Dungeon Crawler Quest(Original Fantasy)

[Arkeus]

No more new ground then the first time we did a two man dungeon with two people or a three man dungeon with three.

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Actually, yes, more new grounds. As we first did a two man dungeons with two people after we had already done that dungeon and overlevelled dungeons that were twice as hard as that one, and we did the 3 man dungeon with three after we had already done a dungeon that had the exact same info from Divine Eye and then done the D-rank of that one.

Also, would you have wanted to do the Ash Grotto with three people were it the place Maya's companions had died?

Anyway, this is going in circle, so i'll take a break from this argument.

 

[redaeth]

Yeah, we aren't going to convince the other.

 

[Guile]

...You are actually saying "a°)We should not act in character?, b°) Possibly rubbing Maya's face in her trauma when we are not 100% the dungeon will be a stomp is cool", or am i misunderstanding you?

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I'm saying that, like usual, Yrs will couch whatever we vote for in Alice talk. So it won't be 'because it's interesting' when she sells it to Maya, it'll be whyever Al is going for it.

I feel that we can vote for just about anything and Yrs will take care of the ' in character' part.

 

[mrttao]

And you are overestimating them. With Sera and Shimah we are well suited to taking undead on. Sera is going to be strong against undead thanks to fire, she after all took out a vampire solo and she will be wielding lightning soon which is the strongest single target magic. Shimah is a perfect counter for status effects not to mention the many, many panacea we've picked up.

Graveyards are also not known for mile high cliffs.

There will probably be spawners. Undead are known for swarming. However we've handled spawners before. Even if they act like the bats in the Wailing Cavern maze where you have to bypass them instead of fighting... well we've done that too. Alice is perceptive. She'll figure things out.

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remember that the vampire she defeated was really low level and that it was a difficult battle for her where she ate a lot of potions
Also remember that a huge part of how we handle spawners is by us providing CC which won't be available here
incidentally. We might want to get a fire mage crystal for ourselves. its 300 gilder and we can swap it back to ice/water when not fighting undead

 

[Grosstoad]

Still have CC, though more of a SoS type than AoE status.

Anyway, not yet tomorrow.

 

[mrttao]

Still have CC, though more of a SoS type than AoE status.

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SoS?

 

[Grosstoad]

Save or Suck (Blind, Paralysis, Grappled, Sleep, etc.), in comparison to Save or Die (Disintegration, Death whatever, etc.), Dungeon and Dragons edition 3.5 unofficial terms.

 

[yrsillar]

I'm saying that, like usual, Yrs will couch whatever we vote for in Alice talk. So it won't be 'because it's interesting' when she sells it to Maya, it'll be whyever Al is going for it.

I feel that we can vote for just about anything and Yrs will take care of the ' in character' part.

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Thanks for the vote of confidence? I think? please don't take this statement as a challenge.

 

[mrttao]

Save or Suck (Blind, Paralysis, Grappled, Sleep, etc.), in comparison to Save or Die (Disintegration, Death whatever, etc.), Dungeon and Dragons edition 3.5 unofficial terms.

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I am familiar, I just didn't connect it to SoS
All our SoS spells that we have that are ice related and the undead are resistant to ice

 

[a2znut]

Aqua Prison is not ice related.

 

[mrttao]

Aqua Prison is not ice related.

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ok, true. but
1. undead don't drown
2. undead are high in strength
3. it can only hold one enemy at a time.
4. I did explicitly say CC as in Crowd Control rather then single target control.

 

[a2znut]

Fire more Aqua Prisons then, it's a shoot and forget.

 

[Falconis]

Remember that we can Aqua Prison and then freeze it for combo.
I believe that was mentioned as a possibility (especially since we have the race mod now)

 

[mrttao]

Fire more Aqua Prisons then, it's a shoot and forget.

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casting a second aqua prison dispels the first.

 

[Grosstoad]

It does?
+shrugs+
Well, take out the weak ones (archers, mages, clerics), then use acid darts, and let Sera do her Crowd Control (BURNINATING) instead?

Wait, why Undead anyway?

 

[mrttao]

Wait, why Undead anyway?

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we are discussing whether or not we should do undead for our next dungeon.

 

[a2znut]

casting a second aqua prison dispels the first.

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Where does it even say that?

 

[mrttao]

Where does it even say that?

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not in the description, but i remember we tried it once and that was the result. also this is why we never use it on more than one enemy at once

 

[a2znut]

not in the description, but i remember we tried it once and that was the result. also this is why we never use it on more than one enemy at once

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Where.
http://forum.questionablequesting.c...uest-original-fantasy.822/page-27#post-186727
http://forum.questionablequesting.c...uest-original-fantasy.822/page-29#post-190974
http://forum.questionablequesting.c...uest-original-fantasy.822/page-30#post-192958

There was not a single place where I read that it fizzles out when you use it again. It just seems that Alice never attempted to use it more than once ever.

 

[yrsillar]

It's more that Alice isn't one to blow her SP wad without good reason. She uses it to lock down key enemies. Also range limitations/priority of slapping slow on groups.

 

[a2znut]

Hai Yrsillar.

Are undead resistance/immune to ice as in D&D as mrttao speculates too? Or do ice make bones easier to break due to brittleness? Or neutral?

 

[Guile]

I believe it was implied that undead do resist Ice.

 

[yrsillar]

the enemies in Lost graveyard resist Ice, Maya stated this. Aqua prison will lock them down just fine if they don't have the strength to break it though.

 

[Goldenlima]

Did we lose some job points to our elementalist job somewhere? We have a total of 93 but I think first level of ice elemenalist was 35 points and adding that to 47 is 82. Did 11 points go missing somewhere or have I got something confused?

 

[yrsillar]

Huh... someone else mind adding that up as a double check? It's entirely possible I fudged the math at some point.

 

[redaeth]

We had a total of 94 JP from our various battles. So since we had Ice Elementalist from the start we are at 59/70

EDIT: First time I added it all together I accidentally got 104, oops. 94 is correct though.

EDIT the 2nd: Noted where we got Divine Eye and Water Elementalist for help.

EDIT the 3rd: Unless I am way off Water Magic should be at 32. Divine Eye should be at 77. I think I know where the lost points on Ice Elementalist went, they went to Divine Eye.

50 Experience
8 Job points
57 Gilder

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65 Experience
9 Job Points
38 Gilder

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Divine Eye GET!

60 Experience
8 Job Points
100 Gilder

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90 Experience
10 Job points
102 Gilder

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8 Experience
1JP
9 Gilder

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18 Experience
2 Job points
12 Gilder

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95 Experience
5 Job points
45 Gilder

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Failure!
You have fled the dungeon, and will receive neither items nor Gilder. You have still earned a fraction of the experience earned so far. Choose your dungeons wisely adventurer!
25 Experience
2 Job points

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Congratulations!
You have gained.
54 Experience
5 Job points
72 Gilder

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90 XP
12 Job Points
100 Gilder

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Water Elementalist Get

Congratulations
80 XP
10 Job Points
85 Gilder

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75 Experience
8 Job points
75 Gilder

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100 Experience
12 Job Points
105 Gilder

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25 Experience
2 Job points
35 Gilder

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[yrsillar]

I'll fix that in the morning then.

 

[mrttao]

It's more that Alice isn't one to blow her SP wad without good reason. She uses it to lock down key enemies. Also range limitations/priority of slapping slow on groups.

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It would seem I was wrong then, my apologies

 

[Arkeus]

yrsillar, for calculation purposes could we have the exp/Jp the 3-men group got from Goblin Glade D-rank, as well as what Shimah/Sera got from Ogre Den E-rank?

 

[Darkened]

I'm saying that, like usual, Yrs will couch whatever we vote for in Alice talk. So it won't be 'because it's interesting' when she sells it to Maya, it'll be whyever Al is going for it.

I feel that we can vote for just about anything and Yrs will take care of the ' in character' part.

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Sure, and when Maya freaks out says fuck off and pretty much everyone not Alice agrees with her, that will be entirely a response to whatever motivation Yrs gives Alice for trying this. We have shit charisma and this is the kind of thing that will require really good charisma to do well without a decent argument.

The argument against it is that this is a pointlessly cruel thing that tears at our party member's scab for really no reasons since we'll probably do it anyway a day later. Doing this gains us next to nothing besides fucking up our relationships.

Also, Alice is limited because Ice is weak in Graveyard, given that we're one dungeon away from D rank water magic (and only a little more away from C rank Ice elementalist and the best chance to swap our job and start grinding water elementalist up to C) it makes eminent sense to wait on Graveyard.

As I like the characters here, I'd rather not do that.

Beyond that, actually doing high end stuff, clearing dungeons, etc, requires we keep doing dungeons at E-S rank. Getting loot for our party requires doing stuff at E through S rank. Ashen Grotto in particular is great for Sera. If we go through Graveyard tomorrow, we're going to have:

Devil's Eye(10),Desecrated Fort(8), Tomb of Worms(10) for new dungeons, none of which looks to be immediately doable (Fort might be worth checking out but I strongly suspect it's a 5-man dungeon given the way it was talked up).

Ergo we can either take forever doing missions rather than getting competent enough to survive the big dangerous event coming at us (And also dropping the thing that's earned us positive attention from some of the most powerful people in the area). Or we can clear new tiers of old dungeons. Personally I find going back and doing easy dungeons after clearing hard ones to be pretty meh in terms of tension, so I'd prefer to clear the dungeons we're aiming to clear in rough order of difficulty.


Now, since I'm bored and don't feel like writing quite yet, let's do some number crunching about difficulty.

In practice, I suspect that

1: Dungeons at the same tier (Crystal Cave and Drake's Nest) are not necessarily perfectly equal. Some dungeons will be nastier despite their rank.
2. DIfferent parties will be more or less suited to different dungeons based on gear. Right now, for example, Shimah's gear makes Ashen Grotto a breeze.
3: Despite 1 and 2, it's still probably possible to roughly guess the average difficulty for a given dungeon, and extreme variance should be noticed either way by branded, ergo outliers will be easily identified.
4. Accordingly it is possible to make a party-neutralish ranking of dungeon difficulty by using some formula based on suggested party size, maximum level and potentially rank.
5. I probably don't have the numbers to do that yet (COME TO ME DIVINE EYE RANK D) so am just going to stick to trying to figure out how each factor seems to alter complexity.
6. Sample size is limited, but we can pin down these theories going forward. Each claim I'll make does have predictive power, ergo we can verify as best we can (allowing that dungeons deviate from the average and that our DPS will keep increasing by indeterminant amounts)
7. Going back and doing easy dungeons is the best way to keep checking how we're growing and how dungeon difficulty patterns seem to work.

Lastly, I'm proposing a notation of RANK/MAX LEVEL/RECCED PARTY SIZE for this, since it's easier to write than typing out every detail for each.

In that vein Goblin's Glade is an E/3/2 and a D/5/2 Lost Graveyard is an E/6/5.

So, what do we know?

Spoiler: Rank Info

http://forum.questionablequesting.c...uest-original-fantasy.822/page-12#post-165812 - Maya, generally the best at analysis, if the most cautious, refuses to do a C rank or higher until everyone's level 5.

First. Yes you can go straight to the D-rank Ogre Den. As long as Shimah is in your party at least. If you split up, only the person she goes with will be able to do so. I will note that D-ranks are more difficult though, and this little trick is... inadvisable at ranks higher than C.

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"D rank dungeons are more than a bit harder, enemies aren't just higher leveled, but they also have more abilities and use them more intelligently. I suppose it's not a problem since you two still have escape orbs…"" -http://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/dungeon-crawler-quest-original-fantasy.822/page-12#post-165812

Other quotes would be appreciated if anyone knows them.

Ergo, besides raised stats, I suspect that the prime effect of raising rank is better AI and more monster complexity. They use skills, teamwork, etc as a force multiplier.

In this sense, an E/8/4 vs a B/8/4, the latter should be far more difficult, but the monsters likely won't necessarily have more HP or attack.

In this sense, clearing E-A rank without skipping is advisable because you're trained for the dungeon with enemy and boss abilities and strategies being introduced incrementally. Running D rank lets you see the tells on a boss and gives you valuable intel regarding how to fight it. I imagine that using escape orbs multiple times is fairly standard for S rank dungeons where the first few attempts are likely exploratory, meant to find info and confirm strategies. S rank shouldn't come in till late teens at the earliest.

Spoiler: Ranks and levels

Given that, aside from EX dungeons (And the though of an EX dungeon with a level cap of 4-10 is terrifying) Goblin's Glade is probably about the LOWEST level progression of dungeons. (All dungeons besides the rule breakin Ex have a progression of E-S.)

Now, we know the first numbers in sequence are 3/5, but we don't know that there's a pattern or not.

3/5/7/9/11/13 would probably be the lowest, but the 5 is an unusual jump
3/5/8/11/14/17 would be slightly more realistic, but is probably still too low.

What this does say is that you're unlikely to see an S rank dungeon below level 17 when 200 gilder on an escape orb is a joke.

So then, I think that answers what we know about rank.

Let's move on to level. This is fairly simple, but hard to tell.

Spoiler: Analysis

Ranking the dungeons we've done purely in terms of level..

Goblin's Glade EWailing Cavern E/Ashen Grotto E
Ogre's Den D/Crystal Lake E
Wailing Cavern D/Drake's Nest E
Crystal Lake D

Commonalities are hard because these were done at scattered times.

Specifically the order was (party size, bonus boss spawns, and a suggestive difficulty going from Joke, Easy, Normal, challenging, Very hard, Defeated)

Goblin's Glade E (4 people, bonus, easy clear)
Wailing Cavern E (4 people, bonus, very hard) -normalish aside from bonus
Crystal Lake E (4 people, no bonus, very hard) - Boss took a while to burn down, as did other non-spiders
Ogre's Den D (4 people, bonus, very hard edging to defeat)- First dungeon of elite enemies. Very high HP. Challenging without bonus
Crystal Lake D (5 people, uncertain, defeated) DPS was too low.
Ogre's Den D again (5 people, no bonus, challenging) one room spawned a very tough fight. Party took significant damage from attacks.
Wailing Cavern D (5 people, bonus, very hard) normalish without bonus, maybe challenging.
Goblin's Glade E again (2 people, no bonus, joke) - didn't need to pot despite tanking.
Drake's Nest E (5 people, no bonus, challenging to very hard) slow on boss, went through 4 cycles, only Maya had enough DPS for dungeon.
Ashen Grotto E (3 people, no bonus, normal) enemies had very low damage, boss died quick (poisoned)

Looking at Ashen Grotto and Drake's Nest in comparison to Crystal Lake and Wailing Cavern it looks like very difficult became manageable but challenging and that normal became pretty easy as we leveled.

If we look at Ashen Grotto's recent clear, Drake's Nest, and Goblin's Glade, we can see that, (allowing for a big damage buff in Ashen) higher level meant a lot longer to clear. (Drake's Nest took a while, Ashen is noted as being over very quickly)

In comparison with Goblin's Glade, Wailing Cavern and Crystal Lake, again, Wailing Cavern went fairly okay and Crystal Lake enemies that weren't small endlessly spawning spiders took a while to kill.

To that end, I suspect that the chief effect of level is that enemy stats increase. Damage taken, and damage needed to give out rise. This is a bit hard to verify since our damage output has been rising consistently (Though the first set Ashen/Drake/Goblin's there had Al with the same configuration. The prior set had some changes that increased damage, meaning the pattern should have been more pronounced if we hadn't gotten geared up.

So then, party size.

Spoiler: Party Size

Breaking finished dungeons up again, we get
1- Nope
2- Goblin's Glade, Ogre's Den
3- Wailing Cavern, Ashen Grotto
4- Crystal Lake, Drake's Nest
5- None yet

Goblin's Glade and Ogre's Den are simple straightforward romps. Kill the enemies and keep moving.

Wailing Cavern and Ashen Grotto added a few features to this. Wailing Cavern's maze and confusion and Ashen Grotto had damaging floors and enemies that attacked random party members.

Crystal Lake had rooms that ran into each other, forcing the party to adapt for some of the hardest fights of the dungeon, enemies resistant to many kinds of damage and spawners. It paired nastyish enemies up with large numbers of weaklings.

Drake Nest featured a lot of environmental hazards (Cliffs) as well as enemies particularly suited to take advantage of this. Again enemies had diversified roles with healers and buffers accompanying weak enemies. The dungeon had events like the egg smashing rather than only straight fights and the boss adopted a complex strategy.

This leads me to think that party size again leads to greater enemy cooperation and dungeon sophistication rather than more damage or enemies on the whole. Exceptions may exist, but it seems like dungeons that require larger party sizes tend to be far more complex.

In summation, I think that rank and party size recommendation are fairly similar in function. Increasing either leads to increased enemy strategies and enemies with more diverse skills.

However, I suspect that party size alone indicates a more complex dungeon layout. Ogre's Den remained largely the same structure that we saw in the 2 man goblin glade. Hence, running low ranks tells you what to expect (though surprises likely exist.)

By contrast, level is primarily going to change enemy damage and HP.

In that end, I suspect that the E/6/5 Lost Graveyard will have enemies that are generally weaker than the E/7/4 Drake's Nest, but will increase complexity by an order of magnitude.

As our DPS was currently, aside from Maya whose since upgraded, low for Drake's Nest, And Al's best element (and accompanying slow effect) are likely to be resisted, this will be harder than it might appear in terms of tanking the dungeon.

Likewise, we can't guarantee the ability to reinforce Anshelm in the dungeon. On the other hand, Sera's fire skills will shine, though her recent gear upgrade means she might steal Al's job of stealing enemy attention. At least Shimah's used to someone doing it, but if/when we do it, she should be prepared to be looking at Sera's HP and keeping that up more than she's paying attention to Al.

Likewise, getting level 5, the elementalist and warrrior passive skills (Which may be party buffs that make this thing easier) Divine Eye at D rank and Water Elementalist at D, in addition to a second accessory slot to help Anshelm better resist whatever enemies use there, will make the dungeon far far more manageable. We'll also likely be backing up Al with Wind Magic at that point, making this even more likely to work well.

While this diversification of skills will make us better at everything, it seems more likely to help with managing the complexity of a 5 man dungeon than it would help in dealing with higher numbers a la Crystal Lake D's level 9.

In the interest of better guide-writing and better planning, I'd suggest we try to find a high level adventurer in the near future (or at least higher level) and then ask them about such patterns.