Patch 23.02 - Plateau of Apophis Tweaks

Announcements
#1

This patch is now currently available!

Dungeon changes:

Chief Mordoken
  • Throwable glowing rock will not collide with player items (like Bard Marimba)
  • Projectiles only apply DoT to player that was hit (not the orignal target)
  • Only require one interrupt for Oogly Boogly
  • All damage taken during stun phase is increased by 25%
Tothmaug
  • Removed interrupt to sand storm
  • Added way to remove boomerangs
  • Projectiles only apply DoT to player that was hit (not the original target)

Misc:

  • Swapped goblin pet animations
  • Increased size of “Dusk, Mask of Corruption” Shaman mask
9 Likes
#2

I really love what you’ve done with Tothmaug. The fight is very cool now IMO.

Mordoken could still use some work, but definitely feels way better than he did before.

It’s getting close to a state where I think we’ll feel comfortable doing level 15’s.

Good stuff! Keep it up.

#3

Question about Mordoken is it suppose to randomly open when you throw the rock or should it only happen after 4 rocks cause sometimes it does just randomly go into stun after 1 or 2 rock throws

#4

@Jake_E So i’d just like to say, Tothmaug is perfect. it is such a fun and balanced boss fight now. Hands down my favorite boss in the game now.

Mordoken on the other hand is still a bit buggy. The heals still sometimes go off at the beginning of the castbar making him heal no matter what.

Also we ran into a problem below half health where both adds and pools would spawn at the same time. both of their spawn conditions being linked to his heal and end of dps phase causes groups to become overwhelmed very easily, not in the fun kinda “oh just get better at mechanics way.” just kinda, unbeatable.
Maybe if each one had one of the conditions, adds spawn on heal cast bar even if interrupted, and pools spawn on end of dps phase, or vise versa.

Also pools spawn kinda high, when pools are active on the arena you cant see bolts through them.

I recorded our dungeon, we did it on a 12. Aggressive, Fatigued, Hot Foot. Mordoken is the start of the video, Skip to 12:05 for Tothmaug

2 Likes
Patch 23.01- Plateau of Apophis
#5

I swear we’re all good friends :sweat_smile:

We just bicker like a 5-way married couple.

1 Like
#6

This is my biggest gripe for the boss. You have a lot of mechanics happening at once. While each on their own is manageable, trying to kill adds, dodge pools and dodge bolts gets a bit overwhelming. That’s not even including rock spawner/rock thrower.

You only need one person to mess up one mechanic once for a potentially wipe. The longer it goes on for the higher the chances, and that fight goes on for a while.

#7

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The shaman mask is a good width now but it floats in front of the shaman very far away from their face.

3 Likes
#8

Update:

Chief Mordoken
  • There was a case where the glowing rocks could count for multiple hits based on how the clean up was set up but that should be fixed so that it should always just count as one hit.
  • I’ve made some adjustments to how “Oogly Boogly” gets triggered. You shouldn’t notice a change here but I’m hoping this fixes the auto heal issue. If it doesn’t give you time to interrupt, let me know but the bar should last for 3 seconds.
  • Attempted to prevent him from moving around so hopefully he should stay in his original position.
  • Minions spawning and Pool spawning are separated so that only one or the other will happen. (Never both)
  • Lowered starting height of pools.
  • Increased damage dealt during stun phase from 25% to 35%
Tothmaug
  • Properly clean up Boomerangs on reset

These changes are live.

7 Likes
#9

Oh haha that’s cute but that will be fixed in the next client-side patch.

1 Like
#10

Literally amazing, thank you so much!!

#11

With these changes, the dungeon feels really good now. We were able to complete a level 13 shard within the time limit today. It was no walk in the park and we cut it a little bit close, but we got it done.

I did want to mention that Mordoken is still healing early sometimes on “Oogly Boogly.” It’s not every time and I haven’t been able to figure out if there’s anything we’re doing that could be causing it to happen, but when it happens it seems like the heal is going off immediately, as soon as the cast bar appears.

The Tothmaug fight is still really fun, I seriously love what you decided to do with it! The only thing I want to mention here is that occasionally the Boomerangs are invisible. We can see him cast the attack, and we see the Boomerang appear above his head, they seem to turn invisible on their way down to the ground level.

Thank you for all the work that you’ve done! You’ve put the dungeon in a really nice spot. It’s fun, it still feels challenging, and we now know that high shards are at least doable in its current state! We’re looking forward to running our first level 15 soon :smiling_imp:

3 Likes
#12

Would it be possible to change the sandstorm DoT icon again? It’s the same icon as the Crystal Flame attack now. Maybe to something like the yellow mist icon from Mist Keeper.

#13

I just changed it to Poison. It will do the same damage and everything but it will use the poison icon.

I pushed up something for this to hopefully help. But basically now it ensures that any other charged up attack is complete before doing this or any other attack that uses the bar.

6 Likes
#14

We ran an 8 shard yesterday, and everything worked pretty well! All in all a very fun dungeon, and on its way to becoming one of my favourites! And the healing issue with Mordoken seems to be resolved too, we didn’t have him heal too soon even once.

I also love how Tothmaug’s attacks are pretty similar to the Water Wyvern’s now, and implies that the two of them might be related somehow - with the teleport, Crystal flame, wind-based attacks in Sandstorm and the Tornadoes, and the Meteor/Boomerang projectiles, while also resulting in a very different boss fight.

A few things that I feel can be improved on:

  • There’s that group of skull hornets in front of Mordoken’s cave that like to spawn on top of that one rock. When they are in that place, they can’t path towards the attacker and just reset every time. Actually, there’s this spot on the bridge in Crypt too where Colossus can get stuck behind the rubble too. It’s possible to still kill them by getting up right in their faces.
  • There’s one spot after Mordoken’s cave where enemies path weirdly and teleport up to the higher level.
  • We found that the plateau weapons don’t drop in shard dungeons, they will just have the normal shard dungeon skins. And there are no armor drops in this dungeon at all. I do like the idea of a weapons-only dungeon, and I think it would be nice to have Plateau only drop weapons and always the Plateau transmogs, and Cove only armor and only Cove transmogs.
4 Likes
#15

About weapons. If you level up within the dungeon, the gold chest will have the dungeon weapon for that class. Not sure if intended.

you can just get close to leveling, then kill the first few groups to get that transmog

#16

@Jake_E we found something that is a slight nuisance on the Tothmaug fight.

We were having a Musketeer use a charged Gravity Orb shot to help with the interrupts for Crystal Flame X (along with a Scoundrel firing a charged shot) and it seems that the AoE from Gravity is also breaking the blue orbs that end the Sand Storm phase.

The issue we found is that, if the Musketeer’s charged Gravity shot comes after the Scoundrel’s charged shot, it both clears the interrupt & breaks all the orbs (or all the ones remaining) some of the time. When it happens, the Sand Storm phase does end, but the Boomerangs do not clear. It seems like both of those things should happen in situations like this, since we did both break the orbs & succeeded on the interrupts.

We managed to deal with this by not using the Gravity Orb for the interrupts, and instead having a couple of the DPS work together along with the Musketeer to clear the interrupts, but it would be nice if we didn’t have to forego using Gravity for this. Clearing the boomerangs & ending the phase simultaneously using that method would be pretty nice!

3 Likes
#17

This should be fixed now. But yes the intention here was to only drop weapons in this dungeon with skins exclusive to this dungeon.

This was probably just a perfect timing issue but I pushed up something for this I think will work.

#18

Would it be possible to fix the non-walkable floor next to the dungeon entrance?

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6 Likes
#19

Minor cosmetic thing. Love the sword, but the blade is really thicc, it’s more club than sword at this point. Is it possible to flatten the blade without affecting the hilt?

#20

Small thing I’ve noticed recently & I’m not sure whether it’s intended or not:

On the Mordoken fight, if we throw the final (4th) rock to stun him during the “Oogly Boogly” animation or even immediately after it’s interrupted, he does not take damage during the stun phase.

3 Likes