Guess how ao defends the relic?

[Adventurer#1337]

In nc I crush everything with a cot, in tc I can choose between various ways to kill them with the shifter, with assassin everyone with less than 50 base fort risks a smite, no need to talk about pm, they got the best summon in game & the multiclass options are great. Dwd? well it's not a big threat but at least has durability and can follow a raider in any room (unless they hide).
What I see about AO? People defend with Fighters, barbarians, a mage maybe. Rdd dragons are horrible to defend (but not as horrible as they are to raid) first because the damage is everything but great, if people have the right shield (but i've said this already).
Second but most important, all those stupid rooms and choke points in the relic room make it impossible to defend. I would simplify the temple of the ancients removing all the useless rooms. And I'd give a bump to the rdd damage, such a pain to level to see people run away from it everytime. Wish it had something like firestream, It would compensate the only 2 shapes/day that aren't enough to chase people running into small rooms.
Don't add the excuse of large size blocking door, you can do the same with a shapechange scroll in any faction. And everyone who can move his/her toon properly knows how to get past.

[Nyeleni]

Yes, Cots are pretty good. But you don't defeat everything with it.
Shifters good for defense? Certainly not better than other options in TC. Which you can build in AO too. Well most of them.
Don't get me started on Assassin. It certainly is the weakest unique prc option for any faction.

Yes, dragons have issues with small spaces. Still they are pretty devastating in a melee. Even if you know how to navigate around them, they still can be a hindrance.

Now let's skip to the cradle locations. Let's compare Sleeth with Melencia for instance: Sleeth has one maybe two choking points, only two entrances and even better: only one exit with a relic.
Melencia is just wide open with no decent area defense at all. The cradle room is underground to add insult to injury. No gate which warns from incoming raiders, etc.

I don't think you really have a reason to complain to be honest. Just learn to accept the situation and focus on the strength of your faction.

[VagaStorm]

Yeah, it's useless to be a dragon defending in the temple. Anyone can just run into a sideroom with a bow and pick off the dragon that can't follow. Beeing a dragon faction, that room makes no sense. A realy cool solution would be to make dragon breth a hazard in those closed spaces, but I'm not sure how... Maybe put something in those rooms that burns badly if you use breathepon on it?

[Delisha Zrazorian]

Yeah, it's useless to be a dragon defending in the temple

hummm.... I disagree here... and this comes from my experience raiding them...

Perhaps alone they have some problems, but with a partner or a team they are a nasty enemy!

able to block the entrance/exit with their bulk, great KD and virtually impossible to kill with a sneak...

they allow their friends time enough to get into the cradle and take on the raiders...



will offer more info from an inside perspective, as our Fury infiltrator RDD grows and learns...


at your service,
DZ

[Rufio]

In my experience raiding AO, running into those side rooms is a death trap. You end up stuck inside with no easy way out. It should only be a problem if your only defenders are dragons.

You all really need to quit fixating on that single RDD dragon build anyways, it is just one aspect of your prestige class that has a specific pvp function. If this were basketball, it would be like blaming your loss on Shaq's 3-point shooting.

[Bargeld]

SL has the only temple with a trans door to another room in it. (The one in the middle to the healer's room). Instant HB cancellation...

[Alkapwn]

RDD dragons are pllenty powerful. Why do you think players hide in those small rooms? Very few toons can 1v1 any of the dragonshapes. AO has way more build options then SL minus SD's and Assassins (not a big advantage considering how easy it is to build a decent spotter), and you we don't seem to have a problem defending even with our little highly exploitable room.

[Adventurer#1337]

Just learn to accept the situation and focus on the strength of your faction.

1) if something isn't right i gotta say it. 2) I know well the strenght of nc/tc/ma/sl/rk(dwd?) . And I you gonna be surprised knowing i know the strenght of AO too Fighters, barbarians, with rare presence of casters . pretty standard, like any other faction's defense except assassins often insta kill someone (that spends some time asking why i died?) This is a nice and funny extra to the usual barbs + fighters. I've seen pdk's screw raiders good with fear. These are just examples. I've never seen a rdd "change the situation" mostly because of that Temple of The Ancients that is the most ANTI DRAGON room in the whole server lol. I guess when it was designed the only dragons were druids and used to defend by spamming 20 grease/20 vinemine/10 creeping/etc etc etc. I'm glad this changed, now it's time to change the cradle room. Just use your bulldozer and take down the walls. No more annoying rooms, there will still be the choke points where people who cant really fight a dragon (and it's easy because dragon has no more 25% damage immunity but only 10%, cant change shields , gets stuck, gets dispelled, yes the token is pretty dispellable ill repeat this in the proper place)

Yeah, it's useless to be a dragon defending in the temple

Perhaps alone they have some problems, but with a partner or a team they are a nasty enemy!

Thanks for your honesty that brings out my point: RDD needs a partner, Alone it sucks! The other prcs can own a raider by themselves. A rdd could , maybe, if it could move. With a larger temple without rooms, rdd would be ok to defend at least. Since they are already pretty unhandy to raid, and this wont change. They should be good to defend at least!

[mining]

The other prcs can own a raider by themselves.

I query this. DWD can't stop a raider, PM can't stop a raider, some shifters can't stop specific raiders (i.e. SD or monk raiders due to no ranged attacks), PDK can't stop some raiders (monk is immune to fear, cleric spell is +alot + cures). Assassin can stop, but is very much "you have to have meh spot, not be fighting and not have much fort". CoT is probably the best as a stopping tool, and that's because it can be built as a stunner - pure fighter stunner or HiPSer stunner is around as good as a defender.

[MrAsimov]

Hmm, Where to begin with a response to this. There are so many things being brought up in your post. In the future please try limiting your posts to one area of complaint at a time for easier responses. I suppose I'll start with something I agree with in part and then go from there.

I agree that the AO relic room should be changed in design. I've always found those tiny side chambers rather a silly concept for a temple made for dragons as well as humanoids. I think there should be side chambers with huge arched entrances for dragon sized bodies. The whole chamber seems a bit small for multiple dragons.

Now to the rest of my reply.

Second but most important, all those stupid rooms and choke points in the relic room make it impossible to defend......Don't add the excuse of large size blocking door, you can do the same with a shapechange scroll in any faction. And everyone who can move his/her toon properly knows how to get past.

There are overlong threads on this forum, and I don't feel like searching out to post links for these, that thouroughly disagree with this evaluation of the room and are entirely contrary to how you feel about it.

In nc I crush everything with a cot, in tc I can choose between various ways to kill them with the shifter, with assassin everyone with less than 50 base fort risks a smite, no need to talk about pm, they got the best summon in game & the multiclass options are great. Dwd? well it's not a big threat but at least has durability and can follow a raider in any room (unless they hide).
What I see about AO? People defend with Fighters, barbarians, a mage maybe. Rdd dragons are horrible to defend (but not as horrible as they are to raid) first because the damage is everything but great, if people have the right shield (but i've said this already).

While this may appear to be right in a generalized way, I can't even begin to point out how poor an assessment this is of the various builds available and how often they are used to defend. So I will simply point out that your whole point is apparently to compare one specific RDD build type, the RDD Dragon, to an assortment of other builds that come in a huge variety of types. This type of comparision, while it helps your point sound valid, is just ridiculous, especially considering the builds available to you using RDD.

[Eldaquen]

This thread covers a wide range of topics. We all have features in our cradle rooms that we respectively find as weakness, and very much wish would change. AO's cradle map's side rooms are akin to MA's cradle map's side hallways. The difference being AO's have doors that anyone can close (defender and raider alike), while in MA any normal sized toon can run in and out the length of the hall way as they please. Anyone playing on a dragon build will find those rooms/hallways annoying ... just as TC finds those 2 rocks and that stagmite in the back of the Wolf's Den annoying. For that matter AO rooms, MA side hallways, and TC stalagmite are very annoying to casters whose casting attempts get canceled when a foe goes out of line of sight (or when the foe was shielded from a successfully casted AoE). NC's side rooms are very annoying for the same reasons. Furthermore RK'S short cuts to the surface that are direct transitions devoid of maps is IMHO unfair, compared to TC/NC's crevasse that is 2 maps long (also IMHO a waste of server space as those 2 maps could have been used elsewhere in the planes).

As far as how the temple was designed: AO's cradle used to be outside in the Sleeth: Compound map, just as TC's cradle used to be outside on the Melencia map. Both cradles were moved due to an epic NPC defender spawning issue that were caused by having the cradles on the main map of the respective cities. The Sleeth Temple was already changed once to accomadate relic wars battles occuring inside. The original Sleeth Temple was worse for RDD defenders and dragon raiders alike due to the former small passages between the exit and the cradle. TC has not been updated, it is the same Wolf's den as it was before the addition of the cradle.

I understand your desire for a change to AO's cradle room, but please acknowledge that all factions have weaknesses in their factions' maps designs that we all would like to see changed. Should AO's be updated (again), perhaps but at the same time TC's weaknesses should also be addressed. For one in my IMHO Wild Wood should not connect to Beryn, maybe Forest Pass but not Beryn.

As far as AO using RDD Dragons to defend, the fact that people run away rather than fight them as stipulated already in this thread gives credit how much of a game changer they are.

There was an AO player that boasted that their RDD dragon had an AC of around 85, during a mixed faction planar run. I know of no druid dragon or shifter dragon that even comes close to that. Shapechange spell is lessor than any RDD, druid/shifter dragon. For one a shapechange spell dragon does not have the 10% immunity and is not sneak immune (according to Wiki). So please if going to compare dragons please compare them fully.

There is no ONE build that garauntees any of us victory 100% of the time. Contrary to what some people claim even CoT's do not win 100% of the time.

Regarding shifters: the shifter versitility is a perception not a fact.

One final thought: the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, until you get on the other side of that fence.

[Lokey]

People can hide from DwD? Even Carejo's isn't that bad.

[mining]

(also IMHO a waste of server space as those 2 maps could have been used elsewhere in the planes)

At this stage (to the best of my knowledge) we're about 2/3 of the server's size past the "magically runs better" number of areas - so this probably won't make much difference.

[Ryddwillow]

There was an AO player that boasted that their RDD dragon had an AC of around 85

Ya it was mentioned in the forum threads like 5 months ago by mining explaining they were the bomb in promoting AO that the RDD dragon was great. I could go search for it but i am lazy, and he displayed pictures too. It is like this, You as a dragon are huge, I mean huge and every player here hitting you auto hits on crits. So I as a lonely fighter chose a scimmy or a rapier, pretty much a crit on every other hit with strenght or dex(take feats). I have kd token so 3 extra hits. Boom you dead. I can run and use doors or leverge to my advantage you cant. I mean many scenrios can happen. i say all along is that it is the builder and player that kill the most. RDD dragons are allright but not a savior as other prestige classes in other factions.


PM have a great beasty and they are awesome themselves but pms are rump meat to a real mage player
Assassins are great and can be a menance if your saves are not great,a sd or AA can subdue them greatly
Cots are awesome but a bigger bulk like a pure barb or fighter can due them in and a good skill fill mage, sd maybe
Shifters depends on the shift, they can be built well or like crap and suffer plenty.
DWD can take a punishment but suffer

I built all these toons except the rdd dragon due to being decieved. I had a TC pure druid dragon, good ac and ab and other abilities. Now it is a stun bait being so HUGE in shape since con is not included, why build one?

[cRaZy8or5e]

Yeah, it's useless to be a dragon defending in the temple. Anyone can just run into a sideroom with a bow and pick off the dragon that can't follow. Beeing a dragon faction, that room makes no sense. A realy cool solution would be to make dragon breth a hazard in those closed spaces, but I'm not sure how... Maybe put something in those rooms that burns badly if you use breathepon on it?

QFT

The side rooms can be death traps, but if the dragon is the sole defender well they're a PitA. And really it seems counter-intuitive that a faction devoted to dragon kind would not have structures, especially their cradle, be dragon-conscious/friendly.

Every other discussion about builds and lack of in AO ... well it's all been said.