Just wanted to give my two cents on my initial impressions of EP48 so far. Given the new dev team and new direction that was stated I was surprised to find out how very linear (with other episodes) EP48 is. The instanced content is way too short and will not retain players for very long, especially endgame. After a few months only having 1 raid with 2 bosses seems a bit of a short change. Elite (and by extension e+) will either be too easy, or will have accidental difficulty in the form of all the adds. DCUO has a bad tendency to over rely on adds in raids rather than design fresh innovative and in some cases punishing mechanics during boss encounters, which is something I feel should change going forward. The raid is too short, though making General Kraze a boss and increasing his health to boss level should help with this - even have Kalibak as a more significant boss later in the raid, like Mordru in Shattered Gotham. If there is one thing I can praise on from what I've seen so far, is that the artists seem to have done a decent job with the new instances in spite of some recycled elements, though this is not without fault. The lighting of the lava especially in the open world is going to cast a large shadow over the episode, and like with The Terrorium raid the devs will spend more time trying to fix the lighting issues so players don't get sick, than give TLC to the episode post-release. A September release seems very rushed, as content has been reduced in length and we have lost a raid to get an earlier release of the episode when normally it would be October as with recent years. Unless EP49 is releasing December/January I predict this episode will not be very successful unless changes are made with regard to difficulty of content, making General Kraze a boss in the raid, and the lighting issues.
100% agree with this. My favorite content has always been raids with unique room or boss mechanics. Throwing adds at everything is probably easier to develop I guess. After running through the content on test I am definitely disappointed. I can hope that EP49 is somehow an improvement, but at this point I feel like we have been told that better times have been around the corner for ages. Maybe they knew EP48 was going to be a disappointment and are saving double artifact XP to placate the playerbase lol
Despite the fact some of the new episode looked okay, it also didn't look different so I see it lasting a few weeks before everyone's bored again, this game is lacking innovation. Difficulty is reliant upon overlapping messy mechanics, chaos and large amounts of adds, it's got entirely silly.
So one more episode that's light on content and same old dailies and this is suppose to keep players from not getting bored to death. At this point the only Mercy I can show the is to keep my sanity and wish them the best of Luck.
I'm not sure what happened but there's no real "new" direction for 48. Unless you count daily quest givers being spread out, the open world being noisier than ever and the open world causing me actual pain and sickness. And I sure don't count any of those things as a positive. From everything else I've seen, it's a cookie cutter episode. It won't be what rights the ship. Nothing about it screams I have to play it. If 49 isn't something truly and genuinely special, this game is in serious trouble. On top of that, we need double days to come back. Communication has to improve (Youtubers are a poor Mepps fill in and it's not their fault). Monthly login stuff needs a serious look, 1 base item and some prestige is particularly insulting.
Too many players just want to pew-pew, and ignore room mechanics. Look at the first boss battle of The Terrorium, the first two (and to a lesser extent, the third) boss battles in Cursed Themyscira, and pretty much all of the boss battles in the current episode. And the only reason they don't ignore all the mechs on the last boss in CT is because you can't damage the boss unless you at least do some of the mechs. So, yeah, it's easier to just throw in some adds to distract from the boss.
And then wonder why everyone wants to DPS and some wonder why theres a lack of support rolls why would there be many suport rolls when the raid content consists of like 5 out of 8 players will be dpses even in elite etc and they with the buff trolling artswapper sweat are the ultimate deciding factor on how well the run will be.. someones a skilled tank? Yea you dont matter really its all about dps pew pew. The devs shouldnt be surprised about lack of engagment with this continusly boring content design but they probably know what they are doing, keeping the dps sweats happy with this type of content design.