There is this annoying bug that happened to us once after the push / pul phase the atropal wasn't in correct place again and we couldn't hit it at all or target it with anything so we had to wipe there
Update: we did this trial more times in preview and so far i only managed to succeed twice the push/pull mechanic is very unfair specially to classes that don't have a dodge mechanic in most times the boss was easy but this mechanic made us wipe so many times i even lost count
So has anyone beat it with out scrolls of life? It's hilarious how many people are spamming those during the boss fight seems impossible to beat it with out those.
So has anyone beat it with out scrolls of life? It's hilarious how many people are spamming those during the boss fight seems impossible to beat it with out those.
I think is not so impossible. But, this trial requires good team-work.
I still do not understand how to avoid 2aoe with 2 arrows on top. But sometimes we can stay alive without scrolls of life. The main problem is that every time you need to go to last boss from begining.
@asterdahl Can you tell us: how work aoe with 2 arrows on top? Anyway you will add this info to journal. Or this time no?
2
Options
adinosiiMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,294Arc User
edited January 2018
OK, so I got to try this for the first time yesterday. I went in with a pretty much random group of 10 people - 3 DCs, 2 OPS, 1 GF, 2 GWFs, 1 SW and 1 TR or CW (don't remember, sorry). Our IL ranged from 13k to people with 17.5K+, with maxed out R14s and so on. In other words, pretty much the same type of players as those who regularly farm ToNG.
The TL;DR summary: First three phases are too easy, last phase is problematic or too hard.
Now, keep in mind that only one person in the group had even tried this before - so the rest of us had to learn as we went. Also, we did not have voice communication, and English was clearly not the primary language of many (most?) in the group, so there were some communication issues. In other words, we were a pretty typical random group.
Once we figured out what to do in the first phase (stay alive, kill everything that moves, except the skulls - drag those to the ghost face) it was pretty easy. We had some issues at the very beginning when people would attack the skulls before they got to the right position, but once everyone got the message this was pretty trivial.
Second phase was fun. We had a similar issue with the jelly cubes on the first try - people would blow them up in the center, the timer ran down and we failed. Second try went smooth - a cube appears - the person who has it runs towards a pair of unjammed gears, and blows it up there. We completed without any issues that time with around one minute to spare.
Third phase was trivially easy - a few DPSers and buffers went after the souls, while the rest cut the ropes. Easy success on first try. Too easy in my opinion.
Fourth phase, uhm.... now that's when things got interesting, and eventually too many people gave up for us to be able to complete it. I am not sure if the difficulty was because there was some problem with the mechanism, or because we just had not figured it out properly. It did not help things that most people forgot to bring injury kits (too used to having VIP immunity, I guess) or resurrection scrolls.
Anyhow, I am happy with the trial - it may need a bit of tweaking, but it looks good and has the potential to be a popular challenge.
Hoping for improvements...
2
Options
thefabricantMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 5,248Arc User
edited January 2018
Ok, after some thought about the trial I would like to give my thoughts.
First off, I really like the design of it, it is challenging and only a very small minority of players will be able to complete it. This, imo, is a good thing as it provides a true end game. However, the trial has some design flaws which I would like to go over.
1) Anyone that can't complete it, has no reason to run it. This is a problem because it means only a very small portion of the playerbase is ever going to attempt it more than once. This will lead to players complaining, as expected, because there exists content that they are unable to run. Whilst I don't think that everyone should be able to finish it, I think everyone should have a reason to try running it and the way I would do this is not by making the last boss easier (I would leave it as is) but by adding 2 more bosses. The first boss would be after you throw the skulls at the mines, a boss would spawn in the center of the elevator that you have to kill. The second boss would be after the ooze phase, when the elevator reaches the bottom something blocks the door and prevents you from getting out. Then the third boss is the dead baby. This creates 3 phases. The first boss + his mechanics phase (the ghost). The second boss and his mechanics phase (the oozes) and the third boss and his "kill the tentacles" phase. I would then have the bosses increase in order of difficulty, have the first boss be somewhat easy, so most groups can beat him. The second boss be more challenging and then the third boss remain as is. Then have the first boss give everyone some RP for beating him (for example, a black opal), the second boss some salvage+rp+seals of the brave and then the third boss retains his current loot table (this way you can only exalt gear if you can beat him). This means that everyone has a reason to run the trial, even if they cannot beat the final boss.
2) The pacing is a problem. If you fail at phase 3 you have to do phase 1 and 2 again. I would add a campfire and circle after each stage so instead of resetting at phase 1, you start at the beginning of each phase. Alternatively, only have a campfire before the final boss and a, "vote to try boss," or, "vote to leave" option. If you vote to leave you get some small reward for getting that far, but nothing needed for exalting. If you vote to try boss you get nothing if you fail. However, if you implement something like this you need more mechanics on the elevator to justify rewarding players.
3) Some of the mechanics in phase 4 are not clear and are poorly explained, for example, when 2 players get the AoE around them. In my opinion, hints to what to do with these mechanics should be added to the battle tactics tab.
4) At the moment the elevator phase is just boring, it feels like running illusionists gambit minus the scenery. Some suggestions (besides just adding bosses) could include adding a targeted projectile that slow travels towards a player and when it reaches them it creates a persistent vortex at their location that deals damage over time to everyone within it. This creates a challenge for players to correctly position these DoTs so that they do not run out of safe space while completing the objective.
It is probably too late in development to do anything like this, but it should be taken into consideration as a, "lesson learned" moving forward. Maybe something like a non master version of the raid with an easier final boss (that only has a pull and not a push) that does not reward the stuff needed for exalting but gives generic loot is an "easy alternative" to improving the raid mechanics. Other than that it looks good. I highly anticipate this going live.
First off, I'm fond on this Trial. While the first three stages were rather trivial, as has been pointed out by the other people before me, the final stage - the actual boss fight - is challenging. The addition of a mechanic similar to that of the second boss in Spellplague, where you can get pushed off the platform, is a good choice in my opinion. It makes it so that the party can't just brute-force their way through the fight by stacking buffs and debuffs. It requires something more than just standing in the right spot to receive all the buffs and become basicly immortal. However, this push/pull is also the part I'm a little worried about.
Preview seems to run a lot smoother than Live. Anyone who's ran Tomb of the Nine Gods on Live will tell you it can be a laggy hell hole. Hell, the lag and rubberbanding on the Live server has more than once gotten me killed, and I have a low ping compared to a lot of folks. If we add the issues on Live to the equation, the push/pull mechanic looks like it will get a lot of people killed, because they simply wont have time to react, or wont be able to react because of the latency. On Preview it was already clear that certain classes could fight the push/pull easier than others. Paladins and Guardian Fighters are relatively safe, while others struggled a lot more. I was playing as a Hunter Ranger, and after a few tries I got the hang of it, and dodged it reliably.
Hunter Rangers have a rather short immunity frame on their dodge, and if the instance was laggy, I'm sure I would've failed a lot more. Players with a worse ping than I would probably fair even worse. Punishing people for server-side issues or latency seems a bit harsh. I'd suggest a bit more 'warm-up', possibly with an audio queue, between the end of the pull and the actual push, or making the donut a bit larger so there's a bit more of a margin for error. However, I'm not sure if that should be implemented *now* or letting it go to Live as-is would be the better choice. When Tomb of the Nine Gods came to Preview, we considered it pretty difficult, yet now we blow through it. The same thing might happen with Cradle.
In short:
1) The first stages need some extra spice. Once people know what to do, it's just a boring ride with too many 'dead moments' where you're just waiting. In the runs we've done, I don't think we ever struggled with the skulls/jellies.
2) Killing the rope things didn't bring much more excitement either. It's just running around a circle and burning things down. Could use some spice.
3) The actual boss encounter is fun, but I have some small issues with the push/pull mechanic.
4) I like this Trial. The boss is certainly the hardest thing we've had so far, and I look forward to completing it many times.
Isaac the Adequate - Level 70 Oath of Protection Paladin
We have looked into reports of players experiencing connection problems and have been unable to identify any server, data center, or client-side issues. We believe this may be ISP related.
So has anyone beat it with out scrolls of life? It's hilarious how many people are spamming those during the boss fight seems impossible to beat it with out those.
So is this supposed to happen? Atropal deals 5294062 (6691695) Necrotic Damage to you with Lingering Turmoil.
We've identified an issue wherein the damage dealt by lingering turmoil is mistakenly being affected by the damage bonuses of the target. This should be fixed for the next preview build. In the meantime, I apologize for the inconvenience.
So has anyone beat it with out scrolls of life? It's hilarious how many people are spamming those during the boss fight seems impossible to beat it with out those.
It should not be impossible, although the issue with lingering turmoil's damage scaling incorrectly may make it more difficult than intended depending on your group's overall damage bonuses. I will say about the few runs I've been able to watch so far, even some of the successful runs, a huge number of mechanics are being completely brute forced through.
Some of the early choices that were made in regards to how many sources of shields, temporary health and damage mitigation were available, as well as mechanics like soulforged make it difficult to prevent brute forcing without heavy handed instant kills. Considering the trial is actually tuned to be able to be completed by a group of 12k players, it's inevitable that it will be possible to brute force through some of the mechanics, especially with scrolls of life.
If you brute force through mechanics, you'll definitely be making the fight significantly more difficult for yourself in terms of incoming damage. If you'd like to reduce the incoming damage, please give it a try approaching the mechanics in different ways.
@asterdahl Can you tell us: how work aoe with 2 arrows on top? Anyway you will add this info to journal. Or this time no?
We prefer that the journal generally does not explain how to deal with a mechanic, only what the mechanic does. In this case, it's relatively self explanatory what happens to the player who gets the arrow over their head. However, I'd generally like to avoid giving any strong hints or specific instructions on how to deal with mechanics. Please communicate among each other if you'd like to share different ways to approach mechanics.
The pacing is a problem. If you fail at phase 3 you have to do phase 1 and 2 again. I would add a campfire and circle after each stage so instead of resetting at phase 1, you start at the beginning of each phase.
...
Some of the mechanics in phase 4 are not clear and are poorly explained, for example, when 2 players get the AoE around them. In my opinion, hints to what to do with these mechanics should be added to the battle tactics tab.
In regards to the pacing, you're correct, the pacing is off, we're going to be adjusting the difficulty ahead of release, so we appreciate the feedback. Internally the development team is strong at dealing with mechanics but we don't generally maintain DPS as high as many of our best live groups. So often times once the fights are in front of you all, we get to see areas where things aren't tuned quite right.
In regards to the mechanics being poorly explained. We don't have any intent to be heavy handed in explaining how mechanics work. Generally a lot of mechanics in our lower difficulty encounters are explained pretty heavily, but as this is a very endgame focused encounter, we'd rather players have an opportunity to master the mechanics themselves.
As always, thank you all for your continued feedback, and good luck should you tackle the cradle again!
I'm all up for a mechanics-intense dungeons and trials, but I'm genuinely afraid of people not being able to finish this at ALL on live server. On Mimic, there's MUCH less lag (there's still some, the supposed 1 second pause in the flush mechanic is almost instant for me), but on preview, it's much laggier. If barely anyone can finish it on preview, I dare not wonder how will real runs turn out like.
...Maybe something like a non master version of the raid with an easier final boss (that only has a pull and not a push) that does not reward the stuff needed for exalting but gives generic loot is an "easy alternative" to improving the raid mechanics...
I've always thought this was a wonderful idea. Underdark did this with the Demo Trial, and it was great. (Svardborg did it too, but not as well.) Normal Demo gave everyone a chance to enjoy the content and learn how the mechanics worked without dying constantly. The best rewards (Twisted weapons) were still locked behind the master version, but the normal version prepared everyone to run it. I obviously don't have the numbers, but I'm certain that a LOT more people were able to successfully run the master version and get their Twisted weapons who otherwise wouldn't have BECAUSE they were able to cut their teeth on the normal version first.
I'd personally like to see this with newer dungeons too, but I get not doing it. With these big, complex trials though, I think a normal version really adds value. And I'm sure you would like more than a few percent of the player base to be able to enjoy all your hard work.
3
Options
minotaur2857Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,141Arc User
I'm all up for a mechanics-intense dungeons and trials, but I'm genuinely afraid of people not being able to finish this at ALL on live server. On Mimic, there's MUCH less lag (there's still some, the supposed 1 second pause in the flush mechanic is almost instant for me), but on preview, it's much laggier. If barely anyone can finish it on preview, I dare not wonder how will real runs turn out like.
QFT, I haven't been able to do ANY of the recent dungeons because of this, focusing on mechanics that don't actually happen on my screen until after the penalty for getting them wrong is killing this game for me, and my machine and connection are a lot better than some peoples'.
A question to the dev team, do you actually test any of these dungeons using a connection that has a less than great ping ? Mine is usually around 130 but we have guildies that never get better than 300. If the dungeon is unplayable when you do this, you're ruling out many players in Africa and Asia from ever doing it.
0
Options
thefabricantMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 5,248Arc User
So is this supposed to happen? Atropal deals 5294062 (6691695) Necrotic Damage to you with Lingering Turmoil.
We've identified an issue wherein the damage dealt by lingering turmoil is mistakenly being affected by the damage bonuses of the target. This should be fixed for the next preview build. In the meantime, I apologize for the inconvenience.
Even the devs blame the DCs Stop the hate guys seriously!
I'm all up for a mechanics-intense dungeons and trials, but I'm genuinely afraid of people not being able to finish this at ALL on live server. On Mimic, there's MUCH less lag (there's still some, the supposed 1 second pause in the flush mechanic is almost instant for me), but on preview, it's much laggier. If barely anyone can finish it on preview, I dare not wonder how will real runs turn out like.
QFT, I haven't been able to do ANY of the recent dungeons because of this, focusing on mechanics that don't actually happen on my screen until after the penalty for getting them wrong is killing this game for me, and my machine and connection are a lot better than some peoples'.
A question to the dev team, do you actually test any of these dungeons using a connection that has a less than great ping ? Mine is usually around 130 but we have guildies that never get better than 300. If the dungeon is unplayable when you do this, you're ruling out many players in Africa and Asia from ever doing it.
I have a ping over 300 and can do it on preview but I do not believe I will be able to do it on live.
...Maybe something like a non master version of the raid with an easier final boss (that only has a pull and not a push) that does not reward the stuff needed for exalting but gives generic loot is an "easy alternative" to improving the raid mechanics...
I've always thought this was a wonderful idea. Underdark did this with the Demo Trial, and it was great. (Svardborg did it too, but not as well.) Normal Demo gave everyone a chance to enjoy the content and learn how the mechanics worked without dying constantly. The best rewards (Twisted weapons) were still locked behind the master version, but the normal version prepared everyone to run it. I obviously don't have the numbers, but I'm certain that a LOT more people were able to successfully run the master version and get their Twisted weapons who otherwise wouldn't have BECAUSE they were able to cut their teeth on the normal version first.
I'd personally like to see this with newer dungeons too, but I get not doing it. With these big, complex trials though, I think a normal version really adds value. And I'm sure you would like more than a few percent of the player base to be able to enjoy all your hard work.
One more thing - 12k IL demanded is not that high these days as you can quite easly/cheap get yourself decent gear from hunts, cheap mounts with blue insignia and quite easy refinment. That taken together brings a lot of new players to that level, and - lets be honest is not making them CN ready (due to lack of experience) not to mention TONG or a new trial. Adding "normal version" would give them oportunity to at least have some chultan content not virtually avilable, but possible to finish for them.
Devs say that they dont want to explain mechanics, well then let us learn it then, but maybe in less brutal conditions where 15k+ iL groups fail. Especially if its so hardly lag dependant as mentioned above.
Bug During the first/second phases, if you apply a CC effect to the floating skulls/jello cubes (ex: Smoke Bomb), the green line telling you who needs to move disappears. This isn't necessarily a dealbreaker for teams, but it becomes annoying when trying to figure out who needs to move where.
Also, I am sure you guys are in the middle of fixing these bugs, but the "boss benefits from player buffs/debuffs" and the "first cutscene skipped kills you" bugs are still present.
Feedback:
I think the difficulty curve is a little better now that most of the team I've run with has seen/beaten the trial. We haven't been spamming as many scrolls of life, that's for certain.
Other than that... Please make the Ampoules bound to account.
If you want to encourage people to run the trial, then you need to encourage people to not feel punished for only running their support characters, since this trial (and everything else in the game) is won or lost by how good your support is.
Currently, the ampoules are BtC, meaning that you are punished for progress on your main character for wanting to help others on your support alts. Leaving the ampoules BtC also creates a situation where all the DPS players race to recruit all the support players before the support players finish their weapons, which, as we saw with Svardborg, became a huge mess.
I don't understand the push pull mechanic. What am I meant to be looking at as a visual tell to know when to go which direction? It's extremely punishing and I admit that I died to it immediately every time. There is no room at all for a learning curve and made the whole experience not fun for me. I can't see myself running this trial for + meaningless item level that does nothing at all for my character. Yeah, okay If you wanted hard content this is hard but not in a way that is challenging. It's in a way that ping will kill you or any minor distraction in your physical environment will end your trial. The elevator was fun. I don't understand what the heck happened with the dead baby. Maybe I'll try it again. Maybe not.
Relmyna - AC/DC Righteous + Haste| Nadine - CW MoF (working on it)|Buffy - GF SM Tact| Hrist - Justice Tankadin|Healadin (Wannabe Tank)| Lena -MI Sabo TR (Farmer) | Jeska - GWF SM Destroyer (Farmer) | Maggie - HR PF Trapper (Wannabe DPS)
--
I'll never retrace my steps.
I have a ping over 300 and can do it on preview but I do not believe I will be able to do it on live.
To expand a bit on my original comment about over-extending one's self without giving away the farm, I will say that the way I am seeing a lot of players dealing with this mechanic is not the most efficient way. The 1 second pause is basically there to give players who may have messed up the first part a slim chance to recover.
If you're dealing with the mechanic in the most efficient manner, a little lag shouldn't kill you, but may make it impossible to recover from a screw up.
Unfortunately, if we make the ampoules bound to account at launch, players with multiple characters who can run this content will be able to finish their weapon significantly faster. Obviously it's great if you have time to play multiple characters, and we want to make it as painless as possible to have multiple characters, but we also don't want anyoneto feel like it's necessary to not be left behind on this sort of progression.
The feedback is valuable though, while we may not make this adjustment to ampoules right away, it's definitely something we'd want to do in the future. And we would like to consider doing more things based on account in the future so that we can give players with multiple characters more freedom and quality of life without making it feel like a necessary part of progressing.
@asterdahl I believe the main point here might be that once you complete the upgrade on your strongest (or only) trial ready character, that you are able to then fund your alts (or DPS) in a painless manner with the excess Ampoules from from your main character.
A way to do this without speeding up progression would be to make a purchasable upgrade item that costs the current exaltation ingredients, which could be transferred to your lower characters. The ingredients would remain bound, but the item required to actually do the upgrade could be transferred. Progression could not be accelerated, and the Ampoules on your main (or support) character no longer go to waste.
I have a ping over 300 and can do it on preview but I do not believe I will be able to do it on live.
To expand a bit on my original comment about over-extending one's self without giving away the farm, I will say that the way I am seeing a lot of players dealing with this mechanic is not the most efficient way. The 1 second pause is basically there to give players who may have messed up the first part a slim chance to recover.
If you're dealing with the mechanic in the most efficient manner, a little lag shouldn't kill you, but may make it impossible to recover from a screw up.
Unfortunately, if we make the ampoules bound to account at launch, players with multiple characters who can run this content will be able to finish their weapon significantly faster. Obviously it's great if you have time to play multiple characters, and we want to make it as painless as possible to have multiple characters, but we also don't want anyoneto feel like it's necessary to not be left behind on this sort of progression.
The feedback is valuable though, while we may not make this adjustment to ampoules right away, it's definitely something we'd want to do in the future. And we would like to consider doing more things based on account in the future so that we can give players with multiple characters more freedom and quality of life without making it feel like a necessary part of progressing.
Well the way we are doing it is by running in a circular pattern - clockwise, going forward and left. That's the single way we could actually survive it.
Also, maybe make the ampules (when you have enough of 'em) make one item that's BtA, otherwise ampules themselves are BtC? It would be convoluted, sure, but DPS isn't in such a high demand, so anyone who has a support would be getting those weapons really quickly, and once they're done with the runs they need, there would be a shortage of supports willing to help us poor DPS mortals. It's just a tad too frustrating to run over and over and over again.
I have a ping over 300 and can do it on preview but I do not believe I will be able to do it on live.
To expand a bit on my original comment about over-extending one's self without giving away the farm, I will say that the way I am seeing a lot of players dealing with this mechanic is not the most efficient way. The 1 second pause is basically there to give players who may have messed up the first part a slim chance to recover.
If you're dealing with the mechanic in the most efficient manner, a little lag shouldn't kill you, but may make it impossible to recover from a screw up.
Unfortunately, if we make the ampoules bound to account at launch, players with multiple characters who can run this content will be able to finish their weapon significantly faster. Obviously it's great if you have time to play multiple characters, and we want to make it as painless as possible to have multiple characters, but we also don't want anyoneto feel like it's necessary to not be left behind on this sort of progression.
The feedback is valuable though, while we may not make this adjustment to ampoules right away, it's definitely something we'd want to do in the future. And we would like to consider doing more things based on account in the future so that we can give players with multiple characters more freedom and quality of life without making it feel like a necessary part of progressing.
Well the way we are doing it is by running in a circular pattern - clockwise, going forward and left. That's the single way we could actually survive it.
Also, maybe make the ampules (when you have enough of 'em) make one item that's BtA, otherwise ampules themselves are BtC? It would be convoluted, sure, but DPS isn't in such a high demand, so anyone who has a support would be getting those weapons really quickly, and once they're done with the runs they need, there would be a shortage of supports willing to help us poor DPS mortals. It's just a tad too frustrating to run over and over and over again.
Well, some support will. From what I saw, I didn't see any opportunity for my CC-build CW to have anything to contribute (it's the same situation in TONG, for that matter). She was built for the old CN, but now that it's gone Tiamat and Marauders appear to be the only places where she is useful.
I'd like to second the idea of a non-epic version that lets people learn the mechanics. There was a time, for instance, that eLoL and eSoT had "normal" LoL and SoT variants. I can say that in TONG I've been in a number of groups where we had a huge problem explaining the mechanics to new players, especially when English wasn't their first language.
I'm still really concerned about how companions can wind up dying in the third stage. You get a notification that you have to resummon them, but I couldn't see any opportunity to get out of aggro to do so. Once the cutscene ends, you're immediately back in the fire, so to speak.
Harper Chronicles: Cap Snatchers (RELEASED) - NW-DPUTABC6X Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
Unfortunately, if we make the ampoules bound to account at launch, players with multiple characters who can run this content will be able to finish their weapon significantly faster. Obviously it's great if you have time to play multiple characters, and we want to make it as painless as possible to have multiple characters, but we also don't want anyoneto feel like it's necessary to not be left behind on this sort of progression.
The feedback is valuable though, while we may not make this adjustment to ampoules right away, it's definitely something we'd want to do in the future. And we would like to consider doing more things based on account in the future so that we can give players with multiple characters more freedom and quality of life without making it feel like a necessary part of progressing.
Cool. So I now have exactly 0 reason to do more than 1 per week on my OP. AKA no reason to join and help out unless it's just for lulz. Also means on GWF it will be a mad dash to get what I need before supports stop running the content. @asterdahl thanks so much for that. /s
Unfortunately, if we make the ampoules bound to account at launch, players with multiple characters who can run this content will be able to finish their weapon significantly faster. Obviously it's great if you have time to play multiple characters, and we want to make it as painless as possible to have multiple characters, but we also don't want anyoneto feel like it's necessary to not be left behind on this sort of progression.
The feedback is valuable though, while we may not make this adjustment to ampoules right away, it's definitely something we'd want to do in the future. And we would like to consider doing more things based on account in the future so that we can give players with multiple characters more freedom and quality of life without making it feel like a necessary part of progressing.
I do not think these words mean what you think they mean.
Because for me they mean only my main can ever have the stuff I need the Ampule for, none of my 3 main alts have a hope of getting it because the game is moving ever futher away from them.
Obsidian Moonlight - Paladin Obsidian Oath - Warlock A whole lot of other Obsidian toons as well.
I believe the main point here might be that once you complete the upgrade on your strongest (or only) trial ready character, that you are able to then fund your alts in a painless manner with the excess Ampoules from from your main character.
A way to do this without speeding up progression would be to make a purchasable item that costs your current exaltation ingredients, which could be transferred to your lower characters. The ingredients would remain bound, but the item required to actually do the upgrade could be transferred. Progression could not be accelerated, and the Ampoules on your main character no longer go to waste.
We understand the desire, however, there is no functionality currently that would allow you to transfer ampoules from your main to your alt characters without also allowing a player with multiple trial-ready characters to accelerate a single character to finish their weapons, 2-8x faster.
However, we are considering the available options and do not plan to leave them nontransferable forever.
I believe the main point here might be that once you complete the upgrade on your strongest (or only) trial ready character, that you are able to then fund your alts in a painless manner with the excess Ampoules from from your main character.
A way to do this without speeding up progression would be to make a purchasable item that costs your current exaltation ingredients, which could be transferred to your lower characters. The ingredients would remain bound, but the item required to actually do the upgrade could be transferred. Progression could not be accelerated, and the Ampoules on your main character no longer go to waste.
We understand the desire, however, there is no functionality currently that would allow you to transfer ampoules from your main to your alt characters without also allowing a player with multiple trial-ready characters to accelerate a single character to finish their weapons, 2-8x faster.
However, we are considering the available options and do not plan to leave them nontransferable forever.
The thing is, with the current meta, most DPS classes want 2 enchants, and most end-game players usually have 2 weapons for that - one running an AoE enchant, and one running Single target (Lightning in M13 and Fey, respectively). And that means, to max it out, we'll need 13 weeks to Exalt our weapons and main hands, the grind to unlock the trial aside. If we do count in the time to unlock (all the caps included), that's about 18 weeks just to exalt our weapons, and if someone wants different sets... There has to be a slightly more efficient way to get exalted weapons than running Cradle once a week in hopes of your group actually finishing it with lag and the 50 billion scroll of mass life required. And that's probably underestimating it.
Simple method to allow farming for alts without allowing farming BY alts is to put an item in the game that is bought for ampules. 5 ampules for MH upgrade kit, 3 for OH upgrade kit, or whatever the correct amounts are. The kits are BtA but the ampules remain BtC.
"We have always been at war with Dread Vault" ~ Little Brother
I believe the main point here might be that once you complete the upgrade on your strongest (or only) trial ready character, that you are able to then fund your alts in a painless manner with the excess Ampoules from from your main character.
A way to do this without speeding up progression would be to make a purchasable item that costs your current exaltation ingredients, which could be transferred to your lower characters. The ingredients would remain bound, but the item required to actually do the upgrade could be transferred. Progression could not be accelerated, and the Ampoules on your main character no longer go to waste.
We understand the desire, however, there is no functionality currently that would allow you to transfer ampoules from your main to your alt characters without also allowing a player with multiple trial-ready characters to accelerate a single character to finish their weapons, 2-8x faster.
However, we are considering the available options and do not plan to leave them nontransferable forever.
I understand that for the current weapon design this is probably too late, but here is an idea:
Rather than having weapon crafting take a variety of BtC/BtA/BoE ingredients, make it take exactly 1 BtA ingredient. Then allow the purchase of that ingredient from the campaign store for whatever mix of campaign currencies, including BtC pieces (Ampoules, etc.).
Using such a system, you could make it such that multiple toons cannot accelerate a single toon's progress. But one toon can eventually gear out alts.
Simple method to allow farming for alts without allowing farming BY alts is to put an item in the game that is bought for ampules. 5 ampules for MH upgrade kit, 3 for OH upgrade kit, or whatever the correct amounts are. The kits are BtA but the ampules remain BtC.
Occurred to me overnight that this would still allow for acceleration so make the purchasable item cost 8 ampules, be BtA and drop BtC kits for MH and OH.
"We have always been at war with Dread Vault" ~ Little Brother
Simple method to allow farming for alts without allowing farming BY alts is to put an item in the game that is bought for ampules. 5 ampules for MH upgrade kit, 3 for OH upgrade kit, or whatever the correct amounts are. The kits are BtA but the ampules remain BtC.
Occurred to me overnight that this would still allow for acceleration so make the purchasable item cost 8 ampules, be BtA and drop BtC kits for MH and OH.
Or only allow access to purchase the BtA "for-Alts" packages after you have crafted a weapon on that character. That way, after each character unlocks a weapon then they can help accelerate any subsequent alts, but nobody gets and edge on the first unlock.
Comments
There is this annoying bug that happened to us once after the push / pul phase the atropal wasn't in correct place again and we couldn't hit it at all or target it with anything so we had to wipe there
Update: we did this trial more times in preview and so far i only managed to succeed twice the push/pull mechanic is very unfair specially to classes that don't have a dodge mechanic in most times the boss was easy but this mechanic made us wipe so many times i even lost count
But, this trial requires good team-work.
I still do not understand how to avoid 2aoe with 2 arrows on top. But sometimes we can stay alive without scrolls of life.
The main problem is that every time you need to go to last boss from begining.
Can you tell us: how work aoe with 2 arrows on top?
Anyway you will add this info to journal. Or this time no?
The TL;DR summary: First three phases are too easy, last phase is problematic or too hard.
Now, keep in mind that only one person in the group had even tried this before - so the rest of us had to learn as we went. Also, we did not have voice communication, and English was clearly not the primary language of many (most?) in the group, so there were some communication issues. In other words, we were a pretty typical random group.
- Once we figured out what to do in the first phase (stay alive, kill everything that moves, except the skulls - drag those to the ghost face) it was pretty easy. We had some issues at the very beginning when people would attack the skulls before they got to the right position, but once everyone got the message this was pretty trivial.
- Second phase was fun. We had a similar issue with the jelly cubes on the first try - people would blow them up in the center, the timer ran down and we failed. Second try went smooth - a cube appears - the person who has it runs towards a pair of unjammed gears, and blows it up there. We completed without any issues that time with around one minute to spare.
- Third phase was trivially easy - a few DPSers and buffers went after the souls, while the rest cut the ropes. Easy success on first try. Too easy in my opinion.
- Fourth phase, uhm.... now that's when things got interesting, and eventually too many people gave up for us to be able to complete it. I am not sure if the difficulty was because there was some problem with the mechanism, or because we just had not figured it out properly. It did not help things that most people forgot to bring injury kits (too used to having VIP immunity, I guess) or resurrection scrolls.
Anyhow, I am happy with the trial - it may need a bit of tweaking, but it looks good and has the potential to be a popular challenge.First off, I really like the design of it, it is challenging and only a very small minority of players will be able to complete it. This, imo, is a good thing as it provides a true end game. However, the trial has some design flaws which I would like to go over.
1) Anyone that can't complete it, has no reason to run it. This is a problem because it means only a very small portion of the playerbase is ever going to attempt it more than once. This will lead to players complaining, as expected, because there exists content that they are unable to run. Whilst I don't think that everyone should be able to finish it, I think everyone should have a reason to try running it and the way I would do this is not by making the last boss easier (I would leave it as is) but by adding 2 more bosses. The first boss would be after you throw the skulls at the mines, a boss would spawn in the center of the elevator that you have to kill. The second boss would be after the ooze phase, when the elevator reaches the bottom something blocks the door and prevents you from getting out. Then the third boss is the dead baby. This creates 3 phases. The first boss + his mechanics phase (the ghost). The second boss and his mechanics phase (the oozes) and the third boss and his "kill the tentacles" phase. I would then have the bosses increase in order of difficulty, have the first boss be somewhat easy, so most groups can beat him. The second boss be more challenging and then the third boss remain as is. Then have the first boss give everyone some RP for beating him (for example, a black opal), the second boss some salvage+rp+seals of the brave and then the third boss retains his current loot table (this way you can only exalt gear if you can beat him). This means that everyone has a reason to run the trial, even if they cannot beat the final boss.
2) The pacing is a problem. If you fail at phase 3 you have to do phase 1 and 2 again. I would add a campfire and circle after each stage so instead of resetting at phase 1, you start at the beginning of each phase. Alternatively, only have a campfire before the final boss and a, "vote to try boss," or, "vote to leave" option. If you vote to leave you get some small reward for getting that far, but nothing needed for exalting. If you vote to try boss you get nothing if you fail. However, if you implement something like this you need more mechanics on the elevator to justify rewarding players.
3) Some of the mechanics in phase 4 are not clear and are poorly explained, for example, when 2 players get the AoE around them. In my opinion, hints to what to do with these mechanics should be added to the battle tactics tab.
4) At the moment the elevator phase is just boring, it feels like running illusionists gambit minus the scenery. Some suggestions (besides just adding bosses) could include adding a targeted projectile that slow travels towards a player and when it reaches them it creates a persistent vortex at their location that deals damage over time to everyone within it. This creates a challenge for players to correctly position these DoTs so that they do not run out of safe space while completing the objective.
It is probably too late in development to do anything like this, but it should be taken into consideration as a, "lesson learned" moving forward. Maybe something like a non master version of the raid with an easier final boss (that only has a pull and not a push) that does not reward the stuff needed for exalting but gives generic loot is an "easy alternative" to improving the raid mechanics. Other than that it looks good. I highly anticipate this going live.
First off, I'm fond on this Trial. While the first three stages were rather trivial, as has been pointed out by the other people before me, the final stage - the actual boss fight - is challenging. The addition of a mechanic similar to that of the second boss in Spellplague, where you can get pushed off the platform, is a good choice in my opinion. It makes it so that the party can't just brute-force their way through the fight by stacking buffs and debuffs. It requires something more than just standing in the right spot to receive all the buffs and become basicly immortal. However, this push/pull is also the part I'm a little worried about.
Preview seems to run a lot smoother than Live. Anyone who's ran Tomb of the Nine Gods on Live will tell you it can be a laggy hell hole. Hell, the lag and rubberbanding on the Live server has more than once gotten me killed, and I have a low ping compared to a lot of folks. If we add the issues on Live to the equation, the push/pull mechanic looks like it will get a lot of people killed, because they simply wont have time to react, or wont be able to react because of the latency. On Preview it was already clear that certain classes could fight the push/pull easier than others. Paladins and Guardian Fighters are relatively safe, while others struggled a lot more. I was playing as a Hunter Ranger, and after a few tries I got the hang of it, and dodged it reliably.
Hunter Rangers have a rather short immunity frame on their dodge, and if the instance was laggy, I'm sure I would've failed a lot more. Players with a worse ping than I would probably fair even worse. Punishing people for server-side issues or latency seems a bit harsh. I'd suggest a bit more 'warm-up', possibly with an audio queue, between the end of the pull and the actual push, or making the donut a bit larger so there's a bit more of a margin for error. However, I'm not sure if that should be implemented *now* or letting it go to Live as-is would be the better choice. When Tomb of the Nine Gods came to Preview, we considered it pretty difficult, yet now we blow through it. The same thing might happen with Cradle.
In short:
1) The first stages need some extra spice. Once people know what to do, it's just a boring ride with too many 'dead moments' where you're just waiting. In the runs we've done, I don't think we ever struggled with the skulls/jellies.
2) Killing the rope things didn't bring much more excitement either. It's just running around a circle and burning things down. Could use some spice.
3) The actual boss encounter is fun, but I have some small issues with the push/pull mechanic.
4) I like this Trial. The boss is certainly the hardest thing we've had so far, and I look forward to completing it many times.
Some of the early choices that were made in regards to how many sources of shields, temporary health and damage mitigation were available, as well as mechanics like soulforged make it difficult to prevent brute forcing without heavy handed instant kills. Considering the trial is actually tuned to be able to be completed by a group of 12k players, it's inevitable that it will be possible to brute force through some of the mechanics, especially with scrolls of life.
If you brute force through mechanics, you'll definitely be making the fight significantly more difficult for yourself in terms of incoming damage. If you'd like to reduce the incoming damage, please give it a try approaching the mechanics in different ways. We prefer that the journal generally does not explain how to deal with a mechanic, only what the mechanic does. In this case, it's relatively self explanatory what happens to the player who gets the arrow over their head. However, I'd generally like to avoid giving any strong hints or specific instructions on how to deal with mechanics. Please communicate among each other if you'd like to share different ways to approach mechanics. In regards to the pacing, you're correct, the pacing is off, we're going to be adjusting the difficulty ahead of release, so we appreciate the feedback. Internally the development team is strong at dealing with mechanics but we don't generally maintain DPS as high as many of our best live groups. So often times once the fights are in front of you all, we get to see areas where things aren't tuned quite right.
In regards to the mechanics being poorly explained. We don't have any intent to be heavy handed in explaining how mechanics work. Generally a lot of mechanics in our lower difficulty encounters are explained pretty heavily, but as this is a very endgame focused encounter, we'd rather players have an opportunity to master the mechanics themselves.
As always, thank you all for your continued feedback, and good luck should you tackle the cradle again!
I'd personally like to see this with newer dungeons too, but I get not doing it. With these big, complex trials though, I think a normal version really adds value. And I'm sure you would like more than a few percent of the player base to be able to enjoy all your hard work.
A question to the dev team, do you actually test any of these dungeons using a connection that has a less than great ping ? Mine is usually around 130 but we have guildies that never get better than 300. If the dungeon is unplayable when you do this, you're ruling out many players in Africa and Asia from ever doing it.
I have a ping over 300 and can do it on preview but I do not believe I will be able to do it on live.
Devs say that they dont want to explain mechanics, well then let us learn it then, but maybe in less brutal conditions where 15k+ iL groups fail. Especially if its so hardly lag dependant as mentioned above.
During the first/second phases, if you apply a CC effect to the floating skulls/jello cubes (ex: Smoke Bomb), the green line telling you who needs to move disappears. This isn't necessarily a dealbreaker for teams, but it becomes annoying when trying to figure out who needs to move where.
Also, I am sure you guys are in the middle of fixing these bugs, but the "boss benefits from player buffs/debuffs" and the "first cutscene skipped kills you" bugs are still present.
Feedback:
I think the difficulty curve is a little better now that most of the team I've run with has seen/beaten the trial. We haven't been spamming as many scrolls of life, that's for certain.
Other than that... Please make the Ampoules bound to account.
If you want to encourage people to run the trial, then you need to encourage people to not feel punished for only running their support characters, since this trial (and everything else in the game) is won or lost by how good your support is.
Currently, the ampoules are BtC, meaning that you are punished for progress on your main character for wanting to help others on your support alts. Leaving the ampoules BtC also creates a situation where all the DPS players race to recruit all the support players before the support players finish their weapons, which, as we saw with Svardborg, became a huge mess.
--
I'll never retrace my steps.
Some of my best friends are Imaginary.
If you're dealing with the mechanic in the most efficient manner, a little lag shouldn't kill you, but may make it impossible to recover from a screw up. Unfortunately, if we make the ampoules bound to account at launch, players with multiple characters who can run this content will be able to finish their weapon significantly faster. Obviously it's great if you have time to play multiple characters, and we want to make it as painless as possible to have multiple characters, but we also don't want anyoneto feel like it's necessary to not be left behind on this sort of progression.
The feedback is valuable though, while we may not make this adjustment to ampoules right away, it's definitely something we'd want to do in the future. And we would like to consider doing more things based on account in the future so that we can give players with multiple characters more freedom and quality of life without making it feel like a necessary part of progressing.
I believe the main point here might be that once you complete the upgrade on your strongest (or only) trial ready character, that you are able to then fund your alts (or DPS) in a painless manner with the excess Ampoules from from your main character.
A way to do this without speeding up progression would be to make a purchasable upgrade item that costs the current exaltation ingredients, which could be transferred to your lower characters. The ingredients would remain bound, but the item required to actually do the upgrade could be transferred. Progression could not be accelerated, and the Ampoules on your main (or support) character no longer go to waste.
Also, maybe make the ampules (when you have enough of 'em) make one item that's BtA, otherwise ampules themselves are BtC? It would be convoluted, sure, but DPS isn't in such a high demand, so anyone who has a support would be getting those weapons really quickly, and once they're done with the runs they need, there would be a shortage of supports willing to help us poor DPS mortals. It's just a tad too frustrating to run over and over and over again.
I'd like to second the idea of a non-epic version that lets people learn the mechanics. There was a time, for instance, that eLoL and eSoT had "normal" LoL and SoT variants. I can say that in TONG I've been in a number of groups where we had a huge problem explaining the mechanics to new players, especially when English wasn't their first language.
I'm still really concerned about how companions can wind up dying in the third stage. You get a notification that you have to resummon them, but I couldn't see any opportunity to get out of aggro to do so. Once the cutscene ends, you're immediately back in the fire, so to speak.
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
Cool. So I now have exactly 0 reason to do more than 1 per week on my OP. AKA no reason to join and help out unless it's just for lulz. Also means on GWF it will be a mad dash to get what I need before supports stop running the content. @asterdahl thanks so much for that. /s
Because for me they mean only my main can ever have the stuff I need the Ampule for, none of my 3 main alts have a hope of getting it because the game is moving ever futher away from them.
Obsidian Oath - Warlock
A whole lot of other Obsidian toons as well.
However, we are considering the available options and do not plan to leave them nontransferable forever.
If we do count in the time to unlock (all the caps included), that's about 18 weeks just to exalt our weapons, and if someone wants different sets... There has to be a slightly more efficient way to get exalted weapons than running Cradle once a week in hopes of your group actually finishing it with lag and the 50 billion scroll of mass life required. And that's probably underestimating it.
Rather than having weapon crafting take a variety of BtC/BtA/BoE ingredients, make it take exactly 1 BtA ingredient. Then allow the purchase of that ingredient from the campaign store for whatever mix of campaign currencies, including BtC pieces (Ampoules, etc.).
Using such a system, you could make it such that multiple toons cannot accelerate a single toon's progress. But one toon can eventually gear out alts.