The wiki says, under Purge Difficulty, that what mobs you get and how hard they hit is entirely determined by where your base is:
River: none
Desert and Savannah: tier 1
Swamp, Highlands, and Tundra: tier 2
Snow and Volcano: tier 3
And yet we had a guy on (PvE offical) server 1522 with a base in the eastern savannah, just northwest of al Merrayah, holler for help (and we did help him) because the first wave of skeleton warriors tore right through one of his tier 3 walls in seconds. And it’s a good thing we did: wave 4 was a legendary world boss, the Undead Dragon.
In the meantime, my base in the Highlands (just southwest of the Ruins of Velstad), also made of tier 3 materials, only gets puny waves of tier 2-3 Cimmerian warriors – no weapons or special attacks that can seriously damage structures, half the hit points of those skeleton warriors, no armor at all.
My first thought is that it’s just that buggy; that he shouldn’t be seeing skeleton warriors and I should be seeing a third and a fourth wave including (probably) a Rotbranch world boss. (In which case thank Derketo I’m not, because an offline purge with a legendary world boss is nuts.)
But I wonder if it is working as intended and there’s just something left out of the description. Because everybody I know who’s been hit that hard has a much, much bigger base than mine. Mine’s a single 4x7 single-story house with two tiny outbuildings; his was a something like 20x20 multi-story fortress. Is Purge Difficulty also dependent on the size of the base?
I got that purge with the skeletons and the undead dragon in my solo server… it was fun
EDIT: Forgot to clarify: it was on my base located in the Northern Highlands, so in my case it was “normal”, I guess.
As for how they work? It seems totally random to me… probably it maps purge difficulty = X to one of thos tiers in a fixed way but using a random calculation throw in there just to hace a chance to get different results, including a higher than normal purge w.r.t. where you are located.
Ha! On my server I don’t even get purges. Purges happen a lot in the Lost Tribes Camp and seem to be targeting only 1 clan.
I made a suggestion before that for PVE purges could be a timed event say every 3 days, the 4th day is a guaranteed purge and the purge meter will instead become a timer that counts down. It should be a global thing IMO and not just clans. Say guaranteed purge spawns that will start in the desert region, after the last wave it will then start on to the jungle/savanna region then after the last wave again it would start in the Highlands region.
I think guaranteed purge spawns everywhere are great for PVE and Single Player so you do have a chance to grab some archpriests and T4 alchemists that could craft white dye.
The problem of that is the solo mode client… due to how the world loads, nothing exists outside the small area of player’s influence around him/her, so no purges could spawn in the map outside that.
That mode could work on a full server and perhaps could be fun to try it, but IMO it needs to be a separate setting, maybe an purge tier, like 7 or something, only available under a dedicated server.
We recently got a purge on one of our bases, was on for the majority of the day but we didn’t get any messages. A wight tore through half a base without the thralls engaging (all thralls accounted for)
it’s a bit weird though because the clan I’m in hasn’t even hit the first purge meter, whereas when I was lonestarring it on a dead server I got purged as soon as I logged in after I had hit the meter. It was highlands and about a dozen spiders.
I recently had a Purge on my Public Map Room between Sepermu and the Silver Mine nearby on the Official PvE Server #1026.
So not a big building, just Foundations, Walls, Ceilings to encircle it and some Witchfire Torches as deco.
When I logged in the Purge was already in process. It, too, was the one with Skeletons and the Bone Dragon as boss.
Glad it vanished since the timer may have run out, since I wasn’t geared for a fight (expected the Purge to be already over, since I logged in after 10p.m.)
I don’t really think the purge difficulty map is relevant anymore, it may have been earlier but who knows nowadays.
I got a purge of spiders with a legendary spider boss at my small outpost in the Savannah area which was only big enough to place a map room, maybe 2 map rooms.
Also don’t think setting purge difficulty to 5 or 6 is worth it due to the humans not spawning.
