Prey of the Hunter - negative feedback

[Riggs]

It is interesting to note, that after having fought the 2 white dragons at the end, where it took a fair bit of time, and gobs of fire damage and tanks beating on them - like 10 minutes at least (on hard usually) - that a couple giants can drop the dragon faster than a single haste spell can last.

Usually have been running the quest on hard because it seems people say on normal the dragon doesnt last long enough to even reach her most of the time. When getting to the random maze, even on hard, 1-2 wrong turns and the quest fails.

It is incredibly frustrating to be running in the maze, tab the dragon, and watch the health drop while your running into dead ends, then have her die just as you finally reach the floor and cant do a darned thing to stop it because its too late.

The dragon needs more health - or at least a lot more health when fighting the giants - since she seems to have plenty more health when the players decide to fight her. Having a quest fail because of player error is fine.

Having a quest fail because of a random maze, and once the timer starts you only have maybe a window for success of 20 seconds in a 30 minute quest is franky just mean.

Its kind of like saying "Ok spend 30 minutes running a quest - now flip a coin, heads you get to finish, tails you randomly just fail for no good reason - have a nice day".

I havent run this quest with pugs, only with good groups where most of the people have run it before and know what they are doing - and it has failed several times once people make a couple wrong turns in the maze.

Please change this. Quests should succeed or fail because of player ability, not random events that players have no control over.

[Noctus]

/signed

Couldnt have said it better.

[Vorn]

/shrug
Kind of reminded of when we all hated East Threnal 3 and that nerd Coyle--it was maddening that the noob kept making our quest fail--some adjustments in tactics and in the quest made it easier, though it's still challenging on untwinked lvl appropriate characters. Faithful Departed falls into that same maddening category.

To their credit, the Dev's have added more hp to her on normal and moved the shrine. Even making every wrong turn using the fireman's rule it's possible to reach her with about 30% of her HP remaining when hasted. Barbs/monks/sprint boost folks get there even faster. Have only run hard once since the update and normal about a dozen times. On hard she was at 40% when I arrived on scene.

Only bothered to fight the two dragons once (on normal, without cheesing it). Was some good graphics, but not really that interesting a fight. Now if they could fly and strafe and .... Did get a white scale and a giant relic from the chest there, though.

[Samadhi]

Just wait until it starts bugging on you.

Floors that won't break - not fun

Walls that spring up and block the end chest - pretty much make you want to post a Doooom thread.

The QA on this quest is the worst I have seen in a while, possibly ever.

[Kintro]

No need to bump the hitpoints any further, when my groups fail it's not due to random luck it's because we don't coordinate which routes have been checked through the maze well enough or we don't take care of the giants quickly enough. Having said that one particular route through the maze is considerably longer than others which makes it more of a challenge.

The maze is only semi-random, three possible routes into the "middle" and three out, it shouldn't be any problem finding and relaying the route while a cleric/caster shrines (it was fine in it's original location). The cleric and caster don't need to be there for the start of the fight anyway, aslong as you can get someone out of the maze who can disrupt/move the fight before the red named giant spawns.

I think they need to drop the HP on the dragons at the end fight or put some named loot in the chests or it's just not worth the time.

[tihocan]

Have you run it on normal recently? It's easy enough now (just make sure the party splits in maze to quickly figure out the correct way).

[Shima-ra]

I disagree, that quest is fun not that hard.
Randomness should have been part of ddo from day1.

If you can't pass the labyrinth, your doing it the wrong way:
Have your team split up and tell which paths are good,
you don't have to look far to find which are deadends

[Chelsa]

Been running the quest allot since the last update and the balance and mechanics are proper for each level of difficulty.

I give it a big thumbs up.

[Justicesar]

Fun factor of this ends when the ice does not break. Such a fast paced quest really bogs down when it happens and then fun factor goes out the door.

[Strumpoo]

The whole blue barrier thing not coming down after you beat quest is ridiculous. Devs, you should just get rid of the blue barrier!

Had to wait for over 45 mins to get a GM to port us through the barrier this weekend, and that didn't even advance the completed quest for us....

[Nott]

I ran this on normal 5 or 6 times this weekend (all part of a single attempt at completion). All but one of us had done the quest before, some multiple times succesfully. Every time, we split up and communicated (voice chat) deadends, etc, and every time (except the last time) we got to the dragon, she was very low on health and there was little that could be done... unless perhaps an intimitank gets to her first, and is able to pull all the giant aggro quickly, success seems too random.

[Talon_Moonshadow]

/shrug
Kind of reminded of when we all hated East Threnal 3 and that nerd Coyle--it was maddening that the noob kept making our quest fail--some adjustments in tactics and in the quest made it easier, though it's still challenging on untwinked lvl appropriate characters. Faithful Departed falls into that same maddening category.

To their credit, the Dev's have added more hp to her on normal and moved the shrine. Even making every wrong turn using the fireman's rule it's possible to reach her with about 30% of her HP remaining when hasted. Barbs/monks/sprint boost folks get there even faster. Have only run hard once since the update and normal about a dozen times. On hard she was at 40% when I arrived on scene.

Only bothered to fight the two dragons once (on normal, without cheesing it). Was some good graphics, but not really that interesting a fight. Now if they could fly and strafe and .... Did get a white scale and a giant relic from the chest there, though.

TE3, and Faithful both have tactics that a group can employ though......unlike Prey.

[EazyWeazy]

I had a fun little experience yesterday in this quest. We'd saved the dragon and decided to kill them so we could get the extra chests. I took the mate and kited him around with my ranger while the rest of the party handled the first dragon.

It was taking a long time as we were not an ideal party makeup to do this, but we had some players that hadn't done it before and we were all solid players in general so we kept at it.

I'd gotten the mate down about 15% or so by kiting and the first dragon was almost dead. Next thing I know...the big, white, gnashing of teeth dragon that was trying to take a bite out of my arse disappears. The rest of the party finishes the first dragon and says, "Ok...lets finish this." I'm like..."Um...guys...I kinda lost my dragon..."

So we have someone finish out so they can put in a ticket (because none of us could do it while within the quest) and we wait for a DM. After a little bit one shows up. As soon as we tell him the dragon disappeared he asks if we were kiting him...well...yeah. Duh. How else you gonna kill two freaking big dragons. Keep one busy while you kill the other one.

He says that he can finish the quest for us and teleport us to the final chest (there is a barrier up so we can't get to the chest at this point) but that we're hosed for the dragon hoard because we didn't kill the other dragon. He wouldn't/couldn't spawn the 2nd dragon for us to complete correctly. He also said that it was our fault that the dragon disappeared because we were kiting it.

From other things I've read and also experienced we now have the new Stormcleave aka buggiest quest in Stormreach. Overall I'm not too upset at missing the extra chests...it happens. What I didn't like was having a DM tell us that kiting the second dragon isn't a viable strategy. Are you kidding me?

[marcosoneghett]

I had a fun little experience yesterday in this quest. We'd saved the dragon and decided to kill them so we could get the extra chests. I took the mate and kited him around with my ranger while the rest of the party handled the first dragon.

It was taking a long time as we were not an ideal party makeup to do this, but we had some players that hadn't done it before and we were all solid players in general so we kept at it.

I'd gotten the mate down about 15% or so by kiting and the first dragon was almost dead. Next thing I know...the big, white, gnashing of teeth dragon that was trying to take a bite out of my arse disappears. The rest of the party finishes the first dragon and says, "Ok...lets finish this." I'm like..."Um...guys...I kinda lost my dragon..."

So we have someone finish out so they can put in a ticket (because none of us could do it while within the quest) and we wait for a DM. After a little bit one shows up. As soon as we tell him the dragon disappeared he asks if we were kiting him...well...yeah. Duh. How else you gonna kill two freaking big dragons. Keep one busy while you kill the other one.

He says that he can finish the quest for us and teleport us to the final chest (there is a barrier up so we can't get to the chest at this point) but that we're hosed for the dragon hoard because we didn't kill the other dragon. He wouldn't/couldn't spawn the 2nd dragon for us to complete correctly. He also said that it was our fault that the dragon disappeared because we were kiting it.

From other things I've read and also experienced we now have the new Stormcleave aka buggiest quest in Stormreach. Overall I'm not too upset at missing the extra chests...it happens. What I didn't like was having a DM tell us that kiting the second dragon isn't a viable strategy. Are you kidding me?

Im not sure if i was with you in the same group, but i have a very similar experience when trying to kill the dragons. Have to check to see if this is on the known issues.

[Junts]

I had a fun little experience yesterday in this quest. We'd saved the dragon and decided to kill them so we could get the extra chests. I took the mate and kited him around with my ranger while the rest of the party handled the first dragon.

It was taking a long time as we were not an ideal party makeup to do this, but we had some players that hadn't done it before and we were all solid players in general so we kept at it.

I'd gotten the mate down about 15% or so by kiting and the first dragon was almost dead. Next thing I know...the big, white, gnashing of teeth dragon that was trying to take a bite out of my arse disappears. The rest of the party finishes the first dragon and says, "Ok...lets finish this." I'm like..."Um...guys...I kinda lost my dragon..."

So we have someone finish out so they can put in a ticket (because none of us could do it while within the quest) and we wait for a DM. After a little bit one shows up. As soon as we tell him the dragon disappeared he asks if we were kiting him...well...yeah. Duh. How else you gonna kill two freaking big dragons. Keep one busy while you kill the other one.

He says that he can finish the quest for us and teleport us to the final chest (there is a barrier up so we can't get to the chest at this point) but that we're hosed for the dragon hoard because we didn't kill the other dragon. He wouldn't/couldn't spawn the 2nd dragon for us to complete correctly. He also said that it was our fault that the dragon disappeared because we were kiting it.

From other things I've read and also experienced we now have the new Stormcleave aka buggiest quest in Stormreach. Overall I'm not too upset at missing the extra chests...it happens. What I didn't like was having a DM tell us that kiting the second dragon isn't a viable strategy. Are you kidding me?

I hate to say this but even on elite the dragons suck so much that you should just pull them in a corner, drop a lot of firewalsl and beat them down simultaneously - their damage dealing is terrible, only the knock-away and knock-down are remotely debilitating, i've never seen someone even have to use a pot doing it that way.

they are so easy its kind of insulting

[Gornin]

Agreed that this quest has some balancing issues, but the cheesiest tactic in the new quests is all the respawns. That, on top of the excessive HP and immunities, is cheese. There should be a limited number of opponenets, not unlimited.

[EazyWeazy]

I hate to say this but even on elite the dragons suck so much that you should just pull them in a corner, drop a lot of firewalsl and beat them down simultaneously - their damage dealing is terrible, only the knock-away and knock-down are remotely debilitating, i've never seen someone even have to use a pot doing it that way.

they are so easy its kind of insulting

Given a different setup than we had that may have worked fine. We needed to do it differently however and we were doing it just fine...until the big guy went poof and disappeared.

[Talcyndl]

Have you run it on normal recently? It's easy enough now (just make sure the party splits in maze to quickly figure out the correct way).

Agreed. Haven't had any problem since the change.

Other than flaky the wall/floor not breaking in certain spots, seemingly randomly.

[FlimsyFirewood]

The maze part of the dungeon is easier on normal: the giants don't hit as hard.

Right now the 'hard' version of the dungeon is what 'normal' used to be before the patch. What I'm saying is that normal got nerfed pretty hard.

Team tactics can be used to negate the maze's randomness factor by splitting up.

Kiting the dragon is a viable tactic, however, we're investigating the reasons behind the dragon's disappearances, and they seem related to him being kited. Try to avoid kiting the dragon until we fix this unintended problem.

Flaky walls and reappearing magic barriers are also being looked into.

[Mockduck]

I've only run this twice, but in both times I got through this quest easily. Both times I was like "really? what's the big deal?"

Now, I'm probably one of the most map-and-maze averse people in the game (I'm totally hopeless), but even I was able to find my way through the maze! In time as well. Split up, find the correct path, have striders-haste and it's fine.