So, I ran a level 14 Plateau shard today with a great group of players, and we got kinda stomped if I’m being completely honest.
We spent over half an hour attempting Mordoken alone and we never took more than like 30% of his health bar down. The adds are pretty tanky & they hit decently hard, so we were struggling to take them down in a manageable amount of time, often getting overwhelmed. I may have a better idea about how to deal with this & I’ll be trying to get another 13-15 shard to try that out on in the next few days, but it was really tough. I think it would be a lot more doable if they didn’t have quite as much health.
On the topic of health, Mordoken felt like he had a ridiculous amount of it. It seemed like it would be quite the long fight, even if we performed the mechanics flawlessly, including interrupting his heal. While I’m on that topic, his heal ability is definitely bugged. Sometimes he heals before the cast-bar is even over, and we saw at least a few cases where our interrupts just didn’t work at all. Our musky would use charged Gravity Orb and it did nothing at all, the boss healed anyway. I really like his mechanics, it just felt like the fight would take too long even with perfect execution, and that presents a problem for sharded dungeons where we have limited time.
As for Tothmaug, that fight feels like it’s in a pretty good place, except for the Boomerangs. I feel like there either needs to be a cap on the number of Boomerangs that can be in the arena at any given time, or we need to be able to break them somehow, because the longer the fight goes on it just becomes way too chaotic with the amount of them that are spinning around everywhere. Aside from that, his fight felt really good and he didn’t feel like he had too much health to take down in a reasonable amount of time. We were able to kill him on our second attempt.
One other thing I wanted to mention is that the DoT pools that spawn from the Rattle attack hurt A LOT. They were basically one-shotting everyone who wasn’t the tank, and even the tank couldn’t take more than 1 tick. We can probably learn to just call these out when the cast-bar starts and get used to teleporting pre-emptively to avoid it, but it certainly feels like the damage could be nerfed. It would still be punishing, just not so unforgiving-feeling like it felt in that shard today.
Oh and back to Mordoken, the DoT debuff from Ooga phase does not ignore Lava Totem pulses and I feel like it should. Lava Totem is a staple of high-end Shaman builds, and it’s not like our Shamans can just despawn their totems at will or anything, so it’s really punishing for them. They can’t use Lava Totem at all or we risk a party wipe bc it will trigger the debuff. If that mechanic can ignore DoTs from other DPS classes/abilities, I think it should ignore the Lava Pulse too.
Anyways that’s about all I wanted to say about it. We’ll be trying higher shards every chance we get this week, I’ll post an update here if we find better ways to get through them. Best of luck to anyone else who attempts any high-shard Plateaus this week!
