JynnSilverstar wrote:
I finished the subclass quest the other day, and figured I would post about a strange occurence in my quest. I did the stuff in Blackburrow (by the way, it makes it 10 times quicker and easier if you use the second back door to BB past the underwater cave), and went back to begin the instance portion. I entered the instance and immediately used Hunt. Now, I have Hunt at Adept 1 and I'm level 19 (the appropriate level to do the quest) so I should be invisible to every enemy necessary to complete the quest. But, I'm not. The first group of enemies had one guy in it that was orange con and saw through my invisibility. This group of enemies was right in the only doorway to get to the next room, there was no way around him. There was no way to get through to finish the quest. Since I didn't know that was the only way to go, I proceeded upstairs thinking this might be some high speed test to see if I have the common sense enough to think outside the box, and go up the stairs to drop down in the other room through a hole or something. To no avail, nothing upstairs but red cons who see through invis. Playing around, I tried to ease past the first orange con to go through the door anyway. Aggro, zone out cause I can't kill 2 level 22+ NPCs at once. Wait 15 minutes, zone back in... those same enemies no longer see through my stealth. Go through the quest, everything's fine.
The point is that apparently something is jacked up in the design of the instance. The NPC that saw through my stealth could not have been designed to see through invisibility. I personally think it's because at Hunt Adept1 I can sneak past low-con orange NPCs (level 22), but the high con orange NPCs (level 23) still see me. I'm assuming this is a screw up, and I think it should be fixed. Furthermore, not everyone has the cash or the luck to get Hunt to Adept1, and I'd be willing to bet that all oranges see through Hunt without it, which includes most of the NPCs that you are required to sneak past. It would make doing the quest impossible.
Corrections, feedback...?
Actually, I disagree with your assumption. You said that you "should be invisible to every enemy necessary to complete the quest." How many of us failed to get our butts handed to us at least once in the Level 10 Predator test? I recall zoning in the first time in that one, taking my time getting down the first hallway, only to get jumped by the big dog (and that was one honkin' big dog!) before I got halfway to the second hallway. The second and third time, I got jumped as soon as I zoned in. It was only the fourth time (maybe the fifth) that I got all the way to the back room undetected. And bear in mind as with this test, I zoned-in in stealth mode each time. And I was not alone in this. There were predators-to-be stacked up outside the door expressing similar experiences to me the whole time I was there. So the assumption is not really valid based most people's experiences with the first trial.
Besides, that is not how it works. Most games like this operate on some variation on the way D&D works. In a D&D-like game, your stealth ability plus a random die roll would be compared against the critter's detect ability. If you win, you are undetected. If not, they see you. And this skill check is done at specific intervals, so even if you are undeteced initially, your stealth may be broken later.
I cannot say the exact process this game uses, but it is similar. And we know that the higher the level of the critter compared to your own, the more likely it would be that they will break your stealth. There is a point at which a critter that is at a sufficiently low enough level compared to you which would make it impossible to break your stealth and that a sufficiently high enough level critter will automatically see through it. But between those two points, whether or not they break your stealth is up to a "die" roll, and the higher the level they are the greater the chance it will be broken. For instance, I was in a place in TS once where my exits were blocked on both sides by Giants. The group of four yellow (no ups) were nearest the safest route out. While in stealth where I was standing, they could not see me. So I started sneaking past them, and, sure enough, as soon as I reached the choke point where I was closest to them, I was suddenly visible and under attack. That just meant I got a bad die roll on one of the subsequent skill checks, and my stealth was broken.
Now those guys were only yellow to me. The guys in test were orange to you. So it is not necessarily a bug that you were seen the first time. You likely just got a bad "die roll" that time, and they saw through your stealth right away. Also, as you mention, orange critters could be one of two levels. I do not know about this instance, but in many places, a critter that spawns can vary by a level the next time it spawns. It could be that the first time, the instance spawned a higher level orange and the second a lower level orange. That is still not a bug. You would have just gotten a better spawn the second time. But even if they were the same level creature, chance plays a part in the detection process, so you just got a bad roll of the die one way or another.
When I did this test, I zoned in and got all the way back and out without being detected (except for the combat phase of the test). Otherwise, I had no problems whatsoever. But I fully expected for this test to go like the first, so the fact that yours resulted in you being detected the first time should not be that big of a surprise. It would not be much of a "test" if there was no chance of detection, after all.
Message Edited by Sotaudi on 01-30-2005 01:16 PM