PTS Update 21 - Feedback Thread for Frostvault

validifyedneb18_ESO

Did this dungeon with 2 dd players, the first boss seems to have a bug where if you interrupt him just before he does the 1shot slamming ground mechanic (Killing the person on the ground) then he becomes immune to further interrupts for the duration of the 1shot cast meaning your teammate is dead.

Also his ability to knockdown everyone on both sides of his jump is a tad bull-***, making dealing with adds impossible

After the 1shot is interrupted, the person on the ground is forced to stay on the ground for what would have been the duration of the 1shot cast. This often makes it borderline impossible to escape his large AOE slam is he casts it immediately after you interrupt his 1shot

He can also chain knock you down by using 2 abilities directly in a row and you dont seem to have even half a second of invulnerability

Also we has an issue where sometimes the person on the ground during the 1shot looked like they where just standing still rather than being pinned to the ground.

We did this with 2 very squishy dd, but with top quality PVP sets on. This boss/dungeon will likely be impossible for new/leveling players, I suggest you nerf normal mode considerably if you want to keep newer players interested in the game.

validifyedneb18_ESO

Also the fact that the archers get the bow ult is *** awful for a normal.

Pugs will not survive.

Disturbed125

validifyedneb18_ESO wrote: »

After the 1shot is interrupted, the person on the ground is forced to stay on the ground for what would have been the duration of the 1shot cast. This often makes it borderline impossible to escape his large AOE slam is he casts it immediately after you interrupt his 1shot

Yeah this is a point I didn't remember to mention. That uppercut mechanic is slightly clunky. If you time it right you can actually dodge the mechanic entirely, this either results in the boss standing there for a minute doing nothing or chasing after a teammate uncontrollably (acts as though hes over-taunted). The stun on the knock down last far too long as well, as valid says it lasts until what would be the execute mechanic is complete even if interrupted. This leaves the player out of control of their character and unable to defend themselves for a very long time in a fight with many ads.

Tandor

I certainly don't have a problem with extending the new chapter storyline to encompass DLCs throughout the year, but you already have a problem for a lot of players when two-thirds of the DLCs each year are group dungeons that only a section of the playerbase want to do, and locking the storyline behind them is a bad idea.

I've suggested before that the group dungeon DLCs would appeal to a lot more players (and therefore be commercially more viable) if they each included at least one delve, so as to give non-dungeoneers a reason to get those particular DLCs. If you wanted to add storyline to the DLCs, put it in the delves and everyone gets to enjoy them.

Alternatively, make a separate solo mode for the dungeons so that everyone can enjoy the storyline and also complete the DLCs.

Agalloch

Carbonised wrote: »

From all the feedback provided here, it seems pretty safe to conclude that mixing the lore/story aspect with the dungeon/mechanics aspect is NOT a success, and NOT something ZOS should do more in the future.

Personally I enjoy the lore/story aspect very much, while also doing quite a lot of the mechanics/gameplay, and have done some of the new DLC dungeons on vet as well as done quite a lot of PvP.

But - I am NOT going to grind myself against hardcore vet and HM mechanics just for the sake of doing them, and I don't agree that dungeons is the greatest place to put emphasis on any kind of story content. People who play ESO PvE competitively, don't care a thing about the story or the lore, and will in most cases not be helpful if you actually take time reading dialogue or enjoying the scenery. Sure you can do that in base dungeons, either solo or with friends, but the DLC vet dungeons have become so hard that many people struggle to do them even on normal, and the people I know who run them on vet let alone HM are miniscule.

With this ever increasing emphasis on mechanics difficulty, you're basically excluding the majority of your player base from the content.
Sorry to say, but ESO will never be a competitive or hardcore game, so you may as well stop pretending that it is. The majority of the players play it for the story, the lore, the setting and all that, not to play competitively in trials or dungeons against extremely hard mechanics.

That said, I appreciate that you locked the cosmetics and collectibles behind vet mode and not all the challenges, which would be unobtainable by 99.9999 % of us. You can get a title from the nodeath and HM and all that, that should be plenty sufficient for anyone's fragile ego.

This!

I'm not against mechanics...but the abundance of one shot mechanics in the last 6 dlc dungeons make the majority of player base to NOT do them.

Agalloch

thatlaurachick wrote: »

Requesting story mode for dungeons. To be able to read the quest text, and find lorebooks. Don't need lootables or chests, just the ability to hear the story, after the group runs through, disbands immediately, and hopefully you got the quest turned in for a skill point (maybe).

A version 1 easier , with story mode, and a version II harder would be awesome for all the DLC dungeons.

Why don't have 2 versions of dungeons as we have with many of the vanilla dungeons?

profundidob16_ESO

After doing more runs in veteran Frostvault the past days I've gathered following extra feedback:


-The Troll boss telegraph seems late, off or just too short all together in every run. As tank I see the "pummel" message appear while standing arm to arm to the boss -in position and ready to bash- and even when I press 0.2sec after the telegraph appears, he still kills group members and continues as if I had not bashed. Something is wrong for sure and totally non-transparant for new users. Even after killin him about 5 times now it still doesn't make sense to me and always seems off.

-Tzogvin's door didn't open after killing him during 1 particular run. We had to reset the dungeon instance since we were stuck.


-Laser boss is the new pug killer for sure. During some vet run with only 3 highly skilled people we managed to kill the first 2 bosses without much problem despite having only 1 dps in the group. Even this third "laser" boss we managed to get down to 20% because that dps not only had insane dps but in addition the skills down to avoid all dmge. Then a 4th person from zone chat joined who was turned out to be basically not up to vet dlc level in general and we start wiping for hours feeling like having to drag dead weight along.

Don't get me wrong: I personally love this fight with all it's aspects. It's most probably my new favorite. But it really is currently so that 1 lower-skilled player in the group is already enough to make it impossible to even kill this boss, even if the other 3 could perfectly do it with one eye closed. Not sure if that is the design you intended. Perhaps you want to include some tweaks (e.g lower dmge/health on adds ?) that allow better players to cover for less skilled (read: dead!) players. The adds overrunning us eventually is the main problem in almost all cases where 1 dps dies and rezzing causes more adds to spawn.


-Rizzuk's actions could use a bit more guiding info towards the players. After several runs I noticed we were still "guessing" some of his mechanics. The atro's actions are also somewhat of a puzzle that will require above average intelligence for tanks to actually figure out. More specifically the icecage mechanic with the partial circle AOE's a tank has to quickly sidestep. It took me about 5 times of instant dying to at that point in time to me "unexplainable dmge" before I started realizing how it works and I noticed Alcast's group had the same.


-Last boss: After the first 2-3 times we hear the npc shout "don't target the body, target a more vulnerable part" we get it but after wiping on this boss for a few hours this message quickly becomes tiresome and annoying


General other feedback:

-After comparing several of my runs to Alcast's high-dps burn group I noticed their high dps allows them to almost completely skip certain mechanics (on Rizzuk and Tzogvin for instance). It feels wrong that the average-good group has no other way to learn mechanics properly and completely while a high-burn group does not. Unless you intended mechanics to be skippable by high dps you might want to tune that or include certain "immune to dps at x% health" phases.

-Lag is an issue with the 1-shot mechanics. As euro player I ran with mostly 3 other euro players and with constant 200ms ping dps becomes lower and response time to certain 1-shot mechanics is a real problem. You might want to tune (loosen) some timing and re-test them with 200-300ms for yourself.



@ZOS_Finn

profundidob16_ESO

Agalloch wrote: »

Carbonised wrote: »

From all the feedback provided here, it seems pretty safe to conclude that mixing the lore/story aspect with the dungeon/mechanics aspect is NOT a success, and NOT something ZOS should do more in the future.

Personally I enjoy the lore/story aspect very much, while also doing quite a lot of the mechanics/gameplay, and have done some of the new DLC dungeons on vet as well as done quite a lot of PvP.

But - I am NOT going to grind myself against hardcore vet and HM mechanics just for the sake of doing them, and I don't agree that dungeons is the greatest place to put emphasis on any kind of story content. People who play ESO PvE competitively, don't care a thing about the story or the lore, and will in most cases not be helpful if you actually take time reading dialogue or enjoying the scenery. Sure you can do that in base dungeons, either solo or with friends, but the DLC vet dungeons have become so hard that many people struggle to do them even on normal, and the people I know who run them on vet let alone HM are miniscule.

With this ever increasing emphasis on mechanics difficulty, you're basically excluding the majority of your player base from the content.
Sorry to say, but ESO will never be a competitive or hardcore game, so you may as well stop pretending that it is. The majority of the players play it for the story, the lore, the setting and all that, not to play competitively in trials or dungeons against extremely hard mechanics.

That said, I appreciate that you locked the cosmetics and collectibles behind vet mode and not all the challenges, which would be unobtainable by 99.9999 % of us. You can get a title from the nodeath and HM and all that, that should be plenty sufficient for anyone's fragile ego.

This!

I'm not against mechanics...but the abundance of one shot mechanics in the last 6 dlc dungeons make the majority of player base to NOT do them.

in all fairness, it's clearly been the players that forced the devs down this route. In the past -without the 1 shot mechanics- people did literally anything (outdps, outshield, overheal) in order to just skip and ignore mechanics completely and guess what, they got away with it too !! The devs adapted by implementing 1shot dmge levels but only in vet mode. Note that on normal you can still ignore all mechanics by overhealing-overshielding-dpsburn so normal is still forgiving.

code65536

profundidob16_ESO wrote: »

Laser boss is the new pug killer for sure.

Biggest problem with the laser boss is that the mechanics and spawns are happening on a timer.

In our latest run, we were sloppy, had a death that we had to recover from, and despite that, we didn't get the first 4-beam sweep until the boss was well into execute and almost dead--we did one 4-beam sweep, and the boss died immediately after. Easy peasy.

Alcast's group had posted a video where, with clean execution and even higher DPS, and they didn't even see a 4-beam sweep. Way too easy.

And then the other day, I was watching Ninja614 on Twitch wipe on that boss for over an hour. They had low DPS and spent a lot of time trying to recover. The result? They saw their first 4-beam sweep at around 60% boss health. At that rate, they'd have to survive several 4-beam sweeps. That's brutal.

The problem with this design is that the difficulty is not linear. If you do twice as much DPS, it doesn't become twice as easy--it becomes four times as easy. More DPS means adds die faster and you are able to spend more of your time hitting the boss instead of adds (e.g., we were able to kill adds mostly during the boss immunity phases and were able to devote most of the normal phases to the boss), which speeds up the fight even more and means you have even fewer adds to kill. And as mentioned, you skip mechanics outright. The result is a fight that's trivially easy for some while brutally hard for others. Making add spawns and laser sweeps happen at boss percentages will make the fight harder for higher-DPS groups since they won't be able to burn past mechanics, while at the same time making the fight easier for other groups, since they won't be overwhelmed by mechanics.

BTW, for people who are having trouble with the 4-laser sweeps, here's a tip to make that mechanic much easier to deal with: For each sweep sequence, you will always rotate around the boss in the same direction to avoid each laser in that sequence. What this means is that if you moved clockwise around the boss to get from the first laser's safe spot to the second laser's safe spot, you will move clockwise again for the third laser and again for the fourth laser. Same thing if the second laser's safe spot was counter-clockwise from that of the first laser. You'll still have to pay attention to the first two lasers to establish whether it's clockwise or counter-clockwise, but after you determine that, the third and fourth lasers become much easier to avoid. Hopefully this will help more people get past this boss.

profundidob16_ESO

exactly @code65536 I saw that video from Alcast's group as well. That's what I meant with: "after comparing it seems high burn dps groups are able to skip mechanics partially or even completely". Seems highly unfair.

Killed the laser boss over 5 times now with different groups and have seen over 30 non-kill tries where there are always deaths. I guarantee this fight is a new pug killer even more than the archivist was in Wolfhunter

As soon as your dps is low/dead and you fall behind on killing spheres it's basically impossible to recover or catch up.

RouDeR

Dungeons are EZ, mechanics are below average difficulty...

profundidob16_ESO

RouDeR wrote: »

Dungeons are EZ, mechanics are below average difficulty...

Lemme guess, you kill the Stonekeeper boss on veteran mode while watching TV and eating at the same time ?

and then finally wake up and realize it was all just a dream ?

Contraptions

[*] Did you enjoy this new dungeon?

Not really, no. It's the kind of difficulty that I would endure once for the pet at the end on vet and then do the rest of any gear farming on normal if I'm really desperate. I can foresee lots of people skipping this dungeon if it's the daily pledge. Well, most people already skip the latest DLC dungeons for pledges, and I think this will be no different.

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

This dungeon is way way more unforgiving than any previous dungeon in this game, including the previous DLC dungeons. All the bosses and even the trash mobs have some form of one shot mechanic, and in general the damage being dished out is kinda overwhelming in general. All previous dungeons had a mix of minbosses and bosses to allow for some ups and downs, after a hard main boss would be a miniboss to allow players to "relax". Here it's 5 bosses in a row; the overall difficulty is too much.

[*] Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?

Veteran.

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

I didn't like any boss to be honest. To contextualize I ran this with my group of Oceanic friends, all 270-300 ping at minimum, all of us are decently experienced with DLC and vet content (vet DLC dungeons with challengers done, some vet trials) but we're nowhere near "top tier" PVE players. We tried running with 3 dps and a tank, but had to swap to 1 healer, 2 dps and a tank since the damage in here is just too much. This was done during the 4.3.0 version of the update.

Trash mobs

Overall the amount of trash mobs in here seems adequate, although a slight reduction in trash mob lethality would be better. The riekling uppercut one shots people even through block, the one hander and shield's heavy attack one shots through block, the ice meteor from the mage one shots if unblocked, and even while blocked does 14-15k damage, the archers have the bow ult which can be interrupted (no red line indicators though) but again drains stamina really quickly if blocked and does a lot of damage if unblocked.

I can understand the one-hand and shield guy doing high damage, he's marked as an elite mob and is larger than the other trash. But why are even the "normal" mobs, aka those with no pips and markings, doing so much damage? This is a problem that has existed since MOS and MHK honestly, why are normal looking wolves and werewolves one-shotting people through block with their heavy attacks? If you want a mob to be dangerous and high priority, please INDICATE IT CLEARLY IN GAME. Or again, reduce the damage they deal.

Icestalker

The ground pound tremors from the boss do too much damage with too little telegraphing. The least you could do is give the tremors some form of red circle indicator and increase the wind up animation so ranged characters can strafe around them and melee players can get away in time.

The mechanic where the boss stuns a player and the rest have to interrupt it if not he instakills the player occurs way too quickly with not enough reaction time. When our tank got pinned, with full resistances and 40k health he died in less than 1 second.

Adds seem to be summoned based on health percentage (not too sure), they seem to stun and snare pretty often, again not a fan of excessive CCs which favour stam builds.

Warlord Tzogvin

The bleed from the bosses' light attack is excessive with 4k ticks per second on a light armoured build. Heavy attack does massive damage but that's expected, animation for uppercut seems a bit delayed though. Adds summoned throughout the fight are simple enough to take down.

Tether mechanic is too hard to see, the thin green beam is not obvious at all in combat with particle effects going on. There also appears to be no telegraphing from the boss when doing this mechanic, the beam just appears with no sound effects/animations etc. The only hint is a line of text on screen, but most of the time people don't realise they're tethered until they start taking massive damage. I suggest making the formation of the beam slower and more obvious, and of course making the beam itself more obvious so players marked can separate quickly. Or, like the Gamyne Bandu fight, you can make it such that players who react and roll early can avoid the tether all together.

The Reckless Charge displays fire lines emitting from under him when he spins at the target, is this meant to do damage? Or is it just the AOE spin that does damage?

Not a fan of how deadly the ice tornadoes are, again it's not fair when they appear almost instantly and start dealing almost 9k ticks on the spot which is almost an instakill. The boss's large channeled center frost AOE is also far too deadly, barely grazed the edge for less than a second and was dead. Not sure if it's lag or incorrect circle telegraphs but this seems way too punishing. Would suggest making ice tornadoes slower overall. Tzogvin's throne also overlaps/blocks the outer running path during his frost AOE attack occasionally, making it very hard to outrun the smaller tornadoes.

Not sure if the Fire Pulse (aka the MOL first boss mechanic) and adds are time based or health based. Would suggest making it health based and lowering the pulse damage so as to not punish groups with lower dps too much during his shield phase.

Vault Protector

My personal least favourite boss in the game. Adds are summoned based on a timer, instakill lasers activate based on a timer (12 seconds or so based on observations) and the mechanics ramp up way too fast. This boss is a dps race to the extreme and I absolutely HATE DPS races, or mechanics that punish low dps.

The laser mechanic is well explained before the boss, you need to find an obstruction to block the laser, and death hints tell you that the boss's shield does that. Fair enough. Boss itself also does some mechanics, but those are easy to deal with. But again, adds and lasers spawn and ramp up too quickly. First it's 1, then 1, then 2, then 2, then 3, 4 beams at once or so, which means that most groups will have to deal with 4 beams within a minute or so of the fight, unless you're one of those top tier groups who just burn through everything while claiming everything is too easy. Given how the beams come one after another, if the boss's shield is in a bad place, like off center, you're basically screwed. If the Sphere fires a ground tremor at the wrong moment at the party while they're stuck behind the boss, it's either instant death or everyone takes 14-15k worth of damage. If the rolling spheres come up, you get stunned, and then you're dead. I really really dislike how little room for error there is, and how random stacking mechanics can just screw you over.

The ray emitter is also not obvious at all, it is too hard to tell which end of the laser is the emitter in combat, which is necessary to know which side of the boss to hide on.

I do think this boss has some potential, but the mechanics should be redesigned extensively. Here is my version of the boss that seems more fair

I suggest making rays activate and adds spawn based on health percentage of the boss: 90%, 70%, 50%, 30% will spawn a sphere and a spider each. 80% will have a 1 beam activate, 60% will have 2 beams, 40% will have 3 and 20% will have all 4 beams. Beams will now destroy any adds still alive as they pass. The achievement associated with this boss can be amended to "destroy 20 adds manually" or something. This will help ensure that the true test of this boss is mechanics, positioning and dodging instead of just mindless dps.

Rizzuk and Avalanche

I really can't give any feedback on this boss since I have no idea what the proper intended way of beating him is. Rizzuk has some form of very deadly interrurptible spell. Ok. Some very deadly frost AOEs appear all over the place almost randomly (with no red circles) and no telegraphing. Ok. The atronach's AOEs and swing one shot people for 90k. Ok. Some spiky frost ball emerges from the tornadoes and chases people around, and does practically no damage when it hits them. Ok. Rizzuk freezes everyone with almost no telegraphing and does a high dot with an unblockable meteor that sometimes one shots people, while sometimes it doesn't. Ok.

Ok then. I have no idea what's the intended strategy here. We just rezzed the dead and dpsed the mage down. The only improvement I can suggest is to just make Avalanche invulnerable so people know to focus on Rizzuk, and reducing the damage from all the random AOEs overall. If the frost spike ball is supposed to do something that would be nice. Maybe kiting it into a tornado removes it? Maybe kiting it into the boss stuns it? Maybe intentionally freezing yourself in the tornadoes negates the boss's meteor like the first boss in SCP? I dunno.

Stonekeeper

Ugh this boss. In general I think the arena is a bit too small for the amount of kiting you need to do esp in the second phase with the spinning blades, since the inner blade track leaves you with barely any room to avoid it on the outer ring. Similarly, the outer ring's spinning blade pushes you way too near to the boss, which if you touch him stuns and damages you. I can see this boss being rather melee unfriendly, and I think the damage and stun near the bosses's body should just be removed to give more room for maneuvering as well as a reduction in the size of the spinning blade AOE. Damage and bleed from the blade could also be toned down.

Mechanics hints are provided by the NPC are adequate, boss's body being invulnerable initially teaches players to focus the arms and then the body. Blade arm AOE needs to activate a bit slower so people have time to get out of the AOE. Centurions summoned by the arms breaking are ok to deal with but not a fan of their heavy attacks one shotting people. Boss's spinning armpit fire mechanic is fine but can be annoying when trying to avoid blades, centurions and other attacks. Suggest increasing cooldown on that mechanic so players don't have to constantly kite. The instakill cone on 3rd phase could also be delayed slightly to give players more reaction time.

I really dislike the skeevaton phase at 70% and 40%. Skeevatons have their own skills which aren't explained anywhere, this mechanic is never introduced in any form before the last fight and frankly just seems pointless and gimmicky. Skeevatons have too little health in general. Going into the skeevaton also unsummons your pets, so good luck sorcerors. Why is there a need to "charge up" the special pylon destroying ultimate with a skill? Wouldn't it be much more straightforward to have a damage skill do that instead directly?

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I wish the skeevaton phase just be scrapped entirely. It seems entirely out of place within this fight and will get tiresome very very quickly. And this is a minor issue but lorewise, since this dungeon seems to be part of the "main story" of this year, how does it make sense that players are able to transform into clockwork rats and back again? We're not controlling them magically like drones, since all damage you take in skeevaton form transfers over to your player and if you die in rat form you die for real. What? Just please get rid of this ridiculous mechanic.

I didn't bother with HM, but from vids I've seen it's just more health more damage, more constant debuffs and the skeevaton phase is somehow even more complicated and janky. Overall just a giant pain.

[*] What level and build was the character you used?

CP 810 mag sorc.

[*] Do you have any other general feedback?

@ZOS_Finn I don't know if you guys actually read the feedback here, and I apologize for the length of this post. But I am writing this to speak out against what I feel is a worrying trend of making the newer DLC dungeons so much more insanely hard and complicated compared to older base game dungeons and even the older DLC dungeons. Is there really a need to "one up" the previous content in terms of difficulty all the time?

Difficulty comes in two forms for me - numbers and mechanics. Numbers difficulty has to do with enemy health and damage output compared to our own health and damage. On that note, why is trash and boss damage constantly getting higher and higher? Some boss attacks are hitting for up to 90k, trash heavy attacks are hitting for 60k.

Maybe this is your way of encouraging people to play as tanks and healers, I don't know. But making all of these attacks hit so hard that they one shot anyone who isn't a tank has instead promoted a different meta in general. There is a reason why people tend to favour self sustaining 3 dps 1 tank setups. More dps allows us to clear content faster, for one. The less time you spend, the less chance of screwing up. Also, more dps allows people to burn through enemies before the incoming damage/mechanics gets overwhelming, and in general allows people to skip boss mechanics by reaching certain health gates fast (see Zaan in SCP and practically every boss in vet Blackrose).

Excessively high damage and the prevalence of one-shot mechanics in the newer DLC dungeons doesn't promote healers - it promotes rezzers. The ghost lines in Fang Lair HM come so often and the random poison cones in SCP HM come so fast that if someone dies, and most of the time someone will, it's easier to just get a Templar with Kagrenac's to get them up since no one else can rez fast enough before the next line of ghosts comes or the next poison cone fires. Please reconsider your dungeon team's love of mechanics like these. Please give us more reaction time and "down time" in general for these types of mechanics - increase the time between ghost lines and make the poison cones spawn a bit slower so we can react. Most of us do not have the luxury of playing with sub 100 ping, like I mentioned earlier most Oceanic players have 300 ping minimum at the best of times. The number of times we have died to AOEs that we thought we had dodged, but the server decided that we hadn't, is just infuriating. Having to dodge instakill AOEs, heavy attacks and mechanics constantly at high ping just gets exhausting after a while.

Mechanics wise, why is there a need to constantly introduce gimmick mechanics and invulnerability phases? First it was the 3 crouch phases in Tarcyr in MOS and the 3 pointless hedge maze phases in MHK, and now this silly skeevaton nonsense. It's ok that for dungeons you want to introduce something special to spice up combat, but if more time is spent dealing with the special mechanics to remove the invulnerability than actually fighting the boss, then I think the mechanic isn't a good one. (Who even thinks waddling around in crouch while avoiding AOEs to get to a wisp to press interact, 3 times each for 3 phases, is fun? Just reveal the boss on the first interaction, anything longer than that is just tedious.)

And finally, what is up with the trend of making the HM vet dungeons so much more ridiculously difficult than normal vet, which seems to have started with SCP and FL? You do realize that HM is part of the daily pledge criteria right? What is the intended completion rate/ intended replayability rate of vet HM DLC dungeons? As mentioned earlier most people already skip DLC pledges, and making content that a large portion of the player base skips or at most does only once seems counter intuitive.

There is clearly talent involved in designing these dungeons and encounters, and I don't want it to look like I'm bashing the devs for no reason. I just feel that at this point there seems to be questionable design choices being made that makes all this DLC content, aka content that we paid premium price for, unreasonably restrictive and unfun for a large portion of the player base outside the "top tier" players. Dungeons shouldn't be this demanding ever, especially when you're advertising it to be storyline and lore related, even in vet and HM.

Agalloch

Contraptions wrote: »

[*] Did you enjoy this new dungeon?

Not really, no. It's the kind of difficulty that I would endure once for the pet at the end on vet and then do the rest of any gear farming on normal if I'm really desperate. I can foresee lots of people skipping this dungeon if it's the daily pledge. Well, most people already skip the latest DLC dungeons for pledges, and I think this will be no different.

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

This dungeon is way way more unforgiving than any previous dungeon in this game, including the previous DLC dungeons. All the bosses and even the trash mobs have some form of one shot mechanic, and in general the damage being dished out is kinda overwhelming in general. All previous dungeons had a mix of minbosses and bosses to allow for some ups and downs, after a hard main boss would be a miniboss to allow players to "relax". Here it's 5 bosses in a row; the overall difficulty is too much.

[*] Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?

Veteran.

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

I didn't like any boss to be honest. To contextualize I ran this with my group of Oceanic friends, all 270-300 ping at minimum, all of us are decently experienced with DLC and vet content (vet DLC dungeons with challengers done, some vet trials) but we're nowhere near "top tier" PVE players. We tried running with 3 dps and a tank, but had to swap to 1 healer, 2 dps and a tank since the damage in here is just too much. This was done during the 4.3.0 version of the update.

Trash mobs

Overall the amount of trash mobs in here seems adequate, although a slight reduction in trash mob lethality would be better. The riekling uppercut one shots people even through block, the one hander and shield's heavy attack one shots through block, the ice meteor from the mage one shots if unblocked, and even while blocked does 14-15k damage, the archers have the bow ult which can be interrupted (no red line indicators though) but again drains stamina really quickly if blocked and does a lot of damage if unblocked.

I can understand the one-hand and shield guy doing high damage, he's marked as an elite mob and is larger than the other trash. But why are even the "normal" mobs, aka those with no pips and markings, doing so much damage? This is a problem that has existed since MOS and MHK honestly, why are normal looking wolves and werewolves one-shotting people through block with their heavy attacks? If you want a mob to be dangerous and high priority, please INDICATE IT CLEARLY IN GAME. Or again, reduce the damage they deal.

Icestalker

The ground pound tremors from the boss do too much damage with too little telegraphing. The least you could do is give the tremors some form of red circle indicator and increase the wind up animation so ranged characters can strafe around them and melee players can get away in time.

The mechanic where the boss stuns a player and the rest have to interrupt it if not he instakills the player occurs way too quickly with not enough reaction time. When our tank got pinned, with full resistances and 40k health he died in less than 1 second.

Adds seem to be summoned based on health percentage (not too sure), they seem to stun and snare pretty often, again not a fan of excessive CCs which favour stam builds.

Warlord Tzogvin

The bleed from the bosses' light attack is excessive with 4k ticks per second on a light armoured build. Heavy attack does massive damage but that's expected, animation for uppercut seems a bit delayed though. Adds summoned throughout the fight are simple enough to take down.

Tether mechanic is too hard to see, the thin green beam is not obvious at all in combat with particle effects going on. There also appears to be no telegraphing from the boss when doing this mechanic, the beam just appears with no sound effects/animations etc. The only hint is a line of text on screen, but most of the time people don't realise they're tethered until they start taking massive damage. I suggest making the formation of the beam slower and more obvious, and of course making the beam itself more obvious so players marked can separate quickly. Or, like the Gamyne Bandu fight, you can make it such that players who react and roll early can avoid the tether all together.

The Reckless Charge displays fire lines emitting from under him when he spins at the target, is this meant to do damage? Or is it just the AOE spin that does damage?

Not a fan of how deadly the ice tornadoes are, again it's not fair when they appear almost instantly and start dealing almost 9k ticks on the spot which is almost an instakill. The boss's large channeled center frost AOE is also far too deadly, barely grazed the edge for less than a second and was dead. Not sure if it's lag or incorrect circle telegraphs but this seems way too punishing. Would suggest making ice tornadoes slower overall. Tzogvin's throne also overlaps/blocks the outer running path during his frost AOE attack occasionally, making it very hard to outrun the smaller tornadoes.

Not sure if the Fire Pulse (aka the MOL first boss mechanic) and adds are time based or health based. Would suggest making it health based and lowering the pulse damage so as to not punish groups with lower dps too much during his shield phase.

Vault Protector

My personal least favourite boss in the game. Adds are summoned based on a timer, instakill lasers activate based on a timer (12 seconds or so based on observations) and the mechanics ramp up way too fast. This boss is a dps race to the extreme and I absolutely HATE DPS races, or mechanics that punish low dps.

The laser mechanic is well explained before the boss, you need to find an obstruction to block the laser, and death hints tell you that the boss's shield does that. Fair enough. Boss itself also does some mechanics, but those are easy to deal with. But again, adds and lasers spawn and ramp up too quickly. First it's 1, then 1, then 2, then 2, then 3, 4 beams at once or so, which means that most groups will have to deal with 4 beams within a minute or so of the fight, unless you're one of those top tier groups who just burn through everything while claiming everything is too easy. Given how the beams come one after another, if the boss's shield is in a bad place, like off center, you're basically screwed. If the Sphere fires a ground tremor at the wrong moment at the party while they're stuck behind the boss, it's either instant death or everyone takes 14-15k worth of damage. If the rolling spheres come up, you get stunned, and then you're dead. I really really dislike how little room for error there is, and how random stacking mechanics can just screw you over.

The ray emitter is also not obvious at all, it is too hard to tell which end of the laser is the emitter in combat, which is necessary to know which side of the boss to hide on.

I do think this boss has some potential, but the mechanics should be redesigned extensively. Here is my version of the boss that seems more fair

I suggest making rays activate and adds spawn based on health percentage of the boss: 90%, 70%, 50%, 30% will spawn a sphere and a spider each. 80% will have a 1 beam activate, 60% will have 2 beams, 40% will have 3 and 20% will have all 4 beams. Beams will now destroy any adds still alive as they pass. The achievement associated with this boss can be amended to "destroy 20 adds manually" or something. This will help ensure that the true test of this boss is mechanics, positioning and dodging instead of just mindless dps.

Rizzuk and Avalanche

I really can't give any feedback on this boss since I have no idea what the proper intended way of beating him is. Rizzuk has some form of very deadly interrurptible spell. Ok. Some very deadly frost AOEs appear all over the place almost randomly (with no red circles) and no telegraphing. Ok. The atronach's AOEs and swing one shot people for 90k. Ok. Some spiky frost ball emerges from the tornadoes and chases people around, and does practically no damage when it hits them. Ok. Rizzuk freezes everyone with almost no telegraphing and does a high dot with an unblockable meteor that sometimes one shots people, while sometimes it doesn't. Ok.

Ok then. I have no idea what's the intended strategy here. We just rezzed the dead and dpsed the mage down. The only improvement I can suggest is to just make Avalanche invulnerable so people know to focus on Rizzuk, and reducing the damage from all the random AOEs overall. If the frost spike ball is supposed to do something that would be nice. Maybe kiting it into a tornado removes it? Maybe kiting it into the boss stuns it? Maybe intentionally freezing yourself in the tornadoes negates the boss's meteor like the first boss in SCP? I dunno.

Stonekeeper

Ugh this boss. In general I think the arena is a bit too small for the amount of kiting you need to do esp in the second phase with the spinning blades, since the inner blade track leaves you with barely any room to avoid it on the outer ring. Similarly, the outer ring's spinning blade pushes you way too near to the boss, which if you touch him stuns and damages you. I can see this boss being rather melee unfriendly, and I think the damage and stun near the bosses's body should just be removed to give more room for maneuvering as well as a reduction in the size of the spinning blade AOE. Damage and bleed from the blade could also be toned down.

Mechanics hints are provided by the NPC are adequate, boss's body being invulnerable initially teaches players to focus the arms and then the body. Blade arm AOE needs to activate a bit slower so people have time to get out of the AOE. Centurions summoned by the arms breaking are ok to deal with but not a fan of their heavy attacks one shotting people. Boss's spinning armpit fire mechanic is fine but can be annoying when trying to avoid blades, centurions and other attacks. Suggest increasing cooldown on that mechanic so players don't have to constantly kite. The instakill cone on 3rd phase could also be delayed slightly to give players more reaction time.

I really dislike the skeevaton phase at 70% and 40%. Skeevatons have their own skills which aren't explained anywhere, this mechanic is never introduced in any form before the last fight and frankly just seems pointless and gimmicky. Skeevatons have too little health in general. Going into the skeevaton also unsummons your pets, so good luck sorcerors. Why is there a need to "charge up" the special pylon destroying ultimate with a skill? Wouldn't it be much more straightforward to have a damage skill do that instead directly?

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I wish the skeevaton phase just be scrapped entirely. It seems entirely out of place within this fight and will get tiresome very very quickly. And this is a minor issue but lorewise, since this dungeon seems to be part of the "main story" of this year, how does it make sense that players are able to transform into clockwork rats and back again? We're not controlling them magically like drones, since all damage you take in skeevaton form transfers over to your player and if you die in rat form you die for real. What? Just please get rid of this ridiculous mechanic.

I didn't bother with HM, but from vids I've seen it's just more health more damage, more constant debuffs and the skeevaton phase is somehow even more complicated and janky. Overall just a giant pain.

[*] What level and build was the character you used?

CP 810 mag sorc.

[*] Do you have any other general feedback?

@ZOS_Finn I don't know if you guys actually read the feedback here, and I apologize for the length of this post. But I am writing this to speak out against what I feel is a worrying trend of making the newer DLC dungeons so much more insanely hard and complicated compared to older base game dungeons and even the older DLC dungeons. Is there really a need to "one up" the previous content in terms of difficulty all the time?

Difficulty comes in two forms for me - numbers and mechanics. Numbers difficulty has to do with enemy health and damage output compared to our own health and damage. On that note, why is trash and boss damage constantly getting higher and higher? Some boss attacks are hitting for up to 90k, trash heavy attacks are hitting for 60k.

Maybe this is your way of encouraging people to play as tanks and healers, I don't know. But making all of these attacks hit so hard that they one shot anyone who isn't a tank has instead promoted a different meta in general. There is a reason why people tend to favour self sustaining 3 dps 1 tank setups. More dps allows us to clear content faster, for one. The less time you spend, the less chance of screwing up. Also, more dps allows people to burn through enemies before the incoming damage/mechanics gets overwhelming, and in general allows people to skip boss mechanics by reaching certain health gates fast (see Zaan in SCP and practically every boss in vet Blackrose).

Excessively high damage and the prevalence of one-shot mechanics in the newer DLC dungeons doesn't promote healers - it promotes rezzers. The ghost lines in Fang Lair HM come so often and the random poison cones in SCP HM come so fast that if someone dies, and most of the time someone will, it's easier to just get a Templar with Kagrenac's to get them up since no one else can rez fast enough before the next line of ghosts comes or the next poison cone fires. Please reconsider your dungeon team's love of mechanics like these. Please give us more reaction time and "down time" in general for these types of mechanics - increase the time between ghost lines and make the poison cones spawn a bit slower so we can react. Most of us do not have the luxury of playing with sub 100 ping, like I mentioned earlier most Oceanic players have 300 ping minimum at the best of times. The number of times we have died to AOEs that we thought we had dodged, but the server decided that we hadn't, is just infuriating. Having to dodge instakill AOEs, heavy attacks and mechanics constantly at high ping just gets exhausting after a while.

Mechanics wise, why is there a need to constantly introduce gimmick mechanics and invulnerability phases? First it was the 3 crouch phases in Tarcyr in MOS and the 3 pointless hedge maze phases in MHK, and now this silly skeevaton nonsense. It's ok that for dungeons you want to introduce something special to spice up combat, but if more time is spent dealing with the special mechanics to remove the invulnerability than actually fighting the boss, then I think the mechanic isn't a good one. (Who even thinks waddling around in crouch while avoiding AOEs to get to a wisp to press interact, 3 times each for 3 phases, is fun? Just reveal the boss on the first interaction, anything longer than that is just tedious.)

And finally, what is up with the trend of making the HM vet dungeons so much more ridiculously difficult than normal vet, which seems to have started with SCP and FL? You do realize that HM is part of the daily pledge criteria right? What is the intended completion rate/ intended replayability rate of vet HM DLC dungeons? As mentioned earlier most people already skip DLC pledges, and making content that a large portion of the player base skips or at most does only once seems counter intuitive.

There is clearly talent involved in designing these dungeons and encounters, and I don't want it to look like I'm bashing the devs for no reason. I just feel that at this point there seems to be questionable design choices being made that makes all this DLC content, aka content that we paid premium price for, unreasonably restrictive and unfun for a large portion of the player base outside the "top tier" players. Dungeons shouldn't be this demanding ever, especially when you're advertising it to be storyline and lore related, even in vet and HM.

Contraptions wrote: »

[*] Did you enjoy this new dungeon?

Not really, no. It's the kind of difficulty that I would endure once for the pet at the end on vet and then do the rest of any gear farming on normal if I'm really desperate. I can foresee lots of people skipping this dungeon if it's the daily pledge. Well, most people already skip the latest DLC dungeons for pledges, and I think this will be no different.

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

This dungeon is way way more unforgiving than any previous dungeon in this game, including the previous DLC dungeons. All the bosses and even the trash mobs have some form of one shot mechanic, and in general the damage being dished out is kinda overwhelming in general. All previous dungeons had a mix of minbosses and bosses to allow for some ups and downs, after a hard main boss would be a miniboss to allow players to "relax". Here it's 5 bosses in a row; the overall difficulty is too much.

[*] Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?

Veteran.

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

I didn't like any boss to be honest. To contextualize I ran this with my group of Oceanic friends, all 270-300 ping at minimum, all of us are decently experienced with DLC and vet content (vet DLC dungeons with challengers done, some vet trials) but we're nowhere near "top tier" PVE players. We tried running with 3 dps and a tank, but had to swap to 1 healer, 2 dps and a tank since the damage in here is just too much. This was done during the 4.3.0 version of the update.

Trash mobs

Overall the amount of trash mobs in here seems adequate, although a slight reduction in trash mob lethality would be better. The riekling uppercut one shots people even through block, the one hander and shield's heavy attack one shots through block, the ice meteor from the mage one shots if unblocked, and even while blocked does 14-15k damage, the archers have the bow ult which can be interrupted (no red line indicators though) but again drains stamina really quickly if blocked and does a lot of damage if unblocked.

I can understand the one-hand and shield guy doing high damage, he's marked as an elite mob and is larger than the other trash. But why are even the "normal" mobs, aka those with no pips and markings, doing so much damage? This is a problem that has existed since MOS and MHK honestly, why are normal looking wolves and werewolves one-shotting people through block with their heavy attacks? If you want a mob to be dangerous and high priority, please INDICATE IT CLEARLY IN GAME. Or again, reduce the damage they deal.

Icestalker

The ground pound tremors from the boss do too much damage with too little telegraphing. The least you could do is give the tremors some form of red circle indicator and increase the wind up animation so ranged characters can strafe around them and melee players can get away in time.

The mechanic where the boss stuns a player and the rest have to interrupt it if not he instakills the player occurs way too quickly with not enough reaction time. When our tank got pinned, with full resistances and 40k health he died in less than 1 second.

Adds seem to be summoned based on health percentage (not too sure), they seem to stun and snare pretty often, again not a fan of excessive CCs which favour stam builds.

Warlord Tzogvin

The bleed from the bosses' light attack is excessive with 4k ticks per second on a light armoured build. Heavy attack does massive damage but that's expected, animation for uppercut seems a bit delayed though. Adds summoned throughout the fight are simple enough to take down.

Tether mechanic is too hard to see, the thin green beam is not obvious at all in combat with particle effects going on. There also appears to be no telegraphing from the boss when doing this mechanic, the beam just appears with no sound effects/animations etc. The only hint is a line of text on screen, but most of the time people don't realise they're tethered until they start taking massive damage. I suggest making the formation of the beam slower and more obvious, and of course making the beam itself more obvious so players marked can separate quickly. Or, like the Gamyne Bandu fight, you can make it such that players who react and roll early can avoid the tether all together.

The Reckless Charge displays fire lines emitting from under him when he spins at the target, is this meant to do damage? Or is it just the AOE spin that does damage?

Not a fan of how deadly the ice tornadoes are, again it's not fair when they appear almost instantly and start dealing almost 9k ticks on the spot which is almost an instakill. The boss's large channeled center frost AOE is also far too deadly, barely grazed the edge for less than a second and was dead. Not sure if it's lag or incorrect circle telegraphs but this seems way too punishing. Would suggest making ice tornadoes slower overall. Tzogvin's throne also overlaps/blocks the outer running path during his frost AOE attack occasionally, making it very hard to outrun the smaller tornadoes.

Not sure if the Fire Pulse (aka the MOL first boss mechanic) and adds are time based or health based. Would suggest making it health based and lowering the pulse damage so as to not punish groups with lower dps too much during his shield phase.

Vault Protector

My personal least favourite boss in the game. Adds are summoned based on a timer, instakill lasers activate based on a timer (12 seconds or so based on observations) and the mechanics ramp up way too fast. This boss is a dps race to the extreme and I absolutely HATE DPS races, or mechanics that punish low dps.

The laser mechanic is well explained before the boss, you need to find an obstruction to block the laser, and death hints tell you that the boss's shield does that. Fair enough. Boss itself also does some mechanics, but those are easy to deal with. But again, adds and lasers spawn and ramp up too quickly. First it's 1, then 1, then 2, then 2, then 3, 4 beams at once or so, which means that most groups will have to deal with 4 beams within a minute or so of the fight, unless you're one of those top tier groups who just burn through everything while claiming everything is too easy. Given how the beams come one after another, if the boss's shield is in a bad place, like off center, you're basically screwed. If the Sphere fires a ground tremor at the wrong moment at the party while they're stuck behind the boss, it's either instant death or everyone takes 14-15k worth of damage. If the rolling spheres come up, you get stunned, and then you're dead. I really really dislike how little room for error there is, and how random stacking mechanics can just screw you over.

The ray emitter is also not obvious at all, it is too hard to tell which end of the laser is the emitter in combat, which is necessary to know which side of the boss to hide on.

I do think this boss has some potential, but the mechanics should be redesigned extensively. Here is my version of the boss that seems more fair

I suggest making rays activate and adds spawn based on health percentage of the boss: 90%, 70%, 50%, 30% will spawn a sphere and a spider each. 80% will have a 1 beam activate, 60% will have 2 beams, 40% will have 3 and 20% will have all 4 beams. Beams will now destroy any adds still alive as they pass. The achievement associated with this boss can be amended to "destroy 20 adds manually" or something. This will help ensure that the true test of this boss is mechanics, positioning and dodging instead of just mindless dps.

Rizzuk and Avalanche

I really can't give any feedback on this boss since I have no idea what the proper intended way of beating him is. Rizzuk has some form of very deadly interrurptible spell. Ok. Some very deadly frost AOEs appear all over the place almost randomly (with no red circles) and no telegraphing. Ok. The atronach's AOEs and swing one shot people for 90k. Ok. Some spiky frost ball emerges from the tornadoes and chases people around, and does practically no damage when it hits them. Ok. Rizzuk freezes everyone with almost no telegraphing and does a high dot with an unblockable meteor that sometimes one shots people, while sometimes it doesn't. Ok.

Ok then. I have no idea what's the intended strategy here. We just rezzed the dead and dpsed the mage down. The only improvement I can suggest is to just make Avalanche invulnerable so people know to focus on Rizzuk, and reducing the damage from all the random AOEs overall. If the frost spike ball is supposed to do something that would be nice. Maybe kiting it into a tornado removes it? Maybe kiting it into the boss stuns it? Maybe intentionally freezing yourself in the tornadoes negates the boss's meteor like the first boss in SCP? I dunno.

Stonekeeper

Ugh this boss. In general I think the arena is a bit too small for the amount of kiting you need to do esp in the second phase with the spinning blades, since the inner blade track leaves you with barely any room to avoid it on the outer ring. Similarly, the outer ring's spinning blade pushes you way too near to the boss, which if you touch him stuns and damages you. I can see this boss being rather melee unfriendly, and I think the damage and stun near the bosses's body should just be removed to give more room for maneuvering as well as a reduction in the size of the spinning blade AOE. Damage and bleed from the blade could also be toned down.

Mechanics hints are provided by the NPC are adequate, boss's body being invulnerable initially teaches players to focus the arms and then the body. Blade arm AOE needs to activate a bit slower so people have time to get out of the AOE. Centurions summoned by the arms breaking are ok to deal with but not a fan of their heavy attacks one shotting people. Boss's spinning armpit fire mechanic is fine but can be annoying when trying to avoid blades, centurions and other attacks. Suggest increasing cooldown on that mechanic so players don't have to constantly kite. The instakill cone on 3rd phase could also be delayed slightly to give players more reaction time.

I really dislike the skeevaton phase at 70% and 40%. Skeevatons have their own skills which aren't explained anywhere, this mechanic is never introduced in any form before the last fight and frankly just seems pointless and gimmicky. Skeevatons have too little health in general. Going into the skeevaton also unsummons your pets, so good luck sorcerors. Why is there a need to "charge up" the special pylon destroying ultimate with a skill? Wouldn't it be much more straightforward to have a damage skill do that instead directly?

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I wish the skeevaton phase just be scrapped entirely. It seems entirely out of place within this fight and will get tiresome very very quickly. And this is a minor issue but lorewise, since this dungeon seems to be part of the "main story" of this year, how does it make sense that players are able to transform into clockwork rats and back again? We're not controlling them magically like drones, since all damage you take in skeevaton form transfers over to your player and if you die in rat form you die for real. What? Just please get rid of this ridiculous mechanic.

I didn't bother with HM, but from vids I've seen it's just more health more damage, more constant debuffs and the skeevaton phase is somehow even more complicated and janky. Overall just a giant pain.

[*] What level and build was the character you used?

CP 810 mag sorc.

[*] Do you have any other general feedback?

@ZOS_Finn I don't know if you guys actually read the feedback here, and I apologize for the length of this post. But I am writing this to speak out against what I feel is a worrying trend of making the newer DLC dungeons so much more insanely hard and complicated compared to older base game dungeons and even the older DLC dungeons. Is there really a need to "one up" the previous content in terms of difficulty all the time?

Difficulty comes in two forms for me - numbers and mechanics. Numbers difficulty has to do with enemy health and damage output compared to our own health and damage. On that note, why is trash and boss damage constantly getting higher and higher? Some boss attacks are hitting for up to 90k, trash heavy attacks are hitting for 60k.

Maybe this is your way of encouraging people to play as tanks and healers, I don't know. But making all of these attacks hit so hard that they one shot anyone who isn't a tank has instead promoted a different meta in general. There is a reason why people tend to favour self sustaining 3 dps 1 tank setups. More dps allows us to clear content faster, for one. The less time you spend, the less chance of screwing up. Also, more dps allows people to burn through enemies before the incoming damage/mechanics gets overwhelming, and in general allows people to skip boss mechanics by reaching certain health gates fast (see Zaan in SCP and practically every boss in vet Blackrose).

Excessively high damage and the prevalence of one-shot mechanics in the newer DLC dungeons doesn't promote healers - it promotes rezzers. The ghost lines in Fang Lair HM come so often and the random poison cones in SCP HM come so fast that if someone dies, and most of the time someone will, it's easier to just get a Templar with Kagrenac's to get them up since no one else can rez fast enough before the next line of ghosts comes or the next poison cone fires. Please reconsider your dungeon team's love of mechanics like these. Please give us more reaction time and "down time" in general for these types of mechanics - increase the time between ghost lines and make the poison cones spawn a bit slower so we can react. Most of us do not have the luxury of playing with sub 100 ping, like I mentioned earlier most Oceanic players have 300 ping minimum at the best of times. The number of times we have died to AOEs that we thought we had dodged, but the server decided that we hadn't, is just infuriating. Having to dodge instakill AOEs, heavy attacks and mechanics constantly at high ping just gets exhausting after a while.

Mechanics wise, why is there a need to constantly introduce gimmick mechanics and invulnerability phases? First it was the 3 crouch phases in Tarcyr in MOS and the 3 pointless hedge maze phases in MHK, and now this silly skeevaton nonsense. It's ok that for dungeons you want to introduce something special to spice up combat, but if more time is spent dealing with the special mechanics to remove the invulnerability than actually fighting the boss, then I think the mechanic isn't a good one. (Who even thinks waddling around in crouch while avoiding AOEs to get to a wisp to press interact, 3 times each for 3 phases, is fun? Just reveal the boss on the first interaction, anything longer than that is just tedious.)

And finally, what is up with the trend of making the HM vet dungeons so much more ridiculously difficult than normal vet, which seems to have started with SCP and FL? You do realize that HM is part of the daily pledge criteria right? What is the intended completion rate/ intended replayability rate of vet HM DLC dungeons? As mentioned earlier most people already skip DLC pledges, and making content that a large portion of the player base skips or at most does only once seems counter intuitive.

There is clearly talent involved in designing these dungeons and encounters, and I don't want it to look like I'm bashing the devs for no reason. I just feel that at this point there seems to be questionable design choices being made that makes all this DLC content, aka content that we paid premium price for, unreasonably restrictive and unfun for a large portion of the player base outside the "top tier" players. Dungeons shouldn't be this demanding ever, especially when you're advertising it to be storyline and lore related, even in vet and HM.

This!

I believe they want these dungeons ( last 6 dungeon DLC) to be played only by 5% of the player base. HM is a requisite for daily pledge reward . Only 0.1 % of the player base will do Frostvault VET HM.

I am a member of 5 great guilds ( minimum 120 people online on each guild every day)

They stopped to do VET DLC dungeons since Horns of The Reach.

If u stay in Stormhaven or any other daily pledge HUB...for a day u see in chat only : LFG daily pledges NOT DLC , or LFG 4 keys.

It seems very few people do the last DLC dungeons. They hate the inflation of one shot mechanics or health debuff...

They want to have fun playing the game ...not to have headache and frustration trying to learn how to pass these mechanics.



English is not my native language.

Aliyavana

Please dont use obvious clockwork city assets in a dwemer dungeon (or atleast reskin them to look more dwemer)

TheRimOfTheSky

I'm gonna miss the goblin gibberish, just funny to see dialogue like this in a boss fight instead of a bunch of taunts😔

Aliyavana

TheRimOfTheSky wrote: »

I'm gonna miss the goblin gibberish, just funny to see dialogue like this in a boss fight instead of a bunch of taunts😔

That was good dialogue, whyd they decide to remove it

code65536

I had a genuinely good laugh when I first saw those subtitles--it was one of my favorite little touches of the dungeon. I guess they were concerned about it interfering with PUGs who communicate by text chat?

Cellentel

Same intro comment from post in the other dungeon's topic:

I completed both new dungeons on vet non-HM with a standard setup of magsorc dps, magblade dps (me), templar healer, and DK tank. Overall, I liked them both a lot.

My main piece of feedback is that these seem overly punishing on the tank. Our tank died fairly often on several of the fights. Some of this was mechanics that we were figuring out, so the deaths were expected. But some of them I think were just that the stuff in there hits super hard - he was geared as a tank for base game vet DLC dungeons, and I think he wasn't quite tanky enough to take some of the hits. My feedback here is:

• For the mechanics that are supposed to be avoided by the tank, please telegraph them better so that the tank knows they're supposed to dodge them instead of absorbing them.
• For the mechanics the tank is supposed to absorb, lower the damage a bit. Requiring extreme tankiness makes these needlessly difficult for pug tanks.

Icestalker

This was a very basic boss; we didn't have any trouble with it. It was super easy compared to the first boss in the other dungeon.

Warlord Tzogvin

The number of mechanics and damage sources going in here seemed excessive. There were bleeds, some shackle thing we never really figured out, archer s spewing stuff, whirlwinds, etc. Ultimately we just healed through everything but the whirlwinds and it was fine, albeit unsatisfying.

Vault Protector

This was fun, but I echo the other comments about it: it needs to be much more obvious where the origin of the laser is. The actual mechanic was easy enough to figure out, particularly once we realized it was always clockwise or counter-clockwise, but it was still quite difficult to see which side to stand on while everything else was going on.

It also seemed unfairly punishing to low dps groups. Groups with super high dps can coast through it without seeing much of anything mechanic-wise, but low dps groups have to contend with a lot more mechanics and adds. To expand on an idea someone else echoed earlier in the thread, I suggest making the lasers damage the adds. Perhaps each laser takes off 25% of an add's max health? That way, if groups get to the 4-laser phase, they benefit from the adds getting killed for them. This balances the fight somewhat: high dps groups can burn the boss before the mechanics show up, but low dps groups can have the mechanics take care of the adds for them.

Rizzuk and Avalanche

Based on what I read in other comments, the improvements you made in PTS patch 2 helped the clarity in this fight, but we still had no idea what was going on. We couldn't figure out how Glacial Cage worked, other than that it insta-gibbed the tank. There is still a weird tether and ground AoE that don't seem to do anything.

Ultimately, we had the tank kite the atronach while the dps burned down the goblin. We were then surprised to see the atronach die on its own once the goblin was killed. If he isn't meant to be damaged, please give him a gold healthbar so groups can figure that out on their own the first time they're in there.

Stonekeeper

This was an interesting fight, but I feel it needs work to become fun instead of a chore.

We had a lot of problems with the centurion's heavy attacks killing the tank - I think we need to dodge those, but it would be nice to have them telegraphed a bit better. Roll dodging them is made trickier then it should be by the various environmental hazards.

The skeever part was confusing the first time, but became trivial once we figured it out. That feels like a mechanic that will make pugging it very difficult, but will barely be noticeable in good groups.

There wasn't enough room to avoid the ground spinning blades, particularly given the environmental hazards on both sides. I suggest making the radius of the blades a bit smaller so it they are possible to avoid.

The stun pool by the boss seemed unnecessary given how small the arena was and how much there was to avoid. Why not let us stand there? Likewise, it seems unnecessary to have an (almost) insta-kill fire zone on the entrance and exit -- we killed ourselves several times roll dodging into it. Put a wall there instead of an insta-kill zone.

code65536

Cellentel wrote: »

To expand on an idea someone else echoed earlier in the thread, I suggest making the lasers damage the adds. Perhaps each laser takes off 25% of an add's max health? That way, if groups get to the 4-laser phase, they benefit from the adds getting killed for them. This balances the fight somewhat: high dps groups can burn the boss before the mechanics show up, but low dps groups can have the mechanics take care of the adds for them.

I disagree with this solution. Simply making the mechanics and add spawns happen at set percentages will solve the problem. Having the lasers damage the adds will overnerf the fight.

The problem for low-DPS groups right now is that, because the add spawns and mechanics happen on a timer, they get overwhelmed and have no reprieve. Having them spawn at boss health points mean that low-DPS groups can take their time killing the adds and control the pace of the fight--if they need to recover, just refrain from damaging the boss.

Have 1-beam sweeps happen at 80% and 60%. Have a 2-beam sweep happen at 40%, and have a 4-beam sweep happen at 20%. This will be a slight difficulty buff for high-DPS groups, as they will be forced to contend with a 4-beam sweep (whereas it is currently possible to simply skip it) while limiting the number of 4-beam sweeps for all other groups to just one (which will constitute a huge difficulty nerf for them and render unnecessary the idea of lasers damaging adds).

Cellentel wrote: »

There wasn't enough room to avoid the ground spinning blades

This is mostly a problem when the blade is running on the inside track. The amount of space left on the outer edge is very small and cramped, and the punishment for going out of bounds there is also more severe than going out of bounds when standing in the inner ring to avoid an outer ring blade (guaranteed death vs. a stun).

In any case, I do agree with a slight reduction to the blade radius to make standing on the outside edge to avoid an inner-track blade feel a bit less perilous.

Cellentel wrote: »

Likewise, it seems unnecessary to have an (almost) insta-kill fire zone on the entrance and exit -- we killed ourselves several times roll dodging into it. Put a wall there instead of an insta-kill zone.

No, don't do that. It is fine as it is, and it's an important mechanic that eases the difficulty of HM. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but going out of bounds is something that kills everything, not just players. If you fall off the platform, you die. If you use a knockback ability and push an enemy off the platform, they die. Since it's not possible to be knocked off the platform at either the entrance or exit, an alternate means of lethality is required.

The easiest, most efficient, and most satisfyingly fun way to deal with adds in this boss fight is to use knockback abilities to push them off the platform or into the entrance/exit hazards. There's even an achievement for doing this. In vet HM, where add control is important, making the entrance/exit areas non-lethal will make add control via knockback slightly harder and thus make HM slightly harder.

Cellentel

code65536 wrote: »

No, don't do that. It is fine as it is, and it's an important mechanic that eases the difficulty of HM. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but going out of bounds is something that kills everything, not just players. If you fall off the platform, you die. If you use a knockback ability and push an enemy off the platform, they die. Since it's not possible to be knocked off the platform at either the entrance or exit, an alternate means of lethality is required.

The easiest, most efficient, and most satisfyingly fun way to deal with adds in this boss fight is to use knockback abilities to push them off the platform or into the entrance/exit hazards. There's even an achievement for doing this. In vet HM, where add control is important, making the entrance/exit areas non-lethal will make add control via knockback slightly harder and thus make HM slightly harder.

I had not realized that, and so revise my comment a bit. I still think it would be nice to give players a bit more leeyway with not dying from those zones, but don't remove them completely.

Admittedly, if the spinning blades are smaller, that would make this less of a problem.

Aliyavana

@ZOS_Finn do you guys take feedback on art assets on this thread? or only more so for balance? Should I make a separate thread for art assets?

code65536

Aliyavana wrote: »

do you guys take feedback on art assets on this thread? or only more so for balance? Should I make a separate thread for art assets?

I'm going to venture a guess here: seeing as how in the gaming industry art assets are typically made many months in advance, I think it's highly unlikely any changes can be made by the time a PTS rolls around.

Aliyavana

code65536 wrote: »

Aliyavana wrote: »

do you guys take feedback on art assets on this thread? or only more so for balance? Should I make a separate thread for art assets?

I'm going to venture a guess here: seeing as how in the gaming industry art assets are typically made many months in advance, I think it's highly unlikely any changes can be made by the time a PTS rolls around.

ya, but im hoping at the very least on live, they can recreate the assets with the glyphs wiped for the purpose for dwemer use.

ZOS_Finn

We take all feedback related to the Dungeon in this thread

Moloch1514

Based on ESO Live, the normal version is too hard. Jess and Gina keep wiping, so this will be too hard for most pug groups.

Disturbed125

Moloch1514 wrote: »

Based on ESO Live, the normal version is too hard. Jess and Gina keep wiping, so this will be too hard for most pug groups.

He also said on live there were changes coming to lessen the difficulty. Though I assume these changes are only going to be for the normal version.

saf227_ESO

When Rich & Finn say, "Stand here," and they're giggling, don't stand there.

Vanthras79

Anyone else saw all of those goblins and thought they should have been Falmer? Maybe I was playing too much Skyrim lately.

Artim_X

Vanthras79 wrote: »

Anyone else saw all of those goblins and thought they should have been Falmer? Maybe I was playing too much Skyrim lately.

Falmer would've been cooler and the thought did cross my mind xD