Did you enjoy this new dungeon?

It was okay. Visually, the areas are awesome. The characters were relatable but the story does ram into a bit of a why am I doing this type situation from an RP perspective as my character may not really care who leads a group of cultists or which prince they serve. Combat was active enough that it was kind of tiring by the end of it but, then again I was doing it with just a companion and it might feel better in an actual group.

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

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

I would say that it was harder than most and harder than the other dungeon in the DLC.

Which was your favorite boss in this dungeon, and why?
I'd probably say the second one because I didn't really enjoy the first or the third one. The first felt a bit chaotic/visually noisy for my taste and I spent much of the third worried about falling off the edge or becoming crispy. Some of that would likely go away playing with a group or doing it more.

What level and build was the character you used?
1596 CP Tank, Scourger + Crimson + Leeching Warden. I did it with just myself and Mirri.
Did you happen to notice or find anything particularly interesting or different? Just curious…

Greetings.

Cleared both Hard Modes with @code65536 @skinnycheeks and @ninibini - I suspect Code will do a more detailed post with our collective thoughts soon, but I wanted to jump in here with a Solo Normal perspective that I just ran.

Before I get into it, some general points:

• Visually, amazing job. Really leaning into the Oblivion planes was a great choice IMO and it was nice to revisit the Deadlands and an expanded Spiral Skein area.
• I think there was some custom music made for this dungeon which I really enjoyed.
• The Vault at the start is a cool concept, and I'm still yet to find the map tool which I suspect unlocks another boss? Will get back to you on that.

Boss 1 - Riftmaster Naqri

Let it not be said that I didn't enjoy this fight on Vet HM with my group - the book mechanics are really interesting and a cool, unique take on a HM encounter.

The thing that jumps out at me the most on this fight is that Normal and Vet HM + Book are virtually identical, except for one less bomb on Normal. This seemed like a little much - I think on Normal culling one of the book mechanics, and making it so you only have to fetch one book, would be a little more balanced. The red shade can snipe you from the other side of the room if you're not ready for it, and while there isn't a strong room-wide DoT in Normal, I still think it's going to overwhelm the majority of groups.


Boss 2 - Ozezan the Inferno

Similar to when I solo'd Archdruid Devyric, I did have to spec defensively to deal with this boss on Normal - even more so than Devyric. While I appreciate the lack of a heal absorb, coagulants and an execute Iron Atronach in Normal, dealing with the sheer volume of those little green inferniums is difficult. This applies to Vet HM as well, and usually ends up in one of two situations:

1. You take it slowly, step on all the inferniums to prevent the Broodlings from spawning, and lose all of your floor space to lava (read: becomes a damage race)
2. You opt for the burn strategy, ignoring all of the inferniums, and overwhelming the tank with 5-6 Broodlings, as well as the three coagulants, on top of the hard-hitting breath attack

Even with the ally cleaning the lava, and only two Broodlings (usually) in Normal, it was still a delicate balancing act trying to survive. I think there could be a little more forgiveness here with the sheer volume of adds to try and quell some of this chaos.


Boss 3 - Valinna

This boss encounter looks amazing, with lots of eye candy, but ultimately falls short of the predicted trend in difficulty - it really feels like the first two are overtuned compared to this one. The fire circles were relatively easy to deal with compared to the AoE management on the two previous bosses, and the final phase just felt sort of underwhelming - not many mechanics to begin with and simply losing the rolling balls on Normal. Not to say I want this boss buffed to Oblivion, but I think the relative difficulty curve for all three bosses could be evened out a bit, instead of a sharp peak followed by a quick decline.


For relative context (after seeing the entirety of the dungeon on Vet HM):

• Naqri took me about 7 wipes
• Ozezan took me about 10 wipes
• Valinna I completed first try

Will update my thoughts once we do some more testing.

Did you enjoy this new dungeon?
Yes, it was really good. One of the best you have made.
The vistas are great but the fights are on the easy side.

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

Boss 1 HM:
The mechanics were awesome, fun, and challenging fight.

Please do not make the fight have a tutorial for playing the game, there are lots of fights throughout the game where an AoE forms under your feet, and then you need to dodge. There is no need to add a tutorial for that, or any attack, at this stage.
Having the text "W A S D prepare to dodge" come up was more distracting than helpful.

If you want to add a combat tutorial, add a combat tutorial, it would be great. But don't do it in the middle of a dungeon.

Buring the book adds a lot to the difficulty by giving the boss a big damage buff, which is great. I love that there is an 'extra hm' toggle. Just for those that want to push themselves.

Boss 2 HM:
The fight is a good challenge until we realized it was just easier to ignore the mechanics and burn the adds before they have the ability to teleport and start channeling. Then it became really easy. Please don't make the fight really easy if you just burn everything and a challenge if you don't.

Boss 3 HM:
The easiest boss by far. It is a really interesting and visually appealing fight, but god, it's too easy on vet HM. Failing the meteor mechanic doesn't even wipe you. The avoidable mechanics should deal significantly more damage and the meteor should have more health and wipe you if you fail it.

Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?
Vet HM

Which was your favorite boss in this dungeon, and why?
Boss 1, having the extra HM of burning the book was great. The outburst was interesting.

What level and build was the character you used?
Template 3600, DK Tank, Templar Healer, Templar DD, DK DD

Did you happen to notice or find anything particularly interesting or different? Just curious…
Yes, the vault and tool are brilliant! Really interesting secret content. Love it!
Excited to figure out how to get to the secret inside the vault!

Do you have any other general feedback?
Boss 3 is visually great but needs to be harder than the other two bosses.
Boss 2 encourages you to nuke and ignore the fight mechanics
Boss 1 shouldn't be where you teach players to play the game, can I suggest you use the overland fights to do that?

code65536 wrote: »

CyberOnEso wrote: »

Having the text "W A S D prepare to dodge" come up was more distracting than helpful.

I never saw anything like that.

I think that's just the generic combat tips that are shown the first time a new character encounters something. You are using a new character via template; I doubt you'll see this on Live (or PTS EU copies) with a character that has seen combat before.

That's fair, however, I do believe they are new. As the text had an unknown image icon before it. I don't believe I have seen the wording "W A S D Prepare to dodge" before.

We also did Bal Sunnar before this dungeon and never had these mechanic indicators appear.

I think the mechanics that caused it are only applying to people without aggro. Did no one in your group see it?

It was very cool first time experience, but I have feeling that so much was wasted on creating the environment that you could have done two dungeons instead of one

Trash:
Once again, it's absolute disappointment. We tried to do second clear to get some vault keys and were testing around how hard trash hits what happens etc. It's all copy pasted from other content. Iron atros have heavy that does healing absorb and enrages while dodging, and then follows it with ground tremors - total copy paste of first boss in ERE. But that's not the worst part. These mechanics are just there visually. They don't do... well anything. At some point I was purposefully taking heavy attacks from every mob to see what they do. Apparently unblocked heavies do 4-9k damage or close. It was so bad that I just stopped taunting to see if they can kill dd. And apprently they can if dd doesn't block. One of our dds took on heavy which did 31k damage to him. If we had warden in group with aoe resolve and minor toughness, and say, minor protection from pulsar, it wouldn't even kill a dd as unblocked attack.
Seriously, are we back in Banished Cells or something? We had example of trash that you needed to respect, like Stone Watchers/Aurorans in Malatar, every elite add in Bloodroot Forge, Falkreath, Mazaztun etc. Those are eaten by years of powercreep now, but this is dead on arival.

Boss 1 HM:
Very nice overall. It does seem like those aoes from cyclone don't increase in daamge depending on how much you stand in stupid, which is meh. Would prefer approach taken in Coral Aerie where you can't do that and have to interact with that mechanic, or have boss soft enrage/immune when standing in Cyclone center to engage tanks.

Boss 2 HM:
Will echo that burn strat is really strong here. For comparison we tried stomping bugs and in 3:30 we managed to take boss down to ~55% with entire arena being filled with lava, where burn and ignore larvae we killed boss in 3:00 with only one teleport (I think).

Boss 3 HM:
Huge disappointment. Phases are extremely straightforward and there's so little happening plus so much time to recover that anything loses meaning. Fire cone is good with aoes on ground eating away at your stamina and deny area, but everything else is bleh. We were stacking fire aoes together all the time and I tried stepping into those to see if they hurt. To my shock I was able to stand in 4 of them stacked for some time. It does seem like there's ramp up in damage but it's so slow it can borderline be ignored. And that wasn't one aoe, it was four of them. Copy coding of Mouldering Taint from bahsei HM fight for this mechanic. Aside from that there was confusion about splitting mechanic and stacking fire aoes because indicators seemed similar. This might come due to lack of experience with this content however. And seriously, we wanted to wipe to check some stuff on last boss so we left meteor in execute to blow up. Increase its hp, and make it actually kill everyone. This didn't even do any damage it seemed like.

For both dungeons final bosses in HM need a serious makeover. They are both so trivial where in majority of new dungeons when they dropped live, final bosses were spectacles, and you needed mini prog to take them down. They were something to look forward to. I see lots of talk about accessability, but we have normal and veteran for that. Leave those HMs to be proper fights. If dungeon population is so bad that they need trash from non DLC dungeons, then give us option to spice that up as well. These will be only dungeons we'll be getting this year and from what it looks like, they are too easy

Did you enjoy this new dungeon?

I did. It was pretty, and I'd run it for a pledge or if guild members needed gear from here. Pretty is maybe too simple a statement. Parts of it reminded me of the best efforts put out by housing enthusiasts. In multiple places, I stopped and looked around just to enjoy the decor.


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

I died a few times here, so it must be harder than some. That said, the deaths were to mechanics that would be easily avoided if I'd read the guide that someone will create in the next few weeks. On a second run, I doubt this would present much challenge. If time permits, I'll go back and try it solo on vet.


Did you complete Normal or Veteran (or both)?

Normal, solo.


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

None of them really grabbed me. It's not that they are bad, I'm just not a fan of mechanics that kill you if you don't know them and aren't particularly difficult once you do. Of the three, I think I would like the last boss best, but her cone breath attack really needs to hit harder. In addition, some cue about running far far away from (rather than trying to evade or block) the instakill mechanic would be nice. Initially, I just thought I'd failed a DPS check.

What level and build was the character you used?

I used my main account and my existing solo dungeon gear: CP 1700, Khajiit Nightblade with vamp stage 3 wearing 2 pc Lord Warden, 5 piece leeching with tri-stat glyphs, perfected maelstrom shock staff, oakensoul (triune), and 2 training jewelry pieces (protective) all with spell damage, well the new version of it. Bastian ran it with me and lived throughout this one, for the most part.


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

In short, no. In fact, I didn't even notice the puzzle that the others have mentioned. That said, I'm going to stick this stuff here anyway:

Cartoklepts
On the one hand, it makes sense that a creature would retreat when it's getting stomped. On the other, I missed why anyone would bother chasing these down. It dropped a key that seemed tied to the fellow I met at the beginning who guarded a vault... I guess in a PUG I'd hustle back there before the dungeon times out (?) P.s. So, I did hustle back and used my little key. The reward was sufficient for the effort; however, no PUG group is going to bother chasing Cartoklepts for the payout I received. Maybe with guild members this content will be pursued? Maybe if the chests drop a lead for something cool.

Oddities:
I found it odd that I could bloodmist teleport across one rift while chasing the Cartoklept, but not the other.

It seemed silly to watch Keshargo walk off in captivity on the right, but then we have to take the long way on the left. The watcher can open locked gates, but apparently not locked doors. Mazandi just portaled us from the second boss, but can't do it now. The scenery here was breathtaking, though, so I suppose I didn't mind. I loved the huge red crystals, the deep ravine with water and the distant structures looming out of the thick atmosphere.

The luminous plants in the areas after you burn the webbing were beautiful. Really nice job with these areas! But I go down them expecting a boss and find another cartoklept. So... why would I go back there again, except to see the decor. Solo, ofc, I'll burn the webs just because the animation is cool, but I can't see why I'd chase down another Cartoklept.

Other:
It seemed some of the new mobs were using Arcanist skills. If so, while they looked fun and flashy, I'd certainly want to be able to turn them down. They remind me a bit of when Guild Wars 2 added the Revenant, and in every group the Revenant skill line overwhelmed the visuals of the existing classes. There also seemed to be a skill that laid down a rectangular damage indicator that would generally indicate a charge that should be blocked, but then did not result in a charge.



Do you have any other general feedback?

Boss 1 - Riftmaster Naqri

Interesting fight, I had to die and read the death tool tip to see what I was supposed to do. The first time I just figured I'd fight through it and see what happens. The death re-cap showed that I'd absorbed 1.25 million damage before the three books got me. I had more details here, but to avoid spoilers, this is the type of mechanic I hate. You read the guide and know what to do making it a non-event, or you don't know in advance and die. At a guess, most PUG groups will ignore the mechanic and just try to burn the boss and heal through the codices. This seems very possible on normal. On vet, this will be a challenge with multi-lingual PUG groups. I'd suggest that the unnecessary, big, splashy "get ready to dodge / block" prompts be replaced with a better prompt to look for and use multiple books. For reference, this one killed me three times. Once I knew the mechanic it was trivial.


Boss 2 - Ozezan the Inferno

This reminded me of Maw in BC2: position the boss so the room doesn't fill with lava, tank and spank. I did use the larvae here and there for the stamina regen bonus as the breath cone attack burned through my pool quickly while blocking. No deaths here.


Boss 3 - Valinna

I died twice to the fire mechanic. Once I retreated ahead of it before I realized, too late, that it would fill the room. The second time I left the room in the direction we're herded, but didn't realize we were supposed to run to another place. Instead, I waited at the door intending to go back in - dead. A third death was likely a bug. I rezzed but couldn't engage the boss. After exiting back through the entrance, I got the "joining encounter in progress" warp and then could fight. But, I seemed to be really squishy and died to a couple of spider bites. As with the first boss, aside from getting the mechanic, there's nothing particularly difficult about this fight. In particular, Valinna's conal breath attack seemed to do negligible damage. I stopped even blocking and just stood in it with no real impact.

A few little pieces of feedback for the final boss.

Normally, during the transition between the "rooms", players have a couple of seconds after Lamikhai is pushed to 50% or dies before the exit opens for the first and second transitions respectively. This allows players some time to start moving towards the exit before it opens.

However, if the Fire Rain or Immolation Trap mechanics are present, it seems that the opening of the exit is delayed until those mechanics complete.

But what this means is that players no longer have those couple of seconds to start moving to the exit before it opens. This is a little problematic for the Immolation Trap on the second phase; if a player is standing near the entrance with the trap when Lamikhai dies, they have the entire length of the room to cover when the trap ends and the exit opens, since the trap prevents them from starting to move earlier.

If there was a trap mechanic, then waiting an extra second or so to open the exit webbing and start the flood-room-with-fire mechanic would make the timing of the transitions more consistent.

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Second, I just want to elaborate on my week 4 feedback about cocoons setting off Immolation Trap, this time with a video clip. Here's a clip of this happening. You can see the freshly-cocooned player crossing the boundary of their own trap and setting it off. Their cocoon protects them from this damage, but the Immolation Trap explosion has a 15m radius and nuked half the group.

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Finally, on the topic of Immolation Traps, the explosion from setting off the trap appears to be 15m wide. This isn't telegraphed anywhere, which gives people confusing feedback, since the only visual available to them is the size of the trap itself. During the first week of PTS, there were multiple instances where a trap would go off and someone who was clearly out of the trap died, which was very confusing. Of course, now that I know that the explosion's radius is much larger than the visuals of the trap itself, it all makes sense, but this information isn't readily available to players. Flashing a big 15m circle when a trap explodes would go a long ways to clarifying to players what's going on.

I don't know where its appropriate to put some generic appreciation, but both the new dungeons were fantastic. The story was very well-written in both, and they were both really fun to explore. Dungeon releases have been big events for my partner and I- we always set aside time to explore them. Thanks so much, and absolutely fantastic job, honestly.