Instanced Task Dungeons
Dungeon tasks were created for the solo player; but may be completed with a group. They are an expanded version of the existing task system. The existing task system requires you to find a guard, which may be difficult, because you have to find the right guard who offers tasks of an appropriate level. New players generally don't know about this task method. With this in mind Destin mentioned that “ One of Mythic's goals with this expansion was to make this expansion much more user friendly.”
In each starting classic world city you will find an NPC called a taskmaster. In fact, your starting trainer will tell you about the taskmaster. When you click on the taskmaster they will offer you a task, as well as inform you of the regular task system. When the task master assigns you a task, such as clearing out a mob in an instanced task dungeon, it will appear in your quest journal under tasks. So if you were given a task to kill 6 skeletons in the instanced dungeon the journal will keep tally of how many of that mob you have left to kill before you complete the task.
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There are three different types of tasks the taskmaster can give you: 1) clear the entire dungeon, 2) Kill a named boss and 3) Kill a set number of a particular type of mob. For each range of 10 player levels there are 5 possible task dungeon layouts, with 100 different types of monsters which can spawn in each. You'll only see about 20 or so types of mobs in any given task. This opens up about 25 different variations of tasks you might get per level. So, where one person may be tasked to kill 25 bear cubs another might be sent to eliminate 20 skeletons. If you are grouped when you speak with the taskmaster, those in the group will be given the same task as you, and all will receive the same reward of coin and experience.
New Quests
Another addition to Camelot with the Catacombs expansion is the introduction of over 400 quests, the majority of these being mini-quests. Mini-quests are geared toward the solo player, though you may do them in groups if you wish. They are much shorter than typical quests and offer additional routes for players to level their characters.
About 80% of the 400 new quests are mini-quests, with the remainder being lengthier and more like the quests previously in the game. Mini-quests offer experience and a bit of coin as a reward with no item rewards. The standard quests offer the full package of, item, coin and experience reward. Standard quests require much more time than mini-quests, and may require you to bring along a friend or three, depending on your level. Mini-quests take only a few minutes to complete: in fact some of the dialog for these quests takes more time to read than it does to complete the quest. However it is worth the time to read the dialog for all the new quests, as they are very well written and reveal much of the back-story of the Catacombs expansion.
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High Level Content
There has been concern that Catacombs will not offer anything to the level 50 character, or to folks who like participating in large-scale raids. The Dark Spire zone, an instanced dungeon is aimed at these players. The Dark Spire is the toughest zone in Catacombs and is geared towards a solid level 50 group of eight. With your party of eight you will have to fight your way through the Underground Forest to reach the Dark Spire. The Dark Spire itself is the same for all three realms, with only the monsters being different. The eye candy in this zone is amazing, and the difficulty level is fantastic. Completing such a fiendish dungeon with only eight players requires skill and strategy, unlike the zerg rush tactics of raids held in ToA for master levels.
Destin shared a bit of insight on how the encounters for this level 50 instanced dungeon were designed: “ When you enter Dark Spire with a group you are faced with a choice at each stop, there will be a crystal that spawns monsters that will work their way up to you, actually there are 3 of these crystals that will be spawning monsters at about 7-8 second intervals, so your group will have to act fast and decide how they want to tackle this encounter. Depending on your group make up you may want to destroy the crystal to stop the monsters from spawning. But by destroying a crystal you will trigger different traps in the zone, so then you will want to go disarm the trap as your next step.”
“Basically Mythic is hoping to gear this encounter so that depending on your group make up, say if you have a full group of tanks for example you would not worry about disarming the crystals you would concentrate on fighting your way down in the dungeon to the throne room. Where as if you had a group that was mainly casters, where you would not want to get into close combat you'd want to destroy the crystals and then work your way down disarming the traps set from destroying the crystals. The final battle for this dungeon occurs in the throne room.”
After picking Destin's brain for information on instanced dungeons and tasks, there was still time for a few wider ranging questions:
Q&A with Destin:
Maia: How did you come up with the idea for this expansion?
Destin: We wanted to get back to the roots of Camelot, Trials of Atlantis was way out there, it was a totally separate entity. So we started to think what races can we start building these underground cities off of. And we came up with the Kobold, Shar and the Inconnu, and we began to build up off of that.
The rest of it was basically we started with an over arching story. We wanted to give the players purpose to be down here, we wanted to get them involved, that sort of feeling of a life below Camelot, Jordheim and Tir na Nog.
So we wanted to create a bad guy, so we created the bad guy off of the lore of the three realms. And from there we started thinking about what type of zones we wanted to have. We actually wrote a back story, or actually our quest lead Jen Hicks wrote the back story for each individual zone, we've got over 80 pages of back story. Which we've never done before. Camelot at launch did not have this many pages of back story written to this extent.
We did of course gather information from Celtic lore and Albion and Midgard.