Went to do the Harvest Temple dungeon yesterday for the first time with a nicely sized group of the right level. I think the dungeon was on high spawn.
First Impressions / Summary
When you walk up to the temple the area looks great, there's a nice encounter with undead outside, and the lore behind the cursed temple is fantastic.
I also appreciated how the dungeon starts off by introducing you to a puzzle element first and does not overwhelm you with hostile spawns right away.
I think our party consisted of 5 characters between level 9 and 12 or 13. We were well prepared and managed to clear the entire temple with relative ease, we somewhat struggled with one group that had a lot of casters (multiple area of effect spells), but that was mostly a screw up on our end because we drew their aggro too soon and had positioned ourselves poorly. It was a pretty fun dungeon, lots of opportunity to roleplay, and we managed to make it through the entire dungeon without any deaths.
And then we went into the basement...
Basement
This is the main reason I am making this thread, the difficulty level of the basement is very disproportionate to the rest of the dungeon.
As soon as we went into the basement we immediately drew the aggro of over 20 ancient mummies, I counted at least a dozen of Priest and Lord spawns. There was also a named enemy (boss spawn?) there, but I am not sure if he actually managed to join the fight because the room was incredibly overcrowded, despite the relatively wide corridor. Most of the enemies were capable of ranged spells, so this was still mainly to our disadvantage and we were instantly pinned down. My character did not even make it off the steps.
Before all of our party members had even made it through the transition we already got targetted by several long range AoE spells that both stun and blind your character. I could not tell how many spells I actually got hit by, but the effects lasted over 20 seconds on my character, I was essentially stunlocked and blinded from right after I set foot in the room until the moment I died. Did not have a clue what was happening. I did have a bunch of potions on me to counter the CC / disables, but from what I did see we all got stunlocked at the entrance by the several high DC AoE spells within seconds, so I never had a chance to use any of them.
Because there was so much AoE and so little room (we were already fighting with our backs against the door from the moment we entered the room) we also all got corpsed or dropped to -9 pretty much right away by all of the AoE. One person did manage to escape and get back through the transition in time. The problem was that as soon as he went out into the hall leading towards the basement he said another 5 Ancient Mummy Lords spawned there right away and eliminated any chance of recovering the remaining bodies.
When I mentioned this dungeon to some people on Skype, a chat group with some of my faction members in it who are more experienced with higher level dungeons than I am, I immediately got responses from about five different people all telling me that the last room in the dungeon is notorious for having absurdly strong spawns. From what they told me the spawns in the basement are sometimes so hard that even a level 20 can struggle with it, you basically need to bring a high level caster with you just for that last room so you can have the caster clear out the mummies by casting lots of empowered AoE fire spells.
Fortunately we managed to find two high levels, including a high level cleric, that were willing to come save our dead bodies. But even with the cleric's help we still had to retreat several times and use high level fire spell scrolls on top of the high level cleric AoE spells before we managed to clear the room. This last room just seemed to be on a completely different (difficulty) level than the rest of the dungeon.
In short, I think it would be good if the spawns in the basement were adjusted to be more in line with the difficulty level of the rest of the dungeon.
Toning down the number of casters a bit or moving the spawns a bit further away from the door to allow your party members to transition into the room first, without getting aggro as soon as they walk down the steps, should already make a world of difference. Alternatively you could also achieve this by making the rest of the dungeon more difficult instead. Either method would help to make the overall difficulty level of the dungeon feel a little bit more cohesive.
Those respawn / ambush triggers after coming out of the basement, our rogue thought it might have been related to the opening and closing of doors, also seemed really unnecessary and a little bit overkill if you ask, regardless of the difficulty level of the dungeon as a whole. But that is just my completely subjective, personal opinion. I suppose I am one of those players who prefers it when the final boss fight is truly the final encounter in a dungeon.
Overall
Overall the dungeon run was fantastic, I absolutely loved the puzzle element and the bits of Egyptian (or Akiri) lore spread throughout the temple.
It was quite a long dungeon, I am not sure if six halls were really necessary, but there was at least some variety between the different hallways.
Loving the traps as well, especially when I accidentally triggered one and those huge axes suddenly came swinging from the ceiling. Very cool trap. There were a few traps with extremely high DCs that we could not remove, but they did not instantly kill a prepared group so they should be manageable for any level appropriate group. All of the locks were doable as well, at least for a party that brings a locksmith and some thieves' tools.
The reward from the dungeon (both in terms of XP gain and the loot / profit) seemed alright considering the difficulty and length of the dungeon.
All of the hostile spawns up to the basement (including the ambush spawns) were challenging and seemed to gradually get a little tougher, but they were doable.
The basement area was the only real issue, I figured it would be useful if someone made a feedback thread as this seems to have been a problem area for a while.
Hopefully this feedback turns out to be useful and, as always, keep up the good work.
