Seekers wrote:As it stands; dunc is hard enough for fresh 120 (except a few builds that steamroll it with no gear) even when barrels are a non issue if playing properly, imagine crowded teleporrt areas with the flamestrike or storm crows souls: you tele, no room to move and you eat 5+ flamestrikes or stormcrows to the face with no counterplay as unlike barrels; you dont get 3 seconds to kill souls and gtfo before it deals damage. They would have to deal basically no damage.
Which is why I proposed the elemental conversion. I mean, if that's still too strong you can add that conversion to melee hits as well. That's how Island of the Sunless sea works. Elemental conversion everywhere, even on melee hits, if not downright pure elemental damage. And with my suggestion to have 1 farming uber for each element, I really don't see why this could possibly be a problem aside from people hating change in general as is usually the case.
There are only 2 issues that come to my mind regarding my previous suggestion:
1) Stacking resist is a "hidden" necessity newbies don't know.
2) When you want to farm this area you would have to change your sockets.
The 2nd can be easily countered by adding ~ 100 fire resist to assur's charm, so you only need to stack fire resist that heavily until you kill assur.
And the first point is like a joke. Because with barrels being in duncraig, that is already the case for example by stacking life. But I'm much rather talking about the sparks, which I have noticed in streams from newbies aren't noticed that easily by the new players (especially with heavy Aoe attack builds). Even other ubers have hidden mechanics, like resist stacking not working in Teganze for example. I don't think they would have such an issue to understand what hit them with fast-moving auto-aiming firebolts firing right into their face (in order not to have knives in that Storm Crows copy and display it's fire damage)
Or that would easily work in unison with a change I suggested a year ago: Add helpful info text about the (hidden) mechanics of the different ubers to decard cain, so he can teach the newbies.
So to sum it up:
Pro:
- More/better partyplay possible
- It's less visually demanding (regarding noticing the sparks. Especially so when you play a build that has AoE skills with similar colors like Tempest)
- It's not an almost instant-kill after 3 seconds if your damage is too low which would then result in the difficulty spike of this uber being slightly flattened
Con:
There are no cons.
You wouldn't even be able to argue that this uber then turns into a gear check only. Because it already is. If your damage is not enough, you're out. With my suggestion it would be: If your fire resist and damage is not enough, you're out. And fire resist is pretty easy to come by (You can get 90 fire resist just by moing your rings and amulet) so there isn't much that really changes for the old players.
Seekers wrote:Replacing barrels will make dunc unbearable; barrels are basically nonexistant when you understand theyre casted on top of the player at the front; if you just keep pushing forward and dont fall behind you will never get hit by them. Yes, in Realm, if you do die you will probably enter a TP and die to invis barrels when you try to get back to the group but I dont feel like this is big enough of an issue to where the mechanic has to be replaced (you can hover behind until a big area u can teleport to the side and dodge the invis barrels)
I don't know man... I don't understand why you consider the team not smart enough to be able to balance it. It's obvious that one change requires another change in order to balance it. Especially when you have a change to an area defining mechanic. But from what I've seen from the team so far, I trust them that they will be able to figure out a way to replace barrels with a better, more fluid mechanic, regardless of whether they consider my input or not.
We as a community can only say what's a shit mechanic and what requires a change for a better gaming experience overall. Especially so when you consider that the game focuses more and more on realmplay & multiplayer. So any change that would improve the gameplay with more than 1 player in the game should be welcomed with open arms instead of dismissed as not important.
SP speaking here... And it's not like I want to play SP, but MP just isn't in the least attractive since I can't imagine a single time when I'll actually want to play with another random player in the game. Neither in terms of leveling (Arcane crystals get taken by other players. Wohoo. Or players that need arcane crystals far past your level join your game and kill your Mephisto/diablo quest without making a portal so you have to create a new game and play multiple areas twice. Or some players are there for the ladder and rush so far ahead you'll never see them again. Or some players don't respond and don't take your TP at andy and you keep waiting for them to walk from the inner cloister to andy, or they get upset because you didn't wait 10 minutes for them) nor in terms of farming (50% more monster health per player in the game with minimal change to actual drops) nor in terms of bossing (50% longer killing time, whereas the other guy might die 1hit depending on his gear, or not even join you in that fight at all.)
I, too, just want this game to be balanced in regards to multiplayer. Actual Multiplayer, not the type of solo everything & trade Multiplayer it is now. Duncraig Barrels is just one part of the problem. It's a mechanic stemming from the solo content it originally was intended for. It's not a mechanic you can leave in a game that increasingly focuses on MP, regardless of whether it's bugged or not (the team has my respect for fixing the invisible barrels bug)
Feel free to change my mind of course.