An idea to make Abbot a little less of a pain

[Saravis]

Goggles I've noticed has the most failures of all the "puzzles". What makes goggles worse is that it tends to take the longest to complete. So other "puzzles" are completed, you wait and wait, goggles fails, oh joy have to go at it all over again.

So here's an idea, how about instead of dying when you fall into the pit on goggles, you get teleported back to the side you started from. From what I can tell this doesn't trivialize goggles as you still have to complete it like you would regularly, it just allows you to go at it perpetually. No longer will you have to restart the raid on a goggles failure and have to go at all the puzzles all over again. Most importantly, lag caused failures in goggles will be less frustrating.

So what do you think?

[somenewnoob]

I'd be more in favor of it doing damage like asteroids every time you fall, and no healing in there so that if you fall too much you will eventually fail.

What you proposed, there would be no way to fail it, just keep trying and trying and trying........until you WISHED that the people would fall off and die! It would trivialize it completely. Saying it isn't trivial is like saying a dungeon where the mobs did no damage to you wasn't trivial because you still had to walk through the dungeon to the end.

[Saravis]

I'd be more in favor of it doing damage like asteroids every time you fall, and no healing in there so that if you fall too much you will eventually fail.

What you proposed, there would be no way to fail it, just keep trying and trying and trying........until you WISHED that the people would fall off and die! It would trivialize it completely. Saying it isn't trivial is like saying a dungeon where the mobs did no damage to you wasn't trivial because you still had to walk through the dungeon to the end.

Not exactly, it would be more like a dungeon that you still take damage from mobs, but instead of being killed, you restart at the beginning of the dungeon or at a halfway checkpoint.

In my idea, a failed run in goggles doesn't prevent you from failing that same spot again, it just prevents you from having to restart the whole raid all over again.

I understand your issue with getting bored, but in that case just go make a sandwich, surf the internet, whatever. Would you rather have to go at your puzzle, whether it be ice or asteroids, again and again and again and again?

[somenewnoob]

Not exactly, it would be more like a dungeon that you still take damage from mobs, but instead of being killed, you restart at the beginning of the dungeon or at a halfway checkpoint.

In my idea, a failed run in goggles doesn't prevent you from failing that same spot again, it just prevents you from having to restart the whole raid all over again.

I understand your issue with getting bored, but in that case just go make a sandwich, surf the internet, whatever. Would you rather have to go at your puzzle, whether it be ice or asteroids, again and again and again and again?

But there still is NO WAY TO FAIL that part. At all doing what you suggested. That is absolutely trivial.

There must be some way to fail it other than the group getting bored and leaving.

Like I said, add some damage to the fall and I'm all for it, I think the insta death is a bit harsh on it.

[Dragaer]

No. Bad idea.

Goggles isn't that hard once you learn how to do them. Remember the voice lag and Kentucky windage it a bit. Tiles is really not that hard with a little experience.

This idea sounds like "I don't like what I pulled in the chest, so I want the chest to spawn new items every time I open it...that way all I have to do is keep opening it till I get something that I want."

[Saravis]

But there still is NO WAY TO FAIL that part. At all doing what you suggested. That is absolutely trivial.

Thats what I don't think you're understanding, in my idea you can still fail goggles, you just aren't failing the whole raid. You still have to complete goggles like you would if you fell in the pit and died.

Have you ever played super meat boy? Its an awesome, highly challenging, side-scrolling platformer. Why am I bringing this up? It has the least frustrating deaths I've ever seen in a platformer. There are no game overs, no continue screens, no world restarts. When you die you restart the same level and the levels are so short that if you're taking more than a minute to complete one, you are slow. In no way are the levels trivialized because of this, they are simply less frustrating. This is where my idea is coming from.

No. Bad idea.

Goggles isn't that hard once you learn how to do them. Remember the voice lag and Kentucky windage it a bit. Tiles is really not that hard with a little experience.

This idea sounds like "I don't like what I pulled in the chest, so I want the chest to spawn new items every time I open it...that way all I have to do is keep opening it till I get something that I want."

You think I'm suggesting this because I'm failing goggles? No sir, I'm just tired of doing asteroids or ice over and over and over and over and etc.

[Memek]

That doesnt solve the issue that it takes the longest (in fact, it might well confound it), which is the biggest issue imho.

[Chai]

Thats what I don't think you're understanding, in my idea you can still fail goggles, you just aren't failing the whole raid. You still have to complete goggles like you would if you fell in the pit and died.

Have you ever played super meat boy? Its an awesome, highly challenging, side-scrolling platformer. Why am I bringing this up? It has the least frustrating deaths I've ever seen in a platformer. There are no game overs, no continue screens, no world restarts. When you die you restart the same level and the levels are so short that if you're taking more than a minute to complete one, you are slow. In no way are the levels trivialized because of this, they are simply less frustrating. This is where my idea is coming from..

So in other words "make death and failure have no penalty". Im not for that. You can die and you can fail, but theres no penalty for either. Same end result as not being able to fail really.

You think I'm suggesting this because I'm failing goggles? No sir, I'm just tired of doing asteroids or ice over and over and over and over and etc.

We made our own beds on this one by not teaching the masses how to run this raid during the time it was out. Over the years attrition loss at the high end made it so we now need to fill in group alots with PUGers.

The raid is fine. The players mentality that raids should just be autocomplete due to not wanting to PUG and teach is what needs adjusting.

[Sarisa]

I'd rather gut the entire raid and redo the "puzzles" with actual puzzles, not arcade type minigames that are hyper-sensitive to server/client latency or lag induced wands-not-firing bugs.

[Saravis]

That doesnt solve the issue that it takes the longest (in fact, it might well confound it), which is the biggest issue imho.

In a way it does solve that issue. If you add in the time it takes to release out, reform, regen mana, regather inside, redo first fight, redo scouting, and reenter the puzzles after a failure in goggles. Then I could argue that in my idea, goggles takes less time to do.

[sweez]

I'd rather gut the entire raid and redo the "puzzles" with actual puzzles, not arcade type minigames that are hyper-sensitive to server/client latency or lag induced wands-not-firing bugs.

One can dream.

[scoobmx]

Here's a better idea. Fix lag. Then all of these issues are avoided.

[Memek]

In a way it does solve that issue. If you add in the time it takes to release out, reform, regen mana, regather inside, redo first fight, redo scouting, and reenter the puzzles after a failure in goggles. Then I could argue that in my idea, goggles takes less time to do.

But that time isnt spent waiting.
Waiting time for phase would increase, unless you expect people to take bigger risks and get away with it. Likely you'd wait for phase to try and try again and try again. Not to mention that it completely trivializes phase, and the arcade game is pretty fun as it is.

[aristarchus1000]

I like the idea.

Having falling do some damage seems reasonable to me as well. After 3 or 4 falls you fail.

If you can't fail at all (i.e. don't take any damage), I can just imagine some people blindly running and jumping through the tiles hoping to get to the other side (with wings and boots of propulsion) and trivializing that content.

I agree that the problem is lag, for both the puzzles and the main fight. I don't think there is an easy solution to that.

[Dragaer]

You think I'm suggesting this because I'm failing goggles? No sir, I'm just tired of doing asteroids or ice over and over and over and over and etc.

Then stop being lazy and get a couple friends together and practice tiles. It isn't that hard to beat him down, go into a puzzle and practice...those of us who can do tiles did that. Heaven forbid that you need to learn how to do something.

If you're doing abbot with a steady group and they fail tiles often, get new tilers e.g. you

[Niv-mizzet]

How to fix abbot v 1.0

-Enter, initial fight, two portals open. Both lead to a copy of asteroids.

-Both halves of the raid do their own asteroid instance. At most, only 4 people will be piking for 5 minutes during this. (note for future versions, maybe think up something else to do here, like maybe just put 2 more boulder stacks down so 6 people can play.)

-Both asteroid rooms finish and exit into their own ice instance. No one is piking because they all want across. (possibility: have more traps, but have them disarmable, with the boxes out on the wall near them, thus requiring ice platforms to get to.)

-Both ice teams enter into opposite sides of a SINGLE goggles instance. (If you had a pair of people planned to work together, you would send them apart at the beginning so they would end up on opposite sides.) Side 1 goes as normal, slight expected pike-time, however at least they're there to watch instead of staring at stars and a portal.

-As soon as the stone gets broken at the other end of the first side, the bridge on that side becomes VISIBLE for all to see. (it DOES NOT, however, stop shuffling tiles, so the rest of that side will still need to get across, but shouldn't take as much effort as the first guy.)

-Repeat for side 2.

-All deaths send people to the center room just as now, thus your side of the raid could run out of people if you make too many mistakes, or you may just find that after goggles, you have too many people having to get rezzed mid-fight.

Abbot issues to address:

-people finishing a puzzle and going AFK for several minutes, or sit there and stare at nothing but stars or water. (should be mostly fixed, or at least spread out a little so that people don't feel like they can get up and take a shower mid-raid, and even when they do have time to do nothing, they can actually see the active puzzle being worked on.)

-Having no chance of completing without prior knowledge of the raid. (should be somewhat fixed, as now you can simply see two portals, and thus you split the raid in half and deal with each one as it comes. Granted 12 people who have never done it still probably have little chance, but its not 0!)

-Crippling lag of doom during fighting. (...I ain't a miracle worker)

Anyway my main gripe with the abbot raid as-is is the fact that, as long as I'm not in goggles, I literally have time to go take a shower or get fast food after my puzzle is done. I have nothing to say, nothing to look at, nothing helpful at all to do except sit there for an unacceptable amount of time. And yes every time I've taken advantage of the abbot 'wait-time' to go do something that takes like 15 minutes, I've returned with 1 or 2 minutes to spare. This should not be occuring during a RAID. A RAID should be somewhat exciting. Even old Reaver was more exciting than watching a static field of stars for 20 minutes.

Although in line with that last couple sentences, I believe TITAN should be looked at after Abbot.

[bloodnose13]

maybe goggles "puzzle" could look diffrent, biggest problem in it is the need to tell others to start or stop moveing, there is a problem of delay on voice, but also the problem of common lag

maybe it should look like this, room with two levels, one with invisible tiles as it is now, and another one above it that has a glass floor (there would be a 1 use teleporter leading to the top lvl, that dissapears when someone is up on glass floor lvl), person guiding party would look through glass floor (glass floor would work like the glasses, makeing them obsolete, would remove the need to take them off afterwards) and ppl below would follow his movement by looking on mini map, this would lower the need for explaining where and how to move, also would make that movement much more precise. also glass floor on top lvl could have markings showing the tile borders to the one on it to make it even more precise

[~Cavalier9999]

Abbot is a level 17 raid on normal.

As a matter of game design, I think it is reasonable that a pug group of 20's should be able to complete it on normal most of the time. This is not how it is working and it should be fixed. Nerfing tiles in some way and adjusting the final fight to be equivalent in difficulty to shroud part 5, for normal, is badly needed.

Not everything needs to be geared for the uber elite. People who want hard, elite or epic levels of difficulty should have that option and should get loot drops that scale accordingly. However, normal should not be a fail-fest for over level toons.

[Vanshilar]

Or you can change your raid strategy. When we run Abbot, asteroids is usually the last one to finish (simply because it's more or less timed), and it's neck-and-neck whether ice or tiles finishes first. Lately I think we've had more resets due to asteroids messing up (people not going in fast enough, invisible asteroids or repeated misfiring at an asteroid or whatever) than the other two puzzles combined.

If your raid strategy involves sticking the majority of the group in one objective (asteroids) so that they wait around for the other objectives, not to mention have no backup for the other objectives, it's more an issue of group resource allocation IMO than problems with the raid itself. No different than if the raid leader says only one person is allowed to solve the floor puzzles in Shroud part 3 and everyone else is on water duty. Of course you will have issues with everyone else waiting around when that's the strategy being used. And as mentioned already, it's also an issue of willingness to learn how the puzzles work on your own rather than everyone expecting "someone else" to do it for them or "someone else" to teach. Anyone is free to take a buddy into Abbot, two-man the initial fight (it shouldn't be that difficult), and is guaranteed to get one of the puzzles that they can practice: how to do tiles together, how to do ice together, or how to do asteroids together. There's also online resources on how to do each of the puzzles, so they shouldn't be too difficult to learn.

Abbot has issues with lag and is pretty lag-sensitive, not to mention other issues like wands mis-firing (although again, that can be somewhat mitigated by raid strategy), but I don't think the puzzles are the issue at the moment. The issues with Abbot are more about the actual fight with the boss in terms of long and tedious elite fights due to the inflated HP and that casters are not particularly useful in the raid but the loot is caster-oriented. Those are more worth addressing I think than the puzzles.

However, normal should not be a fail-fest for over level toons.

I think it's only a fail-fest for people who don't learn the raid. That's also the case with many other raids and I don't think that's a problem. For example, if you don't know the mechanics of Reaver's Fate it is unlikely that you will complete, simply because 1) you may not know what to do during reverse gravity and die on the spikes 2) you may not know you shouldn't kill the guy until all 9 orbs are lit and kill him prematurely, thus failing the raid 3) you may not know what to do or where to go after all 9 orbs are lit 4) lastly, you have to get the end puzzle in the correct one position out of 6^4 = 1296 possible positions so you have 0.08% chance of getting it right on any particular try. And it's a level 14 raid! Should be cakewalk for level 20s! Nope, just like (almost) any other raid, understanding the mechanics are what's important for completions, not just simply leveling.

The OP is talking about having done ice and asteroids many times, and takes a perspective of everyone waiting at a bottleneck, which indicates lack of understanding of how to rearrange the raid strategy around that bottleneck. That's not an issue with the raid itself, but of how players are choosing to go about completing it. You are initially given only 4 sets of boulders in asteroids. That's an indication of the maximum number of players that need to be (or should be) in there, but most groups take that as the minimum instead, and then complain about how boring the raid is for them to wait for the few remaining players.

[Tobril]

willingness to learn how the puzzles work on your own rather than everyone expecting "someone else" to do it for them or "someone else" to teach....so they shouldn't be too difficult to learn.

You’re rather foolishly presuming there are people who want to learn and people who want to teach.

Both tend to be a bit on the rare side.

Why learn puzzles when you can just sleep in roids and collect your loot afterwards?