Practice mode for dungeons and raids

Is it possible to have a practice mode built into dungeons and raids?

I am pretty new to these aspects of the game and have been in a number of them with mixed results. What I have found is that simply surviving is tricky and for the most part is the focus when you are new. Seeing and learning the mechanics is very difficult when you are red and then dead.

What I am wondering is if a practice mode could be added that would give all of the effects of the dungeon/ raid with a reduced damage effect on players? Make the damage variable from 0% to 100%. That way a group could enter and train new players. This would be a positive way for guilds to get new members up to speed without causing damage to their guild stats or cause resentment when a raid fails due to new players inexperience.

Of course in practice mode, no drops or credit would be given. No advancing/ breaking of shards would happen. No positive or negative effects just training.

I mean, unshared dungeons are essentially what you’re describing. The enemies are scaled to you and you have access to them at any point. Dying to mechanics is kinda part of the journey. It’s not like there is a punishment to death in dungeons either, durability is only affected in overworld play

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The problem is when there is an expectation of gear drops, it makes failure due to inexperience a real thing. The feeling of letting the group down is also a thing. The fact that even in the most understanding groups, a wash takes a bunch of time to get reawakened and back to the play area.

If in this environment the damage were to be scaled back so every shot from everywhere was not a kill shot, getting into the rhythm of the event would not be so time consuming. And in this environment everyone participating knows in advance that they are on a training run. No expectations

Zero damage setting would let trainers run through the mechanics, get players where they need to be and doing what they are supposed to do. Run with that until that sets in then start cranking up the damage setting. You would have super players in no time all with no hard feelings from the hard core players.

My concern is that with the dungeon queues being so very similar to this but giving a reward for perseverance that not many people would even use the practice mode. Also, the general feel behind Orbus is that it doesn’t hold your hand. When there’s new content, you dive in head first and try to figure out the mechanics

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Taking no damage at all, I think, would be counter productive. It would often make it hard to realize you even made a mistake or that you failed to dodge something.

Learning from your mistakes is in my experience one of the fastest ways of learning, you make a mistake, then quickly realize it was a mistake and try to avoid it moving forward. Of course most people will make the same mistake multiple times, but eventually you’ll be pretty consistent with it. Even experienced players like myself who have done hundreds of level 15 shards and hardmode raids still make mistakes and keep learning from them, that’s just part of the game and one of the things that keep me coming back, that urge to improve.
Now if you didn’t take damage, you would often not even realize you made a mistake and so you loose a big part of the learning loop. Taking damage is the primary way you know you f***** up in most cases.


I think, the way dungeon shards work already accomplishes more than what you are suggesting would. You start out with low level shards that are pretty forgiving and allow for minor mistakes to be made so you can learn and get a good feel for the dungeons. Then you level them up and gradually get higher and higher, requiring more and more skill, accumulated from repeated mistakes and practice. In the case that it’s too much for the group and you fail you get a little set-back, but you can still get gear if you complete the dungeon after the shard breaks.

As for raids, kinda same thing, there’s an easier variant of each raid, normal mode, and a harder variant, hardmode. Normal mode is the practice version for hard mode, lower damage, more forgiving, but mostly the same mechanics. When you go on your first raid, no-one expects you to understand everything right away. You will make mistakes, but more importantly, you’ll learn from those mistakes. First few times may feel like you-re being carried, but that’s alright because you’ll learn and improve and eventually be one of the people carrying others and teaching others.

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Honestly I think just adding abandoned mines and ancient temple to dungeon que would solve a lot of problems and then some, thoughts?

I also see the immediate difficulty but would still like to see if people had suggestions on this.

Issue is they are scaled to level 30 now and it would cause a lot of issues when it comes to people realizing they have been doing mist keeper wrong and cant clear a shard because the damage scaling would be so different.
Just my thoughts on them adding them to dungeon que though.

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what about adding another dungeon queue specifically for mines and temple that unlocks when you hit lv30? that way people can practice it more easily while still having it at the same difficulty that it is currently

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Part of the problem is that having separate queues could split the “pool” of people in the dungeon queue since you can’t be in two queues simultaneously. I’ve always thought a change to the queue GUI would be helpful to keep people from queueing as the wrong role (dps/support/tank). What about something like this?

Instead of selecting dps/support/tank, you select the classes you wish to play as. The system auto-groups that into their typical roles and puts you in that queue. If you have that class as level 30, you have the option to also queue as that class for lvl 30 dungeons. That way, if there are more <30 players in the queue, you can still get into a dungeon. But if there are enough 30 players, it’ll pull you into a lvl 30 dungeon instead. (Kind of a parallel queue system).

This could help minimize <30 players queueing for the dungeons which don’t scale :woman_shrugging:

(Sorry for the bad paint graphic, just figured this might make it more understandable :upside_down_face:)

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now that’s something i could get behind!

This part bothers me though. Because why are you not allowed to be in multiple queues?

Basically, by queueing you are saying “i’m ok with doing x”. I don’t see a reason a player can’t choose to sign up for x, y and z and get tossed into whichever content is filled with interest first.

On top of that, a better GUI to more exactly choose what you want to do (quick queue - aka existing form for a random dungeon, specific queue with select dungeons, role/class/levels), raids, raid specific selections etc.

At the end of the day, each player selection is just a set of properties in a list entry for the matching system to draw upon. Being able to sign up for either more content, or more specific content just allows the system to be more precise in bringing players the experience they are looking for.

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