Epic Gianthold - The Fall of Truth

[SqueakofDoom]

This thread is for discussing the Epic Gianthold Raid: The Fall of Truth.

[DogMania]

All I can say is that it was fun because it was none stop action and therefore quite hard to work out exactly what order to do things in, but we managed it.
Oh and this was normal, dread to think what EH or EE would be like, but all in all a laugh

[patang01]

Our group did it on EH and we almost wiped from the dracolich breath. But it was glorious.

I love this raid.

It seems that the reaver is bugged - he doesn't really do anything (maybe it's supposed to be like that) but everything else is great.


And I finally feel like there's an conclusion on the whole story line that starts from the beginning of the intro movie (with the giant coming out of the water). This is the end.

Now we only have to end the Droaam thingy and some other stuff - but this seems to be over. And I love it.

[Ginarrbrik]

First EE attempt: distracted by how AMAZING everything looked (especially the dracolich hehe) and got caught by surprise when the floor fell out, so we wiped in about 30 secs :P

Second EE attempt: lasted several minutes, but the damage from the dragon breaths were eventually too much to handle. with that said, I don't think it should be nerfed at all. It will be the perfect challenge to give the top-notch players something to figure out and work on.

Then entered epic hard and completed in about 20 mins. It was fairly easy and straightforward but was a TON of fun. I mean, don't dragons make EVERYTHING more fun? But seriously, I love how there's always a lot going on at once in a lot of different places (I was on my healer, so this made it exciting.) No more "Piker's Fate". It required teamwork and communication, just like a raid should. I'm sure it wouldn't be so easy if we didn't have such a good group. Definitely my new favorite raid. The loot seemed appropriate for the level of difficulty so I'll definitely be running this again and again. I'd much rather have a really short, but action-packed raid as opposed to a longer, but more boring raid (like Web, where you just do a lot of running hehe)

Well done devs, well done.

PS: the only main bug i noticed, that was also mentioned above... the Stormreaver (like most other giants) was almost completely unresponsive when attacked. other than that, super smooth and for loot, we got the pendant, armbands, and several comms - seems like you get 1 on eN, up to 2 on eH, and up to 3 on eE, which makes sense.

[Matuse]

Is the 16 hour raid lockout timer something permanent, or just for quicker testing on Lammania?

[Beruria]

Completed EE with Sirgog's Group, Its definitely a good Raid, everybody has to be active at all times or it could go downhill very fast.The Major Bug was the Stormreaver. But still enjoyable.

Good Job Devs

[sirgog]

Oh my god, this raid was amazing. Completed EH and EE both first try though EE was tough and used a level of consumables that would not be sustainable, mainly because we died a lot. For the record I was on a not overly geared first life spellsinger, albeit in a maxxed ED. The character has no CITW loot, only one EE U15/16 item and no +4 tomes let alone +5s.




An outline. MAJOR SPOILERS including both storyline and strategy spoilers. Highlight black text to read this (it contains some feedback too)


- Phase 1: Fight three dragon/giant pairs at once (as in Tor).
- Phase 2: Upon first dragon/giant pair dying, Truthful One enters the fray.
- Phase 3: Upon second dragon/giant pair dying, Truthful One conjures a crystal in the sky which must be ranged DPS'ed down. It attacks back with a ray that does 446 force damage (EE) and can't be dodged/mitigated that we saw.
- Phase 4: Upon killing crystal and third dragon/giant pair, Truthful One dominates the Stormreaver. They become a dragon/giant pair. (Note the Reaver does not currently attack the raid in any way). Truthful One gains ability to summons some respawning trash.
- Phase 5 (optional, extreme difficulty, not 100% certain on the trigger condition but we got this on EH and not EE): If in phase 3 you killed the third dragon/giant pair before the crystal, Truthful One raises all three dragons as undead. If possible, avoid triggering this phase as it does not seem to provide more loot. Kill Reaver and Truthful simultaneously to complete the raid. If you don't trigger this, phase 4 continues and again you complete when killing the two bosses at once.

A warning: The arena is large. Healing range will be an issue often.

This raid was intense non-stop action. A rundown of the foes:

- Giant of Silence: Arcane CC caster. Drops devastating discoballs. Absolute primary target to kill in phase 1 as his discoballs and other spells mess up kiting. Kiting is key to this raid in a lot of ways.
- Giant of Confusion: Summoner. Conjures air elementals, wraiths, and other nasties. Was our phase 2 target. At all times, air elementals are to be killed on sight. I think this one was the one that spams Destruction too - Death Ward is not enough as you'll die repeatedly, so be wearing a Deathblock item. He also has random aggro and seems impossible to intimidate (or his Intim DC is much higher than everything else). He also Deathwards his elementals but only with the single target Deathward spell so you can often instakill them.
- Giant of something else: Not nearly as dangerous. Don't remember much of what he does.

All three giants are relatively safe to be in melee range of. They hit hard but slowly (200 damage per 2.5 seconds or so on EE in a frontal cleave are, much much less on EH, can't hit targets behind them in melee). All Giants cast Heal on themselves but have quite low healing amplification (they might heal 1200hp or so on EE, it's not much). HP estimate maybe a quarter million each (EE) - enough to last a while when the raid focuses on one but not to drag on for ages like Suulomades did in elite TOD runs at the level 20 cap.


- The three paired dragons:
These have moderately dangerous melee attacks and a devastating breath.
The breath attacks deal moderate amounts of damage and inflict a debuff that causes you to take a -50 Reflex save penalty and double incoming damage of their particular element. In other words, you do not want to be hit twice by it. Improved evasion toons and toons that stack HP will survive the breath.
We kited these around the outside of the arena and peeled off the one that was paired to the giant we were focusing on when ready.
We saw no tell warning of their breath attack and found the dragons effectively untankable as a result. The breath would outright kill any character without 1000hp or improved evasion, even on hard. If the intention is for these to be tanked not kited, the breath needs to be dialed down in damage or the -50 penalty toned down (if this is done, giving them an ability to snare players could be considered too)

- The Truthful One:
Dracolich. Has multiple breath weapons and occasionally flies up to above the arena to throw fireballs (much like Veraxina in the King's Forest).
His melee attacks are deadly to anyone but a defensively specced melee and hit a very wide frontal cleave radius. I was hit for over 400 in one instance on EE (not a crit, minimal PRR). In other words, attack him from behind and move to keep flanking as he adjusts. He will also rear up and unleash a devastating breath attack that seems to be all three little dragon breaths at once. For this reason we mostly kite him, and when tanking him in the final phase we have a lot of tank deaths to mistakes made responding to the breath tell.
Presumably he is meant to have DR 30/blunt and good but he does not currently.

- The Stormreaver:
Bugged, just a sack of hitpoints. Presumably he'll need to be tanked when fixed. Important - if he is intended to function similarly to his heroic counterpart, he needs the ability to turn faster as the Reaver can't handle a player running tight circles around him.



As for feedback:

Firstly, outstanding design. This is everything I like about Lord of Blades, minus the bad things (long run in to retry after a wipe, silly loot system, long phases of quiet punctuated by short phases of intense action). It's intense start to finish, especially when someone with a key job dies and you need to change tack fast. (IIRC we had 50 or so deaths on EE so this happens a lot).

There's jobs for all sorts of toons too - toons focused on sustained DPS, on defense, on ranged DPS, burst DPS, instakills - it's all used.

And I absolutely LOVE the loot system. Normal drops 'base' versions of the items and 1 Heroic Comm. Hard drops tier 2 items with 1 or 2 comms, and elite tier 3 items with 2 or 3 comms. So if your guild feels EE is beyond you, you can run EH and pay comms and relics to get the tier 3 items, and if you miss a run you can join an EN PUG and feel you will get something out of it. But EE will get you there much faster.

Others will post the loot in other threads but it seems solid.

Question: Is it your design intention that everyone needs to go out of their way to focus on elemental absorption for EE? I somewhat expect to see a lot of people looking to wear a Primal armor or Epic Demon Scale or similar and maybe even carrying TOD rings or Shroud weapons with specific elemental absorbs.

Suggested changes:

- Consider making one, two or all three of the dragons tankable. We considered it implausible to keep a tank alive through their breaths and so kited them. Non-evasion fullplate tanks are far behind improved evasion ones for tanking the dragons and even the dracolich, and the giants don't really need much tanking. If you do this, give one (and only one) dragon a ranged snare ability or some other way to menace kiting players effectively, preferably something that only interferes with movement like Hamstring, not the silly binding chains.
- Add a major optional for allowing the Truthful One to zombify the three dragons and killing them in that form, that awards more loot. AFAICT noone has beaten that fight on EE yet.
- Add some SP regeneration mechanic. We are fighting eight bosses (11 with optional hard mode), a crystal with a lot of HP, and truly deadly trash.
- DR 30/blunt and good on the Truthful One, and lower his HP a little to keep his overall durability about the same.
- Stormreaver needs to turn quickly (like Arraetrikos, not like heroic Stormreaver) once he is unbugged.

[Jitty]

Completed two runs. One hard and one elite. We had a great group that communicated well and seemed to be well geared for the occasion. Keep that in mind because an undergeared group that didn't listen wouldn't have a good time in there on hard or elite :P

I was on my raid tank for both so most feedback will come from that perspective.

BTW, most fun I've had playing DDO in a very long time. This raid is an instant classic.

Problems:
1) Only real problem was that the stormreaver didn't do much. He stood there an accepted his beat down nicely.

The good:
1) Everyone was involved and nobody got to just stand there while an objective was completed. This is good design. We just tried to learn the mechanics in the first run, but the second run we tried to split up roles and it worked pretty well. Ranged characters were really useful (kiting dragons while melee prepped giants).

2) The raid mechanics were easy enough to figure out. Newer players wouldn't have a hard time with kill order or what they should be focusing on hitting.

3) It was fun

4) It was fun

Comments:
1) the giant of confussion seemed to switch agro a lot. Thematicly that makes perfect sense, but I failed an intim on elite that was a roll of 19 +98. I had no ship buffs or fire finisher at that point, but I do have a large guild slotted shield with +4 intim in it which can no longer be obtained. Those things coupled together made him hard to control. My will saves aren't the best, but I failed literally every attempt to save from his disco balls (Freedom Of Movement didn't prevent this). Also when the giants are agroed on you and you melee them, they back up every so often. This meant break enchantment was vital because I had to keep running through the discos.

2) The cloud giant, whose name I can't remeber, but its the one with dr that has no bypass. His ac (on elite) may be a bit high. I have 18 lvls of fighter so BAB in the 20s and got a LOT of glancing blows. I was using a +8 CITW weapon on him. By that time I had no ship buffs, but did have gh. I didn't have a greater giant bane weapon though so crafting one may help, but even a cannith crafted greater giant bane is only 1 more to hit. Melees with low to hits like bards, monks, and rogues may struggle.

3) Tanking any dragon in the raid was a death sentance on hard and elite. I started out with reflex saves in the mid 60s, but the debuffs from the dragon breath meant that if you were standing in front of a dragon, you would die pretty quick. This meant that we got a ranged character to get the agro of any dragons and melee ran around behind them trying to beat on them while the ranged guy kited them. Maybe we missed the tells of when a dragon was going to unleash its breath. If there was no tell, there probably should be so people can avoid the breath. It was a bit annoying running around after a dragon hitting it every 5 to 10 seconds.

4) The stormreaver's mithral DR. I used a celestia and an antique great axe. This was fine, but monks and ranged characters may struggle to find top tier dps weapons that bypass dr as they must be metalline. I thought silver weapons would work but I was wrong. I suppose a cannith crafted metalline of greater giant bane may be the way to go. Once the stormreaver is working correctly this may be an issue.

5) The truthful one has no DR? Not even /bludgening? Ok with me but seems odd.

6) the melee damage that the mobs did to us in the raid seemed well balanced, but I had 140ish prr 17% dodge and 125 AC. Monks were getting 2 shotted but in an elite raid I think that is acceptable.

7) The truthful one has a pelvic bone sticking out of his (safe to say its a him) skelleton. Please keep that.

8) It was pretty frantic in there so people were scattered all doing something. That was great because it was fun, but it made it hard on the healers. Maybe add a ledge or something for people to stand on that want to stay out of combat. That way, people that need a raise dead know where to run to and healers don't have to worry about trash too much. The spot should still be vulnerable to dragon's breath though so divines have to pay attention and bad tactics can still wipe the raid.

[sirgog]

6) the melee damage that the mobs did to us in the raid seemed well balanced, but I had 140ish prr 17% dodge and 125 AC. Monks were getting 2 shotted but in an elite raid I think that is acceptable.

As the squishiest melee in the group (Spellsinger, light armor, 570odd HP), nothing was two-shotting me in melee except Old Truthful. The giants hit around 200. (Truthy hit me for 320-420 but I only got hit by him when I made a mistake or we had a tank death)

I did get two-shot when I had a lot of death penalties though. I won the /deathcount with 8 of the raid's 44 deaths.


Oh and major congrats to Miztophey. No deaths.

[EatSmart]

SPOILERS

Ran EE 3 times, final run wiped a few mins after the truthful one resed all the dragons again. I blame shade for foolishly saying something optimistic over voice as 8 people immediately died ^^.

Mechanics: calling out "resists please" over voice appears to call down a 900-1000 point lightning strike on the caller.

General feedback: I had an enormous amount of fun, and I like the loot distribution method/philosophy. I like that EE is rewarding in the sense of significantly reducing the grind to get a "completed/final" version of the item, rather than a version uniquely restricted to obtaining in EE only.

I dont currently see a solution to completing the raid on EE without pots, but i might be missing one or more mechanics of the fight. (scrolls will have range issues as they cant be cast with enlarge, and both scrolls and SLAs will have speed issues as they cant keep up with the spike damage when its happening) I dont personally have a problem with this, as I like that there's content in the game that's /that/ hard on EE. If your intention was to scale EE to be completeable without pots though, the observation stands.

Stormreaver piked all raid. Although this was helpful when he turned on us.

The doomsday device was firing out beams at people, but no mass carnage appeared to happen. I'm suspect this is a bug.

I had a lot of fun.

A lot.

Hope the popcorn was tasty

[Jitty]

As the squishiest melee in the group (Spellsinger, light armor, 570odd HP), nothing was two-shotting me in melee except Old Truthful. The giants hit around 200. (Truthy hit me for 320-420 but I only got hit by him when I made a mistake or we had a tank death)

I did get two-shot when I had a lot of death penalties though. I won the /deathcount with 8 of the raid's 44 deaths.


Oh and major congrats to Miztophey. No deaths.

Sorry it was so intense in there I must have lost track of when this was happening. It must have been the stacked up death penalties. Didn't mean to exagerate

[4tonmantis]

I decided to wait and soak in what the raid was before posting my feedback.

This is currently Endgame. It is a level 24 Raid. It has possibly the easiest flag in the game and is possibly the shortest raid as well.

While I did find that the initial play was very frantic and kinetic, the whole thing is rather abrupt.
I understand that the AI is not working properly right now for Storm Reaver. Outside of that though, seeing everything just kind of happen, then you fight. I completed this on a rogue that didn't have half of his enhancements trained (my main contribution was scrolling raise dead repeatedly) and an archer.
It was extremely unclear to the second group I ran in (we wiped) exactly what was supposed to happen so I very very carefully explained it to the next group (3 total attempts, 2 successful).

From a story telling standpoint, there's a major flaw about why didn't the dracolich simply control Stormreaver before.. which, sure you can make up whatever.. but it's a huge hole in the plot/lore.

In my mind, if you wanted to make this more interesting.. Have the dragons/giants come in first.. I don't honestly know what's going on with them.. why they're paired off.. maybe I missed something.. either way, they all come in and players fight in the main floor.. When the first pair falls, THEN boom.. there goes the floor. . This should scramble up whatever the strategy was a little.

The dancing balls are a little annoying as are the mobs.. I guess that's supposed to be challenging..but it's just a big mess. Manyshot destroyed whatever was bugging me and I just kited the dragons around plinking at them. When they came back as spectral dragons or whatever, people were confused as to whether or not we should kill them or if they would come back etc. That's ok too.. I'd rather people be unsure than have hand-holding... it's Epic Endgame.. there shouldn't be hand-holding at this point.

On that note.. if you compare flagging and gameplay of heroic endgame (shav/vale) on Elite at level, the experience, from a player's perspective is not a linear growth. I feel like Epic = Downhill unless Elite.. which jumps it up to ludicrous.

I did like that it requires coordination and flexibility (it's very likely that the healers will die, raise scrolls/clickies for non-healers are a must) which is something I think is vital to endgame.

I don't hate the concept behind this raid but it seems like the way it currently plays out is a chaotic dogpile followed by a standard boss fight followed by a lot of kiting. Compare this to TOD or Shroud and you'll find that the game itself feels entirely different.

[maddmatt70]

It sounds too easy on ee. Groups completing on first try on ee shrug. Oh well since I did not try my opinion does not matter, but as a matter of principle ee should not be completeable on the first try.

[Grosbeak07]

It sounds too easy on ee. Groups completing on first try on ee shrug. Oh well since I did not try my opinion does not matter, but as a matter of principle ee should not be completeable on the first try.

Keep in mind this is lammania with mana pots flowing freely. Sort of skews the difficulty. What I've found with this raid (I did not complete, but we got through a good chunk of it) is you can simply brute force your way through. Not as likely on live, where resources will be more limited.

I had a ton of fun with it. Its clearly my idea of a raid.

[maddmatt70]

Keep in mind this is lammania with mana pots flowing freely. Sort of skews the difficulty. What I've found with this raid (I did not complete, but we got through a good chunk of it) is you can simply brute force your way through. Not as likely on live, where resources will be more limited.

I had a ton of fun with it. Its clearly my idea of a raid.

Teth or somebody should solo it quick - that may convince the devs to upgrade teh difficulty, but probably not.

[sirgog]

Keep in mind this is lammania with mana pots flowing freely. Sort of skews the difficulty. What I've found with this raid (I did not complete, but we got through a good chunk of it) is you can simply brute force your way through. Not as likely on live, where resources will be more limited.

I had a ton of fun with it. Its clearly my idea of a raid.

In our run the wizards chainchugged pots the whole time. Divines didn't chainchug but did use a fair few. Maybe 100 pots on the casters, and 50 total on the rest of the raid.

We used less pots than early VOD runs (probably the most mana pot intensive raid in DDO's history in the first week) but more than I remember using in early eChrono or early elite TOD runs. I didn't try elite CITW early but word is it was almost as resource intense as the early VOD runs (50-150 pots raidwide).


I compare it to a raid that's easy now because everyone forgets how many more pots are used in learning runs or server first runs than in farm runs.



Oh and this isn't getting soloed any time soon. Anyone with a debuff from the lesser dragon breath attacks can't survive the Truthful One's aggro.

[Ape_Man]

Keep in mind this is lammania with mana pots flowing freely . . .

How's that different from live?

[MattiG]

Teth or somebody should solo it quick - that may convince the devs to upgrade teh difficulty, but probably not.

It's definitely soloable, already duo'd, although the dracolich ate us. Fortunately, a double rainbow proc killed it shortly thereafter.



In all honesty, I'm not sure that the difficulty will be too out of line when ol' stormy is brought back online.

Even then, our EE completion wasn't easy by any means. We had lots of dot'ers and several AA's, and as Sirgog mentioned in another thread, it's unlikely we would have completed EE without running eH first.

[Jitty]

It sounds too easy on ee. Groups completing on first try on ee shrug. Oh well since I did not try my opinion does not matter, but as a matter of principle ee should not be completeable on the first try.

Sounds too easy on elite? Did you try it? If not I don't really see the value of this comment.

[patang01]

It sounds too easy on ee. Groups completing on first try on ee shrug. Oh well since I did not try my opinion does not matter, but as a matter of principle ee should not be completeable on the first try.

Keep in mind that a lot of players had recieved good loot the day before and taken advantage of the free leveling in the harbor so they had all destinies unlocked and was geared to the hilt.

I think that some of the success comes from the fact that there was no limit to resources including the gear itself. That's not going to be the norm on live.