Test Discussion Episode 30: Escape from Earth 3 Raid

Thanks a lot for the feedback. It's always great to hear player's opinions on story and content.

We pulled a lot of inspiration from the Forever Evil series of the comic for this content. We approached it as a prequel to Forever Evil in some ways so we could introduce the Crime Syndicate and the Justice League in their new lineup without diminishing it.

If you've read the Forever Evil comics, Lex falls into a similar situation in underestimating Ultraman. Lex is a powerful, brilliant and very stubborn guy. These sort of faux pas happen a ton to him in the comics because his obsession with Superman is all consuming. Brings me back to Kingdom Come where Lex gets outsmarted by Batman and Green Arrow because he's so consumed with exposing Superman's prison camp.

These sort of situations were the inspiration behind him going off half cocked in the content. In the Open World missions, you may have noticed he has the villains running counter intel missions on the Crime Syndicate, trying to prepare for his showdown. But in the end, we wanted to give the players that classic moment from Forever Evil where even Lex can see the greater evil and threat that Ultraman and the Crime Syndicate poses. I hope it was executed as epicly as intended.

As far as the cliff hanger ending goes, we've dropped a few hints along the way, and despite being forced to leave for the greater good of their own Earth, I don't think the Justice League has seen the end of Alexander Luthor or the Crime Syndicate. Thanks again for the feedback and I hope this helps put it in perspective.

Thank you for the detailed answer JohnnyDC. It is appreciated.

I understand Earth 3 is based on the Forever Evil. Still while watching my replays of my raid runs, I just don't feel like Lex Luthors motivations for invading the Panopticon are explained very well as presented in the game. Superman calls him out on his actions with his "Coming here halfcocked got you into this mess in the first place" line, but Lex's only reply is to say that he wants to "slay a false god."

As previously written in DCUO, Lex Luthor is very cold and calculating. The game has gone out of its way to show that Lex always does a ton of research on his opponents. He's the smartest man in DCUO and he knows it. Lex always has a backup plan and very rarely does something come as a surprise. His hatred for Kryptonians is a major part of his characterization in DCUO, but it never completely consumed him. Based on his previous characterization, it is hard to accept that he's going to invade the Panopticon by himself and kill Ultraman (A Superman from a different dimension) by himself in a sudden fit of rage without doing any research.

I think some extra lines at the end of the Owlman fight cutscene would have helped. Maybe something like:
Superman: What were you thinking Lex?
Lex Luthor: I couldn't just stand by and let ANOTHER Kryptonian attack MY planet. I will show myself to be the real Superman of Earth and slay this false god. You Kryptonians have caused enough damage.

That would have been more in-line with his previous portrayal in DCUO and helped explain what he was thinking. As is, he just comes across as being completely consumed by his bloodlust. Part of the appeal of DCUO is the lore and character development. As presented in game, we don't have the opportunity to understand Lex's reasoning.

Sure thing.
1) Nope, they actually take a little bit of damage, so the group's healer will probably need to be watching their health as well as anyone elses.
2) Some groups may want to bring an off-tank into the fight for this situation. As it is currently, any player who is locked down can still be attacked and can still take damage. I'm going to make a few minor tweaks so that the bosses will mostly avoid attacking a locked down player.

Those changes won't be in the Test server until their's a hotfix. Thanks for the feedback!

Hey Penryn,

Again thanks for the feedback.

As I mentioned in previous posts, we always do our best to include strong characterizations and story for our iconic characters.

Just to frame Lex's story a little for you: In the open world missions you learn that Lex is trying to locate the Crime Syndicate's Panopticon with the villains help, which much like the Justice League Watchtower is a formidable piece of tech. The Crime Syndicate's Panopticon however is not just an observation or defensive base, it's heavily armed and very dangerous battle station, hence why the Crime Syndicate opening a portal and bringing it through to our world would be disastrous.

Lex's intent was to sneak onto the Panopticon, access the CS's internal files and seize control of the space station so he could take control of Earth 3 and evict the Crime Syndicate from their place of power for his own purposes. In Lex's mind, Ultraman/Superman is always the biggest threat so he felt prepared to take both on thanks to his Kryptonite spear. Lex has dealt with the Justice League for so long he is used to the way they operate and the limitations of being "Heroes" and often uses this to his own advantage.
Johnny Quick points out in the Raid he "saw you coming, and that they saw Lex coming too".
Unlike on our Earth, the Crime Syndicate's monitor womb violates peoples privacy in ways the Justice League would never dare. So their version of the monitor womb allowed them to anticipate Lex's arrival and take him out.
Worse still for Lex, instead of being held in a nice Watchtower detention cell, he is instead subjected to mental torture and a total invasion of his greatest prize... his mind.
For Lex, having his mind invaded by the Crime Syndicate ( let alone a Superman from another Earth) was the last straw for him, which is why he flies off the handle when he is rescued and decides to confront Ultraman head on.
I do agree a few more lines of VO would have been great to sell this, we really have pushed the limits of our cam lengths for this content so I apologize if we didn't get as in depth with Luthor, as you'd like.
On the bright side, we plan on make an even more concerted effort to tell succinct yet engaging stories in the upcoming year, tackling some really amazing content that I hope you guys enjoy!

Thank you for the reply JackFrost.

I do have one more question about the Lockdown Drone. How will the Lockdown Drone affect Rage players? Will Rage players be able to avoid Rage Crashing? Rage Crashing is always a problem with transformation and encasement mechanics.

I'm just worried that Rage players won't be able to avoid Rage Crashing if they happen to be encased.

I added a safeguard before the content went to PCTest that should prevent Rage Crash from being an issue with that Lockdown drone mechanic. If anyone sees it not working properly, please flag it up; but it shouldn't be an issue. Thanks!

http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Omega_Man_(New_Earth)

This guy would have looked so cool coming out of that portal. Could have had his chest as a style reward with the atomic animations in the centre of the armor.

Bugs/Questions/Feedback
This is for the End-Game version of Escape from Earth 3.

1. The Kill Bot 3000 immediately started attacking the group after the intro cutscene. Is that intended? Here is an example:


Jump to 10 seconds.


2. Just to clarify, exactly what are the consoles in the Kill Bot 3000 supposed to do if you activate them all in time? From what I'm seeing, it disables the shield on an existing drone and summons a new drone with a shield. Here is an example video:


At 2 seconds, you'll see the Augmentor Drone being protected by a red shield. The consoles become active at that time. By 14.5 seconds, all of the consoles have been activated. The red shield on the Augmentor Drone has disappeared. At the same time, an Orbital Doom Drone with a red shield appears.

Generally, a new drone was summoned whenever we completed a console sequence.

However, there was one sequence where it dropped the shields on all of the drones:


Is all of that working as intended? You can see in the first video that we activated all of the consoles and still got the "Error" message.



3. Will keeping the Lockdown Drone stunned prevent it from encasing a teammate?


4. Should I be seeing the lifebars for Alexander Luthor and Superman in this picture? I see Lex Luthor's lifebar:



5. In this particular fight, the group defeats the Kill Bot 3000 first at 15 seconds. However, the "Defeat Kill Bot 3000" bullet doesn't disappear. Instead, the "Defeat Owlman" bullet disappears at 31 seconds after another console sequence. Why did that console sequence generate an error message? Here is the video:



6. Should a DPS be able to crowd control the Lockdown Drone? Here is an example:


Look on the fight side of the screen. You'll see a Lockdown Drone being attacked by a Gadgets DPS. The Lockdown Drone eventually ends up being encased. I was the only Controller in the group.

Feedback
The End-game version of the raid doesn't seem too difficult at the moment with the recent bug fixes and tuning. The only thing that seems broken are those consoles on the Kill Bot 3000 fight. A geared group should be able to complete the raid in ~20 minutes.

I tried putting together a group for Escape from Earth 3, but no one wanted to run it. The people I talked to felt that Kill Bot 3000 was an impossible fight. They were telling me about it took a full group on Team Speak just to get Kill Bot 3000 down to 80% health in 30 minutes of continuous combat. They didn't tell me what the specific problem was. It could be the boss's health or something else.

Just a quick question. Did your second paragraph refer to the Elite version of the raid? Thanks!

1) It is not intended that he attacks right away, but it looks like it happened because a player had a pet that was too close. I'll see if I can do something about it.
2) If there is one shielded drone, and the group hacks one Drone Controller console, it'll remove the shield off that single drone. If there are two shielded drones, and the group hacks two consoles, it'll remove two shields, etc. If there's one shielded drone, and the group hacks more than one console, it'll overload it. If that happens, it'll remove the shield off the single drone, but then it'll summon an additional shielded drone (assuming there aren't already the maximum that can be up at once). If there're two shielded drones, and the group hacks all three Drone Controller consoles, it'll remove the two shields, but because it's been overloaded, it'll summon an additional shielded drone. A couple of caveats: this isn't relevant to the Event mode, and in the Elite mode, all of this is true, but all of the Drones become overclocked (buffed) in addition to an extra shielded drone being summoned. If I hope this helps!
3) Yep, it should.
4) It's something that can happen when they are hit by certain attacks. But generally, in this content, I tried to set it up so that you don't.
5) Thanks for the report.
6) It's certainly possible. The unshielded drones in that fight are pretty susceptible to CC.

Thanks for the feedback!

My mistake. That second paragraph was a reference to Elite. The people that have been running were reporting issues with the Kill Bot 3000 taking a very long time to kill on Elite.

Thank you for the reply and explanation JackFrost. That helps clear up the misunderstandings I have about the console phase.

The console mechanic probably runs counter to how most players would expect the consoles to work. Players have been conditioned to "turn all cogs on all consoles or something bad happens" in these types of fights. The current mechanic messaging doesn't do much to dissuade a person from that expectation. Coordinating "turn only a certain number of consoles" with the group will be a bit trickier than "turn all of the cogs." That goes double with "well-intentioned" PUGs who may not be the wiser.

I'm hoping most PUG groups will leave activating the consoles to just one person who is familiar with the mechanic.

Thanks for putting a shielded drone counter in the bulletin menu. That will help to make the mechanic more manageable.

Feedback
I was talking to the tank from my last run of Escape from Earth 3 about the Kill Bot 3000 fight. In our particular run, we had Owlman. His feedback was that Owlman was more of a nuisance than any real threat in the Kill Bot 3000 fight. Should Owlman be doing any skull attacks in the Kill Bot 3000 fight in the End-game version of the instance? I rewatched my video and didn't see anything. Our tank mentioned a backflip attack and that seemed to be it. Is the second boss intended more of a "flavor" thing in the Kill Bot 3000 fight?

In general, Owlman doesn't seem particularly dangerous in any of the Earth 3 End-game raids. You fight him once in Panopticon and once/twice in Escape from Earth 3. By himself, he isn't very dangerous. I haven't seen the raid-version of Owlman use that skull-based high-damage vortex attack from the alert.

Thanks! If anyone has any feedback about the elite mode first-hand, I'd love to hear it.

I'm curious of a few things, from anyone who might have this info:

• Did the players involved have all of the things set up they would on Live? (ie. league buffs, player base buffs, etc.)
• Was the issue that the group never wiped, and in 30 minutes. they just tired of trying?
• Or was it 30 minutes of trying/wiping/re-trying, and the best result they got was getting Killbot 3000 down to ~80% health?

Thanks again!

All of the players involved were modded and appeared to have buffs active.

From my understanding, it was taking 30 minutes in one attempt to get Kill Bot 3000 down to 80% health.

It's true that he doesn't use the same 'vortex' attack from the Alert, and that is the intent. I made a fix today to have him use a couple more of the abilities he uses in the final boss fight. A similar change was made for Superwoman. That change won't be on the Test server in the next hotfix, but should hopefully make the live publish. Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for the additional info. I managed to find one group's Youtube video of their attempt at the first boss fight in Elite mode, and it gave me some additional information. I'm not sure it was the same group you had been chatting with. We're making some changes to the Elite mode's health and damage, but those changes probably won't be immediately visible on PCTest. Thanks for your help!