THF Content Update Feb 2020 Discussion

[Ydiss]

Use this thread to discuss your thoughts and feedback for the new content.

If you want to discuss specifics, please make sure it's clear you're posting spoilers!

For any specific issues (i.e. that will mean you need to discuss details of the new content) please use the petition subforum. For any other issues (like this item doesn't work or spells don't work), you can just use the normal issues forums.

[Nilbus]

on vacation so can't test play yet but the line about pets concerns me. mages have traditionally been the pet class wearing cloth as a downside versus leather and block/Dodge on a bst.

[Ydiss]

on vacation so can't test play yet but the line about pets concerns me. mages have traditionally been the pet class wearing cloth as a downside versus leather and block/Dodge on a bst.

I wouldn't read anything into that line, it's just a very rough personal estimation and nothing has actually changed with Beastlord or mage pets?

The only reason that was written was to explain how we've organised the power of the lower end pets. If this part causes any confusion I'll just delete it.

[Ydiss]

Some server firsts happening all the time, I'll post some non spoiler details towards the end of the week.

I've noticed some chat about the vitrik drops in cotw and would like to remind everyone that the quest related to these (charm 8) has been totally rewritten, as per the update notes:

- Rewrote the charm 8 quest entirely. It's now possible to complete one charm 8 quest for a single character with a single run of The Citadel. How this can be done has changed significantly, however.

The last line is the most important part. For anyone who has previously completed this quest, the old method of acquiring the quest items (they just dropped randomly) won't work.

There are two reasons for this change:

1) There has been feedback that it can take a long time to get the required items (and only 2 chances per run of cotw). I felt that it would be better if it were more of a challenge but could be completed 100% for one character per run.

2) Considering the charm 6 and 7 quests and how the challenge increases nicely, I felt the first iteration of the charm 8 quest felt a little like an afterthought. Since it was written, my experience of writing more complicated quests has leapt up. I feel this quest deserves to be much more interesting.

Fundamentally, the way to complete the quest hasn't changed (Lilly still wants the same quest items to complete her research). What has changed is how you get all of them.

You'll need to work that out for yourselves. Good luck!

We have planned two more charm quests and they will be even more challenging and fun (particularly charm 10, which will be the final charm in the quest line and will deserve an equally epic final quest to achieve!)

[Ydiss]

Server firsts!

The new content has been out for just over a week now and we hope you've been enjoying it.

We've been tracking progress through the story and tasks in the new zone and have quite a few server firsts already.

There are some mild spoilers here but nothing specific is mentioned. Encounters/boss kills are "code-named" but tasks are mentioned directly by name.

So far over 70 characters have located the new zone.

The first guild to locate the new zone was Theatre of Pain. They managed this just a few hours after the launch.

The first to kill the lost ancient that wields electrical powers was Nibelung Valesti.

The same guild then pushed on to complete the first quest "Antithesis of Corruption".

It took another two days before Nibelung Valesti continued the main quest line of the zone to the second stage by completing "Fear of Ferocity".

Here are all the rest of the quests in the new zone, listing what guild completed it first and how many guilds have competed it to date;

Quest Friends Reunited: Nibelung Valesti

Quest Discordant Infiltration: Nibelung Valesti

Quest Blazing Elemental: Nibelung Valesti

Quest Bazu Hunter: Nibelung Valesti

Quest The Last Stand: Nibelung Valesti

Quest School's Out: Not yet completed!

Quest Ultimate Antithesis: Nibelung Valesti

Research of the Words (spell quest): Nibelung Valesti (

The Taming of the Beasts (pet quest): Nibelung Valesti

Quest Unlocking the Totems: Nibelung Valesti

Boss kill The wielder of the whip: Afterlife

Boss kill The Crazy One: Spitfire

Boss kill The Big Windy One: Spitfire

Boss kill The Big Murk: Afterlife

Ghillie's Research stage 1 (instance access): Afterlife

Ghillie's Research Stage 2 (Haven): Afterlife

Speaking with Spirits: Echoes: Theatre of Pain

Speaking with Spirits: Ghost Hunt:
Theatre of Pain

Speaking with Spirits: Have Faith: Nibelung Valesti

Boss kill The Red One: Theatre of Pain

Boss kill The Blue One: Theatre of Pain

Boss kill The White One: Nibelung Valesti

Access quest:Nibelung Valesti

Instance completion: Nibelung Valesti

7th Gate: Not yet completed!

[Ydiss]

Bit of an update on this (sorry it's so late, been pretty busy with RL for obvious reasons!)

I've edited the server first post above with the new firsts by guild. I just want to take a moment to congratulate Freydis of Nibelung Valesti, who was the first player to complete the instance (and currently the only, though Galdace is close to doing so!)

I've made some changes to the instance which I'll mention below but I wanted to point out that Freydis managed to defeat the instance in its initial state (and Galdace did most of the instance, so deserves a mention). The changes below have eased the difficulty of the zone so it's a unique achievement to be the first to beat it despite that. Ghillie will be sure to mention this in her dialogue to those who follow in Freydis' footsteps from now on.

So, the changes (to be clear, this applies only to the group instance, not causeway) ...

Npc difficulty has been reduced

There was some difficulty scaling that we tested as part of the instance. It's something I'm not going to go into detail about but the purpose of the test was to gauge the practical impact of it for use in some future content. The test was useful but ultimately proved to us that it'll only be appropriate for that future content (it'll make a lot more sense when we roll it out so don't worry about it for now).

Ultimately, we've removed the scaling from the T9 group instance. This means the difficulty will have been reduced. The tasks all remain the same but many of the targets in the zone should be much easier to kill.

One completion will now flag the whole group

Up until now, the flag for completing the group instance only updated for one character per run. This should now flag the whole group on the first run. Please let us know if this doesn't work (you'll get an odd message from Ghillie at the end if it didn't)

Future planned changes: New rank 9 augments and quest timers scaling based on ip count

New Rank 9 augments

Very shortly we'll be adding more loot to both causeway and the instance. This will be in the form of augments (not slot 8). There will be some common augments added to the mini bosses in causeway, some rarer ones to the major bosses and a set of really nice ones in the instance.

Augments in T9 are really underrepresented. This will give you the opportunity to fill out your character's augs with rank 9 quality augments.

Quest timer scaling based on unique ip count

We've had a lot of great feedback on the new content and quite a bit of that has centered on some of the new puzzle based tasks.

We're going to look into making a change to these puzzles that should improve them quite a lot and make them fairer. First though, I'd like to stress something here...

All of our content is designed with the intention of allowing anyone to enjoy it, not just single boxers or mq2 players. These time-based coordination puzzles were no exception but we appreciate that the end result may appear to be punitive towards mq2 players.

This wasn't the intention but was an unfortunate by-product. Essentially, these puzzles were designed to give a group a challenge to coordinate and communicate to achieve a goal and yes, some of these puzzles can't be scripted away with mq2 because they require real human decision making to work.

I think this is a good thing to have personally (real decision making that isn't binary and automated). I think groups of more real players will enjoy completing these tasks. I didn't really want them to be frustrating for mq2 players so tried to balance them to be possible for a single person (and was able to manage them myself with some very specific strategies). In the end, the point of these tasks is not to make the challenge different based on number of players.

Ultimately, the feedback has been consistent that these tasks are too frustrating and the time alloted to complete them is too short for solo players to handle up to six clients simultaneously so for one example I just added extra seconds to the timer. But that'll just trivialise the task for a group of 6 human players, which isn't fair either. So this is what we propose change.

We want to introduce a count of unique ips in the instance (we actually want to do this for a number of reasons so more on this at a later date). For these tasks specifically, this will allow us to tailor the difficulty of these tasks so it's balanced no matter how many real players there are.

This means one unique ip will result in a slightly longer timer, enough to allow a reasonable challenge. The more human players you have, the more we can reasonably shorten the time to account for less human multi tasking. The end result we intend is these tasks challenge you equally and no one gets an advantage.

I hope this makes sense. Please let me know your thoughts.

[PKinternet]

I think that the IP solution is very creative. =)

Question on the unlocking the totems, isn't that just being able to port with them? I believe a few people have finished that.

[Ydiss]

It is. Might be logging is broken for that.

If you know who did it first I'll update it otherwise I'll just remove the note for it.

[PKinternet]

Not sure who was first, but Frey was before me.

[Ydiss]

It was Frey then. Only one group did the spell quest before you. Thanks! Updated.

Also, added a ton of new augs to causeway now. One slot 8, three slot 16 and loads of slot 17.

Enjoy.