SPOILER (Bit of a rant) the Dwarves & Doguns questline feels a bit outdated

I've done a rant like this before, on amadel as a boss, so I figured I might as well do it again

It's one of the longer questlines, and really the only quests in the molten heights area, and has a fair amount of lore in it, but it seems like it's aged a lot. Not lore-wose, but gameplay-wise. A fair amount of the time you spend is spent going around the molten heights, a place that's not particularly easy to traverse, and it also has some fetch quest elements mixed in. I'll start at raw beginning to go more in-depth.

To start off with, the whole premise of the questline is that one race or species of people is being actively persecuted & killed and that the dwarves are being lied to about them, and it is up to the player, being the universe's little police force, to stop it. However, the actions the player takes to do so rarely do much to benefit anyone. The situation only escalates after the player joins the coalition, and in their quest to stop garaheth from killing everyone in d&d 4, they destroy the dogun village, kill several Dwarven commanders, and break down a wall defending several doguns from a group of dwarves, who kill them after we go through. Instead of trying to calm the situation down, as axelus does after we kill garaheth, we immediately make our way to the portal and kill basically anyone in our way.

Gameplay-wise, it's not terrible, but it could definetly be better. A few of the steps seem entirely extraneous, like when in d&d 3, after seeing the ritual taking place, the player is told to go meet korzim in maex to talk about it. I understand that that's where the rest of the quest takes place, more or less, but I feel like it'd benefit from a smoother transition. Then, the player is sent on a little fetch quest to get some ingredients, which is fine, and then sent into a little crafting minihame that has you make an amulet yourself. However, if you mess it up, as I did the first time, upon exiting you do not get the ingredients back and have to go and re-collect them. (If you're wondering, i didn notice the cobweb placement because the background is also more or less white and I was focusing on the bright red parts in the center.) You are then sent in another fetch quest, through a cave jn the freezing heights, to get some ice. Just a minor thing, but there's a slay minigame in the cave that I feel really doesn't add anything to it and really has no purpose being there but to make it take a little bit longer. At the end of the quest, the dwarven army marches out and the player is told to meet korzim at the next level, which, even assuming you did tff2 first, requires another slay post's worth of experience.
Then, you go and break axelus out of a cage, which enrages a bunch of citizens just trying to keep a criminal from escaping, forcing you to kill them. (I think you have to.) Then you finally make your way to the dogun village and clear your way through 2 armies killing each other, just to find that the ritual to summon garaheth was at least an hour long and it has just now been finished. Then you have to go through the portal and kill garaheth from inside his body (which apparently has like 4 hearts and eyes all along the intestinal tract) while he is still chained and completely helpless. Not saying g you shouldn't have killed him, he would have destroyed anything, but he's yet another being killed by the escalation of the dwarf & dogun conflict. Then and only then does axelus try to peacefully resolve the situation, before being killed by the dogun chieftain because... reasons. The dwarves & the doguns then sign a treaty or something allowing peace, and the hero gets paid for basically starting & ending a fight that would get a bunch of innocents killed because we couldn't try to handle things diplomatically.

I have skipped a bit in that summary though. The first thing the player has to do is find a theater where a play is being shown in a manner that ROL 3 would be proud of, with axelus there to kindly point out their historical inaccuracies. You then, for some reason, have to go to the dogun festival with encouragement by anyone to do so, and witness the dwarves petrify a sentient creature while the dwarves all celebrate. Axelus runs off his mouth about this, getting him arrested immediately, and he gives you a note saying to meet him at the prison. Then, after you go to meet him, he gives you another note telling you where you actually have to go, a place called the library of flames, which apparently requires you to kill the spirits of 4 great dwarven warriors & give their souls to some sort of receptacle that opens into a door leading to a bridge that is then promptly destroyed, leading to a little platforming section. Then, after doing all that, you read 3 pages from a book in the middle of the room and go out of one of 2 exits which were apparently there the whole time despite us having to desecrate 4 graves & destroy a bridge to get there. Then, axelus, who apparently got out of prison, tells the player to go to house 81 in maex for answers & disappears. Then instead of the coalition hideout actually being at house 81, you have to do a random and entirely impractical platforming section going across the roofs of the town, a safeguard with is entirely rendered useless when, after getting some pieces of a dragon bone, the dwarves just dig a hole in the wall of the coalition base and attack, forcing you to kill them. You then take some tunnels up to the secret dogun village, which apparently the dwarves haven't found despite it being out in the open and having signs pointing to it. I guess this can be explained away with the dwarves never going up on the surface, but it still seems a bit implausible to me.
You then have a short meeting before going back down into the caves to sabotage a dwarf weapons cache,, and blow up 4 cannons and 2 catapults after killing another squadron of dwarven soldiers to get in. Then, axelus goes down into the power core of the city & shuts off all the power for rodoroc, because apparently he knows the dogun magic that the place is made with, meaning that after he shuts it off itd probably take either him or a dogun to turn it back on and restore power to an entire city of innocent people. The dwarves don't want this to happen, so more soldiers are sent down, and as before and after, you have to kill them all. Therw are at least 3 time in 4 quests when you have to kill a bunch of dwarves to progress the story. You then sneak into the palace to meet the king, who is apparently fine with all the trouble we've caused for the city because axelus is being a problem child again. You then leave, axelus tells you he'll talk to him again despite him not listening tue first time, and all the events mentioned in the paragraph prior come to pass.

Overall, it's not terrible, but it seems, at least to me, much like an older style of quests for some reason, with more antiquated methods of getting things done. I dunno, im tired and maybe I just didn't see it the right way because I dies several times to the garahath boss fight because I was using level 70 gear, but that's how I saw it & I wasn't a huge fan of it.
Tl;dr, I just spent 30 minutes typing an essay on why a questline is mediocre and offered no alternatives to make it better and you probably will have difficulty reading it because I can't type.

 

i'm not reading all of that

use paragraphs for the love of crap

 

um what.

i didnt read it but just gonna say i played 1 and 2 its kinda boring (this may have been because i was grinding for levels then and kept getting fustrated on the part where you destroy siege machines)

 

I did but I just used enter once so they lined up & it looks like I didn't
I'll fix that

That part was a bit buggy, the first time while I was trying to figure it out axelus didn't spawn in the middle so I couldn't reset my time

 

D&D has one really good part, that being the structure and pace of the war in part 4. The rest of it is decent but forgettable filler.

 

newlines are free

yes, war is good

 

no way guys the five year old quest is outdated exploding head emoji

 

It's a bit outdated but still far ahead of many of the early wynn quests, they should update those first before DND

 

honestly killing people along the way in d&d 4 seems in character cause who doesn't murder citizens in town for damage test(in game)

 

It really isn't though- the complaints raised here are the exact same as they were back when the quest was first released, being that D&D3 is a mega filler quest & the questline as a whole is only really good when done as a whole at once, despite the level range. Also OP mentions it's somewhat formulaic and slow but that's not at all related to the quest being made in 2018 and rather being made anywhere since 2018 lol

 

It may be outdated and boring but it’s still many times better than whatever Aldorei’s Secret is now

 

i think lost tower might be outdated

 

There are so many bizarre story lines in wynncraft that is' hard to know here to start, but one of my favorites si when poeple are getting sick and dying and a scientist decides the most logical thing to do about it is put a giant egg of unknown origin in a cave. Pushing 3 people off the edge from a great height and stealing an airship to raid a nest and steal a dragon egg just because you are too lazy to go back to Wynn to get a passport seems a bit like a moral failure. In the DaD quests, it is weird how between them or even between steps you can wander around in Rodoroc even though you are a known co-conspirator and have been slaughtering troops.

And is DaD really over? Breaking Point sort of continues it and it left something hanging; the elders indicated they may be planning to kill the dwarven king (who can run like a track star when you have to follow him).

 

its way better than a bunch of 2.0 quests so im not complaining

 

I guess, aldorei's secret 2 & hunger of gerts 2 are definetly worse than this

 

Aldorei’s Secret Part II is definitely not worse than D&D. I’ve played thru both recently and D&D twice. The original quest didn’t even have a secret; the secret was literally that there was no secret and that greed is bad. That’s it. No one felt like a character. D&D and AS Part II both aren’t one of my favorite quests, but I do give credit to AS Part II for having less filler than D&D.

I’ll give you Hunger of Gerts though. There’s no payoff unlike in D&D and Aldorei’s Secret Part II.

 

The old Aldorei's Secret Part II was maybe the worst quest in the entire game, so I can't imagine the new one being worse tbh.

 

Imo the worst quest was either one of the last 2 old quests in the Realm of Light quest line. Finding the Light was the epitome of everything wrong with old quests; pure backtracking, fetching, random story, and a quest helmet to top it off. The Realm of Light didn’t have as much fetching as Finding the Light, but it overall was disappointing. That quest went unfinished for almost 5 years, yet it was built up as saving the world.

 

I think old Finding the Light's story is pretty decent actually (albeit a bit too contrived), and old Realm of Light is bad but imo not as bad as Aldorei's Secret II unintentionally satirizing itself.

 

i liked old finding the light

old realm of light was awful though