A dragon should be hard because it is a dragon.
Not because it has hundreds of little imp friends.
Almost all adds should be removed from this encounter, but the mobs should hit harder to compensate. Actually reward a group for paying attention and dodging.
Lieutenant Johnathan "Seven" Abradax Liberated Borg -Captain USS Solstice Member of Starfleet Borg Task Force - Tactical Unit
-Yes it is fine to have hard fights
-Yes it is fine to have the be almost impossible to pug
-No not everything should be a cakewalk
HOWEVER
Such encounters should not be coming out of the blue at the end of a mid level dungeon with 2 comparatively easy bosses beforehand.
I agree with this. To me it's just proper game design. Guild Wars 2 had this issue, they had PvE in the open world set one way and then you do a dungeon, it was like "WTF game is this?", night and day difference. I don't mind hard either, but it should be gradual, there is basically nothing leading you up to this prior. The content should have been getting much more stiff earlier (as in levels earlier), leading you into this.
Then you fail..... then you out level and never had a chance to finish another WTF is going on here moment...
I ended up just leveling out of its bracket. Not knowing about how HAMSTER healer threat was when I was building my Cleric, I was thinking more towards increasing my healing output the entire time. Which leaves me with every single mob including the Dragon on my butt the entire fight.
Beating the dungeon wasn't worth the aggravation after multiple attempts over multiple groups.
The only real issue I've had with any of the boss fights thus far is not that I find them too difficult... but because they've just been powercreeped.
I do not expect boss fights to be easy by any means. Boss fights should be hard. That's why it's a boss. However, instead of actually introducing new mechanics to every boss to make them hard they've simply just amped up HP, how hard they hit & thrown in a ton of adds.
The only thing that needs to be removed in a good amount of these fights is the number of adds that there are, and then they need to make it so every boss is different, so that there's actual mechanics to find and work around to defeat them.
It makes little sense to have 1 difficult boss thrown in when ALL the other bosses are easy. Not to mention this is during the leveling period so it makes even less sense to have this brick wall of a boss fight. In a couple hours you will just out level the dungeon and the loot is worthless.
"It's a Dragon, it should be hard." Sorry, that's not an excuse.
I finally did my first Mad Dragon run. Only the cleric had done this dungeon before, and was certainly discouraged by finding out that none of us had. We handle the other bosses well enough, but the cleric would often make comments about how bad we were going to get HAMSTER by the final boss if we didn't improve..
Before the final boss we made the decision for me (GWF) to help keep the adds on the cleric in check. During the fight I stuck with the cleric most of the time, but found that our dps on the boss was horrid. Judging from the party chat, I guess someone was afk for a bit, plus we had to res them a few times. Because of this I would jump on the boss at certain points to help out.
Unfortunately there were some times when the Cleric was getting swarmed, but I would soon catch up and clear them off. One thing that made things extremely difficult with this, was the Cleric would kite all over the place, like a mad man, and all around the Dragon. This made it hard to key in on the Cleric, especially since you can't run through the dragon. Another thing I struggled with was getting aggro. I would beat the HAMSTER out of all the mobs, but it didn't matter as they would only focus on the Cleric.
Anyway, the fight didn't go so well and we wiped at about 60% health on the boss.
What really bothers me most is the fact that the group just gave up after one attempt. The Cleric basically said we all suck and complained that I should have had all the adds dead, at all times..
I led the group with 1.25mil damage (next in line was 1mil, 700k and 600k), had the most kills (more than 3rd and 4th place combine) and took the LEAST damage out of anyone.
My question is, as a GWF, what can I be doing better? My spec is designed around AOE damage, but some of the mobs take a sec to kill and it doesn't help when the Cleric is randomly kiting them all over the area.
I say leave it as it is, it's a good challenging fight but entirely doable with a competent group and all that's required is talking a little strat before you go in to fight it so everyone knows what's going on.
I would hate for them to remove the lockout door because then it would become like GW2 where bosses are trivialised by doing a death-zerg where it doesn't even matter, which I think sucks.
I sincerely hope that dungeon bosses from LotMD upwards get more challenging because it's nice to have something tough to work towards conquering and that's what I really enjoy when it comes to party-based content in an MMO.
Comments
Not because it has hundreds of little imp friends.
Almost all adds should be removed from this encounter, but the mobs should hit harder to compensate. Actually reward a group for paying attention and dodging.
Liberated Borg -Captain USS Solstice
Member of Starfleet Borg Task Force - Tactical Unit
I agree with this. To me it's just proper game design. Guild Wars 2 had this issue, they had PvE in the open world set one way and then you do a dungeon, it was like "WTF game is this?", night and day difference. I don't mind hard either, but it should be gradual, there is basically nothing leading you up to this prior. The content should have been getting much more stiff earlier (as in levels earlier), leading you into this.
Then you fail..... then you out level and never had a chance to finish another WTF is going on here moment...
Beating the dungeon wasn't worth the aggravation after multiple attempts over multiple groups.
I do not expect boss fights to be easy by any means. Boss fights should be hard. That's why it's a boss. However, instead of actually introducing new mechanics to every boss to make them hard they've simply just amped up HP, how hard they hit & thrown in a ton of adds.
The only thing that needs to be removed in a good amount of these fights is the number of adds that there are, and then they need to make it so every boss is different, so that there's actual mechanics to find and work around to defeat them.
"It's a Dragon, it should be hard." Sorry, that's not an excuse.
Before the final boss we made the decision for me (GWF) to help keep the adds on the cleric in check. During the fight I stuck with the cleric most of the time, but found that our dps on the boss was horrid. Judging from the party chat, I guess someone was afk for a bit, plus we had to res them a few times. Because of this I would jump on the boss at certain points to help out.
Unfortunately there were some times when the Cleric was getting swarmed, but I would soon catch up and clear them off. One thing that made things extremely difficult with this, was the Cleric would kite all over the place, like a mad man, and all around the Dragon. This made it hard to key in on the Cleric, especially since you can't run through the dragon. Another thing I struggled with was getting aggro. I would beat the HAMSTER out of all the mobs, but it didn't matter as they would only focus on the Cleric.
Anyway, the fight didn't go so well and we wiped at about 60% health on the boss.
What really bothers me most is the fact that the group just gave up after one attempt. The Cleric basically said we all suck and complained that I should have had all the adds dead, at all times..
I led the group with 1.25mil damage (next in line was 1mil, 700k and 600k), had the most kills (more than 3rd and 4th place combine) and took the LEAST damage out of anyone.
My question is, as a GWF, what can I be doing better? My spec is designed around AOE damage, but some of the mobs take a sec to kill and it doesn't help when the Cleric is randomly kiting them all over the area.
I would hate for them to remove the lockout door because then it would become like GW2 where bosses are trivialised by doing a death-zerg where it doesn't even matter, which I think sucks.
I sincerely hope that dungeon bosses from LotMD upwards get more challenging because it's nice to have something tough to work towards conquering and that's what I really enjoy when it comes to party-based content in an MMO.