[BUGS] Veteran Blackrose Prison (XBOX)

AbbyMeowCat

Hello everyone, I’m AbbyMeowCat from Xbox NA.

I completed Veteran Blackrose Prison on a Dragonknight Magicka Tank on the first week of release.

However, I experienced some issues when playing other tank classes as I love playing the Templar Tank, Nightblade Tank and Warden Tank too and tryharding the hardest content in the game.

While Doing vBRP:

I realised that attacks from Battlemage Boss and Tames-The-Beast has Major and Minor Defile, and also has a bleed Damage-Over-Time that deals increased damage for each additional stack, up to 5.

Once it hits 5 stacks, it is almost unsurvivable without constant healing and almost difficult to manage resources without some support from the team or sigils as it CANNOT be Purged.

On the Dragonknight Tank, the skill called Reflective Plate is able to totally ignore the bleed DoT from both bosses light attacks. However, you would have to roll dodge Battlemage’s heavy attack and Tames’ Taking Aim as well to be completely free from the debuffs.

I tried to tank this on other classes by using other skills that could deflect, sadly there is no skill that other classes have that could have the same effect as Dragonknight’s Reflective Plate.

Warden’s Shimmering Shields does not ignore the bleed like Reflective Plate can.

Absorb Magic and Defensive Stance from the One-Hand-And-Shield skill line and its morphs can’t deflect as well which is disappointing as I thought Murkmire was going to be a patch which focuses on the balancing of classes and this was the only available general skill that is capable of deflection for non-Dragonknight tanks. Even the Spell Wall ultimate does not have the same effect.

Sorcerer Tank’s Ball of Lightning does not even absorb the projectile and negate the bleed.

The Nightblade Tank, even though has the strongest self-heal (Dark Cloak) with Jailer set and Soul Siphon, will still struggle as defile becomes even stronger at 5 stacks and only way is to wait for Tames to finish his taking aim and roll dodge it to finish the DoT timer at the very last second.

This makes vBRP currently in favor of only the Dragonknight Tank, making it manageable for this one class and almost impossible for other tank classes.

Another issue I faced was during the fight against Lady Minara in 3rd Arena. She has a huge Bat Swarm AoE which she will cast on the tank. However strangely enough, there is a bug where you take the full AoE damage until the effect ends even ‘when you are out of it’ or even miles away from it! The only way for us to fight through this AoE bug is by having a magicka sorcerer lay down a Negate on the Bat Swarm and my friends have Bat Swarm on their death recaps.

The Infusers are also sometimes not responsive when they are bashed missing our chances to interrupt, enraging her.

The Battlemage and Lady Minara also sometimes has no animation displaying their heavy attack or Shield Bash to prepare you to dodge roll, killing you or your group instantly.

These are the bugs I have faced so far and if anyone else has faced other things while doing it please share as well as vBRP is buggy and imbalanced at the moment.

I hope Zenimax hears my feedback on the bugs of vBRP.

Thank you.

React

The infusers definitely do ignore bashes sometimes, or the lag simply causes the bashes not to register in time (it can get pretty laggy in there towards the end of the arena). I've also noticed the bat swarm thing on one or two occasions, dieing with that as the primary damage on my recap despite being 5+ meters outside of the visual aoe.

As far as tanking goes, dk's are designed as tanks and they should be the most effective. Every class shouldn't be able to easily fill any role, otherwise there will be no unique class identity whatsoever.

AbbyMeowCat

I experienced another bug today:

Doing vBRP sometimes glitches the character to be invisible when switching bars being unable to do any skill unless we re-equip the weapon. Another bug that impedes progress.

Will share video soon.

AbbyMeowCat

Thank you for sharing your experience with the bug and also your opinion.

I enjoy 4 man content and have all Hard Mode Dungeon Achievements on all tank classes in every single dungeon and DLC Dungeon and have also hit leaderboards on vDSA on all of them.

I play only as a tank in this game and I do not agree that Dragonknight is the best tank for four-man content but more about player skill however in this vBRP case is fixing some skill bugs like Defensive Posture and Absorb Magic to balance vBRP for tanks.

All of the tank classes bring something unique to the table and if I were to be honest, the Nightblade tank would be the most powerful self-healing dungeon tank at the moment and not the Dragonknight but I do appreciate your opinion so if talking about just plain selfish tanking, Nightblade is currently very solid.

Thank you though.

AbbyMeowCat

Another issue I experienced was the vampire drain and colossus heavy attack sync time when fighting Lady Minara.
I do not know if it was intended but getting the drained and colossus bash at once is death.

Sometimes the vampire drain occurs only after the colossus’ heavy attack and at other times, they happen together which causes an instant death. Breaking free animation does not allow enough connection time to roll dodge or block the colossus bash.

The attack sequences and timings for these attacks vary and are inconsistent and when they occur at the same time on the same player, it’s an immediate death. I do not know if this is a bug or is intended.

AbbyMeowCat

Here is a video my teammate recorded when he experienced a disabled ability skill bar and player turning invisible, unable to do skills while doing vBRP.

This happened several times to me as well.

https://youtu.be/IALFBY4dW8k

ZOS_GinaBruno

Thanks so much for the write up, @AbbyMeowCat! We're making sure the team can review your list. At the very least, we did confirm the issue you called out with Reflective Plate.

AbbyMeowCat

Thank you ZOS_GinaBruno for your reply!

Even though it is buggy, I feel Blackrose Prison is a great arena design and is a great test of teamwork and trust for players and by far the most exciting one! A challenge I would like to complete on all my other tank classes.

I look forward to the fixes and changes in the future for vBRP for a more balanced, completable, fun and still challenging environment for everyone to enjoy!

In case there are any more bugs, I will keep posting more here! Thank you for hearing me out.

code65536

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Thanks so much for the write up, @AbbyMeowCat! We're making sure the team can review your list. At the very least, we did confirm the issue you called out with Reflective Plate.

Why do I get the feeling that this means, "we'll be making those attacks non-reflectable so that DKs will have to suffer the same as non-DKs"?

The uptime on the defile+bleed is pretty extreme. Last I checked, something around 90%. Unpurgeable, applied from simple light attacks from the boss. I think this was added to force groups to run with a healer. When we worked on vBRP on the PTS, we didn't even consider doing it without a healer because of the need to babysit a tank through that. I was genuinely surprised to see groups push through it healerless once it went Live.

I have mixed feeling about it, TBH. On one hand, I hate this ever-present defile+bleed effect and I welcome being able to bypass it on stage 2 using a reflect. On the other hand, I can understand why they wanted to add it in the first place...

AbbyMeowCat

Yes I have to agree. The defile and bleed on the tank is like having major and minor defile with max befoul cp in pvp.

Unable to self-heal and manage resources overtime even with CP to reduce incoming DoT damage unless boss dies before it reaches that maximum stack.

Indeed it is downright awful once it hits to 5 stacks and a guaranteed death as it drains your resources trying to keep yourself alive without a healer.

It is not so bad on the first boss as she does that spinning wheel flame or heavy attack to roll dodge. By then the DoT bleed and defile stack is over.

Groups are able to 3 dps if their dps is very very very high, ultra high, with high stamina dps, bypassing spawns and mechanics, so Tank players can just pray they survive the dps race before they bleed out but not every group composition are able to pull this feat off.

Reflective Plate was helpful for DK Tanking to ignore this effect.

Maybe give other tank classes access to the deflection of these attacks?

One Hand and Shield Defensive Posture and its morphs?

Warden Crystallized Shield and its morphs?

Sorcerer Ball of Lightning?

Or maybe the bleed and defile be made purgeable?

I hope your team consider these thoughts.

Weesacs

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Thanks so much for the write up, @AbbyMeowCat! We're making sure the team can review your list. At the very least, we did confirm the issue you called out with Reflective Plate.

Has this issue been addressed yet?

Solariken

My group got the Bat Swarm bug tonight. The bats would hit everyone in group no matter where they stood and heal the boss every time. She is basically unkillable and the bug persisted throughout 20+ attempts. @ZOS_Finn can we get an ETA on this and possibly mail me the Blackrose Bow you robbed from me?

wonf

I also enjoy tanking the harder content in the game and suppose i'll throw my 2 cents in this thread. I have also experienced all the above Bugs on PC NA servers before at one time or another. @AbbyMeowCat makes several good points about effectiveness of certain skills that I feel should really be addressed @ZOS_GinaBruno. If a Skill Tooltip says, for example, that it reflects projectiles, then it should in fact reflect projectiles. If the attack or projectile is undeflectable then it should be undeflectable by all skills the same. ZOS/ESO has always been bad Skills and Item Sets not functioning "exactly" as they are explained in the tooltip though.
I've managed to clear vBRP as a Tankplar several times, with a group healer. Of course there are different ways of going about it and I wouldn't go so far to say that one class or another is expressly "the best" at that specific content. Certainly can't maximize/optimize the effectiveness of a each class using the same gear sets and play style. The heavy attacks are best to roll dodge and it take a concentrated group effort to make sure Tames the Beast gets interrupted. The bleeds can be controlled well with high self healing to Health regen passives, Beekeeper's and Orgnum's are good for this. Battalion Defender is another good set but your Support and DPS can "steal" your heals if they take damage. Another useful set-up was running Thurvokun, Auto-Defense, Dead waters guile sets on a Templar tank. Empowering Sweeps grants 50% additional mitigation this way and make the incoming damage more manageable for the healer. If you had a healer running a Mending set and possibly some Dmg Debuff weapon enchants,(which i did not) you could see massive mitigation for the entire group. BTW this doesn't work as of next week because @ESO_DEVs nerfed empower. (Thanks guys, good looking out).
I do firmly believe that content like vBRP with its heavy defiles and persistent bleeds are an attempt by the powers be, to promote healers in group content. However healing in the game is mechanically flawed and always has been since release with no source of a major direct heal. The "Smart targeting heals" aren't reliable enough in most content to support an entire group. The rest of the major heals in the game are ground effect heals or HoTs, which don't return high enough values to mitigate the level of damage taken in these contents, coupled with the necessity of high mobility in vBRP, good luck catching someone with all those ground effects.
Well this turned into more of a rant then I wanted, maybe there's something here that's useful. As long as all ESO will deliver content to gamers, it will undoubtedly be full of holes and BUGs. Attempts to direct game play in favor of certain classes and group content will be regular occurrences. And without a rework of base game mechanics, i.e. degree/frequency of damage, block cost/mitigation, healing mechanics.... players will continue to attempt to DPS "break" all content in the game. Because higher DPS is always achievable each content release. Whereas stronger healing or increased tank mitigation has been ignored.

Zalathorm

Bat swarm is still wiping groups no matter where we stand. SUPER FRUSTRATING. Can't progress and thy that time we already have an hour at least suck into it

code65536

Zalathorm wrote: »

Bat swarm is still wiping groups no matter where we stand. SUPER FRUSTRATING. Can't progress and thy that time we already have an hour at least suck into it

Not sure that's a bug.

Her Bat Swarm is not like the typical Bat Swarm that you are used to, as the swarm is essentially pelting people with projectiles even if they are not in the primary damage AoE.

The damage is modest and be healed through.

sadlythebest

https://youtube.com/watch?v=idlR7JprQvI&feature=youtu.be

This happened alot. Including getting hit by invisible netch poisons and bog bursts that is clearly headed in the other direction.