Early Beehive (Shield) Dungeon?

[Own]

I don't know if this is exactly necessary, but having a mini-dungeon near the start of your hometown for the purposes of exploring the shield seems like it could be an interesting way of teaching shield mechanics.

You'd have the usual Mrs. Bee, who gets stunned when ramming your shield.

You'd have a Mr. Bee, who never dives at you. Instead, he circles around you in the air occasionally firing off a stinger projectile, which requires a perfect guard to 100% of the time send it back up at him, knocking him out of the air and stunning him.

And then you would have a Baby Bee, which is normally too small and too fast to be hit by any attack or skill, triggering a 'Miss!' with every attack. Baby Bee would charge at you along the ground, requiring a Perfect Guard chained immediately into a weapon-crit or skill-instacharge-hit to kill.

The reward could maybe be a Stinger Shield, deal damage to enemies on a perfect guard.

The purpose of going to the dungeon? Maybe... seeking out some Royal Jelly, to give to the sick kid in Startington as medicine? Or maybe just a purely optional area. I'm not sure.

Of course, you probably have a better way of teaching shield mechanics to players up your sleeve.

 

[Hobo]

That's... actually well thought out, quite impressive.

 

[IHeartPie]

Wasn't there a mandatory perfect guard training in the sky fortress?

 

[Own]

Wasn't there a mandatory perfect guard training in the sky fortress?

There was, but a few problems:

A) It's brief enough to be forgettable.
B) It only requires you luck into getting a single PerfectGuard.
C) The boss fight immediately after it doesn't require it's utilization, and because it's a bossfight (and you're taught about teleport arrows right after) the training is forgotten immediately. I think the only thing you can reflect in that fight is the green shot?
D) It doesn't put into practice PerfectGuard+Attack/Skill comboing.

It's better when you have something that's memorable, actually puts it into practice and outright requires it for success. Ideally a brief, one room, optional PerfectGuard-based dungeon would be there to teach you how to pull it off and the Flying Fortress training would be there to serve as a reminder of what you've learned - or to teach people who never bothered with the Bee Dungeon.

I could be wrong and Flying Fortress Practice Room is good enough for it as-is, though.

 

[GarlicJelly]

When I look at the wall in that perfect block "practise" in the flying fortress I feel like there will be 4(if I remember correctly) more perfect blocks before you enter the boss room. I do agree with you that the boss is not "forcing" you to use perfect blocks since it's all about character placement (no blocking required) but from what I've seen so far in the beta is that normally there is no need to perfect block anything which leads me to the conclusion that the perfect block skill is more used (and maybe only usefull) in arcade mode.

 

[MrChocodemon]

I could do the flying fortress with just one good block and the rest with good evasion.
The only part is the door that opens with a perfect block.

 

[Teddy]

That's a pretty cool idea, Own! We actually agree that the Flying Temple introduction isn't quite good enough, and would rather that be a reminder about perfect guard.

Personally, though, I would have such a dungeon as an optional bee dungeon later in the game. Looking at what a hard time people are having with the shield in the beginning, I suspect most would not even stand a remote chance at clearing that dungeon! Even with some sort of tutorial text which in my opinion would take away some of the mood of such a place.

The not-quite-so-extravagant approach we're planning to go for is to have a short training session with Master Ji with the new recruits (Luke, Marino, etc) and your multiplayer friends after the exams. That way we can add some story/character into the mix and get a pretty natural tutorial in there without resorting to BagOfTricks or a narrator textbox!

While this section is not set in stone yet, my thinking is it would first introduce the shield as a way of blocking and counter attacking enemies (a very rare use of the shield for new players) without perfect guard, followed by teaching perfect guard to reflect a shuriken or something (since reflection requires no followup action), and lastly you'll be asked to perfect guard at close range and follow it up with a normal attack or a skill. Here we could also have Luke or one of the dojo students demonstrate the timing, which would probably be helpful to new players.