How to Rewrite Tower of Ascension

ToA's got a lot of problems. It's Qira Hive, but worse in every way. Here's a full list:

• Monsters bad. 2.1 will hopefully fix this, but I'm not sure, because I can't access the beta. Bosses not the best either.
• The lore's really crappy. The levels have rudimentary themes, but they're broken a lot (for instance, Floor 6, the mechanical/Corkian floor, has random bugs and witches in it). Other than a Secret Discovery revealing that ToA's crystal is a Cosmic meteor, and another discovery revealing that its Death isn't the real Death, we get basically no lore about anything in it.
• You need to constantly revisit it, and it's inconvenient. Lusuco is really far from basically anything important - Nesaak's off the beaten path already, and Lusuco's worse. Besides, ToA opens right when the game starts to shift focus to Gavel rather than Wynn (made extreme in current updates since Wynn hasn't had a real content update in a while - it's had spot-patches and a lot of build improvements, but not the full revamp like Gavel that it kind of needs), and by the time you can finish it, it's basically a footnote.
• Rewards are bad. Your reward for coming back all those times, every 5-10 levels, is the Champion's armor set, which isn't particularly good and gets outclassed quickly since you're going to still be leveling up in Gavel. Barely even worth going back. You also don't get any rewards until Level 75, other than a smattering of mob XP (which rapidly declines in value outside of grind spots once you hit the midgame), incentivising you to get the whole thing done in one go, probably after completing Flight in Distress.
• Mechanics are obviously very old. The rooms still run on tokens, and constantly teleport you to new areas. Mob AIs are all the same (Ranged or Melee with the occasional spell).

My proposed solutions.

• Full lore rewrite. Deusphage reacts to this with a , which is understandable. But Qira Hive works in part because the lore and characters are good and got work put into them. Qira and Gale are the most present characters (because they do stuff outside of being fought), but all the characters are still sort of there. Also, Selvut went and wrote the Qira has a Cold/Hive Drabbles series, which did a lot as well. Focus a bit on that Ascension thing.
• Change how the floors work. Remove the dropped tokens, except from bosses. (The boss tokens could be specifically implied to be Cosmic shards, with unique item lore for each token.) Every floor is an outright rush - you're in a single room, and the room will spawn mobs until you have killed 10, at which point it starts spawning the next type of mob. At the end, after 9 mob types have been felled, the crystal (moved to the center of the arena) activates and allows you to go to the boss room.
• As an addendum to the above, Floor 7 could be a boss rush, where you fight buffed versions of the previous bosses (with additional attacks) until you get to Death, who summons the bosses again around halfway through.
• You should be given a free Lusuco teleport scroll when you clear Floor 1 as a nudge to the player that you're intended to use those to return to the area. I'd also suggest, after, say, Floor 2, that you be given a one-way fast-travel back to Detlas.

Spoiler: Quest Progression

(This might be tricky to execute properly. In the full idealistic vision, not only does the quest have a plot which can change significantly depending on your actions, but it would also take into account other quests the player's completed - IE you'll be recognised for defeating CoW near the end if you've done TotL, or for your actions in WynnEx.)


Firstly, you aren't the only person scaling the Tower. A significant part of the quest revolves around the other contestants who are trying to scale the Tower along with you. They'll disrupt the sequence, alter the plot, and also dispense a hekin' ton of Lore.

Ankou is the Voice of the Tower. He has journeyed across the world to find extraordinary specimens and bring them to the Tower for... unknown purposes. Recently, he's called a Tournament of Ascension, where heroes from across the land of Wynn come to the Tower to try to scale it.

When you arrive at the Tower, having heard the call while journeying through Nesaak (possibly specifically after completing an updated, not-crap Bob's Lost Soul), you find that there's already a significant camp established outside the Tower. Here, you can talk to some of the contestants, including a couple who run shops. (Well, maybe you can't talk to the merchants. I don't think Wynn can do that yet, given how you don't buy potions from Nami the Healer after Lava Springs.) After this, you go in to speak to Ankou, who sends you to the first floor.


The floor bosses will change depending on your actions. A regular floor boss (like Snow Bear or Argaddon) is the default, but they will occasionally be replaced by contestants depending on how you goad them during the between-floor segments.

After defeating each floor, you talk to the contestants and advance the plot outside of the Tower. I don't know how feasible it is, but the idea is that, depending on how the contestants interact with you and each other (mainly you), they'll show up during combat in some form. For instance, if you help the contestant who has serious self-worth issues, he actually gets to the floor boss before you and defeats it, so you have to fight and defeat him. If you irritate a certain contestant, they'll appear in the middle of a floor and you'll have to fight them while also fending off the floor's proper enemies. As the quest goes on, the social circle gets downright murderous.

The rewards for defeating each floor are focused on utility or uniqueness. Major IDs are very common among the items and probably allow you to partially replicate the boss's fighting style or attacks. If the enemy boss is a contestant, you get an inversion of the Hive's rewards scheme - you get to have all the items associated with the contestant. In return, there's not as many of them, and they aren't extraordinarily powerful individually, but designed to synergise with each other.

Alternatively, the rewards for each floor, in keeping with an ascension motif, could be a modular item that you upgrade as you go. You're able to customise the item to fit your playstyle, and it remains useful for the entire game (possibly being an inventory item like the Raid charms, or some sort of Aspect-like item). You could hybridise this with the first suggestion by having the modular item upgrade via defeating regular bosses, and the utility items and contestant sets being gained by defeating contestant bosses, so you have to navigate the contestant situation carefully to get the correct type of boss.

Or, as a third alternative, contestant bosses will drop items based on a build (lifesteal, tstack, tank, etc.) while regular bosses will drop items based on an element (ice, tech, dark, etc.).


Gameplay is thus a basic loop: fight through floor, defeat boss, speak to contestants, get new item, leave, come back when higher level, and fight through floor again. Floors have concrete themes that aren't deviated from (no Crumbling Bones in my tech floor), and which are mirrored in the upgrade components, equipment items, and/or utility items you receive from clearing the floor.

The battle against Death would probably feature Death summoning ghosts of the bosses you fought regardless of who they were (contestant or regular floor boss). Death might also be a chatty opponent, delivering plot reveals or trying to entice you to become a permanent resident of the Tower, replacing one of the floor leaders or something. Death herself mostly won't directly fight - she's just a necromancer, more-or-less.


This would be very difficult to implement, I think, but would be very cool if it was successfully pulled off and would make this a very memorable quest, even if the floor monsters weren't updated much outside the bosses.

Spoiler: Lore Proposal

The Tower of Ascension is semi-sentient and has mysterious motives. Death claims to be the ruler of the Tower, but she's basically just a powerful servant, like Ankou or Lari. The only concrete details about the Tower are that:

• It possesses 'white magic', which may be juxtaposed with 'black magic' implied to be Qira's. This white magic is not traditional good-type, mostly-healing magic. It is merely the magic of the White Tower (aka the Tower of Ascension) and its cosmic crystal.
• It can purify creatures within of their Influence. This allows it to contain Corrupted, Light, and Dernic creatures without them causing havoc or altering the tower. (Corrupted monsters are fought in current!ToA, Alkevo and the Despair Gaze from floor 6 both look like they could be Dernic, and Floor 7 could arguably be interpreted as having some Light creatures, like perhaps the Ethereal Demigod.) This Influence is replaced with white magic.
• It wants or is somehow empowered by the creatures within it being stronger.

To achieve this goal, it has what is essentially a tiny cult, consisting only of Death and Ankou, Ankou possibly being only a puppet of Death. Ankou will go out, visiting areas to locate extraordinary specimens of local fauna and stealing them to come to the Tower, where they're partially emptied and have the holes filled with white magic. They are challenged against each other and visiting contestants, causing them to grow stronger. (If you want to take a sci-fi bent, the reason why you fight 10 monsters per room is because they're all copies of the same monster, but each of them has slight tweaks, so the one that's most successful lasts the longest and is duplicated into a bunch of new monsters with slight tweaks, similarly to how AIs evolve.)

A lot of the monsters have stories (mainly any ones with associated names) and some of them have relations in said stories to each other. They've been growing steadily stronger and more numerous over time as Ankou acquires more beasts, and some have been evolving and mutating in the Tower. The end-result is probably an army of angels or eldritch beasts, but that's millenia off.

Another possibility is that it's specifically dead things that are brought to the Tower. This is the true reason why the contest was held - Death wanted every contestant to die, so that she could reap their souls and bring them to populate a new floor. To this end, there might be specifically 10 contestants, you included. To foreshadow this, you might be able to find and speak to the ghosts of dead contestants before Floor 7, or you might be able to find signs their ghosts are hanging around.

Spoiler: §#¥ͰΣՁ֎թձ ԾՔנ‎ܓԿऔ४

(I already did this, like a week ago?)

(ழఅసകധႣ თవᗖᕖ)

(Oh.)

 

I reacted with this not because I am against rewriting the lore of ToA, but because we don't need external input or a "how to". We have our own ideas for ToA and what to do with it, otherwise we wouldn't have mentioned its existence in one of the new mythic lores in 2.1.

 

Interested in those lore ideas.

 

This could be interesting, but the contestants/social aspects seems unwynncrafty. The other lore stuff sounds cool, although does each room spawn 10 monsters, or does it spawn lots who all despawn when 10 are killed

 

Could be either. Additional challenge would be that it spawns lots, and they don't despawn when 10 are killed, so they'll stick around but not contribute deaths after you finish their pack.

For something easier and simpler, it just spawns 10.

 

Wait Lusuco teleport scrolls exist

 

no, they do not.

 

this would add them IG

 

No, I just didn't realise they didn't exist. It's really stupid that they don't. They should be added tho.

 

If I had any say in this I want to see a past flashback or flashbacks of TOA Death during her genocidal period. Time travel is unrealistic but I kinda want to see both how she looked like pre-TOA and also be able to fight her at her prime.

This is... under the assumption that she's the same Death as the one from Scythe's lore text, which I sure hope it is, I'm always for evidences of item lore being present in real-world content, strengthens the connection between these two in a way and makes the items much more narratively significant asides from just stat sticks

 

Okay yeah, but this is the General Suggestion section.
I don't see how you're harmed by someone writing a suggestion on how they would change it, regardless of whether you disagree, or if you need input, as this is kinda the place for external input in general. I would also like to add, it's almost entirely impossible for players to know whats happening inside the content team, until it's plainly stated, outside of taking very large logical leaps.

Sorry if this comes off as confrontational at all, it's not really meant to be, but this is the place for input by community members and responding to a suggestion by saying, "We don't need external input" is kinda.. at best odd.

 

Yes, deus complains at people making bad suggestion that are not detailed and cant be added in General Suggestions, because it is "for things that are real suggestions"
and then says that these suggestions are bad because the content team was thinking on the same thing.

 

I don't necessarily think they're bad, but for stuff like new quests and new classes and adding stuff to the lore, that's not really something that we are really looking for from the community. While it can be neat to read concepts for what a unique quest somebody came up with could.be like, there's not going to be an instance of a GM going 'oh what a cool quest I'll add this'. At the very least, some concepts could end up getting used as inspiration in the future

 

First time I'm hearing about this.

You know, if you want to avoid having difficult suggestions like this, maybe... tell people you don't want them? I'd have to imagine it's at least once a week you'll get a suggestion about this sort of stuff.

The content team is really very opaque, it's impossible to magically read your mind and be like 'Deusphage doesn't want lore suggestions', because there are no telepaths. So, new suggestion: can we add some better guidelines to General Suggestions and Feedback? It seems like you spend a lot of effort constantly shutting down or redirecting suggestions, or distributing new information about what the CT can or cannot do. It would be very convenient for everyone if the guidelines for these boards happened to include details on what goes where, and how much to write, and what sorts of suggestions the CT won't add, and what sorts of feedback the CT needs.

 

What

 

im stupid i was thinking of smth else

 

I think the Boss Rush concept for floor 7 is probably the best thing you could do.

I absolutely love boss rushes.

 

make ToA a game show

 

Then Death would be the real death i suppose, would fit in character.

________________________________

Instead of fighting TOA, we should fight TOAA
from marvel
fight the one above all
balanced fr

 

What is the general suggestions even for then? Its literally in the NAME: GENERAL Suggestions.

Most suggestions will never be implemented, but straight up discouraging suggestions of various kinds is nonsensical.