Patch 6.85: Expert Mode Raids

Announcements
#1

Hey everyone,

Today at 12 PM (Noon) US Central Time we’ll be rolling out Patch 6.85 which adds the Expert Mode Raids to the game.

Expert Mode Raids feature twists to the existing mechanics of the raid in additional to tougher scaling in general and are meant to be incredibly challenging. They reward Level 21.4 gear, as well as a new cape if you can make it through the entire raid and defeat the last boss.

I’m not really going to say a whole lot else because I want the experience of figuring out the fights to be had by the players, but suffice it to say in many of the fights you will have to make changes to existing strategies in order to succeed.

In addition to that, we have the following bug fixes/changes which are rolling out and will affect all Raid levels (including Normal and Hard):

  • On Boss 3, the highest-aggro target will now never be chosen as the target for the leap.
  • On Boss 3, updated the navmesh in the room to hopefully prevent discontent pools from spawning underground on ramps.

Regarding the “frame rate drop” bug which seems to affect Boss 4 and Boss 5, I have still be unable to determine a root cause. I know at one point folks were planning on sending in videos with the new FPS meter active so I could see exactly how the FPS drop progressed and (perhaps more importantly) exactly when it ended, but I never really received those in the end so I’ve been unable to figure it out.

I did do an experiment where I made myself only ever take 1 damage, and put myself on Boss 4 and just let them attack me over and over again for 30 minutes straight, and this did not seem to result in any FPS loss on two different computers (including my low-end testing rig), so I think that rules out the status effects and the AoE attacks being the cause. At this point I think it is more likely to be something like all the spell casting that’s likely going on in a raid, or everyone triggering their Supers or something like that. So, if you get a chance to record what’s going on with the FPS meter active and can send that in that would be great.

Thanks!

5 Likes
Boss 5 expert down but only 2 people got a cape?
#2
#3

Are these brand new mechanics that are unique to the Bosses?

If I see a mushroom spawn on any Boss I am going to cry.

6 Likes
#4

These are twists to existing mechanics. There are no mushrooms spawning.

Although I have thought about adding in mutations to Raids if people would be interested in that. Probably more for like a version of Normal Raids though, I assume hard + mutations would be very difficult.

#5

Any chance if u can share if there was a numbers buff(health, damage, etc) to boss 5 he’ll demons?

#6

You’ll just have to wait and see! There were changes made to everything.

2 Likes
#7

I think I’d quit

With the stat meter you made it’s really hard to raid and have it in view to a point where it will be useful as you have to look up to see it, and that means you can’t do what you need to do in the raid, if you could change it so it stays in the middle of the screen on the desktop window or something then it will be a lot better to record it, or have it so it’s in the middle of your vision but easy enough to see through, we can then record and send you what you need and then disable it when we’re done.

I’ve noticed the frame drops can happen when lifewell is up and ranger super is used, I’m not sure if it has to do with partial effect or what, it also seems to be worse when we have more mages in the group, I run a normal mode group on Thursdays with Rebels and Alphabet and we tend to only have 2 mages and the rest of the dps are rangers, the frame rate never gets bad, that might also be something to consider while trying to get to the root of it

Will the new gear level have any new skins? Even if it’s just more horns or accent pattern would be nice to tell the difference between those that have gotten the hardest content in the game down and those that have killed boss 1 on hardmode for weeks and gotten full set of gear from that.

Also, we have had the same Weapon skins now for 5 different armour sets (normal tradu, shard 1-5, shard 6-10, normal raid, hard/expert raid) could we please get a new looking weapon for expert? please??

Next thing, can anyone access expert mode regardless of progression or will it be locked until hardmode has been cleared or anything like that? I’ve seen players who only kill hardmode boss 1 each week with better gear than someone who has been doing a multiple bosses per week and now they will be able to ignore doing hardmode all together and trying to progress in the game and just do Expert mode boss 1 until they are fully geared again in there

4 Likes
#8

I really think that this is necessary. I went in a PUG raid a couple weeks ago with a fresh level 20, never did any shards perhaps besides a shard 1, and they got a T12 wand off of the first boss.

I truly think that, if the devs want to encourage people to progress down their envisioned path (lvl20->tradu->shard1-4->normal raid->shard 6-8(ish)->Hard raid) that they need to lock hard mode/expert mode for people who haven’t actually cleared the previous raid content yet. Im fine with fresh 20’s to go into normal mode right away to experience the raid, but I also feel like all of the work that I personally did to gear my classes up has been completely wasted because others can just jump right up to where I’m at just by killing boss 1 every week without experiencing, for example, high level shard mutations.

Just my thoughts.

1 Like
#9

Maybe some sort of solution might be to lock pieces of gear to specific bosses?
Boss 1 - gloves
Boss 2 - hat
ect

Can confirm it felt pretty lousy to get 7 full clears on hard (only got a helm drop in that time) and watch someone fully gear out in 2 weeks of partial runs.

#10

We are not doing any raid progression unlocks or attunements or anything like that this time around. I’ll certainly take that into consideration for the next round of raids, though.

My main concern with that kind of thing is that it even further divides the player base. So if we get to a point where there are thousands of people running Raids every week, sure, let’s add in some more stuff like that. But as of right now, I think it would just cause even fewer people to even attempt the content at all, which just seems like the wrong decision for the current iteration of the game.

2 Likes
#11

Client-side patches are now available on both Steam and Oculus.

There is also a Beta client which has some additional tweaks to the Default networking code (basically the same tweaks that were on udpfix2 before) for those of you who are still getting the occasional crash on that to see if it helps.

#12

raid is not instanced, just like hardmode launch

#13

Patch is now live. Good luck and enjoy!

#14

Oh gosh darnit, hang on.

#15

Okay that should be fixed, sorry for the false start.

You’ll be glad to know that in the realm of learning from one’s mistakes, we did specifically test that the cape is dropping off Boss 5 this time :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#16

Frequent desyncs and perma stuck in combat even after death bugs are back :frowning:

#17

Are you on the beta branch or regular?

I’m not sure about the stuck in combat after death stuff (that’s weird), but you’re saying you ran the Hard mode raid for example like two days ago or something and weren’t desyncing and now you are?

#18

Yeah, the stuck in combat when dead thing is back with a vengeance. We’re having to have most of the raid log out each wipe, though it seems like it’s usually a healer or tank that ends up being the sticking point. (We always try to do extra graveyards and stuck combats first, but even that doesn’t always work and stuck combat has a long cooldown).

#19

Okay, well I am going to restart the server in 10 minutes and revert a change I made to the networking stuff that might be causing that although I don’t know why it would be. Can’t hurt to try though.

My other question would be, were you regularly wiping a lot before this? I’m just trying to get a sense of it if it’s definitely a new bug or if you just weren’t having whole party wipes very often for a while.

#20

Seems healers are desyncing more often. Colonel is in normal, Aelar on beta. Boss one rarely/never has full wipes but the issues are definitely new this patch