QCF Design Community

Alright, everyone, it’s time for round two! Once again, this post is going to be pretty spoiler heavy, so read at your own peril. Of course we recommend experiencing things organically, but sometimes its nice to know what you’re getting. Still, the precise specifics for everything except the classes will remain for everyone to discover, so the spoiler areas will just contain general summaries, names, and the like.

Official Download: http://ddmod.weebly.com/download.html

Accessing New Content


New Classes
Once again, this region features two new classes. However, unlike the Bard, the East’s second class is quite a bit harder to get, so I’m hiding him wholesale in a spoiler tag.

Heretic


Class 2


Class Challenges
This time around (and in all future directional regions) there are only three class challenges. Still, since they’re built on the Heretic, they are rather… interesting.

Bronze


Silver


Gold


New Puzzle Pack


Dungeons
Whew, welcome to the meat of the expansion. This time around there are a full six dungeons (thanks for the opportunity, VHoS), and hopefully they match difficulty roughly evenly with the Northern Region. Spoilers will give name, difficulty, generic summary, and some quest info.

First Dungeon


Second Dungeon


Third Dungeon


Fourth Dungeon


Fifth Dungeon


Sixth Dungeon?!


Items
There’s your standard bevy of new items here (especially in new subdungeons, and a few of those aren’t half bad…), but again the primary two come from a quest and a silver challenge. There are vicious items too, but you’ll have to find those yourself.

Item 1


Item 2


New Preparation


New Badge


That just about covers all of it! Happy adventuring, enjoy the discoveries, and post your screenshots!

Played for a few hours, rolled through everything up to Frigid Plains. It's a nightmare. It's the perfect concoction of dangerous horrible enemies, inconvenient dungeon layout, and the worst dual boss this side of Ornstein and Smough. No preps makes it just that extra bit worse, as with even just a reflex potion and schadenfreude alone I could have won at least two of those tries, but as for now... I think I'm going to scum up some PISSORF strats, because fighting both back to back as separate challenges isn't working.

As for the good feedback, holy crap that new badge is awesome it's fantastic it's amazing and I love you two for including it. The sheer content in the game now is staggering! I almost want to finish all the quests just so I have the excuse to go free-playing and check all of those out.

Okay, I might have found a minor problem. Did some puzzles, tried out heretic and the first dungeon, came back to the map and noticed that Hobbler's Hold had two flags... so I checked what the second one was in case it was a new quest, but it was a PQI, because all progress (Classes and Badges) had been removed from that one dungeon. So I checked my old Extreme Edition backup version and it showed everything done, so I copied that over (because I hadn't really done much) to see if I could try and repeat and find out when the progress gets lost.

Test 1: Progress was there immediately after starting. Bought Zeppelin, still there. Bought Church, still there. Did Unstable pt 1 puzzle, all gone.

Test 2 (to see if it's just the puzzle): Progress there at start and after doing the puzzle. Bought Zeppelin, still there. Bought Church, still there. Did puzzle again, gone.

Test 3: Just upgraded Church before the puzzle, and things were fine. Upgrading the Zeppelin and doing the puzzle again, killed the progress.

Test 4: Just upgrading Zeppelin then doing the puzzle kills the progress. Church confirmed to be not involved.

EDIT: Further testing has shown that all I need to do is buy the Zeppelin, exit the game and restart it, and the progress will be gone.

The progress is gone from Hobbler's Hold only, right? What is the second quest you have there? If it's One Lord to Rule Em All, complete it and tell me if it solves the problem.

Wow, this is way harder than I expected. I just unlocked the Troll Lab, and oh...

And, yeah, really, the new badge is mind-blowing. Great job.

It IS really hard. I'm pushing through it, but this feels WAY rougher than Extreme North. Right now, my efforts are focused on Heretic Silver and the Phantom Citadel's Half Dragon quest. It's all doable, but it's feeling like I carving through this with my TEETH. I haven't seen past the first boss of the Citadel, and I ALMOST have the Silver nailed after 7 tries of thinking and optimizing my approach. It may not be the best way to beat it, but it's ALMOST working and I feel that if I just play sliiiightly better and just get some slightly better luck with map generation and Quicksilver dodge procs, I could beat it my very next try.

Edit: Turns out I've needed none of that and won even a "bad" run by just realizing

Another post, this time in rage.

So I finally made headway in Fi Fi Fo Fum 2. I had it all, things were going GREAT, and theeeen...

https://puu.sh/yHQCS/5166ec4d8d.jpg

Crashed upon picking up the item. I have to do it ALL OVER now. Fun. Yaaay.

EDIT: Did it again. Game didn't crash this time, but I died anyway because of the typical "It's a vicious dungeon so it's going to just straight lie to you and take all your resources/throw a curve ball at the last minute."

This... is gonna be a little bit.

MULTIEDIT!!: I couldn't get the crash to happen again, even with the same build and strategy. No idea where to even start with it, but I beat the dungeon finally. Almost got all the content unlocked, just need to unlock the other class and the shield, and I think I've opened access to everything in the update.

Hm, I think that crash might just be your machine being unable to handle the burden of the transformation sequence. Also, I think pt 2 might be harder than pt 3, as 3 is more of a question of planning it properly. Meanwhile Phantom Citadel is just a brutal dungeon. Have you knocked off the extra vicious dungeon? There's a bit of extra content behind that.

It's interesting to see that you think the East is that much harder than the North. It is definitely requires more planning and careful play due to the trickier monster set, but I don't feel like the respective dungeons are that much more challenging once you learn how to play smart with the new effects. (This is excluding Oasis Town v Frigid Plains, as Oasis Town is intentionally not supposed to be too hard).

Frostbite is just brutal, really. Not just it, either, most of the monsters here have the age-old pains too. Curse, corrode, poison, mana burn all on one monster, death gaze 100%'s or curses on the only guaranteed first strikers... and the bosses are no joke, either. Jealous Apprentice and Goat Face were tough, but pretty straightforward to counter. A lot of the East's bosses force you into a harrowing battle of attrition, being quite meaty with a slew of dangerous effects that separate them from your average Super Meat Man. The east is "interesting," AND hard, which is where it sets itself apart. The North was tough in its own right, but for the most part it wasn't too hard to answer it. Everything had a very clear workaround. No blackspace? Then steamroll through levels with high damage and IMAWAL. Bosses get stronger with each monster killed? Focus all in on the bonus EXP, give goblins a try. Two bosses, one a stonewall, the other (several) glass cannons? Prep for one, burn resources making up for the other. Reviving enemies that deny EXP without a ton of extra effort? Make it hard for them to damage you.

The East isn't quite so simple. Frost bite is a huge problem, and dealing with it often means losing half your health and needing to regen... except regening just frostbites you more, making a vicious cycle. Frigid Plains takes the cute gimmick of Yin and Yang, and stretches it into a brutal fight that all but requires a fantastic hybrid build, as regen fighting is utterly ineffective between frostbite, the fact both need to die back to back (therefore they may as well regain a combined total of 20 HP per tile) and the little detail that it's Labyrinth style so blackspace is short anyway. Phantom Citadel features one hell of a beefgate initial boss encouraging the player to level up high just to survive a hit, and likely blow their blackspace in doing so, which you NEED for the last phase. Better hope you got the Zombie Hallway subdungeon and poison! And then there's the boss of the last dungeon (which I just now beat with a bread and butter Paladin Tank) which is... a little scary, to say the least, and seemingly impossible without one hell of a build. I'd need more time to have a solid opinion on it, as I beat it first time I saw it, and don't really have context to how other types of characters would manage.

So yes, I've got the new preparation now, and only really need to go for the Troll Lab quest to have "done everything" as far as content unlocks go. I'll probably have more to say once it's all said and done.