Phases Locked This Strictly Was A Horrible Idea

Maybe if you are in a group your space in the phase could be reserved for you to return to should you have to go to the WT/HOD or to your base. That's not an unreasonable request. If you drop group or the last person in the group leaves the phase, all bets are off.

Oh, I don't know... maybe ignoring those big red letters on the screen that say things like, "Block Ares Stomp Attack," "Get away from Kalibak's Attack," "Block or Dodge Steppenwolf's Attack," or about picking up the teeth to prevent them from becoming Spartoi during the Hydra fight has something to do with it.

Possibly, I can't speak for all groups but I had trouble zeroing back on the main target after hitting those cogs and Murk I couldn't see at all because of the influx of adds so I had no way of knowing which way he was facing, Kalibak was like that at times too. Too many skeletons are definitely a bad thing though. Gotta hit those cogs. But once the lag started and the screen started glitching like crazy you sort of prayed for the best in defeating the bosses. Then pray you didn't get dc'd going to the next zone.

Just a suggestion, if the 'soft' cap just means you cannot phase on your own...and that's set to 40, I'd say the 'hard' cap, meaning where you can phase into the phase if you are already grouped, is double at 80. Yes, right now that probably means 70 man boss fights, but since out of the 40 building up to 'soft' it's reasonable to assume that 10 or so are NOT doing the boss fights, that leaves 30 people to work on the bosses...which at this point seems short unless you are talking about a co-ordinated effort. While I'd like to think that the community can put forth that effort, if the last few days are any indication, they cannot. I've participated in several groups where 1 or 2 bosses of the 5 (especially Hydra) ends up being a fail even with 20-30 people working on it.

I get you want a level of difficulty that will pay off later when we are still experiencing a challenge even when geared up, but the time commitment in getting these bosses makes missing one a real issue.

This was rly what caused the issue. Tons of people would join a group just to leave to form a new group over and over until the server broke, which was pointless because it didn't even make anything any faster.

We have no way of identifying which phase is which, and if several phases are full, it means there are people scrambling to find any phase, meaning the non-full phases fill/unfill fluidly and we can't observe the changes (or know who's where to phase on, and people can't really tell if their own phase is full until people try to join it. Would be less of an issue if instead of phasing on a random person and hoping for the best, there was a "Phases" selection added to the social menu that would list each phase along with the population and the most densely populated non-watchtower zone.

Eg. Social Menu -> Phases:

Alpha - 37/52 - Deluge Star City
Beta - 52/52 - Patchwork Themyscira
Charlie - 50/52 - Patchwork Themiscyra

etc -> click on one and have option to phase to it.

That would be ideal, and a much more organized and reasonable means of navigating the phase system. Would reduce some load too as players wouldn't be constantly forcing the servers to load them into new phases all the time and people could LFG after getting into a phase or specify their phase in LFG chat (or the system could).

Also, is there any way you can make it so people don't immediately lose their place in a phase if they step out for a few min, do a walk-in in the same zone, or get D/Ced? That is a real downer and kinda kills the social aspect, because everyone going on cruise control and just afking as much as possible instead of doing concurrent activities in game.

Side note: Just curious, why isn't 200 people in a phase possible? As mentioned before, FFXI was doing this on PlayStation 2 ~20 years ago with little to no issue. The performance in Besieged, for example, with virtually the entire server in a single shared zone at the same time was at worse no chuggier than the post-phase changes we have now here and that was also with dozens of large boss-tier special enemies + enormous hydra-grade megabosses accompanied by hundreds of sub-boss tier trash mobs and assorted fodder. Just curious what the limiting factor is and why our servers can't handle it. You guys do cool stuff and it feels like you'd be able to do a lot more cool stuff if it wasn't for these limitations.

I think they're beatable with 20, just maybe not in 3min. When I was building groups to fill an empty room, we buzzer beat Murk with 3secs to spare. Group size was right around 20. Next fight, maybe up to 25 and got the job done with maybe 20secs to spare. 30ppl next round and went smooth. There's no need to he melting them. Complaints came up about burn and people asked me to build more groups after we failed on hydra. I replied that it wasn't a lack of burn and was due to so many people taking a knee during that fight. I think 35ish is the perfect amount for lag free/ quality fight that presents some challenge. 20 great players that are coordinated shouldn't have an issue but 20 "pugs" certainly will.
My "fear" is for future players. 2 dlcs from now, anyone just starting the game won't be able to finish the feats, probably be hard enough just to get a group together so 8 players have to be able to beat them and scale up from there. But it still couldn't be 8 randoms just out trying to play solo with other solos helping.

Once the next episode comes out this dlc will be in my rear view mirror. Don't even care of I get all the feats or not. Whatever I get, I get and whatever I don't, I don't. For me it's a time thing, I don't have that much time to put into every older episode/dlc. This game does not and never has put thought into things like this. It's why there are problems getting groups for older content. And when you have a new episode, you need to focus on what that has to offer....until the next one comes out.

I like the ideas they are trying and the new bounty system in theory seems nice if the scaling of myth would actually work but if you don't get the feats now, you probably won't once the new episode comes.

If you're on PS4, do the following:

Settings -> UI -> Show Overhead League Names -> Never
Settings -> UI -> Show Overhead Titles -> Never
Settings -> Video -> Effects Quality -> (slide it all the way to the left... as in, turn them all the way down)

Sadly, this is a side effect of not being able to have a PS test server. PCs don't get overwhelmed as much in this situation as PS4s (and possibly other game consoles) do.

It always sorts itself out. I'm grinding hard for my healer side while reminding myself I have months to get this done. I do like to be "op" with role by the end of the 1st month so that's 5 bounty rotations a day on my main for a bit. My dps side will be purple or normal vendor gear. Alt will do daily's and weekly's and no spamming. All the complaints I'm seeing are missing one big thing: they've given us a lot to do without spending replays or "running for nothing" while doing counters. Everyone wants test servers on console, well here ya go. Consider the 1st 2 weeks test server and form valid/ helpful/ constructive feedback.

Knew those settings were there just never messed with them before.
I will try that with these bounties though. Thanks.

Is there a way to migrate non-participants from a capped phase?

There's also Settings -> UI -> Hide Non-Hostile Players, which has the greatest impact it seems.

Tbf, compared to other MMOs, DCUO does tend to have pretty good respect for our time and the grind feats, though they may seem bad upfront it looks like they've been spec'd around the concept of "if someone does this once a day while this content is 'in relevancy,' they'll fini it before the episode rotates out." Obviously it gets harder the longer people take to do grind large-group content though, which is really just a "strike while the iron is hot" scenario that there's no way around. Conversely, Squeenix w FFXIV is an absolute master of time wastage, seeming to always know the exact amount of skinner box bs to introduce to ensure that if a person plays 24/7, they'll just finish everything in time for it to be made obsolete by the next release (which is why a lot of players would only do the raids and ignore every other aspect of the game they could).

Why dont give the possibility to see all available phases and join the one im interested in. The phase is lagging, 2 overcrowded no problem. Alot of games already do this and I dobt see why dcuo shouldnt too. (you could even use it to notify if an soft or hard cap was hit)

When you make adjustments, please consider all of a boss' pattern when allocating health. If we are meant to be defending 3 successive skull attacks for example, it means we're defending and not attacking for that amount of time. Then it's that amount x the time it repeats the pattern within the battle timer. So if a boss has a long window of attack, health can be high, but if he/she has relentless skulls, then health should be adjusted down (in the case of Patchwork because it's timed).

Another thing to keep in mind is when you have 2 mechanics that work against each other, like Murk does the skull charge (we are prompted to block) at the same time we need to interrupt the sorcerers (weapon lunge)... it means a portion of the group is meant to be KO'd? So you have to calculate for pickup time (more time we're not doing damage).

Hope this helps.

As a fine-tuning adjustment to your first point, another question to ask is whether the brunt of the attack is in a forward cone a 360-degree. If it's the forward cone I expect the damage range to go further than if it's a 360, especially in terms of what is considered a "one-shot," and it should also account for whether or not an individual shield from a tank or a group shield from a healer or controller should be able to absorb some or all of the damage. This can also mitigate some of what's going on with the two conflicting mechanics because if you're outside of the effect zone you should be able to pick up whatever object it is.

Regarding the second point, however, I think it's more because the bosses are being burned so quickly in some cases that they are advancing through phases a lot faster due to the extra burn being applied. I don't know how much the devs can actually do to avoid this beyond adding some kind of "the boss takes no damage/gains a shield for 10-20 seconds during the pick-up-the-objects phase" to allow for people to do these objectives. This, unfortunately, can cause the fight to be lost when it could otherwise have been won.

every hydra fight i say...”get teeeeeeth”....some one 100% of time replies “NO”...thats how you FAIL if group isnt like 50 people. Also on Athena...same thing with boxes of source material being protected! Burn burn burn seems to be the mantra..but if you ONLY protect boxes while athena is being slaughtered...YOU STILL GET MAX TIER REWARDS!

I think people are just focused on getting hits in before the Hydra goes down, which, depending on the phase is relatively fast. Honestly this whole thing is JUST like the Metal Man Bat. People are going to do what they want, and in my experience, when you say "Don't use orbitals" They'll make sure to use them even more.

I posted something, but never mind. I saw a response in another post and can't delete my original - so painting over it with this ;-)

Brainstorming here with some ideas, might lead to some inspiration to a better solution yet but here goes:

Not sure if this will work but it would be be cool if phases in here worked slightly different to the rest of the game. E.g. On those heavily populated phases where you are sitting at hard cap, after defeating Hydra, do a force re-phase for everyone involved in that fight.

Take groups out of the big maxed out phase and divide them up into others which are not quite so populated and waiting to fight Murk. There will obviously need to be some metric to this, e.g if you have 3 groups all from the same league, you would want to keep them together etc etc. I mean even if it is done on the hour before you start Murk.

It might mean the burn will be slightly slower on these bosses but it does also mean that you have a bit more time to justify your contribution for top tier rewards if you are a support role. It also means that we can fight these bosses and actually having to pay a bit more attention to their mechanics, e.g. blocking ....... and interacting with things.

This also means that you get a slightly different experience every hour / after the re-phase too as you might be playing with other groups. The idea would be to make constant phasing of whole groups a logistical nightmare, but at the same time make it so that you don't really need to re-phase as there is enough people in the phase to be good enough so you can defeat all the bosses in that 30 min period before Murk starts again. This may even mean that the game will need to include individual player average dps in their phasing metrics, or something down that line. Cause if you really think about it, if everyone just follow some boss mechanics then it actually becomes quite easy to defeat them.

Just a thought.....

Hmmm...

Well, I think a simple "phase list" would help. For example, if Patchwork Themyscira can only hold 45 players at a time, then a list should show up to let players know if it is empty, partially filled or filled (10/45, 35/45, 43/45) and provide a list of phases that will be available as you open them (phase 1, phase 2, phase 3..). Example: LFG Chat: Open World Boss Farming team for Patch Themy forming in phase 2. Come join the fun! Click on the Warp Menu, choose Patchwork Themyscira and then choose Phase 2 while noting how full the phase is.

I play other games that have phase lists and it does help with spreading out players across phases. If one phase is full, those that cannot make it in will start to populate the next empty phase that they see. That is the main point; having a phase list "visible" to players so they can spread themselves out. Having a hard cap is helpful, but it would be better if we could pick and choose the next open phase on our own.