Something is still wonky with HA's

First off, it's not all HA's and it's not even all mobs in HA's, but there is a problem. I ran the Gribble mission, Disrupting the Ritual, the other day and it went fine, no problems. It was easy, and it should have been. I'm a 108 Monk, and had a 92 Shaman with me. The mission is capped at level 100 and everything was light blue, even the named at the end. This was as expected.

Immediately afterwards I ran the second Captain Cooper mission, Excavating an Answer. It started off similarly, with light blue mobs. Eventually I got to a point where I was attacking crates and fighting the mobs that would spawn one at a time. This also was fine, the mobs were as expected. But then I ran into two dark blue mobs, which were in my way and needed to be killed to move past them. They could not be mezzed or lulled, meaning I had to fight them at the same time. With a lot of extra clearing I could have made some more room and maybe FD split them, but that's not really the point.

These two mobs hit like trucks, way out of line for this HA which is capped at level 100. My merc is capped on AA's for AC increases. At 108 my healer merc can tank two blues pretty well, far better than I can. My merc was dead in seconds, literally no chance. I didn't have logging on to see what the mobs were hitting for, but they were dropping me and the merc very quickly. I ended up having to bail on the mission. If I could have gotten them separately then maybe I could have proceeded, but it's no guarantee. These mobs hit like the spiders in Lceanium. And this is considering that my Vital Conflagrant Belt procced on both and they still destroyed us.

Now I know the Captain Cooper missions are harder than the other Dead Hills HA's. I ran the first one before any of the HA changes and it was hard but doable. This is another level of hard, probably related to the original HA changes that altered the templates the mobs use. These two specific mobs are off the charts compared to the rest of the HA.

I'm sure this is similar to the problem people have seen with named mobs in HA's after they changed. I would expect a named fight to be harder, but these weren't named, and they were blue. Something is still wrong here and I'd appreciate it if a dev could take a look.

I recently did all of the captain HAs along with all of the bixie and neriak ones and did not encounter anything that I thought could kill me. I am also 108 so the turning should be the same. The only thing is there are different versions of several HAs in terms of what mobs spawn which could explain things.

I don't think you've provided enough info for anybody to follow up on, let alone to be worth a dev's time. No names given for the dark blues that gave you trouble, or even what step of the HA you were on. Cooper HA mobs have an annoying tendency to buff up, which can have an impact, like damage shields versus a melee group. They also hit harder than the other DH HA mobs, but still have low health (compared to 105 and 110 mobs), so you should be able to blow them up after dispelling them.

If you run into this again and want somebody else to verify you, you'll need to provide more data: HA, step, mob name and model, location, hit numbers. It has to be reproduceable.

For reference, after you run past the scaffolding, the path takes a left turn, and that is where the crates start showing up. The two mobs were on the left side wall, just after that left turn. It's possible they aren't always there. It's also possible that a tank with a cleric merc might not have as much of a problem with them.

I've just never seen anything in CotF tear through my merc healer like that. I'm still not sure I could tank one by myself if I got it solo. And that's considering that I can tank FM Goblins all day long with the merc on balanced.

That's a little harsh, but I get that you are trying to help. The thing is that for an HA level capped at 100, there shouldn't be any non-named mobs that are dark blue at 108. These were the only two I saw in this mission or any other CotF HA I've run recently. So I think the problem starts there, why are there dark blue (non-named) mobs showing up in this mission at all?

It's actually very easy to reproduce ... because it's not a bug. ALL heroic adventures from that expansion, as well as the broken mirror, scale poorly relative to player level. The only reason this isn't a bigger deal is because people of that level aren't doing them any more, after the experience changes, and the only interaction most people have with heroic adventures now is running their low level characters through using their level 110, which is always going to be easy.

It's a fact that heroic adventures are much more difficult, in general, than content from the same level range in the open zones. The difficulty scale is around Underfoot level, in case you want a comparison. Once I get the time, I will do a few comparisons to illustrate this.

This is, unfortunately, not true. There are a few CotF HAs that have red con non-named mobs. Excavating an answer is one of them. In the step after destroying the wall, there are 3 possible tasks. One involves killing 14 or so red and yellow con mobs. Another involves killing 4 red con commanders that spawn health-based adds. The third possibility involves crates. I don't remember if there are red cons that spawn which are not part of that step, but I think it would be possible to invis past them, if you have ivu.

Since the HAs cap at level 100 now, a mob which is yellow at the cap can be up to level 103. A red con must be at least level 104. I think both of those would con dark blue at level 108.

Something which may help with Excavating an Answer is that it's possible to open the crates, which means it's not necessary to deal with the mobs that spawn while damaging the crate. You'll need to disarm the trap first (priests and int casters get spells for this that requires a greater scrying stone). Then you'll need to unlock the crate and open it with /open.

That explains it then. I was on the crate step, and the mobs that spawned from attacking it were light-blue, but there were some on the path that were dark-blue. I could invis past them but had no room to pull mobs past them to clear further into the mission or fight the mobs from the latter crates.

It's good to know it's the mission and not the HA scaling, as you are right about the levels the mobs would be with the 100 cap. I still think they hit quite hard for their level, but that's just the nature of HA's since the initial change earlier this year that caused all the issues.

Been trying to work on CotF progression in my downtime and it was frustrating to get stuck even after adding a boxed Shaman. But I can just get more help for this one, and probably the third Cooper mission also. Thanks for clearing this up.

I successfully moloed "excavating an answer" the other day as a level 110 wizard(EoK-raidgeared+). I didn't encounter anything other than lightblue mobs, but maybe I was just lucky to get the easiest steps in this.
Some of the lightblue mobs(spawned from nuking crates, "guardians"-something) did occasionally hit me for 13k+ (had shield of consequence up, so not sure how hard they really were hitting). Forgot about that ldon-remove trap spell!

It was significantly harder than the other deadhills HA's, I actually had to evac once!


Had a darkblue named in the deadhills-ha "death peace", forgot the name...

A few HAs are still out of whack mainly TBM HAs and are harder now at level 108 than they were when they were released at 105.

Enraged Guardian of Sul is hitting for 57K.

I agree with Yinla. A new level 105 player thinking they will do some lvl 105 TBM HA content is in for a shock. At least you can level up and do them at 108 but why? TBM is level 105 content.

We had a thread about the HA re-tune that was 50 pages long but it was never explained, far as I know, why they did a re-tune to begin with.

The problem before the re-tune was that low-level groups who invited a single high-level, would be severely penalized, because of the up scaling. Upscaled HA's were almost at RoS difficulty levels if I understand correctly.
It meant you had to be very selective with group-levels, if you wanted to have a shot at completing HA's, going against the spirit of of mixed-level groups.
It also made it much harder to molo in older HA-centric expansions.

When RoS went live, lots of players leveled to 110 in CotF HAs before even stepping foot into the new zones. Devs were not amused.

RoS has is a horrible expansion. The fact that some people step foot in the expansion, outside raid requirements, amazes me..

As your negative attitude is widely known, nobody gives a darn sht about your opinion.

And no one gives a poop about a large green troll.

Yes, and this was fixed, in that now you can power through them using high level characters.

But what wasn't fixed is the difficulty at lower levels. When they changed it so that they were no longer the best option for fast levels, they forgot that many lower level people depend on them for developing their characters, and wouldn't be equipped to handle monsters designed for people who were already wearing the best for their level.

They should have just made a single change - to the experience you got from running them - and left it. Instead, the difficulty was raised across all levels and the whole idea of making them for 2 to 3 people with their mercenaries was thrown out the window. The rare monsters, especially, are significantly out of balance, such that level 85 rare monsters that should be hitting around House of Thule level rare monsters, are hitting so hard they might as well be Veil of Alaris rare monsters. Mercenary tanks are so weak even at level 80 that they die in two hits to these monsters, and even player tanks won't survive long.

You are absolutely right that they aren't tuned properly for low-level groups, and I hope they fix that soon.
I guess the best we can do is to post info about wrongly tuned mobs, in the patch bug thread.
Is the problem that they hit too hard with normal attacks? or are they using too powerful special attacks/spells?

It has been ages since I have done a HA without a max level in the group, so I can't provide useful info.

I could agree to

if it wasn't for that

I leveled sk/nec in CotF/TBM HAs from 75 to 94 after the change because I was curious. This was just about the same as it was before the change. Killing the (optional) named requires some effort, though.

We have had 3 re-tunes on this, one which made it much harder presumable because HAs were too easy at level 110. The second caped them at the the level in which they were introduced (CotF Max 100, TDS, TBM & EoK max 105) the third was to reduce the dps of some of the rares and the dot frequency on one of the TBM missions.

The problem is they never returned the 105 HAs to the difficulty they were before and are still harder than they were when they were introduced, lower level HAs have never scaled properly (names hitting the same for level 100/105 instead of level 75 - 95). Mobs in some of the HAs hit harder these days than the open zones they are equivalent to where as before they hit for less so could be done with less players. The worst seems to be TBM HAs.