Graven Deep: Zelvraak Veteran non-HM Balancing Issues

code65536

During the first week of the Update 35 PTS, I posted the following in the feedback thread: "[W]e were surprised at how tough it is by regular vet standards. [...] The amount of damage done by the flesh atro seems a bit high by regular dungeon vet standards."

Someone else in the feedback thread wrote, "I feel the non- HM is around 80% the difficulty of the HM, which is probably not where the line should be drawn. Usually the vet bosses feel around 40- 50% as difficult as the vet HM bosses."

A third person wrote, "On non hard mode, [the Flesh Abomination] does too much damage and has too much health. My group actually wiped to this thing the first time we faced it non hm bc we weren't expecting something of this strength. I think it might severely limit how many people can get passed the simple non hard mode vet dungeon and get a clear if left in the game. A pug tank will never deal with it."

And since the dungeons have gone live, I've watched some streamers repeatedly wipe on this boss on regular vet.

To be clear, I think HM is fine and in a good place. The problem is that non-HM is clearly overtuned, so when I saw today's patch notes, I assumed that the changes were in response to this problem. They clearly missed the mark. By a mile.

I ran Graven Deep twice today, once on Hard Mode with friends and again on regular vet by queuing as a tank in Group Finder.

I'm honestly not sure what today's patch was supposed to accomplish.

• Boss health is unchanged.
• Flesh Abomination health was reduced by 6.2%.
• Flesh Abomination damage feels the same. I took an unblocked hit, and it chunked out 38K, which is about how much it did before today. Looking at the logs, it looks like the damage was reduced by only a few percent.
• Flesh Abomination still spams that swipe seemingly as much as before.
• And most importantly, non-HM got the same insignificant haircut that HM got.

Essentially, today's patch did nothing. The adjustments are so small that they are materially irrelevant. Which, to be clear, is perfectly fine for Hard Mode. The balance for Hard Mode is fine and it's actually an easier HM than the HMs in Ascending Tide.

The problem is that non-HM is too similar to HM. Specifically, all the incoming damage in non-HM is basically the same as HM. What today's patch needed to do was to increase the difficulty gap between non-HM and HM by lowering non-HM, and it did not do that at all, since it didn't make non-HM easier in any appreciable way.

So what's different between HM and non-HM?

• 4 orbs instead of 2: This is pretty much the only difference that matters
• 2 soul sunders instead of 1: Once people know how to do the mechanic, this doesn't affect the difficulty in a significant way
• More health for the split phase: This doesn't increase the difficulty that much, since the Barrage hits for the same and has the same small interrupt window
• More boss health & class copies include a defensive ability: This doesn't really increase the difficulty, because there are no DPS checks or races, and in some ways, it makes the second phase easier in HM
  • Why does more health (and boss self-healing) make HM easier in the second phase? Because in non-HM, if you get the Flesh Abomination, it has about as much health as what the boss has left (since it has the same health in non-HM as it does in HM). And boss mechanics happen at boss health percentages (sea orbs at 40%, second split at 25%). In HM, you can kill the abomination before pushing the boss to 40%. In non-HM, since the boss has far less health while the abomination retains the same health, that's a lot harder to do, and usually the boss will get pushed to 25%, leaving players to deal with orbs and split with the abomination still alive.
    
    In my HM runs, the abomination was easy to handle, since we could easily kill it before getting the orb and split mechanics. In non-HM, I almost always end up holding the abomination for the entire second half of the fight, through the orb and split mechanics, which actually makes that second phase more stressful on non-HM than it is on HM.
• Skeletons that spawn from dead player corpses: Makes recovery harder, but doesn't make the fight itself more difficult

Essentially, that PTS 1 feedback of "80% the difficulty of the HM" is pretty much on the mark, and I will tell people that there's no point in doing regular vet, because if you can do regular vet, then you should just do HM instead, as HM is only slightly harder than regular vet.

What about downgrading the abomination to a harmless little atro? Um, yea, good luck getting that to happen with the typical regular-vet target audience, like what you'd get in a Group Finder PUG. The problem here is that the Afterlife mechanic remains highly unintuitive. There are people who have cleared HM multiple times who are still unsure what the point of the Fractured Souls are. If you kill enough, the flesh abomination gets downgraded to a flesh atro, and if you kill more, it gets downgraded again to a bone colossus. The problem is that if you don't kill enough for that first downgrade, nothing changes, and all four players need to kill a large majority of them in order for that first downgrade to occur. The effect is like falling off a cliff, rather than rolling down a hill, so most players never get any feedback about the effects of killing the Fractured Souls. If the effect was more gradual, where players saw modest reductions in abomination health if they kill some Fractured Souls (but not enough for that huge downgrade to occur), then there would be a clearer connection between the Fractured Souls and the summoned creature, and there would be the necessary feedback to let players know what the point of the mechanic is.

Here's what I suggest: Don't touch HM, it's fine as-is. Non-HM, however, needs adjustments; specifically, I recommend the following changes:

• Reduce the damage of Bloody Bash in non-HM (it's basically a light attack that does almost 40K if it catches the tank unblocked, such as on a barswap; this might be tolerable for HM, but it's nuts for regular vet)
• More time to collect a sundered soul in non-HM
• More time to interrupt the Barrage in non-HM (currently, it's a short 1.6s on both HM and non-HM; keep it at 1.6s for HM and increase it to 2.6s on non-HM) and increase the amount of health the split copies have in non-HM
  • Right now, the copies have just 130K health on non-HM and 610K health on HM, which is a nerf of 80% vs. HM. This encourages a DPS-through-the-problem solution for vet. If the health was increased to something like 200K and the interrupt window was increased from 1.6s (which I feel like is too short for regular vet) to 2.6s (a much more reasonable figure for non-HM), then it would make it easier to play the intended mechanic.
• Less stringent requirements for downgrading to a flesh atro in non-HM (should be doable if just a couple of the players are doing things right), and some modest intermediate benefits for killing the Fractured Souls so that players get that feedback about what's going on
• Much less health on the abomination in non-HM (it shouldn't have as much health as the boss at that point)
• Clearer telegraph and/or more consistent voice lines for Fear; the visual telegraph is too subtle and too easily missed, and while the dialog cue is nice and clear, it doesn't always play. Players on PC are able to skirt this issue with the help of addons, but it's a major pain point on console.

Destyran

Imo the flesh atro having 3.8 million health more health than the boss at 50% in normal is stupid

Jakk

Destyran wrote: »

Imo the flesh atro having 3.8 million health more health than the boss at 50% in normal is stupid

I think it absolutely should have 3.8m hp. It's a penalty for ignoring the fractured soul mechanic.
If you dont want the penalty, don't ignore the mechanic. Kill the fractured souls and you get a bone collosus instead with a measley 900k hp.


If anything, just have the NPC explain the benefits to killing the souls, by having him yell out some immersive banter like "LOOK OUT! Zelvraak is summoning! The more fractured souls he collects, the more powerful his creation will be, stop them souls from reaching him!!"... or something like that.

Or my wife's idea was to add some add encounters where the souls transform a bone collosus into an abomination throughout the dungeon if fractured souls reach them, or something along those kind of lines, as a tutorial.

code65536

Jakk wrote: »

Destyran wrote: »

Imo the flesh atro having 3.8 million health more health than the boss at 50% in normal is stupid

I think it absolutely should have 3.8m hp. It's a penalty for ignoring the fractured soul mechanic.

But why is the penalty the same in non-HM as HM?

Dr_Con

Jakk wrote: »

Destyran wrote: »

Imo the flesh atro having 3.8 million health more health than the boss at 50% in normal is stupid

I think it absolutely should have 3.8m hp. It's a penalty for ignoring the fractured soul mechanic.
If you dont want the penalty, don't ignore the mechanic. Kill the fractured souls and you get a bone collosus instead with a measley 900k hp.


If anything, just have the NPC explain the benefits to killing the souls, by having him yell out some immersive banter like "LOOK OUT! Zelvraak is summoning! The more fractured souls he collects, the more powerful his creation will be, stop them souls from reaching him!!"... or something like that.

Or my wife's idea was to add some add encounters where the souls transform a bone collosus into an abomination throughout the dungeon if fractured souls reach them, or something along those kind of lines, as a tutorial.

I saw the NPC outside in the water killing fractured souls while recovering from a wipe, that's how I knew. I haven't gone outside to talk with him yet while he's doing it, maybe I will on a next attempt.

I listened to the ritual for any sound of the large "boom" on some attempts- the tell-tale sign that a fractured soul reached it, and only heard 1 and still the 3.6m colossus spawned. This was on vet non-hm, I think only 1 reaching the middle, if that's the case, is not a great design as I consider this a likely wipe if it spawns... It should be like 8, as that's what I assumed those flames on the ground around the ritual were supposed to indicate.

Throughout the dungeon we see either summoners summoning things with souls already prepared or glowing blastbones making a colossus even more colossal. You're right that the dungeon doesn't prepare for this mechanic, but there are subtle clues that can lead a player to these conclusions and a fail-safe in the form of the laser that can kill that beast in 10 ticks if positioned just right

Destyran

Jakk wrote: »

Destyran wrote: »

Imo the flesh atro having 3.8 million health more health than the boss at 50% in normal is stupid

I think it absolutely should have 3.8m hp. It's a penalty for ignoring the fractured soul mechanic.
If you dont want the penalty, don't ignore the mechanic. Kill the fractured souls and you get a bone collosus instead with a measley 900k hp.


If anything, just have the NPC explain the benefits to killing the souls, by having him yell out some immersive banter like "LOOK OUT! Zelvraak is summoning! The more fractured souls he collects, the more powerful his creation will be, stop them souls from reaching him!!"... or something like that.

Or my wife's idea was to add some add encounters where the souls transform a bone collosus into an abomination throughout the dungeon if fractured souls reach them, or something along those kind of lines, as a tutorial.

I have cleared hm and almost have trifecta. No it shouldn’t. It should have 1.8mil on normal vet about the same as the one before boss. The 3.8mill on hm makes sense but non Hm is a meme. You can burn and ignore every mechanic still apart from the 3.8 mill atro because you start to burn that and the push boss to 25% with cleave and wipe on mechanics.