Kiga - There must be another way.

xrazamax · March 2018

I find the current meta's strategy of relying on 1 person to CC all four of kiga's hounds to be kinda wonky.

To be fair, it is a bit ingenious and when this strategy is employed right and some times it works incredibly well. So no hard feelings to those who came up with doing things this way and I'm not trying to start an argument. However, there are a couple of glaring issues beyond allowing a single point of failure:

It is hard to setup.
Requires specialized builds to do well.
The strategy is prone to failing due either to bad luck or weird aggro AI.
When it fails, it does so CATASTROPHICALLY. The whole attempt must be reset.
It is tremendously vulnerable to trolling.
SO MUCH pressure is put on ONE PERSON to keep the whole thing together. I think this is bad beyond having a single failure point. It is demoralizing for that player and the entire group when you see one player struggle.

In addition, the need to rush a tank up to kiga at the same time the CC starts on the hounds means you are absolutely committed to the fight. CCer needs tank to go, tanks need dps for tombs, everyone needs the healers. That means if there is an error early on, there are huge wipes on the altar near kiga. Unlike Dino, we can't say, "Yeah, it is fine, the fight is set up. Squishy dps you guys come in now."

So as a community, can we think of ways to mitigate some of these risk during the encounter?

markhawkman · March 2018

There's also the multi-tank configuration. You can just tank the hounds for the fight. But it takes more people and works best if you can interrupt howls. The CC approach has 1 or two people on dogs everyone else on Kiga.

So yeah, have tanks play with dogs in both spots.

I've never SEEN people do it, but I've heard it's been done.

pantagruel01 · March 2018

There are several methods other than the single CCer, but they're all harder to setup and require more people with specialized builds than the single CCer. The most common alternate setup the double CC, the second CC either just functions as a tank that happens to be able to tank without breaking CC, or helps by trading holds to make bridging less of a hassle.

jaazaniah1 · March 2018

I'd kind of like to know what the dev's expectation was here? Were we supposed to have multiple tanks and healers dealing with the dogs, and the single CCer is an aberration of the original intent; or, was the single CCer envisioned from the beginning as the easiest approach?

I wish there was some actual use for more than a single tank at Kiga (beyond having a tank pull for the CC during phase 2, though not all CCers need a puller, while MT scurries to the altar). Show up with another tank and you should shift to hybrid and take off your OV secondaries so you don't grab aggro and screw everything up. I wish soak tanks had a use there.

pantagruel01 · March 2018

jaazaniah1 said:
I'd kind of like to know what the dev's expectation was here? Were we supposed to have multiple tanks and healers dealing with the dogs, and the single CCer is an aberration of the original intent; or, was the single CCer envisioned from the beginning as the easiest approach?

Originally multiple tanks were envisioned, solo CC took probably two months to evolve. Before solo CC, kiga was seen as the most difficult cosmic by far.

jaazaniah1 · March 2018

I remember how it evolved, everyone waiting for 5 tanks and 7 healers to show up. I just wasn't clear on if that was the intention.

xrazamax · March 2018

Why just one ccer? Would it not be easier still to split the hounds in say groups of two? Wouldn't that make CCing less prone to failing with a wayward hound?

pantagruel01 · March 2018

xrazamax said:
Why just one ccer? Would it not be easier still to split the hounds in say groups of two? Wouldn't that make CCing less prone to failing with a wayward hound?

It's quite difficult to split the dogs due to how their aggro works, and since one hound howling wakes up all the dogs, it doubles the possible points of failure.

qawsada · March 2018

xrazamax said:
Why just one ccer? Would it not be easier still to split the hounds in say groups of two? Wouldn't that make CCing less prone to failing with a wayward hound?

One of the main problem with the first method of doing kiga, which was getting 4 dog tanks with some healers, was getting those players at all. You would have to wait until the roles are fill, and most people generally don't want to do those role. Having one CCer usually eliminated that problem.

pantagruel01 · March 2018

jaazaniah1 said:
I remember how it evolved, everyone waiting for 5 tanks and 7 healers to show up. I just wasn't clear on if that was the intention.

We figured out that it could be done in principle some time before anyone actually pulled it off, and as far as I could tell Kaiserin was surprised but not concerned.

markhawkman · March 2018

Do you actually need to interrupt regularly if you're not trying to sleep dogs? I seem to remember someone saying the buff howl gives has a range it gets applied in.

qawsada · March 2018

markhawkman said:
Do you actually need to interrupt regularly if you're not trying to sleep dogs? I seem to remember someone saying the buff howl gives has a range it gets applied in.

Yes. Howl wake up all dogs regardless of range.

pantagruel01 · March 2018

markhawkman said:
Do you actually need to interrupt regularly if you're not trying to sleep dogs? I seem to remember someone saying the buff howl gives has a range it gets applied in.

The buff has a fairly short range (though it can stack on itself, which is annoying all by itself), but it wakes up other dogs at a much longer range.

xrazamax · March 2018

pantagruel01 said:
The buff has a fairly short range (though it can stack on itself, which is annoying all by itself), but it wakes up other dogs at a much longer range.

If you were to then try to split the dogs between two CCers, if one CCer lost their hounds long enough for a buff to go off it would wake up the other CCer's hounds?

markhawkman · March 2018

pantagruel01 said:

markhawkman said:
Do you actually need to interrupt regularly if you're not trying to sleep dogs? I seem to remember someone saying the buff howl gives has a range it gets applied in.
The buff has a fairly short range (though it can stack on itself, which is annoying all by itself), but it wakes up other dogs at a much longer range.

So if you separate them while tanking them, howl doesn't do as much? Of course the trick is to separate them as they like to all aggro the same dude.

pantagruel01 · March 2018

xrazamax said:
If you were to then try to split the dogs between two CCers, if one CCer lost their hounds long enough for a buff to go off it would wake up the other CCer's hounds?

Yes.

markhawkman said:
So if you separate them while tanking them, howl doesn't do as much? Of course the trick is to separate them as they like to all aggro the same dude.

If you separate them, they don't build up buff stacks as fast and it's easier to interrupt stack building, though it's harder to wipe all stacks by just holding all of them for 20+ seconds.

morigosa · March 2018

I do remember the days of dog-tanking; one of my characters is still set up to be able to tank one dog with little to no healer support. On the one hand, I kinda miss being able to be useful as a secondary tank there. On the other hand, I definitely don't miss waiting for enough tanks/healers to show up, nor do I miss issues where a sufficiently fast kill meant dog tanks didn't get credit.

riverocean · March 2018

qawsada said:

xrazamax said:
Why just one ccer? Would it not be easier still to split the hounds in say groups of two? Wouldn't that make CCing less prone to failing with a wayward hound?
One of the main problem with the first method of doing kiga, which was getting 4 dog tanks with some healers, was getting those players at all. You would have to wait until the roles are fill, and most people generally don't want to do those role. Having one CCer usually eliminated that problem.

Yup. I remember multiple healers and tanks splitting up (or at least trying to) the hounds. The issue was not enough people with well built enough tanks and healers. CO caters to solo dps players (as do most MMO's these days), so there were never enough of those around.

But now we have the problem, that this encounter is reliant on a few players with specific CC builds. What happens if that handful of players quit? Or just gets tired of CC tanking? I mean we could try the old way again, but then we're back to not having enough properly build tanks & healers.

*shrugs*

Other than re-designing the encounter to make it easier for a random grouping of players - I don't see a solution to this.

pantagruel01 · March 2018

riverocean said:

But now we have the problem, that this encounter is reliant on a few players with specific CC builds. What happens if that handful of players quit?

It's not really that small a number; if that many players all quit, there's bigger problems than cosmics failing.

kamokami · March 2018

Separating the dogs, while non-trivial, was done before. It was painful to wait for the needed roles of 5 tanks (1 for each dog and 1 for kiga) and 5 healers. This is an img from a June 2016 post in the Tips thread:

The wait+setup time is what largely motivated finding a solution where 1 player could replace 7.

But it would still be cool to discuss different solutions that might be less fragile.

Since, unlike all other cosmics, Kiga doesn't split damage for his main attack vs the Tank, it's safe to assume that the intention is for other Tanks to be doing something with the dogs.

For example, I find that in phase 1, when the dogs get woken up early some of the more sturdy CCers are able to hold block and survive for long enough until hold resist stacks wear off and the dogs try to howl again. Especially if that CCer gets heals. This allows the CCer to wait it out until the next howl attempt, which gives them a chance to re-sleep the dogs.

So what if we modified this situation a bit and applied it to phase 2 with less specialized builds? Maybe one of the non-CCer tanks can take all 4 dogs since they tougher than most CCers anyways....and maybe one of the healers can have an AoE paralyze or sleep and babysit the Dog Tank.

This would make the dogs briefly waking up be ok since the healer is the one charging up a control power and the Tank is just blocking + taking hits. And if something went wrong the healer could just keep healing the Dog Tank until the next round of howls. So we just replace a CCer with 1 regular tank + 1 healer with an aoe paralyze/sleep.

pantagruel01 · March 2018

kamokami said:
So what if we modified this situation a bit and applied it to phase 2 with less specialized builds? Maybe one of the non-CCer tanks can take all 4 dogs since they tougher than most CCers anyways....and maybe one of the healers can have an AoE paralyze or sleep and babysit the Dog Tank.

The problem is that most non-CC tanks are not built to generate threat without breaking holds. You can do this with a CC tank, of course, and it does work and is less brittle than the single CC method.

kamokami · March 2018

pantagruel01 said:
The problem is that most non-CC tanks are not built to generate threat without breaking holds. You can do this with a CC tank, of course, and it does work and is less brittle than the single CC method.

I wonder how much threat they'd need to generate? Most tanks have a melee energy builder which does add a little bit of threat without dealing damage when used at range. Maybe once the dogs are CCed, the tank could rotate using their melee energy builder at range to keep them interested

pantagruel01 · March 2018

kamokami said:
I wonder how much threat they'd need to generate?

Depends how badly the Kiga is going. On a bad Kiga with multiple wipes it can take me as much as a minute to get solid threat on a CCer in tank role (using mental leech) and an energy builder doesn't give anything like that much threat.

roughbearmattach · March 2018

pantagruel01 said:

Depends how badly the Kiga is going. On a bad Kiga with multiple wipes it can take me as much as a minute to get solid threat on a CCer in tank role (using mental leech) and an energy builder doesn't give anything like that much threat.

Conversely, if the run is really fast, there is a possibility that the healer (for the CC/tank) would not hit the minimum score for rewards.

theglasskitten · March 2018

pantagruel01 said:

kamokami said:
So what if we modified this situation a bit and applied it to phase 2 with less specialized builds? Maybe one of the non-CCer tanks can take all 4 dogs since they tougher than most CCers anyways....and maybe one of the healers can have an AoE paralyze or sleep and babysit the Dog Tank.
The problem is that most non-CC tanks are not built to generate threat without breaking holds. You can do this with a CC tank, of course, and it does work and is less brittle than the single CC method.

I use to use this method often and the tank would just use a PB AoE to wake the dogs with and the healer would re-CC after they woke up. Most healer duration on paralyzes is long enough to allow stacks to reset and the tank always keeps threat. This method is much less fragile and even helped me to learn to CC the dogs without the stress of a misclick failing the encounter.

The primary issue, as Roughbear stated, was the minimum score threshold.

markhawkman · March 2018

well, part of the reason for this discussion is a certain *censored* named *redacted* who was intentionally sabotaging CC a while back. people went with the dog tank version as a counter on some runs.

Also, If you have a tank as backup for the CCer, would the tank continue to hold aggro while the dogs sleep?

pantagruel01 · March 2018

roughbearmattach said:
Conversely, if the run is really fast, there is a possibility that the healer (for the CC/tank) would not hit the minimum score for rewards.

Min score for the tank worries me more -- a reasonable cc build has enough healing that a separate healer is not needed (there are people out there with bad cc builds, of course).

markhawkman · March 2018

Hmm... that gives me pause to consider methods of score padding that might be effective. Does massacring the local cannon fodder count towards your score?

Also it'd require the DPS to hold off, but you can definitely rack up score in phase 1 by being the guy slapping the dogs around.

pantagruel01 · March 2018

markhawkman said:
Hmm... that gives me pause to consider methods of score padding that might be effective.

If you're being that organized you can probably just use something more optimal. We also solved the troll issues with double CCers with one CCer just being a tank. Sure, your average CCer tank build is not cosmic tank level, I think my tank build is 11k hp with invuln, but it's sufficient for what's needed.

pwestolemyname · April 2018

pantagruel01 · April 2018

pwestolemyname said:

Haven't read the whole thread, but to be clear, the solo CC method was suggested by the devs, so it is fair to assume that was their original plan, and the multi-tank method was the aberration.

Urr...I was there when single CC was invented. You don't know what you're talking about.

pwestolemyname · April 2018

pwestolemyname · April 2018

pantagruel01 · April 2018

pwestolemyname said:
I was there, too. Nobody even knew the dogs could be CCed until one of the dev's told us.

Completely different issue. CC was always the plan. A single CC doing all of it wasn't.

spinnytop · April 2018

I dunno if this has been brought up, but the multiple dog tanks method could likely be accomplished with two tanks and one healer. I've been able to keep multiple dogs from howling on a tank. Four is nuts, three is difficult, two is pretty easy. When we used four tanks it felt pretty trivial to tank just one dog.

pantagruel01 said:
Completely different issue. CC was always the plan. A single CC doing all of it wasn't.

I remember at one point Kaiz was trying to push the idea of using multiple CCs but none of us listened because we're a bunch of elitist tryhards who wanna look cool while doing impossible things.

ealford1985 · April 2018

I could bring my Uncle Jeb, he has a way with sheep...I’m sure goat gods are no different

pantagruel01 · April 2018

spinnytop said:
I dunno if this has been brought up, but the multiple dog tanks method could likely be accomplished with two tanks and one healer. I've been able to keep multiple dogs from howling on a tank. Four is nuts, three is difficult, two is pretty easy. When we used four tanks it felt pretty trivial to tank just one dog.

If you aren't going for perma cc, it doesn't matter if a dog howls occasionally, you just need often enough that their stacks don't build up, and that's not hard with two dogs at once. It's just a giant pain splitting up dogs.

spinnytop · April 2018

pantagruel01 said:
If you aren't going for perma cc, it doesn't matter if a dog howls occasionally, you just need often enough that their stacks don't build up, and that's not hard with two dogs at once. It's just a giant pain splitting up dogs.

Yeah, and I was able to keep 3 dogs from howling at all, so 2 is no problem.

And let's keep in mind that the tank doesn't need to be the one with the stun. One tank could tank all 4 dogs, while a dps with stun works to keep them from howling too much, and a healer hangs out to keep them alive.

shadowolf505 · April 2018

Super late on this but here is my take on Kiga

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pantagruel01 · April 2018

spinnytop said:
And let's keep in mind that the tank doesn't need to be the one with the stun. One tank could tank all 4 dogs, while a dps with stun works to keep them from howling too much, and a healer hangs out to keep them alive.

Of course, if you have a tank that can generate threat through holds (ego DoTs, moonstruck, howl) you can just go conventional CC + tank, or plus healer. That's significantly less fragile than solo CC, and not hard, it's just build dependent.

spinnytop · April 2018

So yeah, there's another way. People just don't use them because CCers keep showing up, and trolls are rather rare.

Kiga - There must be another way.

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