PTS Update 47 - Feedback Thread for Black Gem Foundry

ZOS_Kevin · July 8

This is the official feedback thread for Black Gem Foundry. Specific feedback that the team is looking for includes the following:

Did you enjoy this new dungeon?
How did the difficulty compare to existing dungeons on Normal and Veteran versions?
Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?
Which was your favorite boss in this dungeon, and why?
What level and build was the character you used?
Did you happen to notice or find anything particularly interesting or different?
Do you have any other general feedback?

MyNameIsElias · July 9

Did you enjoy this new dungeon?

Yes, it was quite fun.

How did the difficulty compare to existing dungeons on Normal and Veteran versions?

Feels very comparable to the previous dungeon dlc, perhaps a bit easier

Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?

Did everything until last boss at about 40%, my team can't seem to figure out how the annihilation mechanic is supposed to be countered. We are unable to find any pattern, as the npc suggests.

Which was your favorite boss in this dungeon, and why?

First boss, i like it when my character goes flying across the room, just like the toilet bowl mechanic on first boss in coral aerie.

What level and build was the character you used?

3600 arcanist/necromancer/nightblade

Did you happen to notice or find anything particularly interesting or different?

Found all 3 secret bosses, the first one was quite well hidden in my opinion, was a bit hard to notice the entrance at first.

Do you have any other general feedback?

Nothing for now, i still need to figure out how the annihilation mechanic works on last boss. If anyone can help us out, please do.

Freelancer_ESO · July 10

Did you enjoy this new dungeon?

Yeah, I liked the story behind it especially the bonus section.

How did the difficulty compare to existing dungeons on Normal and Veteran versions?

I'd say it was pretty comparable with the possible exception of the last boss.

Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?

I completed it on Normal

Which was your favorite boss in this dungeon, and why?

I thought the third bonus boss was amusing with the dialog/writing.

What level and build was the character you used?

I solo'd it on my Warden that's running Leeching+Crimson with a companion.

Did you happen to notice or find anything particularly interesting or different?

I really enjoyed the Bonus Bosses and liked the detail of Hostile Takeover after it completed.

Do you have any other general feedback?

I tried walking back to see if I could find the Atronachs (I forgot about the side gate to go down) but you can't get back up to the other side of the forge via walking that I could tell.

I had a bit of trouble figuring out the last bosses mechanics. That might not actually be an issue as I had a ton of noise when I was doing it that was making it hard for me to hear what was said. It was kinda dumb of me to not turn subtitles on in advance as the NPC's dialogue did say I'd need to pay more attention than he did. I'll have to remember to turn subtitles when I run it next. Since I had enough HP I just tanked the mechanics and revived my companion a bunch. I believe one of them was to find an NPC that didn't match the two colors by her head and stand by it but, I wasn't 100% sure.

The Summoner has multiple copies of himself that remain behind farther back after you complete the dungeon talking about how he can't summon.

I also liked how the player's crafting skill was utilized.

CoolBlast3 · July 10

Do you have any other general feedback?

This is a feedback less about the dungeon itself, but about one of its rewards. The "Slippery Soul Gem" memento. The memento has us break a soul gem, which is usually okay. However it specifies it's a black soul gem. This is an issue because black soul gems are indestructible:

Legend of Vastarie lorebook:
To Mannimarco, they were perfect. Small, capable of containing even the most willful of souls, and apparently indestructible. To Vastarie, they were deeply flawed, for enchantment was the only safe way to free a soul from their depths.

Removing the single line that says "black" in the description would immediately fix this (admittedly minor) lore issue! Hope you see this, and thank you

MincMincMinc · July 10

Do you have any other general feedback?

solo/duo PvP main, none of the items are worth getting, no point spending my time doing the dungeons. Its understandable though, as zos has gotten stuck having to make an absurd quote for gear each patch. Atleast the sets will just be forgotten to time instead of destroying the current meta and replacing it for a week before the next dlc comes along.

code65536 · July 10

I've been in this dungeon three times.

On July 8, we cleared all the HMs with the optional bonuses.
On July 9, the same group cleared all the HMs again, but without the aid of bonuses.
Later on July 9, I ran it "blind" with a different group who had never seen the dungeon, in which I was forbidden from explaining anything or even giving any hints, and we made it to the final boss but could not clear before we ran out of time.

I think, on the whole, this is the most interesting dungeon that we've ever had. The biggest challenge in this dungeon is figuring out what's going on, and to that end, it was interesting to run it with different people to see how different people react to and interpret the various cues and clues.

First boss:

It seems that any of the boss's AoE abilities can remove splinters, but the best and most reliable is the conal attack. But the boss's usage of this ability seems very inconsistent. There were times when the boss uses this ability very shortly after splinters were applied, and times when he takes so long that people have died to the splinters before the ability was used.

Stiles was watching our run, and commented along the lines that it was working as intended, so I take that to mean that we're missing something here, but we have yet to figure out what.

One minor complaint: There are areas along the outer edge that are not covered by sharp blades, which led me to assume that being pushed into those areas would not be lethal. This seemed like a reasonable assumption given the visuals, but it was of course wrong.

Second boss:

This boss's HM was fun to figure out, and it was delightful to have those "aha!" moments when we figured out things like how to kill the Black Gem Shards and how to control their positioning.

But there are instances where the boss would bug out and not do mechanics properly. In one of the pulls that wiped on July 8, someone died during the first laser beam mechanic, which led the boss to just stand around and not do much (e.g., the Pyromancer phase that was supposed to happen around 80% just didn't happen).

And in the pull that cleared with the later blind July 9 run, the boss did not do any execute mechanics (i.e., the cycling between the middle and sides being filled with lava didn't happen), though I'm not sure what triggered this, and I haven't had a chance to review the recording of that run.

Final boss:

I'll write this section from the standpoint of the struggles that I've seen with people trying to understand how the mechanics work.

When we first cleared this boss, we didn't notice that there was a readable book near the entrance until after we had killed the boss. And in hindsight, I'm glad that we didn't read it, because it definitely led the later July 9 blind group (which did read it) astray.

A part of the problem is that the Unstable souls move relatively slowly, so bringing them to a crystal can be a pretty time-consuming process and the penalty for not killing them near a crystal is manageable, and I think it was easier to just ignore that bring-to-crystal bit and that having the group trying to bring them to the crystal actually made the fight harder and more complicated.

And since the Unstable soul is usually moving at around the same time the sets of 4 Anguished souls are out, people's attentions were drawn away from the Anguished souls (the big colorful AoE around the Unstable does make it rather attention-grabby, whereas the faded light purple of the Anguished makes them almost feel like an unimportant part of the background), even though it can be argued that the Anguished are a bigger threat. To compound this, when people die to the Anguished, they assumed that it was a mishandling of the Unstable that killed them.

If the Unstable soul was intended as a misdirection away from the Anguished souls, then it certainly worked for the people in the July 9 blind run, since they never fully figured out what was going on there.

The next problem with the Anguished souls is that it's not clear that you are seeing different things than other people. As a tank, I never saw one of them turn green (I guess tanks are excluded because doing a Sunspire-tomb-style heal check on someone with the amount of health that a tank has is pretty sus), so I personally had no idea what that mechanic was until pretty late in that first run, and the healer in that run didn't realize until fairly late that the others don't see the green soul that she sees.

To be fair, the NPC does drop hints, e.g., "Tell your allies—one's not like the others!" but when I nudged the July 9 blind run people to listen to the NPC, they said that they didn't hear anything, whereas I, as the tank who never sees the green Anguished, heard the "tell your allies" line.

I'm not sure what can--or should--be done about this. There are hints, and my first group figured it out relatively quickly, but I've also seen how the people in the second group completely miss it (in a large part due to them misdirecting their attention to the Unstable soul; I honestly think they would've been better off if they didn't read that book).

Okay, what's next. My first group figured out the "Vykosa colors" mechanic relatively quickly. Having to reveal the colors before the mechanic was a bit of a wrench that threw us initially (and I noticed from watching a non-HM stream that this was one of the differences--that they are still able to reveal once she channels, whereas on HM, you can't reveal any more once the channel starts), but familiarity with Moon Hunter Keep meant that this wasn't too bad to figure out.

The July 9 blind run didn't figure it out, but I think that's because they're limping/rezzing through not understanding the Anguished/Unstable souls, so we didn't have a "clean entry" into the "Vykosa colors" mechanic.

And finally, the Annihilation. I recall Stiles writing the laughing emoji in Twitch chat when we were going through one of our multiple misinterpretations of how the mechanic worked. Because, boy, there were some very wild goose chases with this one.

Here are some of the hints that are in the game:

"Watch her closely. Memorize her movements!"
"There's power in that pattern. Pay attention!"
"Remember that pattern? Find it, quick!"
"Can you see the pattern?"
"Mental dexterity of this recollection is required to lead your group to safety."

So the first time we saw that mechanic, one person heard the "memorize her movements" line (I heard "power in that pattern") and relayed it to us, and my first thought was, "ok, is there something that's going to be moving around the room?" And then "lead your group to safety" in the subsequent death recap hint made me think that there's something moving around the room, tracing out a safe path that people need to take, and that we'll need to remember that path.

So I was looking at the ground the whole time, rather than the shades high above, and I didn't see any movement around the room, certainly nothing like a path. But instead of thinking, "oh, maybe they meant something else", I assume, "oh, maybe only one person can see this path, and I just wasn't the chosen one".

It took me a very, very long time to finally realize (and only with the help of my group members who figured it out before me) that "pattern" and "movements" were referring to what she was doing with her staff.

That's because the first thing I think of when I hear "movement" is physical movement of the body, from point A to point B. And I thought that the staff movement was just the animation of her casting this mechanic (well, it is that too). I'm not sure why, but that connection between "movement" and "pattern" with "staff" was one that I just could not make. (And it didn't help that I was mostly looking down to see if I could see a path on the ground, rather than looking up.)

I think that the biggest change here to make this mechanic much more accessible is to just add the word "staff" to one of the hints. Now, I realize that the NPC lines probably can't be changed since the voice acting has already been done. But slipping the word "staff" into the death recap hint (e.g., "Prior to <<1>>, Vykand will recall an <<2>> with her staff. Mental dexterity of this recollection is required to lead your group to safety.") would help a lot. And I suspect this should also sufficiently answer the query from @MyNameIsElias earlier in this thread.

code65536 · July 11

We ran this dungeon's HMs a fourth time with yet another different group, on July 10. (I didn't stream it this time, but Skinny Cheeks was in the run and he was streaming, so there should still be a recording of the run, whenever his VODs become available in a couple of days.)

It was semi-blind; one DD was from the first group, but our healer and Skinny hadn't seen the HMs before. While we didn't explain things initially, the two who hadn't seem HM before were not opposed to hints or explanations after a few blind pulls, so there wasn't nearly as much insight to be gleaned in the "how-discoverable-are-the-mechanics" department.

Second boss not doing mechanics:

We ran into the problem again of the second boss not doing any execute mechanics. I think it might be related to the target of Soul Focus dying, in which case this seems likely to be related to or even the same as the bug that prevented the Pyromancer mechanic from happening.

Second boss mechanics demonstration:

I finally noticed, after rewatching one of my earlier recordings, that there is a demonstration of the second boss destroying an enemy with Soul Focus as you enter the room. It was very easy to miss, though, since the boss is far off in the distance as you enter the room, and the demonstration happened very quickly. Someone from the first run commented that they were taking in the sights of the huge second boss area when they entered. I was too, and nobody in our first group noticed that the demonstration was there.

If you contrast this second boss demonstration with the mechanics demonstration from the first boss, the first boss and the subjects of the demonstration were much closer and thus occupied a much larger slice of our field of vision. And he didn't perform the demonstration immediately. He had a brief line of dialog first, while the second boss just does his demonstration immediately.

The beam from the second boss demonstration lacked the long windup that you see during the fight itself, and we wondered if the delay from that windup would've made it a bit easier to notice.

Third boss hints:

As I suggested in my earlier post, adding the word "staff" to the hints could help make the Annihilation mechanic easier to pick up, and so in this run, I read out the original in-game hints but with the word "staff" inserted (e.g., I said "Watch her closely. Memorize her staff movements!"). Even with that more explicit hint, the newcomers still did not immediately pick up on what was needed, so I don't think you'll be giving away too much if you add that word to your hints. There is just so much going on that I think it was overwhelming to the newcomers even with the more explicit hint that we gave them.

We also chatted briefly after this run about one of the ways in which we misinterpreted the Annihilation mechanic during our first run on July 8. We took the word "movement" from the hint as being the shade's body rising up into the air and then violently slamming down (which is accompanied by a burst of damage!). Ah, so rising up and slamming down is the "movement", we thought, and maybe if one of us saw a lit-up square where there wasn't a shade directly over it slamming down and doing damage, then that must be the truly safe square.

So, yea, please add the word "staff" to one of the hints.

Other thoughts:

The newcomers commented that the mechanic of identifying the correct Anguished soul during the Acute Enervation mechanic was made confusing with the concurrence of the Unstable soul walking in, esp. if it also happens to be a green Unstable soul, which seems to match what I observed with the July 9 blind group.

It would be nice if our Master Gatherer CP applied to the soul gem harvest. Oh, and our customized mining actions too? I got that adorable mini-battering-ram mining animation that I like...

f047ys3v3n · July 12

Finished the HM today. For sure some of the best mechanics of any dungeon in the game. My thoughts.

1) Yea, you guys need better hints on the annihilation mechanic. If Code hadn't written about it having to do with the bosses staff I don't know how long it would have taken to figure out. Even with that it still took a number of pulls.

2) Thumbs up on that boss fight though. Super good. It is certainly lands in the top few dungeons for difficulty without that difficulty just being generated by throwing a mess of mobs at you or just tuning the damage too high. Instead, it's mechanics based and that is much more interesting.

3)I don't really have much comment on the other bosses. The group I ran with proged them the day before I was on so I was pretty much just doing what I was told on those fights and don't totally understand what the mechanics were. They seemed similar in difficulty to most other HM non final boss fights.

AJTC5000 · July 12

I was in a few of the runs with @code65536 so I'm just going to piggy-back off of his comments whilst giving some of my own thoughts. I may do a solo normal run like I usually do in the coming weeks.

All in all it's a very aesthetically pleasing dungeon and I am glad we have returned to a decent level of mechanical challenge, rather than just throwing out a ton of damage and being expected to survive it. The little achivement with the atronachs at the end was also very cute.

code65536 wrote: »

First boss:

It seems that any of the boss's AoE abilities can remove splinters, but the best and most reliable is the conal attack. But the boss's usage of this ability seems very inconsistent. There were times when the boss uses this ability very shortly after splinters were applied, and times when he takes so long that people have died to the splinters before the ability was used.

Stiles was watching our run, and commented along the lines that it was working as intended, so I take that to mean that we're missing something here, but we have yet to figure out what.

One minor complaint: There are areas along the outer edge that are not covered by sharp blades, which led me to assume that being pushed into those areas would not be lethal. This seemed like a reasonable assumption given the visuals, but it was of course wrong.

The boss' lightning-based mechanics seem almost completely random. We tried having someone be on the opposite side of the arena to see if that would cause him to either charge or jump to their location, but that didn't work, and then he decided to charge someone who was stood right next to him, which just made it even more confusing.

I did notice right at the beginning that the outer wall and inner "plinth" do pulse with an enemy telegraph ring, but this doesn't persist, so it's easy to then make the assumption that the non-bladed areas are safe (as the middle doesn't have any blades at all, just small crystal fragments).

code65536 wrote: »

Second boss:

This boss's HM was fun to figure out, and it was delightful to have those "aha!" moments when we figured out things like how to kill the Black Gem Shards and how to control their positioning.

But there are instances where the boss would bug out and not do mechanics properly. In one of the pulls that wiped on July 8, someone died during the first laser beam mechanic, which led the boss to just stand around and not do much (e.g., the Pyromancer phase that was supposed to happen around 80% just didn't happen).

And in the pull that cleared with the later blind July 9 run, the boss did not do any execute mechanics (i.e., the cycling between the middle and sides being filled with lava didn't happen), though I'm not sure what triggered this, and I haven't had a chance to review the recording of that run.

Nothing much to add here, pretty cut and dry once the mechanics are figured out, just needs the "someone dying to the laser removes all of the boss' mechanics" problem fixed.

code65536 wrote: »

Final boss:

A part of the problem is that the Unstable souls move relatively slowly, so bringing them to a crystal can be a pretty time-consuming process and the penalty for not killing them near a crystal is manageable, and I think it was easier to just ignore that bring-to-crystal bit and that having the group trying to bring them to the crystal actually made the fight harder and more complicated.

And since the Unstable soul is usually moving at around the same time the sets of 4 Anguished souls are out, people's attentions were drawn away from the Anguished souls (the big colorful AoE around the Unstable does make it rather attention-grabby, whereas the faded light purple of the Anguished makes them almost feel like an unimportant part of the background), even though it can be argued that the Anguished are a bigger threat. To compound this, when people die to the Anguished, they assumed that it was a mishandling of the Unstable that killed them.

If the Unstable soul was intended as a misdirection away from the Anguished souls, then it certainly worked for the people in the July 9 blind run, since they never fully figured out what was going on there.

Currently from my perspective as the DD, the "runners" / Unstable Souls are pure distraction, but only in the sense that disposing with them in the "intended" way only serves to create more problems for the rest of the group and breaks the flow of the encounter.

Yes, they drop a soul essence well if they're not killed on the crystal, but only one. The real threat is that they draw your eye away from what the boss is doing, and if you miss her slam attack because you're looking to the corners of the room instead of at the boss, that's then four soul essence wells, which is much worse long term. I ended up dealing with the Unstable Souls by myself so that the rest of the group could keep their eyes on the boss in order to avoid the slam successfully, and this resulted in a manageable rate of spawning soul essence wells. I suppose groups with lower damage may find they have to deal with the unstable souls so they don't get overwhelmed, but honestly I feel they are then even more at risk from getting more soul essence wells from the boss herself. The fact that there is an achievement to dispose of all of the Unstable Souls correctly seems to suggest that this is indeed a "harder" way of doing it.

As Code mentioned, the Unstable Soul spawning during the Anguished Soul mechanic is also quite devious, especially when it's a green Unstable Soul. Maybe there could be a longer delay before the Anguished Soul mechanic begins, or the Unstable Soul could move faster?

code65536 wrote: »

Here are some of the hints that are in the game:

"Watch her closely. Memorize her movements!"
"There's power in that pattern. Pay attention!"
"Remember that pattern? Find it, quick!"
"Can you see the pattern?"
"Mental dexterity of this recollection is required to lead your group to safety."

So the first time we saw that mechanic, one person heard the "memorize her movements" line (I heard "power in that pattern") and relayed it to us, and my first thought was, "ok, is there something that's going to be moving around the room?" And then "lead your group to safety" in the subsequent death recap hint made me think that there's something moving around the room, tracing out a safe path that people need to take, and that we'll need to remember that path.

So I was looking at the ground the whole time, rather than the shades high above, and I didn't see any movement around the room, certainly nothing like a path. But instead of thinking, "oh, maybe they meant something else", I assume, "oh, maybe only one person can see this path, and I just wasn't the chosen one".

It took me a very, very long time to finally realize (and only with the help of my group members who figured it out before me) that "pattern" and "movements" were referring to what she was doing with her staff.

That's because the first thing I think of when I hear "movement" is physical movement of the body, from point A to point B. And I thought that the staff movement was just the animation of her casting this mechanic (well, it is that too). I'm not sure why, but that connection between "movement" and "pattern" with "staff" was one that I just could not make. (And it didn't help that I was mostly looking down to see if I could see a path on the ground, rather than looking up.)

I think that the biggest change here to make this mechanic much more accessible is to just add the word "staff" to one of the hints. Now, I realize that the NPC lines probably can't be changed since the voice acting has already been done. But slipping the word "staff" into the death recap hint (e.g., "Prior to <<1>>, Vykand will recall an <<2>> with her staff. Mental dexterity of this recollection is required to lead your group to safety.") would help a lot. And I suspect this should also sufficiently answer the query from @MyNameIsElias earlier in this thread.

This is a really good mechanic that we spent some time trying to figure out, and I initially had a different idea before we realised that the boss was doing different animations for each player:

Each person sees a different safe square
The boss spawns a bunch of ghostly copies of herself that float over all of the squares
Whichever person does *not* have any ghostly copies of the boss in their safe square, that person has the correct safe square

This made sense in my head at first, because why else are there so many copies of the boss? You are pulled to the middle before the mechanic starts, you become immune to any damage both from the soul essence wells and any adds that are present (the adds even get despawned), so your focus should naturally go towards the boss herself *first* before looking around the room trying to find where your pad is.

Now that I know what the mechanic is, I assume the reason there are so many copies of the boss is so you can go:

"Okay, I got pulled to the middle, I'm looking up ... she's doing her "staff up" animation, right, "staff up"."
"Got to find my square now, let's see ... ah! There it is - north-west. Okay, so my safe square is north-west."
"So now I've just got to put those two pieces of information together. North-west, and ... crap, I forgot what animation she was doing."
"Ah, but now that I'm in my square, I can simply look up, and not have to look back towards middle. Ah! There we go - "staff up". So I am "staff up", north-west".

Or maybe it's just to do with the lore and that's the reason why she does such a big tick of damage after this phase - whatever.

As Code mentioned, adding some reference to her staff to the death recap would be very helpful, as it would immediately then draw the player's eye to the boss herself, as you would naturally initially assume (as we did) that what animation is playing for you is the animation that is playing for everyone else in your group.

code65536 · July 14

Just a quick reaction to today's patch notes; not sure when we'll have a chance to test it again.

Increased the damage dealt by Harbinger of Annihilation in Hard Mode.

This seems like a strange change since during week 1, HoA was already hitting for 85% of a player's max health and it was already pretty effective at killing players who were not topped off. There's not much room to make it go even higher, and I'm not sure there will be much practical difference between, say, 90% or 95% instead of the 85% in PTS 1.

Increased the health of Anguished Refracted Souls in Hard Mode.

I like the idea behind this change, since in PTS 1, "just spin your beams around" was a viable strategy to fudge through this mechanic, and there were times when the true Anguished died before it could even be identified.

mdjessup4906 · July 14

CoolBlast3 wrote: »

Do you have any other general feedback?

This is a feedback less about the dungeon itself, but about one of its rewards. The "Slippery Soul Gem" memento. The memento has us break a soul gem, which is usually okay. However it specifies it's a black soul gem. This is an issue because black soul gems are indestructible:

Legend of Vastarie lorebook:
To Mannimarco, they were perfect. Small, capable of containing even the most willful of souls, and apparently indestructible. To Vastarie, they were deeply flawed, for enchantment was the only safe way to free a soul from their depths.

Removing the single line that says "black" in the description would immediately fix this (admittedly minor) lore issue! Hope you see this, and thank you

I havent seen the memento yet, but in skyrim, oblivion, or even here in eso (where I assume our rez gems are black since they can hold anything and are no longer leveled lol) they break after use just like "white" ones. I took her "indestructible" as like inescapable or something. Or just an inconsistency, there's no few of them.

Soarora · July 17

I have not completed the last boss yet so my review is incomplete, if/when I do so I'll post in the typical format. But for now:

Review covering first and 2nd boss HMs from a pure class sorcerer tank.

I love them. The aesthetics? Love the purple. The iron atronachs give me psychological pain, perfect for a Molag Bal dungeon.
The mechanics? Wonderful, they feel just repetitive enough to get a handle on but not repetitive enough to be a slog. And most importantly, I love that they require good group positioning with the first boss' crystals and purposefully coning the group (!!!) as well as the second boss' beam attack (getting enough people to mitigate the damage but also positioning yourself so that the beam goes through the adds).

My one criticism right now is that the beam on 2nd boss doesn't feel like the visuals match the mechanic. I see the impact on the person targeted by it but when it's going through me it doesn't actually look like its hitting me even though it very much is. I think this also affects the clarity as to what you're supposed to do with the mechanic as it doesn't look like I'm helping mitigate anything even though the death recap implies that someone should stand in the beam.

code65536 · July 17

Soarora wrote: »

My one criticism right now is that the beam on 2nd boss doesn't feel like the visuals match the mechanic. I see the impact on the person targeted by it but when it's going through me it doesn't actually look like its hitting me even though it very much is. I think this also affects the clarity as to what you're supposed to do with the mechanic as it doesn't look like I'm helping mitigate anything even though the death recap implies that someone should stand in the beam.

I didn't notice it until someone in the group pointed it out, but the beam does change from a thick beam to a thin beam when the tank is blocking it, and I've been using that as the visual check for "am I actually intercepting the beam?".

Soarora · July 17

code65536 wrote: »

Soarora wrote: »

My one criticism right now is that the beam on 2nd boss doesn't feel like the visuals match the mechanic. I see the impact on the person targeted by it but when it's going through me it doesn't actually look like its hitting me even though it very much is. I think this also affects the clarity as to what you're supposed to do with the mechanic as it doesn't look like I'm helping mitigate anything even though the death recap implies that someone should stand in the beam.

I didn't notice it until someone in the group pointed it out, but the beam does change from a thick beam to a thin beam when the tank is blocking it, and I've been using that as the visual check for "am I actually intercepting the beam?".

That is a good point, in memory I can remember the difference but never connected the dots. I’ve been looking at my health bar to see if I’m in the beam because visually it doesn’t always look like I am when I actually am (beam looks like its going past me because the thin line doesn’t actually connect to me in any way).

code65536 · July 20

There are two things about the second boss that I forgot to mention in my previous posts.

First, the visuals for the lava don't line up that well with the damage.

Scenario 1: Lava is on the outside, I'm moving in an area that is visually free of Lava, but I die to Lava because the damage area extends beyond the visuals.
- A video clip demonstrating this problem: https://eso.code65536.com/clips/u47/bgf_side_lava.mp4
Scenario 2: The middle is filling with Lava, and I die to it before the visuals of the Lava reaches me. I think that either the damage should be delayed by a couple of seconds, or the visuals need to appear a couple of seconds earlier.
- A video clip demonstrating this problem: https://eso.code65536.com/clips/u47/bgf_middle_lava.mp4
  - As I rewatch this clip, I see that the NPC has already yelled at me about the lava, but at the time I wasn't paying attention to the NPC and was going by what I could see, and there were no visuals at all for the middle lava when the NPC was yelling.

Second, the order in which the boss does mechanics seems to vary. In most cases, the boss would heavy-attack the tank, then spawn the Black Gem Shards, and then cast Soul Focus. This is a good sequence of events, as it allows the tank to turn the cleave of the heavy attack away, and then get in position to intercept the Soul Focus. And we've had pulls where this is sequence that we see every single time.

But we've also had pulls where the boss would spawn the Black Gem Shards, and then heavy attack the tank, before finally casting Soul Focus. This makes things messier and harder because after the Shard spawns, the tank is trying to get in position to intercept Soul Focus, and then when the tank gets into a position to intercept a beam that goes through the Shards, the heavy attack leaves behind a line of area denial that interferes with correct angling of the beam.

I think (I haven't thoroughly reviewed my recordings to see if this is actually correct) things like deaths are what causes the mechanic timings to go out of whack and produce these bad orderings of mechanics.

And a couple of comments about the final boss in PTS 2.

First, we noticed that the NPC was no longer yelling out any hints at the start of the Ominous Vision during the final boss encounter. Not sure if this is intended or not. We still hear the hint at the start of Annihilation, it's just the Ominous Vision hints that are missing from the NPC's dialog.

Finally, about that change to Harbinger of Annihilation in PTS 2...

code65536 wrote: »

Just a quick reaction to today's patch notes; not sure when we'll have a chance to test it again.

Increased the damage dealt by Harbinger of Annihilation in Hard Mode.

This seems like a strange change since during week 1, HoA was already hitting for 85% of a player's max health and it was already pretty effective at killing players who were not topped off. There's not much room to make it go even higher, and I'm not sure there will be much practical difference between, say, 90% or 95% instead of the 85% in PTS 1.

LOL, okay, I understand why this change was made now.

During PTS 1, I just assumed that Harbinger was unavoidable damage that gave the healer something to do. But now that I've experienced this change in PTS 2, I now know that Harbinger is not unavoidable. I really like this change, because it not only forcibly introduces the concept of a safe square, but more importantly, it also forces players to realize that they are each seeing different things.

LordDraw · July 21

Did you enjoy this new dungeon?
Yes I did.

How did the difficulty compare to existing dungeons on Normal and Veteran versions?
Fair

Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?
Veteran, no Hard Mode

Which was your favorite boss in this dungeon, and why?
High Soulbinder Vykand with his mechanics. A bit confusing during the blind run but fun to learn.

What level and build was the character you used?
Arcanist 3600 CP template setup (Deadly Strike and Null Arca sets).

Did you happen to notice or find anything particularly interesting or different?
Imps attacks AoE HA like players nowadays. I think it would be better to make it simillar to the currect ST Heavy Attacks like players do.

Do you have any other general feedback?
If I understood correct, from v11.1.3, the difficulty for High Soulbinder Vykand will be equal to Voskrona Stonehulk Poxito's encounter non HM from Naj-Caldeesh dungeon because Death Essence's Spreading Corruption already works like that from the first week that one-shots on veteran non HM. So now I suppose Refracted Soul Essences works the same way. I'm not sure if it's a good idea. This boss from the second dungeon is already too difficult to defeat without dying. Also, this completely disqualifies any Barrier ultimate from support players.

Jaimeh · July 22

Did you enjoy this new dungeon?

Yes, it's very challenging but fun as well.

How did the difficulty compare to existing dungeons on Normal and Veteran versions?

I've only done veteran, and I think the last boss HM might be one of the hardest so far, but I like that the difficulty comes from the timing of mechanics and not just incoming damage.

Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?

On veteran.

Which was your favorite boss in this dungeon, and why?

The last boss because it depends a lot on group communication and coordination, and I like the puzzle of figuring out how to best deal with the mechanics.

What level and build was the character you used?

Max level DPS, using an arcanist/templar/NB sublassing combo

Did you happen to notice or find anything particularly interesting or different?

I've only run it twice so far with the intent of dealing with the fights, so I haven't had the opportunity to take my time with the story or exploring the different areas, but I liked the different atronach NPCs that can be seen at the end giving a piece of their mind, so to speak, to the villains.

Do you have any other general feedback?

I really like the complexity of the last boss fight, I haven't enjoyed a fight so much for a while. But I think the tornadoes/fountains should be adjusted, because the ones that spawn from the boss' ranged heavy attack slam are too fast for the players to skip, so we have to deal with their damage for the rest of the fight, which makes it exponentially more difficult. Either adjust the telegraph of the spawn, or reduce the damage, or have them despawn after a certain condition is met, so that even if we miss dodging the slams, they won't make the fight so unforgiving.

code65536 · July 22

TL;DR: Please revert all the changes to the Soul Essence in PTS 3. The final boss encounter was basically perfect in PTS 2, with a nice smooth rhythm to the mechanics, and then the changes this week ruined it.

Okay, so it seems clear that the intent this week was to get people to do the Unstable Soul mechanic properly. You want us to bring it to the correct crystal and then kill it on that crystal, and to get us to do that, you increased the speed of the Unstable Soul when it's following a player to make it a little less clunky, and you dramatically increased the threat from the Soul Essences so that there is a clear penalty for not doing this mechanic as intended.

Ideally, if the mechanics are done correctly, no Soul Essences will spawn, so we won't have to worry about their increased damage.

Reading the changes in the patch notes, it sounded great. But in practice, these changes just don't work out.

So the first problem is that the Unstable Soul mechanic overlaps with the Anguished Soul / Enervation mechanic. The healer needs to heal whoever has Enervation, and the DDs need to be able to kill each other's Anguished. So our initial strategy was to have the tank bring the Unstable Soul to the crystal, since the tank has nothing to do for Enervation/Anguished. This turned out to be a horrible idea, because the boss will follow along too and if the Unstable Soul gets too close to the boss, we get a Soul Essence.

Alright, let's have the healer do it then, and then the tank can slot healing skills to do the healer's job of healing Enervation while they're off shepherding the Unstable Soul. This approach worked for us for the singleton Unstable Souls.

While the approach did work, things felt more hectic and overwhelming, and this does not work for the later phases when we have two Unstable Souls spawning at once. If we didn't have the overlap with Enervation, we could handle both Unstable souls, but that overlap means that we have to ignore one of the Unstables, so we are getting unavoidable Soul Essences in the later parts of the fight.

The second problem is that the increased power of the Soul Essences makes the fight far too unforgiving. They also spawn from the Soul Slag AoEs following the boss's heavy attack. If players are hit by Soul Slag early on, you might as well just wipe and reset, because extra AoEs from early in the fight, when combined with the later unavoidable Soul Essences, is just too much damage.

"If you messed up early, so you're screwed for the rest of the fight" just feels horrible and smothers all the fun of this encounter.

Compounding this problem is that Soul Slag is hard to avoid if you don't have eyes on the boss. If you're busy running around revealing the purple shades, you're not going to be looking at the boss, and those Soul Slag AoEs will easily sneak up on you. This dungeon as a whole is pretty well-telegraphed, except for this one glaring exception. (One possible solution is to just have the boss not use heavy attacks during the run-through-purple-shades phases.)

Finally, the Unstable Soul mechanic just feels clunky. Yes, the extra speed helps, but it's still slow. It's easy for it to die prematurely to cleave as players are dealing with the Anguished Souls. Ignoring the Unstable Souls in the first two weeks and just dealing with the milder effects of the Soul Essences made for a much smoother and natural-feeling flow to the fight, and being forced to bring the Unstables to the crystals is a significant disruption to that flow.

My suggestions for this encounter

Honestly, I feel like PTS week 2 was spot-on perfect. It was a fun, mechanically-dense fight. The build-up of Soul Essences was background damage that slowly ramped up and required some amount of care late in the fight, and I think that was just fine. There are bigger, more important mechanics to worry about, and those other mechanics took center stage in PTS 2. In PTS 3, the Soul Essences basically stole the spotlight. And the problem with that is Soul Essence control isn't fun. "We didn't spawn a bad thing" doesn't have quite the thrill as "We survived the wipe mechanic through teamwork".

When you're making a dish, you want the salt and other spices to be there, in the background, enhancing the flavor of the main attraction. But if you add too much, you'll overwhelm that flavor and ruin the dish. Soul Essence is that spice. There was just enough of it in PTS 2 to make things interesting and in PTS 3, it feels like that's all we're tasting.

Yes, I realize that reducing the power of the Soul Essences will mean that players will go back to ignoring the bring-to-crystal mechanic, but maybe that's just a sacrifice that has to be made. Sometimes something sounds great on paper, but it doesn't quite work out in practice, and I feel like the bring-Unstable-to-Crystal mechanic is unfortunately one of those cases. Its interaction with Enervation/Anguished is just too awkward.

There is an achievement for doing that mechanic, and I think that's a good place for it: as a flavor achievement, rather than as something that must be done if you don't want to wipe in HM.

Alternative suggestions

If you hate the idea of reverting the Soul Essence buffs and want to keep them as powerful as they are now, then something else has to give. Uh, maybe make them despawn after a while instead of having them be permanent?

Or maybe further rework the bring-to-crystal mechanic? Make the Unstable Soul immune to damage, and have it be absorbed by the crystal as soon as it reaches the crystal. If it reaches the boss or if it's up for too long, then have it turn into a Soul Essence. Oh, and give it another speed increase. I think that all that together would do a lot to make it less clunky and would make the increased Soul Essence power a bit more palatable, if you intend to keep the elevated Soul Essence power.

code65536 · July 23

A couple more things to mention...

First, the start of Ominous Vision will turn any active Unstable Souls into Soul Essences, even one that had just spawned. Unstable Souls dispelled by means outside of the player's control shouldn't leave behind such a penalty.
Video clip: https://eso.code65536.com/clips/u47/bgf_ominous_vision_essence.mp4

Second, the yellow telegraph circle underneath the Unstable Soul is... unfortunate. Yes, we know that we're supposed to look at the Unstable Soul itself and/or the symbol above its head, but this is like that experiment where people are asked to read out words that are colored differently than the color expressed by the word itself., e.g, Blue Yellow Green. Can you make the circle white instead?

AJTC5000 · July 23

Concur with pretty much everything Code said - the changes to Soul Essence just make this fight suck now, which is a shame because the mechanics were pretty enjoyable before. At the end of Code's stream yesterday (22 July 2025) we did talk about some ideas for how this fight could be better reworked, so I want to develop some of the alternative suggestions we discussed.

I know Stiles seems to be really keen on the crystal mechanic so it seems unlikely that it's going to be reworked completely, but another suggestion could be that the Unstable Soul could drop an item/debuff on death, and the healer could then pick it up and take it to the correct crystal within a certain time? This allows the DDs to be able to nuke it wherever it is to avoid the boss getting it, or it getting killed accidentally in the crossfire from dealing with the Anguished Soul/Enervation mechanic, and then the healer being able to bee-line straight towards the appropriate crystal to dispose of the debuff. The healer could also potentially hold on to the debuff for a certain period, at their behest/judgment call, in order to be more available to heal the group through the Anguished Soul/Enervation mechanic before then completing the deposit of the debuff. This removes all of the clunky movement with having to drag the Unstable Soul around (especially as moving to a crystal that is already moving itself is even worse).

Another idea was swapping the mechanic order. Currently it proceeds as follows (forgive me for only partially correct terminology):
- Heavy attack/first round of "avoid spawning Soul Essences"
- Boss spawns an Unstable Soul
- Boss performs the Anguished Soul/Enervation mechanic on two people while the Unstable Soul is being corralled
- "Red Mini" (crusher) or "Yellow Mini" (withering) add spawns - this is usually right as our healer has got the Unstable Soul into the correct position and we have killed it
- "Illusion phase" where we reveal the safe coloured boss aspects. Usually the mini dies during this phase, if not before
- This all occurs until 60%, at which point the boss starts doing her staff mechanics, starts spawning two unstable souls, and stops doing the "illusion phase"

Would it be possible for the Unstable Soul to spawn after the Anguished Soul/Enervation mechanic, instead of just before? This lets us complete the Anguished Soul/Enervation mechanic in its entirety, with the healer in the group with us to better provide the required healing, before anyone has to worry about where the Unstable Soul is.

The other thing to consider is that by removing the illusion phase, you are removing a component of the boss' mechanics rotation, which will make her cycle through them quicker and thus you will have her spawning the Unstable Souls more frequently - this is not even considering the fact that she spawns two in the build up to execute anyway. As Code mentions, the Unstable Souls being forcibly turned into Soul Essences when she begins her staff mechanic sucks, so it's not like the addition of this mechanic to replace the removal of the illusion phase actually helps with timings.

tl;dr I guess my wishlist requests would be:

Rework the Unstable Souls so they drop a debuff on death instead of a Soul Essence, that then needs to be transported to the crystal within a certain time (10-15 seconds) - giving the depositor freedom to decide when they get to the crystal and what they can do to help the group in the meantime (e.g. run back to the centre and heal everyone) - if they don't make it, they drop a Soul Essence at their location (and die maybe? lol)

OR
Make Soul Essences despawn after a set duration (1 minute?)

code65536 · July 24

I ran Vykand HM again with my other group, this time with the assistance of an addon to make avoiding the Soul Essences from Soul Slag more reliable.

We used the same strategy as the previous day, where the healer aggros the Unstable Soul and the tank takes over healing for Enervation.

After 60%, we planned to get only one of the double Unstables, and then if possible, try to opportunistically get the second.

With the help of more reliable Soul Slag avoidance and making an effort to take care of the second Unstable Soul, we managed to kill the boss without spawning any Soul Essences.

https://youtu.be/dPhpV6iGSsg

Even though we were able to kill the boss cleanly with the PTS 3 changes, I still have some concerns:

The power and permanence of the Soul Essences makes the fight unrecoverable. On Tuesday, if we messed up early with a heavy attack Soul Slag, we just called wipe. This HM encounter in its current state is basically "do it perfectly or don't do it at all". Clearing this boss's HM should not rise to the level of doing it for a trifecta.
The increased Soul Essence power essentially makes Soul Slag the most threatening thing in HM. As I mentioned in my earlier post, this is a problem in situations where players don't have eyes on the boss. We got around that problem here with addon assistance.
The bring-to-crystal mechanic still feels a little clunky. It moves slowly and we need to be careful about not having it die early to cleave. Still not a fan of how it overlaps with Enervation/Anguished, but at least it seems the strategy of sending the healer out while the tank heals the Enervation victim seems to be working for us.

kevkj · July 25

Did you enjoy this new dungeon?

Mostly. The trash pulls are a bit numerous and lengthy.
How did the difficulty compare to existing dungeons on Normal and Veteran versions?

On Veteran Hardmode, definitely near the top end of difficulty.
Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?

Only Veteran Hardmode and with buffs.
Which was your favorite boss in this dungeon, and why?

Probably the first boss or the last one. On first boss, I'm quite a fan of having to use the cone attack from the boss to help you clear the room and the related 'push' mechanic. The last boss is challenging, so I enjoy it. To me the second boss seemed a bit of a mess both mechanically and thematically, I did not really enjoy it.
What level and build was the character you used?

Full group with golded out trial gear and mostly optimized.
Did you happen to notice or find anything particularly interesting or different?

Some of the strongest dungeon buffs we've had in a while, which will be very helpful considering how difficult the Hardmode is.
Do you have any other general feedback?

To echo what code has mentioned regarding the last boss, the Unstable Soul immediately turning into Soul Essence at the start of the "Safe Square" phase feels a bit cheap. You can do everything perfectly and still get 3+ Soul Essences by the end of the fight. Secondly, I'm not sure if there's a way to tell if the souls you have to run through to reveal symbols is an 'empty' one. If there isn't, I would like there to be one even if subtle.

code65536 · July 30

Thank you for addressing in this week's patch all of the feedback points that had been brought up.

But, in doing so, it feels like that the pendulum may have swung just a smidge too far in the other direction.

The biggest problem in earlier weeks with the double-Unstable was the overlap of the Unstable mechanic with Enervation. With people having to do things for Enervation, it was often impractical to spare two people to handle the two Unstables. But with the changes that were made this week to mostly eliminate that overlap, I feel like the removal of the double-Unstable was unnecessary. (Also, the increase in the Unstable speed helped a lot.)

My suggestion is to restore the double-Unstable for HM, and perhaps even have it happen earlier on HM; I think it could be interesting for HM to always have double-Unstable.

The reason I suggest this is because if it happens only in the final stages of the encounter, there's not much incentive to actually do that mechanic properly. "Just burn the boss." Whereas if double-Unstable is there from the get-go, it will reinforce the need to play this mechanic properly. And with the removal of the mechanics overlap and the speed increase, it's a lot less clunky and a lot more doable than before.

Bug: We completed the dungeon today within the 30-minute speedrun limit and did not get the speedrun achievement.

It was 27:30 from the first engagement to the end, less than the stated 30 limit, but more than the 25 that's usually used as the limit.
We killed the first optional encounter but skipped the latter two.
We did wait for a long time in the "lobby" of the dungeon (before taking the portal).
(Since we were aware of another group that failed to get the SR achievement last night despite coming in under time, we were careful to ensure that we got everything in the quarry area.)