Welcome to Gaia! ::

Imma take a quick nap but I'll be there once it opens. xd

See you guys there as well. pirate

Alas! I must be at work when it opens. crying

But I'll be back later tonight to check it out.

I've got to wonder. What level are you that CL 11 stuff cons red to you? Everyone I've been with and all the enemies I saw barring the Nigh Fright con Orange for everyone else. One would expect you to at the very least be a proper maximum level before entering a grueling difficult area. ninja
Yes, they ARE Cl 11. Yes that is 1.0 Cl above us. NO they are NOT red to me or anyone I've played with. I remember everyone being surprised at the fright that was conning Red.

And why yes, the people making the game did play test the place. JK himself says he solo'ed the first screens at CL 11.4. A mere .4 Cl above the instace's "base" CL.
On OUR servers.

See, your complaint is all over the place.
You are right about one thing. They did make virtual difficulty by making us be just a bit below the level of the mobs. In fact, it's quite blatant and obvious that they did it on purpose. And I have to happen to have no problem with that. They want to extend DMS' lifespan, and having an instance that can be passed in the first day would be far more of a failure than having one that has such an "unfair" obstacle, one that people actually figured how to get past.
Is that a good thing? Not entirely, but the devs did warn that the are would start incredibly though and would be toned down a bit at a time to adjust to the players. JK already proposed skipping the toning down on the first two screens by suppressing stuff there to CL 10.
We were WARNED that this would happen. And it's a ******** good thing it is happening. I'll take the virtual extension for now, as the opposite - toning it up from easy until it is an acceptable challenge - is essentially WORSE as people would manage to clear the place and lose interest. Anyone that can't handle it even after tweaks can just wait until everyone else is CL 11 and capable of carrying them.

But you are wrong elsewhere. Look at the enemies and do the math. At Cl 11, vampires do 150 damage to the whole crew. And hey fear you. Werewolves around 200. I'm talking fully protected. They still have the root effects and knockback. Both still have range like never seen before and can catch someone offf guard thinking they're a safe distance. Both will do impossible large damage to anyone too cheeky to think they can just revive spam. This is still at CL 11.
These are not just enemies that are getting inflated difficulty merely trough CL, these are enemies that are effectively geared towards being fought in less numbers than the usual swarmer we see everywhere else. These are large foes that hurt - a different challenge that you have to fight slightly different than the usual. This is commendable on its own.
And are they easy? Well yes they are. For a Cl 11 crew, they don't seem much of a threat. But, you're complaining about the first screens. As far as we were told, the place is even harder on later segments, both in battle and map screwing and the first few screens are an appetizer.Will we handle larger packs of wolves and vampires? With what we learned from fighting just a few of them when they were a threat, if we can't handle more, then we're bad players.
So, I just don't get where your complaints regarding the monster being badly thought of are coming from.


I find it hilarious that you sum up your problems in that passage

Which besides the number on the CL, is EXACTLY what I've seen. That's the funny part: You described what IS happening.
Crews that are too dumb to retreat while learning, or that can't get trough their thick heads what cat and killing only one monster at a time is supposed to mean, or that are just generally bad and can't do something as simple as changing targets mid-battle / healing everyone / checking buffss - Crews that are NOT awesome - die and are thrown out. This is pretty effective at that, and you should do a random crew to feel it in the skin. I did and it's terrible, and some people are making decent arguments out of it.
The crews that CAN are awesome and get rewards around 80% of times (That is my current Shadow Orb drop rate. Loot is around 30% or so)
This seems exactly to be the fair fight you want.
Unless you want to complain about Shadow Orb Farm rate. That's a different issue altogether, and I can only back it with preference and nostalgia. It still isn't related to the difficulty, only to a player's patience.

I just feel like disagreeing with your entire post on too many levels. evil I wonder if we're even doing the same instance...

If you want to argue that the area isn't too hard which it actually might not be once we level up, and that we're just blowing water, then at least don't do it in a way that isn't complaining about stuff we were told to expect. From the dev's words, I'm getting exactly what I expected.

actually you shouldn't be saying anything yet. if you only been in the first couple of rooms, yeah.... i really think there is more to dms than seen. just you need to not harp about it right now when you aren't even near the beef of it all. like, i will voice my opinion on dms overall WHEN i hit cl 11 and then again at another level up. but for now, sure it is grinding your way up. it reminds me of how i had to constantly orb farm when zomg came out. same exact thing. so no need to baw about it right now.

Perhaps that in itself is my beef, that they've created this tiny area that we are now forced to grind in before we can continue the game.

When I started zOMG, I never really felt horribly "trapped" in a few tiny rooms. The sewers were large enough to enjoy hunting around in and doing quests. Village Greens was a blast to explore. And just when things started to feel like they were slowing down... I could move on to Bill's Ranch. By the time I felt that I needed to start actually grinding before moving on to Zen Gardens, I had become addicted to Goofball, that and a few grucken events later, and Zen Gardens was about my speed. There were tons of little quests there too that made it lots of fun, obtaining the full ninja set of recipes and a little extra farming on Kat's Dolls.

Bass'ken Lake was the first real slowdown for me, because I was a bit resistant to multi-farming Papa Saw like everyone does, and I still wasn't using armors, which made enemies really tough for me (though I had divinity obviously). I got over not wanting to do PS runs, and quickly learned from crewing there that a couple armor buffs made the difference between a too-easy run, or a crew constantly heal-spamming just to stay alive (though still rare to daze).

From there, the rest of the game unfurled smoothly, I ran a couple more PS Hards whenever the lack of players in Aqueduct or Otami became an issue, but soon got to my first SS/EB run, and that was that.

...

At no point did I ever stop and say "just 300 more kills, and I can upgrade this one ring by 1.0 CL..."

The artificial curve created by this to force countless grinding hours before the area can be cleared just feels ... well, artificial.



If I'm not "to the meat" of DMS yet... to run with this metaphor... by the time I GET to the meat, I feel like I'm going to be sick of the filler. You can only eat so much stuffing before you want to vomit, and while a little makes for a good meal, I can smell the meat there, taunting me, but know if I can't shovel down another 10 pounds of Stove Top, big daddy JK won't let me have a slice of the tasty, tasty turkey.

I haven't excused myself from the table yet, but looking at the unnecessarily thick bloat to get into DMS proper, I'm starting to think I will soon.

I don't have the time, energy or patience to pick apart the rest of your posts cause I've been up all night enjoying DMS and quite sleepy right now but let me point out something really quick.



You have no idea what's coming down the road and already make this assumption. Come back to this when you hit the second maze (green rooms) and beyond while looking at the CL and swarms of everything and tell me then if people will be speeding through it anytime.... EVER.

I probably have more to say (again too tired to respond to them now) but some parts of your recent posts in general about DMS in here have been in some ways quite insulting thus far to everything I've seen come about with the development of the place. 4 letters in my sig say why but all I'll say is that I'm not really taking any of your opinions seriously at all right now when it's only day 2 into the release.

Come back when you hit CL11 or something and MAYBE THEN I'll try to respect your opinions in some form.

well you seem more like a baaaawer than anything. and the first impression i had was that this is exciting and scary at the same time. finally something new to do.

good luck whining because i decided you're not worth reading.