Probably a bit radical and will be met with insane resistance but I think it makes some sense. Beholders are supposed to be one of the most feared, insane, scary monsters in D&D. This quest really trivializes how PCs look at them, in my experience. Players often get the required 'fort' saves and cheese it with darkness which I strongly feel such a monster likely would be able to very easily counter or see past. Balancing such a quest is nearly impossible due to the save or die nature of the creature in question. If you make higher or random DCs on the rays people will either complain or just never do the quest anyways.
Removing the quest and making the beholder a DM tool or rare strong spawn in the Lowerdark as it is now seems far more interesting way to keep this creature from being "off to hunt some beholders come join me friends" type of sight which I find cringe worthy.
He has a point.. maybe it does need tweeking or removing.
Maybe change it into a fear of death quest. A Knight of the New Path / Spellguard Agent has a lead on rescuing some slaves / Deep Imaskarran from the tunnels, as soon as the alarm is tripped however the beholders will be coming...
("Closer and Closer" messages appear in the combat log for players on the quest).
Fight your way past thralls and servants until you reach the end to free the slaves, activating a portal device that sends you to The Pyrimo / Mythallar Chamber to close the quest there. Should you take too long to go after treasure, recoup or otherwise... Then the beholders begin to descend on top of the thralls. Causing them to block your escape, dispel / kill backrow people and maybe bring in thralls the equivalent of the Sahagin Prince in difficulty (with maybe half HP).
Maybe the air in the place changes and everyone starts taking damage.
A true Terrifying Cave experience.
Could just change it to be a once-only, risk of permadeath quest. Sort of like a certain other quest that exists. The rewards would have to be buffed to compensate, I think.
By applying this logic you would have to remove pretty much all high end quests. It's unlikely that every person taking this quest is un-killable by saves and I've seen more people die from the lesser spawns in this quest, it is a challenge but like all quests if done with an optimum party they will crush it. You wouldn't go fight trolls without acid/fire, you wouldn't fight chosen without silver or a magic weapon, same applies for beholders, you would only fight them if you stood a good chance against their attacks. Also beholders can cause significant magic damage (can't be blocked) and there's not much you can do about that regardless of saves. I can only guess you haven't actually done this quest.
to summarise my suggestion: No change required. If someone wants to trivialise ICly how they view beholders, good luck to them until they walk into a hero.
I have done this quest. I have soloed this quest while my weak group mates stayed back soaking the XP. I know first hand how easy it is to cheese the AI here. Comparing a beholder to a troll or wererat is pretty much the reasoning behind my suggestion. They are literally top end dangerous foes in the D&D realms.
Back in my days, people would avoide beholders like the plague.
I will not be removing this quest.
I will however adjust the content as I'd not like this to be solod since you have high fort.
My problem isin't the beholders on the quest. They're scary, yes, especially if you don't have the 'right' saves. They can still kill entire parties now that they shoot out a dozen rays at once. The quest as it is can party wipe or be REALLY easy, depending on how you do it.
I would suggest increasing the variety in the spawns. For example, you can usually do the quest if you have 1 tank who can deal with the non-beholders, and 1 damage dealer who can kill the beholder, and both have enough fort / will. Making it so that you CAN'T ignore the normal spawns would be cool. Maybe thralls like Drudges creating their own chaos?
Edit: Also, cheesing the A.I. is expected to make things easier. The A.I. isin't acting like it's supposed to. Bugging them with darkness? Not fun. (Speaking as someone who used to do it a lot). Shooting one mob to lure them out? definitely not cool. Don't cheese the A.I. to make things easier if you don't want to make things easier.
Just as a side note please dont make this quest harder than it already is, just because the minority of people can bash through it with ease, there are many of us who struggle to beat this quest >_>
A small change could be made in the spawning, instead of having just one type of young beholder spawn, perhaps adding a chance of a mutated young beholder that will see through darkness.
We should just add spider / Drider AI to beholders so they're pretty much unkillable and floating around nuking everything.
That spider/drider floating thing sounds perfect.
You are an evil man, Gippy, and I love it.
Beholders zipping around like drider arcanists would be the single most terrifying thing I'd have ever faced.
I would probably never play a wizard without Great Fortitude again, quivering in silent terror of dooms to come...
Assuming that is was not sarcasm and was a serious suggestion :
I personally hate the suggestion. There's nothing worse than being almost unable to kill something because the moment it 'drops' from the ceiling, it immediately dissapears, appearing somewhere else.
Worse is when you add in the fact that unlike a drider arcanist, which is frustrating enough to face, you have a beholder who has nearly unmigtatable damage (magic damage bolts), a dispel gaze, a DEATH gaze that apparently does not take into account saves vs death or vs mind effecting... and firing off additional bolts every single second? No. I do not believe that to be a viable answer. Yes, it would make them more difficult to kill, and more likely to kill you by default.
As it stands, most of the reason that the quest is 'easy' to solo is do to only two or three factors.
First, the quest is set in a tunnel with tons of sharp turns and cramped spaces. It is stupidly easy to abuse line of sight (for leaser beholder rays) and the size of ogres to slowly grind through entire encounters.
Second, while incredibly dangerous to fight, with a combination of good fortitude and good will saves and high damage, you can kill a beholder before it has time to burst you down. Yes, you will take 60-70 magick damage and a ton of other bolts, but you should be able to kill it before it kills you.
Third, the variety of mobs. Ogres are really simple to fight. Get ac, and kill them one by one. Lesser beholders are only annouing to kill due to their HP and numbers, and while they hurt because of numbers, aren't a problem for most people. Greater beholderkin are dangerous primarily due to no save stuns and knockdowns, allowing the other mobs to kill you. This can be migitated by most people, especially when the beholder is dead.
That's it. Anyone who can abuse or address these issues can do the quest, and usually solo or two man carry.
I will provide suggestions in the order that the problems were presented:
First, you can add scripted (random?) spawns due to the nature of the tunnels. Want to make it scarier? Have a beholder spawn in the backline. While easy ish to kill, i gaurentee you it will terrify the backline of people leaching xp. Hell, you can even have just smaller beholderkin spawn if you want to be nice.
Second, a lot of the weakness of beholders is either abusing darkness or killing it quickly. The issue of darkness is 'blinding' it before it sees you, thus breaking the AI as it dosint see a foe. A simple solution would be to script the ai to "if blind, then dispel cone". Or flee blind, then dispel or something like that. Additionally, if you wished to make the beholder more dangerous or harder to kill without being rediculous, you could give the beholder minor DR, such as 5/+1. It'd slow down how fast most people can kill the beholder, thus making it more dangerous.
Third, as i have stated, mob variety. Its really easy to deal with the current mobs. They are all dangerous in their own right. Perhaps increasing the types of thralls so that people have to adjust their tactica? Ogre thrall mages to draw people out, or employ archers? Enthralled kobolds or goblin that poke up from behind to scare the shit out of you?
Just thoughts.
I think everyone still fears beholders. It's funny watching a crowd scatter when one approaches; even in the quest.
If I had to give my two cents on how to make terrifying cave more terrifying, I'd:
- Give the Beholders the "fly-in" animation and script that triggers after a PC crosses a certain point. I think that'd prevent darkness being casted on them before they have a chance to attack, and therefore making the quest much more challenging. Not sure how practical of an implementation that is, though.
- Give Beholders permanent Ultravision while within their lair.
- Make the final boss a Monstrous beholder instead of a Beholder Mage.
- If you keep the Beholder Mage, give it the Seers boss AI.
- Continue to spice Beholders. Anytime some basic tactics/ logic is applied to the quest by a DM, the quest becomes much more difficult.
- Casually remind players to not make dumb sendings.
I will say this: high fort does not equal auto victory in the beholders quest.
I think we're over estimating the number of people who have the fortitude, AC, and AB who can effectively solo a bunch of ogres while getting dispelled, hit with magic damage, and subjected to a no-save stun. What, truly, makes Beholders an "easy" quest is darkness. Fix that, and I think this will become much more difficult.
I'm quite enjoying this discussion. I've noticed something odd with the Beholders AI (something beyond the rays AI which I've tinkered before), and I wonder if it will make them better if I adjust it a bit. Taking into account all the posts and suggestions above I'll start with a test, and if it proves not broken towards completely useless / unbeatable, I'll probably add a few instances of them to the Beholders quest and have a group a few players test it for me.
Not sure if this will work out very well, but we'll see.
Beholders should be dangerous, and having a quest that not all PCs can do is totally fine, and should be quite an achievement for other PCs.
And as the post above says, don't make dumb sendings about "let's go kill beholders" (which I've seen lately). It's not really appropriate and personally speaking, it's a bit of a turnoff
Removing any quest because some players spam/metagame it isn't the way to go.
To be the devil's advocate: it's perfectly normal for people to do quests for fun, xp, or whaver, and adapted to their lvl range. Spamming beholders, orogs, sahaguins or sand crypt is what you get for having lvl8-9-10 pcs strolling around the server. As much as I don't like seeing groups spamming those symbolic quests, this is initially a structural issue, not a player issue. Efu's lvl range makes supposedly scary monsters much less scary.
It becomes a player issue when the PCs turn back as soon as they know they'll be spiced, or abuse AI/ darkness because they can. A friendly reminder that they shouldn't do that is probably easier and less tedious than scripting anything.
We can also give beholders true sight and watch TPK happen again....
Removing the ability to use darkness would be pretty lame. I'm also not to sure what people are talking about really, as any time there is even the remotest spice on beholders people die and shit themselves.
The difficulty in trying to further balance beholders is they auto dispel, can do huge magic damage anyway and have death spells.
Leave as is and focus on making the server less stale via new quests, plots etc
This quest is so old it's stale no matter what. The same situation with seers too. They're like 8 years old...
i believe it's been said that players are justified in leaving a quest when a dm becomes involved for one reason or another at their discretion
Quote from: Letsplayforfun;n685306As much as I don't like seeing groups spamming those symbolic quests, this is initially a structural issue, not a player issue. Efu's lvl range makes supposedly scary monsters much less scary.
It becomes a player issue when the PCs turn back as soon as they know they'll be spiced
Coming from multiple instances of IC experiences of DM spice
I reserve the right to convince the party to turn around if it seems like we are incapable after going through a 30min rp'd march to get there, fully accept the quest is a failure after events indicate it is heading in that direction, spice or no spice and to come back another day when we are more sufficiently prepared to adapt for unknown challenges, and can reorganise everyone to assemble, without feeling judged
as a player for my actions.
Risk normalisation is a condition that should not be punished. It's an actual legitimate condition humans are affected by that makes us forget of the expected dangers if we repeat an activity, IG or IRL, and nothing bad happens.
DM spice is a touchy subject for those that have been on the (perceived) wrong end of it.
Sometimes Spice creates an interesting and worthwhile diversion. Other times it's unremovable and/or undetectable and/or undisarmable traps along a critical route, and it's no longer DM Spice but DM Spiking.
Players have every right to turn down any opportunity that presents itself, this includes questing spice.
The last thing we should do is remove content from efu. The Beholder quest is completely fine as it is. It's not an easy encounter, and with some hiccups sits right at that peak of quest content that is actually well balanced.
It's not going to be removed.
However, if I see another punctuation-less, low-effort sending inviting people to "smash beholders" I will be deducting exp. We pride ourselves on maintaining high standards here, so I expect people to at least try.