Black Abbot Anniversary

[Venar]

This raid is ran regularly by a few guilds on Ghallanda. Good for them.
I gave it a shot, i remember when it came out, BCB wanted to be the first to beat it, we gave it the same dedication we gave the Titan (every night, all night).
But we stopped because...
The raid is boring.
I'm sorry, maybe some like it, but in general, it is not a fun raid.
Why? Because players are randomly selected to solve challenge that have nothing to do with their character's strenght.
This is not very D&Dish.

In the Reaver, the taskto tank is given to people with that skill. In the Shroud, there are some tasks. Gate runner, kiter, scouter... In each raids, Titan, Dragon, Queen, etc..., players can decide who is better suited for each tasks, and act accordingly.

I would love the Abbot to function like this. Make challenges that players can pick, and that will favor certain classes. Like, the asteroids could be an archery gauntlet for exemple. The floor tiles could be spotted with high spot skills, or be visible with grease/fogs. I dont know.
But as long as it's just a place where a few person are asked to randomly do bunker tasks, then i will avoid it, and so will may players.

Why? I like to think that planning and strategy will get me somewhere.

[Blazer]

Since the cool thing seems to be bumping threads so they don't get purged, even if they need to be necro'd, I choose to save this one.

[Angelus_dead]

Guess I'll update this thread a bit.

Wow, the asteroid part actually looks doable by a pug from this video. The asteroid speed is reasonable (at least to start), targeting doesn't seem to mess up (at first), and the character shown can actually take a number of hits from the asteroids before being knocked off.

Was this set up different on the Japanese servers? Did the player in the video have a super high speed, super reliable connection close to the game server?

Looking doable: That's an illusion.
Reasonable asteroid speed: It's always started reasonable, and it always becomes excessive, because only one invisible asteroid is all it takes.
Take a number of hits: The character in the video survives 10-20 hits before being thrown off. Every time an asteroid hit the plat without pushing him off is a bug. Each impact includes a text message "An asteroid slams into your body, plunging you to your death" (translated to Japanese). So, his system of surviving the asteroids mainly by standing on the platform and being hit is a bug exploit, and an reliable one: notice that he still fell off at the end.

How the asteroids were supposed to work is that one hit would fail the challenge, but the asteroids are easy and reliable to shoot down, except that boulder-cooldowns mean you need to divide the job with a partner. That game design objective failed, and just because someone completes asteroids by somehow remaining on the platform after explosions doesn't mean it's now working correctly.

And yes, they're on the Japanese servers, where everyone has less latency because all players are geographically within an area smaller than California.

and one hit knocks a person right off the platform (as was shown with the companion in the video).

The guy in the video is taking advantage of both a lot of luck, and the fact that the distance an asteroid will push you is related to it's flight angle. The pushing direction was supposed to be a visual decoration only, and the devs had not intended players to treat high-angle asteroids as less dangerous because they can't push as far.

If the puzzle could be "fixed" to be more like this video, this puzzle might, just might, be doable with a pug.

The video doesn't show it's fixed- he's just making it look easy, because he recorded a good run.

[Angelus_dead]

There were a few more Abbot-related posts from a developer, so I'll add them to the record.

http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p...90&postcount=4
Significant changes are being planned for the Abbot module nine. These happen to include several of the bullet points from the original post, including Fix the holes in the story line (why does he send us to do puzzles, etc.).

http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p...14&postcount=8
Many of the issues that may come up in this thread may be obsolete - I rescripted and updated most of the encounter during my pass. Very little went untouched.

http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p...4&postcount=13
There are still three areas where the Abbot has his defenses (guarding objects of critical importance to him), that the Silver Flame / Emerald Claw force access to when you create a moment of weakness.

Those updates give hope that the Abbot raid will be fixed in Module 9, well over a year since it was broken in Module 5, and in the same patch that the new Shavarath quests are attracting all the attention