First off, I want to start off with the good stuff. This zone is amazing, both in terms of aesthetic value and in fun fights. I kinda look forward to redoing and playing through this instance several times. Anyways, with that done, on to the nitty gritty. Our group was an inquisitor (me), guardian, necro, necro, troub, coercer. We cleared all up to ogre. 1) The first room is a constant wipe waiting to happen. The epic x4s were awesome for wow factor, but should be kept untargettable (like at the dock) or have something which prevents random group wipes from happening. We had two necros and the swarm pets would often times accidentally run over, hit the x4 and bam, wipe. Again, making a warning like with the dock NPC would go a long way in making this room alot less "Lawl pwned" 2) I'd probably be willing to bet that the first boss could be soloed by a necro, on a long enough timeline. That being said, the gimmick serves to make the boss more annoying then much else. Now, I'm not asking to make it nuke like a truck or anything, but perhaps making it so that she only ports every 10 or 25%, then making something happen in the port (like everyone gets suctioned to her and gets that frost of rime debuff for the slow). Beyond that, she's free loot. 3) This is more a personal gripe then anything else, but this zone has massive amounts of mobs and all of them deep orange. I don't think there's absolutely any need for the ridiculous amount of auto attack present in this zone, as the overlaying cones cause it so that their effective aoe attack becomes "Anywhere near the tank." We had situations where the tank turned while getting in position or the troub just happened to be meleeing when splat, dead squishy/troub. More than likely, this is a gear issue, but geez, it bears mentioning that it's bad here more than anywhere else. 4) Counter agents for the mission would probably be better off on track or have the arena one pop out at the first door. We almost walked right by it. Even stealthed/invis would be a great upgrade 5) Not sure why the dockmaster was a named. If he had any sort of mechanic or ability, he didn't use it. Tank and spank that was probably less threatening then the Armor boss from TOFS 2. The event on the docks to make the dockmaster active was awesome, as was the warning to stay away from the ettin. The dwarf was the wonderful cherry on the top for that scene. Something this strong or this interesting would be good to see in the first room (With the epics being unattackable but a warning to stay away and a dwarf telling you to go to the side). 6) Bug with the arena door: If you wipe with the bookie, running back with the rime illusion on makes the door unable to be opened. Cancelling the illusion and reapplying it makes it work just fine. Also, the Shardhammer illusion from RoK says it works in the zone, but no such thing is possible (it says there's no rime in the zone). On a side note, why is the guard outside still aggro to you when you throw the illusion on? Nitpicking here more than anything, I know it's for flavor. 7) The arena fight is ungodly annoying, but not entirely for the obvious reasons. I like how the bookie doesn't need to be tanked by anything at all due to his daze, and I like his balancing book nuke. On our first attempt, we realized that the fighter add one shots everyone if they're close, so we pulled the bookie up and to the corner opposite the entrance. When the bookie hit 75%, the fighter became attackable...and stood there. We burned the bookie down, he got up, etc, figured it was part of the encounter. We then engaged the fighter, burned him down, burned the bookie down, verdict took care of the rest. Suggestion: Give each a buff that makes it clear that you have to kill them at the same time, call it tag team or bound by Rime or something, but just make it clear that they either flip out when near each other and/or they need to be killed at the same time. Beyond that, they have WAY too much HP and the regen is another little bit of an unpleasant part of the fight. Again, may be a gearing issue, but our guardian tanked the fighter easily and the DPS was steady. 8) Elevator gets a little glitchy, the lever flips out graphically and sometimes the lift will come down and immediately back up without stopping. 9) Rime Officer (what I'm guessing is the key mob) popped on track and vanished almost immediately after. Couldn't pick it back up again, but no clue where this bugger is. 10) Storm Ettin: Alright, just for a point of reference, with divine guidance and all of my buffs running, our guardian had something in the realm of 46k HP and 130-150 crit mit or something high like that. Through both my group reactives, divine guidance, chilling invigoration, holy armor, AND my emergency reactives he was getting -destroyed-. I realize this is supposed to be one of the end dungeons, and this may be completely a gear thing, but that amount of damage is something ludicrous. It was a giant combination of engulfiing maw, rumbling strike spam (which hits me for 30k and puts me at 1% HP or unconscious if I'm close), and good old fashioned melee on the boss, but this guy just does not seem like he belongs in this instance. What we ultimately ended up doing was pulling him, the guardian getting liquefied, and the four mobs suddenly getting into a slap fight with each other. We waited something like 20 minutes, watched the last worm die, fought him, then simply could not DPS him down. We'd go from 100-98/97, he'd port to the pedestal, aoe auto attack everyone near it, heal to full, and generally one or two people would be dead. We'd hit the buttons preemptively, immediately when he ported, all that, but it'd still cause him to go "lol no" and one shot someone. Admittedly, our of our DPS had left at this time, but it must've been something like 10-20 seconds between ports. This is most definitely a gear check boss and the gear requirements are astronomical compared to the rest of the zone. Beyond that, fun instance though. We got two brawler drops despite not having a brawler ;_;
1st room epics encounter...not a big deal, keep it the way it is. We figured out what to do. We had no problems fighting the tough orange mobs. We expected the room to be hard since it was 3rd in the series, and with T2 raid gear mixed in with some DoV crit chance, it was dangerous but doable. The bookie, however, has waaay too many hp. Trying to burn down a mob for over 6 minutes with 100K group dps is nuts (this is not a raid), and having to do it 4x times because we were trying to figure out the encounter (and having one thing go wrong at the last 1%) is draining. We liked the boss mentioned in #2 above the way it is. Once you know what to do to keep from being nuked (hint: don't be a dead weight), it was fun. We were unable to go further due to time constraints.
The bookie is ridiculously vague, and I'm less than thrilled with the spammy red text that comes along with it.
Part of my gripe with AoE auto attack isn't just that it's prevalent, it's more that positioning in this zone is a colossal nightmare and change. Having both crit mit and plate, I could easily melee a mob, but often times ended up taking near constant damage despite being completely behind two or three mobs simply due to the obnoxious arc involved on top of the numbers (Two mobs with pets, three mobs normal as an example). Having, say, the magi lose AoE auto attack wouldn't impact the difficulty of the zone, but would very much help positioning and generally stop "Whoops, you're dead" moments when a scout gets gibbed by five or six auto attacks all suddenly overlapping through nobody's fault. I will admit this could all potentially be a gear thing, so moving on. The epics -are- avoidable, but I know for a fact that whenever we fought the boss up top, I would randomly get one shot for no good reason whatsoever. I wasn't aoeing nor was I falling down, but time and time again I'd just get splattered for no good reason. All of those times, an awaken grave mob/necro swarm pet would also get gibbed as well as me, but over the entire fight it happened a total of like four or five times. The only constants were that I would get gibbed (the healer) and a swarm pet would always die. I'll see how it feels through another run to see if anything happens again. The huge nuke is probably broken or nonexistant though, since it was a ridiculously easy, if not annoying, fight. The bookie fight is really, really, REALLY easy once you figure the strat out, arguably easier then the Dockmaster. There's nothing wrong with this at all, but the functionality or at least making it obvious wtf's going on would go a long way with making this fight much less agonizing. Honestly though, this boss will be free loot once everyone knows what to do.
The current list of things we will be looking at with regards to this zone are: 1 - The Dockmaster fight is not firing his script at all. 2 - Messaging on bookie fight (not tweaking toughness) 3 - Bouont Crushingfist is healing a bit too much and a bit too often. Timing needs tweaked and I will take a look and make sure his buffs aren't out of whack with rest of zone.
We made the zone yesterday but we had a huge problem with the "bookie" ... we talked to the gnome (?) and we have done the "sleeping poweder" into the jug of the x4. After that nothing happens ... no one was aggro ... we talked to Abelbrow but he don't wanted to accept our wager. So we were not able to trigger any mob in this part of the zone. We looked for several minutes if there is anything to "klick" ... anyone to talk to ... nothing. Did we made anything wrong there?
Kilnger wrote: I have to agree that the guy in the control room seems far out of tune with the rest of the zone. If you can't lock down the minions with a chanter, you pretty much stand no chance in progression appropriate gear. And the change to autoattack range this expansion and the memwipe makes positioning an absolute nightmare, with it being nearly impossible to melee without being in someone's aoe autoattack, which hits pretty crazy hard.
Yunay@Innovation wrote: This happened to my group too, spiked the drink and hailed the bookie and the only option we had to click on after saying we wanted to wager a plat was, "I have no interest in giving away my platinum".
Killed the guy in the control room twice now, in two completely different setups. 1. Warden(me) templar guardian bruiser illusionst dirge, it was a very long 50 minute fight, and there were some iffy moments, but we were lacking dps, how we did it was i'd pull with encounter root, tank picks up named, enchanter locks down two adds, i cancel root, we kill adds one by one. Then the storm thing was interesting but we got it sorted after a while, our illusionist still got random one shots on him throughout the fight, but he was on the oposite side of the pillar with the templar so i didn't see what was happening, his healing is fine, it's 1% according to the buff he gets, so without making it so it can't crit, or increasing time between heals, i dont see what you can do to make it easier (you get 5 seconds to click the buttons, this is fine). 2.Warden bruiser dirge coercer ranger necro. Considering the trouble i had healing the guardian, i was amazed that we had success here, but the people in the group did really well for a PuG, the only person i knew was the dirge, everyone else i'd picked up randoms. Few iffy moments where people died, and because it was the first time the tank had ever pulled the mob, positioning was a pain, but again, we got there in the end and it was only a 25 minute fight this time woot! The adds and the named just have a ton of health is all. The contraband quest is causing adds to continually spawn on us, little solo mobs which aren't difficult, but they are a pain in the rear, especially since you can't hand in that quest at the moment. We noticed the same thing with the door and the illusion having to be canceled and re-applied. With the elevator, the problem you are probably seeing is more than 1 person clicking it, it's like the WoE elevator, just communicate with the group and tell them to not touch it. The first named teleports alot if you're low on dps, since i guess it's a timed thing rather than % based, also it becomes attackable on it's seocnd or third to last port, which gets confusing when you head towards it and then it ports again. As long as people stay off the other 3 bars, they wont die, so it's a fairly easy fight. For those that couldn't find it, the key mob is in the first room, you have to click it to activate it, i loved the right click option On the last named, that curse is utterly brutal man, i was trying to communicate to my group to interupt it, but he casts it while the water is going off and so he'll tend to get a few off during the fight and there is no way to keep your power up against the drain once it's been on for 20-30 seconds, even with a coercer and spamming heals as a warden to proc my myth buff, i easily hit 0%, and then boom, headshot. In the end, it's a dps race to try and kill him before too many curses stack up for too long. As far as loot goes, the only really disappointing one is the guy in the control room, both times after that monumental fight to kill him, it's been meh, greed for both items, atleast the last guy drops a chestpiece. Though we did get a master off him both times, masters aren't exactly awesome loot these days, been along time since i've seen one that someone has hit need on. Might be nice to get something else off of him, those crafting components for example, or similar to ferzhul, a shard.
Since there is a dev posting in this thread I figure this may be a good place for this comment. I "think" the reason why the X4 version of this zone is having bugged doors leading up to the third encounter is that the Rime illusion mechanic is activating in the X4 version. We have had our instance of Kraytoc's X4 bug out after just a couple pulls on Kreegar multiple times. Each time the doors were locked with no way to open them. We have since started camping an alt healer in the room, but we should not have to be doing that for an encounter. I "think" using the levers in the X4 is in some way activating the Rime illusion mechanic. Since the illusion is temp no-trade and only works in the heroic version, if you are in the epic version you are basically fubar if that happens.
Yunay@Innovation wrote: Did you have no money on you or something? You have to wager him 1 plat(which you get back at the end of the fight a couple times over)
Gninja wrote: Ive had this issue once also. Was our first time in. Every time in since we had both options and were able to progress. Edit - All had plat on them etc. Talked to the guy up top, went down and put the thing in the cup. Guy at the bottom gave one option, guy up top kept saying to put the sleeping powder in the drink.
Elhonas@Antonia Bayle wrote: She still does her big nuke (Icy Spears) after she ports. We did observe it sort of bug out last time we ran the zone, though; my group was all standing right next to her but 3/6ths still got speared for some reason. Gninja wrote: Can I suggest lowering the HP on the main named a bit as well? Once the adds are down, the challenging part of the encounter is over with in my opinion, and it's just a matter of burning the named while clicking the buttons. Also kind of sad to see that the Dockmaster is supposed to have a script. It was a fun parse fight!
Gninja wrote: For our group it was, yes. We started it late the previous day and then went back in the next to finish it. ---- Also, we did have the green text pop up saying that we spiked his drink.
Did you do any parts of the "talking to the gnome, spiking the drink, talking to Abelbrow" before the zone was left the first time?
