Dungeons Improved Dungeons - 1.20 Edition!

I made a suggestion with my thoughts on fixing dungeons around this time last year, but with some of the new changes being made I think now is a good time for me to update that suggestion with some new ideas and fix some of the mistakes I made.

This suggestion will be broken into different sections broken up by spoiler tags. This will be a long post, so feel free to skip sections which you don't find interesting, however if you're only going to read one thing, I would recommend you read the first section. Here's a general break down of what each section will be about;

Section 1 - Current Issues with Dungeons
Section 2 - Changes to Getting Broken Keys
Section 3 - Changes to Unlocking the Forgery Dungeons
Section 4 - Changes to Dungeon Layouts
Section 5 - Changes to Dungeon Rewards, Dungeon Shop and the Removal of Fragments

Spoiler: Current Issues with Dungeons

Current Issues with Dungeons
As of 1.19, dungeons are a fairly essential part of the endgame. Some dungeons have extremely powerful items which make them worth running 8+ times, others give a lot of XP as a reward and are great for leveling. There's a lot to love about dungeons, but they also have a whole lot of problems which stop them from being used as anything beyond free XP in dungeon parties.

I would say the first real issue is the lack of difficulty scaling. I know in 1.20 forgery dungeons are getting difficulty scaling, but it might be nice to have that for every other dungeon too. I would love it if I had some reason to run Fallen Factory beyond the fact that it's the best dungeon in the game (hot take, I know). What they've done with the corrupted dungeons is a good start, but I hope it's just that, a start. I've complained about this a lot in my last post as well as other threads so I won't go any further into this issue from here.

Putting that aside, I think the first real problem is getting keys. I think we can all admit, getting broken keys in bulk is a huge pain. As of 1.19, there are two ways to do it; Hunt the guardians or buy them on the market. The first option is extremely grindy and barely yields any keys (depending on the dungeon) and the second option requires you to pay relatively large sums of money for a key, which is fine if you only need a couple but can be a little much if you want to run an endgame dungeon 8+ times just for XP.

The second part to keys is runes. In my opinion, grinding runes is far easier then grinding keys and the forgery chest might make this even easier, so I don't have much to say about this beyond the fact that Tol runes are a bit on the expensive side, it might be nice if the conversion from Nii or Uth was a little more friendly/if the cost of keys was dropped a little bit.

The next issue I have is with the lack of any meaningful activities associated with the forgery dungeons. Every normal dungeon has a quest associated with it, why shouldn't the forgery dungeons?

My next set of issues are based on what you experience once you actually enter the dungeon. Some dungeons are so short and have nothing interesting in them when they have so much potential to be great, especially EO which had some awesome challenges in the quest leading up to it and just completely fell short in its execution.

Finally, I think the dungeon shop is just awful. Some of the items are good, but because of the way dungeons pay out rewards, it's extremely grindy to get anything good out of them, and once you do there's no reason to keep running most dungeons. The forgery chest tries to fix this problem, but it fails because it doesn't give you a way to use the dungeon rewards you already have, it just gives you more generic drops which you probably don't need.

Spoiler: Changes to Getting Broken Keys

Changes to Getting Broken Keys
This suggestion is really more of a minor change then anything. With the addition of the forgery chest, it's become extremely important that the player has the ability to collect every type of key in a reasonable quantity. Sure you could farm or buy them, but I think a nice QOL change would be to add broken keys into the daily login bonus for players at level 100+. If each day gave the player a broken key, on average they could complete the forgery chest once a week for free* (you still need the runes and to run the dungeons themselves).

This might be a bit of a controversial way to start off, but I think it would be a good change in the long run. Since there isn't too much you can buy after a single run, giving players a single key won't really drop the value of keys since people who need drops will still be buying them, plus demand will be up from people who want to grind the chest so adding a free way to get keys for logging in would probably help keep the prices at a reasonable level for people who just want to go in and get a single item.

There are a few ways to implement something like this, it could be random, a key could be assigned to each day (or in a cycle if there are more than 7), or it could be a random key but it's guaranteed you get at least/only one key per day. There are a lot of ways to implement a system like this so I'm curious what people think, but I do think a system like this would be extremely good to have to encourage people to use the forgery chest, as well as to give players a reason to log in every day.

Spoiler: Changes to Unlocking the Forgery Dungeons

Changes to unlocking the Forgery Dungeons
I think it's hard to argue against the notion that unlocking forgery dungeons is extremely anticlimactic. For every other dungeon, you go through a quest which gives you lore into what you're getting yourself into, then you hit level 70, find the forgery and boom, 7 more dungeons, just like that. There's no substance to it. Back when they were added, I think the idea was increase the number of dungeons in a way which took a lot less effort to make so there could be more content, but I think we're at the point in the game where there needs to be some connection to the rest of the game for these dungeons to feel exciting.

My suggestion here is to add a quest to the forgery which requires you to visit every old dungeon and activate some sort of ritual which allows transportation to that part of the corrupted world through the forgery. It might sound tedious and pointless, but I think having some sort of task which ties the corrupted dungeons to the real ones would go a long way in developing the lore of the corrupted dungeons and the forgery, while also making the process of unlocking the corrupted dungeons a little more eventful. I imagine the quest would be in line with TOL or the Qira hive, where you start at (in this case) level 70 when you reach the Forgery and you revisit the old dungeons when you reach the level to unlock the corrupted versions. Like TOL and the Qira hive, you could complete the entire quest in one sitting if you wanted to go through the grind (and try to take on enough of Corkus to reach FF at level 70 for CFF which might be a little difficult), but like Qira hive you would get reduced XP for not finishing it at the right level (in this case probably 102 or 103).

Spoiler: Changes to Dungeon Layouts

Changes to the Dungeon Layouts
Some dungeons are really good, and some are really lame, which sucks because a lot of the lame dungeons have the best drops (looking at you, EO). I think we can all agree, dungeons would be a lot more fun to run multiple times if they had more interesting and unique rooms beyond kill 20 of [insert themed mob here]. The solution is simple, add some of the puzzles from the dungeon quest into the dungeon itself.

The best example of a bad dungeon, as I mentioned before, is EO. The boss might be alright, but everything leading up to it is just garbage. Here's a breakdown;

Spoiler: What EO Is Now

Room 1: Some weird glass room with a snow theme where you kill ghosts or something? a little weird for the EO, I would think it would be more fitting in the ice dungeon, or a little more thematic if it looked like Lutho pre and post Dernification...

Room 2: Jump on a horse and just go in a straight line, really interesting stuff. I fell off once and it was annoying to get back but other then that it looks cool so I guess it's fine filler.

Room 3: Just like, a giant gauntlet of fighting 5 mini bosses? Why? You;re literally about to spend like 10 min fighting one massive boss, why do you need a bunch of little bosses first?

Room 4: I actually like the invisible parkour. Nice room, nice theming given the boss is an all seeing eye, actually good room unlike the previous 3.

Room 5: Just a long boss fight.

Wow, really interesting dungeon right? Wrong, it's awful and most of the rooms don't even make sense. For a dungeon so focused on the boss, you would assume the rest of the rooms would be parkour and stuff to balance it out but SIKE, it's just like 20 min of straight fighting with a little bit of easy parkour thrown in to mix things up a little. I know I'm just talking about EO right now, but basically every dungeon minus FF, UR and maybe SST has similar problems.

In my mind, the easiest fix is to just remove/remake some of the less useful rooms and replace them with better rooms, so taking EO as an example, my easy fix would be this;

Spoiler: What EO Could Be

Room 1: Replace the ice with one half black and white current Lutho styling and the other half with grassy green Lutho styling. It would play nicely into the theme of sight as you look into the past and the present, which would also play into some of the lore of Lutho too.

Room 2: Keep this I guess, looks kinda cool and doesn't really take anything away from the dungeon.

Room 3: An elytra section like in the pre-req. quest. Make it more difficult then the one in the quest, maybe give it three parts with checkpoints like the parkour and have loops you need to fly through spiraling down into a giant eye or something, idk.

Room 4: Use the wall bouncing slime parkour and voidholes in tandum to create something really cool, where you're working your way upwards by bouncing and you're choosing a path by taking void holes. Could integrate the previous room 3 into the mix where some holes take you to a mini boss room so if you want to do more fighting you can, or if you want to bounce you can do that instead.

Room 5: Previous room 4, it's perfect as is if we're being as lazy as possible.

Room 6: Still just a long boss fight, maybe add more minigames like the falling eyes and the beams to spice things up.

Now I don't know about you, but the second one sounds a whole lot more interesting and fun then the first and it wouldn't take much work to do. Again, that's just for EO, but the same process can be applied to most dungeons in order to make them more fun and interesting.

That being said, there is another way to make dungeons better, and one I personally prefer, though it'll take a whole lot more work; branching paths in dungeons. The idea here is to make it so you can skip rooms in dungeons if you're really good or have high prof levels. Maybe there's a boulder in a token room and if you can remove it with a pickaxe you can skip the token room, or maybe if you're really good at parkour you can take a hidden branch which lets you skip a mini boss or something. There's a whole lot of potential here, but adding these ideas would let players chose their difficulty. A really skilled player could chose to do a few, hard sections where as a not so skilled player could take the easy path which would take longer, but be a lot easier and less risky. Choice is something dungeons really lack right now and I think it would be a massive improvement if some choice was added into the mix.

Spoiler: Changes to Dungeon Rewards, Dungeon Shop and the Removal of Fragments

Changes to Dungeon Rewards, Dungeon Shop and the Removal of Fragments
I like to save my biggest problems for last, so here it goes. There are three parts to to my solution to this issue; Remove dungeon fragments, re-balance shop prices and token quantities and add consumables to the shop.

Dungeon fragments were a cool idea at first, but in reality, fragments have almost no use. In 1.18 they added tools to give them some use, but once you have all the tools you need, only a small handful of dungeons actually give you something to do with them and even then, it's just overpriced skill pots and powders. Another issue is that we're up to 15 dungeons now, each with a token and a fragment for a total of 30 different items you need to keep track of, along with 15 keys, 6 broken keys and 3 runes. Dungeons have way, way too many items associated with them and removing fragments would at least help solve the storage problem some people have.

Interestingly, dungeon tokens actually have the exact opposite problem compared to the intention of fragments, where once you have bought every dungeon item they have no use since you don't tend to need multiple of the same dungeon item.

This leads into my solution for this issue, merge fragments into tokens and just give 3 tokens per dungeon run. This solves the issue of running out stuff to buy since once you've bought all the armor and weapons, you can spend the same currency on consumable items which already exist in the shops, and some new ones which I'll get to later. It also saves a lot of space in the players bank and makes adding more dungeons in the future less consuming of bank space which is always a good thing.

With that out of the way, we have a new problem since shop prices would be completely messed up. To solve this, I would suggest doubling the prices on all existing items. Since I previously suggested getting 3 tokens per run, there could be an argument made for tripling the prices, but I figure since you can't buy tools with fragments anymore, if you wanted them you would still be running the same number of times to get all the gear you want.

Finally, here's my big fix for dungeons and my idea of how to gives players a reason to run dungeons again; adding a second dungeon merchant who only sells consumable items. With this change, there wouldn't just be a single merchant, there would be a Artifact merchant and a Consumable merchant who would each sell items which could be bought with dungeon tokens.

The artifact merchant would be essentially what we have now. Their purpose would be to sell any items which are considered to be armor, weapons, accessories, tools or horses. I still think it would be nice if they all sold an LI style accessory too, but I'll save that for another updated suggestion. Basically, if you only need one of the item, they're the one to go to.

The consumable merchant is exactly what you would expect them to be. They would be the ones selling anything you need more then one of, including skill potions and powders, as well as new stuff like themed crafting ingredients, foods and potions, as well as potentially profession and combat XP scrolls to make leveling faster, or in the case of professions, tolerable. My suggestion would be to have at least one food, one potion and 2 crafting ingredients, one powerful 3* sharing the same name as the token which costs at least 3 tokens, maybe even 9-12 and one 1* or 2*, based on the theme of the dungeon, which you get 3-5 of per token which would be more of a source of items to level profs rather then be extremely powerful on their own.

With all three of these solutions working together, players would gain a reason to run dungeons even after they bought every artifact and they would have an incentive to do it beyond XP as they could get powerful items for crafting and leveling professions, or at the very least some sort of buff potion or food which can help out during tough boss fights or make grinding another dungeon easier.

Thanks for reading, if you have any feedback or ideas on what I can add or change, let me know and I'll see what I can do. I'll list any changes I made and credits to the people who suggest them below here.

dr_carlos - Pointed out that I never really explained the quest for unlocking the forgery dungeon, added a bit of an explanation to give a better idea of what I have in mind. Thanks!

 

same

 

This is really interesting.
I agree with most things, except:

I think they are a bit underpriced personally, but they're only 4 Nii Runes which you can get from 2-4 Nii Guardians which have high spawn rates.

And I have a question,

This is a good idea, but the forgery is unlocked at 70 and if CFF is added, this wouldn't work.
It would work with every other dungeon though.

 

It sounds cheap when you phrase it like that, but considering FGG will probably take at least 2 Tol runes per run, that's killing on average 3 nii guardians when the earlier dungeons require 0.5-1 kill each. I don't think it's that bad, but once we get to CFF and it's around 4-5 kills per run that's where I think I'll start taking issue with the cost. I do want to clarify that I don't really think it's a problem worth solving yet, but I do think it's something to maybe worry about. It really, really depends on how many runes and of what type the forgery chest give

As for the forgery unlocking at 70, you're totally right and I clearly didn't say this properly in the post so that's on me. In my mind the quest would be a staged quest like TOL or the Qira Hive where the idea is you come back when you reach the level required to unlock the pillar or do whatever the quest requires. You wouldn't want to do it all in one shot at that level, you would probably want to travel back around the world to lower level areas as you need to. I guess you probably could do it all at 70 since you can technically go to Corkus at that point, but you can do the same with TOL and Qira hive so I guess it isn't really an issue.

Thanks for the feedback!

 

Okay, but shouldn't it get harder for higher-level dungeons?
CUR needs 1 Tol Rune which is 4 Nii (CLS Cost + 1 Nii), so basically what the cost of CSST should be.

So with the quest, it would be do one part and unlock its corrupted version?
Then do the next and unlock the next corrupted one?

 

I agree it should be harder, and you're probably right that it's fine, I just personally think it's not going to be worth it for the forgery chest since it's so much more expensive to do compared to the 7 cheapest dungeons. Before the Forgery chest it wasn't really an issue, but with level scaling and a reason to do more then the highest level dungeon I feel like even a slight increase in price will make it much less useful for collecting rewards. That being said, I don't really have any good arguments here, but I don't think my opinion is going to change until we see how good the forgery chest is, because the better it is the more I'll worry about the price of the keys.

As for the quest, that's what I was thinking but I'm totally up to hearing suggestions. I wanted the quest to tie into the original dungeons somehow so I just came up with something simple and easily applicable to every dungeon, but if you have any other ideas I would love to hear it!

 

Okay, fair point.
I still think the cost should go up slightly, but yeah, maybe the cost shouldn't be as high.
A fix would be scaling the cost somehow.

The quest is a really good idea, and I do like how it addresses the problem of The Forgery being ultra-random.

 

You understand that EO wasn't meant to have a lot of dungeon stuff, it was more the boss fight...... The whole theme of EO is THE EYE, not the dungeon. So EO is a bad example bc it was made to be different than your standard dungeon. Other than that i think everything here is really valid.

 

I do understand that, but that's no excuse for still being awful. For a dungeon where half of it is a boss fight, it would only make sense that the other half doesn't involve fighting to keep it balanced, plus it would set the mood a lot better since I think a calm before the storm would be really good for the theming of boss fight like that. I would also go as far as to say the 3x3 mini boss room could probably be a boss concept its self, so having that instead of either an elytra room or a slime bounce room is just a bad choice.

 

I think one idea to do with difficulty scaling would be to have all dungeons scale difficulty based on how many players are in them. For example, a dungeon would be at it's normal difficulty when there say 1-3 players, it would be slightly harder with 4-6, and an giant dungeon party might not only make the mobs harder but specifically cater the boss to be fought by large groups of players by giving it abilities and possibly even entire phases that only spawn when in a party of say 20+ players (I have no idea how big dungeon parties normally are so this number could be entirely off but I think you get the picture).

 

I do agree, but I also think that in their current form, dungeons just aren't really built to support that. There is actually one dungeon which does that, EO, but the only change is how often it spams spells which at 4+ players makes it really dumb since wretches spawn every couple seconds and it keeps shooting out it's death beam. I think if some dungeons were reworked to have more team based design I could get behind making them more difficult sections in them, but the issue with difficulty scaling on bosses themselves is the issue of how damage works in Wynn and the fact that the only real way to make something more difficult is to make it do more damage or spam spells more often. That being said, Raids might change my mind and if that happens, I'll probably be more supportive of raid mechanics in dungeons.

 

I love EO actually. I think all of the rooms are designed well and they are different than other dungeons. Personally I think EO is the best dungeon (exept for Fallen Factory)

________________________________

rly? EO is awful?
Its the only real challenge (if we forget about LI for a moment) and its kinda cool how ppl come together to beat the eye... idk I like it a lot

 

I think you got my point based on what you said since the only part of it you mentioned is the eye, since not a single other part of it (maybe not including the parkour) is notable. EO isn't bad because the boss is bad (if that was the only requirement for a good dungeon every other dungeon would be awful), EO is bad because the eye is the only part (again not including the parkour) which isn't bad. A decent boss and tiny section of parkour do not make for a good dungeon on their own and the addition of the other rooms just makes the whole thing worse.

 

I like the other tooms too tbh
O_o

 

You're entirely entitled to your opinion, but the other rooms are just fighting easy mobs for the sake of fighting,

 

I agree. The only way to make bosses harder to fit multiplayer that I can think of while also not making them just annoying is to give them different spells that are more challenging, like totem or aura.

 

If you really think about it, like 50% of all dungeons is just killing easy mobs/minibosses
DS - 1/2 tokens
IP - 2/5 tokens
LS - 2/3 token (including boss)
UC - 1/6 tokens (1/3 for CUC cause of boss)
SST -1/3 tokens (CSST is better for leveling that CUC)
IB - 3/7 tokens (worst dungeon)
UR - 1/3 tokens
GG - 1/7 tokens (cannon minigame is amazing but super easy)
FF - 4/7 tokens (the boss fight makes you get like a million tokens)
EO - 1/2 tokens
I didn’t count some rooms (transition rooms) with this. Also I may have miscounted some things.
Averaged out it is about 40.42% of all dungeons (41.40% percent with corrupted) are tokens rooms.
EO is pretty high up but then again FF is the 2nd highest % of token rooms (below LS).
Galleons graveyards is probably doing the best in terms of token rooms (i didnt count armored pirate as a miniboss room cause its not a straight miniboss fight its more of a mechanic)
Personally I think EO is a pretty good dungeon and calling it bad for being half tokens doesn’t really fit

 

I never said EO was bad because it was half token rooms, don't know why you think that's why I thought it was bad given all the praise I've given to FF but I'll address what you said anyways.

I said this before, but I think it needs to be repeated, but when the whole point of a dungeon is a boss fight, it doesn't make sense to make you fight your way to get there. It makes literally no sense from a gameplay perspective since it's just mindless fighting, or a lore perspective since the eye wants to fight you so why would it make getting an audience with it hard. I should also make this clear, if the whole dungeon was just the door opening and the boss I would have absolutely no issues with the dungeon at all, my problem is solely with what comes before the fight, not with the fight itself.

Next, your math is just so wrong for so many reasons, but mainly because it doesn't even try to take into account the severity of the token room. FF has a lot of token rooms, but the dungeon is just really long in general, not because of the tokens but because FF easily has the single longest section parkour of any dungeon with the clockwork gears, probably at least twice as long as the next closest PLUS it has the conveyer section which I wouldn't really call parkour but it's also not even remotely combat. The token rooms in FF are also so much faster then the ones in EO, one of the three only requires 4 kills, the first is only 22 (which you can do as soon as you spawn in if you have high DPS, one requires 16 regular and one special, and then there's just the preboss which to be fair is a grind but that grind plus the boss fight is still a shorter fight then the eye. FF and EO take fairly close to the same amount of time (EO is probably a little faster), but so much less of the time in FF is spend fighting compared to EO.

Also, just look at the wiki page for EO, even it says the dungeon is 80% combat (ff doesn't have a rating but I would put it closer to 60%, 70% max) which is only lower then CSST (which is really only because there's a 50% chance you get an extra token room) at 85% and would probably be tied with CLS (which is a very special case) if it had a rating.

My whole reason for saying EO is bad also has nothing to do with token rooms in general so bringing up the count doesn't really mater at all, my issue is with the balance. If it takes me 20 min to do EO, I'm realistically spending 18-19 min in combat since the parkour is baby easy and the horse ramp is literally a nothing room which is my problem with EO. I love FF because the atmosphere is really nice, the parkour is really fun and the token rooms are an easy grind between the really fun parts. FF also managed to make the token rooms fun by making the grind mobs super weak so you can kill them insanely easily, even at level. I love (C)UR because the parkour is a lot of fun and 2 of the three combat rooms feature some sort of gimmick which makes it interesting. EO doesn't have any of that, it's just requires you to kill 5 minibosses in a row, right before killing a really long and tedious boss. Sure you get some choice in the element for 3 of the 5 fights, but that doesn't really change the fact that it's both a time consuming and mindless grind, compared to the others which are either one or the other.

Token rooms don't make a dungeon bad, bad token rooms make a dungeon bad and when half the dungeon is bad token rooms, the dungeon is bad. If you disagree, that's fine, but I've run EO enough times now (I have all the T12 tools, 8/9 times were alone) to say my mind is made up and there isn't any new information that will convince me otherwise. I've beaten every dungeon and I strongly believe EO easily the worst when you exclude the boss (which was my whole entire point if you read what I originally wrote).