"removing from area" before quest is complete.

Kaivalya · March 31

virtus753 · March 31

The timer for removing you from the instance isn’t related to quest status.

If that quote (“by Sheor’s beard…it’s a m[assacre in here]”) is from the part of the quest I think it is, you are only at the second altar for the Ancient Remains quest in EH1. Something happened with your group mid-dungeon. Did it disband? Did you leave? Were you kicked? The game will not let you continue the instance solo once you are no longer a part of the group, regardless of how it happened or where you’re at with the quest.

Kaivalya · March 31

"The game will not let you continue the instance solo once you are no longer a part of the group, regardless of how it happened or where you’re at with the quest."

Make sense if I leave the group or get kicked, because they'd have to generate a new instance of the dungeon partially in progress for me to stay in. However, if the rest of the group leaves, that's not an issue. They're the ones who left. Let me keep the instance. If forcing me out of the dungeon under those circumstances is considered to be working as intended, then the bug seems to be in the designers' decision-making process. How did they arrive at this decision? If they're worried about someone going afk and tying up resources, force the final person to leave only if they are idle. If someone wants to intentionally tie up resources by avoiding idleness detection, they can do that without joining a group in the first place.

I guess I trimmed too much of the fat off that screenshot. The rest of the group left. At first, they were all over the place. I'm not the only one who got separated part of the time. One or two of them seemed to have a way of running faster through more trash than I've seen before. Maybe faun's lark cladding. I guess someone left because things weren't going well, and then the rest dropped too. However, I see this kind of thing happen often enough that I really wonder what's going on. Are there that many people who use the dungeon finder just to get equipment, and then they leave if they get what they want? Is there another reason to bypass objectives?

jle30303 · March 31

With Elden Hollow 1, as with Fungal Grotto 1, there is a way to "skip" right to the final boss after the first couple, if all you want is dungeon completion - if you're not doing either (a) the dungeon's one-off quest, which needs to go through all the areas, or (b) the Undaunted Pledge.

(This is because the Undaunted Pledge requires Chokethorn, one of the bosses that is skipped by jumping off the high walkway to land in the room below: while doing the dungeon quest requires going through it all the way, and some of the action is a bit slow.)

And unfortunately, skipping and killing the final boss early, ruins the quest for anybody doing it - who needs to go through the whole dungeon.

The reason people even WANT to skip to the final boss and miss out all the bosses in between, is that the final boss is the only one who can drop a weapon, or jewelry, from any of the dungeon's sets. ALL other bosses can only drop armor - which means that, when you've got 4-5 bosses that drop from a pool of only 21 pieces of armor (7 pieces for each of 3 sets), and 1 boss at the end who drops from a pool of 45 items (7 metal weapons, 5 wooden weapons, shield, ring, amulet, that's 15 items from each of 3 sets), you quickly get to a situation in the early dungeons where for many players, *only* the final boss has any value if the dungeon is a RND, because the other bosses are literally not capable of dropping any thing that is useful to them (would be a new entry in the sticker book). And if even the weapons and jewelry are full in the stickerbook, then veterans doing a RND just want to be through and done.

Really, honestly, that design is hideously bad. It might have been good when there were only the base game dungeons. Now there are SO MANY more dungeons, that this really needs to change: and weapons and jewelry actually need to have a chance (even if non-curated) of dropping from earlier bosses, just to discourage skipping.

(Proposal: If you have all 21 pieces of armour in your sticker book, that's 7 pieces from each of the 3 sets, then the earlier bosses go non-curated but gain the ability to drop ANYTHING - including weapon and jewelry - including duplicates, but also including non-duplicates.)

Alternatively: RND completion should require killing every boss in the dungeon, not just the final one.

katanagirl1 · April 1

I would love to have enough time to go back and look for chests or lorebooks after everyone else has left. You don’t have time while the group is speed running through the dungeon.

Kaivalya · April 3

The main point of daily randoms, in every MMO I'm aware of, is to give people who have already completed a dungeon a reason to go back in for people who haven't completed it. (They let full parties queue because it'd seem weird to people if they couldn't do that.) I hope the designers consider it a mistake to have made the varying quest objectives and drops vary in a way that is so contrary to this. Is this less common with newer dungeons?

virtus753 · April 3

Kaivalya wrote: »

The main point of daily randoms, in every MMO I'm aware of, is to give people who have already completed a dungeon a reason to go back in for people who haven't completed it. (They let full parties queue because it'd seem weird to people if they couldn't do that.) I hope the designers consider it a mistake to have made the varying quest objectives and drops vary in a way that is so contrary to this. Is this less common with newer dungeons?

Newer dungeons operate the same way for gear drops but somewhat differently for quests.

The quests for DLC dungeons are typically "pick up and forget it," in the sense that you do not have to pause and engage with NPCs between the beginning and end of the dungeon. So they differ from base game dungeons in that respect.

The drops all work in the same way, though. As mentioned above, bosses before the final boss give body pieces from a predetermined pool, and the final boss gives weapons or jewelry. Those are curated against your collections ("stickerbook") from within the designated pool for each boss. Named items, when they drop, now come in addition to a curated piece. (When curation first debuted, they replaced the curated drop.) Chests in dungeons can drop any set piece but do so on a non-curated basis, and you will need Treasure Hunter slotted for a chance at set pieces out of simple-difficulty chests. Treasure Hunter effectively bumps a simple-difficulty chest up to use the loot table of an intermediate-difficulty chest, providing a chance (but not a guarantee) at a set piece. (Set pieces are only guaranteed out of an advanced or master chest normally.)

While the change in approach to quest cadence may be taken as an implicit acknowledgment that the base game dungeon quest design can conflict with the speed-run approach taken by players motivated by XP, gear, or other non-quest rewards, as far as I'm aware we've seen no evidence that the developers consider the base game dungeon quest design a mistake or have any intention to address it.

That said, those are two different points, and the devs do not need to consider the original design a mistake in order to change it. What works at one point in the game's lifetime does not necessarily keep working as well as the game ages. We have seen them add transmutation and reconstruction to address pain points with gear collection, for example. That was not an admission that the initial approach to gear was a mistake so much as it was an acknowledgment that it could stand to be improved in order to make gear collecting more palatable and accessible for a wider audience.

If you would like, I'd suggest asking a moderator to move the thread to General Discussion so it gets more exposure, as your feedback is still valid and worth discussing even if what you're seeing isn't technically a bug.