Man I know I am going to get some flames and shrill shrieks from the elitists, but seriously, the dungeons post L30 or so are just too hard for casual players.
I have not finished a final boss in any queued pickup group since craigemire crypts. After several dozen fails on several characters, I have pretty much just stopped queueing dungeons. I will be the first to admit, I can not always get out end boss AE. A second hesitation usually gets me knocked down inside a red circle and burned down to 25% health. But even if I somehow make no mistakes in a 20 minute fight, there are 4 other casual players who have to remain alive.
The average group will give it 3 goes before people rage quit or run out of pots/kits. I am normally against dumbing down a game to make it EZ mode, but I have to say these dungeons seem like EPIC hard mode encounters without much margin for error.
I really like to see them tuned down.
If they make it easy, there is less for people who have decent gear and skill to do. Nerfing content is not a solution. I am not saying you are wrong (they are hard esp with a bunch of casuals) but your solution is no good. What is needed is a difficulty adjustment (automatic if possible, from gear score maybe) or a variety of 5 mans (some easy, some hard, some super hard, etc).
IMHO nothing should ever need to be nerfed -- a nerf is the response of a weak mind that lacks the creativity to produce a better solution or a necessary fix to a poorly tested system. Neither one is really excusable.
There are two pieces of evidence that the OP is correct, and dungeons are too hard.
Evidence 1: Everyone suggests getting a "good" guild.
In other words, have good players carry the casual (aka not very skilled) player.
Evidence 2: Every LFM says "LF exp (fill in class here)"
In other words, "we want good players, not casual (low skilled) players. In other words, dungeons are hard, and if you aren't highly skilled, we'll fail.
Its fairly inarguable that dungeons are, in fact, too hard for casual players. And what makes them hard isn't that they are just "hard" aka "challenging", its that the only mechanism this video game uses to ramp up "difficulty" is mind-numbing amounts of adds. i.e. very, very poor programming/product design on PWE's part.
specific instances
*First few dungeons and skirmishes oneshotted
*Throne of Idris where I first realized downing end bosses could "take ages" (compared to wow)
*Gray Wolf Den finally completed after like 8-9 tries, frustrating, but feelt very good finally downing last boss
*Black Dragon skirmish went well the 1st time, then lots of failing due to people ignoring adds
*Bridge and spellplague skirmish was very hard
*I couldn't complete Karrundax dungeon on normal
overall experience
PvE is way more hard than in the previous mmo I've played, but definitely doable if you get the hang of it. Most of the time they're hard because your teammates make it hard. Up until like level ~50 it felt like I was playing with zombies since no one talked, chatted or even reacted to stuff you wrote. Also, they often left group randomly <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> up everyone else. (Groups not refilling annoyed me to no end, but I kinda get used to it, even though it still bugs me, especially in pvp).
After getting to 60 I had a week or two failing to complete any t2 dungeon. We were joking around with my buddy that the best pve spec on every class is the AH spec where you buy all movement talents just to make the mailbox-AH route faster, so you can make money more rapid in order to get gear. And then we realized that we have a much higher chance to play with competent people making/joining a trade group rather than queue'ing up.
While some fights are very annoying and it's kinda hard to get used to MORE ADDS being the no.1 boss mechanic, I'm now kinda content with the difficulty. I can now tell you that I complete way more dungeons than getting stuck with just 2 bosses (which was my experience with this game for a long time.).
So answering my own biggest question while leveling: "Is it better as a 60? Do you have a chance to complete dungeons there?"
Yes, it's better at 60, but rarely a simple walk in the park. Learning tactics from more experienced players makes it a whole lotta easier though.
queuing for t2 dungeons when you are alone makes not much sense, even if you join a party that seeks players. either you have a team that already dies at the first encounters or you have one of the teams that either speed run a dungeon and you are completely lost there or heavily exploit the dungeon what also is not fun for newer players. i think for casual players without a guild endgame in neverwinter makes no sense at all. you have nothing to do, dungeons can't be finished, you won't become geared...
also it is quite annoying that every dungeon and the bosses comes with tons of adds. expecially when playing a dc this becomes annoying when your team scatters and you try to watch basically 4 sides and yourself while running away from adds that the tank most often can't taunt off of you.
There are two pieces of evidence that the OP is correct, and dungeons are too hard.
Evidence 1: Everyone suggests getting a "good" guild.
In other words, have good players carry the casual (aka not very skilled) player.
This is the way of good mmo's, imo. It takes many may runs through a 'quest' to get good at it filling any specific role. You want to make those many runs with other players who have already done those may runs. That is where guilds come in really handy. In a guild run, maybe you and one other player are the less experienced ones. I do think nw is too difficult (in a 5 man party) for good players to really carry poor players, unless the good player is just ridiculous good.
Evidence 2: Every LFM says "LF exp (fill in class here)"
In other words, "we want good players, not casual (low skilled) players. In other words, dungeons are hard, and if you aren't highly skilled, we'll fail.
Its fairly inarguable that dungeons are, in fact, too hard for casual players. And what makes them hard isn't that they are just "hard" aka "challenging", its that the only mechanism this video game uses to ramp up "difficulty" is mind-numbing amounts of adds. i.e. very, very poor programming/product design on PWE's part.
I disagree about the ads. There is a fundamental problem with a game when half the players complain about some classes being op and the other half complains about dungeons being too hard. I am anti-nerf. That means if a class is truly OP, instead of adjusting the class power down in the role that is OP, you adjust pve power up in that same area. Eg. you balance too much dps by giving mobs more health.
What I do think the game lacks in terms of character power is really good aoe cc. Now, if nw added some really good aoe cc, it should probably also increase the number, health, an diversity of spawn. Most non-boss spawn is trash. That is fail. Other mmos have degrees of trash spawn (easy, standard, difficult, elite, paragon, so on). The problem with nw I think is that trash respawns wayyyyy too much. It would be better to have more spawn at once with higher health, but a much less frequent respawn rate.
This is the way of good mmo's, imo. It takes many may runs through a 'quest' to get good at it filling any specific role.
That's fine for "raid" content. But this is single group content. And actual MMO's don't really raise the stakes so high for single group content.
And that's one of the oddities of this game. It's not an MMO. It's an OMG according to Mr. Emmert. And so the content itself has an inherent identity problem.
Waaaaaay back in the day, I had to learn pull strats for how to break Plane of Fear and how to move about in Plane of Hate. But it was me and 50 or so of my not-so-closest friends doing this.
That's a wee bit different than the scaling for a 5-person dungeon run.
And that's the root of the issue to me. I don't think the content needs to be toned down at all. Just toned sideways. More care and attention needs to be given to the encounter's design. The adds, what they are, how often they pop, why they pop, what their synergy is with the boss and their purpose in the encounter.
Cryptic has a long history of being bad at end-game encounter design. So this game's issues with that don't surprise me. It's like they missed the basic point of it all: the progression mechanic.
A group of folks, be it a guild, or whatever unit you want to call it are at gear-tier-0 when they start the end-game. This tier is just mish mash of whatever they've collected levelling up. Tier 1 is supposed to be challenging to that mish mash. But once that mish mash gets T1, the content becomes trivial to that unit. Because they have the gear from it, it's now "farm status." But the next tier is challenging and so on and so forth.
Cryptic still hasn't quite mastered the ability to create that type of progression. And that's how long lived MMO's like Everquest pretty much kept their "end-game" going for so long.
This game has the foundation to do something better with its end-game. And I think it can improve. I don't think the dungeons need to be toned down. They just need to be smoothed out. Toned SIDEWAYS if you will. Make the encounters work better overall. But I'm leery of the company actually having the people on staff who can pull this off. Guys like Gozer over in STO just never ever ever ever got it. And so the end-game for STO was initially a similar mash up of annoying time sink and overall too many enemies to kill in a "Special Task Force" that didn't work out so well mechanically. Then the pendulum swung the other way and it got defanged into a cuddly set of encounters that anyone who can mash spacebar can finish, just it got shoe-horned into a time gated rep grind.
Both shots missed the mark in terms of end-game progression in an MMO.
I have hope this game won't repeat that. But Cryptic hasn't yet ever put out a game with end-game progression reminiscent of the more successful and long-lived MMOs. So we'll see.
More care and attention needs to be given to the encounter's design. The adds, what they are, how often they pop, why they pop, what their synergy is with the boss and their purpose in the encounter.
I'm still a little annoyed with how repetitive the add-heavy encounters are, but I agree with the above comment at the very least. If Cryptic isn't going to change its design strategy (although the last boss in CM looks like it may be less add-intensive--I haven't experienced it first hand yet), the developers need to at least re-tune things.
Example: I tried to do the Karrundax run with guildies the other night. It was my first time there, but a couple of my guild mates were very knowledgable and well equipped. We were trying to fit the dungeon into a DD and thus were unwilling to spend very long wiping, so we ended up leaving after spending some time on the first boss. The first boss was ridiculous; I don't know what the designers want groups to do with it aside from simply overpower/outgear it. The adds seem to constantly spawn, have very large conal AoEs, and have a decent amount of HP; they overrun the party. Maybe a couple of very well equipped, very focused rogues could burn the boss down? I'm sure we could have gotten it eventually, but I don't see how it would have been worth the effort. I'm rambling a bit so here's the takeaway: the encounter was a mess, without any clear direction or purpose.
Re-tune. Re-focus. NW has a lot going for it, but things like this are very frustrating.
Well that is what the sharandar quest lines are for it will get the casual player geared and ready then when you finish the normal dungeons will be easy.
Dragon is hard period. I don't care how many times you do it or how hardcore or casual you are. That is a HARD Dungeon!
The rest aren't so bad as long as your gear score is appropriate.
The dungeon is hard or the final boss?
Personally, I've found Mad Dragon to be a cakewalk since the Beta nerfs. Try this strat for epic version. You need a GF or Rogue to tank the dragon and a cleric to agro adds.
Position the Cleric and whoever is killing adds behind the chest near the dungeon exit. The Cleric should not move past the chest if possible. The reason why you do this is because adds spawning on the opposite side of the Dragon will agro the Cleric (healing agro) but won't be in range to fire if ranged (obviously melee aren't an issue here). Provided the tank doesn't AoE the mobs as they are moving through the Dragon, all of the adds move approximately 40' past the Dragon before they start shooting to get in range of the Cleric. This means you won't have adds stuck in the Dragon's hitbox and they can be burned down really easily. If more than four casters are alive at any given time, any dps on the Dragon should help burn down some adds to prevent being overwhelmed.
When the boss hits 25% a group of Demons spawn that have a massive heal when they get low. You need to split them apart and burn them down one at a time. Once the 25% wave is dead, kill the Dragon and collect your loot.
The thing that almost always wipes a Mad Dragon group is letting too many casters stay alive because of that annoying flame pillar they do.
Hope that makes sense.
0
kingculexMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited September 2013
Cryptic will probably do an update to lower the difficulty again like they did with the last update. We will see.
Every class has advantages and disadvantages. Learn the disadvantages of you class to overcome them. Learn the advantages of your class and the disadvatages of other classes to use them in pvp to win.
There is no point to whine for nerfs because you win some and loose some. Crying just makes a player look like a crier and no one, especially the devs, should take them seriously. Have a nice day!:)
0
pers3phoneBanned Users, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited September 2013
Dungeons are hardly difficult, just badly designed, that's all. More adds is the answer to anything. Some encounters are OK, some are broken.
Comments
If they make it easy, there is less for people who have decent gear and skill to do. Nerfing content is not a solution. I am not saying you are wrong (they are hard esp with a bunch of casuals) but your solution is no good. What is needed is a difficulty adjustment (automatic if possible, from gear score maybe) or a variety of 5 mans (some easy, some hard, some super hard, etc).
IMHO nothing should ever need to be nerfed -- a nerf is the response of a weak mind that lacks the creativity to produce a better solution or a necessary fix to a poorly tested system. Neither one is really excusable.
Evidence 1: Everyone suggests getting a "good" guild.
In other words, have good players carry the casual (aka not very skilled) player.
Evidence 2: Every LFM says "LF exp (fill in class here)"
In other words, "we want good players, not casual (low skilled) players. In other words, dungeons are hard, and if you aren't highly skilled, we'll fail.
Its fairly inarguable that dungeons are, in fact, too hard for casual players. And what makes them hard isn't that they are just "hard" aka "challenging", its that the only mechanism this video game uses to ramp up "difficulty" is mind-numbing amounts of adds. i.e. very, very poor programming/product design on PWE's part.
specific instances
*First few dungeons and skirmishes oneshotted
*Throne of Idris where I first realized downing end bosses could "take ages" (compared to wow)
*Gray Wolf Den finally completed after like 8-9 tries, frustrating, but feelt very good finally downing last boss
*Black Dragon skirmish went well the 1st time, then lots of failing due to people ignoring adds
*Bridge and spellplague skirmish was very hard
*I couldn't complete Karrundax dungeon on normal
overall experience
PvE is way more hard than in the previous mmo I've played, but definitely doable if you get the hang of it. Most of the time they're hard because your teammates make it hard. Up until like level ~50 it felt like I was playing with zombies since no one talked, chatted or even reacted to stuff you wrote. Also, they often left group randomly <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> up everyone else. (Groups not refilling annoyed me to no end, but I kinda get used to it, even though it still bugs me, especially in pvp).
After getting to 60 I had a week or two failing to complete any t2 dungeon. We were joking around with my buddy that the best pve spec on every class is the AH spec where you buy all movement talents just to make the mailbox-AH route faster, so you can make money more rapid in order to get gear. And then we realized that we have a much higher chance to play with competent people making/joining a trade group rather than queue'ing up.
While some fights are very annoying and it's kinda hard to get used to MORE ADDS being the no.1 boss mechanic, I'm now kinda content with the difficulty. I can now tell you that I complete way more dungeons than getting stuck with just 2 bosses (which was my experience with this game for a long time.).
So answering my own biggest question while leveling: "Is it better as a 60? Do you have a chance to complete dungeons there?"
Yes, it's better at 60, but rarely a simple walk in the park. Learning tactics from more experienced players makes it a whole lotta easier though.
also it is quite annoying that every dungeon and the bosses comes with tons of adds. expecially when playing a dc this becomes annoying when your team scatters and you try to watch basically 4 sides and yourself while running away from adds that the tank most often can't taunt off of you.
This is the way of good mmo's, imo. It takes many may runs through a 'quest' to get good at it filling any specific role. You want to make those many runs with other players who have already done those may runs. That is where guilds come in really handy. In a guild run, maybe you and one other player are the less experienced ones. I do think nw is too difficult (in a 5 man party) for good players to really carry poor players, unless the good player is just ridiculous good.
I disagree about the ads. There is a fundamental problem with a game when half the players complain about some classes being op and the other half complains about dungeons being too hard. I am anti-nerf. That means if a class is truly OP, instead of adjusting the class power down in the role that is OP, you adjust pve power up in that same area. Eg. you balance too much dps by giving mobs more health.
What I do think the game lacks in terms of character power is really good aoe cc. Now, if nw added some really good aoe cc, it should probably also increase the number, health, an diversity of spawn. Most non-boss spawn is trash. That is fail. Other mmos have degrees of trash spawn (easy, standard, difficult, elite, paragon, so on). The problem with nw I think is that trash respawns wayyyyy too much. It would be better to have more spawn at once with higher health, but a much less frequent respawn rate.
That's fine for "raid" content. But this is single group content. And actual MMO's don't really raise the stakes so high for single group content.
And that's one of the oddities of this game. It's not an MMO. It's an OMG according to Mr. Emmert. And so the content itself has an inherent identity problem.
Waaaaaay back in the day, I had to learn pull strats for how to break Plane of Fear and how to move about in Plane of Hate. But it was me and 50 or so of my not-so-closest friends doing this.
That's a wee bit different than the scaling for a 5-person dungeon run.
And that's the root of the issue to me. I don't think the content needs to be toned down at all. Just toned sideways. More care and attention needs to be given to the encounter's design. The adds, what they are, how often they pop, why they pop, what their synergy is with the boss and their purpose in the encounter.
Cryptic has a long history of being bad at end-game encounter design. So this game's issues with that don't surprise me. It's like they missed the basic point of it all: the progression mechanic.
A group of folks, be it a guild, or whatever unit you want to call it are at gear-tier-0 when they start the end-game. This tier is just mish mash of whatever they've collected levelling up. Tier 1 is supposed to be challenging to that mish mash. But once that mish mash gets T1, the content becomes trivial to that unit. Because they have the gear from it, it's now "farm status." But the next tier is challenging and so on and so forth.
Cryptic still hasn't quite mastered the ability to create that type of progression. And that's how long lived MMO's like Everquest pretty much kept their "end-game" going for so long.
This game has the foundation to do something better with its end-game. And I think it can improve. I don't think the dungeons need to be toned down. They just need to be smoothed out. Toned SIDEWAYS if you will. Make the encounters work better overall. But I'm leery of the company actually having the people on staff who can pull this off. Guys like Gozer over in STO just never ever ever ever got it. And so the end-game for STO was initially a similar mash up of annoying time sink and overall too many enemies to kill in a "Special Task Force" that didn't work out so well mechanically. Then the pendulum swung the other way and it got defanged into a cuddly set of encounters that anyone who can mash spacebar can finish, just it got shoe-horned into a time gated rep grind.
Both shots missed the mark in terms of end-game progression in an MMO.
I have hope this game won't repeat that. But Cryptic hasn't yet ever put out a game with end-game progression reminiscent of the more successful and long-lived MMOs. So we'll see.
I wouldn't advise anyone to play this game right now .
I'm still a little annoyed with how repetitive the add-heavy encounters are, but I agree with the above comment at the very least. If Cryptic isn't going to change its design strategy (although the last boss in CM looks like it may be less add-intensive--I haven't experienced it first hand yet), the developers need to at least re-tune things.
Example: I tried to do the Karrundax run with guildies the other night. It was my first time there, but a couple of my guild mates were very knowledgable and well equipped. We were trying to fit the dungeon into a DD and thus were unwilling to spend very long wiping, so we ended up leaving after spending some time on the first boss. The first boss was ridiculous; I don't know what the designers want groups to do with it aside from simply overpower/outgear it. The adds seem to constantly spawn, have very large conal AoEs, and have a decent amount of HP; they overrun the party. Maybe a couple of very well equipped, very focused rogues could burn the boss down? I'm sure we could have gotten it eventually, but I don't see how it would have been worth the effort. I'm rambling a bit so here's the takeaway: the encounter was a mess, without any clear direction or purpose.
Re-tune. Re-focus. NW has a lot going for it, but things like this are very frustrating.
The dungeon is hard or the final boss?
Personally, I've found Mad Dragon to be a cakewalk since the Beta nerfs. Try this strat for epic version. You need a GF or Rogue to tank the dragon and a cleric to agro adds.
Position the Cleric and whoever is killing adds behind the chest near the dungeon exit. The Cleric should not move past the chest if possible. The reason why you do this is because adds spawning on the opposite side of the Dragon will agro the Cleric (healing agro) but won't be in range to fire if ranged (obviously melee aren't an issue here). Provided the tank doesn't AoE the mobs as they are moving through the Dragon, all of the adds move approximately 40' past the Dragon before they start shooting to get in range of the Cleric. This means you won't have adds stuck in the Dragon's hitbox and they can be burned down really easily. If more than four casters are alive at any given time, any dps on the Dragon should help burn down some adds to prevent being overwhelmed.
When the boss hits 25% a group of Demons spawn that have a massive heal when they get low. You need to split them apart and burn them down one at a time. Once the 25% wave is dead, kill the Dragon and collect your loot.
The thing that almost always wipes a Mad Dragon group is letting too many casters stay alive because of that annoying flame pillar they do.
Hope that makes sense.
There is no point to whine for nerfs because you win some and loose some. Crying just makes a player look like a crier and no one, especially the devs, should take them seriously. Have a nice day!:)