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Tales of Old: The Dread Vault - Extension and upcoming changes
terramak
Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 995Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
We're looking into the difficulty of the Tales of Old: The Dread Vault event, but we haven't been able to lock down changes that we can safely get live today. The event will continue running through the weekend as-is, and we hope to do the following next week:
EDIT 2019-09-05: We're still hard at work adjusting and testing the balance changes. Our current target is for an internal team to be able to complete Difficulty x3 with a reasonable amount of coordination, and make decent progress through Difficulty x4.
Our adjustments are not yet ready to hit the live server. We'll still make sure the event gets extended--that'll happen without a patch, tonight or early tomorrow morning. We're aiming to get a build with difficulty improvements live before the weekend.
Some changes we're testing internally:
Edit 2019-09-06: The difficulty changes are now live on Dragon, and will be live on Drider after maintenance in several hours.
- Extend the "Tales of Old: The Dread Vault" event by one week, ending September 12 instead of September 5.
- To accommodate that, reschedule Coins of Waukeen to September 19-23, delayed from September 5-9.
- Test how it feels when we raise the maximum item level of the event, and see whether we need to make any additional changes from there.
EDIT 2019-09-05: We're still hard at work adjusting and testing the balance changes. Our current target is for an internal team to be able to complete Difficulty x3 with a reasonable amount of coordination, and make decent progress through Difficulty x4.
Our adjustments are not yet ready to hit the live server. We'll still make sure the event gets extended--that'll happen without a patch, tonight or early tomorrow morning. We're aiming to get a build with difficulty improvements live before the weekend.
Some changes we're testing internally:
- Fix the red zones on the ground for Mind Burst, so that they consistently display. (This previously made it look like there were safe areas within the area with big scary purple sparks.)
- Make the tether VFX between Yshiggol and nearby enemies display more consistently.
- Review add spawn rates and composition during the Yshiggol fight.
- Review Item Level scaling values in the instance.
Edit 2019-09-06: The difficulty changes are now live on Dragon, and will be live on Drider after maintenance in several hours.
Post edited by terramak on
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Also please dont forget that this is an event, its supposed to be fun, not frustrating to a point where it feels more like chores than fun. Basically lvl1-3 should be considerably easy, 4 and 5 abit harder due to the longer cds and power-defense debuffs, but not by buffing enemies, if you nerf players and buff enemies each round, thats where the frustration hits in.
So I guess the feedback you got from preview just kinda got lost somewhere? Or maybe folks don't even bother to post anymore. I mean what is the point after all?
Ran it (or tried to) with a party of all 24k+.
All experienced. All well geared.
Some of us played the old Dread Vault >5 years ago.
Tried 3 times. Crushed in 2nd round boss every time (on 0 remaining deaths). Struggle is real.
Shouldn't get that hard until round 4 or 5, imho.
ty 4 fixing.
I am Took.
"Full plate and packing steel" in NW since 2013.
It's almost impossible to do multi level runs and we could never get enaugh pages,
seems like the difficulty of 1 atm on the end boss should be lvl 3 or so.
Liking the dungeon and big brain
Update please
Thank you very much, apreciated!
Part of Team Tredecim of the Cloaks Alliance website
https://cloakalliance.wordpress.com/
(While this may be a game-wide Mod 16 side-effect I am still finding that when I am soloing content I hit pretty hard but when I am in a party, I hit like my weapon is made of rubber. Is the new scaling punishing the entire party based on the stats of the most powerful player in a party? Not good.)
Btw: Is the Cat-In-The-Hat Bard a subtle hint at an upcoming playable race?
Wish this had been a day ago, but thank you.
https://www.theholycrusaders.com/
God Help them ^^.
I'm pretty happy with that, just wouldve liked the announcement a day or 2 ago.
https://www.theholycrusaders.com/
Guild: Ruathym Corsairs
Fantastic job on the update and consideration!
The way I see it, transition from MOD15 to MOD16 didn't bode well for the event, and it shows in the runs. It really needed to be adjusted before the event hit LIVE servers, as people have a tendency to remember stuff like this and avoid similar things in the future.
Developer's job isn't easy on this, I think. Basically, giving a rough estimation where the IL cap should be and what is a decent enough setup for people to run x4/x5 successfully is really not an easy job because the Event should be played by people of various IL and it shouldn't be only elite-player exclusive content. Yet again, it should provide a decent challenge. So, RAQ-level stuff at x1-x3, and then REQ-level stuff at x4/x5.
I also think that losing 50% power/def in this case will be extremely bad. It should be 25%-30%, and that's already enough to really mess some people's rotations, let alone defense against enemies.
I also think that the event should be inviting, friendly, and beneficial to new players who, despite the fact they might not get a chance to obtain some of the items, can still experience what it was for the old players to play some of the oldest dungeons from "back in the good ol' days".
A QUICK BUG, a nuisance.
Oh, BTW, Vansi jumped into the pit (1st miniboss spawn @ brain), he launched himself into the oblivion, instakilling himself. Just ptsiuuuu whooosh dead in a sec. Same like that skelly from OMU who liked to imitate formula 1 stuff.
I state this because what will happen to people if, let's say, Vansi gets stuck in a texture after such a jump/dash and it destroys one of X5 runs for someone? Would be bad, really bad.
It's his long reaching, cone attack power. No idea what it's called, but should be tested.
Regards.
@terramak is it possible that this is something similar that was happening in the Hunts in Barovia right after Mod 16 release? The adds say they are level 73 both in round 1, and round 2. However I give you the ACT numbers for Yalghoor the Rank for example, Round 1 he had 1,881,148 HP (that was incoming damage) and he was hitting for 9.4K average. Round 2 he had 3,513,985 HP (incoming damage) and was hitting for 50.9k average.
Yshiggol is actually not bad, when on round one it took 15,279.940 damage to kill, and it was averaging 32k damage outgoing, with it max hit 180k non-crit of mind burst, Round two out going damage was only slightly more at 40k, but its non-crit hits with mind burst were 280k +. I couldn't give u incoming because we died before we killed it.
Graft Harrow first round 1,925,020 incoming damage, no outgoing will killed before they had a chance to hit, round two 3,548,253 HP ( incoming damage) outgoing average of 42.5k with a non-crit of 163k from mind burst.
Pros
- Being able to play Dread Vault again (what I once considered the hardest dungeon in the Mod 5 era) was nice
Cons
- Round 1 took about 20-30 minutes to complete with a nearly end-game group (IL 24-26k; lower IL due to equipment with better % damage modifiers)
- Round 2 was impossible to complete - our tank with 600HP+ was killed far too quickly for our healer to keep alive, and all other characters were one-shot by adds
- Trying to earn 125 tokens to complete the Storyteller book is an exercise in masochism and futility
As noted by players above, the scaling is off. Something is not right when the difference between round 1 and 2 causes a mass wipe in the majority (if not most) of teams entering.
If you have scaling issues, but also the difficulty modifiers with each round (e.g. can't use artifacts, reduced defense and power), you are making things needlessly hard. You will turn players away from events like this, and they will remember it.
I appreciate the developers increasing the duration of the event, and looking at toning down the difficulty.
Recommendation
- Either do not scale us, or change the modifiers per round. DO NOT have both
- If you do still decide to scale us, at least increase the minimum level with each subsequent round
- Allow cut-scenes to be skippable
- Implore you to not release things live before at least having it somewhat reasonably tuned
Also about the stats, I definitely saw a loss of stats on my character from the T1 to the T2. I couldn't say how much since I only tried the T2 once, but it did happen.