[TLE] Raiding Axiom Thoughts.

Discussion in 'General TLE Discussion' started by Adoninilol, Jul 17, 2017.

  1. Adoninilol Well-Known Member

    Hello and thank you for reading, my name is Birds on the Fallen Gate TLE server and i play an assassin in the guild Axiom. Here are just a few of my thoughts on the current situation of raiding after a few raid nights.

    Recently on the TLE Server lots of mobs recieved a buff package after Axiom had their first raid and cleared everything, with the exception of two mobs that we did not pull. Everyone in Axiom agreed that the mobs were too easy and needed some form of buff due to the ease of them, we were clearing raid zones with our players in mostly treasured gear and being unmastered.

    Recently a large buff was applied to most of the raid mobs, which would be appreciated if the mob packages were actually tested or told to the raiders that the packages were being given to the mob.The difference between raiding before the package and after on this server is night and day. Some mobs had drastic changes done to them yet other were left in basically the same format that they were before the patch.

    When we killed Venekor contested on 7/12/2017, Venekor himself had approximately 1.4million hp after max hp debuffs. Yet when we pulled it the next day, 7/13/2017 the mob has roughly around 50million hp. Today when another guild killed the mob venekor had roughly 12million. Now unless killing the adds provide some form of debuff to Venekor that massively reduces his HP the mob was changed from 7/13/2017 to today, 7/17/2017 without any indication of the mob being changed, at least to Axiom.

    Moving onto the next mob, Darthar when we pulled it on 7/10/2017 we did roughly 500k damage in around one minute and got it down to 75%, yet today we did around 450k damage and got him to 99% hit points. As our current math stands it including the strat on Darathar which brings his hp back up to 100% on each threshold it would sit the mob at 125million hit points, making the fight roughly 3hours long if we wanted to kill it in its current state.

    Today we killed The Spirit of Vox which is the instance version of Vision of Vox, and it was a 31 minute fight. The mob had 34million hit points.
    http://imgur.com/a/6fkL2

    The link above links to the breakdown of the parse on the encounter.

    Now given that our raid setup wasn't anywhere near perfect, I believe we have some room for improvement on our 31minute fight timer. We were running four tanks and had one in our mage group and we were missing our wizard. Assuming we had our wizard instead of a paladin in our mage group and also were running the most optimized raid set up in this fight by only having one tank due to the nature of the mob, I would assume that the fight would be roughly 25minutes. If you give us all best in slot gear I would guess that we could MAYBE get the mob down to a 20 minute fight. Which is still largely overtuned.

    The ninja changes of these mobs is ridiculous and frankly unfair, we were given the opportunity to pull Darathar before the mob was ninja changed yet Neustart was not able to. We were able to kill Venekor twice yet before the change yet they were only able to pull it during the post change (after the change that made it unkillable for us with no indication!~).

    In the future, we would appreciate it if patch notes were clear or some form of indication was given to raiders that the mobs were changed, so then that way we could know if mobs were changed in some form before we go in and get lockouts or waste raid time pulling mobs that were changed without any indication.

    One other thing that we would like some form of clarification on, is caps of things such as magical/physical debuffs on this servers raid mobs. The old formula tells us that these mobs cap at around roughly 3000 magical debuffs and phsyical debuffs. Yet we are being told that for some reason stacking 24 crana wands which reduce the mobs physical mitigation by around 600 is cheating, yet no indication was given that the formula changed or that mobs can go into the negative in debuffs or have a grossly higher mitigation cap requiring us to stack wands to actually max out debuffs. I do not believe that this is the case due to the fact that the damage of my damage on some mobs like in heroics isn't much different than raids, unless we could stack so many wands that my abilities could hit for x2 the damage. For the record, we had around three wands in our raid force on the night we cleared everything and they weren't even being co-ordinated what so ever nor did we have any idea that people were using them.

    Thank you for reading/I invite other raid guilds to provide insight on their situation on the TLE server. Thank you.
    Flossie and firecracker like this.
  2. Arandar Well-Known Member

    To be honest, this whole post is giving me flashbacks of KoS on Stormhold. Tuning mobs is fine, and that can be expected to some extent, but these kinds of wild swings in mob health and/or damage is (in part) what drove raiding guilds away from Stormhold in the first place.

    To the developers: Let's not repeat the same mistakes of the past. Incremental changes are fine as long as they're tested and noted in patches so that we know what to look for when we think there's a problem. Wide, sweeping changes to the difficulty of raid content (that obviously has not been thoroughly tested) and no notice whatsoever? For the long-term health of raiding on Fallen Gate, please, let's not do this again.
    Flossie, Adoninilol, Season and 3 others like this.
  3. Mountbatten Well-Known Member

    The lack of communication combined with zone lockouts is really frustrating. We basically waste half a raid night so we don't get a lockout for Darathar, since we have no idea what changes they will make tomorrow, or even if they make any at all.

    That the best gear seems to drop off of easy contested mobs, just rubs salt in the wound.
  4. Mizgamer62 Feldon Fan Club Member

    Prepare to be disappointed again.
    Snikkety likes this.
  5. Mizgamer62 Feldon Fan Club Member

    I am sorry to say that they are not seriously concerned with quality or consistency, but more so with a quick cash grab and some of us were dumb enough to fall for it twice. Is any one really surprised?
  6. Papablaze Member

    Venekor and Darathar were never intentionally meant to be done with rags, just because some of the gear is tagged legendary these days doesn't mean that half of either Axiom or Neustarts raid force is even remotely "raid ready" geared. Communication could be improved I agree, but the changes in tuning without knowing almost makes the game fun again in not knowing what you're going to be facing.

    The contested loot has generally been ****, 1/5 contested if that seem to drop something that's an upgrade, whereas Drayek, Kra'thuk are both just as easy and drop great loot.

    Axiom steamrolled the entire content - Darathar in 2 hours so I'd hope they would buff the mobs, might be time to actually try some contesteds and get some gear the way the game was intended to be.
  7. Jimbolini Member

    Very interesting and informative post, thank you.

    I hope they work these things out before T6, T7 come around.
    Adoninilol likes this.
  8. Mountbatten Well-Known Member

    It's not fun though. It's one thing if a mob is getting tweaked a bit here and a bit there, but buffing a mobs HP by like 50x overnight is crazy. The fact that they are working on them is good, it is just the total absence of communication that makes it very frustrating. We don't mind content being hard, but we'd also like to know that there is going to be consistency, otherwise you may as well just throw progression out of the window.
  9. Season Active Member

    Agreed, I am not interested in killing everything the first week over and over again. We want a challenge, all we are asking for is a little bit of communication, just 3-5 minutes of your day when making changes.
    Flossie, Adoninilol and firecracker like this.
  10. Papablaze Member

    Will agree that the Darathar changes are pretty ridiculous, if they'd actually test the changes we probably wouldn't see these issues, the changes to venekor and some of the other x4's have been appropriate and pretty nice though
  11. Arandar Well-Known Member

    Although it's a secondary issue, changes like this do make the idea of guild progression completely meaningless. If they need raiding guilds to help them test and adjust, that's fine, but they need to be more transparent about it.
    Mizgamer62, firecracker and Draknox like this.
  12. Zenji Well-Known Member


    The first change to Venekor was a bit over the top (50million HP), where he was last night seemed fine though(~12million HP).

    Vox was also a bit higher than I think it should have been(~34 million). I think putting it around where Venekor was last night would be a good place.

    Yes Darathar is a bit ridiculous, I think my biggest complaint is 0 communication from the Dev team. I am not asking for a detailed write up. But something as simple as "balancing adjustments have been made to Darathar to bring him more inline with other T5 raid content". Would be fantastic so raids don't waste half their night just testing to see what the mobs are tuned to that night.
    Adoninilol and firecracker like this.
  13. Vunder Well-Known Member

    After this long playing this game, many of you hard core raiders tend to forget.......The end game is designed around expert level spells and a mixmash of legendary and treasured.

    You guys also keep saying dev team...it's not a team...It's one person. Log onto Discord and chat with Fyre about it. I've learned they tend to avoid the forums because there are way to many nasty people here.
  14. Meaghan Stormfire Well-Known Member

    The Daybreak/SOE tradition has always been to make adjustments with a sledgehammer.
    firecracker likes this.
  15. Adoninilol Well-Known Member


    Umm. No.

    Back in the original days, a lot of content from shattered lands up until about kingdom of sky was done with "rags". I remember people killing all the raid content super soon, and it having no real challenge until spirits of the lost came into play. Then GU13 happened and everyone cleared raids in mastercrafted gear. I would like for you to show me how much dps we are really going to gain by itemization that gives us things like more base stats, when we are capped or ability mod when a lot of our raid force is already capped. Not to mention on stormhold things were cleared the same way, not enough amazing gear drops for us to really go farm. We have the Icy Digg gear, which seems to only drop plate gear, and the scout gear gives me minimal upgrades like .6 haste, and like 3 ability mod. And the ability mod wouldn't even help anything but a few of my stealth attacks which are near the bottom of my parse.

    Some gear gives awesome things like more haste/dps mod/ a bit of casting speed which would help. But that isn't going to turn a 3 hour fight or a 30 minute one into 5-10 minutes. Not to mention a lot of the level 50 fabled gear (which is best in slot and drops at random) only drops off of raid mobs and even then its pretty whack a mole it seems as to what mobs are even dropping this gear. I would like for all the instanced/contested loot to guaranteed drop a piece of the amazing level 50 fabled set, so then that way we don't spend an entire raid day going in to these instances and getting gear that was never changed what so ever and only has green stats, and a proc that does roughly 4 damage according to ACT. \\

    Also i don't know if you remember this but ninja changing mobs isn't fun, nor is things like the HM Drunder game where no one killed a single mob until they decided that we should be able to. They basically applied patches nerfing mobs and then all the guilds would kill it, it wasn't really challenging it was just whoever could go in first on the patch day would ww1st it.

    This is exactly basically what happened with Venekor, we killed it one day its a pushover. The next day its unkillable, the next day its pretty reasonable. Yet no indication was given that any of those changes were going to happen. Why would we bother trying to pull venekor if on thursday night the mob was basically unkillable due to the fact that we would of been sitting there for an hour + after our raid, yet on monday another guild pulls it and it has a 1/5th of the hp.

    I am also confused how you would possibly try to defend a 2 HOUR PULL of darathar, literally 2 hours. Assuming we cheesed it and yes got it to 75% one pull so it would never heal up again then wipe, then rinse repeat down every heal % point, it would still be a ridiculous amount of time. It would probably take longer than an entire raid night to kill that mob, assuming we didn't wipe what so ever and that doesn't even factor in the time it takes to kill all the trash and run there.
    Draknox likes this.
  16. Adoninilol Well-Known Member

    A lot of us have mostly masters, pay to win familiars, and the best gear we can get from things like heritage quests/instances. There really isn't much we can do.

    Also it isn't just one developer, Kander was testing raid mobs on beta. Caithe has been adjusting mobs, and fyre has been doing itemization. It's obvious this entire server is being changed by multiple devs.
    Draknox likes this.
  17. dirgenoobforreal Well-Known Member

    Its a mess.

    They promised FG would be better. So far in terms of difficulty its the same mess as Stormhold was. Heck, a lot of items are still wacky to say the least.
    Mizgamer62 likes this.
  18. Papablaze Member

    the tuning is no way similar to SH/deathtoll at launch.
  19. Venser Active Member

    The treatment is what is similar, not the time stamp it happened in. It is going as I mostly anticipated. The entire Dev team makes it look like they are on board with supporting the server. Then, as soon as it launches they stick around for the first week to cast the "illusion" that they are present, when they really are not. Caith and Fyre end up being the only ones left with the server and Caith only pops in as he can while working on live first. On top of that Fyre has nothing to do with our server except that he is the dedicated itemization dev for us, meaning any questions about any mechanic is directed to Caith, which is seldom around. It was great Caith put a fix on SoTL, although temporary he also managed to go and ninja buff other mobs that drop undesireable loot.

    Loot from all raid instances are inferior to contested, X2, X3, and X4. Why? We will never know and then DoF will hit and rinse and repeat.
    Mizgamer62 likes this.
  20. Adjuvant1 Member

    I'm not amused by the wild changes and frankly I'm disappointed.

    This game isn't some championship esports game, there should not be such demands that a group of people spend dedicated, combined, tens-of-thousands of hours just to get achievements and quest completion. Whatever the devs are thinking, it is nonsense.

    It's a 13.5 yo game, mostly inhabited by casual players engrossed in nostalgia. This content should be accessible to them. If random 60-something joe public with his band of merry adventurers can't beat the content after a handful of serious attempts, devs are doing it wrong. We're beating the content, but we have some serious, heavy-hitting contenders. I shudder to think what experience other guilds will have with this, not every guild has "a chillen", "a cheggers", "a crux", or "a birds", let alone a group contribution of all of these. What are those other people expected to do? Melt and quit after spending $100 or more dollars after "getting there" in 2 or 3 weeks?

    30 minute boss fights are preposterous.

    Getting to 50 (with or without xp potions), getting your 24 people together, posting some half decent parse (maybe 18k-20k total raid) and doing fight mechanics is absolutely all that should be required for a 10ish minute (tops) end-game encounter. If people choose to farm out icy dig or the decent-drop x4s awhile, it should just make it that much easier.

    Daybreak is being jerks to their fans with the way this is handled, bottom line. I am not appreciative.
    Xephane and firecracker like this.