Soarora wrote: »

I am curious— what seems to be causing pugs to wipe? Is it in the realm of not knowing mechanics (ignoring totems, standing in tethers, not standing in the yellow AoEs), too low of damage output (add overwhelm), or too much damage taken (healers underprepared, dps standing in AoEs)?

I'd say it depends on the group. Personally, I think DPS doesn't matter as much. If you know the mechanics, you'll still win most of the time. The problem for me, and perhaps for others, is that I often don't know the mechanics. And neither does anyone else in the group. I don't mind asking, if we're having problems, "Does anyone know the mechanics?" If someone does, then that's great and I know for next time (or when we try again, depending). But often, nobody knows. And because you're in a pug, people aren't willing to try again and work them out. Or you just can't work them out. This game is really annoying in that when you're in the middle of combat, you have some NPC shouting things at you, and you're supposed to just magically know what they want you to do. Sometimes it's clear. Other times it's not.

Or there isn't really a clue about what you're supposed to do, and there's no time to figure it out. When you're pugging, you get one chance. Now sure, after I do a dungeon and we fail, I could go to a site and read the mechanics, but to me, a game that makes you go outside to read mechanics has already failed. I've played some really hard games in my time (been gaming for 40+ years) and I've never had to "do homework" to figure it out. I was playing games when there was no internet to check, so you had to figure stuff out yourself, but the games either taught you, or the mechanics made sense and you could figure them out. Not here most of the time, IMO, which is why they have NPCs yelling at you while you're in the middle of dodging all the AoEs and trying not to die. It's stupid, frankly. By mechanics, I don't mean the basics like stay out of stupid. I mean each boss's unique mechanics.

For some dungeons, I do them enough times and I pick up on the mechanics by watching what others are doing. But again, in pugs, it's hit and miss. Sometimes the only time I learn the mechanics is if we're having problems, because other times the bosses just get burned down too quickly to see anything, and it's worse now with the almighty beam. Bosses sometimes barely have time to go through their phases (which I don't mind. Some of the boss fights in this game are tedious and artificially drawn out). Just last week I was doing a dungeon that I've done at least 10x before. We were having problems, and I asked for the mechanics because I had no clue. The other 10x, that particular boss had been burned down so quickly that they didn't matter. So in that sense, perhaps low DPS can contribute, but it's not the root problem, if you know what I mean.

And for one of the later dungeons, perhaps Naj, not sure, there's so much AoE going on that someone died once and I couldn't find them to rez them. It was ridiculous. I'm running around trying to figure out where they are, but the entire freaking floor was covered in AoEs. It does sometimes feel like the designer(s) have no clue, so they just have the bosses throwing out AoEs everywhere.

Anyhow, I'd say mechanics are more of a problem than DPS. You can slowly kill anything as long as you can stay alive.

(if you couldn't tell, I'm not a fan of dungeon boss design in this game.)

I also regularly have the impression that I have to kill far more enemies than specified for endeavors of this kind to complete. Obviously, I don't rule out that I've made mistakes counting or identifying enemies, but the endevors counter is definitely doing weird things at times.

Here's an example from a while ago: somehow I killed 5 foes, but stil defeated only 4 enemies. Guess they don't count as defeated if they didn't call uncle or something.

I’ve had a blast completing it on my different accounts/chars and learn something new each time. Only bugged once on the last boss when he went awol. Took about 10 minutes to convince everyone to suicide so he would reset, then it worked just fine.

The harvester boss got abit tedious after a few runs but otherwise it seemed well designed and structured.

I think keeping it around permanently in some form would cause it to grow old/stale and it would be empty most of the time. What I’d like to see is for ZOS to bring it back periodically as part of a zone or themed event with new rewards/achievements.