Agreed. I love this dungeon, especially the exploration part and the big surprise during the last boss fight.

I wish pugs could pass the kiln boss. last time I tried the tank refused to pull the boss to the lit sigil on the floor after one of us activated the upper level sigil, then sent me hate tells for "not healing him" (I was healer and nonstop spam healing his squishy, never blocking ass)

dazee wrote: »

I wish pugs could pass the kiln boss. last time I tried the tank refused to pull the boss to the lit sigil on the floor after one of us activated the upper level sigil, then sent me hate tells for "not healing him" (I was healer and nonstop spam healing his squishy, never blocking ass)

I very, very, very rarely have a dungeon run fail. But my second time through Unhallowed Grave ... didn't actually get through.

We had the part where you use a sigil upstairs to reveal one on the floor down, but the tank was not pulling the boss to it, dying, and blaming the healer (Me) for "not healing" when no amount of healing would have saved us from his mess up.

vgabor wrote: »

My problem with the kiln boss is that he sometimes not bother to stick his sword into the ground and just keep smacking the tank even if you pull him to the right place...

This Boss has a red shild, pull him in the rune and smack that shild- when it breaks he sticks the sword in the ground.
I did the dungeon on normal with my husband (duo), it was a blast

Wing wrote: »

this also leads to the skill gap oxymoron problem you see in games like destiny, where the only people allowed into content are people that have done it before.

or the terrible "watch this video of the content before you do it"

awesome. . .

But you don't have to watch any videos or read about mechanics beforehand. Plenty of people (myself included) went in blind and cleared it successfully. These new dungeons are less punishing than the previous ones so with a capable group it shouldn't take too long.

The kiln boss was the only one that slowed down the group I pugged with, we all went in blind, dealt with the first secret boss got to the kiln and were all stumped had no clue what we were suppose to do.

I hadn't even noticed the platforms above never though to look up since most stuff is eye level in most dungeons.

We eventually figured out the sigils up on the top of the platform but still could not figure out where to go from there wasn't till we had a look through alcasts guide of the fight we figured it out.

By then though we had lost a healer and a damage dealer, who did not know the mechanics either and had simply decided to ditch the group.

Once we got the replacements we did the boss in one go and moved on without issue.

Other than that the lich fight took a little while and we screwed up the second secret boss, one group member could not get the grapple point to show up so stayed behind while the rest of us went off ahead, when we finally got to the secret boss we checked the map, the group member was still back at the start of the path.

We had gone back to being blind at that point saving the guide for if we got in trouble, we had a look at the boss "this should be quick only 1.2M health" we started boss teleport-ed away by the time we had figured out where it went, we had taken too long and the boss escaped.

Right at that moment the group member who had struggled with the path had managed to catch back up, we had a good laugh, he had managed to get there and we had lost the boss.

Had no real issue with the rest of the dungeon.

dazee wrote: »

I wish pugs could pass the kiln boss. last time I tried the tank refused to pull the boss to the lit sigil on the floor after one of us activated the upper level sigil, then sent me hate tells for "not healing him" (I was healer and nonstop spam healing his squishy, never blocking ass)

He might have been trying for the "Ceramic Panic" achievement, gotten by beating that boss without ever leading him over the correct sigil. Though if that was the case he should've let you know.

Raisin wrote: »

Ceramic Panic is awarded for not pressing the upstairs sigil, and that's it. Tank can and should still lead the boss to the correct sigil (communicated either via voice or written in chat) to turn off the vents!

How do you know which one is correct without revealing it with sigil?

vgabor wrote: »

My problem with the kiln boss is that he sometimes not bother to stick his sword into the ground and just keep smacking the tank even if you pull him to the right place...

If you break the shield before bringing boss to the correct rune than you're dead. Happens with high dps groups esp. in normal. Need to stop dpsing the moment the message comes.

The dungeon is super fun to run, and a lot of interesting mechanics. Agreed the last boss is not the most interesting, save for vet HM 😉

Raisin wrote: »

Saucy_Jack wrote: »

dazee wrote: »

I wish pugs could pass the kiln boss. last time I tried the tank refused to pull the boss to the lit sigil on the floor after one of us activated the upper level sigil, then sent me hate tells for "not healing him" (I was healer and nonstop spam healing his squishy, never blocking ass)

He might have been trying for the "Ceramic Panic" achievement, gotten by beating that boss without ever leading him over the correct sigil. Though if that was the case he should've let you know.

Ceramic Panic is awarded for not pressing the upstairs sigil, and that's it. Tank can and should still lead the boss to the correct sigil (communicated either via voice or written in chat) to turn off the vents!

One thing that can help as well is keeping him in the middle of the room so you have faster transition to whichever side is called out/glows.

Wing wrote: »

my criticism of it would be the lich fight, a lot of mechanics that are not really explained and you just kind of half to figure it out through trial and error.

this always frustrates me because its how destiny designs raids, that is the difficulty comes from not telling you what to do, and that flies in the face of conventional games skill mastery progression.

@Wing I agree completely. The shelter-behind-the-pillar mechanic was so confusing that even after having defeated this boss twice during the first week of PTS, we weren't completely sure how the mechanic worked. It wasn't until I analyzed the logs that I became confident that we had actually gotten the mechanic right.

Why were we confused about how the pillar worked? Well, first, failing the mechanic doesn't guarantee death. If you had a shield on you at the start of the stun and soul drain and the healer had kept a HoT on you, you could survive the mechanic. Ideally, we'd ask ourselves the question, "Why was I stunned and drained but that guy over there wasn't affected at all?" when trying to understand the mechanic. Instead, we ended up asking, "Why did I survive this thing that guy over there did not?" I.e., instead of looking at failure-vs-success of the mechanic, we had instead looked at failure-with-death-vs-failure-without-death.

The second problem was that the pillars were (and still are) very finicky, particularly the corner pillars. The area where you receive the pillar's safety effect is smaller than the visual area behind the pillar, which led to doubt whether hiding really was the answer ("I still died even though I was clearly standing behind the pillar, so that can't be how it works.")

Obfuscating mechanics is not new, though, and ZOS has a history of doing this for Hard Mode. For example, if it were not for the PTS patch notes that first explained the how Ghastly Wound works, how long would it have taken for people to realize that the heal absorption on Grundwulf HM had debuffs to healing done and shields cast? This bit of information is central to how groups need to strategize for HM, but when I watched people do this fight blind without consulting any guides, it's clear that people have a very hard time discovering this crucial feature of the mechanic. I suppose this sort of thing is okay for HM. But for regular non-final (and thus non-HM) bosses, like Ondagore's pillar mechanic or Kujo's damage-reflect mechanic in vMGF, the mechanic doesn't feel particularly intuitive.

Another form of obfuscation is the deliberate omission of telegraphs. For example, in Unhallowed HM, the Freezing Breath is an AoE effect, where the damage varies based on where in the AoE you are. The AoE covers a large area, but not the entire room, so you might not be in it at all. Or you might be in it near the periphery, in which case you get tickled by it. Or you might be in it near the center, in which case it can potentially 1-shot a typical DD or healer. Yet this AoE is entirely untelegraphed. There is no way to know until the damage has hit whether you are inside. There is no way to know until the damage has hit whether you are going to take the full brunt of the attack or get tickled by it. It's not even clear from watching the colossus's head whether you'll be in the epicenter--there have been times when it seemed like it gave me a dirty look before the breath, but I ended up being outside entirely. Why is there no visible AoE telegraph letting players know where they are relative to the damage, unless it's a cheap source of artificial difficulty?

In Unhallowed HM in particular, it seems that ZOS has relied a lot on the subtlety or outright absence of tells and telegraphs for the difficulty.

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

The kiln fight is confusing. My current belief is:

• You only have to activate the sigil once. The fact that you can keep activating it is a distraction.
• Actually, it doesn't have to be activated at all, if you have some other means of communication to tell the tank where to go. (I got the latter bit from Alcast's solo video.)
• Notwithstanding the advice that everybody should go to a different platform, in fact there's time to go from one to the next to the next if necessary.

Is that accurate?

Also:

• Is the sigil activation instantaneous, or is it interruptible by the add who'll be up there?
• I.e., should you kill the add before using the sigil?

One of the problems with this mechanic is that the tutorial of the mechanic requires that players interact with the sigil. There is no way to progress past the tutorials without someone standing on the sigil and pressing "E".

But on the boss fight itself, there is absolutely no need and no benefit to interacting with the sigil. Just call out which sigil it is--1, 2, 3, or 4--and the tank needs to bring the boss to the correct one and the DDs need to break the boss's damage shield once they are on the correct sigil.

In fact, interacting with the sigil carries a substantial penalty, because the interaction on the boss fight is a long channel (whereas it was almost instant with the tutorials). So your character is locked in a long animation, vulnerable to damage. And you're wasting time that you could otherwise be using for something more useful. And of course, using the interact causes you to lose the Ceramic Panic achievement.

The only reason to interact with the sigil on the boss fight is if you lack voice comms, at which point, interacting with the sigil is an alternative to typing a number in group chat.

And, no, there's no point in killing the add that's up there. If you're calling it out on voice comms, just call out the number and jump down immediately so you can start damaging the boss once it's in position. If you're not calling it out on voice comms, then you can't afford to lose the time killing the archer on top of the time lost futzing with the long animation of the interact. The entire mechanic is timed, after all, so people need to be quick. The archers are mostly nuisances whose damage can just be healed through and ignored.

And no, all platforms will get an archer spawn, and the location (and number) of the sigil is completely random. The arrangement of the sigils downstairs are also randomly shuffled each time the mechanic happens.

At 5:45 of this video, you can see an example of how the mechanic should go, if you have voice comms and thus no need to mess around with the interact.
https://youtu.be/rEHmrUUpEBU?t=345