Did the raid three times. Impressions:
- Fighting your way into the castle is difficult from my perspective, i. e. single-player wiith lots of experience, bad reflexes, top gear. Tried it with two low-level thralls in tow, and they got demolished right away.
- The respawn rate of guards is extreme. I’m not saying it should be nrefed, that’s part of the challenge. But it needs to be mentioned.
- The final boss is difficult to solo, but doable. I’d put him near the Arena Champion in difficulty due to the adds and cramped space.
- It is possible to sneak/climb into the castle. Not sure if that’s intended - I guess so, but wanted to mention it. I like it, felt like playing an assassin, as it’s not really advisable to bring thralls with you if you enter this way.
- The final boss gave a lot of XP - levelled a thrall to 20 right away. Intended? If so, this might the main reward for doing the raid, as it allows us to level thralls.
- The rewards for killing the boss should be looked at. I didn’t find loot chests or anything of importance on his body, but lots - LOTS - of gold each time. The gold may be a bit inflationary, though it may be intended to justify the outrageous prices the mercenary vendor demands. Some gear or resources would have been nice.
- The guards can deal a lot of damage. The hammer dudes and dudettes hit like a truck.
- The guards drop a lot of weapons. It’s not really useful for farming gear or resources, as they’re only hardened steel weapons, but creates inventory spam. I’d think about lowering the drop chance, but improving what you get, e. g. half as many weapons, but a quarter of them are starmetal weapons.
- The castle could benefit from some visual improvements. Also, there’re quite a few rooms not connected to the rest of the castle. Maybe some of the talented builders in the community could help in doing some fine tuning.
- The castle creates a drop in FPS. My own base creates less strain on the hardware, although it’s maybe even larger and has tons of thralls and decorations. Don’t now why that is. Again, maybe a community building expert can help with that.
- I get a lot of “Press X to use this item” in the castle, but cannot use anything as it’s owned by Nimlod. Not a real problem, but if that could be disabled, it’d be nice.
So far, I like the raid.
P. S.: Telith’s ghost still seems to be missing.
P. P. S.: After some more runs… The gold reward is not overblown. It’s really time-consuming to get into that place. Hauling big treasure items to your base probably is a faster way to make gold.
Something more random or unique would still be welcome, though, e. g. putting some purge chests in the boss room.