Okay, so as of this morning’s restart, the Soulkeeper boss has been re-tuned. It now stays around about 50% longer in-between phase shifts, and the minion spawn rate has also been decreased. I’ve also made it so that the Tradu Crypt will no longer be generated as a shard for Tier 9 or higher shards for now, pending getting the tuning correct.
was the damage of the boss tuned at all to make up for the fact that basic attacks can insta kill the DPS?
Depends on armor build. But tankbuster is hard for a dps
The basic attack is the same strength as any other boss’ basic attack. The tank buster attack likely would kill a DPS in one hit, but that’s true of a lot of the bosses…
I think the changes here might help mitigate this already. Fewer adds means the dps is able to reduce the overall damage by a good amount and longer uptime on the boss might mean more time between tank buster and best appearance.
Previously if your shield went down from a tank buster it wouldn’t be up for the first basic when soul keeper re appeared. If that uptime is increased that should mean your shield should be recovered to block that first basic. Perfect execution on this fight would be able to stop soul keeper from ever hitting the dps. That’s going to be a near impossible level of execution but it’s easier to pull off now.
We have attempted a level 4 Tradu Crypt, but so far I feel like the worm boss has too fast attack speed, resulting the shield not coming back up in time if it’s not stunned right before the tank buster hits, which is fine, but when it summons the large worms, they sometimes spawn on top of the tank which triggers the stun. Also I feel like sometimes the shield bash is not working, it’s effectively going trough the boss but doesn’t stun it, which messes up the timer.
For the Soul Keeper, I can confirm what Kamina said, it can kill a DPS in a single hit if the hit is critical, but also the boss is still around for 6 seconds before disappearing, it doesn’t seem to be increased to 9 seconds. Another issue with Soul Keeper is, that sometimes it starts the tank buster animation and disappears right away, effectively not showing the animation for the attack at all, making it hard to decide if the tank has to put the shield up or not.
Also I think in general the bosses have too much health in Tradu Crypt, we were doing a level 4 one, but it took ages to take down the worm boss because the DPSs have to focus on the summoned adds and minions too.
Okay, I see the issue with the timer, there was another spot where it wasn’t added that I hadn’t changed, sorry for wasting your time with that, it should be fixed now…I appreciate you being brave and giving it a shot for us
I will consider making some further changes to the Worm Boss there as well.
The work but has always been that way. Party of the food strategy had been to pull the adds if the tank. Did you find the tank had to hold the adds due to the increased damage from shards?
Side note a little truck for the shield. If you can line up yourself and the boss on the xy axis the stun is much easier to land. The hotboxes work in a weird good fashion so if you aren’t hitting a flat face of the grid it can get really touchy.
Gotta block the tank buster every time whether you see the animation or not. The 9 second window might actually fix this as the tank buster should go off every time well before he disappears now.
we 2 tanked it because of the 6 sec window. horn off each other etc. The adds we had max 2 up at a time.
We did kill it in the end (only level 4 though). once we got the tactics down, although intense, it was possible.
The worm boss was super rough but once we made sure that we had a ranger on one of the big worms it was possible… We also did not wait out the max spawn of worms and just went for it.
Ah gotcha. Did you guys make time on that run?
we could have but we just went in without practice because it was level 4. we might (probably not) try one tomorrow. i have about 12 of them of various 4+ levels.
This largely depends on mutations and shard tier, strategy and player gear. So I would imagine a lot of people may have opinions that may not be very fair to the actual design of the fight.
Here’s my Shard Tier ranks in order of difficulty (easy to hard)
- Maeo Sanctum - Boss mechanics are simple. Good length for 30 minute timer. Enemy trash groups are not overwhelming in difficulty but can still wipe groups.
- Rainforest - Boss mechanics are simple. While there are a lot more trash packs, its manageable for 30 minutes. Enemy groups are somewhat unbalanced with healers and poison enemies, but otherwise straight forward and challenging on higher tiers. Choice of which bosses to kill, with Shuggai taking longer but Dino having more adds to deal with. Dino’s adds deal so much damage however and are pretty tanky. I think this boss should have its adds nerfed in either HP or damage. I feel like people saying this boss is “fine” are those who have beaten this boss routinely and therefore think “its fine” when in reality the adds are doing way more damage than your average enemy, nearing boss levels while also having regular enemy HP pools and spawning fast enough to overwhelm a group if anything goes unwell.
- Desert Crypt - Boss mechanics are simple but more dangerous than previous dungeons. The trash consists of many elites, and you are required to clear almost all the enemies. Because half of them are elites, the trash requirement here is might higher and feels very bad. This dungeon basically feels like it was designed when the game was in a different place, and never really re-balanced for shards. Also the soldiers boss has had many bugs in the past.
- Tradu Skywalk - While Potion Keeper is a cool boss to fight, Squddie feels like a chore with 2 players nearly dedicated to not killing the boss due. Then factor in how the trash requirements are very high as players need to kill everything again except 5 enemies like Desert. The squddie boss also seems to have a bug that one shots the tank. No idea how that happens but our tank yesterday died like 9 times in a row just by charging to squddie. And no they werent tank busters.
- Tradu Forest - With the tube bug fixed now (who knew that even existed…), this dungeon is more manageble. The length of the dungeon however is pretty long and the 30m timer pushes the limit on this shard as the difficulty goes up. The tank keeper’s charge is also really hard to manage and feels like its RNG when it can one shot a mage. A problem here is shrooms spawning inside the shroom boss. Sure there are ways for players to deal with it, but this seems to be a side effect of not having a dead spot for shrooms to not spawn.
- Tradu Lab - Sentry hits like a truck and kills runemages sometimes in one hit. Mistkeeper’s AOE however on higher tiers are randomly killing our tanks. They would survive many AOEs in a row but then one of them kills them off randomly. Seems like a bug, and one that makes this shard basically RNG to complete on time.
- Tradu Crypt - Soul Keeper, nuff said. We’ll see if the nerfs make it easier. The timing change can work against the players and be a buff rather than a nerf. The nerf on mini-soulkeeper adds however is a welcome change. Bosses have too much HP. The run back after dying is too long. Boars are overtuned with their poison. So is the purple aberration that has poison for that matter (it basically kills anyone who has it on them).
A really crappy thing about these shards is also how the enemies respawn if you’ve been in the dungeons for a long time. Make it so shard dungeon enemies don’t respawn!
A big problem with Squddie is the same issue with Soul Keeper. You need multiple people managing other aspects of the fight, leaving very little dedicated DPS to actually killing the boss itself. Soul Keeper phases in and out which extends the fight. Squddie just requires people to manage other aspects while having a larger health pool. The HP pools are overtuned for how much the DPS has to deal with other than the boss.
Another big problem is how boss attack rotations do not reset after a fight is reset. This means a tank can get hit by anything from an AOE to a heavy attack randomly right off the bat.
Corgi I’ve run about 95+ shards, and agree 100% with everything you’ve written above.
I have to agree with Corgi on most of these, though for desert dungeon, I think it is fine the way it is. There may be elites, but the number of enemies you have to kill is also lower, which makes it possible to finish even on higher levels.
Also what I would recommend is removing the critical hit chance from bosses on high level, as a normal hit can potentially kill even a tank if the shield is down and under 80% health and fully geared. This critical hit makes it truly RNG imo.
I think the concerns on trash requirements for both desert and skywalk could be fixed if the percentage for elite mobs were higher than normal mobs. You wouldn’t need to clear as much and it would be more rewarding to kill those elites.
I really like the idea of elites giving a higher percentage for shard completions.
Yeah. Honestly it should just be tied to total HP from trash mobs. This way it scales and every dungeon is balanced up to the type of trash that has to be killed.
I think the elite healers in the Desert dungeon should lose their elite status so they are easier to kill. That or they get another nerf to their HP or heal due to how their heal synergizes with their high HP pool and other elites.
Everything else can stay the same (aside from the AOE visual bugs and mismatched AOE sizes on ifrit + dragon).
Yeah, my issue is the mismatch between the iconography and the stats of the mobs in the desert dungeon. They indicate as non-elites but have elite hp and damage. If they are supposed to be elites (which would be really odd based on the density and groupings of them) then it’s a bug that they are mislabeled. If they aren’t supposed to be elite mobs as shown on their indicators, their stats are a bug and they should be fixed accordingly. In either case it seems like a minor bug to fix that causes a lot of consternation.
I should share this here as it’s relevant and touches on much of what was mentioned above. I wanted to get more info, including video footage for all of these before sharing, but I’ve been pretty busy with work lately, so here goes:
Top Shard Impacting Bugs (Not in any hard order)
- Double Mistkeeper AE Hit (Insta-Kills Tank)
- Squiddie Insta-Kills
- Missing Warrior Shield HP
- Elite/Non-Elite Mismatchs (Desert Dungeon)
- Mob AE Telegraph Visual/Timing Offset (Dragon causes wipes, Corrupted Stag annoying)
- Lingering Client Cache Artifacts (Mushrooms, Acid Pools, Add Corpses, etc)
- Crashing/Desyching (General)
- Client Leakage (Seeing wrong players, players named 0, duplicate players, etc)
Top Shard Balance Issues (Not in any hard order)
- Imbalanced Dungeons - Worst Offender: Tradu Crypt (Long dungeon, issues with both bosses regarding adds) {Note: I haven’t messed with this again since the adjustments but offhand they do sound like they don’t really address the underlying issues. Reserving judgement though.}
- Elite Healers - Drags on and on the higher shard tier (Desert dungeon)
- Polymorph in old dungeons vs Tradu Mines (Can polymorph all non-elites in original dungeons, can only polymorph skogtrols in Tradu Mines)
- Triple Elite Packs - Drags on and gets really annoying at higher shard tiers, effectively an additional boss in some cases (Desert Dungeon)
- Unstable Explosion Distance - Is really problematic in certain tight areas
- Major mutations on some bosses (Sickness on Mistkeeper, etc) {RESOLVED}
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