Dev Discussion Episode 40: The Royal War (Alert)

For first boss Aquaman, adds somehow can ignore the aggro from tanks, and proceed to attack Flash, leading to a failed feat run. The way the adds attacking Flash is also questionable, sometimes they appear and do ranged attack instantly, there is no time to react to that. I'm guessing this is not normal behavior, maybe some adjustments to them.

For second boss, our group still experienced the symbol bug (2 symbols, 0 symbol, etc). And about matching symbols in 4 seconds, I feel like we don't have much time to react (for example, give us a clear warning before symbols appear 3-4 seconds so we can have a better reposition). Also please consider to remove the "grounded" mechanic during Hera/Ares phases, this just makes the feat become impossible. And we got Aphrodite phases during symbols....The feat is about pure skill but the rng also plays a huge role, I'm not a big fan of that

The alert is very good, and fun to play as well, but the feats are not

All tries on elite alert today (4) has ended by flash falling and geopulse taking over the room.
There is no way to start the fight again as everyone will be dead the instant they touch the floor.
Only way to try again is disband and reque.

ANNOYING

Can we please have all the adds leading up to Emperor Aquaman despawn when he is defeated? Being dog-piled by “skippable” corridor adds after a boss fight is easily my least favourite thing in DCUO.

Also perhaps you could have the text prompt for Zoom’s sucking in move appear every time he does it because people seem to have completely forgotten (somehow) what to do by the second time he does it, but it’s not that big a deal I guess.

I've been able to fix that by by starting the fight and then dying which resets it. The geopulse happens in pulses. You just have to wait till right after they shoot up and then lunge in and hit Aquaman with a ranged ability before they fire again.

As I previously said AMAZING elite alert

The zoom fight after the patch feels as it should I even got both feats xd.

However, in one of the groups I run with the burn was so high that they were skipping some of the wonder woman mechanics, while on Hades phase they didnt even bother in killing the adds.
Could it be possible to summon multiple Gods, forcing players to deal with everything if they decide to just brainless burn?
Could Hades adds kill you, if no one bothers burning them? Like if the add at 20%hp or less, player can survive with 1% hp otherwise you deadly dead.

Additionally, I found a bug while doing the turn all Greek letters to red for some reason I couldn't turn the letter M to red.

In normal, Zoom’s Vortex Trap does way too much damage in tank runs. Multiple ticks of 60k while being yanked across the room with no warning is pretty harsh. Seems like the attack is a reskin of Saturn Girl’s Psychic Shock, which I also reported as a problem.

In elite, I wasn't even able to get to Zoom today to see if he was truly patched. This alert has a huge problem with Queen Diana stacking mechanics. Symbols, Lilies, and Reflect all at the same time murder the healer and the DPS/Troll too. Healing and Damage ticks cover the symbol above your head so badly sometimes that you can't even see what symbol you're supposed to run to. One time, Diana shot Circe's magic beam at the healer while simultaneously spawning Aphrodite AND gave the healer a broken heart so he couldn't even roll out of the magic. Or Symbols + two Shades so your only two choices are killing the shades while getting cooked by the DoT, or cleansing the DoT and everyone wiping due to insufficient DPS. And we only had one DPS for almost all attempts, so I doubt it was due to too much burn. Everyone in the group knew what they were doing but we couldn't pass Diana today because of this crap.

Has anyone else ran into an issue with Celestial heal on the Aquaman fight? Sometimes I can't combo Admonish, nor does the animation for Admonish appear. This has happened to me several times, mainly in the elite alert version.

I'm on PS4.

I've only been running reg. The flowers you're supposed to trample for the Where Have All the Flower Gone feat almost NEVER come up.

We are doing this feat now and for some reason it counted for me towards elite and not regular and we are running regular.
Regular counter is stuck on 1/4.

Reflect, symbols, and Circe's magic are all on timers and she will rotate those mechanics indefinitely. The god mechanics are health-based and she will do exactly 4 of them throughout the fight.

Knowing this should give you more control over stacking mechanics. With a little communication, any group has the power to completely avoid symbols EVER happening during a god mechanic.

I imagine this is a rare occurrence but I absolutely grant you that this is one of those things where there's nothing you can do about it and you'll just die. (Technically, you can preempt this using what I said above, but it might not be worth the hassle for something that is very unlikely to happen.)

These are not your only two options. The shade needs to charge up his attack before it goes off. If he is CC'd, he'll have to restart. So while you definitely want to kill the shade, in theory, a tank can juggle it indefinitely and the attack will never go off. This means that the group is free to cleanse their symbols and return to the shade and the tank should have time cleanse his symbol in between juggles.

I mean no offense by this, but if a group can't pass Diana, it's not the fight, it's the group. I know this elite alert is no walk in the park and there's a lot that can happen that might seem like bs, but it would be naive to think that you guys as a group were doing everything in your power to beat it. Hopefully one of the tips I've left will help in your future runs.

While I'm in this thread, I just want to amend my statement on tank immunities. Not that they don't break out of the pull - they do - but the duration of the immunity is pretty bad and they're not a very reliable way of getting around the heal + pull situation.

Everyone using their own breakout trinket would work well in that situation but it's not that common to find yourself in a group where everyone has one.

Alternatively, (similar to my comment on Diana above) knowing that Zoom's pull is on a timer and the healing cogs are health-based, any group has the power to prevent the pull from EVER coinciding with the healing cogs.

Thank you, I appreciate that information. I have beaten Diana several times before, so I was pretty shocked when the group I ran with couldn't pass her. No one was doing anything drastically different than in my previously successful runs, so it felt incredibly inconsistent. Before I'd only get one or maybe two mechanics at the same time. I understand it's normal for the game to have hidden conditions behind mechanics, but in the case of this alert, it seems to me that those hidden conditions can make a critical difference between a relatively smooth run and a horrible run, even more so judging from your comments on Zoom's mechanics. I can see why people think it's RNG. In my case, if there was even a subtle hint that Diana's mechanics were on a timer, that would have increased the probability of my group figuring it out. Everyone knew how to counter each mechanic individually, which even that on its own wipes groups because not everyone does. That's what I meant when I said everyone knew what they were doing. I actually truly enjoy this alert, and I do appreciate the work put into the design. I just think more information would be helpful.

I regularly Celestial heal it, and Admonish combo into Blight always works fine for me. Be certain you're not accidentally rising due to swimming, or going into and out of movement. I imagine you have checked those things and are experiencing some kind of bug, though.

Yeah, I enjoy it too. And I definitely understand the frustration that comes from the seemingly random and chaotic boss fights. There are even some situations in which there really is nothing you can do.

The thing is, it's common for people to "know mechanics" in that they have a general idea of how the mechanics work, but not be privy to the finer details. They then fail to take responsibility when things go wrong because they believe they know everything there is to know (this isn't everyone, of course).

Even knowing the mechanics, finer details included, is only half of what it takes to have consistently smooth runs in these boss fights.

The other half is having the knowledge/skill to respond to mechanics, especially situations involving multiple mechanics. I use both the words "knowledge" and "skill" here because part of responding to mechanics is knowledge that can be derived from the knowledge of how the mechanics work (or learned from other players); but another part is the skill to make ad-hoc decisions in situations that can't really be planned for.

As an example of knowing mechanics vs knowing how to respond to mechanics, take Aphrodite. Most people know that she perma-stuns three players while the fourth needs to get near them to free them, but very few people seem to have figured out that you can group up before it happens and have everyone free within a second, rather than the 5-10 seconds it would take one person to make their way around a spread out group. Now, while this grouping up strategy isn't necessary, there are certainly other cases in which the different ways of responding to a mechanic/combination of mechanics will have more significant consequences.

I think it might be related to Celestial and Purple Healing Ray. Need to investigate it further.

Disregard this in terms of the alert feedback, I think the issue is somewhere else.

During Queen Diana's fight, when we get the symbols above our head and end up standing on the wrong matching symbol, is that supposed to kill us? This is for regular version. I was dodging Ares and went over a floor symbol and I guess the symbol mechanic popped up and was in wrong spot at wrong time.