I want to preface this by saying a few things. First, I’m a 20 Warrior and coming at the mines from that perspective. Second, I haven’t done the new patch 4.50 bosses yet, so this post won’t be about them. I’ll probably make a new post addressing those bosses once I’ve been able to spend some time on them.
Spoiler
-Mines-
This section is primarily going to be about Sentry and Worm. I haven’t killed either of the two “keeper” bosses yet because of the simple fact that with a few internal guild exceptions, nobody is running them. This is because they’re harder and reward the same loot, along with an item that I believe is going to get used to spawn the world boss coming out this week. I know I’ll have a reason to run the harder bosses soon, but it would be cool in the current update to be incentivized to run them a bit more - since having variety is nice. As it is the world boss item just isn’t enough for most people.
For the currently popular bosses, let’s start with Sentry. Sentry is really simple for everyone in the party to fight. It’s easy to avoid making mistakes in this fight, but a mistake will typically punish players with instant death. As far as mechanics go I think this is fine. Sentry has become the “entry level” mines boss and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making the first boss have simple mechanics.
Sentry has a rotation of basic and special attacks. He’ll use a powered up attack after three regular ones that will oneshot any player on a crit. For this reason, he needs to be tanked by a warrior so that the big attack can be blocked with a shield. He’ll also do a red rectangular AOE aimed at a random player that needs to be dodged. This is the only thing DPS players need to do during the fight other than doing damage.
Sentry’s final attack is a scripted aggro change that’s always used after every 2-3 red AOEs. He’ll switch aggro from the tank to a random different player, and execute 3 basic attacks followed by a big attack. This attack can be ignored by everyone except the tank, who simply needs to stand in front of the aggro’d player and hold up his shield. This blocks all incoming damage intended for the aggro’d player. Sentry will resume DPS on the tank after the attack is over. If you have a good musketeer and the aggro’d player has unbending up, the aggro change can be ignored entirely by everyone but the musketeer.
That’s all of Sentry in a nutshell. Because of the simplicity of his mechanics, and his relatively low HP pool, it’s viable and even optimal to run him with as little as two people, since fewer people means fewer runs before everyone has their guaranteed. A musketeer warrior duo should have more of a problem with the adds on the way into the boss than the boss itself. The fight can even go pretty quick if the warrior has bleed, but I’ll mention that later.
I think the mechanics speak for themselves, but I want to mention that I think even for new players, Sentry is a little too easy. The earlier dungeon bosses are already more complex. I don’t think he needs a lot, but I think an extra attack that mixes things up for DPS players would be ideal.
Let’s move onto Worm. Worm is a bit of a mess of a boss. He only has two attacks - a regular and a heavy. He alternates between them predictably just like Sentry. Three regular attacks followed by a heavy. That’s it. The twist is that he spawns two types of adds. The first are “minions” of which he spawns 25 throughout the fight. The second are what I’m going to call babyworms. He spawns one babyworm at 75% hp, two at 50%, and two at 25%.
The catch is that if both babyworms and minions are active and alive at the same time, the boss will receive an attack speed increase.
This is a very big deal because of the way tanking this boss works. Warrior is expected to block the Worm’s heavy attack, or they may be oneshot by a crit. Warrior’s shield is finnicky though. In the event that a heavy attack breaks the shield, you will only have your shield back in time for the next attack if:
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You stun the boss with your shield during the wind-up animation for the heavy attack but before the attack finishes and breaks your shield.
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The boss does not have an attack speed buff.
This means that the warrior can be oneshot if the shield is broken while babyworms are up if all 25 minions haven’t been killed in advance. Because again, having both minions and babyworms up at the same time causes the attack speed increase.
There are a few mechanics that can keep the tank alive. The tank can use big shield to increase the number of hits before the shield goes down. The Warrior’s super can instantly refill their shield. Both warrior super and mage shield will also allow a small shield to survive a big attack from the Worm. If all else fails, musketeer shield will prevent a crit from being lethal. There’s even a strat I’m not aware of where the warrior kites the boss around.
While all of this is happening, DPS needs to coordinate with musketeer on how they position themselves to most effectively take out babyworms and receive healing. Babyworms need to go down quickly before the warrior runs out of resources, and mages need to keep mage shield up on the warrior the entire time if the warrior is using small shield.
This all sounds pretty great, right? There’s a ton of variety in how the party can deal with this attack speed increase, and pressure is put on everyone to excell in their own roles. There are just a few problems that bring worm down from being the fun fight it could be.
The first is hitboxes. Shield bash is extremely buggy. It loves to connect with the worm even when my arm is so far away from the hitbox (yes even the head) it’s sticking out through my Guardian System. It also loves to not connect with the worm when I need it to during the big attack, even when it’s off cooldown and I’m waggling my controller around inside of the worm’s body. This is a warrior super, musketeer shield, or a party wipe if it happens during babyworm phase and it happens extremely frequently.
Compounding the problem is the fact that the shield will just not block sometimes. The worm’s big attack hitbox is low and requires you to shield your stomach, but every now and then it just won’t work. If this is a crit, that’s it. There’s no counterplay. It’s a wipe, and the fight is over.
There are ways to mitigate these risks and ensure a safer fight, but they’re all extremely slow and boring. One way is to kill all 25 minions before spawning a single babyworm. This is probably the safest way to do the fight and it’s mind-numbingly boring. You have to stand around waiting for five minutes before even beginning to chip away at the boss’s already massive health pool. You can also equip a tank shield, but again, with the health pool being this big, the energy wasted swinging your sword around for significantly longer feels insulting. It’s demanding both my time and energy because the fight is too buggy to function in a stable manner without it.
I cannot understate how as warrior, running the boss in this way is an insult to and waste of my time. You are meant to spend five minutes standing there while the rest of your party kills minions, then attack for absolutely no damage just to make sure you have aggro during the long grind of getting Worm’s HP down from 100 to zero.
My time is just as wasted when we wipe because a big attack went through small shield though, so the worm is frustrating either way. The hitboxes for this boss need to be rethought, but if that’s too much to ask, the boss could become a lot more consistent with three changes:
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The boss can no longer crit - This could be a temporary change that is removed when shield block becomes more consistent. It would prevent a run from ending if the game’s hitboxes trip over themselves.
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The boss now spawns minions infinitely until the first babyworm is killed, but only spawns 10 more after that. This would still allow for a variety of different strategies in dealing with the boss, but prevent people from wasting 5 minutes killing minions at the start in order to make the fight brainless. This is an example of players optimizing the fun out of the game and shouldn’t happen.
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Reduce Worm’s HP pool slightly. This one speaks for itself. The pool is too big. Most players will agree on this. It takes the fight from steady to boring unless you’re running the perfect 2rangers/mage/bleed warrior.
– Misc Endgame –
I want to take the time to shoehorn in a couple of easy fixes that could make endgame more fun.
The first is to remove the 5 minute cooldown on the worm WORLD BOSS (I forget his name. Sarithel or something.) in the event of a failure. It’s simply becoming too common for troll players to shoot the boss when it spawns and waste everyone’s time. This boss has become a guild internal affair to keep runs a secret, and they just wind up dissolving once trolls arrive. Having a world boss with such specific actions required of players is already asking a lot from the general community. It’s VR so it can and has worked, but this timer needs to not be a thing in the event of a failure. A secondary function to vote-exclude specific players from the boss area would be great as well, though I’m not sure how this would work.
Next, I want to give a quick shoutout to Bleed. Bleed is currently useless on all classes but Warrior, but turns warrior into a DPS powerhouse. This is pretty cool to me since I think that small shield warrior should be outputting DPS tier damage anyway. That said, I’m the only person I know to have gotten a bleed sword. On one hand, it sucks that getting the proper DPS on warrior is gated behind a rare affix. I hope this is fixed in the class update. On the other, I’ve basically felt like dual weilding Kirito all week. This game has a really small community and allowing players to get a rare drop that makes them become special in some way is really cool. I like the affix system for this and hope Riley goes further with it. I hope others can have my experience.
Finally, I want to mention that Provoke needs a buff. If warriors are meant to be using their shield while tanking damage, they need a way to actually maintain aggro while using it. Provoke isn’t doing nearly enough right now. I’ve used my bleed sword with only wound to take Elongata aggro from main-tanks who are spamming provoke and not even using their shield at all. This shouldn’t happen. Even intermittant provokes need to guarantee that aggro stays on you except of course in rare cases like Sentry.
Edit: Since making this last point on provoke I’ve learned that blocking attacks generates aggro. I still think provoke needs some help but not as much as I did when making this.
Phew this was long. Hope it was helpful. Feel free to chime in.
Edit: I (Outlander) just edited it to hide some of the boss mechanics behind the forums spoiler tag in case anyone hasn’t had a chance (or future players) don’t want to have the mechanics spoiled for them.
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