Depths of Malatar: Symphony of Blades Hard Mode is the most healer-hostile encounter to date

code65536

vDoM HM is not particularly hard--it's easier than vFV HM and many of the HMs that have come before it. But it is not friendly to healers.

Mechanic 1: Purification. Every member of the group takes Purification damage once the final phase of the boss fight starts. Purification ticks every 5s and is unavoidable. The damage from Purification increases over time. Initially, Purification doesn't do much damage, but if you take too long, the damage ramps up until it gets so high that it just wipes the group.

Mechanic 2: Periodically, the boss will plunge all four swords into the ground. Everyone except the tank will receive an effect called Decrepify. This unpurgeable affect lasts for 5s, does Oblivion Damage equal to 10% of a player's max health every second, applies an extreme (almost 100%) defile, and snares the player.

The ramping Purification damage means that this fight is a DPS check. If you have a third DD and can nuke the boss down quickly, then Purification never becomes a threat.

By itself, Decrepify is mostly a nuisance. But it is quite deadly when combined with other sources of damage. Since it is Oblivion Damage, it cannot be mitigated or shielded, so is guaranteed to eat away 50% of your health. If you happen to have less than half health when Decrepify begins or if you take a large chunk of damage while you have Decrepify, you are guaranteed to die, since the near totality of the defile means that a healer cannot help you.

When we worked on the Depths Defier trifecta achievement last week, we came to the conclusion that we didn't want a healer. Having a third DD meant we could avoid high Purification damage, and the moments when we were most vulnerable--when the Decrepify is active--were also the moments when healing was entirely useless. Fortunately, our healer could easily swap between DD and healer roles. He put on some emergency off-heals, and we got Depths Defier with a 3x DD setup.

Again, vDoM HM is not particularly difficult. But it is pretty anti-healer. I also do not want to advocate a change in the mechanics, though--any nerfs to the DPS race or the defile would make this HM even easier than it already is, since the combination of Decrepify, high Purification ticks and other damage is the only real challenge to this boss fight. But, in the future, let's give players challenges where healers can actually play a role.

Disturbed125

Just want to second this. Heavy defiles seem to have become fairly frequent in newer content (blackrose prison/vFV HM/vDoM hm) which I don't believe is a good thing. No one likes having their healing ability reduced, especially the person who's entire job is healing. Many healers in the newer 4-man content feel useless and its because of the mechanic design. The presence of constant 1- shot mechanics, which thankfully have been toned down in these newest dungeons, and heavy defiles make healing effectively useless. This results in groups making the decision to have dps self sustain and add a 3rd DD in order to shorten the fight so that you're exposed to mechanics like these for a shorter time.

While its too late to fix vDoM, as code has already pointed out any mechanic changes at this point would just make an already simple hardmode simpler, in the future I'd like to see more mechanics which do constant light damage. Hitting the group with constant light amounts of damage that a healer can reasonably keep up with would make a healer in 4-man content actually useful since you would need a healer pushing back against the damage in order for DPS to do their job.

IzzyStardust

And frankly, from a healer main, ;-; ZOS. (That said, we managed it the same way, but strong dislike from me)

code65536

Disturbed125 wrote: »

I'd like to see more mechanics which do constant light damage. Hitting the group with constant light amounts of damage that a healer can reasonably keep up with would make a healer in 4-man content actually useful since you would need a healer pushing back against the damage in order for DPS to do their job.

I wonder if that was what they had in mind for Purification, since it is effectively ambient damage. If so, then by making Purification ramp into a group wipe mechanic, it had the opposite effect, as it just incentivizes groups to push higher DPS to avoid the ramped-up damage.

IzzyStardust

Disturbed125 wrote: »

Just want to second this. Heavy defiles seem to have become fairly frequent in newer content (blackrose prison/vFV HM/vDoM hm) which I don't believe is a good thing. No one likes having their healing ability reduced, especially the person who's entire job is healing. Many healers in the newer 4-man content feel useless and its because of the mechanic design. The presence of constant 1- shot mechanics, which thankfully have been toned down in these newest dungeons, and heavy defiles make healing effectively useless. This results in groups making the decision to have dps self sustain and add a 3rd DD in order to shorten the fight so that you're exposed to mechanics like these for a shorter time.

While its too late to fix vDoM, as code has already pointed out any mechanic changes at this point would just make an already simple hardmode simpler, in the future I'd like to see more mechanics which do constant light damage. Hitting the group with constant light amounts of damage that a healer can reasonably keep up with would make a healer in 4-man content actually useful since you would need a healer pushing back against the damage in order for DPS to do their job.

Or that really needs purgable debuffs (maybe on a timer, or random, so you cannot just insta purge them away? Like you’d have to be smart when choosing when to purge or else cannot be purged or only a % is purged?) or has even a strong resource drain; because we’re built for that and we will have enough left to resupply the group). Not unpurgable oblivion ticks! This is not PVP 😂