Feedback Thread: Defiler of the Just

[KookieKobold]

Feel free to leave your feedback on the new raid here!

[Steve_Howe]

My hopes are twofold:

1) it's fun

and

2) it doesn't take too long to run

High hopes indeed?

[XbaileyX]

Things I liked:
-Very Amrath, it fits
-Blades
-Middle fight requires a bit of teamwork and coordination

Things I would like to see changed:
- Real endfight. If you have a short raid the boss should at least be a huge, big nasty boss. Make him hurt. Make us work for it. The need for a tank and healer would be awesome. This feels like we did ToD part 1 and 2, we are missing part 3. Let us in the tower, give us a real boss to fight.
- General damge. incoming and outging. We should be struggling with anything under 10 ppl.
- Dc's? Your need insane dc's but have no real use for them bc the mobs die to quick anyway.


All that said and I done, if we get one fix. Give us another room, with another boss, and make him huge and nasty. Please.

[Rys]

Hitting live: 10 from 10 raids bugged because of the mob stuck in the wall.

[Wizza]

So this raid needs some serious, serious tweaks to be entertaining.

I have only 1 really positive point: the damage of blades on Epic Normal. It was about 500+ dmg per tick and it was actually fun dying in those. I think they are bugged but my suggestion is to keep the damage to 500 in each difficulty. Otherwise, rescale it a bit better: 500 on Elite, 400 on Hard and 300 on Normal. Don't go lower than that or they become the new Shroud blades, where everyone just ignores them.

On the other parts of the raid: it started out good, with ballistas and the first room of blades with the bosses and trash there. It was fun and chaotic. And then the boredom began. In this raid, all you do is run around in circle killing some trash. That's about it. There is no strategy involved, no thinking, no teamwork even required. At the beginning of the quest, you say: A, B, C, D on portal to the left; E F G H on portal to the right; the rest run around for archons. This is it, literally. We duo'ed it and got bored at some point (besides raid bugging out but that's normal), can't imagine the pikefest with 12 people.

Major, major issue: every, every, EVERY. SINGLE. TRASH. MOB. is Orange or Rednamed. You think you can dance the orange named or neg level them? Too bad, Orthons and Barbazus are IMMUNE to everything because of..reasons. Good luck wizards in the raid! Every mob trash has like 40k HP, good luck any kind of user with limited damage (any Damage dealing casters)!

End fight: sorry, have not seen one. Unless Hetaria was the raid boss. Killing the Worm is not required, just kill her and..raid ends. Needs a major overhaul.

Way, way too short. Way too much "do the same thing" over and over. I think blades are really fun on Normal right now and should be kept as they are but that was for me the only fun part of the raid, honestly.


By the way, I'm still lost in the raid looking for a shrine. Has anyone seen one? /sarcasm Hello Devs, we are casters, we need SP. No, we don't want to TR to barbs, thanks.

Also, why are there champs on Hard and Elite?

[Vellrad]

My hopes are twofold:

1) it's fun

and

2) it doesn't take too long to run

High hopes indeed?

so mod fest again?

[MarDeRoam]

Took a look at the raid with a lvl 28 druid (+700 HP/+2200SP) that i just lvled up in the dojo, no PL or endgame/raid gear other then the bit of loot out of the centre cabinet.

Stepped in on EN (i'm a very casual player) to just get a feel and look, got 2 joiners, a warlock and an arti/rogue kinda char (didnt take a good look at the build)

First few mobs were rather easy but the blades weren't, doing over 900 damage a tick (i died a few times to them and checked combat log each time, all were over 900)

Got to the middle part and kinda got a feel for what to do but will need more runs to better understand.
Endfight was same deadly blades again, 1 hit and dead. Think i saw a boss lady and a big wurm but it was rather messy to have a good look around.
Failed the raid there so didn't get all the way to the end.

Was fun to see the raid, not fun were those +900 blades on EN.

[Ladislaio]

All that said and I done, if we get one fix. Give us another room, with another boss, and make him huge and nasty. Please.

+9002


Yes. Even if you just copy and paste the ToD endfight or LoB or the entire VoD raid fight and amp up the stats to fit level 30 content.


Thought: Some way to see progression through the halt the reinforcements / save the archons; that would make it feel like the quest was actually moving along.

Second Thought: (I can have two sometimes!): Maybe the blades are a solution to the complaint of people just farming raids on EN - Buff the damage in EN so it is harder than EE, then nobody will farm it on EN! Good idea.

[The_Human_Cypher]

I enjoyed the raid and found it a decent challenge even on Epic Normal. The raid design is interesting and may be unique in DDO (I can't think of anything like this offhand). 'Defiler' will be one of the more run low level raids in the game.

[XbaileyX]

I don't think any of us care if its from another game

[Barbarbar]

If you don`t mind some drunk suggestions some valid points were made.

No_Worries stayed with us after the Raid completion and we discussed more changes.

[axel15810]

Ran this 4 times yesterday.

First attempt was EN solo, second was EN 4 manned, third was EE and 4th was EH with an almost full raid group. The EH run was with Braegan and both the EE and EH runs were with the dev KookieKobold.

- Trash mob DPS needs to be increased substantially on EN and EH. I'm not yet sure about where EE is at, something was killing my party members left and right on EE although I didn't experience it. It's hard to make a judgement until champs are removed. EN trash was way too easy when I was soloing. Your design goal isn't to make raids solo content right? I shouldn't be able to just stand there with little concern taking 100% of the aggro and get beat on in a raid that is supposed to be scaled up to 12 people. If not for the autofail condition this would be a breeze to solo on EN on a large number of builds.

- Blade damage I know isn't WAI, but 200 for EN, 300 for EH and 450 for EE seems about right when all is said and done. You should have to be weary of blades on any difficulty. Being 2 shotted on EE, 3 shotted on EH and 4 shotted on EN seems fair. I like this part of the raid, makes you have to be careful and on your toes.

- Take out the gather mechanic, unless it's there for lag reasons. It doesn't add anything, just gets annoying if someone goes AFK or is having CPU issues it gives one person the ability to halt the raid...it forces you to have to restart the raid or wait for that person to come back.

- As many have mentioned, you need to make some of the trash non-red named so DC casters aren't useless. I believe every trash mob is red named. DC casters have nothing to do. There needs to be a way to CC the trash, as mentioned above increase trash DPS to compensate for this so difficulty doesn't get even easier. That would kill 2 birds with one stone. It would solve the problems of not enough roles required in this raid and DC casters having nothing to do.

- How about have 1 or 2 very high DPS mobs spawn from the portals randomly somewhere on the map (have it respawn if killed as a disincentive to actually kill it)? It would give the raid a tanking role. I could imagine people looking for this mob and assigning a tank to pull it away. Just an idea, but you could give it some kind of anti-magic aura similar to the intercession aura the death knights in MoD have so the tank couldn't self heal, giving the raid a healer role as well.

- Length was disappointing. I wanted to enter that cave at the end and continue. It's OK to have short raids but considering we only get new content ~4 times a year, if the raid is this short I want 2 of them in the pack.

- The split up mechanic is fine. Tracking down the archons is sorta interesting.

- The endfight needs work. There's no party mechanics required, just a straight beatdown. I want to see more to it than that. Hopefully the omissions Cordovan mentioned above will make this better once they are put in.

I'd like to see more party play required. Other than splitting up to track down archons there's really no party coordination required here. The only thing the raid requires is DPS. There's no use for support roles and I hate that considering this is a raid. I want to see tanking, healing and CC roles involved perhaps through the ideas I mentioned above.

My reaction to the raid is mixed. It's OK. I'm a little bit disappointed overall. I like the blades, tracking down archons is kinda interesting but overall the raid is a little too short and simple. It's pretty much a straight beatdown. I want there to be more party play involved and the endfight to be more climatic. I want roles and party coordination to be involved more.

[Steve_Howe]

so mod fest again?

I'm ok with that. I ran MoD close to 300 times.

[davmuzl]

If the main challenge in the last 3 raids was not to keep the number of trash mobs low I would like the raid. At the moment I just want to see some big bosses like LoB.
I like the big room with the different levels and ramps, it's much nicer than a simple arena.

The blade damage seemed fine to me (considering the damage from elite should have been for norm and the other way round).

I don't know exactly where people have to gather, but it felt like we had to gather at the second gate. If this is the case please change it so as long as everybody is somewhere in the room the fight starts.
I am also a bit worried that this mechanic might be very annoying when running with a pug. I am not looking forward to trying to keep 12 people alive at the same time if half of them could be idiots.

Overall the raid was way too short when we did it. If it stays like this, it will be the same thing as with MoD. The majority of players who actually want to run it will do it within the first few weeks using raid timer bypasses. Whoever wants to get the items later will have a hard tiem finding a group.
It won't be a case of under 10 minute runs, because the archons need some time to spawn, but I think just adding a few big bossfights is the best change.

The final bossfight should also take much longer.
There should be an optional objective for the worm, similar to the kill suulomades objective in ToD.
If hope the green warning thing for the worm spitting attack gets replaced. My idea would to have it roar to warn people and then just have it go into the direction the worm is facing.
The meteors could just fall down where the archon was when she left the area. In ToD it wasn't a huge problem either when the LoB fell on the group btw. It was something the group had to expect. Another option would be to have it fall down on whoever had aggro last.
I hope we don't get this stuff again in future content. I didn't like it in neverwinter and I don't like it here. Warning like the audio hint in LoB or the flames on Velahs nose work pretty well imo.

There should be a counter for the number of archons rescued and the number of archons that have to be rescued, so people can track their progress.

I don't like it when monsters like pit fiends, beholders, dragons, etc are treated as regular mobs. These types of monsters should be the bosses in the dungeons. You could also put horned devils in this category.
The different enemies during the archon rescue phase would ideally be similar to what spwans during the bloodplate fight in chronoscope.


I think the archon rescue phase could be a lot more interesting with some different dynamics. Here is how I would do it:

Remove the reinforcement objective. The mobs should be dangerous enough, that if too many of them are in the area, the party just wipes.
Instead of having a fixed failure number for the archons, the rescued archons should be trying to get the portals closed. In order to do that they have to be protected (healed and mobs should be kept away). Once the first portal is closed a boss appears. Make every portal start with a number of hp, let'S say 500. Every archon in the room deals 1DPS to the portal as long as no enemies are in the room.
Once the second portal is closed a second boss appears.
The archons help fighting the boss before they start closing the second portal.
After the second portal is closed 2 bosses spawn.
The majority of enemies shouldn't be red or orange named. I would have the abishai, which are trying to corrupt the archons (or kill or whatever they are doing to them) red named. Have a few red named horned devils (1 per wave). A few orange named orthons and/or bearded devils and have the rest be usual trash, so there is stuff to CC (btw have we seen any warlocks among the enemies?).

These are just some ideas to make the big part of the raid more interesting. Doesn't haev to be exactly like this, but I think with the concep a lot more could be done.

[davmuzl]

Some more thoughts on markers that warn players, like the meteor ones.

After the LoB jump he either lands on the edge N/E/S/W or on a random player. To avoid wipes people scattered and healed up whoever he landed on.
When we did the quest a lot we always had healers in the group. As a result the mechanic worked fine.

On the other hand there is damage bursts like the abbots energy burst, which I personally find really annoying. The main reason for that is that melees are punished if they don't have a lot of selfhealing by this and there are no healers to heal the full party back up.

If the whole defiler of the just raid requires a setup that includes characters which are specifically focused on healing and then probably also tanks, a marker propably isn't necessary at all.
If it works out like every other quest/raid atm it's propably better to keep them.

In the end it's not that important. I would just like different solutions in future content. For this one the focus should be on making the archon rescue phase less about just killing mobs and more about coordination, adding strong interesting bosses and making it take longer (I don't think it's unreasonable to expect hour long completions on the first ee completions).

[Ladislaio]

'Defiler' will be one of the more run low level raids in the game.

Don't you think that it might be a problem if the latest and highest level content's new raid is something that you would describe as a "low level raid"?

[sudzz]

I enjoyed the raid and found it a decent challenge even on Epic Normal. The raid design is interesting and may be unique in DDO (I can't think of anything like this offhand). 'Defiler' will be one of the more run low level raids in the game.

Low level raid? It was level 30 on EN with no heroic version that I saw.

[JOTMON]

So this raid needs some serious, serious tweaks to be entertaining.

I have only 1 really positive point: the damage of blades on Epic Normal. It was about 500+ dmg per tick and it was actually fun dying in those. I think they are bugged but my suggestion is to keep the damage to 500 in each difficulty. Otherwise, rescale it a bit better: 500 on Elite, 400 on Hard and 300 on Normal. Don't go lower than that or they become the new Shroud blades, where everyone just ignores them.

On the other parts of the raid: it started out good, with ballistas and the first room of blades with the bosses and trash there. It was fun and chaotic. And then the boredom began. In this raid, all you do is run around in circle killing some trash. That's about it. There is no strategy involved, no thinking, no teamwork even required. At the beginning of the quest, you say: A, B, C, D on portal to the left; E F G H on portal to the right; the rest run around for archons. This is it, literally. We duo'ed it and got bored at some point (besides raid bugging out but that's normal), can't imagine the pikefest with 12 people.

Major, major issue: every, every, EVERY. SINGLE. TRASH. MOB. is Orange or Rednamed. You think you can dance the orange named or neg level them? Too bad, Orthons and Barbazus are IMMUNE to everything because of..reasons. Good luck wizards in the raid! Every mob trash has like 40k HP, good luck any kind of user with limited damage (any Damage dealing casters)!

End fight: sorry, have not seen one. Unless Hetaria was the raid boss. Killing the Worm is not required, just kill her and..raid ends. Needs a major overhaul.

Way, way too short. Way too much "do the same thing" over and over. I think blades are really fun on Normal right now and should be kept as they are but that was for me the only fun part of the raid, honestly.


By the way, I'm still lost in the raid looking for a shrine. Has anyone seen one? /sarcasm Hello Devs, we are casters, we need SP. No, we don't want to TR to barbs, thanks.

Also, why are there champs on Hard and Elite?

I am sure I read somewhere that this is a non-caster raid.

[davmuzl]

The bossfight now works properly.

Mobs are generally stronger.

Blade damage has been fixed.

The number of reinforcements that can stay alive at the same time has been increased.

Is that everything that's changed since the first time we saw the raid?

[crazycaren]

I've run the raid a few times all on normal (Khyber). With a really good group with high to very high DPS it went OK, lag was the main problem. Other times with pugs we didn't get the boss down fast enough and were smoked by the bombardment. Could the killers circles be reduced to 1 at a time so you don't get instant party wipe? And yes, even high evasion, reflex, dodge toons were getting smashed to -1800 hp.

On normal difficulty I think it should be able to be completed by regular (i.e.not uber) people working together. Good coordination and team work really don't matter if the yellow circles are everywhere wiping everyone out.