Feedback Dunes of Desolation

This is my impression after playing for few days.
Once again I have to compliment art/graphics team for what they have done. Especially like the carpet mount

As for the event:
- Too much grinding. As stated in some previous posts you have to grind to grind again in another map. I taught that this will be 'real money' orientated event but since you can't buy bone coins I am confused because you have to spend a lot of time grinding to get something worth the effort.
- Difficulty/item drop ratio, not scaled fearly. The lowest drops of bone coin in Painful, Excruciating and Fatal (and the most common, like 70-80%) is, respectively 2, 3, 4. Now for example, on Fatal difficulty it is x3 times harder than Painful but you only get x2 times more bone coins. You can buy buffs but still...
I can get around 700 bone coins for 1 hour. So to get the mount, I will have to spend 40000/700 ≈ 57 hours which is a lot for me. It would take me 5-6 events to get it
- You can buy portals to fight the boss so nothing to say here. But the difficulty/drop items ration is not that good.
- Andermant drop is a bit lower but it drops more frequently so that is acceptable.
- Gem drops are just like in normal maps, every 6-13 runs a Flawed gem drops...
- Coin drop is a bit low (quantity of dropped stacks of coin).
- Strange thing. It drops almost the same types of items in all difficulties. Mostly Improved items .
- One more thing. Not being able to taunt bosses or even some normal monsters for SW that uses it to survive is not nice. This is not that big deal but still....

 

Where the hell is enhanced hour glass vial?! I gone trough 17 scrolls, got 600 sand left ... I can't just play game .. what is this event ... omg! Did the dev's ever think people have lives to live not just play games ... uh...

 

after enhanced glass vail there is lot more to do, r u EDIT kidding me " collecting 200 red lovages and 200 emerald mints" from mobs in evergreen oasis. max 10 in 1 run so 200/10= 20 more runs....u want us to have the EDIT chest or just playing wit us.

 

does anyone realize there is still 9 days left and this is a repeatable event or is it that you don't get a reward with no work or effort put in to it.

 

Yes we realize ... and also we realize there is nothing to play for even for one day.
What do you think ... Santa Claus came and gave us all the items from the previous events for free? Without putting any effort to it? But when something is not worth the effort you don't play it. Simple as that.

 

When Traki said the amount of items you pickup causes a lag, i thougt it was a joke. This is insane. Every progress item shakes the screen...

Also, I did a dumb mistake. Entered a boss map, but wasnt sure what level. So created a group of mine, checked the level, and quit the group. Guess what, it got me back to kingshill... wth is going on with this game

 

Yeah it was lucky 41 dust cloack..... XD

 

Tried it one day and already forgot, grinding on PW more enjoyable.

 

So after the initial shock in which I imagined I would need to finish the minievent in 2 hours and that it was actually repeatable, I read around here that this is not the case. Wow... after the original shock and horror, I was relieved and thought "hey, this might actually be fun. Get bone coins for entrances, do map 2 during minievent map 2, map 3 during minievent map 3, do the stones drop quests in cross (finish map 3 Sunday, use talismans during minievent today)." This way I could do minievents, while also have stones for boss and try to get the materials I need from there. After all, tier 1 items still allow you to benefit from the set bonus (and with what a horrible amulet I have, I figured it would be worth the shot). Genius, I think I nailed the event!

But today, after 3 freaking hours of farming to get 10 entrances to the second map, it hit me just how stupidly imbalanced the drop rate of those freaking Red Lovages are (ugh, I can't even use proper english now... is). I thought Traki and others are exaggerating with how bad this event is (after all, it didn't feel worse than Dragan at some point - I know, not as bad as Dragan, right? ) And after those superb 10 runs (which felt more painfully boring and repetitive than listening to Celine Dion's "My heart will go on")
... I started counting... and doing math... and comparing... and.... O M G....
Really...
67 Lovages in 10 runs...
Out of a total of (oh I'm just gonna go ahead and censor myself here) two *EDIT* hundred!
I think after this event is done I need to get myself a 3 weeks vacation in a mental institution, because even that whole "kill evil gnob with colors" event feels like a walk in a park.
I actually feel the colorless gnob now...
Now I'm really curious what I am farming for here. Cause I heard a lot of stories about those magnificent uniques being dropped and they aren't pretty.
...
Sanitarium, here I come!

 

Finished the challenge nr1 today after 27 runs in Evergreen.... and here is what i got after all these hours farming with brains on low power...

......

Karrabossa Icy Cloak (tier1) & Magotina's Dusky boots (tier2) & Onyx

 

At least he got two "useful" uniques and not something like a T1 full moon unique like Trakilaki got on TS.

EDIT:
Time for my feedback.
Lets start with what is good about this event. That should be rather easy.
1. The art department. As always, the visuals are splendid and the animations smooth. I was also nice to see the boss from the original Drakensang Trailer finally show up in game (with tweaks, of course).


2. Also good is making one of the Enhancement Gems available to be farmed for.

Now for the bad... we may be here a while.
1. The difficulty is scaling poorly. The monsters, particularly the mini bosses, are harder to kill than mini bosses in fatal maps and hit harder than mini bosses in fatal. This might be related to the next point.
2. Only the skeleton mini bosses are armor breakable. In PWs, every mini boss is at least armor break able, even if they can't be stunned.
3. Immunity everywhere. Immune to slow, immune to stun, immune to agro draw. This makes playing a 1H tank usless in this event since they can't do their job, and with all the other immunities, the support/DPS can't fix (hold still) the mini bosses. Even some mobs are immune without being mini bosses, like the giants.
4. Unrewarding drops. We have PW level difficulty monsters (or higher if you pay attention to point 1), yet they drop blues and greens. On painful and excruciating, the minimum drop from a mini boss should be an extraordinary.
5. As said before, the excruciating difficulty is approximately equal to or more difficult than Fatal in the PWs, yet the drops are only "excruciating" level. This included andermant, and the quality of the enchantments. I don't like working harder for less, so after doing Excruciating with blues, I switched to normal with greens. This way, I'm not disappointed by the quality of the drops given that every monster died in one hit.
6. Some mini bosses aren't even "mini bosses." Despite their difficulty, many of the mini bosses don't count as mini bosses for Daily Quests. The main map has 7-10 mini bosses, but only the snake mini boss on the left side of the map counts as a mini boss.
7. There is no event related Daily Quest in the middle category. In the full moon and new moon events, you can get another boss item for beating that boss, which is really rewarding. This time, there is no incentive from the Daily Quest system to fight the event boss.
8. The side areas where you go to collect the medium/large quartz and do the daily event quests are not worth the bone coins spent getting in. We already talked about the crappy drops of items, which also applies to the side maps, but the amount of bone coins spent is not justified by the rewards from the event itself (the daily event quest or the quest items needed for the boss key).
9. The set items for this event. Could you have made them any more complicated and useless at the same time? With the enormous cool downs, the unnecessary complexity, and the underwhelming stats, I can't think of anyone farming this event for the items.
10. The other items from the event. Beyond just the set items, and with the exception of the gem/mount, none of the items are worth while. The mini event is not worth the effort when you don't even have the ability to log in at the right time to participate.
11. Inventory space wasting. With 5-8 currencies (depending if you want to count the quartz), this event hogs an insane amount of space.
12. On top of hogging space, having so many currencies makes it crazy complicated. One person commented (and I'm paraphrasing a little) that if you need a 5+ page guide to explain the event, then you have failed. Events should be reasonably self explanatory.
13. Mini event timing. Here is yet another example of unnecessary complexity and it seems to be universally hated. By having the mini event only available during specific times, it severely handicaps people's ability to participate. Many of the time windows occur while people are at work or asleep. When mini events are 2-4 days long, then they only need to have some availability sometime during the event. Most people play daily, but very few can play 24/7 without your Asian bot.
14. The grind. The grind associated with getting anything out of this event is mind numbing. We've already established that the side maps are a waste of bone coins and time, so the only option that players have if they want to get the only two decent items out of this event (the gem and the mount), and it is thousands of runs of the same map again and again and again to get even that.

Summary: I've earned less than 5k since the event since I've not been able to do more than 3 runs back to back without wanting to throw my mouse across the room. I've actually played less in the past 5 days than I've usually play in a single Saturday or Sunday. There are plenty of names I could give this event: "Dunes of Depression," "Dunes of Drudgery," "Dunes of Demotivation," "Dunes of Disappointment," "Dunes of Disgust," and I could go on and on. My biggest concern is that BP will totally ignore all the negative feedback and make similar alterations to the one last decent event left in the game: Dragan.

My suggestion: Fire the event content development team and find someone who understands what players want and care about. Events are going down hill rapidly and if something drastic isn't done soon, no event will be worth playing.

 

You made mistake and suffer for it.... I had a 5ms problem with net and server lost connection. Epilog: reconnect and Im in kinghill. So lost 300 coins for nothing. I was not in group (solo play) and still lost everything because "relog" fix. Nice work DSO

 

Actually, I wouldnt have guessed that leaving empty team results in teleport to city. It wasnt like that before, at least not in the PW normal maps... thats makes no sense. What can you cheat for by leaving your own team of 1 person...

 

Is it possible that the evergreen quest drops are better in a party? I feel like I'm getting 10+ drops when going in with a party as opposed to 7, 8 when I go solo. Perhaps just random chance due to small sample size.

 

Last step of ghost hunting has taken me 17 runs through the temple to get 59 out of 100 ancient bones. This is ridiculous. Not even sure if I want to finish - got a quiver of the wolf slayer on the other challenge quest!

 

It has been like that for the past several releases. In fact, I'm surprised you haven't come across it before. But, the sunny side is that you know better for next time.

 

I was off the game for 8 months) but I did play last month, and didnt notice it perhaps Ive never quit an empty group.

Anyway, I still see zero sense in this approach.

 

It makes "BigPoint Sense." If they can't figure out a fair way to handle the relog bug, they just took a cluster bomb to it and made the system so broke that it can't be abused.

 

I agree about what Baragain wrote in his post (and I think that is what many people here think).

Right now there is only one thing that I like about this event: read the negative post in the forum.
I think this was a good idea (new map, new quests, new items) but the result is a faillure

I forgot: I'm a bit disappointed that full moon event had to be postponed to give space to the "desolation event"

 

Wow I asked a guy in game and he told me that the second mini first 100 quest has a drop rate of around 15/run, so I thought it would at least be better than evergreen. I guess I was mistaken lol.