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Fire and Ice Rampage, in Caliga's eyes...
xcaligax
Posts: 1,096 Arc User
I am quite happy with what Cryptic did with this Rampage. Bravo. It still needs some fine tune ups. Here is a small laundry list I think should be looked at:
1. The Scoring: I'm not sure how it works, but as a tank, im taking so much damage, and holding the aggro, but yet, im always ranked at the bottom 2? Mind you, not to stroke my own ego or anything, but I hit extremely hard for a tank. My suggestion for this, is either fix it so that healer's get a shot at it, or just remove it. From what I can tell, sometimes healers do not even get a chance at loot because they are focused solely on healing, and that should not be punished.
2. Fire seems to be hitting alot softer than Ice. Either adjust Fire's damage to the same as Ice, or lower Ice's damage to equal Fire.
3. Frozen Spire seems to appear WAY more frequently than the Fire Cage. Please adjust accordingly, either more frequent Fire Cages, or less frequent Frozen Spires.
Im sure there are more, but this is just a small list. I need to do more runs.
Edit: Update: It seems scoring only registers on damage done to the Fire Boss, and not Ice at all.
Edit: Update: Private Queing with other players works fine until you leave the rampage, then you have to invite everyone again, and again, and again, etc etc etc. This get's very tedious. Please look into this.
1. The Scoring: I'm not sure how it works, but as a tank, im taking so much damage, and holding the aggro, but yet, im always ranked at the bottom 2? Mind you, not to stroke my own ego or anything, but I hit extremely hard for a tank. My suggestion for this, is either fix it so that healer's get a shot at it, or just remove it. From what I can tell, sometimes healers do not even get a chance at loot because they are focused solely on healing, and that should not be punished.
2. Fire seems to be hitting alot softer than Ice. Either adjust Fire's damage to the same as Ice, or lower Ice's damage to equal Fire.
3. Frozen Spire seems to appear WAY more frequently than the Fire Cage. Please adjust accordingly, either more frequent Fire Cages, or less frequent Frozen Spires.
Im sure there are more, but this is just a small list. I need to do more runs.
Edit: Update: It seems scoring only registers on damage done to the Fire Boss, and not Ice at all.
Edit: Update: Private Queing with other players works fine until you leave the rampage, then you have to invite everyone again, and again, and again, etc etc etc. This get's very tedious. Please look into this.
Caliga's PRIMUS Database! --XXX--The Caliga Build: Threatening Haymakers! --XXX-- Caliga and Conquer fanart!
Post edited by xcaligax on
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Handle: @Kurobasa
I'm with you in that I would simply remove it. There is no need to see who did what there. You need the whole team working to be effective anyways.
VARIANT
"Nearly all men can withstand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
-Abraham Lincoln-
That makes sense.
When I was in Tank...I was on Ice duty. When I was in Hybrid...I was always on Fire duty.
VARIANT
"Nearly all men can withstand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
-Abraham Lincoln-
The scoring part is a huge issue, especially when it hoses healers, but I'm gonna write this off as a big bug more then anything else. This needs to get fixed ASAP.
The Frozen Spire thing is really grating, too, simply because if you get it on Frosticus as the tank, not having a healer all but spells your doom due to an inability to block. This is technically fine, but it makes me think the answer is just to make Frosticus actually do a tad less damage. I never understood why he could fire two simultaneous ones so often, so that's something that needs tweaking.
Other then that, 100% love this alert. The challenge is just right, not too hard and not too easy, the rewards could use a tweak (namely the currency frequency), but the bug fixes are a huge priority since healers do a massive amount of heavy lifting and badly need rewarding.
Ran it a few times tonight. First some PUGs that failed miserably, then twice with a group from the Rampagers channel. We almost won on the first run, succeeded well on the second run.
I focused on healing, but did contribute to some damage when I could. Think I placed in 8th place on the scoreboard. I got the token in my reward drop.
Overall, I have to say I enjoyed this Rampage. Tonight was my first night trying it out.
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I've easily done 40+ runs with three characters and not gotten a SINGLE token. Not a one. Zero. Nada. Zip!
Please take the developer who thought it'd be a good idea to:
A. Ignore PTS feedback and concerns about a drop rate
B. Ignore that Salvage being in the crafting means of the gear means you WANT TO have the drop rate high on the tokens so you can sell more keys
C. Make the drop rate something random, yet also bound to account so that if you have bad luck you're going to get royally screwed over.
D. Make this random chance drop rate excessively LOW. Low percent bad.
...and SPANK THEM! Please? For me? Spank them hard.
But in all seriousness, WTF GUYS?!
It's also possible to get a not a single reward drop as a healer, that's broken too. I know. It happened to me. Caliga was the one I was mostly healing (others too though of course).
Not that I didn't have an army of pets attacking, but apparently that doesn't' count. Part of that, I'm told, has to do with a bug where Frosticus does not count for the scoreboard. If you put a lot of effort into taking down Frosticus, it doesn't count. Might even mean you don't get a reward. That's messed up, and needs to be fixed ASAP.
Get rid of the chance part or get right of the bound to account part. Preferably the chance part. Make it effort based, somehow. But if you're a unluck person you could theoretically never get the gear no matter how hard you try or how much you carry the team, because it's all luck. This should change.
Consolidate the currencies! (Please!)
Does your Champion have a theme song? (share it!)
Got a funny in-game screenshot? (share it!)
Please fix the Overdrive energy unlock! (Should help promote thematic build diversity!)
Also anything where there's a scoring mechanic that determines if I get loot, means I'll never get anything. It should just be random.
This probably explains why I've never gotten a single drop from Gravitar in hundreds of runs, if the old rampage used a similar system.
But glad some of you can do it, means eventually I'll get in a team that can carry my worthless self. However if I'll never get anything because I don't do enough damage, I guess winning doesn't matter does it?
-Bragging over-
My thoughts have changed.
Everyone calling out living fire/Ice and deaths makes it easy for the healers. Remember.
My second go was on my healer in a pre-made. Aside from a failed first attempt when one's health got above the other, It was fun. However, because I went on a shielding-spree, I didn't get on board.
Like many others have said, Healers should not be penalized.
I need to try it with voice.
@dr490nbr347hi / Playing since January 25, '11
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Frosticus has hit me with that Ice Dagger for as much as 21000-ish damage (normally he hits like 14000 with it, which is more than enough to insta-kill the majority of players you'll find). That's pretty much an insta-kill on my squishy DPS characters. Although my tank characters can just laugh at it. Gorothok can eat a yellow Gravitar bubble for lunch and I know MANY tanks that can do the same.
In my opinion, you need at least one tank and one healer on the team. Somebody needs to tank Frosticus at least, somebody who can take his really hard hitting ice dagger.
Which goes back to what I was saying above. That you don't get a score for attacking Frosticus is stupidly broken. You should get points for that, for goodness' sake.
To be clear I don't find their damage broken. It's fair. It just means you need a team. And DEFINITELY somebody who can resurrect.
I haven't had a team I'm on fail a single Fire & Ice rampage on Live yet (we failed on the PTS). But that's because we had a well balanced team of various hybrid things. People of all different builds and backgrounds. Pretty cool to see it in action. That said, somebody always died. Often times it was me because my main is in-truth a glass canon, but thankfully somebody could get me up and I'd start blasting away again (and being thankful somebody could rez me).
It is random. It's not based on score. This is coming from the devs btw, so... yeah. What you're hearing is a rumor, and it was a concern based on that the only people who got tokens on the PTS were high DPS builds. But with such a small sample size that was easily a false positive. And it appears it was just that.
Although if you have no-score because you're a pure healer, then you're out of luck. As I found out the hard way.
The problem is the "random chance" part. The drop itself is, according to the devs, like an open mission and NOT based on DPS or ranking.
Consolidate the currencies! (Please!)
Does your Champion have a theme song? (share it!)
Got a funny in-game screenshot? (share it!)
Please fix the Overdrive energy unlock! (Should help promote thematic build diversity!)
i can confirm what caliga said PLUS some enitities/ spawn / powers are becoming invisible.. so the only way to see what gave me 22k dmg is to look in combat chat
oh and it lags sometimes.
Rampages, and 99% of the rest of the content that is going to be largely ignored.
The power creep that started with the huge increase in defense possible with the spec trees is now realized in the scale of enemy damage to try and provide a challenge to the toughest tanks. Everyone else is 'squish'.
Given the extreme lag and server instability, randomly dying from damage you dont see coming and even when on the opposite side of the bosses as the tank was - I dont know that fun is the word that first comes to mind.
As a point of reference - I left DDO(Dungeons and Dragons Online) after 7 years of playing because they kept forcing players to grind harder and harder to be able to play new content, and the power creep was getting ridiculous - like epic specialties that could make a melee do 5x the damage they did a few levels earlier. New enemies subsequently became significantly harder - and non-optimized, non-geared out players would get stomped. Also having to remake a character that you took 3 years to build from the ground up (i.e. starting over from level 1 as a reincarnation, and having to run weeks of XP grinding and then weeks to months of epic level grinding just to get back to where you could contribute in content) - well that stopped being fun.
So now CO is going down that road. Every Raid(why not call it that now?) will require well geared, and specifically built characters, two healers, two tanks, and at least half of the 'dps' will need either self ressing or res others in case the main healers go down - sounds exactly like DDO raids.
Running the raid 20 times and not getting the reward sounds like other game raids too now.
CO needed an increase in challenge. Adding content that is at least 10x harder than everything else seems like a wee bit of overkill. But then making spec trees turn tanks into super tanks was going to break the game anyway.
All the pug runs of Fire and Ice I did tonight were dismal failures. I tried running non-heavy duty tanks - and I dont have 'healers' in CO, just characters with some healing. one pug had tanks and healers, and did well but still failed during the last 3rd. Every other one was a dismal failure, in several cases the group had no healers and no tanks. Those fights lasted about 1 minute.
TL:DR
Seems like pug groups are not going to be having much fun in Rampages.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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I am still against spec trees in their current form as they really don't offer much in the way of specialization as they do the inverse - simple inflation; characters using spec trees tend to end up more or less the same, except with higher numbers across the board rather than truly becoming specialized in a single area. But that's really besides the point for this rampage.
Yes, pugs have a very real possibility of getting their **** kicked, but as with any new content, there is always a learning curve. CO is still pretty lenient in that:
Max level players usually do ignore the rest of the content they already played.
They seem to ignore defense regardless.
You need a healer.
I admit, Rampages could be better rather than just a tank and spank.
They are very poor considering lots of toon hopping and 20 runs and only got 4 tokens.
There needs to be some kind of challenge in the game. There needs to be something that pushes players and forces others to get better.
You don't run the toughest raids in WoW with pugs.
Its not designed for pugs to just win a reasonable chance. Not unless you randomly get into a team with two solid tanks and a focused healer.
I find this rampage much easier to run when you have a teammate focused on debuffing the enemy damage output. Fear, Ebon Sigils, a few of the Telepathy Powers, whatever lowers the sheer damage the both of them do is a beneficial form of support. My Lemurian, Cruxie, is good at doing this.
And I will always be @DZPlayer122.
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If drop rate for tokens is too low, so there is no point in bothering.
Considering that also drifter's salvage is needed for Justice gear, and that one must be bought from lockboxes, gear tokens should be guaranteed per successful run. Especially since it's needed to play through all rampages.
I used to love doing the Gravitar rampage for the questionite drop and for the chance at the costume pieces, but if it has been changed to this format too, that kinda stinks. My character normally isn't a complete and total waste of space, but in these smaller random groups it sure feels like it.
I am glad you folks with the super high end gear and extreme free form builds love it, but I just wish it was at least a little less frustrating and a lot more fun for players like me too. The fact that you few are having to group up and run these in small groups of other super high end players to complete them is very disturbing. That means it is less likely to find one of you to help in the random groups most of us middle of the road types end up playing with which of course means even less chance of successful mission completion.
Things I would like to see;
- Better chance for nice rewards for completing it
- Tone down the insta-kill attacks against us non-perfect combination of powers builds (not all of us want to play super nuker tank healers)
- make it less frustrating for random groups (what is frustrating? Dying, no loot, no chance for success due to group character makeup - for example... five people who are healers only)
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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The problem is that if it's that common, nobody will be running the Rampages past the first time through.
Cryptic wants people to be running these for a good long time. Although I agree that the drop rate is into the frustrating line of things.
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I have to agree. I ran this Rampage multiple times (hooray Insomnia). It took me awhile to figure it out and my failures outnumbered my successes, but I started out with PUGs. I don't have the latest fancy gear. The gear I do have was easily obtainable in game and without opening any lockboxes.
At level 40 with simple Heroic and Armadillo Secondary, I did just fine - in support role. I was able to heal myself, heal team-mates, rez, and do some dmg. It was much easier to do this with a pre-made team than PUG. Still two of my PUG runs were successful. The insta-kills are 100% avoidable, but players will need to do more than just button mash. The team needs to pay attention, and take out threats as they arise.
I am far from the extremely equipped crowd. Most of my 40's have Heroics as primary and plain old purples or yellow Q-nite gear for secondaries. A few have one Legionnaire gear. Rank 5 mods for all except for a couple (as in two or three between them all) Rank 6 mods.
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Sorry but I don't have "super high end gear", I have Heroic gear which anyone can easily get, and none of it has anything higher than a Rank 6 mod in it.
Extreme freeform builds? Don't have those either. I build theme characters, which means I can't just take the best powers; I gotta take powers that fit the theme!
And yet, I love Fire and Ice. Gonna play it a bunch more times today.
It's time to stop characterizing anyone who likes the new content as an elitist power gamer, because it's just not true.
I mean seriously, do we have to go through this yet again?
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Y'all are a heck of a lot better equipped than I am. Yeah, I think I made the right decision before - this doesn't suit my temperament, I think I'll sit it out and just play the regular game.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Well I give up on you Jon. Tried explaining to you that it doesn't require good gear, doesn't require roles... really doesn't require much of anything. You wanna leave yourself out and act like you're smart cause of it, go for it.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
You know where I think the problem lies? The players. I know I'll probably catch a lot of flak for saying this, but bear with me.
The only time a good amount of people show up on PTS to test anything is when someone is giving away action figures. The rest of the time, who do you think is testing and giving feedback? The very dedicated players. The very dedicated players also often tend to be really, really good character builders.
These are the people who say "this is too easy," or "this is too hard." Fire and Ice was too hard for them at first. It got toned down to their level which is way above my level of capability (but I don't complain because I don't test).
I also partially blame Cryptic for not opening up PTS to silvers. I would imagine this would bring in a lot more people to test, and they would be testing on Archetypes too, which would help balance things out when content goes live.
A lot of people have a mindset of "Cryptic doesn't pay me to do their testing for them." That's a bad mindset to have. Every MMO needs players to test the game. Anyone who's concerned about how difficult the newest content has been needs to get on the PTS and do some testing, and not just for action figures.
You know that Heroic gear is super-easy to get, right? Have you started the UNITY dailies? Just do those for a week and you're set.
What is fire`s attack that hits for 24k? My combat log just says unknown attack, and im usually fighting frost when it gets me. I don't think it's a living fire, but might be wrong.
Also, i really need to learn what frost dagger looks like. I keep missing it so don't block in time.
Not arguing, genuinely asking. Both of these kill me from full quite often.
Edit= that 24k is before def/dodge/etc.
I hate this rampage just cause you like it.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
It's not always easy to see when the bosses are charging up attacks with powers exploding all over the place. Or if a living thing pops up right in front of your camera. Another example of the game teaching you that powerful attacks have a charge up bubble except when it's convent not to in an attempt to get a few cheap deaths. Changing the rules to make a boss seem harder doesn't actually made the boss harder, just a filthy cheater. You really can't make many mistakes with blocking as a tank. I've seen several people say their tanks die in 2-4 hits, so being able to laugh at Frosty's attacks is not necessarily something all tanks can do.
I do wonder what the point in having the Flamer around is. Frosty does everything she can do better. He's essentially the tank AND dps. She's just... kind of there. Shouldn't she be the one doing most of the damage? You can stick one or two people on her while everyone else focuses on Frosty.
Once upon a time, end game raids dropped actual gear. Not stupid tokens that eventually turned into gear. I don't like this trend as it is just a way to artificially extend the life of content. The business of games is becoming far more important than the creativity and fun in games. And yes, I know customers are partially to blame by screaming MORE MORE MORE all the time.
I didn't like the voice acting. Frosty reminds me of Mr. Freeze from that horrible movie.
As for the queue system, allowing PUGs but not giving them an option to select their role in content that actually requires certain ones is not OK. This isn't NW where everyone can have a tank or healer companion or ends up with healing pots out the nose with a low cooldown.
The best part is at the end with the fire and ice columns. Those should show up during the entire fight. It's even better if you have one of the roll travel powers. Because Wheeee!
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
"Team" and "TeamUp" appeared below the chat entry field. It seemed, each time I ran the alert, more lines appeared. I could not adjust the height of the chat window. Finally, so many lines appeared beneath the chat entry field that I could not read the team chat.
Obviously, this made communication with the team difficult.
Has anyone else run into this problem? Is there something I can do to correct it? Or is it a bug that the developers must fix?
Every one of the combat logs I've looked at after the fight has shown Kenina consistently doing WAAAAY more overall damage than anything else in the alert with Frosty coming in 2nd or 3rd. Probably because her fire cages are more group-deadly than Frosty's frozen spires.
Turning off the in-game voice chat feature will fix that.
Fire cages can only do damage if they actually show and and if someone runs through it.
What's weird is that in all of the combat logs I recorded, Frosty does more damage than Fire Lady sometimes as much as double. Only once did she pull ahead and only slightly. Her attacks do far less damage to my tank. With a decent healer, my tank could probably get away with not blocking any of her attacks ever.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
This is a known issue -- we're going to try to get a fix in for it next patch.
Thanks for the feedback, passing it on.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
I should probably point out that it was in the PuGs I ran that fire cages were scoring kills.
Way to take the line out of context... He meant that the players who tested it were few in numbers, and as such is skewed to their suggestions and experiences.
The lack of wanting to try something new (be it viewed too hard or just not for them) is a decision that is based on the players themselves, not the devs.
However that being said, I agree completely with adding silvers to the PTS access list, because ATs aren't going anywhere for a long time and there does need to be more testing from their perspective. (once they fix the access in general, since that appears to be broken atm)
There are going to be issues with a new fight on live, since it hasn't been tested with the general player base, and as such I'd hope to see some tweaks (things like way to low drop rates, and all participating players getting a fair shot at rewards for starters) in the near future.
@Aleatha1011 in CO | Keeper of the Cheesecake since Nov. 2011| Bunni BOT is on PRIMUS! | Come check out my deviantart page!
That's not my biggest gripe w/ the fight, though. Some aspects of the fight I consider uneven, but could be fine w/ some # tuning. One thing I cannot back is allowing whoever has highest aggro on Frosticus to be able to be put in the ice construct. As it stands, that player NEEDS to be able to block on demand given the no-charge spiky tank dmg Frosticus puts out constantly. Throwing that mechanic on them is quite unfair given the current design. On anyone else- even a healer- its fine and creates needed tension in the fight.. but on Frosticus' tank its just cruel as it stands.
The tank dmg is so high, and the ice/frost ground effects so weak, that I'm actually relieved as a tank or healer when phase 3 rolls around- it means much less time spent dealing w/ Frosticus' crazy tank damage.
Loot drop rates don't seem to be affected by score, and thank heavens for that.
In short, here's what I'd do w/ F&I:
-Disable ice prisons on Frosticus' highest aggro.
-Raise Living Fire/Ice health.
-Raise dmg from the floor spells in p3- give more incentive to avoid them so the Rimefire mechanic has more meaning than it currently does.
-Add charge indicators to Frosticus' dagger attacks, and/or tone down his cast rate or damage- and up Kenian's.
Otherwise I am mostly happy w/ this fight, from a general mechanics standpoint.
I am not happy, AT ALL, w/ the UI bugs that persist in Rampage queues, however.
I have not had a single PuG Rampage yet where all players showed up on the UI (also rarely have had a full team of 10 yet, but that's a diff issue), and its esp problematic on my healer cause it makes following player health very difficult and cumbersome. Worse, aura effects from you do not effect any Rampage teammates that are in the same instance/zone but not loaded onto your UI.
This bug seems to kick in when players first load in to the Rampage from the public queue- there seems to be some disconnect w/ who is loaded in to the instance and who is loaded onto each player's team UI- w/ some players oftentimes showing up in duplicate and replacing other player slots on the UI.
It seems that these UI issues have been around since Gravitar and the Rampages were first implemented, but I think its time to finally address them- esp now that we have Alerts where healing is more valuable. I do notice that the roll-over for player mic volume was scaled down to match player avatar size, which is a nice fix, but more needs to be done on this front.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
Caliga's PRIMUS Database! --XXX--The Caliga Build: Threatening Haymakers! --XXX-- Caliga and Conquer fanart!
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
You could look at it that way, and I'm okay w/ that. But I do think that Frosticus' dmg needs to be more fair in terms of warnings if he's the one that's meant to be the tank-stressor.. esp to melee tanks. Ranged tanks can at least watch his anims and block the attacks in time cause most of em have a sig time of flight (assuming his model isn't being obscured, ofc).
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
This is indeed very annoying.
I almost never see the fire cage. Not in PUGs or Pre-mades. Then again, Fire Lady doesn't seem to attack all that often in general.
Putting a healer in the ice prison instead of the tank sounds interesting. For a tank, it could be a death sentence not just for him, but the entire team considering Frosty's attacks can easily one-shot squishes. Although, if someone is tanking Flames, Frosty will sometimes target that person next. "Surprise! You have aggro! Please accept these FREE frost daggers!" Despite that, I'm not sure if I agree with not having the tank be affected by ice prison. It just means DPS needs to pay attention to the adds and kill them. The tank shouldn't even have time to type out "frozen" because the DPS should have killed it already.
Oddly, the ice prison seems to have way more survivablity than the elemental bombs.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
I haven't done the grinding to get Heroic Gear. I've never needed it before. From the sound of things, though, it's the least I'd need for this Rampage. So yeah, there would seem to be a need for better gear than I've got, and yeah, people need to know what role they're filling in the fight so they can know who (and how) they're supposed to attack next. I'm way too casual for that.
I suppose I could force my way in, but it sounds like nobody would enjoy that at all.
Nemo, are you Gold? If so, are you one of those who refuses to do any testing on PTS because "it's not your job"? If you answered no to either of these, you're not who Smacky was talking to.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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