The Dragon Campaign: Dev Blog - Rob Frazier

Hello All,

My name is Rob Frazier, and I’ve been with Mythic for eight years now. For the majority of that time I’ve worked on DAoC. Content wise, I’ve worked on everything from Catacombs up to the Dragon Campaign. That Campaign was my baby. I was the lead designer and implementer for the epic content, and I’ll always cherish the work that I and the other implementers did on that project. Here’s a bit of history on how things got to be as they are now.


Before being moved to another project, I had left the Dragons weaker than they had originally been because the Campaign was coming to a close, and we all wanted the encounter to be completed by the most amount of players as possible at the time. The intent of this rebalancing was always to bump the Dragons back up again to be more epic when the Campaign was over and the permanent quest track added. This never happened and everyone became accustomed to the fast respawn time and relatively easy encounter, and hence, the farmable qualities of the Dragons.

Over time, the Dragons became constantly farmed, and the only way the vast majority of players could get the coveted Dragon drops was via those who farmed them. The Dev Team heard the vocal outcry amongst the player base about these practices, and we are taking steps to address it.

The very first step was something that could be done relatively quickly, since everyone wanted to do something to curb the rampant Dragon farming. This was seen in 1.99f, where the extremely fast respawn was reduced and the level variance on the Dragons increased.

To some degree, the changes made have helped with the farming as it introduces some random elements which make the set system of farming more difficult and less predictable. The change of the spawn rate has caused the prices on the Dragon drops go up in some cases. With a difficulty increase in the encounter, players who hunt after Gerrik’s Sword can spawn the Dragon manually once an hour, so long as there isn’t a Dragon corpse at the lair. This helps players bypass the spawn rate and take matters into their own hands when they want to take a raid to the Dragon. That being said, the next stages we plan to implement will further address concerns about this issue.

The Dragons will be made epic once more by having their resist, damage, and level values increased back to the levels before the Campaign ended. The original goal was 2-3 groups of players, less with exceptionally good and well-equipped players. Beyond a return to their former power, they will have a few anti-farming mechanics put into place that will target unresponsive characters. Live players that can recognize a threat and react to it will be impacted significantly less than “bots” or unattended characters. Based on these changes, the Dragon drops will increase in number and the adolescent dragons will have a chance to drop main Dragon loot.
A new currency system will also be introduced that’s centralized within the Dragon zones. This will be a system based on Dragon Scales that will be collected by the Order of Dragonslayers. The Dragonslayers will sell the Dragon drops, Dragon Remains, Respec Stones, etc. The Scales will drop from just about everything within the Dragon zones. The main Dragons will top out with largest amount of caches with the Dragon minions having the smallest amounts. There will be a level progression on how many chances a Scale drops much like in Darkness Falls so a green con monster will drop less and less often than a purple con monster. We’re talking everything here – Dragonsworn, minions, Dragon enemy factions, baby dragons, adolescent dragons, etc. The Scale drops don’t stop here however. The Frontier dragon content, the Dracolich, the Shrouded Isle Dragons – Xanxicar, Nosdoden and Myrddraxis and the father of them all, Draco - shall drop their own scales that can be used towards the Dragonslayer stores.

Finally, a new quest will be implemented to kill the Dragons that will also introduce a new type of Mythirian, the Dragon Mythirians. These items will have multiple, yet lesser values based on the Labyrinth Mythirians and will have no Champion XP level requirements. There will be 10 variations of these Mythirians.

There’s a lot of work to be done and the goal is to have most of this available for you in the next major version. So I better stop yapping and get to work!