AstralCodex
Member
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Sigh... This is going to be a bit rambly, so strap in. This was by far my least favorite Inn release since I came back to DragonFable in late 2017, even beating out the much maligned Pandora's Gauntlet release. In many ways, it feels like the complete opposite of what the Inn is supposed to be in my mind. To me, the Inn is supposed to primarily test players in terms of strategy, not grind. Many other parts of DF are about doing the same easy task over and over again - getting good gear from quests is basically this, and wars are definitely this. The Inn is unique because it challenges players to come up with a clever strategy to beat a boss that has unique mechanics. It's not supposed to be more of the same grind. I think the way the quest is setup means that there couldn't have been a difficult boss with complicated or interesting mechanics. No one enjoys dying after 80 rooms to a boss with complicated or obscure mechanics. This meant that the boss is easily defeated with the much maligned Chaosweaver + Guests, Techno + Guests, or basically any offensive class (+ guests if you want). Guests are also encouraged by the fact that the mooks are so large, making them hard to 1-turn reliably. To me, the main conceptual difficulty this week was realizing that you could use high hitcount trinket skills with Quadstaff or Blade of Awe to allow for MP regeneration on classes without MP regen. Another reason I enjoyed the inn (and I suspect many others do) is trying out a variety of niche strategies on a boss. However, this quest doesn't allow for that either, due to the boss being preceded by the dungeon crawl. As noted in the Pandora Gauntlet Post Mortem, a lack of the ability to experiment can be really bad from a player interest perspective. So the result is a quest that can feel more like a slog than an actual inn challenge. After all, 100 rooms without a healing pad is not a challenge, let alone 100 rooms with potions sprinkled around and with guests in their current state. That being said, I would've been fine with the release, if we didn't have to do the quest so many times. To get every piece of DeathKnight gear from this quest, you need 33 relic pieces. To unlock the customization, you need an additional 10 relic pieces. This means you need 43 pieces total. As of now, I've completed 7 runs of the quest, netting 15 relics total and taking me a bit under two hours or so. From talking to other players on discord, I was unlucky with the chests, but it seems that on average, you do get fewer than 3 relic pieces per run. At my current rate, with optimal endgame gear and guests and Chaosweaver and all that, it looks like it'll take almost three hours to get the remaining relic pieces, meaning I'll have spent five hours at the end of it to get all the items from today's release, basically just grinding away at a quest in a similar fashion to farming for random resistance gear from quests. To put this five hours in perspective, getting C&F's cosmetic weapon took me maybe an hour and twenty minutes tops. Farming Pandora for Elpis and C7, assuming you never get the drop, takes maybe an hour or so (though it depends on if you have DC/SO classes). The closest grind in recent memory is Exalted Apotheosis, but that grind consisted of five different releases featuring 6 different bosses and 6 mini bosses, thereby having a ton of variety. Timetorn Matrix and Togs are the only grind in the Inn that exceed today's release in grind difficulty, but both were relatively early in the Inn's release, and Togs has the defense of requiring new strategies as the Togs get harder and also allowing for easy experimentation. (And arguably, Timetorn Matrix has the defense that it's the *first* grind in the inn, as well as having the first 1000 room dungeon.) tl;dr: It's not the least enjoyable thing in the world, but it falls far short from the high standard that most Inn releases hit due to not challenging players strategically, Zeclem being hard to experiment with, and being quite long.
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