(GM Blog) - Legendary Dungeons - 30/11/2016

**Date Posted: 30th November 2016**

Hi, I’m GM Dai-Laiku. I’m part of the team that tunes the game content to the needs of our Riders. Since the introduction of the Legendary Dungeons in October, the community has been very vocal about various aspects of this new content. Some of the major issues brought up within the community include the high difficulty and low survivability within the dungeons and the rewards that these dungeons offer.

We agreed that changes are needed, but we wanted to gather data and combine that information with community feedback to make sure we were able to arrive to the correct answers and adjustments. For the past few weeks, we have been reviewing that game data and gathering community feedback in order to find the best approach and direction to improve the experience for our Riders. We feel that sufficient research has taken place that we can now share the upcoming changes with you.

Today, we would like to take the time to address our Riders about the role of the Legendary Dungeons in the game, the upcoming short term changes, and future plans for the next update!

**Legendary Dungeons**

Legendary Dungeons were designed to be relevant and experienced well into level 50 content. Unlike previous dungeons, the Legendary Dungeons were not meant as a small stepping stone before the next content update. They were designed to be a long term aspirational goal to be achieved after the main story content had been completed. That wasn’t entirely clear to Riders when we launched this content, and we should’ve been better at communicating that to the community.

Successfully clearing the Legendary Dungeons is an incredible—say, even “legendary”— feat for level 40 Riders and the Legendary Dungeons will present a challenge to Riders even at level 50.

**Legendary Dungeon Difficulty at Level 40**

Although our level cap still remains at level 40, we released Legendary Dungeons in October to challenge our Riders before releasing the upcoming Ranger’s Fury update that includes other level 50 features. Even when the Ranger’s Fury update adds more power to our Riders through new gear and a level cap increase, the Legendary Dungeons may still be very challenging since the difficulty level is unlike anything released before.

It was important for our team to allow for enough time to see how our Riders could adjust and adapt to this new experience at level 40. In terms of knowledge and combative experience, we understood that the Riders would need new levels of coordination, teamwork, and knowledge of one’s class to overcome this challenge. To achieve the correct level of difficulty, we chose to present the challenge to the Riders first and adjust per your feedback rather than releasing an under-tuned version with little challenge. Since the Legendary Dungeon launch in October, we’ve recently reduced the health and attack of all enemies in L1 through L4 difficulties and will continue to gather player feedback and data.

For Riders seeking to challenge the dungeons now, further enhancing your gear will help you to rise to the challenge. The table below outlines how bonuses from tempering scale upwards as the tempering level increases. A heroic item tempered to level 15 provides a bonus more than two times that of tempering level 10, and a heroic item tempered to level 20 provides a bonus more than four times that of level 10.

Heroic Armor Tempering Bonus

**The Legendary Karasha Gear**

The main draw of the Legendary Dungeons is the Legendary Karasha gear. The power that the Karasha gear provides is at much higher than that of the previous Ruinous and Jumawu Legendary items. The Karasha set is the Legendary gear that truly reigns above all others.

With that increase in power comes increased rarity compared to previous Legendary items. In order to collect Karasha gear, Riders have opportunities to find rare completed pieces from the Legendary bosses, as well as materials from their many battles used to craft Karasha gear. The journey to collect and obtain these items will be a great achievement to our dedicated and skilled Riders who take on this challenge. After completing our research of game data and assessing community feedback on the availability of Karasha gear, we’ve identified a few ways we can make the gear more accessible while keeping such powerful gear still feeling legendary in rarity.

**Plans for Legendary Dungeons**

Making direct changes to Legendary Dungeons is a delicate task, as changes now would greatly affect the content in future updates. Before making permanent changes, we experimented with buff events to observe how these impacted our Riders and their experiences with the Legendary Dungeons.

We also looked at Karasha gear accessibility as well. With the November 23rd update, we permanently doubled the drop rate for Karasha Armor and Weapon Gear.

The November 30th update introduced some additional improvements to Karasha gear accessibility. We are focused on developing a much more “progressive” reward experience with Legendary Dungeons and Karasha gear. Overall, we want each Legendary Dungeon run to be more rewarding on average with fewer runs where Riders feel that nothing useful dropped. We’ve implemented this in three different ways:

* Additional Daily Achievement with Magic Dragon Essence reward
* Increased Magic Dragon Essence drop rate from Legendary Dungeon bosses
* Further increased drop rates of Karasha armor and weapons from Legendary Dungeon bosses

We’ll continue to monitor player feedback and game data to determine how these changes have affected the Legendary Dungeon experience and Karasha gear collection.

**Moving Forward**

I hope I’ve been able to better outline the role of Legendary Dungeons, our intent when releasing it, our approaches in making adjustments to the content, and the changes we’ve taken in order to improve the accessibility of Karasha gear for our Riders. Of course, when Riders are able to hit the level 50 cap in the upcoming Ranger’s Fury update and continue attempting the Legendary Dungeons, we’ll continue to gather data and player feedback. Please continue to provide us with your feedback on the content we're releasing during this Open Beta period, and will continue to strive to make a game that you love. Thank you.