Temple of Veeshan: Dreadscale's Maw feedback

I completely agree with this. When rangers are so good at the moment and have no way to make their attacks heat damage you rely on the mages to damage the ice that much more and it really does force you to run less summoners and more sorcerers. Especially a big problem for necromancers because at least Conjurors have elemental blast that does substantial damage.

The majority of spells that do not work on the Ice Blocks are spells that require you to be in combat with your adversary. These Ice Blocks do not fight back and thus you are technically not in combat with them. We are looking at ways to possibly avoid this requirement on certain targets but it isn't something that is a quick fix.

First of all, I have to say that overall the zone was really really well done. I think the itemization will be mostly fixed with a few balancing tweaks and on top of that, any bugs that carried over (or were unforeseen) were addressed pretty rapidly.

The tasks and challenges were direct. Some people complain that the zone has been cleared already. I guess the only way to make the zone last longer is to slow down patches and make mobs impossible to kill like in the Drunder era. Apart from that, really... I guess you could make the scripts a lot more cryptic so it is very difficult to figure out what the mob is doing. But I don't think the "lets spend 4 hours doing 2 minute pulls" is a popular raid style. I guess this mini-rant is mostly to say... if the content is running smooth and the guild is strong, it won't be a painful arduous grind trying to sneak by a broken encounter.

Breaking down my impression of the fights...

1) Gatekeeper: Solid fight.

Rewards good group balancing, rewards having strong "weakest links" in a raid force (aka a raid made up by tons of amazing players and a decent chunk of below average ones may struggle during the first phase of the fight)

2) Lady Mirenilla:

Overall, this fight poses a nice challenge, especially for guilds that like to run light on healers. I think that dealing with the adds is a fun challenge overall, and I appreciate that there are multiple paths to victory on the fight. I do think one thing that would've made the fight more fun, is if somewhere somehow there had existed a tinkered optional charm that gave you a temp buff of like +50 swimming that could be used to mitigate the damage a little. One of those cases where if there was a "long forgotten, never used" item, it would've actually been kind of cool. Not that you can retroactively add one in the past.

3) Lord Feshlak:

I actually liked both versions of this fight. Prepatch was a fun game of getting everyone stacked, postpatch was a fun game of the opposite. I think some minor line of sight issues caused by the surface were the only complaint on this one. Of course our ranger was streaming and fell down the hole. Was pretty fun.

4) Lord Kreizenn:

I'm not sure this one ended up working out as intended. The fight ended up probably being easier than intended. For most guilds, it seems to end up being easier killing all the adds than being selective. However, I don't think killing the wrong adds was intended to be a "guaranteed fail" so I'm not sure what you could do about that other than perhaps add a minor detriment on the raid every time an "incorrect" add died. Even that would probably be a pain to program and test to ensure it only ever applied at the correct times and magnitude.

5) Irdul of the Glacier

Not sure why there is much controversy with this one. Perhaps the sorcerer(s) in the other lineups aren't properly managing their bursts? For me, this fight was not a test of my overall dps output (although I'm still going to try to win every parse I'm on) and more of a test of my ability to spike at the right time. (which of course, carries over into the next fight as well) - I found that a single well coordinated mage group could take down the ice cube. In our fights, I am typically well over 50% of the total incoming damage on the icecube, and we're not "cutting it close". We do pull off some extra help at the end just to ensure nothing goes wrong. A couple of minor suggestions... a) Make the optional charm usable even by the frozen person. While it didn't affect us, if on their first time through the zone, a guild assigned the item to a non tank/healer, they'd end up wiping if that person was imprisoned. b) perhaps have a Djinn Master-like item that can be maintained on one player that makes them "freeze proof". This second idea is just due to the reality that since certain T1 classes do better than others on this fight, having the wrong person imprisoned could be a death sentence for certain guilds.

6) Telkorenar

I enjoy this fight quite a bit. I think it is a great way to push dps players to maximize their burst, even more so than Irdul. If there was one thing I'd change, I'd make it so the same person couldn't get selected back-to-back. While it isn't a problem for me, if a beastlord was called out back-to-back I can see the fight becoming exponentially more difficult. The risk of being selected back-to-back forces some T1's into debating between burning all their temps, or saving half of them just in case, which I feel is an element that is a little less fun.

7) Vulak'Aerr the Dreadscale

I think this fight has so much going right for it. It is a lot of fun, provides a cluster of scripts to juggle and forces a bit of raid/group optimization to make victory possible. I'll provide a bit more feedback once more guilds have killed it. Overall I think the difficulty is toned just right, but I think a couple minor changes would improve the overall functionality.

One final idea for the zone as a whole: I like the idea of first-pull bonus loot. However, with the time that a raid has to spend in the zone, I feel like a few minor tweaks to the concept would be wise. The way the loot in the zone works, I think the mob should automatically award all items upon kill, but on first kill the mob would essentially award double loot... two purple gems, two jewelry pieces, etc. I think this would make "first kill" feel more like a bonus instead of a requirement. In addition, you could add in something of the sort where a flawless kill adds a Prismatic Gem to the loot table, regardless of the mob. Doing this could help prevent the "frustration factor" - Once the purple gems have been farmed, first kill loot becomes the "only loot desired" from a mob. If first kill loot was simply "double loot", then the mobs will retain their value for longer. Otherwise, I could see in the future, a guild wiping on their first pull of a mob they wanted only bonus loot from, and then deciding not to bother after the wipe.

Problem is first kill loot so far has been less than desirable.

Exarch Lorokai items and the changes they went through are a good example of what needs to happen with loot in Wing 3.
Exarch loot was far from desirable by any class unless you were wearing a legendary or wanted to get it for un-geared alts. He was there as basically a "checkmark" like some people have opinionated, you kill him once and never got there again. Same thing happened with Fabled Mutagenic Outcast and Fabled Three Princes. Their loot was OK for some people, but it required people already geared from Wing 1 and Wing 2 loot to be able to do succesfully and the rewards were less effective than Wing 1 and 2 loot.

With the patch that upgraded Lorokai's items, now he's far more desirable to kill. I personally been trying to get back in there and kill him again, but the guild has been focusing mainly on Wing 3 first.

I'm hoping to see a pass on Wing 3 loot, just like what happened to Lorokai's loot table.

It was stated by the Dev's themselves that Wing 3 should stand the test of time and be a raid zone to be done consistently even in future expansions, kind of like Siren's Grotto or even PoW. With the current loot tables, I don't even see my guild going back in there even after the new expansion comes out. Every single piece of loot (gems unaccounted for) that drops from the zone has the same basic white stats as Wing 1 and Wing 3 loot, the only thing that gets SLIGHTLY upgraded is the yellow stats and the procs.

Here's to hoping that this whole zone's loot table gets looked at. I was really excited when it was first released, but after seeing more of it's loot table i'm very unimpressed.

First kill loot as currently implemented is absolutely horrible design. It should be more loot, not different loot. Being different loot means if something bad happens it's no longer worth raiding. That's beyond silly, and it will absolutely push people to quit once they realize how annoying it is to try to get better gear.

Not to mention the whole itemization scheme is going to implode completely. The gem mechanic is atrocious, I've been saying it all along. It's even worse now. So you want to do wing 3 for Jewelery and to upgrade your armor, but you have to do wing 1/2 for the basic sole purpose of gems and getting the armor in the first place (because trash isn't going to be remotely consistent enough, especially giving the specific piece. So you made a zone that you do for upgrades, that forces you to go to a zone that SHOULD (I say should, because the gear is terrible) have worse gear.

Forced content running is all this game is about.

Exarch Lorokai gear is still undesirable and the first pull/kill loot in Maw is not enough incentive and it creates a problem for raiders who want to use their time effectively and efficiently. Both Exarch Lorokai and Maw are similar in the way that once you clear them a majority of the players will lose interest very quickly due to the first pull/kill mechanic and the poor quality of the loot. Is some of the loot OK? Sure. Is any of it worth going back every time the zone is reset able? Not much.

There is the excitement of clearing new content but that's a one time deal. After that we need incentive that's worth the time and effort.

So many guilds falling apart lately, I wonder why? This zone needs to have its itemization addressed sooner rather than later...

I personally don't care if my guild doesn't go in wing 3 for like a week or two and just does stuff like wings 1 and 2 or something. cause there is almost nothing I really want in wing 3 it's that depressing.

I actually do enjoy most of the fights too, just the loot...

Gatekeeper is fun if you're in one of the 2 groups that are by themselves, the top 2 groups is a bit boring. If it was possible for a mob to get cancer and fall down a large set of stairs and die while also deleting itself from the game I would not complain if this happened to Lady M, seriously, that fight sucks. 3rd guy I like. 4th guy is fun, though I feel like burning both sets of adds every time was not intended to work, but I don't really care, fun parse fight. Irdul is okay despite melee being mostly useless, the loot just made me want to log out and never come back though. From what I've seen of the 6th fight it seems decent enough, but we only got a few pulls in before end the other day so I can't say too much about it.

the 4th name is clearly still broken.
it doesn't seem to matter which set of adds you kill, or how many adds you kill. you will always get hit with about the same damage. excluding the random spike damage that 1-2 people get from having their resists randomly drop

loot ... very upsetting if you have not left ideas that better adapt to the effects of things eg TSO additions, well, you think that the raid zone is normal loot, and indeed it is garbage ...

http://u.eq2wire.com/item/index/3425271290

Yeah, another disappointing item that's just gonna get mostly Transmuted. =\

The part that appears to be failing is the failure condition for the adds is only killing 1 or 2 people when it fails. I will be taking a look at it this week.

Yeah bring back difficult zones like Drunder era at least that gave people some sense of accomplishment when they actually killed stuff rather than progression being all about what guild got lucky that the patch to broken mobs lined up with their raid schedule the best. Wing 2 was just as annoying with stupid patch kills to broken ****. The fact this zone got cleared over a weekend and the patch was made on a Friday is a joke, even more of a joke is that the broken clickies didn't get patched for a week after they were broken "fixed", which also screwed guilds out of being able to even go back to their instance for an entire week.

Why are people leaving the game in droves atm? Because you get zero sense of accomplishment from killing this stuff and now that we know L100 cap is coming there's even less incentive.

Edit: I will add that I like the encounter designs overall, I just think they are way too easy as they stand.

what zone and such awards .. very strange to sit for weeks on such bosses to get a reward such a disappointment ...
And so did the heroic zone raid x4))) And so previously announced, especially the awards for which the next few additions players were praying, and eventually got the area for a week (due to bugs) and that no award

Drunder was all patch kills, nearly every fight. The patches just came much slower since it was over the holidays. What it did have going for it was the power increase from DoV to Drunder (if you were a fighter or scout since mage/priest loot literally didn't exist) to Skyshrine to PoW. Our power is increasing very slowly atm while we do all of wings 1 and 2 for a handful of needed drops, and wing 3 for . . . I dunno, gems? First pull bonus items are the only items we would actually use from most of those mobs, plus the 1 gem per week. The other reason Drunder felt like it was better progression is that they dumped way too many new (and broken) raids on us before we could work through all of them. Wing 3 came out after we had all cleared wing 2 and had a good amount of the gear from it. Wing 3 is balanced around having the gear from wing 2, therefore the only challenge was learning the fights, not learning the fights and gearing up at the same time. If Wing 3 was released with AS and wings 1 and 2, it would have taken much longer to clear as we would have to gear up first, plus it likely would have been much more broken. Expect that to be the way of things going forward as releasing 34 mobs at the same time (AS and ToV wings 1-3), and have them all 100% working and balanced, is completely unrealistic.

Zones with 7 day timers really need to drop 2-3 items per slot instead of 1, so it's actually somewhat realistic to gear a raidforce out before it's obsolete. It'll take ~30 weeks to gear out our raid with these gems alone which puts us well into the expansion which will obsolete them, and probably have revamped loot in that zone anyway to keep it relevant. First pull bonus loot really should have just been an extra gem and jewelry drop from the same loot table. It needs to be extra loot for executing the fights well, not better loot, and therefore the only loot people want. Also, Irdul dropping gems and nothing else makes for the saddest chests ever, especially for the amount of effort that goes into that fight. The prismatic gems would have been a good bonus loot item also. Gems are small upgrades that would work well as bonus loot. Good actual items should drop no matter what.

+1. Not just for Wing 3, but for all raid zones this expac that ended up with 7 day timers.

Although I suspect this is the idea of Fabled DT being on an 18 hour reset, that plenty to farm in there between times. (Yay?)

yes, we clearly figured out that when they say a raid zone will be relevant for a long time, they meant we would have to farm it for forever to get geared. not because it was actually gonna take a long time...

Not really since a large proportion of people currently clearing wing 3 are in mainly energised or heroic obtained gear with a dabble of stuff from ToV wings 1 and 2. Only thing you need is the green adorn, even then once Gatekeeper's dead you don't really need that anymore, just need people that can press buttons at the right time and can follow scripts, (although that's getting harder to find these days).

And yeah patchkills suck, but patchkills for a few overtuned mobs here and there are far better than a patchkill to a broken mob that gates the entire zone to a roflstomp imho. Personally I was looking forward to a difficult zone with decent loot.

Rings are prolly BIS from last mob in zone, Still not seen AoM loot yet.