No timers, PERIOD

Did you guys know that long ago dungeons did perfectly fine without timers and that we can in fact return to that era.

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Dungeons were also extremely easy during that time, but for a long time punished you heavily for dying too much.

It’s like some people forget that we had 12 years of content with power rewards that had no timers…

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Those are functionally the same thing. When you enter the tower you’re received by a time point by which you will be overcome. Whether that’s a hard counter that hits zero and everything turns black, or just increasing waves of mobs eventually overwhelming you. The point is the same. Once the floor starts, you are on a time limit to beat the floor before you’re overwhelmed.

See above… I’m well aware of what a soft enrage is… It’s still an enrage at the end of the day. It’s not as callous as a counter, but it functions the same. Let’s not split hairs here…

That’s a good point. They could considered winged approaches to floors. Say clearing one region grants you access to a button at its end point, perma-killing the mobs in that region, thus letting you explore it. Or heck, killing the “boss” of the floor could grant you perma-killing powers for that floor? Maybe you have to solve a puzzle to de-activate respawns?

What power rewards from dungeons do you speak of? They had pretty crap gear.

To get the best gear, you raided, which had a timer on each boss pull to get this… prevent degenerate gameplay.

A good parallel I found is bosses during Tyrannical week. It feels like playing TBC to Cata when failing mechanics meant the inevitable death of your group. Just make dungeons hard and remove the timer I’m all for it.

Ya, but there wasn’t a timer BETWEEN those bosses to prevent “degenerate” gameplay.

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Because there’s nothing related to power between those bosses.

The tower is basically one big boss, you get rewards based on how high you get, how far you go.

Remember when they allowed 40 people to go into dungeons? We should return to that era.

Not sure a per-floor cap is the best counter. Some alternatives might be to alter cooldown/debuff decay outside of combat. Not for short ones, of course, just the “problematic” ones. The group I run with in the alpha discussed this possibility last week because the notion of waiting for all debuffs/CDs was already expected to be an issue.

It is a bit tricky though. You’d have to whitelist the specific ones to ensure it is those. Then you have to figure out how much of a slowdown is best. For example, you could have your respective debuff stop decaying at 1m after combat ends, or 2m or even 30s. That would narrowly target the problem, but could then cascade to multiple floors causing a different problem.

Because the floors are not static, and the difficulty increases, a per-floor cap has issues as well. Some of the higher floors - or lower geared or less skilled or poor group comps (ie. solo) may take longer and a cap would be a poor result.

I think it would have to be something that is dynamically scaled to the procedurally generated floor and not a hard cap.

OTOH, this “problem” already exists in (most/nearly all) dungeons and raids (obv not in LFG or LFR ofc :stuck_out_tongue: ). Perhaps an OOC timer that counts down only when one of the “problem” debuffs is active, and is scaled by the mob count or group/area count generated for that floor? And perhaps that timer is floor-specific as well. That would mirror the death count reset you get when you go up a floor.

So with that in mind (a bit stream-of-consciousness here) maybe something more like the death limit: an out-of-combat clock per-floor that is based on the size/difficulty/density of the floor - and exceeding that triggers the Torrasque as if you had too many deaths. And maybe, maybe, it only ticks if you have one of the 'lust-like debuffs or CDs running.

Added to that you could have consumables that extend the timer just as we have ones that lower your death count.

With this, it isn’t a hard timer in that it doesn’t tick when you’re in combat, it isn’t a tower-wide limit, it isn’t a cap on abilities. Plus, if it is only ticking during the 'lust debuff time then it is also specific to the stated problem and can be scaled to how much it is used.

Anyway, just some thoughts on it. Now to hop back onto my account that is in the alpha and leave this idea there. :wink:

And I’d rather it not be “one big boss.” I’d rather we use a bit more finesse and think outside the box, instead of worrying about what less than 1% of the playerbase is willing to do to get a marginal increase in power.

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It’s not “when you enter the tower” though. It’s “when you have progressed many levels into the tower”.

The tower isn’t meant to be a walk in the park where you can stop and smell the roses and enjoy the scenery. You’re there to to beat up bad guys and it would be silly if those bad guys would just twiddle their thumbs forever waiting on you to beat them up.

Problem is, game has to be balanced around what that 1% is willing to do, or you end up with an Emerald Nightmare situation.

That’s like saying… M+ timers don’t matter… you have normal, heroic, and mythic!!! So stop complaining about M+ timers… Well if we’re talking about timers, then it only makes sense to discuss them in terms of M+…

And before you go off on me about M+ timers, I have ZERO, I REPEAT… ZERO issues with M+ timers. None at all. I’m just using the above as an example of how nonsensical it is to dismiss the entire discussion because of when these timers show up. Look up my profile… ask yourself where I’m going to be playing the tower at.

By that analogy, Nya’lotha (and all raids) are clearly a walk in the park where we’re smelling the rose bushes. Cause I can literally sit in there 24/7 with zero detriment.

And I’m saying that we should figure out better ways to counter that 1%, than simply throwing an overall timer at them. Because the timer changes the entire gameplay dynamic of the content.

Definitely a lot to think about there, but I don’t think they’re going to be able to create an algorithm that can take into account all those elements.

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If you have a better solution shoot, and respawns ain’t it, because the mobs aren’t stacked on top of each other, you can easily wait between packs.

I see, so the packs are all fixed, it’s completely IMPOSSIBLE to shift things. It’s alpha afterall, that means we can’t change a darn thing. It’s not like we’re literally currently creating the content. It’s not like we can’t take any of the current packs and have them patrol. Or add in additional packs. Or create pack regions to overcome.

I like the timer approach and I think it enhances the game.

Also - I’m glad there’s an option for you in Classic.

Then how is that any different then saying “you’ve been on this floor for an hour, we’re going to start sending enemies at you”

So normal timers are about 3 minutes. If it takes us 2.4 minutes to take down that trash pack wouldn’t normal timers normally refresh themselves without your specific assistance.

The only variable to worry about then is the 10 minute lust. Which you could cap 1 lust per life per floor and it would eliminate the worry about that.

As for the pace from mob pack to mob pack a classic respawn rate can keep us from spending a hour afk in there.

After that your just making a mountain out of a molehill because our average 3 minute cooldowns would probably re-spawn on their own between packs.

Because one is out of your control. The other is completely in your control. In one, I can stop and stare at the packs in front of me to figure out how to counter them. In the other, I have an ever looming threat of… how much more time do I have before I have to start worrying about getting overwhelmed.

Also, you keep saying the timer is generous. What is it? Exactly? 30 minutes? an hour? When do the waves start?

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