First off, it's buggy. All vVH is buggy as all get out. Probably the buggiest piece of content I have encountered in ESO and that was back when I was doing it, when it was new. I understand it is even worse now. You get desyncs on that final fight a lot. For whatever reason that fight also seems to generate massive lag spikes frequently. I have had plenty deaths and a few ruined trifectas to both. Because of the number of ads and ESO's broken targeting system, there is also a big issue with being able to target the flame sharpers when they need to be interrupted. Often, you just can't as they are blocked by others big hit boxes and tab target isn't' actually tab target in this game. So, lots of issues with just plain bugs.

Now, lets get to the fact that vVH just isn't a good fight. Good fights have major mechanics tied to health points and not on timers. The reason for this is that they then become more challenging the higher score you are shooting for and the higher your dps. The faster you go, the faster the hurt comes. This also keeps fights relevant as dps creep happens. vVH is the opposite. It's almost all timer based so the faster you go, the more you simply skip. What is worse, the fight even has a high dps advantage multiplier in it because the bosses health doesn't simply go back to 100 when you hit the portal. Instead it slowly creeps up. So, the slower you go, the more you face X2. That is just plain terrible fight design. Couple that with the fact the timers are different for multiple mechanics and have differing resets so just the wrong amount of not great dps can mean that you get a ton of them at once. Not good design at all. Unpredictably and often quite tough mechanics for the weaker player but when you watch the, shall we say "enhanced" guys the you tubes, the only mechanic those guys even do is the portals. No interrupts, colossi, rings, nothing, just 2 min of blazing high steroids to make the Russian Olympic team jealous dps with the boss never out of execute between the portal phases.

To answer your initial question though, I don't think the fight is over-tuned. It can certainly be done with non-steroid enhanced dps, even with not stellar dps or meta builds though, you must actually do all or most of the mechanics in those cases. I understand that massive health that the colossi had back when I was doing it has even been nerfed to make a slow boat build more viable. Occasionally, you can even get all the way through vVH without it bugging out and I have trifecta on it. Though, I only have 1 trifecta run and there were probably 5 that I did which were ruined by one or another bug that was not my fault. Not a good ratio at all ZOS. Of course, like vMA, there are even sigals to aid you. The timing of these can even be a substantial amount of strategy for those players having difficulty. For what it is worth, I think my final fights varied from ~7min to ~13min with most of the variance being how many colossi I was willing to risk simply leaving up to push phases. Again, the fight design is quite poor. You get exponentially rewarded with fewer mechanics for being only slightly higher dps. The fight can literally be almost twice as long with maybe 3k dps less.

Btw the whole arena is extremely unbalanced, because most of the bosses have 18k physical but only 9k spell resistances.
I'm very curious how ZOS justifies this!

Sun7dance wrote: »

Btw the whole arena is extremely unbalanced, because most of the bosses have 18k physical but only 9k spell resistances.
I'm very curious how ZOS justifies this!

This is a great point, i always wondered about this myself

Green arena's first boss: 12k stam and mag resistances

Green arena's second boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Red arena's first boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Red arena's second boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Blue arena's first boss: mage has 9k stam and 18k mag and the flesh abomination has 18k stam and 9k mag

Blue arena's second boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Last boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

As you can see out of 7 bosses 2 of them are equal in terms of resistances and 5 of them are tougher for stam. And if you also look at the mobs resistances you can see the majority of the tougher mobs also have higher stam resistance. Stuff like these makes me believe that all of the dev team are magicka mains and they are not good at the game so they had to give magicka an edge to make it easier for themselves.

Versispellis wrote: »

After lots of experience in there, I've decided my biggest contention with this fight is actually all the little adds that sometimes spawn (the goops, archer, mage). They don't add anything to the fight in terms of tangible difficulty besides just sort of getting in the way. I think it muddies the overall design of the fight.

Honestly them standing on top of the ring add you're trying to kill is the only difficulty they seem to add. I basically never die to their attacks. It's a lame and frustrating mechanic.

I noticed running vVH last week for the weekly that it was significantly more bugged and laggy then the last time I had done it. Made what I considered the fun more casual solo arena a bit more annoying. That aside I think the place and this fight in particular strike a good balance when functioning correctly. The place is significantly easier then Maelstrom was at launch and thus a lot more accessible. Personally I just nuke the void [snip] lich at the key times to avoid the creeping wall and what not. I've also done it the slow way, both will get the job done with relatively few issues. I agree with what some others have said, if anything the place could be more difficult, I like the Undying Song title and Spirit Slayer but neither are particularly prestigious like Flawless Conqueror was for the longest time.

[Edited for Censor Bypass]

Iron_Warrior wrote: »

Sun7dance wrote: »

Btw the whole arena is extremely unbalanced, because most of the bosses have 18k physical but only 9k spell resistances.
I'm very curious how ZOS justifies this!

This is a great point, i always wondered about this myself

Green arena's first boss: 12k stam and mag resistances

Green arena's second boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Red arena's first boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Red arena's second boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Blue arena's first boss: mage has 9k stam and 18k mag and the flesh abomination has 18k stam and 9k mag

Blue arena's second boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Last boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

As you can see out of 7 bosses 2 of them are equal in terms of resistances and 5 of them are tougher for stam. And if you also look at the mobs resistances you can see the majority of the tougher mobs also have higher stam resistance. Stuff like these makes me believe that all of the dev team are magicka mains and they are not good at the game so they had to give magicka an edge to make it easier for themselves.

That's a bit strange, coz i got different results.
For example the final boss has 9k spell and 18k physical resistances.

Ok, it's been a long time since my test, but i couldn't find anything in the patch notes either.
Btw i've tested with the Two-hander Ultimate, coz i play on PS4.

The different resistances are one point, but magickas have other significant advantages:

1.) If you do the arena in the intended order for stamina and magicka, then for example the Minotaur has over 1 mil more health than the Pyrelord. All bosses together have pretty the same health, but the Minotaur is for sure harder and longer than the Pyrelord, coz of more movement.

2.) Magickas already get their magicka buff in the 2nd stage, so they can do more damage earlier. Staminas has to wait until the 3rd arena.

3.) If you try a scorerun, you have to kill all adds. But Staminas cannot reach one add group near the secret boss in the blue stage, if they do the whole arena in the intended order.

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

I DID IT!!!!!! I DID It!!!!!… now excuse me while I take some sedatives before I go into cardiac arrest.

Hurray!!!!!

It's a very poorly-designed fight.

Why?

Because it's extremely polarizing.

If you have high DPS, this fight is a cakewalk, because with high DPS, you basically skip all the mechanics. Mechanics? What mechanics?

If you have low DPS, though, then suddenly you're dealing with all of the mechanics piling up on top of each other and the fight becomes much, much harder.

To put it another way, if you have 2x the DPS, the fight doesn't become 2x easier: it becomes 10x easier. This is why you see people in threads like this saying that this is the easiest boss in the arena while you fee like you're banging up against a brick wall. And that's just lousy content design.

Iron_Warrior wrote: »

Sun7dance wrote: »

Iron_Warrior wrote: »

Sun7dance wrote: »

Btw the whole arena is extremely unbalanced, because most of the bosses have 18k physical but only 9k spell resistances.
I'm very curious how ZOS justifies this!

This is a great point, i always wondered about this myself

Green arena's first boss: 12k stam and mag resistances

Green arena's second boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Red arena's first boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Red arena's second boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Blue arena's first boss: mage has 9k stam and 18k mag and the flesh abomination has 18k stam and 9k mag

Blue arena's second boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Last boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

As you can see out of 7 bosses 2 of them are equal in terms of resistances and 5 of them are tougher for stam. And if you also look at the mobs resistances you can see the majority of the tougher mobs also have higher stam resistance. Stuff like these makes me believe that all of the dev team are magicka mains and they are not good at the game so they had to give magicka an edge to make it easier for themselves.

That's a bit strange, coz i got different results.
For example the final boss has 9k spell and 18k physical resistances.

Ok, it's been a long time since my test, but i couldn't find anything in the patch notes either.
Btw i've tested with the Two-hander Ultimate, coz i play on PS4.

The different resistances are one point, but magickas have other significant advantages:

1.) If you do the arena in the intended order for stamina and magicka, then for example the Minotaur has over 1 mil more health than the Pyrelord. All bosses together have pretty the same health, but the Minotaur is for sure harder and longer than the Pyrelord, coz of more movement.

2.) Magickas already get their magicka buff in the 2nd stage, so they can do more damage earlier. Staminas has to wait until the 3rd arena.

3.) If you try a scorerun, you have to kill all adds. But Staminas cannot reach one add group near the secret boss in the blue stage, if they do the whole arena in the intended order.

I might be wrong about the resistances because i saw the information on esohub but no matter if it's 12k or 9k, it's still ridiculous that mag resistance is so much lower than stam and let's not forget that magicka users get 6k pen from their armor passives alone, meanwhile on stam you have to reach 18k pen one way or another. It's clear favouritism towards mag

This is true but Medium Armor gains Weapon/Spell Damage and Crit Damage.
Also there is nothing stopping people from running Light on a Stam toon.
The armor passives are much more liberal options than they used to be. Really it’s down to the recovery options they both offer which still separates them. However, it’s not a deal breaker. I have a Magtoon in Medium Armor and like wise I have a Stamtoon on Light and sustain has never been an issue.

Sun7dance wrote: »

It is a deal breaker!
6k or 9k less resistances are about 10% or 13% damage.
Magickas can easily invest in other sources of damage, while Staminas have to reach 18k Pen first.

All in all Magickas have a more than 20% damage bonus in this arena and that's just ridiculous!
Just take a look to all these world record runs. Is there any Stamina represented?

But my point is that you can run Light Armor on a Stam build and gain that Penetration passive. The only thing you lose out on is Stam Recovery and not by much.

“Light being Mag and Medium being Stam” is not as clear cut as it used to be.
Try it, switch to Light Armor on a Stam build and you might find it does better than you think.

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

Iron_Warrior wrote: »

Sun7dance wrote: »

Iron_Warrior wrote: »

Sun7dance wrote: »

Btw the whole arena is extremely unbalanced, because most of the bosses have 18k physical but only 9k spell resistances.
I'm very curious how ZOS justifies this!

This is a great point, i always wondered about this myself

Green arena's first boss: 12k stam and mag resistances

Green arena's second boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Red arena's first boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Red arena's second boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Blue arena's first boss: mage has 9k stam and 18k mag and the flesh abomination has 18k stam and 9k mag

Blue arena's second boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

Last boss: 18k stam and 12k mag resistances

As you can see out of 7 bosses 2 of them are equal in terms of resistances and 5 of them are tougher for stam. And if you also look at the mobs resistances you can see the majority of the tougher mobs also have higher stam resistance. Stuff like these makes me believe that all of the dev team are magicka mains and they are not good at the game so they had to give magicka an edge to make it easier for themselves.

That's a bit strange, coz i got different results.
For example the final boss has 9k spell and 18k physical resistances.

Ok, it's been a long time since my test, but i couldn't find anything in the patch notes either.
Btw i've tested with the Two-hander Ultimate, coz i play on PS4.

The different resistances are one point, but magickas have other significant advantages:

1.) If you do the arena in the intended order for stamina and magicka, then for example the Minotaur has over 1 mil more health than the Pyrelord. All bosses together have pretty the same health, but the Minotaur is for sure harder and longer than the Pyrelord, coz of more movement.

2.) Magickas already get their magicka buff in the 2nd stage, so they can do more damage earlier. Staminas has to wait until the 3rd arena.

3.) If you try a scorerun, you have to kill all adds. But Staminas cannot reach one add group near the secret boss in the blue stage, if they do the whole arena in the intended order.

I might be wrong about the resistances because i saw the information on esohub but no matter if it's 12k or 9k, it's still ridiculous that mag resistance is so much lower than stam and let's not forget that magicka users get 6k pen from their armor passives alone, meanwhile on stam you have to reach 18k pen one way or another. It's clear favouritism towards mag

This is true but Medium Armor gains Weapon/Spell Damage and Crit Damage.
Also there is nothing stopping people from running Light on a Stam toon.
The armor passives are much more liberal options than they used to be. Really it’s down to the recovery options they both offer which still separates them. However, it’s not a deal breaker. I have a Magtoon in Medium Armor and like wise I have a Stamtoon on Light and sustain has never been an issue.

14% weapon damage boost of medium armor is nowhere near as good as 6k pen and light also get crit chance too. The only time that 14% wd is better than 6k pen is on a trial dummy that only has 3200 resistance. Light armor on stam also hit your sustain pretty bad, you might not have sustain problems with light on stam but it depends on how intense your rotation is and if you want to score push then it means there are a lot of skills in your rotation and no heavy attack so you definitely need that sustain. So if you want to have same pen as mag you have to sacrifice your sustain. Meanwhile mag doesn't need to sacrifice anything