PTS Update 20 - Feedback Thread for Blackrose Prison

Alcast

PTS WEEK 2
Did you play on Normal or Veteran Difficulty?
Veteran
Which classes and roles were included in your group?
DK Tank
SORCERER Healer
Stamina Warden
Stamina Nightblade
Did you complete all Arenas of Blackrose Prison?
Yes
Have you played Dragonstar and/or Malestrom Arena previously?
Yes
If so, how does Blackrose Prison compare to those Arenas?
PTS Week 2, still feels like just recycled old content. So many times you are like "Oh I know this from X Dungeon...and this from Y Dungeon.
Also, the Arenas do feel very similar to each other in terms of design.
Which Arena did you like the most and least, and why?
Liked: Vampire Stage
Least: Last arena, holy moly those constant CCs from the totems jesus. On Magicka characters that is a death sentence.
Were the mechanics within each Arena easy to discern?
Most of the times yes, Arena 2 however feels like a huge *** of AoE damage which most of the time oneshots you.
Sigils:
Did you use the Sigils? If so, which Arenas did you use them in?
No
Which Sigil did you feel was the most and least useful?
Do you have any other general feedback?
Bugfixes
We noticed that some bugs got fixed. The birds in stage 2 don't oneshot anymore. Stage 5 also the area is fixed, week 1 there was huge issues with putting aoe ground effects down, seems to be fixed now.

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Other Changes

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The following monsters are now immune to crowd control effects

I HIGHLY dislike this change. Why make it immune? Why can we not pull them? And then they teleport away again or punish us with some sort of crazy AoE DoT damage or something? In my opinion it is just lazy to implement CC immune mobs. Sure bosses not being CCable makes sense. But normal mobs in my opinion should be pullable, unless they are super damn huge (like Gargoyles, Haj Mota etc).
Lazy: Add CC immunity
Creative: Make them do something when they get pulled or rooted.....like every enemy would do in PvP.
Stage 2
Still feels way too difficult in my opinion compared to the other stages.
Stage 5
This arena is doomsday for magicka setups, constant CCs through the totems...even on stamina setups it is a pain to deal with. Why not make them throw stones on the ground, and if someone lands in it they get stunned? So you at least have the OPTION to walk out, even if its only a very short time that you can react?

Arena overall is definitely better due to some of the bug fixes and difficulty increases. I still think the difficulty should be increasing from stage 1 through 5. currently:
Stage 1: easy
Stage 2: very difficult
Stage 3: medium
Stage 4: difficult
Stage 5: very difficult

Bugs
Stage 2 sometimes has invisible poison AoEs or invisible Netches. We died so many times to something we could not see because apparently there was poison on the ground, but no indicator.

Rewards:
Like I mentioned in earlier patches..I would suggest a change to the rewards order. I know a lot of people like to farm skins. Clearing veteran mode is already a challenge, but can be done if you put in some effort even with a semi optimized group. However, Speedrun, Nodeath, NoSigil clears will not be possible for most groups, therefore there is no motivation at all to get in there for some people. This would change if the Skin was available from only the vet clear.
Suggestion:
Veteran clear: Award Skin
Speedrun,NoDeath,NoSigil clear: Title, or some sort of sellable reward.

Qbiken

For those of you who have done it on veteran difficulty, do you feel the 30 minute speed run is appropriate or too fast?

After checking out some videos (haven't done it myself yet), 30 minutes feels like an achievement that is beyond reach for a huge majority of the player base.

code65536

Qbiken wrote: »

For those of you who have done it on veteran difficulty, do you feel the 30 minute speed run is appropriate or too fast?

After checking out some videos (haven't done it myself yet), 30 minutes feels like an achievement that is beyond reach for a huge majority of the player base.

I don't think that 30 minutes is appropriate.

It's hard to say how fast our run would've been if we had no deaths or wipes and didn't stop to talk about strategy. But we were interested in how close we would've been, so we made some estimates of what our clear time would've been if we had factored those things out. Our estimate came out to 45 minutes. Again, this is just an estimate, but it is a whole 50% longer than what we would've needed to get. I didn't comment on this in my earlier feedback, though, because it is just a rough estimate.

We are not competitive players; my best vMA time is 40 minutes (contrast that with sub-30 minutes for the top competitive players), and my best vDSA time is 54 minutes (contrast that with around 41 minutes for the world record). But those times are still better than what the vast majority of players can do, and we are able to comfortably get every DLC dungeon speedrun (of the four people in our vBRP PTS group, two of us have all 4 of the new DLC dungeon trifectas--Mountain God, No Bones Unbroken, Pure Lunacy, and Apex Predator--and the other two have 3 of the 4 trifectas).

Again, it's hard to say because we didn't have a clean run so we only have a guesstimate of what the time would've been if we didn't wipe or stop to strategize. But based on what we know so far, speedrun seems like it'd be quite difficult.

code65536

A few points about damage that I had forgotten to mention in my earlier feedback:

On stage 2, we have crocodiles. They look like normal overland crocs: they don't look particularly dangerous or threatening. But their Sweep hits for a lot. So much that it will 1-shot a DD even if they block and shield (lol, what shield?). It's okay to have a giant bone colossus 1-shot DDs through block--they're big huge enemies with an attack that has a dramatic windup and they look like they should 1-shot players. But a crocodile that looks like any normal overland crocodile hitting several times harder than the crocodile boss in vWS1? If you're going to make them hit this hard, at least make them look bigger and more dangerous.


On stages 3 and 4, we have gargoyles that apply a DoT on the tank called Rend Flesh. This 8s DoT ramps up in damage and will eventually tick for over 20K. What do you expect us to do about it? Ramping DoTs usually mean that the DoT needs to be purged. But this DoT is unpurgeable. Do you expect tanks to just eat 20K DoT ticks? Or did someone forget to toggle the purgeability flag on this DoT? Look at this recap: 71161 damage from Rend Flesh over the course of just 4.0 seconds.


On stage 5, we have these 2-hander skeletons. Both their uppercut and their lightning AoE ability hit for over 60K; i.e., they will 1-shot a DD through block and shield (lol, shields after Murkmire). But these are just ordinary-looking skeletons that look like any other trash mob skeleton in the arena. Did the art department not have any banners that could suitably fit on a skeletal body to signal to players, "hey, these guys are extra-spicy"?



In the case of the crocodiles and skeleton 2-handers, yes, after you get killed by them and see what damage they do, you quickly learn to treat them as the threat that they are. But it shouldn't be like that: why are things that look like ordinary trash hitting as hard as bosses? Either tone their damage down or make them look appropriately dangerous. The status quo is 100% unintuitive and not obvious.

Disturbed125

Code and Alcast pretty much cover my opinion of Blackrose. On the topic of OP regular enemies that hit too hard, id like to add the Mage version of the re-animated convict as well. It does its channeled heavy way too often (much like many of the other enemies in this place) and should you be unlucky enough to get hit by the blast OR one of the tornadoes it spawns they one shot you. These ads seem to hit harder than even the final boss of the arena with their channeled attack as I've never been able to survive being hit by their attack but have blocked through his (this is also not asking for his attack to be buffed but theirs to be toned down).

edit: I should add I believe the damage recap from the channeled bomb calls the hit "void"

In my opinion the regular enemies in a round having one shot mechanics is silly. The re-animated convicts on round 5 are the COMMON enemy. Why would you give both versions of them not one BUT TWO one shot hits? This type of design has become really prevalent in your newer content and Its this design that has pushed healers out of your newer DLC dungeons.

Lorem123

I'm a console player so I can't test on PTS, but reading the above comments... OMG. The design of this place seems so lazy and horrible with all this inflated damage and onebangs.
And this seems a trend that is getting worse over time. It was bad enough in MHK already, where this kind of inflated heavy attacks was left and right including small adds that instantly unleash 50k "heavy" attacks.

But then shields are what makes healers unnecessary. Sure. Healers are irrelevant because of content design like this, against which healers can do nothing.

The disconnect between the combat team and the dungeon team is glaring.

jypcy

Lorem123 wrote: »

I'm a console player so I can't test on PTS, but reading the above comments... OMG. The design of this place seems so lazy and horrible with all this inflated damage and onebangs.
And this seems a trend that is getting worse over time. It was bad enough in MHK already, where this kind of inflated heavy attacks was left and right including small adds that instantly unleash 50k "heavy" attacks.

But then shields are what makes healers unnecessary. Sure. Healers are irrelevant because of content design like this, against which healers can do nothing.

The disconnect between the combat team and the dungeon team is glaring.

Well and that’s the unfortunate thing, is that there are hints of cool mechanics throughout, from what I’ve seen: the first stage has a lot of movement due to fire aoes; the second stage has netches that only become a threat if hit; the third stage is somewhat remiscent of the undead stage in DSA with pockets on the ground that spawn extra mobs if you step in them. But instead of developing these mechanics further, they’re just there as additional threats in stages that are then jam packed with cc immune mobs and one- or quick-shot attacks. The 3rd stage’s mechanic is probably the most developed—

The boss will curse a party member, who then cleanses by entering one of the aoes. If not cleansed, the player dies and higher threat mobs spawn from the pocket

—but even that seems a little light. I think fewer or less threatening mobs and more interesting and complex mechanics would make this sort of content more fun.

Just for some ideas, the fire stage has both fire aoes that travel across the room and a boss that creates a fire wheel from her position. They could’ve added stone atronachs as some of the mobs here that maintain collision when killed, allowing you the opportunity to set up their bodies as a shield against the fire walls but at the cost of being an obstacle to maneuver around when the wheel starts.
Or for the lightning netch on the second stage, add islands. If you hit the netch while it’s over the water, it’ll deal high damage to everyone in the water at the time. If you hit the netch while it’s over an island, it’ll drop a temporary shock aoe in that location that damages and drains resources (a la Olms’ lls.

andy_s

The incoming damage is too high, especially on a tank. I understand, that the reason of it is to force groups to have a healer, but when you drop a block or don't avoid some aoe, then anything can oneshot you and no heals willl help lol (and this is with the cp cap).

OrphanHelgen

Leogon wrote: »

Why do blackrose prison weapons have 2 bonuses and maelstrom/dsa weapons don't?

Because they will release it in the next patch, just to drag out ideas long enough

weedgenius

Anyone have pictures of the "unique housing item" rewards? Is this just trophy/bust?

TheNightflame

I was going to buy murkmire literally just for black rose prison, when I found out what the mechanics were (aka that it won't be legitimate fun) I was still gonna buy murkmire cuz it provided the first ever collectible/skin for top tier small group pve (an all at once trifecta achievement). Now the skin is for a normal vet clear, and while there's still a title, I'd much much rather be wearing Dromathra Destroyer or the dynamo. GG murkmire... The excitement to perfect the new arena has been killed.

Zapzarap

Since I strongly agree with all the negative feedback about the arena (especially the very bad design, no new mechanics and dificulty by letting 5-10 NPC's spawn where it seems that every single one is able to oneshot a DD..)... I just want to add a few more things that I have not seen here.

(First of all; I have completed vet)

Here is a small list of Bugs/Feedback that we encountered:

• Sometimes you are, for what ever reason, not able to acitvate a sigil.
• The ground of the arena seems to be "not flat" which makes it very dificult to place stuff like a spear, lightning, erruption, etc.
• It would be nice to have (like in DSA) a torch or so to indicate in which stage you are during the fight
• The shield sigil is kind of "in the center" of the arena... we activated that sigil by mistake so often... please move it a little bit more to the wall.
• OR: change the button to activate sigils to "e" (if I am correct thats how you activate the switches in Hof and AS?)... I already see it coming that you activate by mistake (or better deactivate) the HM just because you think a synergie pops up.

code65536

Zapzarap wrote: »

It would be nice to have (like in DSA) a torch or so to indicate in which stage you are during the fight

Yes, please. (Though Maelstrom didn't have such an indicator either...)

Zapzarap wrote: »

The shield sigil is kind of "in the center" of the arena... we activated that sigil by mistake so often... please move it a little bit more to the wall.

We've done that quite a lot, too.

Zapzarap wrote: »

OR: change the button to activate sigils to "e" (if I am correct thats how you activate the switches in Hof and AS?)... I already see it coming that you activate by mistake (or better deactivate) the HM just because you think a synergie pops up.

That would actually be a pretty good QoL change for other content as well. More than once, I've made the mistake of activating the portal in vCR while trying to grab an orb right when the portal was spawning. And in Maelstrom, there have been a couple of times when I picked up a sigil while trying to use the ghost-stun synergy.

There is precedent, too, for using Interact instead of Synergy while in combat. E.g., picking up relics and the Chaosball in Battlegrounds.

Rikkadir

I got the 'Black Gauntlet' quest today. I play mainly solo, apart from the occasional Undaunted pledges. Needless to say I only lasted a minute in stage 1 of the prison yard. lol
A simple question, please...
How is veteran mode selected? I'm on PS4 and it's not selectable in the 'Activity Finder', and Google doesn't tell me either.

Thanks. And yes, a solo mode would be great.

firedrgn

Rikkadir wrote: »

I got the 'Black Gauntlet' quest today. I play mainly solo, apart from the occasional Undaunted pledges. Needless to say I only lasted a minute in stage 1 of the prison yard. lol
A simple question, please...
How is veteran mode selected? I'm on PS4 and it's not selectable in the 'Activity Finder', and Google doesn't tell me either.

Thanks. And yes, a solo mode would be great.

Just like the other dugeons in dungeon finder u need to set to normal or vet then enter

firedrgn

Where u already in the dugeon cause you need to be outside .

Rikkadir

firedrgn wrote: »

Just like the other dugeons in dungeon finder u need to set to normal or vet then enter

Thanks firedrgn, I will try that.
So if activity finder is set to veteran, Blackrose Prison will be in veteran mode even though it isn't listed as a dungeon to select?

Cheers.

firedrgn

Rikkadir wrote: »

firedrgn wrote: »

Just like the other dugeons in dungeon finder u need to set to normal or vet then enter

Thanks firedrgn, I will try that.
So if activity finder is set to veteran, Blackrose Prison will be in veteran mode even though it isn't listed as a dungeon to select?

Cheers.

Yes that should be correct.

post an update if this is incorrect

Cheers