New Patch: 4.50

Announcements
#41

This is what every class is seeing, and we were only dying to bosses in our group. You once said your goal was an ult every 60-90 seconds (has that changed?), but throughout a 6-10 minute boss fight, no class can currently charge their ult efficiently. Even if I die and I start from 0, I should be able to charge an ult on the boss at least once before it dies. I didn’t even hear any mage thunder all night.

Tank Keeper can definitely one-shot mages at full health with Draco rings on the aggro switch/charge.

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#42

Definitely seeing slower warrior ult charging with no changes to playstyle - tested on the old bosses.

#43

I agree unbending is overpowered, but I think it’s overpowered because of the once per minute. That means for basically every fight you get a free death, for boss fights more than one death. I would suggest dramatically increasing that delay. Say once an hour, or even once a day.

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#44

Hey thanks for the long reply. I definitely get how a specific loot system could cause disagreements on what boss to run. The difficulty thing is also problematic Also, shard dungeons sound neat if you can’t just like leave and reenter until you get the one you want.

I sort of see the loot system as a problem which just needs the right solution. As it is now I think that apart from enthusiasts who like checking out the new bosses, most people are just going to run the easy bosses, since all bosses drop the same loot, there’s no reason not to. I saw it happen again yesterday even after finding more success with the new content - people in my group wanted to stop doing new stuff and go back to sentry for the easy daily drops.

There has to be a way to modestly split up loot in a way that encourages people to do at least most bosses without making different classes want different ones.

Some ideas:

  • Each boss drops a different equipment type. eg - one drops shoulders, one drops weapons, etc
  • Each boss’ weapons have a different affix drop table. Though I think the affix system would need to be finished for this to work. It would probably be the most fun&interesting but also has the most potential to be flawed
  • Harder bosses have a higher chance of dropping better rolled gear (My favorite I think)
  • Harder bosses have a higher base chance of dropping epics
  • Harder bosses may drop something cosmetically sparkly

Oh one other thing I’ll mention in response to the unbending change - In all situations this means it would require you to be low HP in order to trigger. It seems a bit weird that the only defense to a tank buster crit/dps killer would be to fight at low health. Maybe it should only trigger on weak attacks? IDK. It is fun to see people survive massive attacks with 1hp because they planned ahead, but it’s so clearly OP. I’m not sure.

3 Likes
#45

I can full charge a ranger ult with good but not perfect play in about 90-120 seconds on a target dummy which seems about right since I did miss a few shots and mistimed a few specials while testing. I expect this to be closer to 90 seconds with a perfect rotation and never missing which is in line with the stated goal of 60-90 seconds.

The problem comes with mechanics on bosses and the penalty for close shots and downtime from movement. There is a lot more chaos in a real fight than on a target dummy, including more close shots, more missed shots from rapid target switching, and downtime of not shooting due to movement for aoe’s and other mechanics.

My question is this: is the 60-90 second ult charge that you’re targeting for perfect play on a target dummy or for real boss conditions? It’s a lot harder to charge a ranger ult on fights where we lose uptime due to encounter design and knowing what the expectation is will help drive further feedback.

Right now I think the ult charge is fine when we can stand still and fire on a stationary target, but I think it’s too slow in real play.

3 Likes
#46

Feedback on the Bosses
TL;DR: I like them all a great deal, though there are some bugs and issues associated with them that could help improve the overall experience. As a general note, the first boss in each dungeon largely requires designated group members to focus exclusively on spawns/adds which can feel a little repetitive, especially when farming these for or over long periods of times.

(Side note: Balance feedback on the bosses is based on the retuned boss difficulty. Bugs are from both pre and post patch versions. Feedback on ultimates to be posted separately)

Mutated Shroom
Solid fight, solid mechanics, everyone has something to dynamically manage.

Issues with the fight:

  • Visibility on the mushroom spawns is sometimes poor, especially if they spawn in shadows.
    Recommendation: Make them glow. There are mitigation strategies for this, but they kinda take you out of the game and make the fight less visually and aurally enjoyable.
  • The mushrooms can spawn embedded in the boss, sometimes multiple times in a row, and with even immediate response will often lead to a wipe or near wipe, so you kinda have to hope that just doesn’t happen during the fight.
    Recommendation: Give a small null zone directly under the feet of the boss out to maybe a meter where Mushrooms cannot spawn
  • Based on the timing, it feels as though only certain classes with a certain damage affix can reliably and consistently destroy the mushrooms quickly enough to prevent their impact. I’m not sure I see how players with all blue gear could defeat this fight without an incredible amount of difficulty.
    Recommendation: Lower the HP on the mushrooms.

Tank Keeper
Tank Keeper is an interesting fight, and interacting with the fuel tanks has a tense and satisfying feel to it. Overall the fight feels like a souped up version of fighting a crab aberration.

Issues with the fight:

  • Keeping Runemages alive, even when multiple mitigation strategies are employed, when the boss has even a single enrage buff is next to impossible without an unbending wand. (This is actually an issue with all bosses that have a randomized aggro function and high damage attacks).
    Recommendation: Disable random aggro attack while boss has enrage buffs. The warrior and healer are already being pressured, and then to have it randomly turn and splat a squishy just means a reset.
  • Even when the tanks are blown extremely quickly/close to theoretical maximum speed, the boss regains much of it’s hp, which feels like being punished despite being effective.
    Recommendation: Increase overall HP and decrease rate of HP recovery during refueling.
  • Wiping to the boss doesn’t reset the tanks. This means as long as you could get to the point each time where you destroy a tank, you would eventually fight the boss without any refueling enrage points.
    Recommendation: Ensure the fight completely resets, including the tanks when the boss resets.
  • Bug: Leashing the boss causes a zone reset. This may have been fixed at some point yesterday, not sure.

Squiddie
Squiddie is fun, as there are multiple things going on, you have to pay attention and communicate and there is no random insta-gibbing, which is nice.
Issues with the fight:

  • Bug: Sometimes the AE telegraphs (particularly the poison stamp) are invisible to some or all of the party. (This also happens on the Soul Keeper fight and with general ghost mobs, who I believe share a similar ability to each other). While this only happens maybe 1 in 25 times, it’s usually going to cause a large problem.
  • Bug: Sometimes the adds still appear to fire their AE even after death. I’m not positive if it’s still applying damage but I believe it is.
  • Sometimes the adds seem to spawn embedded in the walls. I’ll need to watch for this more, but I swear there was once or twice where I checked behind me and literally a couple seconds later a detonation occurred from the direction I checked.
    Recommendation: I’ll try to watch more closely for this one in the future.

Potion Keeper
This one I personally had some issues on, as I was trying to work out the ideal avoidance pattern. Overall the fight seems good, lots of pressure to move around the room in unpredictable ways.

Issues with the fight:

  • There is a section of the floor where there is no AE hitting. While this can make subsequent parts of the fight trickier, it does trivialize this aspect.
    Recommendation: Fill the gap there.
  • I found that warriors could survive a hit from the AE with their health. Musketeers could shield themselves, and anyone with unbending could survive it as well, but as a Runemage without unbending (I have multiples of every other affix, blarg) a single misstep is always death. In fairness, I was trying different approaches to positioning each time, and I’m sure this will become easier over time, it still speaks to the overarching issue of sans-unbending DPS surviveability.
3 Likes
#47

First off, thanks for the feedback everyone thus far! Super helpful. My plan at this point is to let feedback come in today and then hopefully do a balance/bug fix server side patch tomorrow.

Did want to ask a quick question on this specifically:

I think both of those should have gotten fixed around 6 PM last night Central Time. Can anyone let me know if they’re still happening today?

#48

As for the supers, I can also confirm, in 6 hours of doing the mines yesterday, I think that we as a group collectively did like 3 or 4 supers. As a warrior, I did not see mine charge up fully at all. We were only going down to the bosses, and there was easily at least 5 minutes of combat before that would happen.

1 Like
#49

The crash/reset is fixed, but the tanks are definitely not resetting.

1 Like
#50

It’s definitely one-shotting mages, and that’s with all epics and two Draco rings.

2 Likes
#51

Yeah, I died and my ult would reset, but even on kills such as Mutated Shroom, where I have a lot of time to block and swing, my ult never charged. I’m dreading doing some of the older TM content without it. I’ve ulted in SK for the sole purpose of having shield bash available. Warrior is really not interesting without an ult. Pretty disheartened honestly.

Also not thrilled that Tank Keeper instantly kills mages w/o unbending. It’s Soul Keeper all over again, but with more healing and trash mobs.

1 Like
#52

Yes, the tanks are not being reset at all for the tank keeper, also it’s really almost impossible to charge up warrior super, not sure about other classes. Throughout the whole fight with the tank keeper, which is long due to the refueling phases, I could only use super once at the very end of the fight, even though I’m hitting the boss all the time.

Though as Draven mentioned, I don’t think the amount of healing is an issue, but what I think is that the boss is getting the enrage stacks too fast, even if we are nuking the first tank, the boss is around with either 2 or 3 enrage, as noone has super ready that time (at least right after a wipe) So I would rather slow down the enrage regeneration than increase the overall HP of the tanks.

Another issue I’ve found with Squiddie is that the pools are not disappearing sometimes, not sure if it’s an intended mechanism or not, but can make the fight painfully hard

For the mutated shroom I feel like the stacking up enrage buffs are a bit too much, 1 or maybe 2 is still doable, but sometimes it’s getting out of hand and it means instant wipe.

#53

It can one shot people at full health Rangers, Runemages, Musketeers, even in full epic gear and vitality rings.

Basically, its because the charge mechanic is critting these players and this is with physical damage resistance factored in.

@Riley_D

Bug: Sometimes if party members do not die immediately during a wipe, aka stand around and let the boss kill them, this leads to a soft instance reset. This may be related to the tanks not resetting. It may be related to leashing the boss to reset and that resets the instance. Either way there have been a few cases where players are dying off one by one and then as soon as the last player dies, the instance resets.

In this case, which is separate from the leashing problem, the players caught in the soft reset are split. Some respawn at the tank keeper boss by themselves, some are sent to the entrance with 1 hp.

@Riley_D

Warrior super generation is down big time. It’s maybe at best half as fast, and compared to previous patch, while tanking normally it charges at 1/3rd the speed in my case. This is without changing anything. If this is intended it is what it is. But now warriors can barely get their ult up once per long duration fight so that its used much less often and in more cases now, not at all unless something bad happens at the end.

1 Like
#54

I’ve been reflecting on what I like in PVE encounters and the eight TM bosses.

What I find to be the most challenging and rewarding in PVE is coordination of the players, where there is room for human error. A great example of this would be Heigen the Unclean from Naxxramas, which was described here as “the famous dance boss. If you master the dance, then you master the fight. Some may view this as an easy feat, while many players struggle to master the concept.” Every Heigen fight has a low level of uncertainty, but manages to always be challenging.

Mist Keeper accomplishes this pretty nicely, at least for the DPS, and I really like that fight.

What’s least rewarding to me are encounters determined by luck/randomness. For example in Mutated Shroom, and to a lesser degree Mutated Worm, and Squiddle, stuff spawns randomly and in some cases will just cause a wipe, or a win. Soul Keeper, Tank Keeper and Sentry all have a random target selected, and as-is in Tank Keeper, luck can determine a win or wipe. There are interesting parts to these fights for sure, and some randomness such as the box placement in Potion Keeper keep things lively, however occasionally predestined random elements, completely outside of player’s control, are challenging our patience, not skill.

The best way to mitigate such randomness currently is with an unbending weapon affix, which is acquired through RNG. This could be seen as grind to win, instead of practice and coordinate to win.

Thanks for asking for feedback, wonderful to have such an interactive dev team.

7 Likes
#55

In a way I have to agree with you, Fern, however there is a tactic for all of these bosses without depending on luck and focusing purely on coordination, we (Alphabet) are able to farm every boss as long as all the party members have a basic understanding of the boss, even without unbending weapon (as far as I know our main group does not have any of those yet).

Yes, there are some bosses, that are more strict regarding the human errors, but we are talking about current end-game content, it shouldn’t be too easy.

#56

Yes, thought I was clear about this, there are ways to mitigate randomness, and most of Nox, which has fully cleared TM, does not have an unbending weapon.

I am not asking for easy content. Quite on the contrary. I am asking for punishing content with mechanics that can’t be trivialized by a weapon affix or brute force. I am asking for more synchronization, less insta gibbing. More room for us to mess up, not for luck to mess us up. I want to sit there dead and think about everything that I could have done better, not the unlucky placement of mushrooms or the mage that there was no way to keep alive.

2 Likes
#57

I really enjoyed this fight, and agree with Fern. While I haven’t seen the new content yet, I do enjoy more interactive fights that don’t simply boil down to a boring “tank-n-spank”. There’s so much more feeling of accomplishment when you learn a fight and are able to both survive and kill the boss.

2 Likes
#58

This is just funny. Aren’t you the guys that requested a nerf on SK?

3 Likes
#59

What we asked for is not exactly a nerf, but pointing out a bug in the mechanism, as before the “nerf” it was using the tank buster sometimes right after appearing, making it impossible for the tank to take the aggro, so yeah, it used to be 100% luck based before, not giving a single way to eliminate that factor from the fight. Now the warriors have a chance to at least take the aggro before the tank buster starts.

#60

Not 100% luck, a warrior could block it or a musketeer could have hit the member with a defense orb. We don’t clear bosses based on luck.

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