Did you enjoy this new dungeon?

Yes, it is very visually pleasing & the boss fights are stunning to see & the gameplay mechanics were really fun.

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

On normal mode it felt much harder than other normal mode dungeons, perhaps a tad too hard.

Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?

Normal mode while alone, doing veteran hardmodes later with friends.

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

Second boss reminded me a lot of Fang Lair final boss with the moving walls, and was quite fun to beat. First boss is a strong contender though.

What level and build was the character you used?

max level magicka templar, 5 false god, 5 medusa, 1 pale order 1 valkyn skoria shoulder.

Did you happen to notice or find anything interesting? Just curious…

I was able to find the mechanics that allowed me into the secret areas, but sadly it can only be done with a full group. I was alone and was thus unable to open the doors into secret areas. Being able to reach these secrets solo (like in Unhallowed Grave) would be appreciated, not for finding extra gear or rewards, but to experience the hidden lore in these areas without having to bring other humans along. Craglorn had the same issues in a few places and it was resolved to be doable while alone with the One Tamriel patch.

Do you have any other general feedback?

Over all great dungeon, the team has knocked it out of the park with the quality.

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

The HMs of the first two bosses are the hardest non-final-boss HM that I've seen in a dungeon (not that there's much to compare to, as the only other dungeons with HMs on the lesser bosses are SG, BDV, and RPB).

The HM of the final boss is not quite as difficult as Stone Garden's (at least, back when you had to actually do the mechanics on Arkasis HM--as I've noted before, I strongly disagree with the change in the final PTS of SG where the stone husks lost CC immunity, which enables the current strategy of just stack-and-burning the husks in HM, completely bypassing the HM tether and taunt swap mechanics).

Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?

Vet HM for all three bosses

What level and build was the character you used?

We used our live character copies.

• Tank: NB (me)
• Healer: Templar
• DDs: mag NB and mag DK

Did you happen to notice or find anything interesting? Just curious…

The secret areas were fairly easy and straightforward to access. Unfortunately, the NPC's dialog when you access the secret area is not skippable. I.e., even if we immediately lit the braziers in front of the orange crystal, she still completes her introductory speech before activating the crystal. I would suggest that if the brazier gets lit, then she cuts her dialog short and activates the crystal, so people who are there for the first time can get the full dialog to explain lighting the crystal's braziers, but for people who have done it before, she could skip the explanation if players light the braziers before she explains that.

Do you have any other general feedback?

As I noted in the feedback for RPB, this dungeon's HMs are considerably harder, because they actually punish you for mistakes. On the first boss, if you push the boss too hard instead of being more careful with taking care of adds before pushing to the next set of spawns, then it's easy to get overwhelmed. On the second boss, the walls are 1-shots. And there is so much damage on the last boss.

Second boss: One pain point I had with this boss was the snare from the boltwyrm, which obviously makes it hard to avoid the walls. We know that the wyrm takes extra damage from the player that it's tethered to, so ideally, the tethered player should kill their own wyrm. However, I feel like this punishes the tank more than anyone else...

• A tank has fewer options for doing damage, compared to DDs and the healer
• The boss's light attacks take out over half of my health bar if I take them unblocked, and dropping block to kill my wyrm got me killed more than once, which limited my options to skills that I could block-cast
• As the tank, I have the boss and storm atros in my vicinity, which means that they often overlap with the wyrm, which makes targeting the wrym very difficult; I often waste many of my attacks on the wrong target

Aside from the wyrms, I love that second boss.

Final boss: Most of our wipes on Monday were due to us trying to figure out the Outburst mechanic, since it was NOT intuitive. So the visual telegraph for this is that there's a yellow circle telegraph (with what looks like faint pie slices that are not easily noticeable) around the boss, along with a red swirling effect. This kind of visual doesn't exactly say, "come hither and stand in me", and for a long time, I thought that we needed to avoid that circle.

We eventually figured out that it was a mechanic for the tank--if the tank stands in the circle and blocks, then they block the damage from reaching everyone else. But by the time we figured it out on Monday, we were out of time, so we had to come back and kill it on Tuesday. Anyway, at the very least, you need to add a death recap hint about how this works because the current telegraphs are not intuitive.

My other concern is the RNG of the portal realms, since some portal realms are definitely harder than others. The one with the rotating fire lines that you have to avoid, while also avoiding the fire rains, while also avoiding the lava that does ramping damage? Yea, that's much dicier than the other portal realms. The portal realms being random is fine, if they were comparable. But they're not.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Did you enjoy this new dungeon?

Yes. It was really interesting. Some of the mechanics taking a new twist on old mechanics (Depths of Malatar, Fang Lair instant death walls) provide a fresh coat of paint along with the new mechanics.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

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

I'm unsure. I'd say they're harder than the Live or last week PTS of Stone Garden. Defintitely harder than the Q1 dungeons and I believe they are probably the hardest DLC dungeons to date.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?

Normal and veteran hard mode.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

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

All of them were unique. It's hard for me to pick a favourite. I'll only be going over the hard modes for the sake of discussion. On normal, nothing really hurts enough to care.

First boss is nice in that it has a sort of anti-nuke mechanic where adds spawn on health percentages and it's very easy to get overwhelmed with multiple colossi all doing fire AoEs and doing area denial, along with multiple shock adds doing interruptible casts, all while having to deal with daedroths (applying DoTs via breath) and uppercuts from the two-handers. I personally like this over "stack and nuke" that most other content has.

Second boss is a new take on an old mechanic, forcing the group to constantly find an opening. One thing here is, as someone else pointed out, the inconsistency of where the openings are. If they're at the far end (let's say we're at the exit side and the opening is on entrance), you have to run all the way there, especially if you get snared by the adds. Every third or fourth wave, you'll have an extra gap but there's also seemingly no way to tell where this will be. Some waves (I don't mean the gaps) seem to also have inconsistent widths, as in they "spawn" more frequently than other waves. If the group has to move through and you get AoEs (picks two random people), it makes it a challenge to not end up getting split up. Along with the fact that, like occasionally happens in Fang Lair, you think the gap is wide enough but you still get hit.

Third boss, we haven't quite figured out the "best" way to do it, but a clear is a clear. Overlapping mechanics are the worst here. There's a lot of incoming damage, espcially on the tank. We have swirling fire AoEs, a straight line wall of fire with the centre being "safe," the straight line fire beams from the boss which pick three people and leaves a persistent AoE where it hit them (also giving them a hefty fire DoT which doesn't seem to be purgable), the large explosion from the centre, bleed from the boss (not purgable), and Excruatiating DoT on tank (not purgable).

As others have said, the "pie" isn't very intuitive as a tank-specific mechanic. I think it's also debatable that it is a tank mechanic rather than a stack mechanic. We also had almost the entire group standing in it after I died and it seemed to do very little damage. Seems like that's another way to do it. It could be damage which is mitigated with more people standing in each of the pie "slices," but we've yet to test that. Also, having that mechanic at the same time as the fire wall comes over you and having the Scorion applying the DoT is painful. Having only one unpurgable heavy DoT at a time would be great, especially since Mist Form seems to be a no-go due to spider losing aggro (I stopped using it in favour of slotting Revealing Flame for Major Protection).

Last boss was probably my least favourite for a number of reasons. Two main ones being the multiple heavy DoTs and the RNG on portals, furthermore the DoTs do not go away as you're entering the portal and you can die during the teleport sequence. Parroting the same as above, the spinning fire fan and area denial from the colossus, couple with the ramping damage from lava... it's a bit much. You also placed the portal in and out right in the lava so you take a couple ticks once you enter and as you're attempting to leave.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

What level and build was the character you used?

CP cap template, DK tank using Yolnahkriin and Crimson Oath. Stats and skills are more or less the same as Live. Group consisteted of a magicka Dragonknight, a magicka Warden, and a Templar healer.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Did you happen to notice or find anything interesting? Just curious…

The secrets are a lot more obvious this time around. Less of a secret and more of a bright blue neon light (almost literally). A very obvious optional extra rather than a secret. Additionally, it's a shame you can't do this solo or as a duo. It also seems somewhat arbitrary to have two initial braziers but three crystals. You could do the initial two as a duo, but once you go inside the trapdoor you need three people for the crystals.

It makes some sense later on once you see the others, since you have two initial braziers, then three braziers, and the final encounter has four braziers. Why not just have two braziers and two crystals for each, extend the timer a little for the braziers and crystals so if you are speedy enough you can do both yourself? Or have two braziers and two crystals for the first one, then three braziers and three crystals, and finally four braziers and four crystals? In each case, someone is just left standing around doing nothing with the crystals.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Do you have any other general feedback?

There's only one bit of interesting feedback for this dungeon and I don't know whether I like it or not, or if it's even intended. On first boss, last boss, and on other Scorions, if you attempt to use Mist Form after taunting, it will instantly de-aggro the tank and go after someone else. We were initially unsure if this was just a change to the taunt system or if this was intended to happen. It doesn't seem to happen anywhere else. If this is actually a mechanic, then it means Mist Form is a no-go for this dungeon, or you can only use it at specific points. Can we get some sort of confirmation on whether this is supposed to happen or not?

-Did you enjoy this new dungeon?

Overall yes, I'm not sure i like the difficulty spike of the final boss but i enjoyed the dungeon.

-How did the difficulty compare to existing dungeons on Normal and Veteran versions?

I'd say this one is pre-"behemoths can be stun locked" difficulty Stone Garden (aka final week of PTS Stone Garden).

-Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?

Veteran HM

-Which was your favorite boss in this dungeon, and why?

Probably the magma incarnate, even though i have issue with its current damage levels I think overall the fight is fun mechanically and the portal rooms are each unique and interesting. The changing mechanics and mobs of each portal room were probably the best part.

-What level and build was the character you used?

All Max level, 1200+ cp, Nightblade tank, Magicka Dragonknight DD, Magicka Nightblade DD, Templar Healer

Magdk build - 1 piece Slimecrawl, 1 piece zaan , 5 piece Perfected Bahsei's Mania, 5 piece Diamond's Victory

-Did you happen to notice or find anything interesting? Just curious…

Yes, these secrets were a little harder to find and involved finding changing amounts of things but we found all of them. The person who hid that last white crystal is evil by the way.

-Do you have any other general feedback?

- The first boss i feel is in a really good spot.

-The second boss is also ok but the damage output specifically on the tank might need some tweaks. The boss hits REALLY hard with his light attacks and with the amount of moving in that fight + the slow from the lighting wyrms it feels like there's an uneven amount of pressure applied to the tank while trying to dodge the incoming walls.

- The difficulty spike on the third boss was pretty noticeable and a few things stand out:

- Mechanically the fight is fairly simple and has some interesting variety with the portal. However, the Outburst mechanic was not intuitive at all. It took us quite a few pulls to understand that the circle under his feet actually was something the tank needed to stand in rather than for people to avoid. Adding a death recap hint of some kind for this would probably make figuring it out much simpler.

- The damage output of the boss + the spider ads is also a bit much. The health scaling DoT from the main boss has been getting passed around all the dungeons and trials lately and its really not a fun mechanic. Un-purgable, Un-preventable damage is really not a fun way to try to make healers feel useful.

-The spider ad it hits ridiculously hard with its light attacks for a trash mob as well as can attack from an insane distance. In one of our pulls we had this mob 1 shot our healer from across the room, through the generator in the middle so far away and obstructed by set pieces that there was no way to know it was coming. With all the extra pressure on the tank from all your health scaling mechanics (the fire dots as well as the roaming tornadoes) we don't really need a 1 - shot machine gun wandering around the fight to increase the challenge. P.S. to the person who came up with the "drop taunt if the tank mist forms " behavior, you're evil and got me killed

- The return portals in the side arenas need to stick around just a little bit longer. There were several times while we were first trying it out, where someone took the return portal and before people could find it, it simply vanished, forcing everyone else to wait for the "joining encounter in progress" mechanic to return them to the main fight. This would be ok if the joining encounter mechanic didn't stun you and drop you in completely helpless for a second. Extending the time this portal stays active by a few seconds would feel a lot better.

- As others have said, some way to cut the NPC in the secret room's dialogue short would be nice. Lighting the braziers for example could cut her explanation off and let her simply get on with it.