New dungeon balance improvements needed

Bugs and Technical Issues
#1

Hey devs,

I did some research on the new dungeon after I heard the community complain about avoiding the new dungeon. I know that new content should be tweaked with caution because we don’t know yet what is capable and not. But I noticed that there is something very off with the balancing of the dungeon.

For one, the community as a whole expects that the new dungeon is in the same difficulty time wise as in the other dungeons. So when you do a lvl 15 Sewer, or a level 15 K’tulu’s Cove you expect that both of those are doable with a reasonable amount of effort in a reasonable amount of time. This does not seem to be the case. Why? I haven’t looked at all aspects of the dungeon, but one aspect screams a flaw in this principle to the extreme:

Both bosses have alot more health then the other dungeon bosses.

A normal dungeon boss has a 18x health multiplier relative to a trash monster.
The very few special bosses have 19.85x multiplier (Scav Shaman, Mist Keeper)
But the two new bosses are on a different level…

The Water Wyvern has: 25x multiplier. So 25% more health! On top of that it also teleports around making it possible to do good dps alot slower. There are some other bosses that have this slow down problem like the downtime of Dungeon troll. But they don’t have that together with the health increase. To slow the fight even more, extra health to kill adds spawn. And how slower you are at killing how more you get punished by more adds. Exponentially increasing fight time depending on how fast the party kills the boss.

That is not the big problem though. The biggest problem is boss two. This badboy has the power of a million suns. It has all the downsides that you can imagine on a boss. Here it comes:

  • It has a whopping 31x multiplier of health. Making it close to two bosses of health.
  • It has a downtime of like 45% (hard to know exactly. Had no in game time to measure exactly. But that is not needed for getting the point accross), making the boss easily take double the time.
  • The extra wave mechanics makes sure that its almost impossible for most classes to keep their max dps up. (maybe it is, it sure feels like its not. Not my strongest argument)
  • You can throw all the 30 meter rangers out of the window because of the bubble mechanic.
  • It has a 1% damage reduction. Meaning when you hit it, you do only 99% of the damage you normally do (least problematic part of this boss lol)
    All in all, I would say that this boss has so many dps reduction and fight time increase rules in it that we can easily say that this boss will take 3x the amount of time to kill in comparison to any other boss.Maybe in a perfect scenario it would be 2.5x because you can have everyone stack their attacks perfectly aligned for when he gets up. But only have the right classes with you.

There is also alot of feels of frustration and flow of gameplay problems with this crab boss (which is also very important for a game dev to balance into), but I will keep them for the other community members who experienced the boss more then me :sweat_smile:

So after the community perfected this dungeon, it would logically still be impossible to run this dungeon in a reasonable equivalent amount of time as the other dungeons. And I know all the dungeons have their varied theoretical completion times. But this one is for sure on the too extreme side. (a boss with 2.5x longer as theoretical kill time? really?)

Conclusion:
Bosses have too much health and slow down mechanics to be able to finish shards in a reasonable comparable time with the other dungeons. The community would like to see a lowering in this.

11 Likes
#2

Yeah, I can agree with the 30m bit, rangers kind of suffer in that dungeon as a whole, as do warriors once you get to higher level shards, as per everything else, max dps isn’t really a problem, if one mage isn’t pulling their max 130k I don’t think that’s a big issue, as per all the down time issues, there are ways around it, think outside the box. both bosses in this dungeon are extremely mechanic heavy fights, similar to raid bosses. its i nice change of pace from the same old dps burn and move on. these new boss fights have to be treated differently than our old ones, this is all for me personally at least, once I started looking at these fight completely ignoring every other boss fight it all started to make a bit of sense. and sure enough, we were able to beat them on high level shards. all it takes is a bit of mechanic training and coordination.

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#3

Indeed the fights are doable. Just time to complete wise it does not match the other dungeons. Even after robots would have perfected it.

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#4

Idk, this may just be me getting bored with the repetition, doesn’t help that I main pali, but on launch day after failing to kill crabby boi all i had to do was change two things about how i tanked and i nearly halved the amount of time it took to kill. Athough i still do think the 30m thing is bs, not even a stam 3 can compensate for the amount of running around rangers and scoundrels.

1 Like
#5

Irritating as a shaman as well, the constant movement make the intermittent damage even more spread out.

#6

Well, was going to make a seperate post but I’ll put it here instead.

To be honest, the issue isn’t really with the adds, although they do kill players stupidly fast even unsharded, or boss 1, which 1 shots full +6 players unsharded, but boss 2.

The crab is so difficult that even disregarding the bugs with waves, or the massive lag spikes from the old textures, it is still near impossible to complete ontime.

This is going to have mechanic spoilers, so don’t read it if you haven’t tried the new dungeon. Boss 2 has 2 main mechanics:

  • Spin attack, where he becomes completely damage immune for ~12 seconds, then comes back out and you can damage it for 10 seconds. Each player must get a bubble, and if a player gets 2 by accident or because they spawn on top of each other, one player will die.

  • Wave attack where waves are spawned that oneshot a player in full +6 if it hits them.

Due to some math Scott did, he determined that the boss has a 31x heath multiplier on a 15, 1.7x more than a usual shard boss. With the damage immunity 6/11 of the time, we can except that the boss takes 3.15x as long to kill on average, assuming you are doing constant damage for the entire time he can be hit. This is unrealistic, however.

Let’s say that a scoundrel or ranger takes ~2 seconds after the spin to get back to their position, and another ~2 seconds to get close before the spin. They also spend ~2 seconds dodging waves during the damage phase. This leaves a nice 4 seconds to deal damage every 22 seconds. With that uptime, it should take around 9.5x as long to kill the crab as a normal boss.

While I’m slightly exaggerating, the end result is the same. Boss 2 is unkillable. As of writing this, I believe that no one in the game has successfully beat a 15 share, where the closest is a group of multiple 100k+ DPS players and a tank kiting to increase uptime, which was able to get the boss to 30% health after a 10 minute fight in a 4 hour long shard.

For a regular group of casual players that aren’t bringing in the top mages in the entire game for a massive endurance fight where a single lag spike or desync results in a wipe, it’s better to AFK in the shard to break it, as there’s currently no way to beat the dungeon in under 30 minutes.

Some massive changes are necessary to the amount of uptime in this boss where he can be damaged if we would ever like a chance of beating it before the shard breaks, and sub 15 is a thing of the past.

1 Like
#7

I was actually going to make a post about feedback on the new dungeon but you beat me to it.

The new dungeon has been out for one week now! :crab:
We can keep the feedback discussion in this thread moving forward. In addition to issues you’re having, I’d also like to hear about things you like with the new dungeon (just so we can keep this in mind for new content)

Technical:
I think we’ve worked out most of the major issues that were brought up. I am still noticing an occasional crash on boss 1 but not as frequently.(This is my top priority at the moment)

Balancing:
From what I have gathered it sounds like overall boss health for both is too high, which we can definitively reduce to a reasonable level. I also agree that boss 2 down time is too frequent so we can tweak that as well.
I will post specifics once changes are made but I think a change to these two things is a good place to start.

Mechanics:
Being a week out, I don’t think we will be making any changes with these unless there’s a big demand for it or good argument for it.

Of course we will continue to monitor and listen to feedback as we go.

9 Likes
#8

One thing that I will say about the dungeon is that it kinda feels small which is disappointing because it’s the chaos realm and you’d think it would be bigger, not to mention the missed opportunity to have you portal around with one of the main things about the chaos realm is it’s many portals. Maybe this is something you could take into consideration for the next chaos realm dungeon

Also is there any plans on making the whirlpool take you anywhere it feels like it has a purpose that was unfinished

#9

Being a dungeon (which can be sharded) I think for practical reasons we were pretty satisfied with the size. If it were an overworld zone I think the use of portals in a much larger area would be ideal. Maybe portal uses are limited in this area and mostly used by the wyvern. :thinking:

1 Like
#10

Is there any guarantee that if I break a k’tula cove shard it will not become a k’tula cove shard? If I keep the two 14’s and one 6 locked in my backpack all the time, can it block other shards from becoming k’tula cove shards?
I’m trying to help new members of my fellowship to get gear. You don’t get anything from a dungeon you walk away from unfinished. We can’t even complete an unsharded k’tula cove dungeon yet. This dungeon is not designed with average players in mind. Only the top 5 to 10 % players will ever complete a 15 as it is now.

#11

Wait that’s actually like really good points haha you convinced me
Also you talked about lore!!

#12

Here are some changes that should be effective as of now (4:15 pm CST)

Boss 1:

  • HP reduced by ~30%

Boss 2:

  • HP reduced by ~20%
  • Spin phase time reduced by 20%
  • Increased time between spin phases

Give that a try and see if that feels any better/worse. We appreciate your help and feedback as we try to get this to a more enjoyable playing experience. Thanks!

3 Likes
#13

As of right now, no. We will probably reevaluate the shard rotation with this new dungeon after some time has passed and once we’ve had a chance to do some more balancing.

#14

wont reducing spin time after bubbles shot make it more difficult for scoundrels and rangers to be back at their desired locations in time?

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#15

Is there a possibility to increase the size of the hit box for the Boulder, a lot of my bullets or arrows just passed right through it.

On a related note, it is both painful and hard to see the boulders coming straight out of the sky, would it be possible for the boulder to come out of the boss like crystal flames, this would make it much easier physically and mechanic wise.

2 Likes
#16

The overall spin time was reduced from 10 to 8 seconds. The time after the bubbles are shot was not affected. The time between spin phases was increased however

#17

Aaah yes I just double checked. Your right.

I also just noticed that the invulnerability stops right after the spin. Making it impossible for rangers to be back on time.

I did just realize that if you increase the invulnerability time to be like 5 seconds after the spin, and then compensate that by also increasing time between spins, this would fix it for 15+ meter rangers.

#18

The giant meteor from the wyvern has been lowered down to start from just above the boss head.

As for the collision that will be fixed in the next client side patch

5 Likes
#19

Thank you so much :blush:

#20

The only time the crab won’t take damage is when it’s doing it’s start up animation and while it’s spinning. Any other time it can take damage. So does this mean you want a longer spin phase? (assuming not but just trying to clarify what you mean here)

1 Like