dungeons. The way its been put forward, it seems like it would always be a more lucrative idea to go "kill them in the wild" which reduces the appeal of the dungeon as alternative content. I don't object to that as such, as there are still other reasons to build a dungeon, mostly storyline related, but if the rooms are all carboncopies of each other that avenue is also greatly diminished.

 

I'd definitely like to see more customization.

Here are my thoughts that I previously shared: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/episode-2-%E2%80%93-player-built-dungeons-what-we-know-and-additional-thoughts.136194/

 

@kaeshiva I have a Row Lot in Dragomir Mori with the level 1 Kobold dungeon inside the dungeon if you want to take a look.

 

I think that some rooms could be more generic then others. There could be many rooms tagged with a "Random" or "Humanoid" pedestal and swap out a good number of encounter types.

- Skeletons/Zombies
- Bandits
- Obsidian's
- Elves
- Barbarians

They all have Fighters, Mages, Archers. The spawning s can all work the same.

The Random rooms from the Pain Dungeon could be configured for these as well as the 3x3, 1x1 rooms, prison cells, etc.

Larger Mobs like the Trolls, Young Dragons, Liches, Bosses would need Larger Rooms and Pedestals. Just like houses, you can put a smaller totem on a larger pedestal but not the other way around.

Eventually, they may work up to single spawners and random wanderers, but for now the Humanoid spawner pedestal should be fine, no?

 

I just took a look - very helpful - where do you get totem recipes?

 

ALL totem recipes are learnable.

Smelting table: 100 essence, stone chisel.

 

Got it - I had to drag the items on to the table from my inventory list then hit "craft" - and after that - the recipe was added to my book - the same process was needed to add the dungeon room conversion recipes into my book (to convert to MOB spawning rooms) - add the dungeon piece, the stone chisel, and 500 COTOs from inventory and hit "craft"