Rojon asks:
I know the Empyreans v. Olthoi and Isparians v. Olthoi has been talked about before...
And I know the rest of Dereth is overrun with billions of olthoi...
But I can't shake the feeling still that if "we" can beat the olthoi in our own little corner of the world, why can't the Empyreans?
Obviously there are a lot more Empyreans than Isparians - they populated a world.
Obviously their magic is MUCH more powerful than ours - I don't need to go into that.
I still don't get it.
With all the power at their disposal, why did they have to retreat before the Olthoi?
What am I missing?
Stormwaltz responds:
To be frank, you're missing two things that have nothing to do with lore. You're one of the smarter old-timers in AC, so I'm going to assume you know them already. ^_^
1) It's a game. People like to be able to feel heroic, to beat things they know are supposed to be really tough. So we can't have dungeons filled with the one-hit killers Olthoi probably should be. That would just make people angry. The Sepulcher version of BZ angered people for a long, long time - until they hit upon a solution. If every Olthoi was that tough, would you really enjoy it?
2) When the game began, I honestly don't think anyone knew just how godly players could become. Magic is overpowered, and there are folks who are about as adept with it as a Ranger is with firearms. In early beta, the first time someone killed an Olthoi was server-wide news. But it surely didn't stay that way.
Maybe in AC2 Olthoi can be designed from the get-go to be the quicksilver engines of destruction they should be. Cardell has spent weeks on a bunch of spreadsheets that quantify how much damage players and creatures should be able to deal and absorb at every level of advancement.
Since I brought up BZ, it occurs to me that a lot of people still don't know the final secret to killing him. Most of the ideal method was found and used, but I think everyone missed this: Bael'Zharon was very large, and had a wide set of wings. In testing, we found that on average, seven or eight of the projectiles from Flame Wall spells would hit him at once. When we had a group of battlemages down in the pit, they allowed us to take him down relatively quickly.
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Chris "Stormwaltz" L'Etoile |