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Release Notes 6/11/2020
kaiserin
Posts: 3,193 Cryptic Developer
Therakiel's Temple Rework!
This lair has gotten a total rework! This lair is aimed towards endgame players who want to seek out a challenge!
Cutscene skipping!: At the start of the lair there is an interact. If all 5 team members agree all cutscenes will be skipped for the lair.
To access the lair head to Vibora Bay and enter the Apostolic Church.
Rewards
Bosses
Valerian Scarlet
Black Fang
Baron Cimetiere
Vladic Dracul
Therakiel
Alerts
For the next week the Alert Bonus event will be active.
ZEN Store
From now until Monday, 10am ST the following pack will be available:
Spirit Explosion Key Pack
Costumes
Misc
This lair has gotten a total rework! This lair is aimed towards endgame players who want to seek out a challenge!
Cutscene skipping!: At the start of the lair there is an interact. If all 5 team members agree all cutscenes will be skipped for the lair.
To access the lair head to Vibora Bay and enter the Apostolic Church.
- You no longer need to have the Apocalypse Aversion mission active to enter.
- Removed large portions of the lair puzzles to shorten the lair.
- Added new perks for completing the lair.
- Added a new daily to Caliburn that can be picked up without prerequisite missions.
- Puzzles have been simplified to reduce the amount of time to get through the lair.
- Reduced the amount of spawns in the New Shadows wing of the lair.
- Immortals no longer need to be staked in the lair to be defeated.
Rewards
- Added the following costumes as potential drops for completing the lair:: Therakiel's Sword (new version), Therakiel's Wings, Valerian Scarlet's Back Halo, Valerian Scarlet's Glow Tights, Black Fang's Epic Tire Armor, Baron Cimetiere's Face Paint, Vampire Wings.
- Added the following devices as potential drops for completing the lair: Therakiel's Dissonance.
- Added the following auras as potential drops for completing the lair: Astral Projection, Therakiel, Therakiel (Wings), Traitorous (Hands).
- This lair drops Resources, Questionite, Silver Champion Recognition and Gold Champion Recognition. Numeric rewards can be gained once every 20 hours.
- New rewards will be added periodically to this lair.
- New Mod: Devious Shield. Grants flat damage reduction. Drops from Baron Cimetiere.
- New Mod: Tough as Nails. Grants resistance to slashing damage. Drops from Black Fang.
- New Mod: Brilliance. Increases your resistance to all damage. Rank9 only.
- Defeating the sub bosses will grant you resources, modifications, a new consumable and reward box.
Bosses
- Bosses have had their overall damage and health increased.
- Various visual improvements.
- Various changes to their respective lairs to accommodate the boss mechanics.
Valerian Scarlet
- Her summoned minions will no longer despawn after a set period of time.
- Can summon Sigils that will wreak havoc if left unchecked.
- Will move locations throughout the fight, picking a new target to attack.
Black Fang
- Will try and pick off weaker targets.
- Will occasionally challenge less threatening targets.
- May make use of objects in the room.
- Will not tolerate foes that hide behind their block!
Baron Cimetiere
- Pay attention to his block, you may need to move to avoid taking additional damage!
- His zombies are much more hostile.
- Beware of being defeated in his lair!
Vladic Dracul
- Can now trap players in the cages scattered around his lair. You will need help to get out!
- Will shroud targets in a swarm of bats, reducing their vision.
Therakiel
- Therakiel can now become Light or Dark empowered later on in the fight. Players will take additional damage and effects if they have the inappropriate aura affecting them.
- Therakiel's Invocation of the Void will now follow players.
- Statues will now be removed in between phases.
- Updated the costumes of his summoned Hellementals to reflect what aura they create.
Alerts
For the next week the Alert Bonus event will be active.
- Added an alert version of the Valerian Scarlet fight.
- This version of the fight is a simplified version of the Lair fight.
- Players level 20 and above can queue for it.
- In this version, when her sigils explode they will place a debuff on the target. Allowing all 5 to explode will defeat all players. Allowing some to explode will place a stacking debuff on players, reducing their defenses.
- This alert grants XP, Resources and Modifications.
- Robert Caliburn will have a spot in Millennium City while the Therakiel Alerts are active and will give out a daily mission for the alert.
- Added the following costumes as potential drops: Valerian Scarlet Halo, Long Sleeves, Wrapped Cloth, Vladic Dracul Shoulders, Vladic Dracul Bracers.
- Added the following devices as potential drops: Call Up a Trey Kings Gang War (permanent).
- Added perks for completing this alert.
- Players can skip the alert's cutscene by placing a vote in with an interact at the start of the alert. All 5 team members must make an input for the cutscene to be skipped.
ZEN Store
From now until Monday, 10am ST the following pack will be available:
Spirit Explosion Key Pack
- Cost: 900 ZEN
- 10x Cosmic Keys of Power
- 1x Super Spikey Hair Costume
Costumes
- Updated Back Halo and Valerian Scarlet's Halo to have Small and Large versions.
Misc
- Added Back Feathers costume to the Special Store.
Post edited by kaiserin#0958 on
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Comments
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
The alert bonus event is currently not active, despite the date claiming June 11th, 8 am.
Hello, could you enable the alert bonuses event, please? It's not active.
thanks for the clarification!
Not the Spikey ones.
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
It's not that I don't think I'll be able to complete it, it's that I'm not going to have much fun doing it. A game is supposed to be fun, not a chore. And I don't enjoy being that elitist prick who'll only play with sufficiently leet players.
Also, can we stop the R3 mod rewards for level 40 characters. Fusing up from R3 to anything remotely playable is beyond aggravating and a complete waste of time. Making you need literally thousands of something that drops 1-2 at a time is just dumb. R4 should be the minimum mod drop for level 40. (Even fusing up from R4 is pretty annoying, but at least it isn't a logistical nightmare).
also im not sure, but i think the flat damage mod is bugged, doesn't work half the time when equipped.
Alert was pretty smooth and decent.
as for the actual lair.
Val seems to be in a good spot, but the damage on her sigils' targetted lightning attack is a bit too much it does like 1-2k, healer has to deal with tank, mobs, and dps getting shredded by sigils at same time and it can be too much.
Black Fang is perfect I loved it.
Baron is mostly in a good spot, but his mobs are doing more damage than they were on PTS and sometimes, although very rarely, he'll cast his block immediately at the same time of his text call out, giving no reaction time.
Vladic is good, maybe too many bat swarms ;-;
gonna try therakiel
I'm thinking it might be helpful (just for the alert) to have a message pop up that says to 'Destroy the Sigils!' when they spawn, similar to how you are told to block when fighting Psimon for the first time. I know Caliburn literally tells you to destroy them if you chat to him, but as soon as the team has spawned they typically go straight for the enemies so they clearly aren't talking to him.
Likewise, I'm not feeling good about how this turned out. I used to enjoy casual runs of this during holidays for the Stolen Kisses perk, and I can see that's not happening now.
I think this was the wrong lair to give the elite treatment, at least the elite-only treatment. Therakiel's Temple is more or less the climax of the leveling story. You reach 40, you play through a few more Vibora missions, you get to Apocalypse Aversion. Can you then get a group together and dive into it? No, you have to spend weeks grinding for Justice gear and high level mods just to have a chance. At least something like Teleios Ascendant is its own self-contained thing that newly minted players aren't pointed towards. And isn't this the gate for Route of Elements etc. as well?
I expected Baron to be hard, but Therakiel gave us a run for our money. Finally finished it after many hours, but just completing it was reward enough. Great job with the new designs! Feels like you guys really took the time to think out all the bosses.
What's with the spikey stuff, though?
PLEASE give us this hairstyle:
Am I dumb? What's the 'Special Store'?
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
That goofy looking vendor hiding under Recog building...
The one that the Dev Tokens are for.
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
Speaking only for myself, and the times that I am on, I hardly ever see a TA run advertised (Nem cons are the most common, sometimes Vikorin, hardly ever the Factory). Maybe once a day. Yesterday, in the 3 hours I was on, I only saw one person calling for a TT team and I'm not sure if that person ever found a enough players.
Feels very rewarding to figure out the mechanics and develop strategies to deal with them.
I'm excited to run it for a long time to come.
PARSER USAGE GUIDE: click here for an easy how-to ٩(๑･ิᴗ･ิ)۶٩(･ิᴗ･ิ๑)۶
Spectre beats Eido in an SG run: VIDEO HERE
I ran old TT outside those events, whenever i could find a team. My (formerly) favorite lair in the game.
And the better comparison would be Andrith Ruins, which does still see play pretty often, yet is doable without legions/gcr gear. In fact, it sees more play than TA seems to. Andrith Ruins is a fine difficulty level for level 40 end story-arc lairs.
Destroyer Factory rework was a flop because it didn't drop anything worth playing it for. Rewards matter.
Challenge doesn't matter long term. The people who say they want a challenge will beat it several dozen times, reduce it to a rote activity while only playing with a small handful of other 'elite' players, and stop being challenged. Most of them will never take any voluntary action to increase the challenge solely for the challenge of it. And they'll demand more new 'challenging' material because 'nothing is challenging' again. They're a small minority of players, and spending limited dev time catering to their desires is a poor use of a "small dev team" with limited resources, especially since they will demand infinite dev time with never-ending demands for 'more challenge'.
I'd say R7 is the start of remotely playable for content like TT, which, given we're talking about things that drop *in* TT, is not an unreasonable standard. That's 525 R3 mods (assuming you use a safeguard every time, which you won't). If you think R5 is the standard by which we should measure the tolerableness of mod drops, that basically removes all the mod ranks that anyone bothers *actively trading for* from consideration. (I won't say never, but seeing anyone advertise for buying or selling a mod below rank 7 in /zone or /trade or any other chat would be a true oddity).
Even basic mods drop a minimum of R4s at level 40, and sometimes drop R5s - i don't know why 'special' mods don't have similar drops.
Don't even think about the number of R3s it takes to make an R9. It makes my head hurt.
"We need to deal with Therakiel now to stop him bringing about the Apocalypse. We've decimated the gangs, collected the elemental gems to make Caliburn the archmage, and set everything up to take the fight to Therakiel himself... so hold on for a couple months while i go farm cosmics for GCR so I can get sufficiently good gear to actually do this." That's... really awkward.
Story content should be playable sequentially so the story flows. TT should be doable by a party of ATs with blue primary drops and R5 mods as played an average skill player. The VS alert difficulty is what the basic lair difficulty should have been. As Jaazaniah says - they should have fixed the eliteness slider, and current TT could be the elite difficulty version. And the difference between alert VS and TT VS pretty much is just a difference of hp, damage, etc...
Of course, we all know most of the 'content isn't hard enough'-crowd haven't set their difficulty level to elite since the gear rework (when elite meant better gear drops in APs/CSes), because it would take longer to farm stuff.
And who cares what TERA does. TERA is its own thing, with its own design. Superhard content in CO is so disjointed from the rest of the game that it feels out of place. Complaining about difficulty in a game like Path of Exile would be silly, but that game properly sets up suitable expectations. CO currently has a literal difficulty cliff.
Not really rebutting the 'spend weeks grinding for' complaint. In fact, Justice is arguably faster. (Except Legions, but effectively 'buy it with zen' isn't a good answer either).
I'd love to see the number of people who run TA on elite regularly, for the challenge. Best guess, that number is zero.
As you yourself admitted, you end up running lairs on elite only because you forget old characters have it enabled.
And if elite isn't 'hard enough', why aren't you clamoring for fixing the difficulty slider rather than insisting on pushing your gameplay preferences off on everyone.
Don't confuse rhetoric with ignorance. I know exactly how many it is, both ideally and on average.
(The 15625 number assumes safeguard catalysts on every single one of your fusing attempts, at which point you probably should be accounting for the cost in safeguards too. However, if you don't use any catalysts at all, you need substantially more R3s. Assuming 400 crafting skill, it takes an average of ~7.3 R8s to make an R9 with no catalysts, ~6.85 R7s to make an R8, and so on. That means it takes approximately 50 R7s to make an R9 with no catalyst. The number of R3s to get an R9 with no catalysts at all averages ~52,000).
Now, when you use a catalyst, and which catalyst, obviously makes a difference, but now you have to account for the cost in catalysts, and its doubtful you're using safeguards to fuse R3s. 15625-52000 is a huge range, and a using safeguards for fusing R7s and R8s, with no other catalyst, puts you at ~26,000 R3s plus an average of ~18 safeguard catalysts. For any given catalyst regime, it's possible to calculate the expected number, but expectation does not guarantee outcomes, and the underlying probability distributions have long tails of repeated failures that can rapidly increase the cost in practice - especially since even fusing up to an R9 isn't enough RNG draws (certainly at the higher mod ranks, which matter the most for overall expenditure) for the law of large numbers to kick in).
15625 should be enough to make anyone's head hurt, especially something that drops 1-2 at a time on an hour+ lair. But the fact that the real number is likely to be substantially higher makes it even worse.
That, in itself, is really bad design.
And fine. But don't make it a major story arc completion lair. The story arc should be able to be completed by just about anyone. Certainly don't take existing content away from everyone else.
If you want a challenge, do a story arc's final lair on an AT with only gear that's available as quest rewards in the story arc.
this reminds me of the infamous calculation someone did for Diablo 2. in theory you can simply collect a lot of El runes to make a Zod rune, but how many?
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Zod_Rune Then again, this is akin to calculating the number of rank 1 mods needed to make a Rank 33 mod. Since Diablo 2 has 33 runes, and you're taking the lowest level ones and making the highest level one.
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The difference being that in Diablo 2, all the runes drop, even Zod, so fusing runes was never the primary way to get the best runes. If up to R9s dropped in CO, it would be less of a problem - fusing would just be a convenience for small changes in rank at that point.
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