the captain heroics adventures in DH are hard , especially the red con skellys or the quest mobs ( the named red con ghosts ) had to use discs on em to survive and im in very good group gear. i would think a tank merc would have very hard time tanking these if doable at all , killed 2 squires in a instance with 4 other guildies , they feared but really didnt matter to me as a paladin but i would imagine these aint doable for tank mercs. also had a red con trash that 1 rounded me ( 21k 21k 21k 21k etc ) went back and tried again with discs and we finished the adventure. I really do like the missions though.
Bixie seems tuned right for the Tier, dead hills for sure is tier or 2 harder the it probably post to be
So far my group has only done Bixie Warfront Heroic Adventures and 6 different ones. We're RoF Group Tier 3-4 geared (no raid gear) with a mage pet tank and we have had zero problems with the difficulty of the monsters and named. I kept hearing that the Bixie Warfont HAs are overly complicated, but so far they have been straightforward, easy to figure out and progress for our puller/group without any hints from Allakhazam. *** While it wasn't an issue for us, I think it would be best to ensure that it's impossible for the group to get stuck on a task even if someone holding a required item gets disconnected and doesn't return. Extra items or NPCs to kill would be a nice insurance policy if something were to go wrong (disconnect, bug, etc). The HAs also need an indication/message when they give an item to a player. Sometimes items are distributed automatically to everyone and it's not obvious they recieved an item, besides that it tells you to use that item. Or sometimes when a player clicks on an object (like a flower), it's not clear that they had an item automatically placed in their inventory, especially if that flower is spawning a monster. For collectables it would be nice if there was an indication of how many reachable collectables spawned or some sort of indication once they have all been found. For groups without track, it may be nice to have some indication that a named spawn. Or even an indication for when you didn't get a named (and got some garbage spawn).
guess I should say some Dead Hills HA are way harder then some others Example "The Hills are Alive" All mobs are generally white con or higher, and towards the end have to kill a 20k+ hitting Red Cons as part of the quest "Artifacts of Great Importance" were all Dark blue to White for Con's
@ coruth ,,,,,,,what class are your 3 geared toon ?. got a healer in that set up? shm or druid or cleric as well?. or chanter?.
Hey Gladiator. I specifically said "most" because (A) I realize there are better boxers than I and (B) There are people with God complexes such as yourself. Although, i just started boxing in the last month. So, if you wish to call people "inept" because they have to mash 2 buttons every 5 seconds to do massive DPS, that's your call. Plus, I'm still learning about the software available to assist in boxing toons. Having 2 melee toons seems doable if you don't have to alt+tab every 5 secs like i thought. Also, would be easier to run a second melee toon on a laptop. Thanks for those constructive bits of feedback from those people. Oh and btw --- I've been able to box Xulous Prime in DH and The Doomscale Horde in Karana. That's pretty darn good for an inept person running 3 toons and 3 mercs.
I did BW at least enough to get Mercenary ( might of done a couple twice helping other people ), but I've mostly been doing DH. My point of view is completely different than most in this thread, perhaps because of that. DH is mostly simple, I can solo/molo most of them depending on the steps I get ( I do need to load a box for names and if I get a bad fork in the steps ). Bixie I did with a full, balanced group of 6 raid geared players and some of those are just long. There are a couple HA in Bixie there is no way I would consider boxing them as it just wouldn't be fun.
I have some of the same issues with HA as the rest of the posts have stated. I play a bst max AA and T3-5 raid geared, bard 9k AA with T4 grp gear, and a cleric 10k AA T4 grp geared. I run with a tank merc Lv 9 Def/ Lv 2 mit, and 2 dps caster mercs. The issues I had: Either Zones BW or HD: Any mission that had kill an object was basicly just my bstie dpsing cause the mercs do not engage objects. Why do baskets and walls have a billion hps and resist a lot of spells? This just takes forever to complete. I spent 45 mins on some missions just trying to kill objects. Bixie NPCs seamed to do a crap ton of extra damage to my tank merc. There were many times he died and I kept up my bstie tanking with my cleric. If there were adds I would just have to AE mez, stand back with bstie to nuke/slow, while letting the pet tank in offensive mode (-10% hps and mitigation). I do not have to heal the pet with the cleric all that much. Some times the cleric dies right after the merc does and I am able to back up and heal pet while the dps casters nuke his target. Save NPC steps are able impossible to do with a tank merc. Mercs do not save NPCs they save me. So when I have to try and over nuke/agro 1-3 Mobs trying to attack an NPC vs me I end up dead. Then the mobs just go back to the NPC and the mercs leave the mobs alone. We need a Tank Merc AA we can activate that will have the Tank merc taunt and engage our target. Last 2 DH missions I got so sick of my tank merc getting killed I ran with 2 healers. This helped out a lot but still on most red con mobs he was still killed. I changed to just using the pet and once again healed him with no issues. I was even able to go back to 2 caster dps with my cleric solo healing the pet in offensive form. I plan on just doing the first 7 DH missions for tokens as they were pretty 1 group friendly with using a tank merc. Most the BW and the last 2 DHs are only meant to do once and never again unless it is just to help a friend get a flag. Then I still will only do it if no tank mercs are used. Tank mercs need more default AC and hps along with more AAs for hps, def, mit, and some activate skills for taunting and def. I do not understand why I have all those abilities for my pet and he out tanks most real tanks yet a tank merc is pretty useless in the new zones. I agree if it is ok for a dps merc to out dps players then why is it ok for the tank merc to be sub par from a player tank or very sub par from a pet.
I've been doing them with a group geared paladin, mage, wizard and chanter. We use a wiz merc and a cleric merc. The group geared tank does die once-3 times a night.. but we rarely wipe. I think they arent too hard but take a little longer than I'd like to see as a casual player. 30 mins or 45 mins is more the target I'd like to see. Log in do a mission and log off. We've managed a couple in 45 mins.. but most of the time it takes us over an hour - hour and a half to do one. (sometimes longer if we just get back luck). Are they too hard? No. Yes there are mobs that need to be pulled carefully. Even lots of instances for crowd control... even one fight that seemed to be linked and unmezzable / rootable that I ended up kiting while the rest of the group killed the other.. but no, not too hard.
HA: Death Peace. Mob: The Monstrous Minnow. I tried to pull it out of the water. A mistake. It (and a trash add) ran into a wall and got stuck in it. Cannot pull it out of that wall, can't hit it.
I'll reiterate a few of my points based on experiences since originally posting- While I don't expect a completely "level" playing field for ALL the specific zone's HAs, there is a huge gap between HAs in the same zone if the arc was designed by a different dev. My personal suggestion would be that, suppose all 3 zones have 3 HA arcs, the same dev would design the same arc (1, 2, or 3) for EACH zone. What we got with COTF T1a was completely randomized designs by all the devs... it is basically shooting fish in a barrel in regards to difficultly/time/expectation/reward. If management/dev are truly honest, then it should be easy to recognize that there are VERY different expectations even between people of the same rank. About 1/2 of DH's HA are "easy/medium" difficulty taking <40m with 3 PC and 3 mercs. Others take upwards of hours with the same group makeup. When you are presenting a Tier system to your player base with the mentality mentioned above, this results in a very uneven and unpredictable experience. If ALL the current T1a COTF zones are supposed to be relatively "equal" there should not be such a glaring discrepancy in HA/named/whatever. Honestly, you could probably get away with saying DH or whatever are "T2 zones" as an example (yet still maintain the same loot level) and just up the XP or currency for those zones. Fix the bugs (which Augur has responded awesomely to for Bixie HA) and adjust rewards accordingly for HA that are more time consuming and more difficult than others. With beta feedback and posts after COTF has gone live, I think it is clear that some missions/HA in COTF need to either be adjusted or have an increased reward (which isn't saying much given the vendor items but yeah...)
The dev that posted on this thread talked about trying to cater to all playing styles etc. For each HA you should be able to choose a hardmode or "normal/easy" mode for each HA. Hardmode giving more currency maybe and with a chance of extra random drops or something.
Dead Hills are 1/3rd a joke, 1/3rd on par, and 1/3rd WTF... if you have issues with all the dead hills, then its time to rethink on the boxing (keys/setup/toons) the mobs dont hit hard, if your toons are fairly upto speed for the expansion you should be going through them like a hot knife through butter.
Impossible to cast free-target spells in the ogre caves (The Hills Are Alive). The target ring doesn't appear, or rather there is some fake geometry on the floor, and the target ring projects on the real floor. Trying to cast results in "You cannot see your target".
The Hills Are Alive: an unreachable collection spawn point near 1751,-1282,197 (it's behind an invisible wall).
I just completed both the Bixie Warfront and The Dead Hills Mercenary missions (Heroic Missions). I box a Warrior and a Bard. Warrior is level 100 with max aa and Group gear. Bard is level 100 with 3k AA and group gear. I use a Cleric and a Wizard Merc. The Bixie Warfront: These were relatively easy for me, with a few exceptions to some steps in each mission. The overall feel to these is more quest-like with more complex tasks, instead of the typical just go kill mass amounts of mobs and win. I found these missions to be more diverse and interesting, but will be less likely to farm these for the currency. Jacyll's Jailbreak -
This entire expansion so far is undertuned, only fun to be had outside of raids is dead hills final mission, and only because casuals haven't gotten to it yet.
I would almost want to see heroic missions as ldon where there was easy and hard mode - where the points and exp can be adjusted for each -- in a group these missions are fine - but when you use a merc tank everything goes out the window ....
