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toooldforthis
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I'm starting a dedicated thread to the new/old Fire and Ice Rampage, as it appears that it will require a bunch of work - meaning it will very likely take more than a few PTS builds and threads to get it ready for live. Feel free to chime in and correct anything that I got wrong.
A bunch of us went on to PTS this afternoon to begin testing, and we were somewhat hindered by trying to figure out what we were actually supposed to do - so an explanation of this by the devs might be somewhat helpful. Even with some fairly good builds and players, the longest we lasted before full party wipes was probably around 3-4 minutes. I'll provide some feedback on the experience in the next post.
I'm going to start with the attacks that I parsed from the combat logs. I may have missed one or two; please let me know and I'll edit this post to include them. All are base damage that doesn't include any resistances.
Kenina (fire based) -
Explosive potential - 5k
Brimstone rain - 1k
Fire blast - 14k
Fire (flame?) pillar - 16k (can damage Frosticus)
Unknown ability (may be fire blast at a longer range) - 14k
Clinging flames - minor
Frosticus (ice based)
Frozen dagger - 18-25k single target
Ice pillar - 14-18k (can damage Kenina - hit her for 270k, or 20k after her resists.)
Icy shatterblast - 1.6k
Ice block - 10-12k
Ice cage - as per ice power but possibly an exploding AOE attack if not broken.
Ice cage icy grasp DOT - about 700 per tick
The two bosses stand about 50-75' apart.
There are two far nastier attacks that each one has; I'm taking a few parts of the description from one of the players who posted a link to it. Each of these can do 80k of unblockable damage.
First are the individual player attacks.
Frozen Spires - Frosticus locks down one player with a series of icy spires. After 10 seconds this cage detonates, dealing 80,000 damage to the imprisoned player (per description - it may be an AOE). This cage can be broken before it detonates. This appears to be a supercharged ice cage (possibly with interrupt) but cannot be broken by z-mashing; it needs to be separately targeted and attacked and has around 3-4k hps.
Flaming (Firey?) Prison - Kenina roots a target for 2 seconds. After this root expires a flame prison coalesces. If any player but the imprisoned player walks into the prison, it detonates for 80,000 fire damage to all players. Additionally, if the imprisoned player leaves the prison, it will detonate for 80,000 fire damage to all players. This prison expires after 10 seconds. On the combat log, it will show up as 'unknown entity for players outside of her immediate combat range.
While firey prison can (and easily will) wipe the team, the other two nasty attacks are the two pet attacks that have charge timers over them (red for living flame, blue for living ice.) They appear to be targeted to appear right next to whatever player either villain chooses, but may not be in the direct line of sight to the villain.
Living Fire - Kenina summons a Living Fire. After 10 seconds it detonates for 80,000 fire damage to all players. If destroyed the flames instead grant the "Fire in your Veins" buff to nearby players, which increases damage dealt to Freon 2 for a short time. This buff stacks.
Living Ice - Freon II summons a Living Ice. After 10 seconds it detonates for 80,000 cold damage to all players. If destroyed the flames instead grant the "Ice in your Veins" buff to nearby players, which increases damage dealt to Kenina for a short time. This buff stacks.
Both living fire and living ice appear to be fairly easy to destroy as long as they are noticed; it appears they have somewhere around 3-4k hps, and an AOE attack like the neuro pulse generator is enough to knock them both out if they're on a player.
Furthermore, there is both lava and ice on the terrain to deal with. If on lava, players will take around 110 lava pool (fire) damage per tick, and if on ice, 140 frostbite (ice) damage.
Damage resistance for both villains is extreme. Without debuffs, I measured a 82 (650) shred and a 18 (126) flashfire attack, which translates to somewhere north of 85% actual mitigation, or by cryptic math, well over 700% DR. We weren't alive long enough for extensive tests of player debuffs like firesnake, but even with living flame/ice detonation buffs it doesn't look like damage penetration got much above 30%. It does not appear as if either villain is more vulnerable to their opposite number's damage, although the ice/fire pillars do hit them a lot harder than they do players.
It's also unclear what the range on some of the attacks actually is, as well as if they are randomly targeted. It does look like the range on some of the single player attacks exceeds 120' and both villains can and will target players who are aggroing their counterpart.
A bunch of us went on to PTS this afternoon to begin testing, and we were somewhat hindered by trying to figure out what we were actually supposed to do - so an explanation of this by the devs might be somewhat helpful. Even with some fairly good builds and players, the longest we lasted before full party wipes was probably around 3-4 minutes. I'll provide some feedback on the experience in the next post.
I'm going to start with the attacks that I parsed from the combat logs. I may have missed one or two; please let me know and I'll edit this post to include them. All are base damage that doesn't include any resistances.
Kenina (fire based) -
Explosive potential - 5k
Brimstone rain - 1k
Fire blast - 14k
Fire (flame?) pillar - 16k (can damage Frosticus)
Unknown ability (may be fire blast at a longer range) - 14k
Clinging flames - minor
Frosticus (ice based)
Frozen dagger - 18-25k single target
Ice pillar - 14-18k (can damage Kenina - hit her for 270k, or 20k after her resists.)
Icy shatterblast - 1.6k
Ice block - 10-12k
Ice cage - as per ice power but possibly an exploding AOE attack if not broken.
Ice cage icy grasp DOT - about 700 per tick
The two bosses stand about 50-75' apart.
There are two far nastier attacks that each one has; I'm taking a few parts of the description from one of the players who posted a link to it. Each of these can do 80k of unblockable damage.
First are the individual player attacks.
Frozen Spires - Frosticus locks down one player with a series of icy spires. After 10 seconds this cage detonates, dealing 80,000 damage to the imprisoned player (per description - it may be an AOE). This cage can be broken before it detonates. This appears to be a supercharged ice cage (possibly with interrupt) but cannot be broken by z-mashing; it needs to be separately targeted and attacked and has around 3-4k hps.
Flaming (Firey?) Prison - Kenina roots a target for 2 seconds. After this root expires a flame prison coalesces. If any player but the imprisoned player walks into the prison, it detonates for 80,000 fire damage to all players. Additionally, if the imprisoned player leaves the prison, it will detonate for 80,000 fire damage to all players. This prison expires after 10 seconds. On the combat log, it will show up as 'unknown entity for players outside of her immediate combat range.
While firey prison can (and easily will) wipe the team, the other two nasty attacks are the two pet attacks that have charge timers over them (red for living flame, blue for living ice.) They appear to be targeted to appear right next to whatever player either villain chooses, but may not be in the direct line of sight to the villain.
Living Fire - Kenina summons a Living Fire. After 10 seconds it detonates for 80,000 fire damage to all players. If destroyed the flames instead grant the "Fire in your Veins" buff to nearby players, which increases damage dealt to Freon 2 for a short time. This buff stacks.
Living Ice - Freon II summons a Living Ice. After 10 seconds it detonates for 80,000 cold damage to all players. If destroyed the flames instead grant the "Ice in your Veins" buff to nearby players, which increases damage dealt to Kenina for a short time. This buff stacks.
Both living fire and living ice appear to be fairly easy to destroy as long as they are noticed; it appears they have somewhere around 3-4k hps, and an AOE attack like the neuro pulse generator is enough to knock them both out if they're on a player.
Furthermore, there is both lava and ice on the terrain to deal with. If on lava, players will take around 110 lava pool (fire) damage per tick, and if on ice, 140 frostbite (ice) damage.
Damage resistance for both villains is extreme. Without debuffs, I measured a 82 (650) shred and a 18 (126) flashfire attack, which translates to somewhere north of 85% actual mitigation, or by cryptic math, well over 700% DR. We weren't alive long enough for extensive tests of player debuffs like firesnake, but even with living flame/ice detonation buffs it doesn't look like damage penetration got much above 30%. It does not appear as if either villain is more vulnerable to their opposite number's damage, although the ice/fire pillars do hit them a lot harder than they do players.
It's also unclear what the range on some of the attacks actually is, as well as if they are randomly targeted. It does look like the range on some of the single player attacks exceeds 120' and both villains can and will target players who are aggroing their counterpart.
Post edited by toooldforthis on
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As the event is currently structured, it has potential but is at present outright unplayable. Some (and perhaps much) of this may be our fault as players in not knowing how to deal with the mechanics, but there appear to be some glaring issues regardless.
1. Base damage for some of the attacks appears wildly high. Frost dagger can hit for up to 25k base on as little as a 2 second interval. Fire blast can hit up to 15k on much the same interval.
With a def-oriented defiance tank at around 200% damage resistance, frost dagger was routinely hitting for 6-7k. In comparison, Gravitar's gravity cascades (the ones that can hit up to three times in a row) hit for 6-8k pre-damage resistance, or a tough but manageable 2k with decent damage mitigation.
A full 3-strike hit amounting to 6k over a short period of time will force almost any player in Gravitar to drop out of the fight for a moment to block and heal while she turns her attention elsewhere; a good healer can probably keep them up, but if they do so they'll also likely draw immediate aggro from her. (Contrary to common belief, the grav pulses aren't random; they appear to be drawn by very short term spike damage or healing; Gravitar particularly hates rezzes as a 6-10k heal will get her immediate attention.)
6k post mitigation is reasonable with the caveat that the player might at least have a chance at a break. This is what makes Gravitar so hard to solo; it's possible, but even a really well designed toon has to be near-perfect if they are the only ones taking every attack.
6k damage post mitigation every two seconds is not. Even with a dedicated healer (and at one point in Fire and Ice, two), and sigils, and auras...that's almost impossible to keep up with unless the player who draws aggro is supposed to be blocking almost the entire encounter. Which leads to the next problem...
2. Many of the high damage attacks lack the cartoon bubbles over the head of the villains, and some don't seem to even have an animation.
It's my opinion that if you intentionally force a player into a massive-defense role to block most of the encounter in order to survive, it is going to make this an extremely difficult rampage to attract anyone to play; most players like to feel like they're contributing even a little bit, and it's going to take a special type of tank to survive this (see below.) Even then, to maintain aggro they're going to have to drop their block occasionally, and add ice cage hold on top of this and they will eventually get a free shot at you.
Unfortunately, many of the high damage attacks have zero preview in animation. Maybe this is just the fault of the players for not noticing signs or figuring out what procs the attack, but frost dagger in particular had no animation besides the actual attack - meaning that it is a 25k attack that is essentially impossible to consistently block.
If it's actually a block (somewhat hard to tell), ice block too seemed a bit off; despite crippling challenges that should have disabled it, it provided extreme damage.
3. Mixing the damage types will make this extremely difficult for anything but a very high DR or very high dodge tank to even last briefly. A further complication here is that since both villains seem free to attack, mixing fire and ice damage creates some real issues.
There is no defensive passive focused on elemental damage that can provide good protection against both fire and ice damage. For elemental-focused offensive passives, firey form gets to around 90%+ DR against fire, but is only about 25% effective against ice. The reverse is true for ice form. There is also little in the way of easily available equipment that can provide elemental damage mitigation, unlike the armadillo set for physical damage.
Thus, unless there is an intention to create a new elemental or non-physical defensive passive, tanks are going to have to use whatever they can find to create extremely high levels of damage mitigation. A LR dodge tank may actually fare best here if they can get up to around 95% mitigation. For DR tanks, it is likely to be the 100% DR of defiance or possibly even the 90% of AoRP, and more than likely Ebon Void with another 100% DR from the stacks.
4. Flaming prison should be changed to wipe out only the player imprisoned, and probably only if they move rather than someone moving into them.
Many of the party wipes came from the simple act of someone getting flaming prison on them and not noticing, moving, and detonating an 80k attack. Others came from someone else not noticing, moving into the prison, and doing the same.
It is very likely that a standard alert PUG will attract at least one or two players who will in all likelihood detonate flaming prison from their ignorance and routinely wipe the party. This seems unreasonable.
Furthermore, the wandering-into aspect of the prison really makes it very tough for any but a single meleer on any of the bosses; it would be very easy for another meleer to accidentally set it off simply by not noticing for a microsecond, moving, and wiping the entire party. Even wiping out the individual trapped due to someone else's error seems a bit unfair. Players should have control over whether or not they die from their own actions.
5. It's not entirely clear if there's a full 10 second timer on the Living Fire/Ice pets, and they should be placed in front of the player they're assigned to rather than to the side.
It felt more like it was about a 5 second timer, but the bigger issue is that it was often just very hard to see the pets unless you spent a lot of time watching for them. Compare that to Gravitar's bubbles; there isn't any way you'll miss them.
6. At first glance, the damage resistance here appears to be a bit much. The general model for bosses is for fairly heavy damage resistance that can be overcome but a lot of HPs to lengthen the fight. Hard to tell if these villains are designed to change this model since they have about 2 million HPs each, but if so, I would recommend against it - it is far more enjoyable as a player to see larger numbers from attacks take tiny chunks out of a huge number than have tiny bits of damage slowly take larger chunks.
Either way the goal here should be a fight that runs roughly the same duration as Gravitar. I'm not sure that 85% damage mitigation going to 70% on 2 million HPs will accomplish that.
Most of this has been written from the tank role. Part of this is that that is what I was doing during the event, but its also fairly clear that holding aggro here - and keeping the tank alive - will be a lot more important than in most other alerts or high level encounters, which also means there needs to be some thought about if you really do want damage at a level that will require dedicated healers. That's also something for the devs to think about. It may very well be that we as players didn't hold aggro well enough, or didn't watch for attacks well enough, but I think it's pretty clear that there are some other issues going on too.
Last, some guidance from the devs on if we're getting the mechanics wrong might be of assistance; we had open questions, for instance, on if keeping the villains apart helped. Thanks.
This alert has some interesting mechanics, and a lot of potential. I really enjoy a challenging alert, but this one was very difficult to test. Most of our attempts ended abruptly with one of the several insta-kill mechanics, and left us guessing (often incorrectly) at exactly what happened. Having a dev present to explain the mechanics and answer questions would have helped us give more accurate feedback.
The information below is my best guess at the causes of some team wipes, and why they might be problematic if brought Live:
The summoned objects, particularly Frozen Spires, are very difficult to click-target.
Since defeating them within a few seconds is a life-or-death task, the hard-to-find hitboxes are a concern. Frozen Spires also seems to have a rather short duration, considering the level of team coordination needed to identify and destroy it before it downs a team member. And as toooldforthis mentioned, summoning the Living Fire/Ice to the side of a character makes them very difficult to notice, especially if a player's camera is zoomed in.
Flaming Prison
Once we built around the extreme damage output and got the hang of the Living Fire and Living Ice, the Flaming Prison was what consistently killed us. I agree with toooldforthis's suggestion to make it only affect the trapped player, and only if that player moves outside of it. A few things that made Flaming Prison so difficult were:
-If a player dies while inside Flaming Prison, the prison seems to register this as "leaving", and detonates. Combined with the previously mentioned targeting difficulty for Frozen Spires, a character who is Spired then Prisoned will likely die and wipe the entire team.
-If two characters are fighting close together, a Flaming Prison on one of those characters appears to be immediately detonated by the other. I don't believe either character was moving when this occurred, but it happened very fast. If that's how it works, this mechanic would be especially problematic when more than one melee character is attacking one of the villains.
-Pets appear to trigger the Flaming Prison's detonation. This was from an earlier run, so I don't know whether it's completely accurate. If it is, though, it makes having pets an enormous liability. Pseudopets like Fire Snake and Ball Lightning weren't a problem.
-Something in the alert causes knockback. We never pinpointed exactly what it was...but it seemed very sudden and surprising. If that knock causes a character to breach the Flaming Prison, it's a team wipe.
-Flaming Prison always spawned on the ground. If its target was flying above its radius, it instantly detonated. This isn't as big an issue as some of the other concerns, since staying grounded nullifies it. But removing flight as an option leaves fewer viable attack formations, where characters are spaced at least 25 feet apart to avoid each other's Prisons. This spacing becomes increasingly difficult for characters with shorter-range attacks.
I'd like to see some sort of explosion effects to accompany a Flaming Prison or Living Fire/Ice detonation. In the current implementation, we just suddenly drop to the ground and check our combat logs to figure out what happened.
Possible Bugs
-In one attempt, we took down Frosticus. After he fell, the team wiped from a Flaming Prison detonation. The Team-Up window showed that we had failed (red X over the "Defeat Kenina Blaze" objective), but we were never prompted to leave the alert. So we rezzed and kept fighting, and found that Kenina's damage resistance seemed far higher than it usually was. I'm not sure whether this was because we lost the buffs from the Living Ice, or if it was a glitch.
-When I was teamed and queued for the alert, I entered the Powerhouse briefly. After zoning back to Millennium City, there was a duplicate "Fire and Ice" icon below Gravitar on my alert bar. Repeating the zone transfer removed the duplicate icon, but doing so again brought it back. My teammate was unable to duplicate this bug. I was team leader at the time.
-When entering the instance with our pre-made teams, we seemed to have a high incidence of separation, where several players were removed from the alert.
Some things I liked about the alert:
I liked the fire-and-ice effects on the street, and that standing in certain areas damaged you. We wanted to test whether pulling the villains onto the opposing-element terrain made a difference, but we couldn't coordinate it in time.
I like that there are uses for tanks, support, and damage dealers.
Mechanics notwithstanding, Flaming Prison looks pretty cool.
Over-all the villains in this alert are very overpowered as it is right now ....
That being said if the balance can be corrected it looks like it will be a great alert ...... But the balance needs to be fixed!
Thanks!
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Are the villain's attacks using primarily Fire and Cold damage?
These are both elemental damage types, and some toons have high resistances for elemental damage.
Is part of the strategy to get the two villains to damage each other with their pillar attacks?
Has anyone gone into the Rampage with Skarn's Bane yet?
If the villains have removable energy form passives, Skarn's has a huge impact.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
Also, do smoke nades work? Do ice nades interrupt?
Overall it was fun until the party wipes. And they were plentiful.
Kenina Blaze uses Fire and Crushing. Fire is her MAIN damage type.
Frosticious uses Cold Damage.
As far as I could tell, Fire Form and Ice Form protected you from environmental damage only (the environment they are in can hurt you) and did little to help against elemental attacks.
Having said that, I didn't look to check if certain attacks were less painful on Solaris (my Fire toon) vs Mentella.
Pillars - These can damage players and villains. If you get K's Flame Pillar to hit Frosty then he will be damaged AND you'll be buffed to do more damage against him. Visa versa for Frosty on K. What is needed it targeting reticules like Gravitar has so we can see the size of the impact AND who it is targeting.
I distinctly remember Kaiserin tanking Kenina and Frosty and guiding their pillars to hit her whilst she was near the other villain causing considerable damage to the villain. I think it just needs to be clearer.
I didn't notice any passives on the bosses so Skarn's shouldn't interact with anything on a special level like that.
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Also as previous mentioned it seems the alert Queue has a bad tendency to kick half the group. i believe that is because it tries to group chronologically but when a group of 5 queues, then a solo player, then another group of 5 queue, the first group and the solo player get priority forcing the entire second group to get kicked because there are too many people in the alert.
As for the fire prison i think that may need to be changed. Failing that mechanic should hurt the team but not outright wipe them. I think it would be better if it only killed those stuck inside and the one who failed the mechanic in the first place. Another thing i noticed with that mechanic, with certain graphic settings it isn't always visible. At one point i saw it flickering in and out of existence which I predict to be a major issue down the line. I think there should be an effect display priority. Enemy effects should take first priority, followed be the player, followed by the group, followed by everyone else.
As for the "living crystals" i think their mechanics are fine but they can use a longer timer and more hit points. At least long enough for a chunk of people to get the buff, but still dangerous to neglect. Frozen spires are fine as well, but with all these target-able mechanics i think their targeting box need to be larger and when they are destroyed they should disappear almost immediately. It is a little nerve-racking to have an angry crystal of doom or 2 staring you down and there is nothing you can do about it.
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I've always thought the "vector tell" graphics used in Gravitar and Firewing are great mechanics, giving players a reasonable chance to prepare for a deadly attack. I'd like to see that implemented with Flaming Prison, where a Firewing-style orange "vector bubble" appears around the target and follows him, then a few seconds later the Prison activates. This would give other players a bit of time to move out of range, which is very important if you don't want to limit the number of melee characters to 2-or-die.
I stated before that the Prison should only effect the person inside, but I think I prefer the other idea of making the prison only effect those who touch it - and the prison remains in place for its full duration rather than detonating. If the imprisoned player tries to leave, only that player dies. If a player tries to enter the ring, only that player dies. If more than one player is inside the edge of the ring, both survive as long as they don't touch the edge. So basically, change it to "touch the ring and only you die" rather than "get anywhere near your teammates and blow up the whole team". Combined with the vector tell, I think the Prison mechanic would be much more enjoyable. It would also help make pets and melee viable (though more difficult) options. To accommodate such a change, the Prison would likely have to be able to spawn around airborne players, rather than always on the ground.
Adding a vector tell to Frozen Spires would also be a good idea. Currently, the graphic for it isn't very noticeable in the heat of combat. So it's up to the imprisoned player to yell for help, at which point it's usually too late to break them free. A preemptive blue vector column would give the team some warning to stop DPS'ing and gang up on the Spires.
Currently, when the Living Fire and Living Ice are destroyed, they stick around for a while with no hitbox... but they still look the same as when they're active. Once destroyed, I'd like to see them emit some sort of aura to notify players that they are no longer a threat. The aura could also be a visual cue to get the stacking damage buff, not unlike the pulses from the yin yang in Hi Pan's custom alert.
Actually, when I went through the log Firey Form and Stormbringer (ice) did seem to work as advertised against the respective damage types. (Vec actually switched a few times.) The problem is that since the bosses don't seem to have any range restriction, you're going to get hit with both types of damage while both are still alive. While it's great to have ~90%+ DR against one type, you'll always be paper thin at ~25% against the other.
This does offer the tantalizing possibility of switching between the forms from one boss to another if the aggro of the second boss can be managed until the first one is taken down. That would also depend on making the damage of both bosses a bit more reasonable, though.
Basically, a few things have worked so far to not immediately wipe the party. It'll happen eventually given the broken nature of the consistent damage and triggers for the 80k damage, but here's what we've been briefing pre-alert:
1. One player tanks one of the bosses while the other 9 converge on the other boss.
2. Everyone must stand a minimum of 25' away from each other to not automatically trigger fire cage's wipe.
3. No pets allowed. Firesnake, Lightning Ball, and such are fine, but the controllable ones can easily set off fire cage.
4. No travel powers allowed. Being in the air also can proc bad things. And if you're knocked, stay where you are.
5. If you've got an ice cage on you, shout it out so that other players can target it and stop the wipe.
First, it makes sense to just disable fire cage for now for testing purposes.. It's responsible for something like 90% of party wipes, it's got major issues in how it procs those wipes, and all this doesn't allow much in the way of what we're trying to accomplish, which is to test the full fight.
I'm guessing disabling the attack in a quick patch would a lot easier than trying to fix it; that can be done later once the other stuff in the alert gets worked on and fire cage can be reintroduced. Not having routine party wipes would also make it easier to attract more people to test, since most of us aren't gonna stop hunting Bloodmoon stuff only to spend 15 minutes getting enough people to do a 3 minute fight before a party wipe. I haven't seen a single PTS group request all day, for instance.
Second, was doing some back of the envelope math on the damage resistance and DPS output that may illustrate a bit more why I argue for a tweaking.
Gravi has a little under 3M hps, and somewhere between 35-45% damage mitigation depending on what you're throwing at her. The average good Gravi fight without a lot of wipes runs somewhere in the 7-8 minute range. The math is fairly inexact as players have ways to debuff her so that the mitigation is reduced or completely eliminated, but for the sake of argument, let's use that 8 minute figure, 35% mitigation, and 3M HPs to come up with a party of ten producing:
3M damage * 1/(1-.35)= 4.6 million base damage over 8 minutes
8 minutes = 480 seconds
DPS per team = 4.6M/480 = 9583
Feels a bit low, but lets use it for the sake of argument for now, and round it up to 10k DPS to make the math a little easier.
The two bosses in Fire and Ice have 4M HPs in between them.
Their base damage mitigation is 85%.
At 10k DPS -
10000 *(1-.85) = 1500 DPS
4M HPs /1500 DPS = 2666 seconds
2666 seconds = 44 minutes
Again, this is merely a starting point for a discussion. From the logs, we know that blowing up the living fire/ice will get their damage mitigation 'down' to 70%, but it's unclear how long that lasts. We're also nowhere close to discovering what (if any) debuffs might work on them, or if they're vulnerable to a particular type of damage. We do know that dragging the pillar attacks will produce 270k damage pre-mitigation, but how to do this routinely remains a mystery.
But basically, I think it should give the devs some pause for thought. Even if the rewards are superb, it's unlikely many are going to fight a 30-40 minute rampage routinely.
Sadly, missions that the majority of players can do and enjoy are always going to be castigated by the hardcore types as "pitifully easy" because of the massive gap between the average player and someone bent on scraping every last bit of power from the freeform system, whether simply because they can or because they have to in order to compete with the PvP fans who will do anything they can get away with in order to win.
Living Fire, Living Ice, and Frozen Spire
The biggest issue I see is with targeting. They are nearly impossible to click-target and tab-targeting was the only way I could reliably target them. Sometimes we had attentive players with far reaching PBAoEs (Lead Tempest, Epidemic, etc.) and they would easily destroy nearby spawned objects since they didn't need to target them. While such powers are popular, they should not be a necessity.
The other issue is that Living Fire and Living Ice when destroyed, leave no visual indication to indicate such. This means players may think those objects are not yet destroyed and will futilely spend time trying to target them. This may simply be a lack of animation since the Alert is not yet finished, but I mention it just in case it's not.
Fire Prison, A.K.A. "The Fiery Ring of Instant Wipe"
As others said, this needs to be toned down. Allow multiple players and/or pets inside without triggering it. A simple "touch the ring and die" combined with an AoE of Instant Death to those inside and maybe 5' or 10' outside would be more reasonable. As it stands, it suffers from what I call "the Ao'Qephoth problem", where a player who doesn't know what he is doing (or is trolling/griefing) can directly mess up the run for everyone else who knows what they're doing. Compare with Baron Cimet?re, the distant second as most hated Alert boss, who only punishes those who don't know what they're doing rather than punishing the entire team directly.
Incompleteness aside, I really liked this Alert and the potential that it has. There are two bosses, so it's not the usual monolithic tank-and-spank. DPS has a role other than mindlessly spam attacks on the boss until it drops, which is to keep an eye out for spawned objects and take them down quickly (Frozen Spires in particular). The large damage (including those of the instagib magnitude) combined with the usual lockout makes healers and rezzers desirable. It is possible for this Rampage Alert to be just as challenging as Gravitar yet be more accessible to non-hardcore min-maxers. Fire & Ice requires some strategy, and teamwork is a definite must. Players won't be able to solo this without some form of exploit; you're not going to be able to break out of the Frozen Spire hold yourself, and it will kill you if not destroyed. Unlike Gravitar, there's no rez-tracking and no (quasi-?)random multiple spikes of 4K damage. Gravitar encouraged players to layer up on defenses and healing on themselves, which is a major component of the player power gap issue. Fire & Ice, on the other hand, seems to test the player behind the character more than the other way around.
I have an idea for a tactic. This may or may not work and if it does, will lead to a potential bug/abuse that needs to be patched. For the sake of both, I will simply post it.
1. The person tanking Kenina should simply tag her without too much aggro and then move next to Frosticus. Likewise, the person tanking Frosticus should simply tag him without too much aggro and then move next to Kenina.
2. Kenina and Frosticus will attack their respective targets but will also damage each other in the process. Since the tanks did not have much aggro, Kenina and Frosticus will aggro each other.
Unfortunately the hardcore types are most of the people on PTS.
I admire their dedication [and lack of a life :P] but it really throws the curve for the rest of us. OTOH this is a Rampage, so... *shrug*
Here we are now going to the West Side
Weapons in hand as we go for a ride
Some may come and some may stay
Watching out for a sunny day
Where there's love and darkness and my sidearm
In game as @forgemccain
This would allow greater ease in making phases for them. An example could be that at 33%, they vanish and a fire/ice colossus takes their place, we enter a Rimefire burst phase, and players need to somehow drop debuffs, or else they will have the power spammed on them.
Please come up with something better. Frosticus will generate a lot of player ridicule.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
I think that players would have no problem with a 30-40 minute rampage if it was done right. Everyone loves the comic series for example. No one wants to whomp on a boss for 40 minutes.
If I may indulge my all-time favorite "alert-type-thingy' from STO: Mine trap. Multiple phases, and NO END BOSS AT ALL. It's great, and it's very popular despite being one of the longest of their alerts. You have a lot to do, there's a point for every role, and you never feel like a complete wimp who can't hurt that one enemy even with 9 of your friends helping.
which is my biggest gripe about gravitar and most of the other bosses. They make my characters feel non-super. more intro-phase action and a shorter more exciting climax feels super. 30 minutes hitting someone who can 1-shot me, feels like a civilian trying to take down superman.
Why bosses need to have one-shot, party killing attacks that you can't do much about, are super buggy, and easily exploited by trolls is beyond me.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
This. So much this.
Have they fixed the graphical effect priority on the fire/ice stuff so you can always see the party wiping things or can one person with AoED screw over the entire group still?
Initially, I thought that sounded cool, envisioning lava everywhere. Or deadly snow piles. After watching the twitch stream, I was very disappointed. Instead, I see a lot of standing around. Not even the bosses move. I thought this was an action MMO. Where's the action part?
I'd like to see a reason for people to do something other than "stand here and press 1 to win". Don't we have enough sacks of HP fights? The melee guy only moved because the ranged guys where too lazy to click on a different target. How about some aggressive AI with that fight? Make the bosses get up into people's faces and drop death pools. Think you're safe as a ranged DPS? Frosty drops an ice field under you that does constant, massive damage if you don't move. What's-her-face could rush across the ground, leaving a flaming trail in her wake, and uppercut someone.
Instead of that ridiculous party wipe move, why not have Frosty and Fire Lady move together (the tell) and perform a massive AoE attack that will kill anyone not blocking. You have to pay attention and if you die, it's your fault for not blocking. Bonus, your pets don't die if you block.
High risk / high reward is running around with HP so low you can be killed in a single hit because you have gear that give a huge damage buff at low health. It's not having to destroy an object so that some doesn't get one-shotted.
Where is this game? Its sounds really cool and I'd like to play it.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
One thing I did like about cyberlord was needing to find the right buff zone and get to it and back. Plus different buffs for ranged and melee zones so you couldn't just mindlessly follow your friends.
The Brawler tree (I think I have it right), has an option to increase damage (and/or crit) when you're behind an enemy. Giving both villains that specific buff to damage and an AI that likes to move would be very interesting if they also liked to shoot at people attacking thier friend. Like five fire ice's aggro list and ice fire's list. Now you have to move to keep them from getting a big damage buff for hitting you in the back. And because you're moving they'll move too.
Obviously would need to drop the base damage numbers though. But that seems to be the case anyway already.
Shared HP pool.
Phase 1: Alternating as the patch notes say.
Phase 2: Simultaneous, like the iteration we played before.
Phase 3: Mechanics switch. Phase 1 and 2 mechanics cease. Both bosses stand together, assume a floating Socrates-like pose with backs to eachother, and gain a force field of immunity.
Travel powers are suppressed. There are callouts for Frosticus subphases and Kenina Subphases, as well as Rimefire Burst.
Kenina subphase: Heat levels rise, granting flight to all players in the encounter. Dodge lava eruptions, or you will be tagged with clinging flames. Purge the stacks by running to the environmental snow.
Frosticus subphase: It's so cold, you can barely move. Cannot run faster than 100%. No vertical movement beyond jumping. Don't get hit with falling chunks of ice, or you will get tagged with chilled. Purge the stacks by standing in or touching fire hazards in the zone.
Rimefire subphase: The shield begins to shimmer, both villains channel, and rimefire burst strikes all non-pet entities in the map. Anyone with clinging flames is flipped to chilled, and vice versa. Anyone with both effects is instantly killed.
After rimefire burst, the villains will bicker over survivors, causing the shield to break due to pushing and shoving. This is your chance to damage them!
A dynamic series of rounds is fun to play, and rewards plpayers that pay attention.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
Alert has lost a lot of bite to it now that the fire and ice cages are no longer an auto wipe. The alert went from "We're having a lot of trouble beating this" to "We beat this first try."
Brou has a sound idea when it comes to adding phases to these two. The fight felt boring this time around, hitting bags of HP while occasionally tending to a mechanic with no change of scenery. Failure seemed low to null as there's nothing preventing players from being rezzed or self rezzing, and the insta wipe mechanics are easily tended to.
My role was tanking Frosticus, who appears to be the hard hitter of the two. I took the opportunity to try out a Defiant build and LR build. The difference was night and day, with LR being the top performer by a landslide.
At first I thought the LR build would lose out on threat and dps as I was using Fluidity to keep up my dodge, however this proved to be false as I had to spend just as much time, if not more on the Defiant build playing defensively as I was taking far greater amounts of damage.
The one drawback to LR during this fight is when you are trapped in an Ice cage and can no longer maintain your buffs. However this can be mitigated by keeping your active defenses on standby.
I'll work out some data and post in an appropriate thread regarding further findings with Dodge's performance on PTS.
Frozen Spires
Frozen Spires, modeled by the always-fashionable Kaiserin
* Frozen Spires is knockable, and doing so appears to free the trapped player whether the Spires are destroyed or not. I'm not sure whether this is intended.
* After it is destroyed, Frozen Spires becomes untargetable but graphically lingers on the screen. This makes it tough for players to tell which Spires are active and which have been destroyed.
* Frozen Spires is still very difficult to click-target due to its hard-to-find hitbox.
Frozen Dagger
* Frozen Dagger hits extremely hard, enough to one-shot most players who are not blocking. The animation is difficult to detect, which makes blocking problematic. I would recommend taking the "BAM!" warning away from Ice Cages (or whichever Frosticus power currently uses it) and giving it to Frozen Dagger.
Flaming Prison
Flaming Prison, worn by style guru Vecna
* If a player is inside another's Flaming Prison when the Prison first starts, the player's presence does not detonate the Prison as long as that player does not move.
* Eruption does not protect against Flaming Prison's damage.
* Teleporting into a Flaming Prison causes it to explode.
* Pets still detonate the Prison. As I understand, this is a known issue being corrected.
* Using Vapor Form to escape the Prison will detonate it, damaging nearby allies. However, the Vapor Form user is unharmed (watch the street next to Kenina at 10:40 in the demorecord file linked below).
General
* Ice Grenades does seem to interrupt. Though in some cases, the villain immediately began recasting the interrupted attack.
* As Kaiserin mentioned, the fight feels monotonous. I agree that Brou's "phases" suggestion would bring some much-needed variation to the alert.
* I like that the fight resets after failure, rather than kicking everyone out to re-queue. However, once a player re-enters the blue "start the fight" portal, everyone else only has 10 seconds to follow or else they are locked out. If this is a mechanic planned for Live, I would like to see it given the Gravitar treatment, where any players still inside the "lockout dome" are automatically pulled into the active area when the fight begins.
* When one of our team members died and recovered into the "lockout dome", that player tried using Teleport to Teammate and was kicked from the instance. I'm not sure whether this is intended.
In the end, we had a good laugh at the reward. We're all going to retire and buy yachts.
Jacob has the right attitude
My demorecord of our first successful run was corrupted, but I did get a clean demo file of the second run. For anyone who wants to vicariously poke around the alert, here's a link: Fire and Ice demo file. WARNING: It's a titanic 88MB file.
We were testing some specific tactics in that run. So when you see us do something unusual, like me teleporting straight into a Flaming Prison, I claim science over stupidity
Maybe it's just me but Flaming Prison seems...backwards. At least as far as the intended goal. In a boss fight that's supposed to be action packed and dynamic you have a mechanic that forces players to stand still. I think the concept that would be better would be for the Flaming Prison to do heavy damage that lingers on the field so the goal is to get out of it. This would better shake players up from just standing in place and would allow the lava/ice pools to be of more worth for the battle since players would need to avoid those while getting out of the Flaming Prisons. Lingering briefly could also allow it to work off the friendly fire idea among the enemies.
Though Kevin Poe style gun fu backflips would be too much, some sort of special mobility on the bosses would add more to the dynamic feel. Likewise, a mix of knockback, knockto, and Nailed to the Ground would also help with the above concepts.
While players have made comments about the worth of Energy Storm in its current state, I'd argue that a fire and ice duo are the very set of enemies where it would make sense for them to have an NPC variant.
-Sterga
Secondly, Frost Dagger... really? Seriously? REALLY? 25k to the face without warning, implication, or even so much as appearing to get aggro? There are words that are impolite to use here, but rest assured they all come to mind and should be shouted at the devs.
The ice cages, the pets... hell if I know. There were so many random one shots in that thing I just left in disgust. I was shooting ice cages, but didn't have time to see if anyone else was.
My issue here is simple. The dev's have jam packed one hit kills into this thing. Every time I see 1 hit kills, I ask the following: Why do I have hit points? Why do I have heals? Why did I even bother to get levels?
I put up with 1 hit kills in Gradius because in Gradius, I'm just as dangerous as the enemies. One shots in games like this get dev's flamed, and deservedly so. All the equipment, all the effort you've put in doesn't matter because someone got twitchy.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
1. I'm with Spinny on this one. Pay attention, prepare, and it's not that hard. I quite enjoy it to be honest.
2. Where was Tau when this thing was on PTS? It's live now. This thread is kinda pointless at this stage to be perfectly honest except for if, heaven forbid, some kind of gamebreaking bug were to show up. <knocks on wood>
Join Date: Aug 2009 | Title: Devslayer
BTW, I did it tonight on two toons...neither had Con Superstatted. Oh and those were PUGs just because I masochistically wanted to see what it was like. I'm also not having your sound issue but that does not make it less of a sound issue just because I have not experienced it.
Honestly, and don't take this too harshly, I just think you wanted to make a post so you could on and on about "TRINITY Arghhh!" Transcend beyond the Trinity. Rise above it. Be....HEROIC. :cool:
Join Date: Aug 2009 | Title: Devslayer
Yes, because this rampage affects RP'ers so much.
"Oh no we had a rampage added that has some mechanic we don't like too much. Lets go roleplay in another game with even easier PvE content."
"Take that holy trinity!"
A Playlist of my CO PvP video's (starting from post nerf PTS team duels)
You don't know me very well, do you? MMO and Luck almost never meet in my world.
Join Date: Aug 2009 | Title: Devslayer
A Playlist of my CO PvP video's (starting from post nerf PTS team duels)
And how do you think I feel having to read your rants all the time how you say you are leaving the game. Good for you, do what you want but does everyone throughout the forums need to hear all about it? It almost seems you are just here to whine about anything you can.
A Playlist of my CO PvP video's (starting from post nerf PTS team duels)