(SPOILERS IN THIS THREAD)
If you haven’t done the Dungeon that’s currently in the game during the Alpha test and prefer to discover it on your own, please stop reading now. This thread is for people who have already done the dungeon to answer some specific questions I had about it.
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So basically although I got feedback in the midst of other comments during the test, I’m particularly interested in two questions for those of you who attempted/succeeded doing the dungeon:
How did the overall difficulty level feel for a party of 5? Were the groups of monsters other than the bosses a piece of cake? Or were they challenging?
For the last boss fight, if you wiped on the boss, when you came back did the stalactites regenerate? Note: they are not supposed to regenerate while the boss is actively being engaged, only if you wipe.
Of course you’re welcome to provide other feedback in general on the boss fights but those are two questions that I wanted to be sure to ask.
1.) Since this was the first dungeon (not endgame), I thought the difficulty was perfect. I was able to complete it on my first run. Groups of monsters difficulty was probably a 5 out of 10. Some of us died on a few of the mobs from pulling aggro.
2.) Our group didn’t wipe on the boss, so can’t help you with this one.
Thought the dungeon was fun and fun boss mechanics.
For the most part, I found the dungeon to be a good challenge. The groups of enemies required good communication to beat, and the rock crab was very challenging, and an enjoyable fight. Although compared to the rest of the dungeon, the final boss itself was laughably easy. Most of its attacks never hit, and was never really a threat to our party. When we had to wipe because we waisted a lot of stalactites, it took the boss around 5min to kill all of us while we were standing still. Although when it finally killed all of us the stalactites did respawn so that worked. I’m not saying that the fight wasn’t fun, it still required a lot of teamwork and communication to beat, but at some points I found it a bit tedious. I would suggest giving him a more diverse move set, and making him more accurate and then it would be perfect. Overall I would rate the dungeon a 7/10
Okay, great. Yeah that final boss fight I do think needs a little more going on to it.
Was the big room-filling red AoE just not doing enough damage to you all? Or you just had a really good tank that was putting down their big shield every time? Or did that never get triggered haha…
Hey Johann, I think I was your group and Logan was our tank. 
I felt that the difficulty was well enough for the first dungeon. I will say, that as the healer, it would probably be a bit easier once the musketeer class can become a bonafide “dedicated healer”.
So, it is hard to give an accurate opinion about the dungeons difficulty level, or any battle for that matter, until healing is fully straightened out, as I am certain it will have a profound effect on group battle mechanics.
Yep you were in my group and Logan was indeed our tank:)
The AOE only triggered once. Was it the attack that dropped a bunch of stalactites all around the room? If it was then none of the stalactites hit anyone. One of us might’ve been hit by one but if so it didn’t cause enough damage to kill anyone.
Felt like overall it was a good first dungeon experience, not too long, not too short. I’d say later dungeons could stand to be a little longer overall, but as a single wing of a larger dungeon, I think it works very well.
For most of the trash pulls, players generally needed to focus fire on the forest golems to avoid them healing the hostiles, and everyone need the group needed move frequently to avoid ghost AE’s.
I kinda wish the first pull eased you in a little more, like a high HP single, or double pull instead of a triple. The ghosts would sometimes get stuck in walls or disappear for a while and then suddenly reappear several seconds later, which was odd.
A lot of the dungeon is really dark, and while there are torches around to grab, they aren’t really convenient to use even for classes with a friend offhand for a few reasons. Maybe adding a few more sconces throughout would help.
The bridge troll seemed like he was lacking anything special and as a solo mob, he generally just gets melted. He feels like he’s mostly just there for the scare factor more than anything else, which is fine if that’s the intent.
The visual elements to it are really nice, you feel like you just entered a whole new type of gameplay experience, and walking up to the final boss door is really awe-inspiring.
I’m sure this is coming but I really wish there was some type treasure chest or reward payoff for running it. (Maybe slightly better weapon drops?). Maybe some additional interactable elements? Like needing to have the group pull some levers once everything else was dead to open the boss door, etc.
The final boss is very visually cool, and it feels dramatic when he finally dies. The coordination between party members for positioning and stalactite dropping is excellent. He does seem to do very little direct damage for long periods of time until he suddenly one-shots people which is a little odd/frustrating. The massive AE isn’t entirely clear when it’s happening, and while it also wasn’t super threatening it did generally encourage AE Healing from musketeers while providing enough time between uses to get a healing orb on deck. The warrior shield barrier is really tricky to use from a group perspective as it takes away the tanks personal hit mitigation, is often low health, and there generally isn’t enough time to coordinate using it based on telegraph warning duration. In my experience we didn’t use it. I do wish the duration of the stalactite debuff was a little longer, even if the overall fight ended up being the same duration (via adding more total HP to the boss) because it currently feels like you get a couple hits on him and he goes back to being nigh invulnerable. It would also be nice if he had one extra something he did when he got low that forced everyone to prep/react/go-nuts for it, like saving ultimates. I disagree that the boss should have move around more during the fight beyond chasing aggro as that would really make stalactite positioning frustrating.
(Edit: Forgot about the stalactite respawning. We had some issues where we’d wipe or he’d reset while we still had players in the room and they wouldn’t come back. It almost seems like when he resets, they should all reset as well automatically. While the groups I was with generally didn’t run out of stalactites, I could see that happening to certain groups, so it may also be nice to have them slowly respawn during the fight as well so you don’t end up in a situation where people need to decide between doing the last chunk of damage in 1 hp increments or deliberately taking a wipe.)
The regular mobs were perfectly fine to easy aside from the last few groups with the ghosts and elementals where we wiped once or twice. I found the crab boss not so intense as a mage however I think our 2 healers and tank beg to differ, as the tank had a constant problem of low health. The final boss was both very innovative and exciting at first, however I just felt that the time period where we can damage him short. It just did not feel like we did any damage (full lvl 8 party). It was actually quite a bother to take down the boss as we did not know how to regenerate the stalagmites (we proceeded to sit around the boss and use the legendary “hit it `till it dies” strategy). While the huge aoe of the boss dealt a decent damage, it was not really a problem as we could just heal it back with 2 healers, I am not even sure how we are supposed to dodge that one as it is so large.
Overall for just a simple dungeon it was really fun and challanging compared to the open areas. The only thing I felt let down about was the lack of loot after our hard fought victory (but as this is an alpha test I know that is not the point). Thank you for the amazing experience DevTeam.
Yes we will definitely in the future be making it so that the boss drops unique loot and that you are guaranteed at least one loot drop for your group. I will prioritize adding that before the next test so that there’s a good reason to run the dungeon more than once 
The final boss is supposed to be more about teamwork than anything else, since it’s the first dungeon I wanted to give people a reason to work together without being too punishing for mistakes. That said I just checked and I’m sad to say the reason the boss is hitting like a wimp right now is it looks like I totally left his basic attack damage at the “Riley is testing the mechanics” level instead of the “this is for real” level. So, yeah. That’s part of the problem right there.
That said, the big AoE attack is supposed to do quite a bit of damage even if a stalactite doesn’t hit you – probably at least half your health to everyone in your group. So it sounds like maybe that part wasn’t working right? You aren’t really supposed to be able to dodge the red AoE circle, but if your tank plants their shield and you all stand behind it so that the shield is between you and the boss, the shield will absorb all of the damage (even if that causes it to be killed because it is low on HP). So you are really supposed to have to do that mechanic correctly to finish the fight, so if that’s not the case it does need to be re-tuned for that as well.
Glad to hear that generally speaking the rest of the dungeon was about as difficult as we wanted…it should be pretty easy since as noted it is the first dungeon. And yes it’s probably about as long as a single wing would be in an end-game dungeon.
Thanks for the feedback everyone! I’m going to leave this thread up for the rest of the day to collect feedback but then probably delete it so that people don’t run across it on accident and spoil the fights for themselves 
I really liked the dungeon during the Alpha & last stress test, there’s just one thing that I don’t really like about it - The lack of respawning Stalactites. I feel that there should be some sort of a respawn timer on them, due to the fact that it doesn’t take many mistakes to turn the battle into an extremely long one. To keep up the strategy, it could be a fairly long timer, say 10 minutes for one to respawn.
The biggest reasons for this are the fact that the Boss AOE attack can make the fight far more difficult if there aren’t many stalactites left due to the fact that you can’t do much damage anymore.
Also the current structure of the fight would allow a griefer in your group to make the fight effectively un-winnable within minutes, as they could just knock all of the stalactites down at the start of the fight. I know that that problem should be minimal due to how the party system works, generally players should be able to notice when someone in their group is just wants to cause trouble, but there can always be that chance that someone decides that they want to be mean to other players, even if they have been in a party for a while.
Also IRL, Stalactites can have water dripping off of them, could that be worked into the game somehow to make a small indicator on where the stalactite will fall? If done right, it would give observant players a better time on placing the boss where it would need to be to be hit, or where not to stand when the boss is about to do it’s AOE.
The other, minor issue - It appears that you can shoot through the central rock with the blue torch on top of it in the mini boss room. I ended missing a few shots with my healing spells due to that, as if that had been solid, the other player would have been hit by the healing burst, but instead it appeared to hit the back wall of the room instead.
Other than those two issues, I really found the dungeon, and the teamwork requirements to be very nice! When the boss went down everyone was so excited!
That makes sense. I definitely was no where near the warrior shield for his aoe attack and I didn’t take any damage as long as I was out of the red circle.
I mean the way that I originally designed the fight, messing up the stalactites is supposed to be a wipe, basically. The intent wasn’t that you would slog on for 30 more minutes doing 1 dmg at a time to the boss to finish it anyway.
I think there should be enough stalactites that you are allowed to miss 2 or 3 times per phase and still get him down, but at the same time I think that if you mess up to the point that there are none left, it should probably just enrage and kill you or something. I’ll have to think about it.
You are right about a party member griefing the party I suppose, but honestly given that it’s the last thing in the dungeon and you’d have to invest 30 minutes just to get to that part, I can’t imagine it’s going to be super common.
I will make it so that if the boss resets the stalactites respawn, though, so that if you have messed up the fight to the point that you can’t win it you can just run out of the room and reset the boss without needing to actually kill yourself.
i have been forgotten, rip the 2nd of the cave hermits…
Just having the Stalactites reset when the boss resets would be nice, the reason that I was thinking about that is the fact that it wasn’t difficult to make the boss reset & the fight ended up being wiped thanks to that.
It would be nice if boss monsters switched targets instead of resetting when it’s unable to path to their targets. In the dungeon boss room, it was easy for the person being chased by the boss to run towards the columns on one side of the room, which would cause an instant reset, even when there were other players close to it.
I do also agree that if we can’t catch a griefer before they make us wipe on the boss… we probably wouldn’t have been paying enough attention, and would deserve to be wiped. Generally once you reach the boss room, everyone wants to win the fight.
I didn’t think about the running out of Stalactites = wipe, that is actually a good idea, and it does make sense. Bosses should be challenging to beat.
I think the dungeon is overall in really great shape. The trash mobs are just hard enough to get you prepared for the rest of the dungeon, and requires your group to interact with each other right from the start.
The first boss is perfect, does appropriate damage, and its abilities are unforgiving if not handled appropriately. Our group seemed to have a bit of an issue with him resetting more than once due to the large pillar in the room. Granted, we didn’t have a tank so we were having to kite around the room more than usual.
For the last boss, i feel like everything has already been covered , and i think the above mentioned reset feature would be awesome. With him doing appropriate damage, i really don’t think there is a need for him to do additional abilities.
Our Group was able to complete the dungeon in a little less than an hour, and our group comp was Ranger, Runemage and 3 Musketeers. We had quite a few individual deaths on each boss fight, and if i recall correctly one full wipe (or just a reset) on the first boss, and one full wipe on the last boss to reset our depleted stalactites.
As far as suggestions go, i would recommend taking a look at the torches in the beginning. I do like the fact that you have to manually light the way as you go, but i think we would have the same type of experience if there were standing or mounted torches that we could ignite as we progressed through the dungeon. This would prevent groups from having to drop torches on the ground between fights.
The only other thing I want to mention is dying during a boss fight and then being able to run back in and pick up with whichever group members were still remaining. I don’t see this is a issue per say, but it does allow for a very prolonged fight, with the group eventually killing the boss, as opposed to some sort of lock out after death that would make party member deaths more important. During trash pulls that obviously wouldn’t need to be implemented, but i feel a feature like that would add a little more difficulty to the boss fights.
Oooh, I like the idea of lighting things along the way as you progress through the dungeon. Sconces or braziers which you need to hit with a previous lit torch, runemage fireball, or archer fire rain. That would be a lot of fun and give some nice non-combat flavor.
I do worry a little bit about upping the last bosses damage output for both his attacks and his AE without lowering his HP or increasing the duration of the stalactite debuff as it’s fairly easy for players to get one-shot as is and I don’t know that his AE is telegraphed enough in advance to respond to.
I feel that the content was well done in the dungeon. The mobs felt fun and difficult. There’s only 2 things that I noticed that I didn’t like about it. 1) The mini-boss was in a side-room and could be skipped. I understand if that’s only how it’ll be during testing, then it’ll be changed for release, but I feel like you should have to clear the mini-boss to get to the main boss. 2) Dungeons require healers and tanks, and with the current healer setup, you need to bring 2 Muskateers, which means 1 less DPS. I feel like once the healer situation is remedied, and we’re able to bring 3 full-fledged DPS, the fights will feel off and will be a lot shorter than they are.
We never wiped on the boss, only had him reset a lot. Is there a reasoning behind not having the stalactites respawn? If it’s to make the team be careful and position correctly, etc, would it be possible to just have the stalactites respawn at a VERY slow rate? That way, instead of having groups recommend just wiping it and resetting the boss, you can still play it by ear if you can survive long enough.
That’s my full recording of our dungeon run (starts at about 25min in) I found a lot of my complaining was my own errors so ignore most of it 
but stunning would often trigger at random then I’d complain I couldn’t stun without realizing it was on cooldown. Aggro was also hard to control and my shield placement was atrocious which I think caused some issues I complained about ingame (as opposed to actual mechanics issues) take a look and hopefully you can get an idea of our experience. Tank, 2 rangers, musketeer, and mage.
Edit: I didn’t see anyone mention it but when testing warrior and ranger pvp we found the top 1/4 of the shield does not block. Intentional to prevent hitting your own shield?