Schemes of the Enemy - Red Alert end fight

[RandomKeypress]

While the forums were down I ran Schemes of the enemy on elite with a group of six. I forgot to include an arcane in the party due to carelessness, but we did have two healers - FvS and Cleric. Everyone was lev 19-20 and we breezed through to the end without any deaths or problems.

We triggered the end fight and the metal dogs spawned. And spawned. And spawned. A few watchers too.
They didn't do much damage and we had freedom for the grease so we didn't kill them. It did not take long at all to hit red alert, and it stayed there. We were permanently harried and a couple of people died from being mobbed and not being able to escape.

Eventually we had Peicemaker down to 50% and the healers were out of mana. We couldn't be bothered to grind down the rest of the way with pots / scrolls and called it a day.

Question: is having red alert in a static arena WAI? Was it factored in the difficulty - devs don't want you to use CC or common sense - kill the dogs or you get major dungeon grief?
I understood that dungeon alert was introduced to stop zerging, simplify the number of active AIs and so reduce lag. Deliberately triggering it by design in a quest strikes me as being counter-intuitive, particularly considering how bad lag is these days.

What do you think?

[Moltier]

Blade barriers.

[RandomKeypress]

Blade barriers.

Sure - we could have killed them, but they were not a threat by themselves. The threat was dungeon alert. I don't feel that dungeon alert should be used as part of a fight mechanic.

[Mrmorphling]

With a bard or an arcane you can CC and avoid dealing with them, thus saving resources but you have to face pacemaker increased stats due to red alert or you can kill them (or at least keep them at a resonable number) with AoE while DPS'ing the boss.

If you decide to brute force the end fight without a rogue searching for control box to disable boss, without making the puzzle at the bottom floor, without arcane, without bard you need to be ready for quite a long fight under RA but i think we have lots of choices to keep the final fight interesting.

[Moltier]

Sure - we could have killed them, but they were not a threat by themselves. The threat was dungeon alert. I don't feel that dungeon alert should be used as part of a fight mechanic.

I hate DA. Its just stupid the way its implemented. But you knew red alert can be a problem there. A single BB can clean a level, and get rid of some dungeon alert.

[patang01]

While the forums were down I ran Schemes of the enemy on elite with a group of six. I forgot to include an arcane in the party due to carelessness, but we did have two healers - FvS and Cleric. Everyone was lev 19-20 and we breezed through to the end without any deaths or problems.

We triggered the end fight and the metal dogs spawned. And spawned. And spawned. A few watchers too.
They didn't do much damage and we had freedom for the grease so we didn't kill them. It did not take long at all to hit red alert, and it stayed there. We were permanently harried and a couple of people died from being mobbed and not being able to escape.

Eventually we had Peicemaker down to 50% and the healers were out of mana. We couldn't be bothered to grind down the rest of the way with pots / scrolls and called it a day.

Question: is having red alert in a static arena WAI? Was it factored in the difficulty - devs don't want you to use CC or common sense - kill the dogs or you get major dungeon grief?
I understood that dungeon alert was introduced to stop zerging, simplify the number of active AIs and so reduce lag. Deliberately triggering it by design in a quest strikes me as being counter-intuitive, particularly considering how bad lag is these days.

What do you think?

Schemes is one of those quests I won't do on elite anytime soon. I'm guessing if you do it on elite it might behove anyone to first disable the mechanism at the bottom so it removes the constant spawns (I'm only guessing here). It takes someone with good evasion tho as I tried as a Arti just for fun (on normal) and the lightning fried my bacon.

[RandomKeypress]

Schemes is one of those quests I won't do on elite anytime soon. I'm guessing if you do it on elite it might behove anyone to first disable the mechanism at the bottom so it removes the constant spawns (I'm only guessing here). It takes someone with good evasion tho as I tried as a Arti just for fun (on normal) and the lightning fried my bacon.

On elite, getting into the pit is lethal, even if you have improved evasion. You get hit so often that even a high reflex save is not enough and you need constant healing. The problem is that doing the puzzle in the pit just shuts down the magefire cannon for about thirty seconds. Since the problem is doing damage to the canon, not the damage it does to you, it is just not worth doing. Doing the randomly positioned trap box temporarily either makes the cannon inert (see above) or else hostile to the dogs (so you can't hit it). Maybe the dogs then attack it with more DPS than the group can put out, but I doubt it. I really don't see either doing the puzzle or the trap boxes as being an effective strategy.

Unfortunately ignoring the otherwise harmless trash isn't effective either.

[Shade]

On elite, getting into the pit is lethal, even if you have improved evasion.

Electrified floors are a fortitude save.. Thus improved evasion has no effect. I mean think about it, you standing on it, you cant evade it.

But otherwise your post is correct, even a 50+ fort save bbn requires some pretty intense healing to stay down there.

Personally find the end fight rather tedious, tho no problems completing it pretty much no matter what group I take.. Having a +80 attack score helps heh.

[Chai]

Arbitrary game mechanic is arbitrary, as well as broken in many instances. There are encounters with larger amounts of mobs which causes DA, even though the large number of mobs in the encounter is no fault of the player dragging mobs around they "should have killed". I put those words into quotes because this game mechanic is a playstyle limitation device based on the intentions of those who arent even playing the quest in the moment. The fact that the threshold numbers which trigger it arent higher than many actual encounters designed with the same quantity of mobs is hilarious. Its supposed to go off when the players actions caused too many active mobs, not when actual designed encounters violate the thresholds at no fault of the player.

It doesnt even stop zerging, so that one can be taken off the list. /Queues up anti zerger pile on. /taps foot waiting. :p

Who it hurts the most is the newer players or those playing first life toons with lower end gear. DA triggering due to quantity of mobs in an encounter designed to spawn that many mobs is bad game design. Instances where this occurs have not only been cited in the newer quests, but quite a few old mod quests as well. Then theres the wonderful aggro through walls and aggro through floors bugs, which players have no control over.

Arbitrary game mechanic is arbitrary. The minute my DM tries to banter that because we are running from more than 10 mobs, we all take movement and save penalties, Ill respond by saying that I glitch myself into the landscape in such a fashion that the mobs cant hit me but I can hit them all day. Do you want to actually see the furious amounts of attack rolls and confirm them or would you like to just settle on me wiping the board sans taking a point of damage and call it a session. Arbitrary game mechanics in 2011? pffft I got this one guys.