code65536 wrote: »

FierceSam wrote: »

I want mechanics that are challenging, coherent and recognisable.

So a reasonable player should be able to go into a dungeon without having to have watched a video and work out how each boss fight functions. Sure they’ll die while they are learning it, but that will be because they haven’t ‘solved’ it and are working it out.

I like Symphony of Blades in DoM because while it’s complicated and there’s a lot going on, the challenge not understanding what needs to be done, but actually being able to do it.

What I don’t want is

Lazy one-shots (not big, clever or intelligent design)
Incomprehensible, untelegraphed mechanics - like what is going on with King Whatsisface in DoM?
Anything that allows you to skip the mechanics by simply burning down the boss. DPS shouldn’t be a get out of jail free card.
Lazy, uninformative death recaps
Lazy inexplicable debuffs
Random, untelegraphed death shots

But above all, I hate the fact that the normal versions of dungeons don’t have many of the mechanics at all, so it’s impossible to learn them without jumping into the vet dungeons, where 2 weeks after release everyone is magically expected to ‘know’ how to do everything.

What is "intuitive" depends somewhat on the player's perspective.

You mentioned the Ayleid King in vDoM. We cleared vDoM on the first day of PTS (so... going in blind, having never seen or read about any of it before), and we had no difficulty with that boss. Why not? Because when he split into four, the first thing that came to our mind is, "hey, this resembles the topside boss in HRC". We dispatched the decoys, focused the real one, and we quickly cleared it without any difficulty. But for someone who has never done HRC before, I imagine it would be rather confusing.

The worst case of that would be Warlord Tzogvin's mechanic where he rains fire on people. When we saw that for the first time on the first day of PTS, my initial reaction was, "hey, he just got a damage shield--this looks just like the shield mechanic on the first boss of vMoL". Indeed, that was exactly what was happening, and the mechanic posed no trouble for us. Later during that week, I watched another group's Twitch stream. They too went in blind, and they failed repeatedly at that mechanic until I explained in their stream chat how the mechanic worked. It's not their fault, really--the boss is raining damage down on everyone, so their instinctive reaction was to turtle up. The healer spammed heals while the DDs blocked. That's a perfectly reasonable reaction that someone would have to that mechanic. But, of course, it's wrong, since you must do damage to break the shield, and their DDs were not doing damage--they were blocking and shielding.

As for whether unintuitive mechanics are bad... I think that depends on why a mechanic is unintuitive. For example, the spike mechanic on Velidreth is unintuitive because it's poorly telegraphed. During the Hist PTS, I couldn't figure out how to avoid the 1-shot spike until someone wrote, "dodge when you see the puff of dust"... um, okay--I'm not sure if I would've figured that out. The telegraph on that mechanic has since been improved significantly. The "stand still" part is now very explicitly telegraphed, and there is now a new telegraph for the dodge. It only took them a few years to fix, but they did fix it.

But what about the shield phase on Tzogvin? Or the decoys on the Ayleid King? I would say that both are unintuitive, because not everyone has a body of knowledge of prior mechanics to draw from. But unlike the Velidreth spike, this is not a failure of telegraphing. But rather, a failure of correctly interpreting the cues that are given. And there's really nothing that I could think of to make it better telegraphed. And that's not a bad thing. You mentioned the Symphony of Blades. We think that boss fight is very boring and unimaginative. Sure, everything that happens there (except Purification) is pretty intuitive and easy to grasp, but that's because the mechanics there are so simple and rudimentary that there's not much to grasp. And that''s the problem with making all mechanics intuitive--because it really limits what you can do and you end up with things that are well, boring.

Sometimes, a mechanic takes a bit to figure out. But as long as the reason for that is not "the telegraph sucks", then I think that's a fair and worthwhile tradeoff--a bit of initial pain figuring it out (which is actually a lot of fun, TBH), but it usually means that the mechanic is not too boring.

MrBumblefoot wrote: »

What are some dungeon/trial mechanics you don't like and find to be just plain annoying?

I hate the poison spit from the dragon statues in Scalecaller Peak final boss fight. It's usually the biggest reason for a wipe in my experience and it's just a random one-hit mechanic. Last time I was there as a tank, I slotted Retreating Maneuver and kept a 100% uptime so the group can avoid it faster. It worked but I still hate the mechanic.