New Assault Area (03/01/2007)Follow

I think it's safer to assume it's designed for people 65+ akin to Dynamis. If it does actually wind up being an alternative drop location for things like abjurations, relic, or other heavily contested NM drops, what business does a level 40 or the like have there?

There are 5 other Assault zones those that can't get past 50 for some reason to play with. One for the "big boys" only doesn't detract anything from that. You want in? Just try to EXP some more and do the usual "find 5 others" thing.

Maybe, just maybe, this'll actually be done right. I don't see the Salvage drops themselves coming from it, as that would make the entire thing useless if people could peg down any kind of predictablity on drops, but things like the wootz ingots or at least the khroma ore would be a fairer possibility.

I imagine we'll have a general idea what will be there just based on how many new items wind up being data mined come patch day.

if it's all old items already in game, they won't be in .dats to mine. so we still won't have a clue.

Oh yeah, my take on the whole randomness thing...

There are only 5 levels. Not 10, 20, or infinity, just 5. These will be totally randomized upon entering the dungeon akin to how games like Diablo worked. Objectives aside, one should expect certain things as they progress: Namely weaker mobs on floor 1 and harder ones on 5. Bosses may be present on all floors, or none on one and 2 or more on another. The higher you go, the more likely you will find a NM mob, though.

How the tokens will likely fit into this: Say floors one and two usually have low NM spawn rates and your group can get to 5, but not have enough time to finish the bosses there off. The tokens will let you skip those two floors. You miss out on any loot they may drop from the lower floors since you'll only have 3 levels to explore, but it lends itself to more rewarding returns if the higher stuff is indeed more difficult. Costs will probably be like 5/10/15/20 or proportionately higher depending on the tokens' drop rate.

I would expect some kind of superboss on the fifth floor always. These could be the Kings, Ultima, Omega, Jailers, or even loveable AV, himself. This will be the encouragement to stockpile tokens for a floor five run. You may need to kill all the lesser bosses to make it appear. It may just be stupid hard and you'll need whatever amount of time's allotted to hope for a win.

We won't know until it happens, but that's at least my take on the "randomly generated" thing. Given base algorithms, there's no need for static floorplans. No one run should ever look the same, let alone a single floor.



It'd give us a bit of an idea, at least. If we see 50+ new items, then yeah, it's unlikely we're gonna see a lot of old stuff popping up there. However, if the new item list is staggeringly short, then we should expect some repeats. Just need to hope it's stuff people have actually been pining for alternate drops on and not a Tortoise Shield, for example.

Edited, Mar 1st 2007 4:51pm by Seriha

There are only 5 levels. Not 10, 20, or infinity, just 5.

In SE's words "We estimate that approximately 5 floors will be completed during a single attempt" and "When using the Rune of Transfer to exit the Nyzul Isle Assault area, it is possible to record the data of the highest floor you have reached (in blocks of 5 floors)." Those 2 statements really do seem to imply that there will be more than 5 floors, much more.

I fully expect this will be uncapped, meant for level 75, content especially if the drops are anything like what people are predicting.

A note on Hazhalm Testing Grounds: Its never been Double-Dark weather for me when I entered unless Caedarva had Dark.......

My guess is Hazhalm is going to be a ToAU mission BC! oh wait, thats an oxymoron XD


EDIT: the area isn't infinite, there is a definite number of floors (likely starting lower then going up as the missions get higher): [Quote=Square-enix]In order to reach the highest level of this new Assault area, [/Quote=Square-Enix]



At the top is probably insertHNM-type-mob here. Probably something like the versions from Limbus with drops. I suspect tokens will be as common/more common than Beastcoins from Limbus.

BTW, wouldn't it be funny if, y'know, there WAS no minimum or maximum level? Y'know, like, the mobs adjusted themselves to the highest inside the zone, like Assaults do now?

Edited, Mar 1st 2007 4:26pm by plutoknight

I'm willing to bet that some of the drops will be for crafters.Materials needed for salvage gear sets maybe?

either way sounds fun

Here's the thing though, it's highly possible that the rarity of the NM's appearing is going to determine how good the run will be. It's possible that the ground NMs are actually a 1/10 chance that they'd appear, maybe even less likely. Just because they CAN appear doesn't mean that they'll always appear.

So, it all comes down to how often NMs of value (or NMs in particular) appear. It would kick *** if they did appear once every floor to once every 2 floors, possibly even one NM appearing on the third floor and another NM at the 5th floor of a set would be cool too.

You may encounter Fafnir on your first shot... You may encounter him on your 50th shot...

It really all comes down to luck of the draw.

it may not be the difficulty alone that is the challenge, but the random nature of nm spawns. If they try to make things challenging for merited people, they wind up vastly limiting the audience that will consume it. If anything, it should be designed so gear and merits dont give any real advantadge, so that all players need to go in equally and use their skill to win.

You want to have no real barriers to entry at least,and making a relatively high level of difficulty to start will wind up just making another thing many people dont bother with in the game. As you go up in floors, yeah tweak the difficulty, but i really thing SE is making this to be accesible rather than impenetrable.