Hi Devs, this thread is not meant to be rude but I am concerned about this DLC. I’ll try to keep it short. My time in the game is very limited. I need to log in, get my dailies done, grind as much as possible and get to my job. I joined a league recently that has been beneficial. However, when I log in at 4 am I need to be off at 5 to prepare for the work day. So I want to grind the “open world bosses” but can’t even run with my league because of the cap on the phasing. I just sat in my empty phase trying to join my group. Over and Over. But could not. It’s disheartening. Everyone knows the window to get these bounty feats done is limited. Especially at the feat count the devs have set the feat at. Sorry for the pity party, but with my schedule this game was frustrating this morning. Anyone else have a similar situation? Again not meant to be rude, but I accomplished very little today.
I am also a player in those early AM hours. I have simply accepted that those bounties are not possible in their current state. I'm not going to be on at a time and in a phase where we get the 40 people needed to be successful. So that means those are feats that I'm never going to get. Which is fine. I can skip a few feats and still have everything I need to keep my passives maxed. The bigger pain is that I'm missing out on 8-16 marks per week from being unable to complete the weeklies. So I will get my gear much, much slower than normal. And also, I get one fewer raid per week. Ultimately, I'll be pushing the limit just to finish my suit of gear. Do what you can, get as far as you can, and then accept that this terrible Episode is just not going to be friendly for players who aren't online during those primetime hours, on a USPC/PS server. If you're EU, or X-Box, or Switch, or a morning/night player, we're just going to have to miss out on half of this poorly designed Episode.
We're still making adjustments to the world bosses. We expect players will be able to phase out of their maximally full phase to play with their friends and league mates in another, and still beat the bad guys.
The exact Opposite. We have already had beef in our league bcs members didnt want to make New phases with 15...20 ppl... Note: we could not manage with 20...
Yeah everyones worried if they dont get thise feats right now, they never will. So once they find a massive phase with great burn, they ride it until the wheels fall off. My main complaint though, is once you do finally get into a good group in a good phase, people end up DCing at a portal, or after being revived. Then they cant get back into the group because their phase spot was taken the instant they disconnected
My own experience yesterday from about three hours of largely doing -- or trying to do -- the rounds of the bosses: it took me about twenty minutes to find a viable group AND get into the phase where most of them were; once in that phase there were always more than enough other people to rapidly kill bosses, but one didn't dare leave the phase for any reason, or you'd be stuck with another twenty minutes of either reading everyone in LFG shouting that you should phase to their phase, which was full, or you'd be trying to phase to your group and being unable to. The twenty minutes largely consisted of five minutes to get a group invite -- but this could likely frequently be much quicker -- and then fifteen minutes waiting for a momentary slip in population sufficient to allow you into phase with your group. That's while constantly hitting "phase to" on someone in your group more or less non-stop. Meanwhile, most of the existing group were ready to quit by the time I got in the group, though granted there was no issue finding more people to immediately replace them. There seemed to be two options, both towards the extreme: either stay in one phase pointlessly waiting for enough people to accumulate and apparently you'll be there all night, or shout for an invite, but be prepared to wait considerably before you can get to the proper phase and an actual fight. Once there, everything was fine. tl;dr: phases seem to be dramatically split: either you're in a phase low-population enough to not possibly stand the remotest chance of beating a boss, or you get to an almost-constantly-overpopulated phase with a ton of people spamming the bosses and the bosses all go down in about a minute or a minute and a half. tl;dr: the result was tolerable, but suboptimal; the wait to finally get into a useful phase was, in practice yesterday, way too long, though not so long that I quit. I haven't logged in yet today, but will do so shortly; maybe things will have sorted out differently today. Maybe other people are having very different experiences. This was mine yesterday on US PC.
Is it possible to scale by population? Switch needs some serious adjusting because it is absolutely dead.
And just what would “everyone” be basing this knowledge on? We’ve never had a DLC with this format and focus so there is no precedent on which to base such a belief. The open world boss fights are very different from weekly bounties in previous DLC in terms of design, programming, intent and function within the DLC. One full cycle of bosses is essentially supposed to take the place of a weekly raid. But even that isn’t an accurate direct comparison because of the new loot lock and secondary currency system design which allows players to grind at their own preferred pace without a monetary gate/price via replay badges. You are correct in that previous DLC weekly bounty feats were significantly more attainable in yhe furst week b cause of the gargantuan-sized spam groups that could mow down a boss in 15 seconds or less which dramatically sped up the pace to the benefit of everyone in the spam group. And if you had players serving as “phase-anchors” the pace was even much faster yet. But none of that applies to these boss fights. The bosses spawn on half hour timers and spawn at the exact same time in every phase. This normalizes and locks in the pace, the effect being thatthe size of the group can’t really increase that pace. This means that whether you grind all the feats and marks you want all this week or you spread it out over the course of several werks or months, the actual playtime in both scenarios will be nearly identical which negates the vest majority of thr advantages a large bounty spam group historically provided since you can’t really phase jump because of the timers and the burn rate doesn’t effect the spawn rate. While it is theoretically possible to utilize two phases and get a 2-for-1 benefit in your markslaytime ratio, the coordination, execution and overall game skill/competency required to pull that off makes it a very unrealistic endeavor. And as far as difficulty, the intent is that the bosses scale to the group size. I’m pretty sure that target goal hasn’t been achieved just yet but the Devs have been working hard on that aspect and will continue to do so until they get there. This boss difficulty scale tuning is arguably the most vital aspect of what what is essentially the centerpiece of this DLC. I would expect it to remain as one of their top priorities until the devs are successful in matching the implementation to the designs intent, which is for a normal raid sized group that is relatively geared up to have a good chance to successfully beat them.
How about giving us the ability to opt into picking from the list of active phases (with a denotation for full phases or how many open positions are left)? We should have had this ability from the time phasing was put into the game.
Adding to my response above, while I do believe a majority of the expectations, complaints and criticisms of the devs are unfair, undeserved, unrealistic and often born of a general ignorance of video game programming/engineering, industry standards and practices and workflow efficiency, I do believe there is a very fair and warranted criticism that comes in to play here. That being that it seems the dev team severely overestimates the degree to which information that is dispersed here on the forums is circulated throughout the entire player population. I do believe there is onus on players to be able to use basic observation skills to see that these bosses are quite different than weekly bounties in past DLC’s and therefor should be considered and treated differently. However it’s unrealistic to expect that the vast majority of players are aware and up to date with the specifics of the design, intent, implementation and tuning of these open world bosses. So a certain level of panic or misplaced urgency is understandable, but only to an extent.
Exactly how I feel. This not being able to phase and join your group/league is so frustrating and disheartening.
I’m thankful the devs are looking into it and considering adjusting the situation to help out everyone. I am a feat hunter, and don’t mind the grind. But this was a case that prevented people from having fun with leagues and friends.
This is not a brag I promise, but there are a few people on villain with me that tested the bounties prior to nerf in a pvp phase because we knew the bounties scaled to the amount of people. They were beatable in an eight man group. Hydra was nerfed once already, and another coming. You should definitely be able to beat them in small groups. Half of our group didn't even have 200 let alone 160 artifacts. Just make sure you're doing any mechanics that can help with the fight and you'll be good to go I promise.
I've been on the am time and not as many as the prime time of dcuo. I just accepted I will never get the 100 feay count for these bounties. I hated when we had to do it for Starro, Doomsday, or any other. Now we got to do it for 4 of them. No thanks, getting 2 a hour it's way too slow, takes about 50 hours. I play about 5 characters, don't have the times. This dlc is way too grindy.
Partially. Raid is cool; Alert and Solo are okay, regular dailies are okay, not having a "farm 100-900 of something" as a weekly is also cool. Only the stupid currency grind is super bad, killed all my alts and requires way more gameplay per day than it used to. The devs argument of "if you enjoy playing, you play" is also weak, considering if you were used to get to BiS in a feasible amount of time you now need way more time. It's like increasing the distance between you and your loved ones with the argument that "if you like to travel, you travel". I really hope, this is the first and last DLC they introduce this kind of stupid grind. It was a neat idea, it was not implemented in a good way.
I got to admit, I'm already burned out on this DLC and it's been only a week? I got like 15ish bounties on each boss so far and the idea of turning on the game again to play ring around the rosy yet another time sounds like utter torture. The issue is bounties are just big DPS dumps, there nothing fun about them at all. (Only time they are fun is when you try soloing old ones as a tank At least with raids and alerts I can try this loadout and see how it performs, I can see how I'm working within the team; is my DPS lagging? Am I a tank and I'm dying to much? Am I a heal and this new loadout ain't quite right, let me play with it? Standing there for 3 minutes then hitting your rotations as fast as possible for a minute to make sure you get credit is just booooring. And the thought that as people complete the feats, there will be less people in there and thus the bounties will take even lonnnnggger and on top of that you can fail just terrifies me. Ugh. That said, the rest of the content is good, and the raid is great, so no issues there.
The amount of people required to complete the bounties are absurd. The fact that you need at least 5 or more full raid parties to complete one bounty makes it completely unfriendly. You should not, and I repeat should not require to have a full phase to beat the bounties. It locks people out and even discourages others to play. For many switch players they cant even create a full phase. The timers on the bounties need to be adjusted to at the very least 10 minutes. We all know what happens when you have 50+ players all in one area, all using powers/animations. You get frame rate drops and some people lag out completely. Outside of the bounties, I would say this DLC is very well done.
