Server Patch 5/25/21- Hardmode Raid Adjustments

There will be a server side patch and server restart around 12:00 CST (NOON), with Citadel Hardmode Raid adjustments based upon player feedback.

Hardmode Boss 2:

  • Pool AOE will appear 2 seconds before they start doing damage.
  • Lowered chain tick damage.

Hardmode Boss 3:

  • Removed 2 Portal spots that weren’t working properly.

Hardmode Boss 4:

  • Lowered health of monsters that spawn during hard mode Sephotep fight.

EDIT: Server has been restarted and changes should be live

7 Likes

pools still instant tick died to it on multiple occasions when having to stack but also you can’t stack and chains didn’t seem to be changed at all either people were still being ticked down normally from what I remembered

pretty much as it is now you need 80k+ dps from most of the group to even get a chance of clearing it so as of now my group won’t even be attempting it because we don’t want to try to beat something that’s broken

2 Likes

Neither of these were seemingly changed; chains hit just as hard from what we can tell and we had an instance where pools dropped on chain players and instant ticked us. There was nothing changed here unless we all simultaneously desynced for 2 seconds

2 Likes

From double pool or single pool? Or pool + chain?

still does pool+chain and pools didn’t seem to one shot sometimes but did other times

3 Likes

These are the two mechanics that did not necessarily need to be changed. Don’t get me wrong, these changes are fine, I’m not upset with them but this does not solve the problem. I personally don’t mind if pools are dropped when chains appear because you can time exactly when that will happen (every 30 seconds from boss start/ 10 seconds since last chain dropped). I have no clue about the jump though after rampage. The jump is the instant kill mechanic that is currently unavoidable. I haven’t run it since the update but seeing the changes listed I am not hopeful it would fix it.

The root of the issue There is no warning for the jump. Every mechanic that I know of in game is either (a) well timed or (b) has some sort of indicator before the mechanic has to be done. The indicator could be a progress bar, could also be circles appear before damage (aka lich king), etc. Without knowing when or being able to effectively plan jumps is one of the main issues in my opinion. The pools that come with the jump are the same issue as the jump, no time or indication.

Further Problem Description
The jump pre-rampage is at roughly the same intervals. I don’t have any problem with pre-rampage times. The jump timer after rampage gets set… randomly? Maybe based on health but that is incredibly difficult to plan as dps. Once it is set, it is every 30 seconds aka on the chain cycle. Whenever the jump time is, it could be right after chains appear. I have a video of at least 1 fight where he chained + dropped pools on both and then jumped + dropped pools on both (can DM if needed). If the jump mechanic is that you were supposed to soak as a group. That would mean we would have:

  • be grouped up because we don’t know who is going to be chained.
  • Jump out of the first two pools, but with the two chained people towards the front so their chains don’t go through the rest of the group
  • have enough stamina to immediately jump again and all in the same direction within 2 seconds.
  • Get ready to all run in exactly the same direction/ hope he doesn’t rampage immediately after this while close to the group.

Occasionally the jump is not at such a disastrous time but this is the RNG of this boss. The strategy is “since we have no strategy that guarantees survival, sacrifice 1 every 30 seconds.” Except if you found a friend, and then you kill 2 people XD.

Please give some sort of warning or indication or something that will at least allow us to prepare for the jump in some sort of meaningful manner when below rampage. Side tangent, would also be great if there was an icon for when he was rampaging. Right now we just run it a few times until we know how our DPS looks and when it happens roughly.

2 Likes

Yeah boss 2 is still hugely unpredictable, only killable with crazy dps and some positive RNG. It honestly doesn’t seem like anything changed at all, we killed him tonight and he seemed identical to the last time we fought him. poison pools are bad, and chains are bad, but they are manageable. Having zero warning about who and when he jumps to is what is just cleaning out half of the raid before 25% Feels like a race against the RNG.

boss 2 broke still rip

We’re adjusting the damage again in about 40 minutes with the server restart to try and help prevent against random deaths.

1 Like

Thank you for making changes. I’m slightly concerned that just lowering damage is removing the need to even do mechanics properly from the boss. You guys worked really hard on making this boss something that is worthy of a hard mode and an interesting boss with good mechanics.

Are we missing a mechanic for the jump? Is it supposed to be a soak? I’m just concerned that lowering the damage is going to make it easier to kill but the strategy would be the same as we have been doing, which is burning the boss and hoping not for deaths.

8 Likes

There is definitely a consistent strategy to get him from 100% to 25% but he starts jumping, rushing, and putting pools down at the same time making it very grindy. Devs we don’t want his damage to be lower; we just want him to not be able to be able to instakill without any hope of dodging it at 25% and below

You keep repeating 25%. I sadly haven’t seen the boss below 25% much.

But from my experience the random murder officially happens below 50% health. And my suspicion is that your group burns it to 25% with every attempt in the same amount of time. Making the mechanics happen on the same time around 25%. If I am wrong I love to hear so I learn more.

3 Likes

you need a good group and a good communication with the group

2 Likes

From what I have seen it does not place pools on chained people until 50% (he only places 1 pool on jump); when it gets there it rushes and puts pools on chained people and around 2-4 seconds after rush he jumps. When we take 1 jump to burn him down to 50% he will place pools on chains and rush at the same time. However, if we take 2 or 3 jumps he will only start placing pools on chained players once we get to 50%. Then he will start doing everything at once when we hit a specific damage threshold around 25%.

You are right that it could be we are just burning fast enough that random murder starts at 25% for us and 50% for you. The only way to really test it would be to survive at 50% when he starts rushing for as long as possible. His chains seem to guarantee that above 50% he will kill on jump 1 player due to chains intercepting them. Once he is below 50% for our group though that stops happening.

The strategy we use to survive at 50% to 25% is due to our bossfight dropping pools on chained people at the same time as rushing we put frost 3 / hamstring on the boss so he goes slow, after pools are dropped we all stack up on eachother save for the person getting rushed and after the rush stops we hit the group with a shield (warrior horn or musky shield work fine) and we then split up and wait for pool drop and rush again.

Time needs to be tested though to see if fight time does affect it. It might not be considering one run we had around 5 players alive: tank, 2 healers, 2 dps and we were above 25%. It took a considerable amount of time to get him to 25% and we would have just wiped for another attempt if I did not call for us to practice the fight. As soon as he hit that threshold he did everything at once. This was a run that took way longer than normal to get to 25% hp from our more recent ones.

I can’t say for certain because we killed him so fast tonight, but it seemed like he was nerfed. Usually it takes Carnage 3-5 attempts to kill boss 2 with all of our very best players in the party. But tonight we did not have all of our most experienced players, and even had a couple lower DPS in the party and we managed to kill it on our very first attempt, and we had more people alive at the end of the fight than we ever have. I guess we could of just had a really good run, but he seemed very easy compared to what it took to kill him on previous runs. Tonight was our first attempt on him since the devs said he was nerfed.

2 Likes

It took us a few attempts on boss 2 on one of the highest dps groups I have been apart of for Citadel hardmode. So I still think it is very difficult.

Question is how did you kill it?

Whenever I’ve seen it killed the group just out dps the mechanics. You mention ‘more people alive at the end of the fight’ so I assume there isn’t a tactic to ensure 100% survivability.

The boss may be slightly easier with the recent adjustments to damage but if people are guaranteed to die then the fight is fundamentally flawed in my opinion.

The current tactic i’ve seen work is survive the first jump stacked together, then disperse and dps. dodge if you get the chain pool and have a healer heal from range to keep you alive, then 1 person dies from the boss jump. This basically repeats until its a wipe or the boss dies ~ thus the out dps mechanics tactic.

2 Likes

we use strategies and have clear communication no chaos or fulling around with crazy ideas I have seen or heard

1 Like

If you don’t want to go into detail on your tactics thats fine.

The question is: Can you guarantee 100% survive in the fight?
(If someone gets rez then the answer is no)

1 Like

I wasn’t suggesting that the mechanics on boss 2 are good, I said that the boss seems very easy at this point. If the dev team wants to fix the boss by making sure the mechanics are very hard, but possible to do flawlessly if you spend a lot of time grinding him out then great, that would be the best case scenario. But they shouldn’t nerf it so hard that you’re able to walk in there with an unorganized and inexperienced group to kill it which is what is going to happen if they keep nerfing his damage and health.

8 Likes