Cactus rethread

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Jadenpain, Jan 17, 2018.

  1. Qazwsx New Member

  2. Sklak Journeyman

    Doesn't particularly help when shadow-stepped ~1000' away into the scorpion pit
  3. Gadreel New Member

    It seems they want all of the casual players to leave the game and have raid geared play only .
    Pirlo and Corwyhn Lionheart like this.
  4. AnzoRagespirit Augur

    ** Tradeskills ***

    - Increased the drop rate of Conflagrant Ore, Conflagrant Platinum, Conflagrant Wood, Conflagrant Diamond, Conflagrant Reptile Skin, Kunark Conflagrant Powder, and Slime.


    *** Quests And Events ***

    - The Sathir Line - Venril and Rile will now be killable when both of their health percentages are lowered.
    - Fell Foliage (Mission) - Lowered the damage output and hit points of Cactiikii.


    *** Miscellaneous ***

    - You must have an empty inventory slot to claim items.


    I guess everything else that's broken, doesn't matter at all... Yay for fixing uhh...err...toning down a mission...and keeping everything else brokted.

    Pets still not working.
  5. Koryu Professional Roadkill

    Cactiikii is invulnerable when any single cactus or sprout is up. He spawns with a burgeoning and so is invulnerable immediately. You get a new burgeoning maybe every 60 seconds, and a sprout every 30 seconds. You have 30 seconds to kill the sprout or else it spawns as some other cactus. If you can't keep up with sprouts to prevent those adds, you just cannot do this mission because Cactiikii will be permanently invulnerable. 30 seconds sounds generous, except that there's no indication of when a sprout is up or where it's at unless you specifically bring a Tracker.
    Instead of dealing with the big bad Cactiikii, most of this event is spent trying to find sprouts to keep from being overrun, killing adds to unlock the boss, and regrouping because of spinstuns and shadowsteps. The fast pace of sprouts to find/kill and the long-range shadowstep make this a hectic mission for melee that are already disadvantaged by the Agonizing Needles debuff (2: Lifetap from Weapon Damage: -5%, 3: Decrease Chance to Double Attack by 50%, 4: Decrease Accuracy by 100%).
  6. Mehdisin Mahn Augur

    there are hundreds of variations on what "group geared" means. there's also infinite variations on player skill.

    devs should be able to design a functional event where the scripts work and things play out according to an over-arching vision and a roughly tuned level of difficulty without player help. and they do for the most part.

    developers ABSOLUTELY use beta testing to tune. most bugs should be found during alpha and content is tuned during beta testing as well as correcting "unforeseen bugs" as you put it... a beta is necessary to account for player variations. the wider the participation, the more accurately tuned the events will be. you're right though that they don't rely just on player feedback to tune, they also scan logs of the events, come in invis and watch how / what you do.... and they monitor chat between groups as you're figuring things out.... all of that is used to tune the event.. when group players don't log in to beta test, or they log in and immediately go grab the raid beta fish and max AA they don't get an accurate picture of what's going on.
  7. ArtremasEQ Augur

    Having done this a bit more now, some other comments.

    1. You are totally at the mercy of the Shadowstep mechanic. If the wrong toon gets punted early, it is rez, rebuff time. I've lost 3 times today just because it punted the Tank a bazillion miles away. Yes I used Hate-Step to get back fast, but it had already turned and taken out the zerker who was also getting owned by the DS.

    2. Everything has to go perfectly. if a dps dies due to the punt/agro of a pop, you loose, if you can't burn it down quick enough, you will be overrun by adds.

    NOTE: If you dont' have the DPS to burn it down when it goes killable, you pretty much don't have the DPS to kill the chain of adds that spawn as you get deeper in.

    DPS required is approx 1.2 million, sustained over 100s accross several mobs, not all in exact same spot. (More in direct burn on named when it goes vulnerable)

    Still hits like a truck when discs where off. If the mission goes into more than 2 minutes, it gets harder and harder, with more dmg coming in, more adds up, spines flying around, and toons ported. I'm not sure if there is a limit to the number of adds that can pop, but it seems to me, to become impossible after that point, as you just get overwhelmed and don't have the dps to catch up, plus tank is getting massacred.

    The Cactus goes vulnerable when the first sprouting is killed, with burgeoning up still. If you can kill it in that window, approx 50 seconds for 80 mil HP, then win. Its a 90-100s fight all up that way. If not, life gets interesting.

    Note, I'm doing this with all melee, which I think is making it much harder. A guildmate does it with his boxed Power-nukers, and he finds it easier, as no time lost to chasing the succulent, it just explodes, then literally burns down Cactikkii.

    IMO, the mission can now be summarized as a DPS check, with built in RandomAutoFail chance, and biased for casters/range and against melee. If you have a strong caster group you can take then its fine. If you are pure melee, then its more of a struggle but doeable, just quite a bit hit / miss.

    For context, I'm speaking as Group of EOK T2/ROS T1 geared characters, Max AA, with some rares, (All weapons are rares/raid equiv) and one Raid geared Beastlord. SK, Zerk, Bst, Bard, Sham, Cleric.


    Regards Art/Hez.
    Ratbo Peep likes this.
  8. Tamaden Elder

    Group geared Boxer here.
    Wasn't able to box this before the raid tune up, cant even dream about winning SF mission, so VP locked forever for me. So what content do you spouse is there for me? Should i just pay DB for task adds? No options for regular player here that want to come home and enjoy quiet me time. BTW can you move progression to raid tab for achievements since that's who it's for. Game is just peace of ....
    Ratbo Peep likes this.
  9. Tamaden Elder

    And for idiots that cry that game is to easy for them. Put -50% of all stats rebuff on them dummies, but us regular folks asking for more content, not raid tuned group content.
    Xapy likes this.
  10. Stephen51 Augur

    I'd like to thank Absor for acknowledging this issue. That isn't something we see a lot of on these boards. Can I ask does this mean this mission will be in its current state for a month, until the next scheduled patch?

    Group missions are becoming more raid-like. They used to be separated into sections, and sure there were some tough parts, but once you had that part done, it was done. There was a balance, a fairness about them.

    Raids on the other hand, have always been more unforgiving, with less in the way of information given to begin with, mobs hit harder, failure, even to pay attention, is punished, but then you do have 54 people there. The trade-off for this steep learning curve, and miserable multiple deaths, is what is in the chest and what you unlock beyond.

    The OT mission, even before you changed it, was easy, if you had the right classes. As a Paladin, I was at a distinct disadvantage, but that's ok because my lack of dps was countered by my ability to tank multiple mobs, and offer more healing through it all. The problem with this as many of you will know is, healing power only keeps you alive, it doesn't increase your dps, and so you fall farther and farther behind in the mission, and you get more and more adds, and this mission, being unforgiving just like a raid, kills you. There are no mid-point restarts, its back to square one.

    Your missions are become irritating rather than entertaining (in my opinion). I just want to get them out of the way and never go back to them.
  11. Stephen51 Augur

    Apologies, I see now the mission has been altered by a hotfix, while I was offline (I didn't see the patch notes, on logging in).
  12. Tamaden Elder

    Can we have alternative version on impossible group missions? Let's say to kill 100s of mobs with NO chest or loots, just for stinking progression to get in to VP?
  13. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    My Thoughts for improvement

    1. Remove shadow step - with only 1 healer and tank this is a disaster if one of these gets ported. This puts the group behind killing adds if it is a DPS.
    2. Remove damage shield - melee would like to do this mission as well, or make it dispellable.
    3. Remove the manadrain - Healers and casters struggle enough without this.
    4. Remove the spawning of the sprouting without a Burgeoning up. Without a tracker it is hard to see if any of these have spawned, at least with a Burgeoning up you know there is one somewhere.
    5. Lengthen the time before the event power ups, preferably remove it completely. You don't want this event to be a burn DPS event over in 1 minute, it shouldn't bother you if it takes someone 20 minutes now it is taking them longer to kill all the adds, they shouldn't be punished for taking longer.
    6. Achievement Green Thumb should be completable - letting each of those sproutings spawn an add means the group needs more time to kill them before the next one spawns. See 4
    7. Achievement Brown Thumb - This is the achievement everyone in the guild is getting right now and the best way to do this mission.
    8. Achievement Atrocious - Need 5 of the same Cactus up (description doesn't make that clear, sounds more like one of each, though a set could be interpreted as all the same). I feel 5 is a bit high, bearing in mind you need to kill of all the other cacti in the cycle. I would suggest either
    a) reduce the number of cactus needed to create the atrocious, 3?
    b) change the number of different types of cactus
    c) once you have 2/3 cactus up the same the only cactus type that spawn are that type.
    d) every other cactus is the same. eg. Renegade, Pitiful, Surreal, Pitiful, Spiteful, Pitiful, etc.

    At the moment to get 5 cactus up the same you need to go through 4 & half cycles - Renegade, Pitiful, Surreal & Spiteful, not to mention dealing with the Burgeoning.

    Once you start getting close to 25 cacti adds your healer is out of mana your casters are out of mana and your melee dps is dead.
  14. Issk Journeyman


    UAT is good, not testing your changes bad
  15. feeltheburn Augur

    apparently your knob turning skills need honing my good sir, your took one version of making this a hard hot mess and created a new hot mess in tuning it in another negative manner. Might want to revisit your radio knobs and play with them just a bit more. Most here have stated whats wrong with it now, obscene shadow step, nary any time to dps the boss because of the attention needed to adds etc.
    Gyurika Godofwar likes this.
  16. Daedly Augur

    Would be interesting to see a mission that somehow compensates for the DPS being done. As in the more DPS a group is doing, the more damage the main mob does and less that is done, the lower the main mob damage output.

    Not sure how it could be done. Some kind of timed check points where depending on the health of the mob it either casts a buff to increase its strength or it debuffs itself.

    I imagine a debuff where a portion of the healing done to the target of the mob, aka the tank, is applied as damage to the mob. Then you could see a group of 1 tank and 5 clerics lol
    IblisTheMage likes this.
  17. Qbert Gallifreyan

    http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=35897 was the last one I remember, there might be more examples.
  18. Trotts Journeyman

    Looks to be impossible for a group geared group to me, we fought it for 5-10 minutes so the dmg output of the boss wasn't the issue but we just didn't have the dps. Group was War, Bard, Rog, Ench, Wiz, Cleric doing about 600-700k dps sustained but the sprouts and succulents just spawned too fast. We were killing the sprouts before they grew into succulents but the burgeoning succulents would spawn again by the time the sprouts were cleared. Eventually we just had the wizard evac us since we could never get Cactiikii's hp to unlock, noone died on any of the 4 attempts. Pretty disappointing, we're all mostly in RoS T1 or T2 gear.
    Corwyhn Lionheart likes this.
  19. Trotts Journeyman

    Just to add a bit more info here, pre-patch Cactiikii had around 33 million hp total, on our best attempt this morning we did 27 million dmg to him and got him to 70% while killing 15 adds.

    Sprouts - 3.8 mil hp (spawn every 30-45 seconds if a Burgeoning is up? I think?)
    Burgeoning - 11.6 mil hp (spawn every 45 seconds)
    Cactiikii - 100 mil hp (roughly)

    So you have to be able to do around 20 million dmg in 45 seconds just to keep up with the re-spawns alone, I think the above estimate of 1 million sustained dps is about right to do this event since your always going to lose dps due to travel time. Also we had sprouts spawning as far as 150 range away from the boss so we lost a lot of dps there also. All of the adds seem to be linked to the boss so I don't think dragging him around to avoid the sprouts is viable either.
  20. Rigneyy New Member

    Jesus ***** Christ can you guys test the mission or at least ask us to do so before you push your hot fix? This is a TIER 1 RoS group mission right? so a full group with RoS T2 and some EoK raid gear should have no problem doing this? Nope if you have melee in your group and no tracker your *****. Tank or healer get shadow stepped far away? GG your done. Keeping up a 1.2m dps burn going for what? 7-10min with group geared people and melee just being totally useless? what are we talking about here? This is not a raid encounter...this is starting to feel like you have hired someone that worked on WoW and expect that more encounter logic will work out fine. But what you have forgot is that lets say 90% of your player base use at least 1-2 boxed chars at all time and this game is OLD. Your scripts will fail and stuff will go wrong if you over complicate these stuff. If you want to put in an encounter like this to make people "better" and raising the "skill level" of your player base, Please do not put it in the first zone....