Feedback on Dungeon Refresh

Conan Exiles PC Discussion Public Beta Client
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SPOILER WARNING: If you like to explore Funcom’s changes for yourself, don’t read this.

I was pretty excited when the dungeon changes were announced on the stream so I downloaded the beta client and have completed a world tour of all main dungeons, plus a couple of mini-dungeons. As something of a dungeon overhauler myself, I have more opinions on this than most. Here are my findings from that world tour.

Since people will undoubtedly ask, my gear setup was nothing special: a spawned in star metal axe and a set of spawned in silent legion medium armour. No crafting bonuses. I put no effort into optimising this, so no weapon kits or platings were used. I carried a couple of stacks of pure aloe extract for healing. When a better weapon dropped, I used that instead - still without a kit. Server settings were the default for a new game (1.0 everything) and I played solo with no thrall or pet. My attribute build was 20/10/20/0/10/0.

Moving skeleton key chests to dungeons:

  • Unpopular but good for the game; legendaries were too easy to get
  • Makes dungeons relevant again
  • Offers an improved gameplay loop: kill world bosses for keys, do dungeons for loot and to spend keys, use dungeon loot to call purges
  • For all my praise, this new model is not going to be very intuitive for new players - nothing leads them to dungeons after killing a world boss, and they might assume that the skeleton key is a junk item or the legendary chests are bugged

NPC damage:

  • It’s very low
  • Nothing feels dangerous
  • I can facetank everything easily even in bad gear
  • The only real threat to a player is swarming, but this is uncommon and easily avoided

NPCs turning while attacking

  • Makes a big difference, NPCs feel smarter and more responsive
  • Seems to be enabled inconsistently - 3-skull croc turned a little, Khari Remnant turned a lot, Arena Champion didn’t turn at all
  • Rolling behind an attacking enemy is much less effective now
  • Being in melee range of an enemy would be dangerous if they did any damage
  • Fix the damage and we have good tactical gameplay where positioning and waiting your turn are important
  • I hope this still works in lag, but I’m not expecting it to

Chest loot rework

  • Overall this is an improvement, the chests feel much more worth checking now
  • The random deco items are a nice thematic touch but as a server admin all I see is database clutter that players will hoard for no reason
  • Many of the new items added to chests are rare but not useful in this sort of bulk, like radium gems and ebony silk - it’s as if they were selected for being uncommon and no other criteria were used
  • Steel doesn’t seem to exist in Sepermeru anymore :frowning:
  • The rarity of many items is undermined by this rework and there’s very little left in the game that feels genuinely hard to come by anymore

Witch Queen’s Palace:

  • Very little has changed
  • Stone protectors are completely unthreatening
  • Green beam hazards only do 50 damage, so they don’t matter at all
  • Boss’s damage is a little lower than I’d like but not as bad as the other bosses
  • Boss drops 2 witch queen masks now for some reason
  • Overall still very easy but taking bad trades with the boss can be dangerous

The Dregs:

  • 2 new bosses - komodo in starting cavern, spider in side room with acid pool
  • Odd to have endgame 3-skull bosses mixed in with super weak skeletons, but new bosses are easy to skip so low level runners not adversely affected
  • End boss benefits greatly from turning while attacking, the belly flop attack is much more likely to connect now
  • Spider boss’s acid pool doesn’t drain when defeated, and the corpse tends to roll into the pool
  • New chests by the buttons that contain arrows, but no bow - I’d have put javelins or thrown axes in those
  • It used to be possible to craft a bow from scratch using branches off the floor and plant fiber from wooden boxes, but the boxes don’t contain plant fiber anymore - still possible but relies on RNG from harvesting glowing goop
  • Other new chests that take advantage of the changing water level are a nice touch
  • I found a Phoenix-Engraved Sword in one of the chests which is exciting - religious gear is forgotten and overlooked
  • Overall the dungeon is really easy but if we accept it’s a level 20 dungeon then that’s fine

The Black Keep:

  • I enjoyed the implementation of traps - the two at the start are good visual communication that we should expect traps, and the placement of them feels like it’s actually designed to kill
  • The new ledge platforming thing is fun touch, I’d like to see more content like that
  • Black Keep has lots of side rooms that are underutilised, but the treasure room past the key chest is fun with how many traps it has
  • Overall still easy - traps are easily avoided once their locations are known, and the boss is completely toothless
  • Chest loot not as excessive as Warmaker’s but still very generous

Warmaker’s Sanctuary:

  • New bosses make this the best place to go for legendaries by far
  • Warmaker’s Champion still has weirdly high HP compared to everything else in the dungeon, but he still does very little damage
  • Arena Champion drops Champion’s armour pieces, not sure how I feel about that
  • Buggy decal textures appear to be fixed, hooray!
  • Chest loot is absurd - huge quantities of star metal, composite obsidian, hardened leather, gold, silver, grey lotus, and even some armour scraps
  • Anyone who lives near Warmaker’s no longer needs to visit any other part of the map
  • One chest had 28 shield frames in it - why?

Well of Skelos:

  • The stairs outside have had their textures fixed!
  • Generous composite obsidian drops from NPCs, use of the volcano forge seems pointless unless industrial quantities are needed
  • Serpentmen have very high HP but the bosses don’t have much more, so there’s little to distinguish them
  • Placement of dense brimstone along its route suggests Funcom know about the skip from entrance to end boss

Sunken City:

  • Not much changed
  • Chests are good for gold/silver, not much else
  • Watcher Above and Ritual Keeper can drop epic Royal Lemurian pieces
  • People will probably avoid this one forever simply because it involves swimming

Wine Cellar:

  • Absurd chest loot
  • For some reason almost everything drops bulk wolf pelt and ivory
  • Many chests were empty
  • Demon spider lost its legendary chest
  • Khari Remnant minibosses feel much less threatening despite improved accuracy as they are now facetankable

Midnight Grove:

  • New chests are fine - not exciting, not horrible
  • New boss loot is underwhelming, mostly steel or hardened steel weapons
  • There are now dirt splotches with buggy textures around the bull boss just like in Warmaker’s
  • My framerate tanks when looking in certain directions, which is a new issue

Xalthar’s Refuge (AKA The Sobek Cave):

  • Good to see the NPC health brought down to earth
  • This place might be a little OP though now with the NPCs dropping what they wear, which is the Sobek set
  • Going to be a must-visit for the early game, even more than it already is

Temple of Frost:

  • Black Ice item recipe changes are good, but the items themselves are still not worth making
  • Inclusion of Black Ice weapons in the chests undermines the purpose of the Frost Temple Smithy since the items have the same stats
  • Black Yeti boss in The Disjunction feels out of place, but I’m not sure what I’d have done instead
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They aren’t any more difficult now. All this has done is made blocking legendary chest and world bosses moot. Wonder how people that got permabanned for doing that, feel?

What world bosses? the 2 or 3 that can’t be blocked? You all remember when I said people would wall in world bosses for a pet to farm keys? That is right after funcom said it was ok to block world bosses and chest. Now we see why.

Ya, right, wait till a band of nordhimers comes up behind you, stuns you with the first attack then keeps you stunned while they beat you to death. happened to me a few ties last night carrying treasure back to base.

As they defy the laws of physics to attack. Find a 5 pound sludge hammer, give it a hard swing down, mid swing try to change it’s direction.

:100:

And not recyclable. I have found a few things that wont break down in the dismantaler.

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Check that one isn’t a wearable version. The admin panel has one that can be worn. They’re virtually identical, but have different codes. It’s possible she now drops it. Then again, it could just be a bug and be two of the same non-wearable version. That would be annoying since we’ve wanted that wearable version for some time now.

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It’s a stack of 2. Not wearable.

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thanks for sharing those infos, think those dungeons worths a recheck. Finally they fixed those skeletons on wine cellar, despite they was very challenging their amount of damage was wierd, except by rockslide, i feared those skells most than any boss.

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Boo, that’s disappointing. :frowning:

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Warmaker Sanctuary- i let the undead dragon attack me with fire.

I was at 10 vitality which translates to to about 420ish health-

The dragon hit me fire and took 3/4 of my health so about 100 and change left after one hit.

So someone who capped on vitality, non corrupted build , thats about half your health in one hit

I had elite gear on- heavy poitain.

Just saying i like the damage this boss was doing.

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Sunken City

Gold and silver are needed for treasury- capped purge is 100k for level 10 .Thats ALOT of gold coins or bars. Of course the value of Items you carry will boost that too. But those are indeed random across the world AND competitive since others will be looking for them as well.

So gold and silver are a reliable source. Needs to happen.

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Some amazing, and very thorough feedback @Orero! You have done a great job, and were objective. But if I may politely draw something to your attention…you forgot the Silvermine Dungeon my good fellow. :wink:

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The landslide in the Silvermine is gone, so no more quick stone. In it’s place are a few Relic Hunters and just past them is a new three skull undead serpent man boss. Near the Queen are four skeleton key chests.

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Excellent recap.

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It appears we are thinking of two separate dungeons here thurgond. I was referring, albeit somewhat inaccurately, to The Scorpion Den situated in the Abandoned Silver Mine location. It is populated only by scorpions, a king scorpion (world boss) and the unique scorpion queen end boss. Further details can be found here.

Ps- this one @Orero. :point_up_2:

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That is the dungeon he was talking about.
The landslide he refers to is the wall of rock in the hall after the first room. He was describing what has been changed.

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#1 scariest enemy in the game for me was that Scythe Demon. I have PTSD from how many times I misjudged which doorway it comes out of.

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Whoops, so I did. Now that I think of it I forgot about a few others too like the executioner’s cave and probably some others whose names escape me. I’ll fix that now.

Scorpion Den:

  • New RHTS spawns, if those are still any good
  • The landslide seems to still be there, I’ll be very sad if that goes away
  • There seems to be one of those 1-skull human minibosses who drops a heart of a hero now, in the side room
  • If you climb the scaffolding the chests have some very juicy loot including composite obsidian, star metal, hardened steel, gold, silver, and hardened steel tools/weapons
  • The 3-skull skeletal serpentman boss seems to be The Brute from the Unnamed City, or at least has the same HP… in which case, maybe a new source for the predatory blade?
  • Further in there are 14 brimstone stalagmites clustered in a very small footprint, probably the most densely packed brimstone anywhere on either map
  • The end boss is still easy, but has weirdly high HP at 12k
  • 2 skeleton keys from bosses, and 4 chests at the end
  • This is going to be a really nice place to go in the early game to get some starting metals
  • I always forget how cool the aesthetics of this place are

Executioner’s Cave:

  • I didn’t notice much new here. Maybe a few extra skeleton spawns? And a new ring of power with bones in it that will interfere with EEWA’s ultraboss arena exit
  • None of the monsters are hard individually but there are a lot of them and space is tight, so swarming is a very real danger here

The Sinkhole:

  • The snake boss seems to have retained its legendary chest, but unfortunately when I killed it the body ragdolled right through the floor
  • The undead dragon actually feels great, the attacks hurt a lot if you get hit by them but they’re not one-shots
  • One clear of this place got me 90 grey lotus seeds from chests alone with no requirement to kill anything, and the skeletons can drop grey lotus too - what gives, Funcom? Do you just not want grey lotus to be rare anymore?

Weaver’s Hollow:

  • I didn’t notice anything different at all; the legendary chest is still there even

Hanuman’s Grotto:

  • Valis the Loyal can drop Silent Legion pieces now - possibly an oversight?

Closing thoughts:
I do appreciate the effort, but I’m a little worried that the dungeon loot will invalidate other areas of the game. It seems to me that living somewhere in the triangle between Sepermeru, The Jawbone, and Klael’s Stronghold will afford easy access to everything that a player needs, with little incentive to travel further afield.

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