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

Found and fixed an issue with the Vampire Lord not receiving the tag that allows him to be damaged by the Pyre consumable. It's an odd bug since there was no data change to remove it. As such, I'm adding in another method for the Vampire Lord to tag himself as a valid target so there will be two methods in which he does this.

These notes will go up with the next hotfix.

• Found and resolved issue with the Vampire Lord losing the tag that allowed him to be damaged by the Van Helsing Pyre consumable.
• The Real Etrigan is now slightly larger than the Mirror Images he creates.
• Fixed an issue in Normal Mode that would prevent the extra Pools of Darkness spawning after the sub bosses were defeated in the Castle.
• Added midscreen messaging for when Etrigan uses his Sword of Damocles attack.
• Leader of the Pack can now be completed as intended. Those that have gone over the count for the Feat will get the Feat autocompleted in an upcoming update (hotfix after the next).
• Added a note to the description of the Hellish Reflections Feat to help clarify the actions needed to acquire the Feat.

Also from the System Designers:

• Removed CR requirement for purchasing the Lamp of Van Helsing.
• Chaos Essence is now dropped individually, instead of as Need/Greed loot.

Thank you for the fixes- especially on that need/greed on the essences.

Fast work!

THANK YOU SO MUCH, YOU ARE A GOD.

(Who says the devs don't listen and don't respond to polite requests?)

Thanks for taking a look at this...it will make the feat a bit less impossible.

Heads up - the Need/Greed fix from the Systems guys didn't get fully put into place in time for the hotfix so that note got removed. It IS in the pipeline now but may take another couple days to make it your way. Sorry gang.

Eh, I can live with a glitch like that so long as I know that relief is coming within a few days. Obviously, the sooner, the better, but delays happen. Thanks for working on it.

Just got around to trying Hellish Reflections again and it's still not making sense to us. It seems impossible to not trigger the sealing phase. If their something we're missing?

With which part do you struggle? Figuring out who the real Etrigan is, or lack of single target damage?

We just did it with dedicated ST builds plus with a controller you can lock target the real Etrigan slightly faster than the copies - that way you really find him quickly. The real one also has a flame wheel accessory with five flames, the others only have four flames on them.

It also helps when your artifact isn't the bouncy ball one.

The part where the slightest bit of DPS pushes him into the artifact sealing phase. The feat says it has to be done before John starts sealing artifacts and basically one mirror phase worth of damage, even just support damage, triggers the sealing phase.

Oh no worries mate, you just misunderstood the feat.

The idea is to break Etrigans concentration 5x to despawn the images. To do so you have to let Constantine's shield break all the time.

You basically have infinite time on the first duplicates phase to figure out how you will identify the real Etrigan. After that you need to always let Constantine's shield break because Etrigan only summons duplicates when Constantine is not shielded.

I did it yesterday on an alt and it worked like a charm

Also, don't dps Etrigan outside of his image phase because he would die before you could complete the feat. It's about 10% HP you need to damage Etrigan everytime

My groups are still struggling on identifying the real Etrigan. I can not tell any difference in size and if you do not identify the real one in the first 3-5 seconds they start blowing fire. The feat is done once that happens as there is just not enough time after the fire breath to find and phase. Is there any other way other then the 5 fire balls to identify the real one?

I have a problem pointing him out aswell, he is bigger, but not alot, so i'm always doubtfull if i'm attacking the real one or not.

So the feat wording should be "before Constantine seals" not "before Constantine begins sealing." Wow they couldn't have muddied the waters much more on this one.

He BEGINS sealing 30 seconds after the Artifact is out and doing its thing. During that time he is fighting with you. He begins sealing it 30 seconds after where he is NOT fighting with you but is in progress of sealing the Artifact. If you successfully protect him then he seals the artifact successfully. He does not begin sealing anything until he needs protection.

You have 30 seconds between the summoning of the images and when Constantine begins to seal the artifact.

Sorry if that was muddy for you. I can update the wording further if a lot of people are not understanding it.

Yeah sorry, it confused me, my league mates, and every random we've tried it with. To be fair though, we were doing it as described, would quickly DPS real Etrigan for over 10% of his health, all the mirrors would burst, rinse and repeat until he died and it still wasn't popping so it's possible it was just bugging out on us. When the wording was changed, we interpreted it to mean that if he ever reached the sealing phase at all during the fight, the feat was disqualified.

Should we be getting an in game dialog that says something like "Etrigan's concentration has broken" or anything like that?

As of today that happens.

I've been experiencing similar issues. Trying to count the flames is problematic because most of my attacks set all of the Etrigans on fire. The extra visual FX makes it hard to count the number of fireballs. The real Etrigan isn't that much larger than the fake ones.


On a matter unrelated to Etrigan or the previous post, I've been trying to do the laser fence feat at the start of the alert. Ideally, you're able to run your way through the lasers if you get the correct timing. In reality, the laser visuals are often out of sync with the server. You might think the first laser is down and start running. However, you get tagged for damage with no laser visual effect being present. Getting through that section feels very luck-based.

Awesome thanks. That'll help a lot in that we'll be able to tell if we're bugged straight away.

Slightly off topic but yesterday we kept getting the big red mirror images messages after the fight was over. Was weird.

I've increased his size slightly more - another 7 percent. It's now 20 percent bigger than the others. This is the most I will do for sizing. When it gets to Live servers is anyone's guess as it's not a critical fix. If a critical fix is needed for something else then this is ready to go and will roll out with it.

I'll take a look at the midscreen, it's either pulsing too many times or just lagged behind the other midscreen message spam that queues up. I'll look at the lasers as well but I can't control server lag if that's causing it unfortunately. The data is pretty cut and dry but I'll look at it.

Also for the midscreens, I've already set it to go to your chat window so that's where it's really displayed in and on time. So don't rely on when you see the midscreen in terms of determining if you got his images dispelled in time, keep an eye on the default chat window for that.