Dev Discussion Episode 34: "JLD: Darkness Rising" 4-Player Operation

Greetings fellow monster slayers,

Welcome to the JLD: Darkness Rising Alert Operation. There are two versions for you to test and experience: Event and Normal. This particular piece of content focuses on the dark side of the occult. Hope you enjoy!

Please leave feedback and bugs here.

Have fun with the demons and werewolves and vampires- oh my!

KNOWN ISSUES:

• Chaos Essence is now dropped individually, instead of as Need/Greed loot. (This is not fixed yet but will be later this week)

It’s fine, but Etrigans fire move or whatever it is hits a tad too hard. I would tune it a bit.

Played both Event, as a buffed up 215, and Normal with various toons ranging from 256-261.

The Event version took too long. With no wipes, it took 52 minutes, though we did explore the optional side chambers. Still, that felt a bit excessive. I would suggest lower the life on the Shadow Monsters, Mirror Images, and Animated Armor. Again, only in the Event version.

The Normal version was a lot of fun but it feels slightly over-packed. Perhaps slightly lower life on the hallway/street adds, or a slightly shorter turret defense process. Every aspect of the alert was fun, but it seemed like there was just one too many things added to it. For example, if we had a longer Turret portion, and then a slightly longer Etrigan fight, and then a *second, separate* alert in the village of Markovia, with mini-bosses in the Side rooms (which would have to be defeated before going to the middle area), more street encounters, and then the same Vampire Lord fight -- I feel like it would have worked better and felt less packed.

I greatly enjoyed the level of challenge at Normal difficulty, and felt it was both more challenging, and more fun than Shattered Gotham.

What is this Death Sentence nonsense?! random bursts of 75k? Seriously?

I am reducing the hitpoints on Shadow Monsters and reducing the amount it takes to dispel a Mirror Image. The Animated Armor has been reduced enough.

Actually, it is not random - at all. It is a mechanic. It happens when Etrigan is close to be defeated (under 20 percent health). He says VO when that attack setting is triggered which has subtitles. He also does a chevron each time it happens. After it is cast, a Sword of Damocles style attack occurs where you see his flame sword coming down upon you. If you block before it reaches you, then you receive much less damage. If a Controller debuffs his damage, it is even less damage received.

After the first time he does the VO messaging, he will do it every 30 seconds which does the chevron and has the visual of the swords. While the mechanic itself will not be changing, there are a couple things I'll do to enhance it.

• Add a midscreen that repeats each time he uses it (as opposed to doing the VO each time) that will also get sent to your chat screen.
• Reduce the damage if you successfully block and have a controller debuff on him even further, to reward you paying attention even more.

These will be in the next update:

• Enemies in the European Castle will now despawn after the Vampire Lord is defeated. This will free up the map for quick exploration for Collections if the Optional Content is not completed before defeating the Vampire Lord.
• Shadow Monsters have had their health lowered in Event Mode.
• The damage needed to dispel one of Etrigan's Mirror Images has been lowered in Event Mode.
• Etrigan's Mirror Image Flame Breath does one less tick of damage in all Modes.
• Etrigan's Flame Breath does one less tick of damage in Event Mode.
• Etrigan's Sword of Damocles attack will do less damage if both Blocking the attack and a Controller damage debuff is placed on Etrigan.

This update will be in as soon as Localization can take a crack at it. Potentially the next update but likely the one after.

• Etrigan's Sword of Damcoles has additional messaging for midscreen and chat windows.

This helps out a lot. I play without audio (listening to my personal music and bgm & effects over it is annoying) and away from my tv so reading subtitles is an inconvenience. I mostly go off directly visual elements, the red messages, and the messages on the right. I haven't read or looked for subtitles since Rip in Time Elite when he calls out guards and you know the fire is started to spawn.

This alert was insane (258 healer POV). Lots of fun and it almost felt Elite-level. I didn’t quite understand some of the mechanics, and I couldn’t see the Vampire Lord’s pools because of my Solace of the Seas, but still very fun.

Sounds great! If you do play with audio, and I realize that many people do not, the Sword of Damocles voice-tell both telegraphs the attack and is an amusing addition to the encounter

I'm wondering though, Dead King's Sword, Sword of Damocles.... why do you keep trying to kill us with one-shot swords? Like, in particular. Just kidding, keep up the good work, this alert is really fun.

Is it intended that Etrigan's Mirror Images and Walking Armor thingies cannot be cc'd?
Neither me, as tank with 17k dominance, nor troll could pull or stun them. Etrigan's armor would just continue to gnaw on Constantine's protective bubble, barely paying any attention to us.

First time we ran as tank-heal-dps-dps and second time was tank-troll-dps-dps. Somehow it went faster and easier with troll than with healer, lol.

During first run we cleared entire Castle area and explored optional rooms, durind second we didn't. We noticed no difference during final boss fight, is there anything that should happen if we don't go into those rooms?

Yes. They are a DPS and coordination check.

Were you in Event or Normal Mode for the last question? In Event Mode nothing happens but in Normal Mode there are extra pools of darkness, 1 per room that you clear (defeating subbosses) for a total of 6 pools. This helps get the Feat for destroying 6 pools of darkness (it's one of two ways to do it).

If you don't go into those rooms then nothing happens in the final fight. You just get less Lamp food - for both Modes.

Oh I see, thanks for explaining. We were in Normal alert both times, all at or above recommended cr.

Did a quick check, looks like I busted those extra pools somehow when I set the standard 4 pools to spawn slowly over time instead of instantly when the boss fight starts. I'll get that fixed next week. In the mean time, the Feat can be accomplished in the alternate method (destroying pools and letting shadow minions reform them). Thanks for the report.

Ah, ok. I was about to tell you this isn't working, but you're on top of it already!

I was hoping to get some clues/advice on the Hellish Reflections Feat.
My League has tried this feat multiple times and we can only seem to get him to Mirror Image 3-4 times fer run.
Is there a trick to making him phase more than this. We have no issues burning the Armor guys but seems he doesnt wanna split.

I've added some wording to the Feat that helps explain it a bit better. That'll go up this week.

Basically, you have to focus fire on the real Etrigan each time the images comes up, doing 10 percent of his health to make the images despawn. The first time is a freebie in terms of time - they don't despawn on their own, but each time he summons them with an artifact, they will despawn when that Artifact gets locked down by Constantine and you get prompted to protect him. So you have to burn him down in 30 seconds.

Every time Constantine isn't protected, Etrigan summons more images in Normal Mode. Here you do the same thing - dispelling them, in time, a total of 5 times. You'll have to let Constantine's protection fail twice to reach that total.

The Feat wording now reflects that you have to dispel them before Constantine begins his phase.

I also heard about some consumables not working for some reason starting yesterday in regard to the Pyre. I'll look into what could cause that first thing tomorrow.

The Leader of the Pack feat - defeat 151 werewolves in the European castle - seems to be bugged. I can't provide a screenshot, but I am sitting at 169/151 werewolves, and I know of 2 other individuals with the same issue.

Could the real Etrigan be made more different/ noticeable from his copies? I know quite a few ppl that cant complete the feat because they are trying to stand there and count fireballs to see which one is real with the five (which costs quite a bit of time). Maybe an aura or make him slightly bigger? Just kinda annoying. I know others have said hes the only one that speaks but yet again...in a crowd of 3 or 4 adds thats pretty close to impossible to determine.

Will look into this today.

The real Etrigan will be slightly bigger in the next update.

I found the issue with the Leader of the Pack Feat. For people who haven't gotten past the count yet, they will be fine once they reach it. For those who have, they will get updated when they login and get the Feat then. The latter fix may or may not be with the next update since it's server files. It will get updated however.