Dungeon Defenders Should Be Easier

I have trouble writing anything that isn't somewhat long winded, and I don't feel bad in asking that anyone who participates/replies at least read everything I say in this OP. Perhaps its a bad start to begin with what some people will consider a criticism, but I've seen time and again when threads completely derail thanks to people either outright skipping past the nuance or a large lack of reading comprehension.

That said, here we go.

There have been many threads discussing the alleged bugs of the RNG, the roll over bug, and lately a bug that supposedly causes large swaths of loot to disappear all at once. I have no intention of rehashing these issues because whether the bugs are real or not, Trendy has made it clear they are happy with the current loot system and it is 'as intended.'

Therefore I wish to start my support for just outright saying we, the fans, the players, the customers, want the game to be easier. To be specific, when I say 'easier,' I'm referring to a change in the loot tables. Much like the current complaints about the Jester's tower dynamics, I feel the random factor should be reduced. I want some consistency.

I have just under 1600 played hours on DD. My characters are not weak, with their highest stats in the 2.6k range, and generally the less important stats are still pretty good, around 2k. I have one of every builder, several DPS toons, two wall builders. I can complete NMHC survival in the shard stages without too much fuss, plus mix mode with a little fuss.

But my gear hasn't had a real upgrade in months.

To me, this makes something very clear. There's two groups of late game players. The lucky and the unlucky. Some people manage to break the 2k barrier, start doing the late game content, and get better gear. Some people manage to break the 2k barrier, start doing late game content, and get very little. I am in the latter group.

There's a lot of talk lately about who has earned what, specifically in regards to those who have gear in the 3k to 4k range. I think its missing a key point - the only difference between 2.5k stat people and the 4k stat is luck. Plain and simple.

Once you've gotten the stats to have a chance at late game survival, its down to repetition and luck.

I don't think that's fair. More importantly, I don't think that's fun. I want to know I'll get something good for the time. I want to know if I put in another 100 hours, it won't be a toss up whether I actually gain.

To be clear, some randomness in loot is a good thing. If every stage/challenge had an exact, specific reward then there would be little variety between players. But there's a heck of a middle ground between that and the current system.

I'm always hesitant to complain without offering at least an idea for a fix so, I propose a new filter be added to the current loot system. The programming that already generates items could be left alone, but this new filter would essentially reject an item if it fell under certain criteria. Some examples of this criteria could be an item is rejected if it has a negative stat greater than 50, its missing a key component altogether (like no multiple projectiles on a ranged weapon), or its total value is below 2 million. I'd further suggest the criteria be made more strict based on the difficulty of the stage, including the two modes HC and MM, and wave number. When an item is rejected based on this criteria, simply let the current generation system generate a new one, as many times as necessary.

I would also like a form of this filter added to the current rewards for completing challenges and events like Boss Rush. Again, it doesn't and shouldn't mean there is no randomness at all, just that the rewards should never be junk.

Another possibility that I think would extend the life of the game would be more game modes, but instead of adding difficulty these would lessen it. For example, perhaps a checkbox that adds 15% more DU, removes one of the specialty Shard mobs (it'd be especially cool if there was one for each of the four), or removes the time limit on insane/NM campaign. Each one could affect the max potential of loot by, say, 5%. If you just really hated sharken, you can remove them for a relatively small cut in loot. Or maybe you're a casual player who doesn't want a time limit, djinn or sharken, and a little extra DU to work with, and are fine taking a 20% hit to loot potential.

While we're on the subject, I'm particularly concerned that Trendy gets a skewed version of what the community really wants. The majority of players for any game generally consists of the casual gamer, and when someone is casual its unlikely they'll sign up on the forums and be an active member. Therefore the people who regularly interact with the community, building up hundreds of posts are likely to be high end gamers who may consider the game to be relatively easy while a large majority are struggling.

I don't want to take away from the effort some people have put into this game, but some of the behavior and attitudes I see on the forums starts to remind me of those Real Housewives shows - you have to be a 'rich b**ch' just to play.

TL;DR Read the whole thing. There's nuance and detail, that's important for having a real discussion. If you don't think its worth reading then its not worth throwing in your 2 cents either.

i think, as you said, trendy is fairly content with the loot system. i could see them MAYBE tweaking ulti/supreme drops a little if for some reason they're not dropping as intended on the later survival maps, but overall i wouldn't expect a bump up, even if i agree it should happen.

one point of criticism: there couldn't be a re-roll mechanic that could reroll an item more than a few times. whenever you put in a rejection parameter on something as overreaching as loot, giving it infinite rerolls is asking for a crashed game.

i think the reroll thing would be unnecessary. merely adjusting the weight mechanics makes more sense to me, resulting in larger disparities in loot. i'm fine with seeing complete crap drop, as long as good stuff is dropping too. but honestly, i don't see trendy buffing loot drops, which would only hurt the dangling carrot in their eyes, which is the primary component of NM mode's incentive system.

the only real suggestion i'd make is some sort of "power minute" component. maybe give jesters the ability to increase loot quality for 30 seconds, randomly. or a stage trigger, or killing a randomly spawning treasure mob. i assure you that people would do everything in their power to kill as much as possible in those 30 seconds, adding tension, incentive, reward, and risk all at once (expect threads titled "how many of you lost HC matches b/c of power minute?"

one point of criticism: there couldn't be a re-roll mechanic that could reroll an item more than a few times. whenever you put in a rejection parameter on something as overreaching as loot, giving it infinite rerolls is asking for a crashed game.

Fair point. Clearly my inexperience with programming is rearing its head. My thought was that its easier to add a filter than redo the current system and I hoped simplicity would encourage Trendy to enact a change. Perhaps a forced reroll a limited number of times would work, though of course if time and resources weren't an issue then I'd definitely be all for redoing the loot generator with weighted stats.

i'm fine with seeing complete crap drop, as long as good stuff is dropping too.

You may not have been referring to this, but I want to be clear that when I said "the rewards should never be junk" that was specifically in regard to the award from clearing a challenge or event like Boss Rush. I don't think literally every drop should be an upgrade, just that you should definitely get something nice upon completion of an encounter designed around such a goal.

one point of criticism: there couldn't be a re-roll mechanic that could reroll an item more than a few times. whenever you put in a rejection parameter on something as overreaching as loot, giving it infinite rerolls is asking for a crashed game.

Looping item generation and then filtering them is pretty much how you write code to select from a complicated system. I doubt it's going to crash the game. Easy enough to put a limit on how long it checks per item.

But either method would be better than what we have now, which is buggy, bad loot with rollovers and stats that were never meant to go negative now being negative half the time.

I agree though that Trendy doesn't seem to think the rollovers are worth fixing for whatever reason. Keeps people playing when they need to farm 20 hours for an item instead of 1 I guess? When bugs are kept because the devs think they add to the game play experience, that's not really a good sign.

I mean, if the game randomly crashed every 5 hours of playtime, would they keep THAT because it makes it more of a challenge? It's not a bug.. it's the, umm, Giant Crystal Of Death feature! It destroys the universe!

Extra toggles for game modes could be kinda cool. Maybe for fun you could even have "Monster Only" modes. Maybe you want to go up against unending waves of specifically Sharken or Spiders or something just for the fun of it. Why not? It'd be easy to do, I should think, and you can fiddle with the drops accordingly.

But yeah no, the number of negatives showing up on loot is downright stupid. What really puzzles me is how bad items are supposed to disappear in favor of better items. I should think, then, that at most you'd find one piece of total junk after a wave, and you'd have no reason to worry about an upgrade disappearing mid-wave. But yet you'll still find mounds and mounds of garbage at the end of a wave, and upgrades WILL disappear if you don't run out for them. Why? How does that make any sense at all? Items somehow having more mana value but having drastically lower EVERYTHING? It's like the stats roll over but the value doesn't. So you get something worth a lot of mana, that isn't actually worth anything. Really quite annoying.

And I totally agree about awards in general. Giraffes with more negatives than positives? Why does that still happen? Getting better loot in insane than in nightmare? Why?

Fair point. Clearly my inexperience with programming is rearing its head. My thought was that its easier to add a filter than redo the current system and I hoped simplicity would encourage Trendy to enact a change. Perhaps a forced reroll a limited number of times would work, though of course if time and resources weren't an issue then I'd definitely be all for redoing the loot generator with weighted stats.



You may not have been referring to this, but I want to be clear that when I said "the rewards should never be junk" that was specifically in regard to the award from clearing a challenge or event like Boss Rush. I don't think literally every drop should be an upgrade, just that you should definitely get something nice upon completion of an encounter designed around such a goal.

ahhhh... gotya. yea, adding that with a fairly high amount of reroll chances wouldn't be a big deal for rewards. i was more referring to the difficulty in making sure there wasn't some number somewhere (like, a certain type of minigun with a misplaced digit, never allowing it to have more than a certain number) that wouldn't pass the parameters, causing the item re-generation to loop infinitely since it can't possibly meet the standard. rewards are easy to double-check for this, but from the design perspective, i'd be leery of introducing this so it affected ALL loot drops since it'd take forever to track down what was going wrong if it started causing lockups (say, only wave 29 on shard maps had weight values high enough to not meet the filter requirements for that chaingun, it'd take forever to find out that it was that type of chaingun causing the crashes)

There are probably several thousand loops in the code already. Adding one more isn't going to make the game start hanging and crashing. I doubt Trendy would just make it loop forever with no checks. A limit based on loop count or time spent would easily solve that. I can't imagine Tredny, after years of experience developing a complicated game would be incapable of writing a loop that doesn't crash the game. I may question some of their design decisions but they clearly CAN write code. :)

i know, which is why i suggested it couldn't go for an infinite amount of time, meaning it'd possibly roll crappily now and then. i wasn't talking to trendy and telling them how to do loops, just saying it's a little riskier applying stuff like that to every loot drop, and not just the reward items.

basically i was talking to the OP not trendy.

Aside from maybe Crystal Dimension NM and the annoying thing you have to go through before eventually reaching the boss (have fun building your defenses several times instead of just once) the game isn't "too hard". Just very, very, very annoying at times and the loot system is utter crap.

the game isn't "too hard". Just very, very, very annoying at times and the loot system is utter crap.

I went back and forth debating the title for this thread. It wasn't really about loot progression, which has been discussed to death. It wasn't about a broken RNG. I realized I could already 'beat the game,' yet didn't feel done and that's when it hit me - The goal was to just keep getting better gear. Since I was putting in a ton of time and not getting it, 'Dungeon Defenders should be easier.'

But I understand your point and I'm pretty sure we're on the same page anyway.

Yeah well. I've come to terms with the fact that I wont get Crystal Dimension on NM the last thing I'm missing to be "done" with the game. But since I've chosen a huntress for my dps a long time ago and I really can't be bothered to grind stuff for several characters that's simply how it is.
But in all honesty at the end DD felt simply "unrewarding" and "annoying". That's as far as it gets from "challenging" and "fun". Personally I wouldn't recommend the game to anyone. It's simply not worth the money and with all the DLC and how they don't bother balancing stuff anymore it feels as if they simply milked the game for what it was worth and moved on.

So how may hours have you played?

Why do you need to "grind" for another char, you already have the armour set?

Anyway, I agree in principle that it should be a little easier, but then I really dont have a problem with really grindy games.

1. To many.
2. Because you don't simply need to upgrade only one character but all of them.

To me, this makes something very clear. There's two groups of late game players. The lucky and the unlucky. Some people manage to break the 2k barrier, start doing the late game content, and get better gear. Some people manage to break the 2k barrier, start doing late game content, and get very little. I am in the latter group.

There's a lot of talk lately about who has earned what, specifically in regards to those who have gear in the 3k to 4k range. I think its missing a key point - the only difference between 2.5k stat people and the 4k stat is luck. Plain and simple.

I can't fully agree with your point there. There are at least three groups of late game players, and as for the third group, it has nothing to do with luck. Let me use the example of a friend of mine.

I met him a few weeks ago in a public Magus surv run. He was obviously new to DD, didn't know about many of the mechanics, and he was deeply impressed by my rather mediocre stats. So he was more or less nowhere at that point as far as 'endgame' was concerned.

In those few weeks, he has gone from that nowhere to hundreds of billions of mana, a small army of companion cubes and rocks, sets of fully upgraded 3k+ gear for most of his characters, Ultimate weapons, and pretty much nearly damn everything you can have in this game. All while hardly having played it.

No, he's not a hacker. He's a merchant. As he told me, he started out buying a Companion Cube off someone for 5 billion and selling it to someone else for 100 billion. And it all went from there: Cubes, Supremes, Ultimates, a herd of 50 pet rocks bought en masse for 50 billion. Now he buys out Companion Cubes himself at 70 billion a piece, has capped his item box several times with mana tokens, and still needs advice on how things in this game work and tends to space out in survival because it's beyond him how anyone could care about the laughable loot and amounts of mana that can be obtained from there.

Of course it's an extreme example. But from the people I have talked to, all those with stats in the 3k range have obtained their gear through some form of trading. Those who try to rely mainly on their own loot, such as myself, usually end up with one stat somewhere in the 2.5k range and other stats anywhere from 800 to 2k.

It all ultimately supports your point though. The current loot system, and the progression curve in general, leads to vast differences among the player base.

A beginning player considers 5 billion an unimaginable fortune, so many of them will happily give away a one-of-a-kind item for such a reward.

A typical intermediate to advanced player (I'd think of them as the 'worker bees' of this game, effectively generating most of the legitimate mana in circulation) knows that 5 billion is a sum well within their reach, even if costing hours of painful grind; and they will gladly pay such a price for items that may help bring them closer to the 2.5k or even 3k range, hard-to-get weapons or pets (all of which they repeatedly fail to farm themselves). As for cubes, they are vaguely aware of the great prices some will pay for them; maybe they still have their own cube stashed somewhere in the item box, maybe they have given it away long ago in exchange for a set of Transcendent gear, maybe they sold it for billions of mana that was then devoured by such gear in an instant. The upgrade system will effectively act for them as a near-infinite mana sink, usually preventing such players from gathering any savings of mana for prolonged periods of time or indefinitely, and preventing them from becoming...

A merchant. Thanks to their experience, wealth and their own gear amassed from previous trades, obtaining anything that the former groups desire will eventually present no difficulty whatsoever to the merchant. They will benefit from both of those groups while seeking lucrative deals among their own, progressively dealing in larger and larger sums of mana, then better and better qualities of items, and eventually they will turn cubes into a form of currency. (Cubes are a much better currency than mana, as their quantity is strictly bound to the size of the player base and therefore inflates at a much slower rate than mana, which tends to skyrocket with the increase of said player base and introduction of new DLCs.)

A 3k-4k player's gear might as well be the result of work of tens, if not hundreds of players. One player looted the weapon and traded it to the merchant for an item that held no value to the buyer, but was invaluable to the seller. Another looted the pet. Up to four players looted one piece of armor each. Then dozens of worker-bees provided the multiple billions of mana needed for item upgrades, which one player then amassed by the virtue of selling items that those other players desperately needed and could not farm themselves.

For those reasons, the economy appears 'broken' to some; while at the same time, of course, it's working perfectly fine for others. All in all, the current loot system leads to a situation where few profit from the effort of many.

1. To many.
2. Because you don't simply need to upgrade only one character but all of them.

Whats too many to make the statement of the game wasnt worth the money, how many hours?

As for 2, you only need 1 DPS, if you have played "too many" hours I would assume you have 1 of each builder already.

Seems like you havnt actually a clue to why you wrote what you have.

Whats too many to make the statement of the game wasnt worth the money, how many hours?

As for 2, you only need 1 DPS, if you have played "too many" hours I would assume you have 1 of each builder already.

Seems like you havnt actually a clue to why you wrote what you have.

Some people are too resilient to change, there is nothing more to it.

I was in a similar situation to him, one day I said wtf, let's do this, created a monk, sent him to 83 in like 3 sessions, gave him the DPS gear I had in the huntress and for wep used a so so spider leg which was more tower than anything and even with that the monk was already making more damage than the huntress, eventually got a good sts and then moved to a superb wrench, all in few weeks, whereas the first few toons took months to build.

Another thing I was lacking was a good traptress, which didn't prove to be a problem either, found myself with a level 90 huntress just waiting to be fitted.

In a moment of actually wanting to adapt I ended up with a vastly superior DPS toon and the mid point traptress which gets the job done.

Came to understand why some people like to wipe it clean and start all over, all the experience accounts for much.

when you get to lvl 75 to muchhhh xp to get like 20000000

*snip*

For those reasons, the economy appears 'broken' to some; while at the same time, of course, it's working perfectly fine for others. All in all, the current loot system leads to a situation where few profit from the effort of many.

So the economy is too much of a reflection on real life economy. Which is of course why so many people hate it, people play games to get away from real life, not to re-enact it.

when you get to lvl 75 to muchhhh xp to get like 20000000

I started pc a few weeks ago, came over from ps3.

If you think xp on pc is too much, you should try 314million for 83 on ps3 (i think that ammount would get you to 90 on pc). And ps3's best xp is doing glitter at 2.5mill per run(10-15min).

Im extatic about how little xp is needed for pc, and the variety of ways to get good xp.

Why make a game hard?

I love the idea of a "power minute". I'm not sure why nobody brought up that idea after it got posted, but it could at the same time offer good loot, keep the game more exciting and at the same time keep risk and reward in a nice balance. You could also have to look out for a special mob or mana token (for example like those in treasure hunt) - which would mean there shouldn't even be too much coding involved.

Overall I do agree that with the current way RNG screws everyone, progression just relies on luck for too much. Though to be fair I loved what happened to the kings game survival loot, an easier solution could be turning the survival drops for other nightmare maps into something similar. That might be enough in itself, albeit a solution of lesser gameplay value.

thanks. i made a suggestion for it in the suggestion forum but it got nothing but negative attention, really. kinda surprising to me how many disliked the idea when i think it would add a component that would reward active players and give them something extra to do.

http://forums.trendyent.com/showthread.php?76214-Treasure-mob-30s-of-increased-loot-quality-if-PC-killed

obviously the idea could be tweaked or the mechanics changed, i just thought it'd be fun to have the players somehow have a small chance at increasing loot quality for a bit.

Whats too many to make the statement of the game wasnt worth the money, how many hours?

It wasn't worth the money because it eventually became unfun and felt more like "work" then playing a game. I ended up waiting for the point where the fun would come back and it simply didn't.
[Quote]As for 2, you only need 1 DPS, if you have played "too many" hours I would assume you have 1 of each builder already.[/quote]
You need one MONK DPS and several builders such as an Aura Monk, EV for Buff Beams and Walls, Squire/Countess for harpoons and so on. And you have to progress all of them if you want to ever make it anywhere.

[Quote]Seems like you havnt actually a clue to why you wrote what you have.[/QUOTE]
Seems like you have no clue in general.

Blah blah blah, too much to read. But I do have to agree with the statement on which I quoted. Got to the boss finally the other day but friends d/c'ed and fought boss alone and got owned... something needs to be fixed with this stage.

Aside from maybe Crystal Dimension NM and the annoying thing you have to go through before eventually reaching the boss (have fun building your defenses several times instead of just once) the game isn't "too hard". Just very, very, very annoying at times and the loot system is utter crap.

pretty much agree with everything said on this page. rewards start coming too slow to be worth it; survival runs a long time investment (setting aside a few hours for a run isn't easy for everyone) for minimal rewards, CD rewards just not worth learning multiple level layouts (i have better things to do with my time than re-setup the first area while i figure out how the 2nd works, then redo both those as i learn the 3rd, etc etc etc until i have to redo them ALL multiple times as i learn the boss. sorry, it's not worth that hassle for crappy skins i'd never use), and i'd type more meaningful stuff here but i just abused the hell out of the last set of parenthesis so...

basically i enjoy the new challenges and maps from time to time, but i have better things to do than offer up prayers to RNG in survival mode or deal with constantly re-building in CD... over and over and over again as i learn each new phase.