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Any word on the impossible/near impossible Random Q's

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  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 117 Arc User
    Well this was weird. I REALLY should have screenshotted the scoreboard when this respawn fest was over. But I forgot.

    We kept getting swarmed with these guys who are seemingly meant to be cannon fodder, but take an absurd amount of damage to kill.

    Not the first time I'd done this queue, but the first time I'd gotten overwhelmed like this.
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    My character Tsin'xing
  • hexngone#5489 hexngone Member Posts: 370 Arc User
    I know the focus of this discussion has been RIQ and RAQ, but some reference to RQ/RLQ has been made ... so I have some questions:

    Background: I entered Mod16 with all my characters at level 70 and mostly in Primal equipment with the assumption that I would need nothing better until I finished Chult. When it became clear that opening Explorer's scroll cases in Hotenow/Whispering Caverns would be tedious with all the mobs now attacking me, I started the Maze Engine campaign and used it along with WoD quests to get my characters to level 80 (to turn off mob aggro), otherwise their equipment has not changed (not doing Undermountain until done with Ravenloft so ignoring Barovia and UM gear). My IL for all characters is <13K (12,800) so I do not qualify for RIQ.

    1) Maze Engine storyline and Demogorgon dungeon: If the campaign is level 60, and all the quests are at level 60, why does is the Demogorgon dungeon in the RIQ and not the RLQ? Why would the enemies be made so difficult that someone geared with Maze Engine rewarded equipment cannot do it?

    2) Tyranny of Dragons/Tiamat. WoD *was* tagged as level 60 but was moved to level 70 during mod14/15. The local Common Cause quests include mini-dungeons in each tyranny area - Ghost Stories and Barrow Demolition were 'corrected' to level 70/60 (**Thank You**) with a patch pre-m17 but none of the other areas were 'corrected'. Why not? The mini-dungeons in Icespire Peak/Whispering Caverns/Rothe Valley are being done by the *same* character that is doing Neverdeath and Ebon Downs - they are a 'raw' level 70 character, so why are these areas still assuming they are >12K IL? Tiamat - I did it once with my alliance as a training exercise pre-mod 16. For that effort I received 6 Linu's favor. Now that I'm doing the WoD campaigns, it is all about earning Linu's Favor. This, again, is suppose to be a level 70 <12K IL area, but now you are proposing to move Tiamat from RIQ to RAQ! Why? Why are you placing such a large gap in required equipment between players doing the WoD pre-Tiamat work and the final two dungeons/skirmishes (Tuerin and Tiamat) are now even less accessible for them. Books that drop from both of those instances are needed to complete the boon campaigns (yes I know I can buy them in the AH, but the design intends for those to be 'won' in the dungeon, right?). I am getting the impression that the story line and the campaign flow are being ignored just to focus on 'making the dungeon challenging'. The emphasis should be on 'Fun' rather than 'endurance'. So just wondering why?

    As a side note, doing Spellplague Caverns on a Soulbinder Warlock ... tried the last boss 9 times with a Pug (2SW, CW, 1Htr, 1Pally) last night, never got him lower than 50% before the gang of adds would focus on each player and one-shot them. Was not fun for any of us, certainly not worth the 12K AD we might have received.
  • savvje#5554 savvje Member Posts: 9 Arc User

    The only problem is that ppl actually can advance in UM campain without completion of the other campains..

    No boons, No decent gear, First campain to do is UM..

    Doesnt work like that, and it wont work like that for new players at all..

    Maybe make a new Requirement for eatch campain, like:

    Can't advance to Maze engine unless EE is completed. etc etc.

    that would be terrible. it would take a person MONTHS to finish boons. you can do most in 30 -50 days if you do them concurrently and use a few genies. I always also use the campaign tokens from my main. it takes me 30 days probably more like 50 for someone not doing that. if you wanted to gate by boons would be better to just say need at least 34 boon points to que for this, or something like that.

    Didnt you take months to finish the campains you did? Ye, taking months to know the ins-outs of the game? that 2.

    Then a new player comes a-long and randomly starts Queing, who barrely speaks english and doesnt understand the mec of dungeons. While basicly all is learned with the things you do in the campains (at least a part of it)

    My only point is that it is really annoying that new players come in the game and just finish um, the rest is bs.

  • rotatorkufrotatorkuf Member Posts: 537 Arc User
    can we talk about prophecy of madness?

    i'd be surprised if that has a "good" completion rate

    it has such a horrible insanity mechanic and takes way too long imo

    is there any analytics to support retiring/reworking this instance?

    and how do you guys count "completion" rate, does that include ppl leaving, or groups leaving entirely?
  • frogwalloper#6494 frogwalloper Member Posts: 821 Arc User
    @hexngone#5489 I suspect we have a similar approach to the game.
    I don't want to overlevel past the content I'm currently in either. What's frustrating about Demogorgon and Tiamat is that they force players to severely overlevel very early on. The only players that actually need rewards from them are the very players who can't play them. It was poorly done.

    What is needed is a little more variety and complexity.
    What we get instead are overly simplistic solutions jammed into place.
  • noworries#8859 noworries Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 651 Cryptic Developer

    can we talk about prophecy of madness?

    i'd be surprised if that has a "good" completion rate

    it has such a horrible insanity mechanic and takes way too long imo

    is there any analytics to support retiring/reworking this instance?

    and how do you guys count "completion" rate, does that include ppl leaving, or groups leaving entirely?

    It has a 98.9% completion rate with an average match length of 13 minutes.

    We measure a match being made and whether that match completes successfully. Individual people quitting doesn't register for these metrics, if they are replaced by someone else, and the group goes on to win, then that is counted as a successful completion.

    These particular rates are from the public queues and excludes private match data.

    The queue maps that had poor completion rates were the ones called out earlier in the thread, everything else has very high completion rates and the majority have above 90%.
  • rotatorkufrotatorkuf Member Posts: 537 Arc User
    edited August 2019
    well i'll be damned lol, i guess i just hate POM personally

    if i can continue to be indulged tho..

    why is it the design/dev team seems to have an approach of "IL will fix issues?" i understand the approach has to be taken gradually, see what works, what doesn't...

    but, honestly, and i think a lot of players share this opinon, IL is ultimately meaningless by itself...

    is there some kind of thought process in place to implement overall stat requirements? instead of IL requirements?

    i can queue into LOMM with 20k IL easy (without even trying to efficiently arrange my offensive/defensive stats), but my stats will be terrible....and i'll be a huge burden on the team...but i imagine this will be countered with "if it can still be completed, even though it may be more painful and take longer, then it can be completed and we're fine with that"...

    is it too much of a pipedream to have stat requirements instead of IL requirements? or have a scaling system in place that not only scales down, but scales "insufficent statted players" up?...so both sides can reach a happy medium and then the only excuse is just "bad" play?

    i guess that would make things more "fun" for people, to have stat scaling that goes both up and down
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  • frogwalloper#6494 frogwalloper Member Posts: 821 Arc User
    edited August 2019
    Perhaps some more useful statistics would be what percentage of PoM matches end in bronze, and what percentage of players use their abandon to escape that particular skirmish. In either case, the combination of design, difficulty, and the afk/leech-friendly system that's in place encourages a specially toxic environment in there.
  • namelesshero347namelesshero347 Member Posts: 2,109 Arc User
    pitshade said:

    No matter how badly anyone does in the first 2 phases of POM, all you have to do is beat the Balor at the end to complete it.

    Not only that, there is an upper bound to how badly it can be done - 5 minutes per phase. ToDG and PoM can be done in 8-12 minutes. Even I get excited when I get them in RIQ now. It sure beats MC and VT where it can take much longer if there is low DPS.
  • sephiz#1200 sephiz Member Posts: 47 Arc User
    The main issue with PoM is that it feels unbalanced in how difficult is to get gold now. Easier to just sit out the 1st 2 phases and burn the boss for the completion. Would be interesting to see the gold rate of PoM, Bank Heist, and the other skirmishes. Gold rate should be pitiful.
  • mestrahdmestrahd Member Posts: 21 Arc User
    So if Tiamat is moving to RAQ, are you going to be providing another viable method of getting Linu's Favors aside from turning in 100 Dragon's Hoard Coffers every day?
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  • thefiresidecatthefiresidecat Member Posts: 4,486 Arc User
    edited August 2019

    The only problem is that ppl actually can advance in UM campain without completion of the other campains..

    No boons, No decent gear, First campain to do is UM..

    Doesnt work like that, and it wont work like that for new players at all..

    Maybe make a new Requirement for eatch campain, like:

    Can't advance to Maze engine unless EE is completed. etc etc.

    that would be terrible. it would take a person MONTHS to finish boons. you can do most in 30 -50 days if you do them concurrently and use a few genies. I always also use the campaign tokens from my main. it takes me 30 days probably more like 50 for someone not doing that. if you wanted to gate by boons would be better to just say need at least 34 boon points to que for this, or something like that.

    Didnt you take months to finish the campains you did? Ye, taking months to know the ins-outs of the game? that 2.

    Then a new player comes a-long and randomly starts Queing, who barrely speaks english and doesnt understand the mec of dungeons. While basicly all is learned with the things you do in the campains (at least a part of it)

    My only point is that it is really annoying that new players come in the game and just finish um, the rest is bs.

    I have done all campaigns on my main as they are released. the only one that took months was storm kings thunder. it's not reasonable to expect new players to take 3 years to finish their boons or to gate them month by month as it were. that's draconian. don't be so uptight about new people. without them this game is DEAD.. instantly dead.

    the other thing to consider is boons are nice. but they're not gaming changing. it's like what 4 or 5 thousand hp and power and a slightly faster recharge rate and a medocre chance to do this or that for final boon. they don't suddenly make you a great player or know your class.
    Post edited by thefiresidecat on
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 117 Arc User

    Perhaps some more useful statistics would be what percentage of PoM matches end in bronze, and what percentage of players use their abandon to escape that particular skirmish. In either case, the combination of design, difficulty, and the afk/leech-friendly system that's in place encourages a specially toxic environment in there.

    I've never seen it fail... ever. Worst has been a few runs where I had to respawn several times.

    This was fun. Yesterday I queued RIQ and was like "hunh, why is this taking so long?"... then it popped and I saw why.... NDEMO!!!!!

    Which... went.... fine I guess? Other than a few peeps who clearly didn't know mechanics of NDEMO and got confused about what to do when Goristro showed up. Hint: don't aim him at the spawn point!
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    My character Tsin'xing
  • plasticbatplasticbat Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 12,417 Arc User
    edited August 2019
    arazith07 said:

    Perhaps some more useful statistics would be what percentage of PoM matches end in bronze, and what percentage of players use their abandon to escape that particular skirmish. In either case, the combination of design, difficulty, and the afk/leech-friendly system that's in place encourages a specially toxic environment in there.

    I've never seen it fail... ever. Worst has been a few runs where I had to respawn several times.

    This was fun. Yesterday I queued RIQ and was like "hunh, why is this taking so long?"... then it popped and I saw why.... NDEMO!!!!!

    Which... went.... fine I guess? Other than a few peeps who clearly didn't know mechanics of NDEMO and got confused about what to do when Goristro showed up. Hint: don't aim him at the spawn point!
    Aiming him at the spawn point actually is a valid tactic. He remains in ranged dps range through the whole jumping back and forth, usually applying more damage than the damage portal would.
    Yes, that has been the "valid" tactic for a long time. It used to be killed in few jumps back and fore. The problem before was it might be killed too fast and bugged the instance.
    *** The game can read your mind. If you want it, you won't get it. If you don't expect to get it, you will. ***
  • tchefi#6735 tchefi Member Posts: 417 Arc User



    It has a 98.9% completion rate with an average match length of 13 minutes.

    We measure a match being made and whether that match completes successfully. Individual people quitting doesn't register for these metrics, if they are replaced by someone else, and the group goes on to win, then that is counted as a successful completion.

    These particular rates are from the public queues and excludes private match data.

    Prophecy of Madness is obviously very easy to complete in bronze.
    But ('cause there is a but), have you a way to separate the bronze/silver/gold completion rate and the 2 versions (closing portals / charging the pillars&madness) ?

    I mean, it's quite an old skirmish, and even with a decent party picked by the RQ system, it seems to me that gold is very very rare (and even more when you are in the charging pillars&madness version).

    Even with a RIQ premade team composed of seasonned players running reasonnable builds and gears (~22k/23k) who are able to finish LOMM, who had done hundreds (thousands ?) of POM since 4 years, it's a struggle to get the gold in all the 3 stages (the 2nd stage is the one usually falling in silver, though we get gold as the final/complete result).

    It is a skirmish in the Random Intermediate Queue, and gold feels like you need to put yourself in the same mindset as when you want to finish ToNG/CoDG/CR (minus the "dying/wipe risk")...
    It is the one that I enjoy the less in the RIQ (= i hate it), and the one a vast majority of the players i know enjoy the less (= they hate it).

    Especially, the madness version is really a pain... (i'm fed up running around trying to catch the sanity circle while half of the time it just vanishes when i am 2 steps away from entering in to reappears diagonnally opposite side, like it is baiting, taunting and laughing at me...).
    And i'm very prone to leave this dungeon just right away at the beginning if it's what the RIQ gives me and if i have stuff to do elsewhere that can keep me busy 30 minutes (weeklies/stronghold/etc) so the leaver's punishment wouldn't be a problem.



    On another subject : what's up with the zombies in castle never during the green dome phase just before the 2nd boss ? Why are they individually hitting wayyyyy more harder than Orcus himself (oneshooting dps and putting tanks at very low health if one happens to crit...)
  • ecrana#2080 ecrana Member Posts: 1,654 Arc User

    We measure a match being made and whether that match completes successfully. Individual people quitting doesn't register for these metrics, if they are replaced by someone else, and the group goes on to win, then that is counted as a successful completion.

    These particular rates are from the public queues and excludes private match data.

    The queue maps that had poor completion rates were the ones called out earlier in the thread, everything else has very high completion rates and the majority have above 90%.

    That's a pretty flawed method of testing the success rate of a dungeon. You're most likely not replacing a quitting player with a player of equal skill or gear or whatever. All you're doing by using this run as a metric is skewing the data in your favor.

    If a run has 20 people quit during it's course before a new group of 5 finally gets in there and completes it, that is a huge fail to me.

    I recently got into a run of LoMM through expert queue with a premade group of 5. It put us in at the 2nd boss already because everyone that had been in there had left. We looked at the scoreboard and saw the instance had been open for 2 hours already! I tabbed through and noticed a multitude of names on the dps, heals, deaths charts that must have totaled over a dozen plus people in that time period.

    We got in, rolled through and completed the run quickly. That was a success for 5 people only. The dozen plus people that left? Fails should be counted for that somehow.

    What do you do when the party votes to abandon? Is that just a forfeit instead not a fail so your metrics don't skew negatively?
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 117 Arc User
    arazith07 said:

    Perhaps some more useful statistics would be what percentage of PoM matches end in bronze, and what percentage of players use their abandon to escape that particular skirmish. In either case, the combination of design, difficulty, and the afk/leech-friendly system that's in place encourages a specially toxic environment in there.

    I've never seen it fail... ever. Worst has been a few runs where I had to respawn several times.

    This was fun. Yesterday I queued RIQ and was like "hunh, why is this taking so long?"... then it popped and I saw why.... NDEMO!!!!!

    Which... went.... fine I guess? Other than a few peeps who clearly didn't know mechanics of NDEMO and got confused about what to do when Goristro showed up. Hint: don't aim him at the spawn point!
    Aiming him at the spawn point actually is a valid tactic. He remains in ranged dps range through the whole jumping back and forth, usually applying more damage than the damage portal would.
    the problem is that anyone standing on the spawn point gets trampled by his charge. Keeping him NEAR the spawn point is good, aiming him AT the spawn point is a bad idea.
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    My character Tsin'xing
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 117 Arc User

    Especially, the madness version is really a pain... (i'm fed up running around trying to catch the sanity circle while half of the time it just vanishes when i am 2 steps away from entering in to reappears diagonnally opposite side, like it is baiting, taunting and laughing at me...).

    I see your problem. the madness disable is a timer, and you can fully avoid it if you step in the circles regularly. IE, don't wait until you get disabled.
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    My character Tsin'xing
  • frogwalloper#6494 frogwalloper Member Posts: 821 Arc User
    edited August 2019

    The main issue with PoM is that it feels unbalanced in how difficult is to get gold now. Easier to just sit out the 1st 2 phases and burn the boss for the completion.

    And that's why I refuse to queue for it. I don't random queue any more, but I consider PoM an automatic abandon - not because of difficulty or anything like that, but because it encourages the kind of pathetic player behavior that I can't stand.

    And it's not just me. I remember quite well the waiting at the gate while players abandoned, new ones joined - saw where they were and also abandoned or disconnected if they were jerks. It was absolutely maddening even trying to get the match started. And a large percentage of the time, once you did get in, the infectious afking set in, making it impossible to do better than bronze or even to survive if your character was on the squishy side.

    Everything about that skirmish is wrong, but the queue gate just makes it that much worse. It's like an appetizer of torture before the entree of torment. Whoever came up with the concept of queue gates deserves a good hard pinch.
  • thefiresidecatthefiresidecat Member Posts: 4,486 Arc User


    That's a pretty flawed method of testing the success rate of a dungeon. You're most likely not replacing a quitting player with a player of equal skill or gear or whatever. All you're doing by using this run as a metric is skewing the data in your favor.

    What do you do when the party votes to abandon? Is that just a forfeit instead not a fail so your metrics don't skew negatively?

    One of the issues with discussing data is that people will want to see it done in different ways, with different aspects and focuses.

    I brought up information from part of one report of many reports. In that report we track success as I explained above, and yes if a group abandons it does bring down the success rate. The report is there to track how groups do in content. While it does not count a specific single person abandoning, it does track time. Longer time runs show either difficulty, player turnover, or often times both because the difficulty being faced is causing players to leave. Higher time runs show this fairly clearly and when enough runs are hitting those problems then the average time noticeably increases and that shows a more universal problem with the dungeon.

    LoMM is a good example of that. On PC it is up to an 87% completion rate (public not private matches), while on console it is closer to 80% due to it being newer and players are still gearing up in the new stat structure. It also has a 38 minute average run time on PC, which is one of the highest. That does indicate that a decent portion of the population is still struggling with this dungeon. In this case though, that is expected as for console it is the highest piece of content in the game and on PC it is still the second highest piece of content. The expert queue is meant to be a place players are challenged.

    Because the most problematic matches were already discussed in the thread, it has shifted the direction to a conversation about matches that may take longer than ideally they should, or ones where it is harder to hit gold rank than maybe it should be. While that is an equally valid and important conversation, it is very different from one about whether matches are able to be completed in the first place and as such would be using additional data beyond just success rate.
    even if it does end up having people question the metrics, it's still very interesting information that I think many of us are interested in seeing. I'd personally love to see a monthly metric of the game in various areas. as far as lomm goes I'm gonna guess it's 80 percent premades on console and the 20 percent is people who were not groups before hand. lol. Lomm is a remarkably easy dungeon though. I'd be really interested to see it's completion rate compared to tong.
  • rev#7881 rev Member Posts: 343 Arc User
    edited August 2019
    PoM - i don't really have any problems with it... most of the times is gold, some silvers but never bronze even with people afk (but i still hate this skirmish)

    Many coins - i do agree it needs adjusting (rarely see a tank or healer there) so if you don't have good dps you can forget it

    Folly - has the the problem as many coins, no tank, no healer, too many enemies and for some reason t-rex still 1 shots people but again it may be ard for new players

    Valindra- did one yesterday a wraiths are moving the same speed as they used to before mod 16 so no problem there

    If you are a old player you know the pain tiamat used to be if you didn't follow the mechanics back in the day, now its the same, people use the gems on the wrong heads or don't pick them up at all, the other day i gave it a shot and i was the only player the left side during clerics phase

    Giving 1k+ item lvl i don't think it will be enough for tong, i already said its really easy to get IL but whats the point if you don't have the stats.

    Got cr on a RAQ and when i finished the loading screen i was the only one there

    ndemo and edemo,after the fixes, are kinda easy (yeah if you pug, sometimes, well most of the times you will get a bad tank that doesn't know how to agro or old it and a couple of afk people) but its still doable.


    The only problem that i have right now are the random q's, they are never random i always get the same stuff over and over again:

    Rlq- master of the hunt or carrundax caves(i wouldn't mind this huge HAMSTER dungeon if it was a lvl 70/80 and had some type of transmute or reward or whatever)

    Riq - many coins, folly, pom and thats it every time, oh wait i got a epic grey wolf den the other day i had to take a moment and pray to the lord for that one :p

    Raq - Fbi or mspc
    Post edited by rev#7881 on
  • mebengalsfan#9264 mebengalsfan Member Posts: 3,169 Arc User
    adinosii said:


    The Intermediate queue also has a completion rate mostly in the 80%+ range currently.

    I suspect that the discrepancy that @noworries#8859 noted between the completion numbers they are seeing and player complaints has a couple of explanations...

    First, there are premade groups vs. true "random" groups. Premade groups might have close to a 100% completion rate for any current content (well, maybe not CR, but that's because it is a buggy mess), while random groups might have a much, much lower completion rate. Is there a way to separate those two in the results?

    Second, there is the simple fact that people that successfully run the content do not post about it ... those who complain are those who fail, which results in a bias....disproportionally many negative posts.


    I have yet to fail any content I have run with a full random group. All content in this game is fairly easy if you learn and pay attention to mechanics.
  • mentinmindmakermentinmindmaker Member Posts: 1,492 Arc User


    Many coins - i do agree it needs adjusting (rarely see a tank or healer there) so if you don't have good dps you can forget it

    Folly - has the the problem as many coins, no tank, no healer, too many enemies and for some reason t-rex still 1 shots people but again it may be ard for new players

    The problem I perceive with both Folly and Heist is that the scripts keep adding mob hp to the zone in the form of regular and massive spawns.

    If your dps is unable to remove mob hp from the zone faster than it is added, you have a problem.

    So in these zones you MUST meet a dps standard, or it is a certain fail.

    Also because of the large number of scattered mobs, a tank is less useful in them. The dps generally need to handle the mobs on their own.

    This is why healers and tanks generally switch to dps loadouts in these zones.

    To make them more winnable the number of mob hp added to the zone per time unit should be reduced, to accomodate for lower geared groups.

  • namelesshero347namelesshero347 Member Posts: 2,109 Arc User
    Yesterday for RLQ I got into a MotH that was in progress over 18 minutes. Two of the players in Paingiver had zero dps. The top dps was 9K iLvl and already left the run. I moseyed up to the boss and helped finished it in under a minute. That run "succeeded" for me and it was my fastest MotH ever. But to that 9K guy who left, it was a failed run.

    I hope all that new metrics the devs have include some that can suss out the AFK farming and multiboxing accounts.
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