Is the difficulty of DLC dungeons adjusted to be in line with Wrathstone dungeons?

Jaimeh

I did vBRF today for the first time after a while, and it seemed like a different dungeon. We were on a 3dps/1tank group configuration and we sailed smoothly through all the encounters. With FL being nerfed according to the patch notes today, it got me thinking whether ZOS has been steadily changing the difficulty of DLC dungeons in order to bring them on par with Frostvault and DoM, and whether all DLC dungeons from now on will be at that level: fairly manageable, with HM being the only challenge. I was personally fine with the Wrathstone dungeons being easier, and with the skin tied to vet completion, rather than hard mode, because they are part of the Elseweyr main story, and it was a refreshing change to make them more accessible on vet mode. However, with changes in the other DLC dungeons patch after patch, I’m wondering if this is part of a bigger picture of having all DLCs at around the Wrathstone level of difficulty, and whether this will also affect future content. What does everyone think? I like the challenge of completing difficult content--not to the point of hating my life because of it (though I know some people would say that if it doesn’t make you want to rage-quit then what’s the point ), but there’s a certain sense of accomplishment when it’s finally done, and I find that rewarding feeling is applied to DLC dungeons less and less anymore.

dazee

Not unless they remove the DLC dungeons from random queues.

code65536

Jaimeh wrote: »

bring them on par with Frostvault and DoM

Which one? Frostvault and DoM aren't similar in difficulty. The way I like to gauge difficulty is by the number of times we wipe when we do a dungeon blind for the very first time. And because player power level changes over time, I prefer to compare difficulty at launch rather than at present.

When we did vFV for the first time, it was on the PTS, and we had multiple wipes on the second, third, and fourth bosses before arriving at the final boss. When we did vDoM for the first time on the PTS, we had a wipe on the first boss and then 1-shot all the bosses before the final boss.

And then on the final boss, we spent days beating Frostvault's HM during the first week of PTS. And we beat Malatar's HM in less than an hour during the second week of PTS (the boss was bugged during the first week).

So the idea of aligning difficulty of older dungeons to Wrathstone seems a bit strange, given that Wrathstone itself is wildly inconsistent in its difficulty, with DoM being noticeably easier than its sister dungeon.

Finally, I think that the goal is to just make older content more accessible. If their goal is to uniformly eliminate PUG killer dungeons, then why does the Vault Protector exist? I think it's pretty clear now that their goal is for newer content to be challenging and then tone that difficulty down as the content ages.

(I also wonder if the change to Fang Lair snare was in response to the the snare mitigation toolkit being nerfed this patch with the Rapids change.)