ESO's poor group dungeon design

Wing · January 2018

so there was a thread in the PTS about the new dungeons being too long.

that kind of exploded into a lot of people (myself included) finally venting about not liking ESO's group dungeon design, as they are just trial lights with the same design and different setting, that being:
mob of trash
mob of trash
boss
mob of trash
mob of trash
boss
etc. till final boss

with the only variation involved being what mobs of trash you can cheese past, and what bosses you can cheese period.
___________________________________

I admit I came from DDO where all content was instanced group dungeons, so ESO's have always seemed poor and boring to me. but an example I would like to suggest would be thus:

anyone here been to bleakrock? when the island finally comes under attack, imagine if you will a dungeon being the center town of the island during the attack. you have one major objective that will end the dungeon: kill the commander leading the attack, for sake of example we will say that they are at the lighthouse.

you also have secondary objectives: save some villagers trapped in a burning house, kill a lieutenant organizing the attack on the town, and kill all the invaders in the town (who are not trash mobs of 6-8 but rather the groups of 2-3 we see through out the game.

so one main objective, three optional ones.

now, completing the main objective rewards your classic end chest, however for each objective you complete you get an additional chest that drops everything the main chest does (excluding the monster helm)

this gives groups choices every time they enter:
-do you simply run to the end boss and skip the optional chests and the possibility of motif pages and set items within?
-if you do decide to do the optionals do you go as a group or can individuals handle certain aspects by themselves?

I'm sure a pug group might have to stick together but I'm also sure your trial light groups would be able to spit up and maxamise there time / reward ratio.

in the end, you have options, groups will pursue different goals in different ways, as it stand now all dungeons run the same, tank the boss kill the trash, all that changes is speed based on group and gear, but all dungeons PLAY THE SAME.

djyrb · January 2018

This is an interesting idea. It reminds me of the "Adventures" in Wildstar which were these mostly non-linear objective based PVE instances with open maps. Your team could stick together or split up depending on your strategies, and you received better rewards for beating time limits and completing all the challenges.

One of them even had a MOBA-esque feature where you controlled nodes to send your teams minions down lanes against the NPC team's minions. Another was based around a tower defense type of scenario where you had to place NPC defenses of different types inside the fortress to defend against enemies coming in from different areas.

I wouldn't mind seeing some content like this added in to spice up small group PVE instead of running the same pledges over and over again.

W0lf_z13 · January 2018

def sounds like an interesting idea.... i like it!

QuebraRegra · January 2018

Wing wrote: »

so there was a thread in the PTS about the new dungeons being too long.

that kind of exploded into a lot of people (myself included) finally venting about not liking ESO's group dungeon design, as they are just trial lights with the same design and different setting, that being:
mob of trash
mob of trash
boss
mob of trash
mob of trash
boss
etc. till final boss

with the only variation involved being what mobs of trash you can cheese past, and what bosses you can cheese period.
___________________________________

I admit I came from DDO where all content was instanced group dungeons, so ESO's have always seemed poor and boring to me. but an example I would like to suggest would be thus:

anyone here been to bleakrock? when the island finally comes under attack, imagine if you will a dungeon being the center town of the island during the attack. you have one major objective that will end the dungeon: kill the commander leading the attack, for sake of example we will say that they are at the lighthouse.

you also have secondary objectives: save some villagers trapped in a burning house, kill a lieutenant organizing the attack on the town, and kill all the invaders in the town (who are not trash mobs of 6-8 but rather the groups of 2-3 we see through out the game.

so one main objective, three optional ones.

now, completing the main objective rewards your classic end chest, however for each objective you complete you get an additional chest that drops everything the main chest does (excluding the monster helm)

this gives groups choices every time they enter:
-do you simply run to the end boss and skip the optional chests and the possibility of motif pages and set items within?
-if you do decide to do the optionals do you go as a group or can individuals handle certain aspects by themselves?

I'm sure a pug group might have to stick together but I'm also sure your trial light groups would be able to spit up and maxamise there time / reward ratio.

in the end, you have options, groups will pursue different goals in different ways, as it stand now all dungeons run the same, tank the boss kill the trash, all that changes is speed based on group and gear, but all dungeons PLAY THE SAME.

Need mor DDO style dungeon crawling... need deadly traps, proper passives for trap detection, and disarming, needs procedural generation for keep dungeon layouts, enemies, side-objectives, and trap locations fresh.

ZOS needs to take some of that cash and do some more hiring...