ToFS Raid 1 Difficulty / Mechanics concerns

Gave this one another shot last night. It was tons of "fun" spending the first 3-5 minutes of the event with 0 (ZERO) Restless mobs in the rooms, only non-restless mobs.

While it is winnable it's very much a crap shoot.
I hope the raid gets more refined.

Apparently there are changes to this raid that aren't in the notes. They can be seen running the patcher and reading the file there. eqnews.txt

Yep and the changes look promising

- Heart of Frozen Shadow - Made the following changes to this raid:
- - Removed the per-type kill limitation. Now killing a restless ice NPC will always reduce the Heart of Frozen Shadow's health.
- - Killing a restless ice drolvarg will deal 3% damage to the Heart of Frozen Shadow's health, up from 2%.
- - Reduced the health of the restless ice skeletons and restless ice drolvargs. Increased the health of the restless ice specters.
- - Reduced the melee damage done by the non-restless ice skeletons and non-restless ice drolvargs.
- - Drolvargs and skeletons are rogues instead of warriors now and therefore will no longer shield each other.
- - Non-restless ice drolvargs and non-restless ice skeletons will no longer take damage from damage shields.
- - Non-restless NPCs will now depop much more quickly. Note that the drolvargs and skeletons must be aggro to have a chance to depop.
- - Initial spawns are guaranteed not to be in the same room. Further spawns will rotate between different types of NPCs and on alternating east and west sides of the floor.
- - Drolvargs and skeletons will no longer spawn two at a time.
- - The check to see if more NPCs should spawn will occur more frequently.
- - It's no longer possible for two drolvargs / skeletons to spawn on the same spot.
- - It's more likely that spawned specters will be restless.

I was literally pasting that LIaneb ...

I think the biggest issue with this raid is that this many patches in, the raid has 12 bullet points of changes.

Look forward to trying the changes on the next cycle.

Thank you for listening to the audience in this thread developers.

That's what happens when the raid is beta tested with some guild that requires jt_buff to be able to do anything.

Got the wheelchair treatment....

They should actually make Tserina a challenge to offset this one getting so much easier.

You mean adding spell reflect to the final phase wasn't a challenging and engaging mechanic?

You got me, that extra minute she lives was totally challenging! /sigh

What gets me about some of these raids, there are some real cool and challenging mechanics they could have used, but didn't.

Did this event last night, still has some issues. Your spawning script needs work. For most of the fight, we had 4-5 restless spectres up at all times and nothing in halls to kill. You say it should be rotating between different mob types, but its not. At least not for us.

I don't think having half the raid in halls with nothing to do was your intent.

People cannot range spectres from the halls? TIL.

I'm was hoping to hit this bad RNG one day. 4 (?) weeks without it and now we'll never have it I suppose. We did experience lots of spectres at once this past Monday, but we had no issue with that. It was actually our cleanest run and we had something like 5 minutes left before enrage.

With the latest changes, this event is just going to get rolled over. I don't see many people needing more than 12 minutes max to finish this event now. To think we went from epic raiding clears and events lasting hours to people complaining so much about a 20 minute event and its arbitrary enrage timer that it can now be completed in 10 minutes. Sad times.

I actually enjoyed this event. It was somewhat challenging for a tank getting multiples in a room. Now it's going to be a joke.

Sure people can range spectres from halls, but when you have a melee heavy raid force you can't effectively. Additionally, we shouldn't have to do that if Darkpaw would just implement changes correctly. Or hell, just implement incremental changes instead of making mass changes in every direction.

Has there ever been any comment by the Dev's on the design intent behind enrage timers? By that I mean, why do they want it to get harder after a raid has been active for a preset time?

Unless it was changed after Beta - no, you actually cannot. If you cast spells on them from the halls, you do no damage and get a very specific message. And shooting/throwing stuff at them is a waste of time because they have a mitigation buff against that.

It was change after beta a number of time. This event is change every patch it feels like. Spells do land on them from the hall. I dot them up before running to the next hall. You just have to have the debuff on you to be able to cast on them.

We always get a message about cold interfering with our spells and they do no damage, I can nuke from one room to another room the other side of the hall

When RoV tested it the event had many issues and script errors that were corrected. We didn't have a Dev buff or Dev assistance. Just like every beta after 2~3 hours of script changes repops and attempts the dev wants to move on to see if the the end of event script/other event they are working on is functional. We aren't really testing at the end with the dev insta killing mobs to complete the script to move on and check the next event. The dev takes notes make changes and if they never test it again i don't see why you are blaming us or any guild that tests.

We don't try to get the Dev to move on asap so we can get as much info as possible on multiple events. In the past that might have been key for some guilds to get a jump in content. If it never gets a second test wave or we are the second test wave and it is broken/needs lots of fixes that is not on us. We have told them before that events were too easy for nothing to be done. We have also said events were tuned hard or 'too much at once' for nothing to be done until well after launch. We rarely get to see a finalized event AND the final NPC Damage and HP until design lock if at all.

When we did ToFS 1 without a dev at the end of beta it was winnable but not a free chest spawning 15~20 min after event start. I am not sure how that is the testers fault.

Here's the message being referenced:

Still see this and it even triggers for any spells that trigger on a debuff or dot fading if the caster has moved into a hallway before it triggers.