Zamuel's Exciting Arcs of Adventure

Dhahabu Kingdom and the Indelible Curse of Hate has a new enemy added to mission 2, Spider Archer. Along with other tweaks this should be a smoother mission overall.

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Hey, could you maybe make them playable for lower levels? Maybe?

I tried the Dhabablablabla kingdom one and I got owned by two enemies.

While I do need to eventually make a lowbie arc, I'm probably not going to alter the level ranges of my current arcs. It's rather difficult (near impossible) to make an arc that is suitable for all levels so I try to keep them them narrow. Dhahabu Kingdom and the Indelible Curse of Hate is 41+ and has a fair amount of customs so it would be unlikely a lvl 8 could solo it despite my recently trying to make some parts here and there easier. However, since you've joined the MA Superteam it's very possible you could run it with the SG.

Intro:
Hrm, female contact dressed in clothing appropriate for a warm weather climate. This is always a good thing, but it’s still just pixels. The whole “Queen Auri”/”King Aurus” name thing sounds a little silly. Are they brother and sister (Egyptian incest royal marriage), does the Queen take the King’s name? Does the King take the Queen’s name (matrilineal inheritance). I know, tiny little issue, but some times tiny little issues can stick out.

Mission 1
Okay, Save the hero-king. ACK! It’s an outdoor bug hunt, where I get to wander around a gigantic expanse until I somehow manage to find all the objectives. I have quit some story arcs upon coming across one of these missions, that’s how much they irritate me. But I shall stick this one through. Good thing my beloved fiancee is visiting relatives, today.
Great goshamighty!!!!! The designer picked one of the gawdawful HUGE maps to inflict upon hapless players.
Finally! The ordeal has ended! That’s all I can conclude about this mission. It’s not challenging, it’s merely annoying.
Nitpick: “This unholy sigil has affected Aurus?” I don’t recall a specific drawing/diagram having been mentioned, before. That’s what a sigil is, after all.

Mission 2
Could the queen please be less whiny at this point? Tragic dignity would work better than feckless schoolgirl.
Ah, ANOTHER big outdoor map. This arc really wants me to hate it.
Okay, smacked spider-guy around, and now I have to waste time wandering around this stinking outdoor map some more. Some reinforcements to help Anansi if the fight starts to go against him would have been nice. He’s supposed to be a king, after all.
Found the whatsit. Evidently, Anansi’s subjects don’t think much of him. They just have the work crew there and nobody to try and stop you taking the clue once you get rid of them. An ambush would have made this more lively.

Mission 3
At LAST! An indoor mission. Only one objective. Let’s hope it’s not on one of those huge maps that forces me to run all over the place for an hour or more.
Diddled with a chest to see what would happen. Ah, appropriate “guardian” critters show up.
Alas, it IS one of those absurdly large maps, all filled up with nothing to do.
I found the incense. I found the incantation. I found the altar? NOOOOO! I can’t complete the objective, yet! More wandering around the big cave-o-nuthin’.
Oh! Okay, so the thing that might LOOK LIKE an altar isn’t an altar. It’s the gazing pool. The “altar” looks nothing like an altar but looks like a lectern and not an altar.

Mission 4
Ah, finally, bad-guy smacking time. I can hope that it’s not yet another almost completely empty map of huge size. My hopes are dashed.
Cool! Disembodied emotional essences can be *****-slapped.
I just destroyed something that weakens the boss. There is no immediate retaliation? If I were an evil sorcerer who had put a major chunk of my power into a handful of gizmos, I would certainly MONITOR those gizmos and send somebody out to apply judicious beat-down upon anyone who damaged them. This villain is worse than evil. He’s guilty of felony-level stupid.
Okay, last “rune” smashed; now I get to hunt around the big land of nothing to find the bad guy.
Finally ran into him. Evidently, he’s as disliked by his minions as is Anansi. Nobody ran to the rescue as I whittled him down.

Mission 5
Here we go, showdown in the spirit world.
I’ve got Peace and Love to fight on my side!
A mercifully small map, with an appropriately tough target. I understand why a possessed King Aurus is the goal, but since this is a “spirit plane” mission, it might be entertaining to require a battle against ones doppelganger before one can find Aurus.

Overall
Better than a large number of arcs I’ve seen, but it has one severe flaw: Overly-large maps with next to nothing to do in them in four out of five missions. I seriously considered abandoning the arc just for that reason. The majority of “play” time was spent running around doing nothing.

I both agree and disagree with some of your points. I know mission 3 has a potential for rage due to the setup. It's very love/hate and people are 50/50 in their response to it. I really wish I could chop the map for mission 1 in half due to the size but it is the only map that works. I actually have deliberately fewer spawns in an attempt to cut down the tedium. This also surprised me that you seemingly had few fights in mission 4. I disagree with your view of Mission 2 for the fact that it is perhaps the single most linear outdoor map in the game.

I kept things a little light on ambushes but I've been contemplating tweaking the difficulty here and there. One of the problems with ambushes in mission 4 is that pending on where they spawn and how high your damage output is, you may kill the final boss before they even get there. Then again, Chukizi probably breaks a few too many rules on the Evil Overlord List so it could bear looking at.

I didn't perceive Auri's voice as whiny but different people have different perspectives of things. The Auri/Aurus thing is a reference to gold ("Au") so perhaps too clever for my own good (keeping it though). Likewise the sigil mention is the skull symbol on the possessed villagers but I don't think I ever directly note it and it doesn't glow or anything.

While I wish you enjoyed it more, I'd prefer you be honest and give decent critique. Gave me a few things to think about and it's better than getting 1 starred just for the heck of it.

One question: Solo or team? Settings affect a few things so I'm just curious for reference. Most of the original testing was on a large team and I generally set myself to be x8 but invincible when testing.

I was running solo, invincible.

While some things couldn't be "fixed", I opted to make a few changes to Dhahabu Kingdom and the Indelible Curse of Hate. Hope everyone enjoys them.

Arc Name: Dhahabu Kingdom and the Unfathomable Nightmare of Sand
Arc ID: 453511
Faction: Heroic
Synopsis: The thrilling sequel to Dhahabu Kingdom and the Indelible Curse of Hate (#367872). As you return to this mystic land, the people are assailed by an unholy drought. As something sinister lurks, only you can save this world from an ancient threat.

Review as part of the CoHMR Aggregator thread.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a high-40s DBlade/Fire brute, +1/x2 with bosses on.

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Hmm. I guess it’s just that nonstandard contact colors don’t show up in the little mini-portraits. I like what you’ve done with the queen.

Anyhow, the doom drought approaches.

I wonder what these little crystals are that you can put them in as allies, which is a really nice way to prevent the giant ambush problem.

Looks like the Circle are trying to do their possession thing in the middle of this horrid drought. ...but, uh, I kinda thought Dhahabu Kingdom was in some alternate dimension. Or is it more along the lines of Wakanda?

Ah, okay. The Circle came over from our world too.

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And the queen goes to talk to an island of all-female oracles. I get to be her guide there and wait outside in a boat. ...probably not going to be sitting in the dinghy holding my action the entire time, though.

Carving my way through a wall of demon flesh, I come upon several oracles, with a nice touch as the queen stops to tend to a wounded one.

Apparently the Circle are resurrecting some demon lich of drought to try and win her over to their side. Because that always works so well.

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Apparently the CoT have already hit the alarm and now it’s up to me to stop the resurrection.

...aw geez. Ruladak. This cave’s a real pain unless every enemy’s got some glow on it, because of the zero visibility.

And it looks like enemies don’t have the glow on ‘em.

Have the big mummy bosses got Rage on ‘em, or just normal super strength? I seem to be getting tagged an awful lot.

Hmm. Power Boost and Earth Control mean a quicksand that does about -100% base defense debuff. Might want to look at that.

The queen’s retinue is otherwise reasonable though I can’t really get a good look at them in this light. ...well, not entirely reasonable. The Drain Psyche on the basic slaves is kinda punishing, but they don’t know the right range to use it at so it often doesn’t matter.

After I find a dehydrated Circle mage, the captain of the queen’s guard informs me she’s alive and well. Undead and well. Undead and unwell? Whatever.

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The queen has come out in a small lab in Paragon, which is now a small wrecked lab with drifts of sand in.

After I free another crystal, the queen pops up. She summons water bearers, storm/iceblast customs who definitely looks as though they’re dripping. On lower health there’s an ordinary ambush, but as I’ve got fire armor she’s largely unable to hurt me before she drops out.

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Storyline - ****. Another fine piece of pulp adventure. The one weak link here is exactly how I managed to trap the drought lich in a water crystal. I was figuring mission 4 would provide some clues to that effect and we’d trap her in mission 5, but nope, boss fight, arc over.

It’s not that I can’t see ways. Maybe she was originally in one of ‘em in the underground river as kind of an eternal torment thing, and I’ve got a copy of the old sealing ritual. Maybe she gave some power trinket to her guard captain from mission 3 and I can use that signature to lock her inside the crystal. Maybe her unusual constitution is of the sort that I can just drag her over and suplex her on top of it.

But I’ve presumably never seen these crystals before mission 1, so I was expecting a little more than an “of course!’ to go into the final mission with.

Design - *****. There’s some really great work done with the new custom drought zombies. They’ve got a decent look to ‘em and sensible powersets. The Water Carriers look great, which is way more than I’d expect for a one-off, and there’s some novel use of the Mission Architect mechanics for the crystals in missions 1 and 4, and the queen in mission 2.

Gameplay - ***. This is pretty much all down to mission 3 and the oppressive darkness of Ruladak. It’s pretty hard to make out anything that doesn’t have an aura in this map. Rularuu all have them, as do (for example) the Banished Pantheon. But the customs, aside from the boss, are nigh-invisible. Drain Psyche’s only a pain with this AI if you start combat right close to them, which is possible when invisible, and worse yet is Power Boosted Quicksand from the shadows. I can understand the need for Quicksand on the mages, as it fits their aesthetic, but with Power Boost on it turns from a hindrance into a death mire.

Detail - ***. The supporting detail keeps up pretty well until I find the bones in mission 3, then the clues just kind of peter out, resulting in the confusion about exactly what went on that I talk about in the storyline above.

The detail on the drought lich’s army is a bit lacking, too. I can understand not really bothering much with the water bearers, as there’s not really much time to have a look at their descriptions in the middle of a pitched battle. But the rest of her army... well. They’re from History, and could probably stand to have a bit of legend about them, or maybe a description of the pictures of them in an ancient scroll, rather than just a one-liner.

Overall - ****. No real big-picture concerns, aside from what I’ve outlined above. It’d take just another clue or two and maybe visible auras on all the customs to satisfy most of my major concerns with how this one goes. It’s a decent sequel, keeping the theme but going largely to different places.

Power Boost is simultaneously on purpose and an accident. I added it for the slow but didn't realize it affected tohit debuffs as well. Plus, there's the stacking issue if you don't get the other LTs. I'll be removing that when I get a chance. While the darkness of the Ruladak cave is sort of intentional, I probably will add a glow to the sand mages so it's easier for someone with spike damage to get the drop on them.

The cave is an interesting case of having to work within limitations. I actually wanted to make the player cross the desert but we lack that kind of map. Opted to rework the story so that you're navigating under the desert and decided to use something different than maps already in this arc or the prequel. I see I need to more explicitly note that the "mist" is dust to help add to the setting.

Despite erring on the side of caution, I think I may be forced to bump the final boss up EB to AV. She dies too fast for her ambush to actually matter and it makes King Aurus less overpowered when fighting her.

And overall I think a little more detail probably can be added to the last two missions. Things are still pretty much in first draft mode right now so I've got a bit to look over.

Finally sat down and made some key adjustments to Dhahabu Kingdom and the Unfathomable Nightmare of Sand. While I kept the same map for Mission 3 and limited spawn control did its best to thwart me, I added a new required objective to smooth story progression a bit. Likewise, I tried to alleviate the empty feeling of the map by adding a few non-required objectives to add a little foreshadowing. Due to this story addition, I adjusted the Mission 4 intro text and added a new clue to that mission as well.

I managed to get the problems plaguing Dhahabu Kingdom and the Indelible Curse of Hate fixed. And as far as I can tell, everything is fixed without problems. Though I feel that this may be due to a stealth fix (which has annoyances of its own), I'm in an incredibly good mood over it. While Dhahabu Kingdom and the Unfathomable Nightmare of Sand is still unable to be edited, it only had one corrupted enemy so it wasn't that big of a problem.

You know, I really hate stealth fixes. *sigh* I've got work to do.

Yeah, please spill the beans if you've found another problem.

Well, I have two problems and the bigger one isn't (directly) the stealth fix but here goes.

Know how the Circle of Thorns got updated for Freedom? Well, the Reflections enemy group in the Shadow Shard didn't get updated at that time. I felt it was a massive win since I was using recolored versions of one of those enemies and I figured that anything involving the Shadow Shard was far enough off the radar not to get "fixed". When working on some updates for Dhahabu Kingdom and the Indelible Curse of Hate, I discovered that the CoT within the Reflection group were updated with the new snakeskin look which isn't what I was wanting.

The bigger problem is that when running through Test Mode, I discovered that an entire enemy group lost the renamed standard enemies which will take a while to find and add back. I don't think this is directly related to the Reflections stealth fix though it's gonna take work to do. Also, I don't know if the published version of the arc has been broken or not. Doesn't help that the I22 changes to the Banished Pantheon sorta has me in full panic mode but I'm looking into that and trying to be mellow.

I think whenever a pre-existing group gets changed or added to, such as the CoT, it quacks up any mission using them, yes. I seem to recall having heard that arcs got messed up from some AE authors when the CoT changes rolled in. Not long ago, they apparently* added some females into a formerly all-male group** I use in my Day Job Hell arc and it got borked as well.


*At least I think they did, I can recall having ever seen female models in there before. After fixing my arc it seems like they predominated the group! On top of that, they didn't show up as models to recolor, just the males did, but they often spawned female. That Mercy Island sewer water just canNOT be good for you...

**You know, that one group who hangs out around the sewer works, throwing up a lot? I can't seem to recall the name right now and Paragonwiki is down for the SOPA protest - damn you Congress!

Dhahabu Kingdom and the Indelible Curse of Hate has gotten a visual upgrade on a number of its enemies. Try it out today!

Dhahabu Kingdom and the Indelible Curse of Hate has been fixed...again. Completely rebuilt the enemy group in the fourth mission and had to swap a few other things around due to the high level Banish Pantheon update.