Seasonal difficulty broken

It's more like roles and roless buffs. 9 times out of 10, a dps will go down because emo pilgrim targets him and if your health goes down and don't block, you will die. If you block, you start to heal.

When a player is new and either switches to heal by mistake or only has a few powers, you tend to die easier as you can't block to get the team buff.

Ran it twice last night. Once with a completely random group with my main character at 115 CR and the second time with another group made up of myself and two other guys in a league of mine with a CR 49 character and one random person joining the group. In the first group I don't remember if we were all DPS or what, I know that I was playing DPS at least, and we beat it no problem. I also do not recall what levels we all were, but I did pop a soder when my health did get low, not low enough to knock me out, but low enough that I popped it just to be safe, but overall not really a problem. On the second run with the other group, I think one of my league mates was 116 and the other around 60-65, not sure where the last random person was, but I think in the low range as well. Anyway, with that run we all wiped at first, but going back in, myself and my two league mates were in DPS and the random person was healing and we did all of the mechanics and survived to win in the end. However, even with all the clamping, buffs, nerfs, adequate roles and whatever, I still feel as if I had a much easier time with it on my first run going in with a higher CR character myself than going in with a lower CR character the second time. So, in my experience, it does seem to still make a difference and is not as "easy" as it should/could be for what is supposed to be a quick & fun seasonal event battle.

Yup, that seems to be something the Devs are still not quite understanding: the Seasonals are supposed to be fun, with a little bit of a challenge, not something you need to be fully raid-geared for
They still claim these are for everyone over level ten, and then they pull this crap and make it that no one over 200CR wants to even group with someone lower

These were never meant to be done by people under 30. At least..not at launch. It was just sort of understood. But when max levels start having issues then somethings wrong.

I agree that anyone over 10 (although I personally think 10 is to low. It most definitely is for lpve) but these guys really don't understand what scaling means. If you have 4 under 30 people, difficulty needs to be scaled down a bit. If you have 4 170s, scale it up a bit.

I'm not even sure how any could even think you were sipped to throw the crystals at emo boy. Directions are quite clear in what to do with them. Throwing them to get them across the room quicker is OK though. Personally I just walk them

The events are going to be hell when stats hit lol (please let it before Season Greedings)

Below lvl 30 characters are hit very hard by some abilities.

I suspect that this is caused by the CR differential and the stats update could maybe fix that.

Haven't tested it yet, but seriously, what's the excuse this time? This is happening every single ******* time multiple years in a row. Beginning to feel like instanced seasonal missions should only be run by legends characters. I've still got my scaleup/scaledown test footage from the broken Summer seasonal. :\

Seeing as the instance is meant for level 10 and up, enemies should be just as difficult as in the suicide squad training instance.
I guess only difficulty then would be following mechanics of the boss fight.

Or could start making lpve versions of these for farm fanatics.

The main problem is that people go in with all DPS. They forget tanks and healers make any instance easier. Make a group like a real group, and not a DPS fest, and that event is easy. Same with all events. I go tank as soon as I get in there, and I have never had a problem with any event.

I did the original Halloween instance. Which was when F2P happened. I wasn't 30 yet. My friend who was with me wasn't either. He got the 34IL Scarecrow helm. Which launch event didn't allow low levels? As I seem to always get boosted before the clamping stages.

I just did the instance on my lv16 toon to check out the difficulty. I was HL dps with AM unlocked so my damage was good (or good enough). The other three guys were obvious new players: two DPS who didn't use their AM (so they did 10-20% of my damage) and a Troll who didn't know anything about the role. All of them below 30 like me, clamped to eCR 30.
We did the objectives but we still couldn't beat it. All three were constantly out of power and since there was no support whatsoever I got Klarion's full aggro and died quickly, even while blocking with roleless healing buff activated.

It looks like both clamping and CR differential are working as intended here, but there are problems that make this instance close to impossible for new players who don't know their role mechanics yet:

• First, lowbies get clamped to eCR30 so CR differential scales their damage out to 66% and their damage in to 146%. So not only do these guys not know how to use their powersets (since none of that is properly taught and some AMs aren't even available at earlier levels) but they also get downscaled for being a virtual 4 CR points below target. If we get clamped anyway, gearing up is out of the question so there's no need to have a 4 point CR differential for new players. Of course this is going away with the big update, but that most likely won't be in time for this seasonal.

• Next, the AM - vanilla damage gap is so large that if you don't know your AM your damage will be meaningless. For an instance that's supposed to be accessible (and beatable) by level 10 characters of varying skill and knowledge levels, that's unacceptable. Seasonals should be able to be beaten with vanilla combat since that's the lowest common denominator that we know every noob will be able to apply. Of course in the AM system that would make this seasonal beyond trivial for those who know how to use AMs. This problem too is going away with the big update, yet again not in time for this seasonal.

• Lastly, as I already mentioned Klarion killed me even though I was blocking and had the roleless healing buff on me. That's just crap. If I'm utilizing the combat mechanics as intended I should not get roasted like this, not in a seasonal anyway that is supposed to be beatable with any role setup or skill level. We can't expect lv15 players to find a tank, troll and heal to beat this.

These three are the major problems I see. If noobs are supposed to beat this, they need to either be able to use roleless buffs or offset the lack of support with their damage. They can do neither right now, the only realistic chance to beat it is to either have multiple experienced players using their AMs to burn everything quickly, or to have proper support which can't be expected of sub-30 characters/players.

TLDR: Unless you don't want new players to beat it, go ahead and nerf it to the ground for now. These problems will most likely be gone once the statsmatter update goes live.

Look this comes around yearly and if your not a 30 plus you should be able to que in a month winter Christmas will be here and you can get that one done

To be perfectly clear because I wasn't, I'm speaking to difficulty of event raid. The rest of the event difficulty is something I haven't been too stressed out over so I think it's a little harder than previous events but certainly not impossible. The Oan 8 player instance is what I'm giving up on.

I have seen many good teams that should be able to get through content at our levels fall flat on our face over and over and over again. I'd accept if I'm just garbage and shouldn't be in there but I believe it's just too difficult. Both to get passed and certainly to be any fun.

You mean Survivor Mode?

It's supposed to be punishing and hard. Not all players can do it, and that's ok.

Like black dawn said, SM is labeled by the devs as the hardest content in the game. Its gotten easier over the years. This is the 3rd time around for oan. SM content was aimed at the best of the best players. The top 10-20%. This has been stated by the devs b4 if ya didnt know that. And again its gotten a lot easier because the bosses dont change year to year. So if ya ran it last year or even the year b4 its not very difficult. If ya have never been in there b4 then yes it will be seem difficult and it should. Also past SMs havent always been released with a seasonal event like halloween or christmas. SM and those seasonal events are not connected in any way. They just happened to go live with the same game update this time.

Its a seasonal event and is beatable with any group setup. The devs even say level 10s should be able to do this with any setup. So i dont think anyone should be having to form a 1-1-1-1 group to beat a seasonal. 4 dps should work just fine. I did 4 dps runs on 4 of my 6 toons yesterday and not 1 run was longer then 3mins. But we all knew what to do. And have access to all our powers.

Level 10-20s dont Level 10s just got the feat to do their support role when they reached level 10. So unless its a vet players alt those people are not going to know how to tank or heal and might not even have access to the right powers to come close to tanking or healing properly. The same things get said every time a seasonal goes live. Its kinda odd to see the same things repeated over and over.

in the interests of poper attribution, someone did a youtube video of tips for leveling to 30 faster that I watched during summer of wonder, and it was titled something like "get to level 30 fast - Difficulty Level: Potato" and I thought it sounded funny. So whoever made that video, I thought difficulty level: potato was a funny title.

If ur over cr34 the only difference are sp and MF-mods. Did the summer seasonal with a group of lvl10-19, but all seemed to be alts and people knew what to do and the run was no problem. But it seems that sub30s have a harder time because of cr difference.

Afaik there is not buff for players under lvl 30 anymore expect for a defense-buff since last winter event.

At least the icons on the head are no longer showing and when you check your stats-tab, then at least last time I checked as post30 you have everything nerfed, while pre30 only got defense buffed.