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OFFICIAL FEEDBACK THREAD: Castle Ravenloft
asterdahl
Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 1,258Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Castle Ravenloft
Greetings adventurers, this thread is for providing bug reports and feedback on the following topics:- The epic dungeon: Castle Ravenloft.
- Difficulty of any encounters in the castle.
- Queuing for and unlocking Castle Ravenloft.
Please keep in mind, as always: everything on preview is subject to change. There is no guarantee what you see on preview will translate directly when the module launches on the live server. A number of final adjustments are still being made to Castle Ravenloft, and there are a number of known issues. In particular, some sound effects and dialog may be missing or placeholder.
Thank you for taking the time to play on preview and provide feedback, see you in Barovia!
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Formatting Your Feedback and Bugs
For posting feedback and bugs, please follow the following format to ensure your feedback and bugs are seen clearly and processed in a timely manner, thank you!Type: Bug/Feedback (Please only choose one)
If you are listing a bug please have this text in RED, if you are posting an opinion or feedback please use CYAN. If you are replying to another user's post, or just engaging in general discussion, please do not color your posts, general discussion is welcome and we will read all of it, regardless of color! You can use BBCode to color your text:
<font color=cyan>This text will display in cyan.</font>
<font color=red>This text will display in red.</font>Examples:
Bug: When I pick up the sunsword and get on a mount, all my clothes disappear!
Feedback: The second boss is too easy!
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Comments
So lots of feedback. I was speaking to the lovely balanced as we went along and let him know some minor glitches we found along the way.
For the first boss:
The two other sisters, if very well timed, can be split inbetween two pillars. The wielder of the tome can then pull their aggro getting them stuck - can last as long as the whole first phase or as short as 1 minute.
The tome's Left Click ability has a bit of a visual issue where it always fires at the coordinates of the sisters' initial position, so after they move it continues to fire at the position they were at previously.
The Left Click ability can also be used on phase to, when held down, to block all of the ghostly sisters' abilities. Constaltly pulling their aggro and preventing them from doing anything.
On a prior run we were unable to get through the door the first time. The rally your group button wasn't there but by exiting the
Q group we were able to get in.
Second boss:
No issues as far as we were concerned except the boss didn't do all 4 pillars in his rotation - we thought he would do his whirly sword move for each pillar but he only did 3. This could also vary with the group's DPS reducing the number of pillars needed to complete the boss.
On a side note can we take a second to congratulate whoever did the visuals for inside the castle? The place looks stunning.
The last boss:
No issues as of yet. Although the boss feels very One-Shot-ey. All his abilities are "bang your dead!" which, as a group, certainly kept us on our toes. However after a few of his rotations the one shot-ey-ness was feeling a little much. Would much rather see a new phase to that boss or at least a mix up of new powers after half HP.
Overall:
The first boss is by far the hardest for a new group. Learning the mechanics, deciding who to delegate said mechanics to whilst having no prior experience was certainly inducing rage from the female in the discord.
Despite this we thought that the first boss did fit the vibe of the dungeon which is the Last boss putting you through these tests to see if you're worth his time so we'll call it a truce.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1iLH7CA2e-Q4PjZlNvP-mI6g9agadwL6s
The dungeon environment was reminiscent of dungeons I remember fondly from older games. Really well done, kudos to the environment artists.
We found a possible bug on the 2nd boss when he entered 'spin-mode' and killed our tank while KC was active and just stood there forever unwilling to target anyone still alive. Went back in for 'take 2' and completed the boss without issue, we drove him into 1 pillar then were able to burn him the rest of the way.
Strahd was a great fight, the sun sword addition felt really unique, as Jarek got to run around pretending to be a gwoof. We were able to make sense of most of the mechanics on our first attempt and only lost 1 person. Our tank did get a bit manhandled, but nothing he won't be able to manage more readily after a little practice. It didn't help that our primary buffer/healer was wielding the Sun Sword, but we were having fun so whatevs.
We defeated Strahd and took turns passing around the Sun Sword to see the abilities, collected our loot and took our leave.
The continued increase in complexity and mechanics in boss fights is greatly appreciated from the veteran community. High-fives to the designers of these boss fights.
All in all we really enjoyed our experience. Castle Ravenloft feels more like a 'real' dungeon in an MMO rather than a 10 minutes zerg'fest that Neverwinter has evolved into. This is a nice change of pace.
I didn't receive any loot at all from the first 2 bosses though, and for a long'ish dungeon I think increasing the chance of loot should be looked into. Personally I would run CRavenloft just for the fun/challenge of it but the temptation to complete easier/shorter content for the same(or more) amount of salvage would exist. Then again I have a long history of not getting loot from bosses for lengthy periods of time so I may be an outlier of ill-luck.
There are currently some issues with the action point bar for the sunsword. Once they are fixed, they should appear in a future preview build's patch notes.
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
As I have said before, I think you got the difficulty of ToNG just right... farmable by BiS groups in 20 minutes...doable by decent groups in 40 minutes and a real challenge for undergeared and/or inexperienced groups.
CR has higher IL requirements and should be harder, it does not seem to be...or at least groups seem in general to have an easier time than they had in ToNG on Preview.
OP-GF-GWF-DCx2 all between 15k to 17k
First boss :
The most difficult one. Need some tries to handle it. But once we learned the book mechanics it's was fine.
Second boss :
Really too easy. It's very sad beacause when you see this guy for the first time, you expect to have to handle with a new old orcus 800k+ hits.
Please give him some love and buff ! His disign is awesome.
Last one :
To be honest we don't exactly understood how the fight work, but it's was done after 3 tries.
Maybe a little buff on trash mobs could be nice too.
Conclusion:
Finally we get back a true dungeon experience with more complexes mechanics.
The atmosphere in the castel is really nice and we had the feeling to being in a big castel with several paths.
I'll love in the futur to see fews others dungeons more bigger like was the old Castel Never.
Maybe a big dungeons with fews wings with fews boss by wing, and a one chest at the end of each wing.
I mean i prefere to do one big dungeon of 1h30 instead repeat the same one 3 times.
GREAT JOB CONGRATULATIONS !!!
On the last boss the Sunblade action points reset between phases.
As you can read, english is not my mother tong, be understanding.
First Boss:
Longest boss, since you are effectively down to a 4-person party. It will make for interesting coordinating who should take the book. But once book holder gets a sense of things, it's just a lot of HP to burn through. The rabid vengeance crowd at the third sister is pretty awesome.
Second Boss:
Very interesting mechanics and visuals. Once you figure out the mechanics, it can be a burn. Similar to what others are saying, it's a shame it isn't harder in some clever way (although just more HP to burn through isn't exactly fun).
Final Boss:
Using the sunsword requires planning again, and can completely screw things up if the wrong person picks it up. I'm not sure I actually understand the purpose of the sword yet. It's also a very chaotic fight where it's hard to tell what is important. Figuring out the wall push and letting him come to you took some trying. But eventually we got through it.
Overall:
A bit easier than I expected in a sub-optimal party (although we did have some guild boons). In a well-balanced party I could see this being only slightly longer than tomb.
The mechanics are interesting, although reading about them in the lore journal and reading the tooltips is all kind of hard in the moment.
The visuals are beautiful and have a great atmosphere. The enemies look inspired too, and I found myself surprised a couple times. Great job!
Finished in about 1hr30 including multiple breaks,
Party composition DC/DC/GF/GF/CW, ilvls 14k-17k
First Boss
This boss is actually the hardest of all three but also the most fun/challenging. Why? Because you can understand the mechanics, the rotations are obvious and the addition of lure book that removes one class from your buffs/dps/tanking is a really genius idea.
Compare that to the second boss and you feel a little underwhelmed. The boss is under-powered, has no real sense of developing as the fight continues - especially after a few runs it seems the boss is a little bit of a placeholder. I'd like to see some additional mechanics added to this boss fight, specifically the surviving sister - I'd like to have another swing with her in as part of the second boss fight rather than just watching her die in a cut-scene.
The last Boss
This boss seems like he has loads of rotations, mechanics and is very obviously a powerful dude. But my group and I, after many runs of the dungeon now, feel like we just haven't a clue what's going on.
Where the boss takes someone into some parallel boss fight where they're taken and have to fight their friends seems like just a really unnecessary way to take another player out of the equation in the main room. I'd like to see some benefit from killing the ads in that room. Some form of buff you can get from killing your friends in there. Also I'd like to see the One-Shot nature of this dungeon be removed from that room 'cause at the moment we're calling it the scroll consuming room because that's all it does. And after you've run the dungeon a few times it really starts to take the p!ss how many scrolls are needed if you get taken by the boss and thrown in that other room - especially if it happens more than 2 times to the same player.
- Revision of that is needed
As for the second phase of the boss fight where he lifts you onto a vampiric platform. Cool artwork but he just does the same their as he does in the first phase of the boss fight. Please swap his powers out in that phase to new ones. As a suggestion why not spawn doppelgangers of the whole party during that phase and make the two groups face off against each other as the boss watches and fights as well. Would be much more interesting to watch as the group scrambles to kill it's mirror DC before that DC heals the boss too much.
Also the general colour pallet used in the dungeon is very aesthetic and coordinated, however we feel like key ads, like the doppelgangers, should be coloured differently like they were in the first boss (bright purple glow).
It's not exactly a representative crowd is my general point.
You can get 15K without Bondings, with a Summoned companion. You will be *way* worse than a 15K with Bondings or a 15K with no Bondings and an Augment. You can be a 14K TR and be a strong DPS who regularly hits the top of Paingiver, or you can be a 14K TR who focuses on defensive stats who calls yourself a "tankster rogue" and focuses on gaining aggro, surviving it for a few seconds, then losing it by using stealth, instead of doing DPS. One of those is going to show up on Preview and try a new dungeon. The other is just going to random queue for it on Live and the rest of their party will need to adjust.
I'm not saying "don't take 'this is too easy' as serious feedback". I'm just saying, look carefully at *who* is saying "this is too easy" and definitely run tests with suboptimal builds and marginal ILs, and just plain bad players. Anyone remember the time Strumslingr was "showing off" the first big DC changes on livestream but he never even once hit Tab because he had never played a DC before starting the stream and he didn't understand the Divine Power mechanic before *or after* the change he was "demoing"? That's probably a little too bad for a 13Ker who's doing the Barovia campaign, but I would definitely want to see what the experience was like with people playing less-familiar classes (or classes they're just bad at) to simulate the Rando With A Bad Build factor before reducing difficulty based on Preview-player feedback.
Even "3 bad people who technically qualify and two people who are half-decent" to fail.
Requiring "5 basically okay people who know what they are doing" to get past the first boss would be fine, if the first boss had good drops.
I just object when "4 good players who meet the minimum can't carry a trash player who TECHNICALLY meets the minimum but is just awful because they've deliberately picked the worst possible choices at every step and are actively working against their class strengths, to at least PARTIAL success that gets the 4 honest attempters partially paid".
I'd *love* if there was a bonus reward tier for stomping the dungeon, or an enhanced difficulty option available on a button, for people who want a mega challenge and who get bonus rewards for doing it.
This idea is great, many players would like the possibility to increase difficulty for better rewards.
Because if we are honest, we all know the difficulty of the endgame content is too easy for endgame players.
As long as the end game content stays at 13k and the players at 18k balancing will be difficult.
But anyway a love your idea !
even an increase only in hp for all the enemy on dungeon might create a challenge "more friendly" for all type of player.
The tarocca's idea for increase difficulty and reward is optimal.