There has been a bug reported that on Boss 5, if the tank is sent to the demon area, the boss will sometimes reset, which is unintended (provided that there are other nearby eligible targets).
I have pushed a potential fix for this, you will have to reset your instance to get it if you are already in the zone. Thanks!
Could you add a check into the game for those that DC/Crash/Desync so it checks who is there at the start of the fight and if they are online again when the boss dies? If they die and we don’t have a res for them then they can’t get a hit on the boss and then do not get a loot chest, it’s happened multiple times now
Acavi didn’t get a chest on Expert boss 2 because of this and we have had it happen to Function on Hardmode Boss 5 as well as a few others on the Alphabet/Rebel Thursday run, We had 3 people not get loot from boss 5 because of this a few weeks back and for some of them it was their 1st kill on it which makes it even worse
Oh I see so you’re saying they are actually online when the boss dies, but they are dead and can’t resurrect and come back and hit the boss to get loot because they crashed during the fight? Okay, yeah, I will look into that.
I’ll also PM Acavi and see if we can keep working on their issues with crashing, I’m not sure why they are still crashing when at least that problem seems to be mostly fixed now.
Okay, I’ve added a potential fix for that specific scenario I think. Note that you still have to be online the moment the boss dies (and I don’t think there’s every any getting around that, since otherwise we don’t know who you are/class/etc. to know what gear to roll for you). But even if you didn’t hit the boss again because you are dead, you should still get added to the aggro table automatically to get loot.
Note that this only applies to dungeon (including Raid) bosses. Overworld and trash mobs will still follow the same rules as before.
As usual, if you want the fix immediately, reset your instance, otherwise it will roll out in the next dungeon run you start.
Can I also get some feedback on if the fix for Boss 5 not resetting is working if folks have tried that fight again since the fix?
Since everyone seems to be having a lot of difficulty with the mechanic on Boss 3, I’ve made a small change that makes the mechanic “worth more” which should hopefully make it a little more obvious. Thanks!
Also, just to be clear, if you do the mechanic correctly everyone in the whole group will take less damage, it’s not a situation where one person will be saved or take less damage in particular.
So I am confused on the above statement.
Before you said the damage will vary widely and even per person and now you are saying everyone will always take less damage equally because 1 person shouldn’t just die.
I’m guessing you mean every person has do the “mechanic” or they die because:
We’ve had everyone live.
We’ve had just mages die.
We’ve had mages who are undergeared live and the geared one die.
Or do you mean that it’s a group effort and if we don’t mitigate enough damage then Rangers/Musketeers survive will like 10-30% HP and Mages Die because they have less armour/health?
It’s a group effort where the damage taken is the same among the whole group, but then like any damage it will be mitigated by your individual buffs, armor, etc.
The damage varies per person meaning the number of people affected by the jump affects the damage. Not that each person takes different damage.
As I said to you already, there are a number of potential reasons why this might have happened that have nothing to do with the mechanic, and I would not get very hung up on that one instance.
So in our testing, we are always stacked so that the damage is spread on the person who get’s jumped.
We always have the same defensive buffs since we are stacked.
This mean that the mechanic has a range of mitigation?
Like we can mitigate 10% damage or even 50% damage and whenever we mitigate like 30% damage, the Rangers/Musketeers live* and the Mages die because of their classes HP/armour?
Yes there is a range of mitigation. It is dependent on a single factor though. But consider what else you might be able to sacrifice to spread the damage.
I think that’s a pretty good hint and as I said I will just tell everyone Tuesday what it is.
We’ll test again some more today with that hint but we’ve already tried 10 people stacked.
Thanks,
Also I’m not sure how I feel about the mechanic being this vague. Do you expect groups to test like 50 different things in order to figure it out? I understand the mystery you want but like there is no visual cue anywhere for that fight and honestly I think it’s bad design personally.
Like why do mages only die? This makes it seem like you can’t bring mages to the fight. Why not just make it do a percentage of health damage to everyone? What’s the benefit of having only mages die because either way it’s a wipe. Sure you can say “Well you didn’t mitigate enough damage”, but then why not just make it a you die or don’t die mechanic at that point?
Edit: I guess it becomes the gear check you wanted, but it’s only a gear check for the mages.
Also just to add, this kind of roadblocks Boss 4 and 5 considering we don’t get the portal and everyone’s time is wasted mounting back on wipes.
I have a lot of thoughts on the raid in general, the mechanics and how the community has responded to them, things I would do differently next time, etc. I am planning to write up a post-mortem next week. For example I agree that if I am having to give out hints on the forums and just tell people the mechanic it’s a strong indicator it should have been done differently.
But yeah, for now this is how it is. If you want to just wait until Tuesday for the tuning patch then you certainly can.
Yeah, been holding off a bit, but some thoughts on expert in general. And to give a disclaimer, we do plan to continue to hit all of these to see if we can somehow account for the adjustments successfully.
Boss 1, required some retooling of the basic strat to something more involved with additional behavior for everyone in the raid. Took a little time to work it out perfectly, but it seems solid and is probably around 25% harder overall than hard mode, but honestly, hard mode was a bit on the easy mode side.
Boss 2. I genuinely have no idea what strategy can down a boss in 4 minutes on hard and expert in 9 that usually takes us 10+ on hard, but props to ABC for figuring one out. We’ll keep trying.
Boss 3. As far as I can tell, we are doing everything possible to mitigate the damage over the maximum number of targets. We have the entire raid clump for the jump, we had everyone max out their vitality including potions, used all pre and post healing options, and we still have multiple unbendings each time. I’m curious to find out what the trick to this is, as with the accelerated cycles, even if we can survive the jump reliably with perfect gameplay, the windows for DPS are so small, I suspect the fight will take 30+ mins, and lag becomes a problem after 10.
Boss 4. A single vindictive stack is enough to overwhelm a heavy tank, and the buff lasts long enough that mitigation strategies can’t keep up. The window for effective bell ringing is small enough that even normal spells aren’t fast enough, and it’s easy to miss with ice lance. Combined with the fact that rarely, spells and projectiles will go through the bells means that you are pretty much guaranteed a wipe at some point.
Boss 5. We’ll need to try it again with the reset fix, but the hell demon fight varies dramatically per class. Rangers in particular have it rough sometimes even on hard mode, and cranking up the HP and damage makes this really problematic. This currently seems like one of the more potentially defeatable encounters, but we didn’t get very far with it due to the reset bug, so we’ll see.
Summary/Overview: Even with a raid in almost completely T12 gear, with full potions, with dozens and dozens of hours of practice running the hard mode version of these fights, many of them seem to be pushing the realm of viability. Getting everyone T14 gear from boss 1 and maybe 2 over the next several months so the raid has +5% total damage and +1% total vitality/armor/defenses does not seem like it would matter for overcoming this deficit. I’m sure we’ll come up with some strats for pieces of the fight, but honestly, hard mode was already pushing the limit of balance, when you factor in crashes, desynches, lag, bad crit streaks, loading flashes, animation errors, pathing issues, etc. We were the only guild consistently doing full clears each week on hard, and even after several weeks of perfecting our strats, optimizing our gear and getting practice, sometimes we wouldn’t get a full clear within our 4 hour raid window and need to come back later in the week to finish it off.
With everything here not just being cranked up by 5%-10% but feeling closer to 25%, with additional kill mechanics and even narrower windows of mechanics, identical appearances on the gear drops, a trivial increase in the stats of the new gear… it’s hard to be excited about this content at the moment, and I’ve already been getting feedback from my members that even if we manage to defeat these bosses 1 in 100 attempts when we perfect our strats and have no technical issues, it’s probably not worth doing so on a regular basis.
Apologize if this sounds like sour grapes or whining or whatever. I’m generally really positive and understanding about issues, and personally I am a big believer in aspirational content… this just doesn’t feel like it it’s doing the trick for a number of reasons. I could be wrong, and we’ll keep at it though. I appreciate that the devs are keeping an eye on it and having a dialogue with the end-game community.
Doesn’t sound like sour grapes at all. I am definitely planning on making some changes to some of the tuning, mechanics aside.
Thanks for the detailed feedback!
I think Boss 4 is certainly doable and requires no mistakes, which should be expected from Expert mode.
Although I agree Mages are limited to their role in the fight.
Boss 5 we haven’t really gotten a solid attempt but it seems doable as well.
Was mostly referring to the rare occasion when a projectile goes directly through a bell and doesn’t ring it, akin to the issue that would come up sometimes with the runemage trial dummies. I’ve had it happen to me multiple times on bells over the last 8 weeks of clearing the hard mode version, and while a stack or two is rough but manageable there, it seems to be a likely death sentence for the tank on expert.
Naa man, I think our best time is currently 9ish minutes. Thanks for the props though.
Ah, my mistake, correcting, thanks.
I have to agree with pretty much everything @Draven has said on the tuning on expert mode
This got beaten by a pug group already!
It took 10 minutes and 54 seconds the 1st time and the second try 8 minutes and 52 seconds after some additional changes, I think you might have gotten our hardmode time of 4 minutes and 33 seconds mixed up with Expert
Last last night we through together a group to test a theory and figured out the mechanic for Boss 3, however it wasn’t an optimal group and we didn’t have much time to test as it was 3am here however the faster cycles are leaving very little damage uptime on the boss as stated, so we will be refining the strat later and seeing what we can do, @Justin was unaware of this until just after this recent posts
This one is rough but I think do-able with a perfect run, however a perfect run with all the current bugs and issues with the game seems very unlikely
This did seem to feel like the next more doable boss however didn’t get much time on it cause we didin’t try it until it was close to the end of our raid time, so I only got sent to hell once, which was painful and I died, I agree with it already being rough on hardmode, we have no slow and our trap is useless (guess there is no point talking about that one) so it’s pretty much, don’t get crit by it and hope you crit it hard enough to kill it before it kills you, I had a lot less issues once I got a legendary hardmode bow when doing the minion on hard, so might just be a case of needing to get a legendary expert mode one? how’s @Kamina finding it?
We have been struggling, not going to lie about that, we’ve been pulling people from Nova to come help us too due to lack of tanks etc.
100% agree, as you do harder content, you want better looking gear! Not had a new weapon skin for 6 armour sets now and it honestly feels cheap.