Since its release the marauder, and more broadly the blighted biomes/bosses system as a whole hasn’t received any significant updates. Whilst the minor updates it has received like the grim vessel and ruby increase were nice, the community has been seeking more challenging PvE content for a long time and this post suggests possible ways of adding that to Origin Realms.

Adding Replayability Through Customization

The main problem the marauder currently has is a lack of scaling difficulty. If you’re a newer player and are in under-enchanted diamond equipment with minimal consumables you will really struggle. But, if you are a long time player in hyper-maxed equipment with every consumable Origin Realms has to offer, the boss is no challenge at all. By its very nature as a progression based survival game, Origin Realms’ bosses are impossible to balance with a one size fits all solution. That is where something like the “The Altar” could provide a fix.

The Altar

*possible GUI for new customization system

“The Altar” would be a new interactable block found in the lobby of the marauder, and could be accessible once everyone in the party has completed the marauder at least once. It would allow players to add additional challenges to the marauder bossfight for additional rewards. Below are some examples of how the system could work

Challenges

*five proposed challenges for the marauder

Each of these challenges adds difficulty to the bossfight whilst being unique enough from one another to keep things interesting. Challenges being able to be combined with one another would add another layer of depth and give incentive for replaying the marauder for both fun and through in game rewards.

Rewards

There are multiple ways the rewards from these challenges could work such as: an increase to a specific items drop rate, adding new items only obtainable whilst attempting each challenge, buffs for all future marauder fights or a mixture of the three. If the fight is getting harder, the incentives need to be good enough to encourage players to do the challenges. So finding a good balance would be an important step during testing.

Also each of these challenge modes could have their own badge and cosmetic rewards, including a bonus for doing all challenges simultaneously, as a congratulations to the players who really want to go the extra step.

*badge designs for completing different challenges

Other Marauder Changes

That was the main part of my suggestion, if you were here for the flashy images and big concepts that’s it. I appreciate your time and would love if you could please upvote the thread if you like the suggestion. It shows the admins you would like to see something like this in-game ❤️

If you’re interested in some more general changes and QoL for the marauder please continue reading.

Easier Replayability

Currently there is a bottleneck with participating in the marauder fight. With there being a very limited and random number of spires across all the Open Worlds, it can feel disheartening if we get unlucky and there are only a few spires in the generation for that rotation.

There are multiple ways to go about alleviating the issue, my opinion would be to:

• Have the first entry to each spire remain the same and be free

  • This still encourages and rewards community exploration

• Allow players to purchase re-entries a certain number of times per day

  • Could be static amount of rubies and a lower total number of entries or a exponential amount of rubies increasing per subsequent entry. For a static fee I would suggest 10,000 as it’s slightly more then the average rubies you earn from a spire clear.

• Have the number of entries be a collective pool across all spires

  • Makes things more fair for players as they can now choose when and where to grind the boss. Also removes the randomness from the world gen deciding how many spires you can do per day.

Rewarding Group Play

The current system punishes players who play spires in parties by having the loot be shared amongst the whole party. This system feels outdated and should be changed to allow players to choose how they want to play, without being punished for choosing one of the options.

I think the easiest ways of doing this would be to

• Scale the fight based off of the number of players

  • Increases to health, damage, number of summons, sizes of attacks etc.

• Have the rewards for players be random, not the same for every party member

  • Stops the market being flooded with rare items if a party gets lucky and allows a static loot pool with equal odds for all players regardless of party size

And that’s it for the suggestion.

If you’ve read till the end thankyou. I really appreciate your time as I know this was a long post. I enjoy creating high quality, in-depth suggestions and the feedback you leave in the comments helps me improve at making and writing them.

So, if you like something, hate something, or feel somewhere in between please let me know in the threads comments. I’d be happy to refine the suggestion more and differing perspectives helps the dev team (if they do decide to go with this suggestion) see alternative perspectives.

Have a great rest of your day,

Thanks, CoCap ❤️