Vaults of Madness Feedback (positive!)

Raapnaap

Hello, this thread is mainly directed at the ZOE dungeon designers, but feel free to toss in your opinions about this dungeon as well.

Vaults of Madness is the level 48-50 dungeon inside Coldharbour. Last night I ran this dungeon with 3 other guild mates since we're all stuck waiting for the main quest to be fixed.

We ran the dungeon with the following:
- Templar full healer spec
- 3 Sorcerers AOE & single target DPS spec (weapon swap).
- NO tank, all encounters were doable (some properly challenging).
- The run took about an hour but includes learning boss mechanics with a few wipes.
- Bringing stun removal abilities is useful but we did it without.

I won't spoil the fine details, but I'm just saying you should really make an effort to experience this dungeon with a decent group once you're level 48+.

Feedback from myself and guild mates on this dungeon (and some feedback can be applied to all dungeons).

- Dungeon design is probably the best one in the game or at least amongst the best.

- Encounter design is hit and miss, several bosses are well thought out while others are just meatbags with no notable challenge. Bosses of note were the (forgot names) flame casting flesh atronach, the titan, and of course the final boss, which really gave us a nasty surprise in our first wipe (well done on that, designers!).

- Dungeon trash mobs drop absolutely nothing in the majority of the dungeon, those that do drop anything only drop a tiny amount of gold, and every so often a white item. Not very rewarding or exciting.

- Dungeon bosses can drop level 50 epic items, in our run we had about 5 different ones drop. The problem is that when you don't get an epic item in your RNG roll, the remaining items are rubbish, usually nothing more than a single soul shard and a little bit of gold. Once again, unrewarding and unexciting.

- Repair bill seems... off. We spend an hour in there and wiped about 3-4 times, and we only had to pay a 400-500 gold repair bill. Now, given the current dungeon loot being so poor, that's ok. But what makes little sense here is the fact that this very same group did a public dungeon (village of the lost) for 45 mins prior to the dungeon, we did not ever die in that, but had to pay close to 2000g repair bills! In short, up group dungeon loot, up group dungeon repair bills (specifically the price of failure in wipes, not just for taking damage), and lower the repair bills for public dungeons when taking damage but not being killed.

- All in all I would have liked to see some more traps implemented. The trap at the start of the dungeon nearly gave me a heart attack (well done there as well), unfortunately the rest of the dungeon had no such surprises left in store, other than one for folks that aren't a big fan of heights!

Just our opinion on this dungeon as well as a few general bits regarding dungeons.

SEOINAGE

Just ran it thought it was cool, although didn't get a single drop. Was there a quest in there? that was what bothered me, didn't ever see one and never got a skill point.

Raapnaap

There is a pretty lengthy quest chain in there. I believe you pick it up after a short walk into the dungeon, it is not at the entrance.

I thought this thread got buried already, it seems most people only read and post about negative things on these forums.

As for the loot, yeah, that's one of my feedback points in the main post.

Wifeaggro13

by this point in the game dungeon diffculty should be extremely challenging. it does not bode well that encounters are easily overwhelmed with dps and kitting.im lvl 40 and have yawned through every single dungeon to this point. i am hoping veteran dungeons bring the heat. at least its not a zerg fest like Gw2 but there is work to do on these instances and group mechanics. my personal opinion is anything past T2 should not be doable with out some sort of tank . There are a hundreds different publics for un organized groups with no communication. dont candy land the damn end game activities

idk

I agree with the @raapnaap. I enjoyed this dungeon and the boss mechanics. I healed it on my Templar and had fun and offered a good challenge. I think @Wifeaggro13 misses the point that this is still a leveling up dungeon for starters. At that, it is not really a full dungeon, just a 4 man, unlike the 12 man we will see with Craglorn. The larger dungeons are usually a step up from the end game 4 man content and I expect the same here.

Axer

I enjoyed this one as well.

Though I found it vastly easier then any previous dungeon in the game, which really lessened the fun of it for me.

You can argue oh "blah blah its not a max level one, should be easy!" . I disagree. The game should offer good challenge through out. And this ones FAR easier then many of the lower level ones, making it very unbalanced.

And level 49 isn't exactly early on into the game. You're near the end of the primary story line, and been through a lot to get there. They could offer you some challenge.

And yea I play a tank, so making a dungeon so easy no one cares to take along a tank isn't particularly fun for me.

Really would be nice if they made a vastly harder VR version of it (hard enough to warrant a tank).

Ultimately, difficulty settings to cater to players of all skill levels would be the best solution though.