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Dungeons: Too Many Adds
reskal
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
Okay. Let me preface this by saying I do not feel that dungeons need to be easier, or simpler.
I also believe that adds with some bosses certainly have their place. But there are too many.
There are a lot of bosses in this game that have fantastic abilities. Dodging Chartifilax's poison sprays, explosions, and zones all the while being snared by little imp adds was hectic and fantastic. Some of the bosses in the Hotenow area are great -- dropping those AoE meteors in the correct position, and finding a proper place to stand to avoid cc shooting out of the ground is all a lot of fun.
So my question is: Why do these boss fights need adds as well? Boss mechanics are what give a MMO a change of pace. My experience has been that bosses themselves aren't the real threat. For example, fighting Idris was entertaining for the most part -- positioning to avoid being dazed and trying to maintain maximum uptime on the boss was fun. But Idris wasn't the threat in this boss fight. Her adds were.
Why can't the boss mechanics be more dangerous, and slim down the number of adds a boss will spawn? The damage of boss mechanics can be tuned upwards to keep the overall difficulty of the encounter the same.
I also believe that adds with some bosses certainly have their place. But there are too many.
There are a lot of bosses in this game that have fantastic abilities. Dodging Chartifilax's poison sprays, explosions, and zones all the while being snared by little imp adds was hectic and fantastic. Some of the bosses in the Hotenow area are great -- dropping those AoE meteors in the correct position, and finding a proper place to stand to avoid cc shooting out of the ground is all a lot of fun.
So my question is: Why do these boss fights need adds as well? Boss mechanics are what give a MMO a change of pace. My experience has been that bosses themselves aren't the real threat. For example, fighting Idris was entertaining for the most part -- positioning to avoid being dazed and trying to maintain maximum uptime on the boss was fun. But Idris wasn't the threat in this boss fight. Her adds were.
Why can't the boss mechanics be more dangerous, and slim down the number of adds a boss will spawn? The damage of boss mechanics can be tuned upwards to keep the overall difficulty of the encounter the same.
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Liberated Borg -Captain USS Solstice
Member of Starfleet Borg Task Force - Tactical Unit
Yeah, or that other guy he is designed to team up with to kill the minions; you know the guy with the huge sword...
2-3 clerics, and 1-2 rogue/wiz/weapon fighter is all you need.
If you have a guardian in your group and you wipe - the fault is on you for allowing them to stay.
At the moment, tanking is not how you know it.
Even if you gain the mobs attention 2 things happen, a cleric casts a heal and pull everything in a radius of 1000 miles, or a wizard decided to knock them everywhere, making tanking even harder.
We should be able to pull adds/mobs etc etc, and keep them intrested in us.
I think a daily power should of been to suck the mobs towards the tank, and hold that aggro, but that's not how it is.
Toons:
New: CW Level 60
GF = Level 60
DC = Level 60
TR = Level 60
I've done a few bosses and the mechanics of all bosses have been, honestly, too easy to figure the boss out, I can pretty much pre-determine what the boss is gonna do the most, know what? Exactly, spawn mobs, it's so overused in this game lol.
The difficulty of what I've done so far is pretty much based on how many adds there are, the skills the bosses I've done so far use are too easy to figure out, huge red bloody circles/cones saying don't stand here or you'll take some damage.
Rest is, adds, adds, adds, and more bloody adds.
Overused mechanic is overused.
Remove red circles from anything that can be seen on boss movements, for example if he's about to attack with some kind of breath attack, remove that dumb cone of red.
Lessen the amount of adds drastically due it's just plain boring, add more skill to bosses, where you actually have to pay attention.
"Oh, some red stuff is on the ground, I better move"
lol.
Luckily I'm more for PvP, but I do like some PvE, but what I've seen so far is too predictable, and the adds are just overused.
To many people still get hit standing in the red circles and PWE needs their money.
Red circles/lines/cones stay.
Many end bosses, specifically dragons such as in Mad Dragon or Karrundax, there's infinite adds. You can never kill them fast enough because soon as they die, they instantly respawn. There isn't enough CC in the game even on a CW to continuously CC 2 harder mobs and 4 regular mobs especially when they are ranged and elite (meaning they don't just flop over dead). You can't even really tank them very well because of the range which basically means the Cleric is going to have to tank them and just deal with them banging on him the entire fight.
Other fights where you can kill the adds are perfectly fine, or two smaller adds keep coming (such as Vault and the two intellect devourers that constantly spawn) because those are manageable situations. The periods on bosses where they summon adds and you deal with them and they go down is perfectly fine as well (and can be quite challenging).
Having instantly respawning adds is a bit absurd however and just makes certain fights/dungeons impossible to do if your group isn't on the top of their game.
I would change one thing with adds or with normal mobs in quest hubs, make them a short animation before their first hit to facilitate kiting. Mind-flayers are annoying for glass canon fight as well as large groups of charging mobs since they deal their first hit as soon as they are next to you. If you are questing its not so bad you can use potions to power through but in a boss fight the mobs will usually kill you before you can even react. Range adds do not have this kind of problem since their attack has an built-in charge time.
Ofc I assume that CWs know what they are doing.
You fight the boss on a circular platform, which has outer rings that constantly fall off. At the end of the fight (around 10%) you are left on a tiny platform with at least 30 mobs up at all times. ALL times. You can only take about 15 steps without falling off said platform.
There were so many adds our instance actually locked up and we wiped. Came back for another round and got the kill. I'm not sure how that fight would have been possible without 2 CW to control adds 100% and 2 Rogues to duo the boss. That only leaves room for Cleric.
It's a similar story for Epic Mad Dragon. Guardian Fighter really needs some loving to AOE taunt these adds or at least stop forcing the queue to wait on one -- they're pretty much useless. Lowering the spawn rate on adds would help too.
I agree. I'm tired of all the adds. The same exact fight. 20 bosses, and 20 fights that had me doing the same thing. A boss without endless adds would have been unique. I'm trying out a control mage now, but they're squishy, and wind up shift evading, all over the place. I tried out a guard, too, but no one's killing the adds, so they wind up flanking me and I take tons of damage. People aren't getting they need to kill adds. On the plus side, I CAN'T shift evade...
Soloing on the cleric got to be old. I couldn't kill stuff fast, so I'd get swarmed, and have to shift evade through fights. So they became just like the stuff I hated about the dungeons. Employing the same tactic for every single fight lacks imagination. I can't even do foundry stuff. People have it set up where I have to fight tons of adds, as well.
I mean no offense, but you lack both imagination and experience it seems. There are hundreds of ways to make encounters difficult without add spawns. I started typing them out, but realized how long that would take. In my experience, both eq1 and eq2 were excellent at making difficult fights without addspawn, and even when there were adds, it wasn't necessarily about the waves of them.
-Travail.
I am a guardian.
Just so non-CWs are aware: some bosses (I'm looking at you MD) are extremely difficult to target around. We will routinely have our CCs uselessly hit a boss, when pointed right at a mob near it.
Raged hard on MD yesterday, as his ****ing wings repeatedly screwed with the targeting.
The adds mechanic make it so each blend of had will require different interractions and each time for each run aggro will be split differently. In some groups as a mage i would have to kite the boss while the other members of the group would deal with adds other time tank would keep the boss and i would deal with had by CCing and other time the team would kill adds as they came. Right there you get a variety of solution to a single problem : adds. Give me mechanic that will not turn out to have a single prototyped response in the end ? I dont recall many encounters that did so and that did not rely on splitting the group focus. You might think adds get old but honestly they do much slower than most other mechanics
Dont give me those scripted at 30 % click that button at 60% touch your nose at 80% do the chicken or you group wipes kind of fights.
The fights are still scripted. But now it's at 30% here are some more adds, at 60% here are some more adds, and at 80% here's even more adds. Personally, I don't find considerably less interesting than "at 70%, here's a new boss skill to deal with, at 50%, here's a second new boss skill to deal with, at 15% here's a very difficult new boss skill to deal with".
Maybe my problem is being a guardian fighter.
Doesn't bring anything but frustration.
1-2 waves of special mobs that has to die or it heals boss/deals huge amount of damage/buffs boss, anything, it would be better.
But endless mobs that does little to no damage and just annoying the hell out of you, is just, annoying.
I'm pretty sure Cryptic can muster out better ideas than what I've seen so far, without the adds, the bosses ARE tank and spank, the BOSS is tank and spank, hilarious ain't it.
Where's the DPS races?
Where's the coordination? Bunch of mobs rolling down bombs on you that bounce of walls that you have to avoid, that ain't rolling like some snails, yea I thought it up on the spot.
At least make some Lunatic mode where everything is MUCH harder than a bunch of adds just spawning all over the place.
I could go on and on, really, I can think of too many things I'd add to these bosses to make them more interesting but, can't be bothered.
I agree it is just lazy design, I mean every boss the same thing with the adds, and let me tell you being the only cleric in the group with all the adds is ZERO fun.
Because you'd completely invalidate the point of the GWF and CW. This isn't WoW, every class has a specific role and that's why there are always tons of adds, both weak and strong.