Anyway, if you thought that fight was "too hard" wait till you get to the Werewolf Boss.
The warewolf boss has cemented my original opinion: I'm going to enjoy this as a single-player game and skip the dungeons.
As the cleric, I spend the entirety of the fight running for my life and if I stop to cast something I get maimed for half my health. By the wolf lair I can't outrun the mobs.
Maybe we had poor team composition, maybe I'm not good at this, but whatever. Blowing all of my resources to lose a fight and then getting implicitly or explicitly blamed for it is no fun, and I don't need it.
Personally, I believe that the dragon is overtuned.
I base this belief on several observations:
1) Not only is the dragon much harder than the end boss in the previous dungeon, but it seems to me that it is also much harder than the end boss of the next dungeon.
Seriously, we downed Idris on our first attempt in a PUG with no guardian, no cleric, and no voice coms. Everyone had to work at it, but we all had enough fun that no-one raged when we discovered the quest was bugged. It seems to me that the difficulty of each dungeon should gradually ramp up, not spike then drop back down again.
2) It seems to me that the fight represents far too significant a time investment, especially when you take the chances of a wipe or two into account. For endgame loot, the time is justified as everyone gets at the very least tokens that they can use. However, given how quickly we outlevel not just the loot drops but also the Lion tokens, there is very little incentive to rerun this dungeon at non-epic tiers. If this dungeon is indeed meant to be as wakeup call, and a method of shaking players out of a more complacent mindset, then it needs to be 'must-play' content. Instead we see posts advising players to skip it until epic levels.
3) Any class that is currently believed (rightly or wrongly) by the general player population to be undertuned is (already!) unwelcome in this dungeon. This is not a GWF issue. Temporarily falling below the power curve is going to happen to most classes over the life of this MMO during the cycle of class revisions. I don't see how having a roadblock that makes players consider rerolling at level 30 is anything but bad for the long-term health of this game.
4) The Dragon was not the main danger in the fight. When you finally put the Dragon into "Dungeons and Dragons", I expect it to be an Event. I expect the dragon to be the focus of my attention, capable of singlehandedly annihilating my party if we don't identify and exploit its weaknesses.
Instead, I cannot even remember what colour the darn thing was. I spent most of the fight getting off red patches on the ground and dealing with the far greater threat posed by the adds. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what I wanted out of this fight. I wanted to see brutal attacks, airborne phases, breath attacks that swept the room. Not a bag of hitpoints that summoned henchmen to do most the work like a villain from the 60's Batman TV show.
5) I did not enjoy the dragon fight. There. I said it. By the time we hit the 50% health mark I was over the whole thing and hoping for it to all end soon. When we finally killed the darn pile of pixels I was more relieved than jubilant. I didn't even take a screenshot - I just wanted to forget it and move on. I believe a lot of this was due to 4, but the length of the fight was definitely a major factor.
Somewhere during the fight the whole thing went from challenge to tedium. That's just a really bad sign.
I believe that there is not only room for improvement in this fight, but a need to make those improvements.
Waiting for paladins...
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xantrisMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero UsersPosts: 0Arc User
The warewolf boss has cemented my original opinion: I'm going to enjoy this as a single-player game and skip the dungeons.
As the cleric, I spend the entirety of the fight running for my life and if I stop to cast something I get maimed for half my health. By the wolf lair I can't outrun the mobs.
Maybe we had poor team composition, maybe I'm not good at this, but whatever. Blowing all of my resources to lose a fight and then getting implicitly or explicitly blamed for it is no fun, and I don't need it.
That fight just requires that everyone kill his adds as quickly as possible as soon as they spawn. Even my TR will pull out some AoE and CC on that boss and help focus adds.
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securusMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited May 2013
This boss is actually fairly easy if you know how to deal with adds, the thing is you should have the guardian tank the dragon to the side while everyone else kills the adds, only when every add is dead should you dps the boss, if you are doing this right it makes the fight easy, even if you have poor dps its still easy, the trick is to focus the adds first and ignore the boss.
The problem is so many players have tunnel vision that they ignore the mechanics of the fights and adds and just focus the boss, many TR's are especially bad at this, they will try to burn down the boss instead of killing the adds on the cleric so the cleric dies and then everyone else gets owned. You should never have the magus's up for very long they need to be burned down asap or they destroy the party with their aoe's.
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xerokaiser0Member, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 9Arc User
4) The Dragon was not the main danger in the fight. When you finally put the Dragon into "Dungeons and Dragons", I expect it to be an Event. I expect the dragon to be the focus of my attention, capable of singlehandedly annihilating my party if we don't identify and exploit its weaknesses.
Instead, I cannot even remember what colour the darn thing was. I spent most of the fight getting off red patches on the ground and dealing with the far greater threat posed by the adds. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what I wanted out of this fight. I wanted to see brutal attacks, airborne phases, breath attacks that swept the room. Not a bag of hitpoints that summoned henchmen to do most the work like a villain from the 60's Batman TV show.
That's how I felt about the fight too. It was more tedious than anything. Just wave after wave after wave of trash. It got old pretty fast. And like you said, I honestly don't know what the dragon actually does. 99% of my attention of elsewhere.
Comments
As the cleric, I spend the entirety of the fight running for my life and if I stop to cast something I get maimed for half my health. By the wolf lair I can't outrun the mobs.
Maybe we had poor team composition, maybe I'm not good at this, but whatever. Blowing all of my resources to lose a fight and then getting implicitly or explicitly blamed for it is no fun, and I don't need it.
I base this belief on several observations:
1) Not only is the dragon much harder than the end boss in the previous dungeon, but it seems to me that it is also much harder than the end boss of the next dungeon.
Seriously, we downed Idris on our first attempt in a PUG with no guardian, no cleric, and no voice coms. Everyone had to work at it, but we all had enough fun that no-one raged when we discovered the quest was bugged. It seems to me that the difficulty of each dungeon should gradually ramp up, not spike then drop back down again.
2) It seems to me that the fight represents far too significant a time investment, especially when you take the chances of a wipe or two into account. For endgame loot, the time is justified as everyone gets at the very least tokens that they can use. However, given how quickly we outlevel not just the loot drops but also the Lion tokens, there is very little incentive to rerun this dungeon at non-epic tiers. If this dungeon is indeed meant to be as wakeup call, and a method of shaking players out of a more complacent mindset, then it needs to be 'must-play' content. Instead we see posts advising players to skip it until epic levels.
3) Any class that is currently believed (rightly or wrongly) by the general player population to be undertuned is (already!) unwelcome in this dungeon. This is not a GWF issue. Temporarily falling below the power curve is going to happen to most classes over the life of this MMO during the cycle of class revisions. I don't see how having a roadblock that makes players consider rerolling at level 30 is anything but bad for the long-term health of this game.
4) The Dragon was not the main danger in the fight. When you finally put the Dragon into "Dungeons and Dragons", I expect it to be an Event. I expect the dragon to be the focus of my attention, capable of singlehandedly annihilating my party if we don't identify and exploit its weaknesses.
Instead, I cannot even remember what colour the darn thing was. I spent most of the fight getting off red patches on the ground and dealing with the far greater threat posed by the adds. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what I wanted out of this fight. I wanted to see brutal attacks, airborne phases, breath attacks that swept the room. Not a bag of hitpoints that summoned henchmen to do most the work like a villain from the 60's Batman TV show.
5) I did not enjoy the dragon fight. There. I said it. By the time we hit the 50% health mark I was over the whole thing and hoping for it to all end soon. When we finally killed the darn pile of pixels I was more relieved than jubilant. I didn't even take a screenshot - I just wanted to forget it and move on. I believe a lot of this was due to 4, but the length of the fight was definitely a major factor.
Somewhere during the fight the whole thing went from challenge to tedium. That's just a really bad sign.
I believe that there is not only room for improvement in this fight, but a need to make those improvements.
That fight just requires that everyone kill his adds as quickly as possible as soon as they spawn. Even my TR will pull out some AoE and CC on that boss and help focus adds.
The problem is so many players have tunnel vision that they ignore the mechanics of the fights and adds and just focus the boss, many TR's are especially bad at this, they will try to burn down the boss instead of killing the adds on the cleric so the cleric dies and then everyone else gets owned. You should never have the magus's up for very long they need to be burned down asap or they destroy the party with their aoe's.
That's how I felt about the fight too. It was more tedious than anything. Just wave after wave after wave of trash. It got old pretty fast. And like you said, I honestly don't know what the dragon actually does. 99% of my attention of elsewhere.