The changes to Vuulak's Dominion are well done. Thanks devs. We went in last night for the first time after the changes and cleared Ahrmatal. Prior he would auto kill us. It took 8-9 deaths to figure out the blind/cure effect, but after figuring it out we killed it in 2 pulls. He dropped us one of the 2 sec 2-handers though. =( The zone doesn't require raid gear which is a plus. It allows heroically geared players to face a challenge for very good rewards. I'm glad that you fixed the barrels on the first named. It makes the scripting more enjoyable. Dagrin didn't seem any different, but his adds do spawn very far away. If that's the intent, so be it, but sometimes you go from the upward ramp area to the downward ramp area. That's several hundred meters of range. Pretty dang far. The first wyvern hits much harder, but when you realize that the debuff has a max target limit based on range, you can easily position a second healer (if you don't use a mage like us) outside of the ring beat the scripting. You made his hitbox enormous, so I assume you intended this to be the way it was handled. I enjoy that fight. The mounted wyvern/aerakyn fight is pretty straight forward. The aerakyn starts to spike more damage the lower he gets in health, but it's certainly manageable. It's really the only "bland" fight. Arhmatal's damage still spikes incredibly high while fully defiler/dirge debuffed. It became the case that each cure-blind cycle required the use of emergency heals/soaks/avoids. I assume this is intended, but boy does it make me nervous while healing. You're always concerned if that KB is going to hit at the same time as the spike. For reference to anyone that cares to look. We beat the zone with a Paladin, Defiler, Inquisitor, Fury, Beastlord, and Dirge. Each person's name is in the respective order so that you can check and confirm that none of us are overgeared for the zone. Reddranth, Gaealiege, Nindakin, Ellisandra, Colossus, and Claraness.
Gonna chime in here as someone else who did the zone both pre and post change. Overall more enjoyable to heal through as luck is less of a factor and skill is more of a factor due to evening out of spike damage. Loot on last guy still seems a little...meh though.
I think this more of a factor of heroic gear being generally same or better than raid gear in many cases rather than zone design. Anyhow, happy to hear that you were able to beat it with healing - even if it took 3 healers. The only way I've seen him beaten is by tanking (i.e. cycling defensives, not taking damage).
It didn't require 3 healers. We simply had 3 healers. I was 116k HPS, the inquisitor was at 125k, the paladin was at 68k, and the fury was at 45k. On Ahrmatal that is. He's the only fight that is new to us. Every other fight we've done with 5 people (the fury wasn't present).
There's only one more thing that this zone desperately needs. Instead of recovery speed cloaks, and cloaks no one would ever use dropping from the 4th named... The 4th named should drop cb/potency/flurry - cb/potency/doublecast - cb/mit/block cloaks. The cloaks that people this expansion actually value and wear. If THOSE were the cloaks that the named dropped, I'd be infinitely happier with the zone in it's entirety. Right now it's not in a bad place though. A lot easier than it used to be, we healed through it without using blockers with a solo healer prior to the change. The current version isn't particularly difficult, but hopefully a challenging heroic zone will come out with a game update.
Ran the zone last night for the first time since patch. It's basically gone from easy to easier... it's hard to gauge how much easier it has gotten because the patch has made no difference to me whatsoever. I'm glad more people are clearing it tho.
Great change to the final boss imo. I play a brawler and the fight for me went from "chain avoiding or die" to "use an avoidance as a reaction to hp dropping" as it should be imo.
IDK how you guys are doing this zone with one healer and without the tank chaining defensives. I really don't. I put out approx 160k HPS on Armadal fight as a defiler. I am specced for every damage reduction debuff that exists and i keep them on the mob at all times. My heals/wards can hold a tank up for maybe 20 seconds out of a 2-3 minute fight when i use MS, Soulward, Zek cloak and two casts of Channeling. The rest of the time, he's gotta chain defensive or he dies. I've tried with with an SK and Guard, both excellently geared (3/3 potent and 1/1 raid), fully specced defensive and both who know their class. I just don't see any way they can survive this fight without chaining defensives (which is how we beat it). Am i just a terrible healer? Seriously, I don't understand how you can get through this fight, healing a tank that's not cycling defensives. Tips welcome.
i mean now you dont have to chain them, but should still click them, idk i just play my zerker like i dont have a healer most of the time im tanking. so i usually end up out healing my healers anyway.
Well.. that would be the case if the tank was required to chain defensives. Multiple people are posting that they're tanking it without doing so, therefore it's on the healer. We're beating the encounter fine by having the tank avoid damage for like 30-40 seconds at a time, then having me bridge them until the defensives recharge and so on. I want to know how people are doing it with just heals, without having the tank avoid the damage.
I took my monk in to a zone with a fairly undergeared mage group and getiar was meleeing me for over a million damage. After my avoidance temps/stoneskins/etc were all down I threw up all my damage reductions (~60%) before the last tag team wore off then died in less than half a second. ****** geared paladin I was originally on was taking ~700k inc dps. Being unkillable without dps/haste/str debuffs or unless you kill it in under a minute ftw.
I run it with Heroic or 0/1 Energized with is roughly Potent in quality. Dagrin still one shots me from 1.2 Million HP or leaves me in deep-red. This coupled with a Magamatic Destroyer forming 200m away from the boss, I mean these are spawning outside of most players render distance. These make the fight just dumb, it's not challenging at all other than for me to learn to quickly react to temps. I am still cycling temps for 60-90 seconds then asking my Warden to cycle me and pray he lasts long enough for one of my temps to come back up. Literally nothing has changed for us about this zone, other than mobs have more HP.
As an SK, Furor gets me about 26 seconds of tanking, Divine Aura is basically useless as the mobs now hit for more than 50% of my hps leaving me with one defensive buff worth a crap. Chaotic blade just doesn't last long enough with the extra hps. Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of picking and choosing our classes to ensure we have a dirge, defiler, templar, etc. we always run with a fury and Inq. Between them two and my self heals, which comes to about 270kish HPS still doesn't stop the 350k incoming dps or the 800k hits every second. As Buffrat says, without the proper debuffs and class stackings or being extremely geared to reach the 10mil plus required to kill it in under a minute, it's pretty disheartening.
just fyi, my group for killing it after patch was SK, Defiler, Troub, Illy, Conjy, Wiz. It was about 3 minutes. But like i said, our SK had to use everything he had to stay up. My heals/wards/etc were grossly inadequate for keeping him up when he had nothing running.
