Tower of Trials - Feedback Thread

cruro

Hey there,

I didn't see any designated place to place feedback, so I'll just put it here in the open where anyone can chime in 🙂

For context, we did our run until floor 30, until we more or less threw the towel as people got tired or were forced to leave. So while we did not get quite as far as some others, I think it should be enough for some level of feedback. That being said, I'll only list my personal opinion here and I'm not speaking for others.

What I liked:

Using endless tower as a theme: It's nostalgic to have that map be an actual thread again. Due to the cramped space, the party has to move careful and as a union, which IMO makes for engaging party play
The random trials: This adds some spice, but more importantly, it gives different party members their moment to shine, which IMO adds to the fun. It's good that the "banned" damage-types still deal at least 1 damage so that those party members can at least add their debuffs if they otherwise can't damage.
The balance of damage-received/dealt: At least pre-floor 50, I think the monsters are tanky enough to require endgame players, but not so tanky that it sucks out all the fun of hitting endless hp sponges - though, I think if we would've got to floor 50, I think I'd start to put this on the "dislike" list (but I didn't experience that myself, so..). At the same time, I think the damage-received was also mostly fine. It wasn't a one-shot fest, except for few exceptions which gave our IG another moment to shine as holy armor was preventing that specific instance of damage.

What I disliked:

Having to leave party members behind: If someone crashed, they were unable to continue afterwards, so they were forced to leave for us to continue (also [GM] Follow would count towards the playerlist, so we often had to wait for them to teleport somewhere else to be able to continue). In that regard, I'm also not a fan of the Death-trial, as it punishes squishy (or simply unlucky) players with no way to recover from that. Having to exclude your fellow party members from a group activity seems like the opposite of what I'd like to see from a custom instance.
The amount of status effects: This is something I'm a bit unsure about, maybe there are some good counter-plays we simply were not aware of (so a public discussion might help here). But on some floors the status effects are just too punishing, effectively shutting everyone down until they've worn off. One of the worst offenders here were probably Howl of Mandragora, which effectively just barred everyone from playing. Status effects with counter-plays are fine, but for the most part the gameplay devolved into waiting them out, which is not the most engaging gameplay. Even the status effects with counter-play were sometimes spammed so often that clearing them hardly helped.
No movement skills: Not sure if it was only Snap being disabled here, but especially for melee-classes (which are required for close-combat trials), not being able to gap close is a huge drawback as hit-lock impacts that build archetype like no other. ~~The most humiliating part was seeing a Grand Peco snapping around though.~~ I understand that it was most likely done so it's not so easy to skip the life/death trials, but in my experience the safest way is anyway to clear the room normally, in order to leave no one behind. If only classes with snap/backslide/etc make it, they'll anyway be screwed on the next floor.
Scaling past floor 50: I can't comment on this too much since I haven't reached it myself, but seeing even a party with completely decked out players (including demigod set) "only" making it to 50, I think this is something that should be considered for the reward structure later on. It does not appear like we'll get much more powerful upgrades in the near future from kRO updates, so I don't think it'll be feasible for anyone to reach floor 100. But again, if this is considered, and running it until way lower floors will still be rewarded in the actual implementation, then this might be fine.

In general, it's really nice seeing a custom instance like this, and especially the concept of the trials seem pretty fun to me. My main motivation for writing this is because I want to see it succeed and have fun in the final implementation 🙂

But I'm definitely also curious to read other's opinions here!

CannonMeat

hi there thanks for your detailed feedback~

to 1: i will try to resolve the issue with getting crashed and not beeing able to continue with the party
however this is to prevent from slaves being brought in to get additional rewards/sell leech. (i ll fix the gm follow bug)

death trial: i can see your point however i encourage you to see it as an additional challenge and if you know you have squishies within your party it would be better to put those further back, pull monsters one by one etc.
2: yeah i know ^^ it s a bit too much i ve alrdy nerved the mandragora and might add a bit more cd to sleep and freeze
3: iirc there are no restrictions to movement skills (only your general movementspeed is fixed) but skills such as snap, charge attack front/backslide etc is allowed and yes getting destroyed by that lunatic is the point XD
4: the tower is supposed to be unbeatable (yet) with more content / new classes it ll become more easy/possible to clear it, so the instance is interesting even in a year+ or so. you ll get rewards depending on how far you go (but i m to confused on what the rewards are going to be XD) so even if you only get to the 25th floor(or so) you ll be rewarded
*edit rewards start at floor 15 and you will gain more every 5 floors every 25 floors the rewards will ~double every 5 floors alongside a bonus for reaching 25/50/75/100

jinbou

guess I'll give my feedback too. for reference, I was in the party that made it until floor 42.

Overall it was very enjoyable, spent the whole weekend climbing & testing/theorycrafting about what to improve in terms of gears and how to fight against specific mobs etc, and it was the most fun I had playing RO in a long time, thanks to everyone who worked on it 🙏 On that regard, I also didn't mind the status effects, since we got owned by them in our first try, but did much better after preparing against them the next day.
No one died from our party during death trials so we didn't get affected by it, but I'd say it does sound like a too harsh of a punishment. Maybe it'd be better if death trial instead made it so, on that floor, we can't get ressurrected in any way if we die. But if the rest of the party manages to clear the floor, everyone would still make it to the next floor. That'd still make it extremely dangerous for floor 26+, as there's a good chance any important member dying would lead to a wipe anyway, but at least it'd be slightly more forgiving.
Movespeed/movement skill limitations were annoying, and I don't really understand why they're necessary? Having a fixed movement speed is fine, but it'd be better if the speed was slightly higher, we were basically moving at snail speed. On our 2nd run I played biolo and was trying to give FCP to everyone on every floor after 26+ (and recast it after deaths), a skill that requires getting into melee range to use, and trying to keep getting into melee range of 11 other people to keep FCP up, at that speed, was just extremely frustrating.

3: iirc there are no restrictions to movement skills (only your general movementspeed is fixed) but skills such as snap, charge attack front/backslide etc is allowed and yes getting destroyed by that lunatic is the point XD

This is also not true unfortunately, I thought about using my inqui but I tested it and snap was disabled so I gave up on the idea. frontslide/backslide were disabled on my meister as well. I think only charge-to-monster skills like knight's charge attack were allowed, all the other movement-related skills were disabled.

On the Life/Death trials it says "Portal to the next floor is open", but while I didn't try it, I don't see why they should be open? I'd say portals should never open before all the monsters are killed, no need to deliberately allow cheesing it. And after that is done, more movement skills should be allowed + the fixed movement speed should be increased (just slightly, we don't need guyak speed, I just don't want to be crawling).
There was an idea someone from my party brought up that we liked, I'd like to share it. It was about changing the melee/range/magic trials so that, rather than only allowing 1 damage type, only 1 damage type would be blocked on these floors and monters would take damage from the other 2 damage types instead.

I assume the intention of these trials is to provide class versatility, and it'd still accomplish that after a change like this. But hopefully it'd also make things more fun, since things can get stale in higher floors when you're a dps and you have nothing to do during these trials. We had two magic trials in a row towards the end, where things got really stale for me as I had nothing to do for a good 20minute. Not to mention things were getting very slow during these trials, realistically we can only have 2 or 3 people of one damage type in a 12people party when support spots are excluded, and it kinda takes too long for 2 people to clear a floor. I don't see anyone ever clearing 100 floors with a limitation like this, no matter how much new gears we get.
Running into speed lunatic for the first time and getting destroyed by it was pretty funny. Getting asura'd by a monster was funny as well

cruro

Lots of good points here where I have nothing to add 🙂

Just want to highlight these:

jinbou Maybe it'd be better if death trial instead made it so, on that floor, we can't get ressurrected in any way if we die. But if the rest of the party manages to clear the floor, everyone would still make it to the next floor.

sakura For the Death trial floor, how about making that floor non-resurrect able when death but after clearing the entire floor, we can resurrect as normal.

I really like that idea. It keeps the concept behind the death trial intact, but also makes it more of a group experience. Needless to say that if almost everyone wipes and those last few survivors somehow manage to clear, this would probably turn into a epic, fun story for that group, opposed to "well, almost everyone was gone, so we had to reset the run".

Some other quick points, as I've seen it mentioned:

Staying in the backline for death-trial is not a valid strategy, @Choi can vouch that I got one-shot from an Errende despite being the farthest away from it (it did look hilarious though, fortunately it was not a death trial floor)
Movement skills definitely do not work in the version we got to test (but sounds like it's just a bug then)
Rushing the portal for death/life trial floors seems like a too risky strategy, so I'd also concur with the idea mentioned, about keeping the portals closed until cleared and giving everyone their movementspeed/-skills back

CannonMeat

hi there thank you for the detailed feedback^^
the movement skill limits is a bug and will be fixed and i guess slightly increasing movementspeed won t do harm 😉

i ll consider making an alteration to the death trial although the tower is supposed to be an extreemly hard party test and if you hit a death trial your party play becomes all the more important.

also to life and death if you hit one and notice oh only porings you can lp walk past them to save time, as time management is important. But in most cases you rather kill everything or skip only the few near the portal, or if the floor has no deadly curse monster you can just use gtb, mob the floor together and have the party walk by.

sadly i don t want to implement your idea as the point was to give non meta classes (mostly melee) a chance to be useful/needed again and with your change you could just run mage and ranger combo and ignore melee which i don t want.
however i m open for creative ideas regarding this.
(and i m glad you like the lunatic as well XD )

sakura

CannonMeat
For the Death trial floor, how about making that floor non-resurrect able when death but after clearing the entire floor, we can resurrect as normal. It would be terrifying if your crucial class died and got kicked out of the tower.

Crosscy

I actually enjoyed the run. I only have 1 feedback, the use of errendes adoramus was really powerful and that's fine by me if that was the only super OP mob with unlimited million dmg aoe usage as it can be countered.

Since we didn't prep for it (none of us had holy armor and we forgot about piety) and got wiped around 42 by 3 errendes rushing us, I don't know if there's more of these omega damage mob later.

If there's none- great but just in case there is, I'd like it if it was also just 1 ele type skill dmg just like errendes so we could aim to counter it.

Unlike waifu garden where all mobs were 1 fixed race and size, there's simply no way to prep a tank that can front line if the mob ai is able to target backline with multi million dmg skill with too many different race/size combinations. Sarah card shouldn't be planned as a solution to everything.

Anyways, gg. Love it overall and hope for its release soon as a good staple of our server party gaming. Hopefully there's good enough rewards for it to be worth playing every week.

Choi

Crosscy I actually enjoyed the run. I only have 1 feedback, the use of errendes adoramus was really powerful and that's fine by me if that was the only super OP mob with unlimited million dmg aoe usage as it can be countered.

Since we didn't prep for it (none of us had holy armor and we forgot about piety) and got wiped around 42 by 3 errendes rushing us, I don't know if there's more of these omega damage mob later.

I think adoramus is fine since there is a very easy counter play option of piety. As far as I know, I didn't see any other damage abilities as significant as adoramus.

cruro I really like that idea. It keeps the concept behind the death trial intact, but also makes it more of a group experience. Needless to say that if almost everyone wipes and those last few survivors somehow manage to clear, this would probably turn into a epic, fun story for that group, opposed to "well, almost everyone was gone, so we had to reset the run".

I didn't really mind the death trial and the high stakes/urgency when entering it. My only concern here is that there were very few levels where we were getting multiple people dying in the life trials, so I feel like that sense of high stakes will be gone if we remove the perma death since I think as of now a lot of the floors will still be cleared without too much concern. The minute trial of death occurred, my members would focus up because they knew the stakes, and I feel like it wouldn't be the case.

That being said, I could see how it could feel bad and how trial of death inherently can lead to some frustrating interactions.

I would be down for the change that is being suggested by everyone, but I would recommend as compensation buffs to the trial of death and trial of life. tbh the ones where only certain damage classes could attack were more troublesome than the trial of life and death ones

Akin

iirc there are no restrictions to movement skills (only your general movementspeed is fixed) but skills such as snap, charge attack front/backslide etc is allowed and yes getting destroyed by that lunatic is the point XD

I tried back sliding and failed inside.

Since most already give their feedback, I'm just going to be concise with mine.

Movespeed cap is unnecessary, or at least cap it at increase agility speed. As once you reach 90% damage reduction your party basically already crawling to clear each floor.
Damage reduction scaling need to be looked into. I'm doubful that 99% reduction is logical if you want players to actually clear this.
Status effect stats immunity removal is a good mechanic. Like the idea of restriction that forces you to work around it.
Death floor. Too punishing. As others already said, ress prevention until the floor is cleared is better than being kicked out. It kills the fun for EVERYONE.
Damage type specific floor. Maybe not fully nullified the other damage types? My suggestion let the main damage deals 100% and the rest deals like 20-30%. At times you have to sit back for like 10-20+ minutes DOING NOTHING (well died a few times when errende wipes the vanguard or lurer overextends) and wasting consumables and just watch as others struggle.

Just my 2 cents. Peace.

CannonMeat

alright here s what i ve done so far:
- *nerved mandragora sleep and freeze slightly
- i removed the 12/12 requirement the pl can now initiate the trial regardless if everyone is there
(if everyone is there it will start automatically as usual)
- i halfed the chance of a melee trial occuring
- increased movement speed
- bugfix movement skills are now usable again
- bugfix gm s are now no longer counted

now onto the death trial:
i thought of an alternative that i would be comfortable with implementing
so instead of getting kicked out you get 10min mute instead (you re basically useless in that state) (disableing res is a bit more complicated in this scenario) which is removed upon leaving the instance, reaching the next floor or waiting 10min for it to dissapear

so would you rather:
1. keep death trial as is
2. Get muted instead
3. Another option

also regarding the life trial i will keep it as is for now you can just treat it as a normal trial
(also keep in mind i might add more trials in the future as well)

but thanks again for all the feedback 🙌

sakura

CannonMeat Thank you so much for working on the Tower of Trials, to be honest i have no idea whats the client limitation so i'll just suggest and see whether will it work for you to implement. How about player will get a status debuff like Hell's Power when they enter death trial floor that prevent player from getting resurrected. I found this on iro Wiki, will that be easier for you to work on?

CannonMeat

also keep in mind the instance is supposed to be unbeatable yet. so you gotta make a choice if you wanna do a quick 1h run to get to 25 or commit to a 4h run to get to 50+

jinbou

so instead of getting kicked out you get 10min mute instead (you re basically useless in that state) (disableing res is a bit more complicated in this scenario) which is removed upon leaving the instance, reaching the next floor or waiting 10min for it to dissapear

sure, sounds like a good alternative

and thanks for the quick updates

Akin

sakura I forgotten that this status effect exist. Been so long since episode 12. This fits the Death Floor theme perfectly. +1