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Any word on the impossible/near impossible Random Q's
prethen
Member Posts: 137 Arc User
I can't tell you how many hours of wasted time I've spent doing various Random Q's (advanced and intermediate). When starting out, it looks like the DPS of the party is awesome and the healing just might work out. Then we hit the final boss (and sometimes the 2nd to last boss) and things peter out.
Here's the list:
Many Coins Bank Heist: I've only been able to complete this one time (doing this probably a couple of dozen times now) after Mod 16. The mobs become insanely powerful for this supposedly middle-power event.
Tiamat: This was a lot of fun...okay, maybe a little too easy before Mod16. Now, I haven't been able to see this finish yet, Tiamat just keeps getting refreshed; the party can't kill the heads fast enough and the heads appear to have much more staying power and breath weapon power.
Nine Gods: I've only been able to see this completed once. The final boss and the ghosties are insanely difficult. I've seen very strong parties wiped out too easily and usually when the boss is at about half to less than half of his HP. What really sucks about this one is that you invest a lot of time before you figure out that you ain't going to be able to finish it. It's quite deflating and makes the game almost undesirable. I'm not as excited coming back to it after I waste that much time.
I think I'm forgetting one or two more, but you guys probably can fill in those blanks.
Is there anything going on in Dev-land with these or did they just set the bar that high deliberately? I know that as I approach 21K that I am not even within striking distance of doing LOMM yet (since my overall stats are too low to realistically even try...so I don't!).
Here's the list:
Many Coins Bank Heist: I've only been able to complete this one time (doing this probably a couple of dozen times now) after Mod 16. The mobs become insanely powerful for this supposedly middle-power event.
Tiamat: This was a lot of fun...okay, maybe a little too easy before Mod16. Now, I haven't been able to see this finish yet, Tiamat just keeps getting refreshed; the party can't kill the heads fast enough and the heads appear to have much more staying power and breath weapon power.
Nine Gods: I've only been able to see this completed once. The final boss and the ghosties are insanely difficult. I've seen very strong parties wiped out too easily and usually when the boss is at about half to less than half of his HP. What really sucks about this one is that you invest a lot of time before you figure out that you ain't going to be able to finish it. It's quite deflating and makes the game almost undesirable. I'm not as excited coming back to it after I waste that much time.
I think I'm forgetting one or two more, but you guys probably can fill in those blanks.
Is there anything going on in Dev-land with these or did they just set the bar that high deliberately? I know that as I approach 21K that I am not even within striking distance of doing LOMM yet (since my overall stats are too low to realistically even try...so I don't!).
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The tiamat one now requires a pre-made group with someone leading and calling the shots, good DPS and maybe healing for it to be successful. Before it did not matter because you had 25 people which allowed for lots of human error now there is only 10 requiring players to have a workable strategy and some skill to win.
The nine gods one I do not know as I have not done RAQ since the release of MOD 16! Although, if I were to do RAQ, I would start with a pre-made group from my alliance and if you happen to be or are in a group of newbies for that content you need to make sure that at least 1 or 2 people are essentially powerful enough to carry the group if need be.
In my opinion, RAQ and above should never be queued solo unless you are pretty much already capable of doing said content solo.
To sum it up, if you're pugging Qs, it's always good to have 1-2 other people with you (depending on your skill levels). It just makes it easier and if the other 2-3 people wipe you at least still know you have some shot with your remaining backup.
10 players that find a good build...)
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On your points of the dungeons being too hard, some of these I can certainly agree with, and there are somethings devs COULD do to fix it however it would probably hurt your experience doing so, such as implementing an ELO style system with completing a dungeon giving you higher ELO, and queuing you for dungeons based on your ELO, instead of Item level, however, they would have to change IL caps to ELO caps which means if you fail too many time you could lose access, not only that the number of people who are potential matches are far smaller, increasing queue time beyond what they are now. an overhaul of a system like this could be very disruptive to the game in general.
its also luck of the draw after all it is random, I have solo REQ'd a few times and had LoMM runs from 18 minutes all the way up to 4 hours, with an average sitting at about 50 minutes. I have also been in the opposite boat to you in manycoins I think I have only failed twice in about 15 runs (it doesn't come up that much).
CR however I have never completed, mostly because the time it takes to get to the end and the last fight. There where a few changes in today's patch and have yet to try them again.
If you struggle try teaming up with a pre-made you know can do it until its super easy, then go back to random Qs, maybe slowly introduce pugs, reducing the pre-made size over time. This allows you to 'coach' pugs who don't know the mechanics and causing the fail to help them understand how to complete it. creating a queue pool with more people who can finish the dungeon. There are many good guilds out there who run lots of content, this is probably the best way to get a premade group together.
The tweaks devs are making (such as increased IL requirement) shows they know its hard and they are trying without having to disrupt the game too much or with insane amounts of work. feedback is good, and being taken in to consideration, but they also don't want to make it so absolutely everyone just walks through content without a second thought.
1) RLQ and RIQ - always queue as DPS. The algorithm is probably trying to minimize wait time and if they have 5 players ready to go and it is not tank-heal-3xdps, you will get a skirmish
2) Many coins - if there isn't enough dps (should be able to tell early), just leave. There is no timer like in demo or sva where if you fail you still get your RQ reward. You fail here, you start over. The sooner you cut your loses, the more time you save
3) Tiamat - if you don't want to take a penalty, just a wait a minute or two. Usually someone else will leave
That's where I got my armor(not the Marty'rs Robe, but the visual). "Elemental alliance" something or other...
My character Tsin'xing
It would be nice to see a weekly bonus for each dungeon that can only be attained once per week, even if you queue it up directly. This will keep variety going so Random players dont always pull the easiest and farmed missions. For this to work... Cryptic needs to collect completion data and success rates. Missions like Tiamat need to have their IL upped 1000.
The missions should be giving a base AD value of about 50 AD per 1000 IL req X Ave minutes to complete. The 20% Least-Played missions should gain about 33% extra AD to encourage their play and to offset cost of difficulty/consumables.
Advanced Queue:
Intermediate Queue:
Leveling Queue:
The Leveling queue mostly has a 90%+ completion rate. Removing those problem maps listed above should make that rate even better.
The Intermediate queue also has a completion rate mostly in the 80%+ range currently. Tiamat was the major outlier so we are going to try that in the Advanced queue due to the complexity of the mechanics and teamwork required. Many Coins bank was the next outlier and has a completion rate ~65% which is lower than we'd like. The increased item level requirement should help. But in addition to that we are adding roles back into skirmishes, both so that they align with the rest of our content and to make sure players have a balanced group when tackling content. We think this combination of adjustments will bring all of the Intermediate queue into high success ranges.
Finally we have the Advanced Queue. Overall the queue is mostly performing as expected. ToNG is slightly below where we'd like the completions to be (currently ~63%). The changes in its own item level requirements as well as the increase in queue item level requirements should bump that up to a better place. The big outliers are Cradle and CR, which at least in part is due to their reputation which causes some players to abandon as soon as they enter. We previously did a variety of balance improvements on those two maps post M16 release, but their reputation has held through. We're hoping the 2k IL increase on entry will encourage players to give the dungeons another real shot and hopefully will lead players to see that those dungeons are actually doable.
Those are all the near term fixes we have in the works which will be live soon on PC (and a couple are already live). From there we will continue to monitor the queues and decide on additional adjustments or different ways to work with the queues as we move forward.
but now it seems like a lot of players that knew the push pull are gone or for some reason just have a hard time now where they didn't before. (right after mod 16 dropped I watched a bunch of people that I used to run with fall over and over again who never had a problem before)
and the newer players never had a chance to learn the mechanics because now that it's an old raid no one has the patience to do the learning ques again that are doomed to hours and hours of fails and the newer players don't really want to bother with it either because what's the point, it is an old raid.
I would suggest either really toning down the pp or adding a campfire. to codg. or putting it to level 80 again for the people that were around when it dropped originally.
I can tell you that those two skirmishes, along with Garrunder, were the most complained about in the first year of this game. Before Mod1, Aberrant Assault/Resonant Evil was the only Skirmish available at max level and geared players struggled in it because you have to use tactics when the bodyguard spawns. It's not available at max level now so I can't try it, but the bodyguard could one shot people, including fighters - because it lacked a collision box when doing the pull AoE, causing the fighter to be pulled inside the mob so the hit was behind their shield. It also lacked extra campfires but that was fixed long ago.
Malabog's has an 85% completion rate
We actually only currently have 8 queue maps that have lower than a 75% completion rate and they're all ones discussed above with the addition of Master Svardborg, which we will be watching to see if the increased Advanced Queue requirement improves that success rate.
One of the trickier parts of design is figuring out why some players are having difficulty with content while a majority aren't. It is one thing when you see a map has a 70% failure rate and you can see that most of the players are dying at Boss #2, that gives a very clear indicator of where a major problem lies. But when a map has an 85-90% completion rate and yet we read multiple players saying that the content is too hard, it becomes a more complicated problem.
There are some quick checks we can look at, for example if all of those players saying the piece of content is hard are the same class, or couple of classes, then we've found a common link that we can focus on. While we know there are still some class issues, those who are failing to complete Malabog's don't lead to it being class specific.
That leads to the fact that it could be a build or power combination that isn't working as well as other setups. That is more complicated since there are so many factors, but it does lead to questions of what better information we can put out there to help players know which parts of character building are more important or less, which powers/power combos we could boost up a bit and more. We've actually been having conversations lately on how we can help players, especially those just hitting level 80, with better information on areas of character improvement or even content that is a better match to their current progress to help players avoid the frustration of jumping into something their character will struggle to survive.
Fortunately we have been developing new analytics over the past year, and the team working on that has given us a lot of great tools and continues to give us new ones all the time. For example we now have a dynamic report that updates every day with match attempts/completions/failures/etc. That kind of instant dynamic report allows us to analyze the queues better and make targeted adjustments.
We also have a report that shows us how many players are making it through which quests/levels. That report is showing that the changes in the levels 1-20 content had a significant positive impact on players getting through the tutorial and into the early levels of the game. Those types of reports are helping us find the problem areas more easily and helping us to make improvements.
However, that still leaves a lot of nuanced areas that aren't so clear cut which can be more difficult to pinpoint what a good adjustment is to help with those having difficulty on a queue like Valindra's, without making a change that would make it too easy for those already completing it.
We still beat it, but especially in the second wraith phase an instant of bad luck ends your run for you, since you have to hope you went down in the last 10 seconds of the phase so someone can rescue you after the wraiths vanish.
Was the vastly increased wraith movement speed (which also happened to the Stronghold black dragon wraiths, BTW) intentional? I don't think I ever saw a patch note about it. I know it's been brought up before but I haven't seen anyone say "yes, that was a deliberate change", or even acknowledge that the change was made.
Re: Malabog's Castle: How many groups are abandoning before the first boss? Because I get a troll stuck in a siege tower where he can't be targeted but won't stop aggroing so we can blow up the tower, almost every time. And it's always a 5-10 minute process of finding the exact right combination of powers and locations and things to kill him, because he's trapped in terrain.
Assuming that doesn't happen, or your party spends the 5-10 minutes killing him extremely slowly using precisely targeted AoE powers, MC is easy. But I suspect you might be having a big chunk of your 15% failures being straight up trapped-in-terrain-bug abandons.
As for Ravenloft, I beat it once after the more recent balancing changes. The whole ordeal didn't give me a "hooray I beat it feeling" but rather a "thank god it's over, let's never do that again" one. It was so excruciatingly tedious, buggy and long that I'll happily abandon it as soon as I have the misfortune of ending up there again. You could abandon the instance, wait 30 minutes, do just about any other RAQ dungeon (without burning through countless scrolls and health stones) and finish with similar rewards, in the same time (that is including doing nothing for 30 minutes) and a whole lot less headache.
There were a number of complaints about various dungeons/trials but all of them were either: a) No one knew the mechanics or b) pug groups AND no one knew the mechanics or c) no one knew the new 85' CA rule applies to enemies too (nsva/msva manticores).
So I made a point of taking some of these guys who were complaining about tiamat and other dungeons being impossible and teaching them the mechanics and showing them that they are actually easy if you and the group know what you are doing.
Not easy in a pug group though. A couple of them reportedly tried to teach people in the pug groups how to do tiamat but they didn't listen.
Solution? Don't pug it solo, pug it with a group that can do it regardless of bot/idiot players that don't listen. Or just don't pug it.
Guild: Ruathym Corsairs
pretty sure their end goal isn't to have random ques that can only be completed by premades.
Balancing in 80+ dungeons and skirmishes is partially terribly off. I'd really like to hear the numbers of completed random queue runs of the problematic dungeons. Per player, not per party. The players who drop in there randomly are so vastly different in their possibilities, it's simply hardly possible to get a group going who is able to run the dungeon. As someone else already said, groups are forming elsewhere, leaving out the actually random players to run the queue with others of lower gear level. Thus, success becomes even less likely.
Inside of the abovenamed dungeons, players frequently ask to be kicked from a weak group. Sometimes low dps get kicked without a warning and don't even know it it's "for harrassment", I voted no on that kind of try a couple times since it's plainly unfair not even to ask. Once a player leaves, usually the others also leave sooner or later, since it's not worth the wait. The algorithms appear not to care whether the overall item / power level of the group is even remotely enough.
On top of that, new players get advice from others more and more rarely, and others (new ones) actually don't care to read the chat. While nothing can be done about the latter, impatient old players are a major problem to teamplay if they feel slowed down. They are the first to leave, but they are necessary for completion.
While in ToNG the group usually at least sticks together, in other dungeons like Tuern, "new" and slow / weak players use to get stuck with the whole mob which others left behind rushing through the level (so here's the use of a legendary mount: Don't be the one who gets stuck with nobody caring, and even being yelled at). The technical impossibility to play as a group of peers in char strength kindles social ineptidude, it seems.
I'm not an old player, but heard of old players that not too long ago, teamplay was much better and "idiot groups" who don't care for anyone rather rare. Meanwhile, that's not the same any more.
I'd hope that devs actually read the feedback they get on dungeons, since numbers alone won't tell what's off. Player satisfaction runs the game, so listen to it, I beg you.
Specific dungeons at 20.5k, Hellbringer Warlock:
CoDG: raq brought me there once. The group disbanded within ten seconds. In theory, due to lack of experience, I agree with feadan about the permanent death mechanics and no possiblity to train the one from the boss fight. Sounds like a challenge, but for most people is likely an overkill due to massive amounts of time that need to be put into running the dungeon over and over.
LoMM: No chance to bring a mimic down. Players in the only serious group (two other dps with above 100k power) got annoyed and left, new party tried about 5 times, then abandoned the instance. The next one disbanded before even ever trying the first boss.
ToNG: Of 20 runs, 6 failed instantly (people leaving - and always the best ones with 22k+) on start, two were finished (everyone else was insanely good), four got to the boss, then failed / disbanded, the rest got two times to the 2nd boss, otherwise failed at Orcus or even before. The last one failed because the healer was a paladin. Please do sth about the bug which blocks this kind of group, since paladin healing overrides the health buff. (I love this dungeon and would like to play it in a balanced version some time.) Players are also sometimes annoyed by explanations for new players. The two runs which worked out actually had only patient people in them ... a rare kind, it seems.
Manycoins: The most annoying dungeon in my opinion. Needs tons of dps and is almost impossible without a healer, yet healers are rarely in the party.
Castle Ravenloft: Been there with a strong group who pulled me through, but the whole group - no matter how tough the character - died almost instantly during the red flame sequence of the boss fight. We abandoned the instance. Those were three guys of 24k+, one of 23k, and me, the noob, at 19.5k. My other four or five random queue starts there ended before the gate because people leave immediately on start.
Tiamat: One fail (time up, people weren't able to kill the heads as well as deal with the mobs), one with people scattering on entry after some swearing over other's power level), one attempt barely making it.
I can't say much about Svardborg, been there only once (at 19k: much too early just again) and Fangbreaker, aside of another two times of parties disbanding and two times being the one who slows everyone down and dies in Drufi's permafrost, so the others need to hope they survive with four. Nothing against boss fight mechanics, but this one is a pain if you want to stay ranged, the camera gets stuck close to the char due to walls, and you can't evade anything because you can't see what's beneath your feet and at the same time, aim. Getting close to Drufi means almost instant death as well, so nope.
A dps problem: One needs to get to the point where one can run these dungeons. With a warlock, it took me always well past the minimum item level, even at least 1k above the new one was needed. E.g. fighting through Barovia at 12k was simply impossible, back at 16k it was still tough, only ~18k brought some flow back into the fights again, together with a serious chance of survival. The tons of bugs harrassing the warlock class appear to remain untouched. Consider that these bugs are also a massive drawback which clashes with item level suggestions.
Several dungeons: Why is there no chest for players without specific keys, with at least some decent, while not outstanding loot, like a chance on some enchanting stones rank 5+? People run a random queue, do their best, likely put resources in it, and get some dropped loot and a locked chest. That's not an incentive. It's easier to put the time into solo slaughtering a bit through Dread Ring and using up some Thayan Keys for a chance on such loot.
Right now there's an additional problem: The insane lag of up to five seconds renders many boss fights impossible. Since some boss fights appear to be especially plagued by lag (I experienced that against Ras Nsi) people die half through if they make it that far, either by too much damage taken, not even half possible damage dealt, or simply by inevitable permadeath mechanics kicking in.
As long as this cannot be fixed (and it's definitely not my connection), please consider to make dungeons rather too easy than veritably impossible.
Addendum: Malabog's has another problem - the group usually breaks up, often leaving low level chars behind, unable to kill trash. Fun goes down the gutters. Please make at least some of the gates only passable with the whole group.
Maybe also consider stopping to punish players by permadeath in boss fights at first death / after a number of deaths. It gets tough up to impossible to revive others without getting killed as well. Skirmishes are better in this respect since they allow everyone to participate and also keep the balance between tough characters and those with less health.
Ardor is easily avoidable to the player that pays attention to the ground. Proven multiple times. Hell we even pug CR with guildies to show pugs it can be done. You look up for the red glowing flames and you move where there's none. Sometimes we might get caught out of guard but not to the point where the dungeon isnt completable.
Oh and no we're not 24-26k iL. We just have eyes.
Idk why people complain about Ardor when the Sisters aggro is still clunky. Thats the real bug in CR.
I will however add one more reason why people fails:
They are inexperienced and do not know the encounters and basic tactics. Or they are not integrated enough in the community to get or pick up advice on building a character. Just yesterday we had to ask a tank in LoMM to leave because he was running with 50k arpen and 55k defense, yet had 22k IL.. just a bad build(no augment pet). He chaindied and could not keep aggro - we did explain things to him though.
And even worse: Some people refuse to listen to instructions, either for personal reasons(ego..) or because they do not have the language skills(english is default in PUGs) or because they just do not watch their chat window. In a way the high translation rate of NW content becomes a problem because we get players that are not fluent in english, and that becomes a problem when it is necessary to give instructions on builds or tactics.
With the exception of Bank Heist(requires too much raw dps to keep up with spawns), and CR/Tong, I have an OK completion rate on most instances without resorting to votekicking weak players. But I sometimes need to spend a bit of time explaining things.
The one thing that makes votekick happen with me is if I cannot communicate with a player that needs instructions.
To avoid situations where groups fail because they just don't know to handle a dungeon you would need some system that assures an experienced player in group. Maybe add a self-toggleable mentor flag and make sure you get at least one in each group, or since anything 'self' is exploitable in some way, consider people with 10+ runs of a dungeon veterans and make sure each group get at least one if possible.
That leads to the fact that it could be a build or power combination that isn't working as well as other setups. That is more complicated since there are so many factors, but it does lead to questions of what better information we can put out there to help players know which parts of character building are more important or less, which powers/power combos we could boost up a bit and more. We've actually been having conversations lately on how we can help players, especially those just hitting level 80, with better information on areas of character improvement or even content that is a better match to their current progress to help players avoid the frustration of jumping into something their character will struggle to survive.
If you look at queues you can see for everyone a basis value.
But nowhere ingame is explained what that means. Yes you can look at the preview mod16 threads where a few hints are left, but that did only a little portion of playerbase.
So my answer to your question is, give ppl information.
Show in ingame tips what basis value of a skirmisch/dungeon means.
Show calculated % values when in skirmish/dungeon for that dungeon in charactersheet.
To the VT Problem: ghosts are very to fast, slow them down 25%-50% and dungeon has a higher complition rate.
To the MC Problem, Troll at third tower is nearly always stuck in it, so do something that a troll could not get into this tower.
To the CR Problem. Beside that something strange is with the three Sisters (here you can see the aggro bug), "Living" sister isnt following tank (or whoever has red aggro bar), Bat attack is mostly death for player attacked casue no lights are avail to end attack. 2nd Boss all ok.
Last boss ist way to heavy in attacks. No DC can heal enough to avoid death of players. Only with OP heal there is a chance.
That is a bad design for a dungeon to have only few classes or combination who can finish it.
To the Manycoin bankheist Problem, cause of split party heal is mostly impossible if a heal (dc) is in group.
And the last boss attacks way to hard, 1 or 2 shot everyone near him.
if you play your game you know that all the above description are true.
My character Tsin'xing