A test of endurance does not mean it has to come from avoiding a bosses attack that can deal high damage. A test of endurance isnt just dodging attacks and paying attention to tells to avoid dangerous attacks. That is part of it. but it's also surviving a prolonged fight by power management from each individual and utilizing smart strategy on their execution of attacks. Blocking when being attacked and in non tank role, using powers or perks that shield or taunt when not with a tank, taking advantage of armory swaps, cycling supply drops together, etc all that tests the players on whether they are clever enough to survive. This endurance test is an easy one, which is good for an alert, because its just additional health on NPCs. There are no one shots and the chances there are to die occur when you take multiple hits. Taking multiple hits allows you to react quickly. I'm a little surprised took you guys at odyssey that long to beat it. The group I was in, 2 RANDOMS, took 41 mins. Could've been shorter if it wasn't for recapturing one flag at the beginning. And the top DPS was in all scion with t4 mods. I was all in scion too. You really think once this hits live that time won't be shorter with a good group? If you're really persistent on reducing the health on those Bosses go for it. I think its lame and it seems like your asking for another trigon level alert but w/e. Just leave the mob NPCs alone.
It was also my second time. Same with D3vi1. We both didnt even finish it the first time because it bugged on us.
the bosses still have way to much health making it feel more like a raid then alert and the gear power consumption makes it very hard to keep a power hungry group feed and i had my vit at 2826 with a soda and was getting double p0t and still group was burning through power to much
That's not really the alert's fault. I was able to keep everyone powered up fairly well. I did have to drink soders and supercharges though. I think I did ~900k power out in a 36 minute run @ 2600 vit.
You don't see how this is actually a player issue? A D.P.S., or any role, spamming powers or using a rotation that is supported by 2 or 3 controllers in an ALERT clearly needs to look up the definition of a budget how to apply it with power. Well I guess the devs wanted to test the stamina of this current generation of DCUO players. It's a shame to see they all failed it. I guess it's time to lower the bosses health even more. Just imagine all the complaining that's going to happen once it's live and the average player struggles.
its not that it was to hard i found all the boss fights quite easy actually so i dont get where this struggling u speak of is coming from its just that it took to long and some of us dont wanna spend what little time we have for some gaming on just one alert we want to get our marks and have some fun all while keeping to our RL schedules.
I did the alert yesterday in a 1-1-1-1 group in tank-role. I was wearing full 92-gear. Not a single time have I been in real danger. I even offered to take off some pieces of gear to make it a little more exciting for the healer. The healer only got something to do in the last boss fight, where Circe kept on lunging the DPS (full 92-gear) and took about 60% of his health in one hit. As tank I could not do anything about her jumping to the DPS, so I could have been easily replaced with another DPS instead. The visual design of the alert is amazing. The fights are just too long and not entertaining or challenging. Someone on the server compared it with hitting a training-dumm and that's unfortunatelly how it felt like. This and how I experienced the alert myself yesterday makes me think there are just two extremes to set up a group for the alert: Either having a might-based DPS, which leads to him and the troller being empty of power for the complete alert. Or having WM-focused DPS only and making the Troller-role obsolete.
When I [Rage] tanked it, I too, was never truly in danger (even though those dang dogs can bring an unfortunate crash now and then). My hp dipped, but never to the point I was close to needing a rez. I was happy to see that, for most of the alert, I finally could hold aggro (compared to recent alerts and raids). With the traditional 1-1-1-1 set up, this alert will test if players actually know their roles (maybe not trollers, cause there was very little CC involved). As far as might vs precision, I have always felt being closer to a balance was usually better than just heavy one way or the other. This may be true going forward, at least for me.
I have to say, I love the look of the alert visually, but yea... I won't play it if this is how it is when it goes Live. I went in as bare bones as possible, Scion Healer Gear, one T6 weapon, crappy 56 DPS utility belt from Magic Wing Vendor (When are you guys going to add Utility Belts to vendors?!), and pugged two groups that can only be called 'the lowest common denominator'. Both ran 2 DPS setups. Both were typical of the "Burn Baby, Burn!" mentality that is prevalent across the game. The level of skill was low, comprehension of basic game concepts was low-average, including failure to understand LOS and power management. One group yelled at me for not having all 92 gear. (Whatever happened to concept of TESTING?!) Overall it was a typical group composition for DCUO. Points to comment on... Neither group finished the alert. It took one group 24 minutes to just figure out the Phoenix. Even though I kept trying to point out the eggs and hatchlings, the Zerg Mentality is strong even on the Test server population. The pavilion boss fights are a little hard to see when they start, as the force fields simply are not opaque enough (at least for my eyes) to cue people in on the fact they have to zone in cause they're cut out of the fight. Some folks kept trying to attack/power through the column gaps. The final fight is just too much. Overall, there's too many NPC characters running around, and I can predict that what will happen is most groups will run 2 DPS and no tank, letting the aggro roam rampant on the healer. At one point I had four of the villains all on me, despite my trying to get distance and move around the room. The Troller could not or would not (hard to tell cause of his English) use any CC powers throughout the whole Alert from beginning to end fight. I suspect the high Dom req may have had something to do with it. Mobs overall are tough, manageable-dangerous for the Tier they are at, but they all take FOREVER to kill. Bosses overall have a LOT of health to burn through. I predict that overall, what will end up happening upon release of this Alert is that DPS-emphasized groups will dominate and overgear the population playering at Tier 6. Tanks will be ditched and trollers will be batteries. Healers will end up tanking and attracting all the aggro. The sheer length and 'mehn' factor will cause a lot of Support players to flat out stop playing it. If the Devs want to change this swing of the pendulum, then CC needs to be emphasized again, tanks need to be able to effectively control mobs while mobs are reduced in overall health and/or numbers, DPS as a role needs to be NOT rewarded for high burn, instead the futility of massive burn as a syndrome needs to be addressed and discouraged from the top down. In this case, I think the most effective Testing is not being done by the high-end players and recognized League personalities, but by the lowest common denominator of PUGs and lone wolves. You want to know what the spread will look like when this Alert goes Live, go pay attention to the 'nobodies' and see how they do. Factor their results by a hundred and that's what the core audience of DCUo will be performing like.
But I thought this game was "free to play it our way". Why should using WM from now on be the only way to get high-lvl-content done? What about people, who love the visuals and effects of their powerset? Who'd rather have a might-based built? Who don't want to focus on weapon-combos to do damage? I think WM as equal alternative to power-based DPS would be totally fine. But it should not be superior and make those builts, which built on using powers, fall far behind.
Tanking the alert with Weapon Mastery is a breeze - you can actually control the mobs in a very neat way while maintaining aggro. People need to realize that it this alert is extremely easy with a tank*. If they don't make use of it and rather fail twice a run then that's their fault. * - Note: I'm aware that you can run it without a healer or a tank or four DPS if you're crazy enough. However this emphasizes for the majority of the DCUO players which CCBatson referred to.
Just so you are aware Batson that you can't CC the adds in that Alert for the most part. Majority of them will break out almost instantly or they just simply don't become CC'd. If your Troller was using PoT and Defense Debuff, they both CC via stuns, juggling, or rooting depending on his power set. So if you didn't notice any CC coming from him it wasn't his fault, especially if he was in T6 for some odd reason (as I agree testing should be done in Scion to get a real feel for the content), because his Dom would surpass 1500.
Yea... I think the Dev's are seriously at fault here for making adds that are NOT CC-able. Big mistake. The whole role function is so seriously skewed now, I am seeing people shouting out for "Fast T6 Alert run, No healers" I have a lot of respect for the Dev's and their work, but they seriously dropped the ball on how this Alert was made. The Phoenix battle was sheer brilliance though, and I think it's stuff like THAT which will weed out the DPS-Zerg mentality.
I am trying to track down the "adds" that are breaking out immediately. Are you talking about adds to a specific boss? I am seeing the majority of the base population currently has a 2-4 second wait before breaking out.
I haven't run it again since that night Loche but I did record the entire run. So I will check it out tonight and see if I can pinpoint certain adds that were generating this issue. I'll also double check to insure I had over 1500 Dom which I'm sure I did but you never know.
When I first ran the alert on the first day, I don't remember any trash mob being vulnerable to CC, our troll was messing around with statis field most of the time over 1500 dom, most trash would be encased and than be out of the encasement in less than or close to a second. Usually an encasement in a trash burn is annoying because it significantly impacts burn by protecting trash, in this alert all the encasement would do was break the grouping I had made as a tank a little bit each time. The only add our troller could really control was the dogs at the boss with the dogs, and the beastimorph at the end of the raid. I definitely don't think I recall anything being CC'd for 2 seconds outside of the boss adds and definitely not 4 seconds, I know because we actually stopped dps at certain points to check it. Ironically, everything in this alert is really easy to tank and maintaining aggro is really easy for the most part which was a welcome change to many bosses lately that have scripted attacks that the tank really can do nothing about. I no real problem juggling or pulling adds, but our troll could not CC. I had about 1990 dom in scion gear. I'll see if I can convince BB or someone else to troll the alert again and see if an update fixed some of the problems we're talking about.
As the controller that was in the alert Wanning was saying, I can't remember the names, but in all the trash mobs, there were a few that broke out. But the problem isn't being able to control them, it's the fact that there isn't a point to stunning them. In Strike you can stun the mobs and move the blink bombs or press switches. There isn't much for a controller to do. Then when the boss fights start, there isn't anything for a controller to do. I deleted the recording I did of that instance as it was huge and at the end got laggy. I can check again with some to test and figure out which mobs breakout.
