Buggy Raiding on a weekend is not enjoyable.

[Alcides]

So the following things need to be fixed, especially on weekends when friends and family get together to raid to relax after a long week of school or work.

1) Fix the lag issues in the Curse of Strahd raid. Notably, if people starting dying in the heart phase, the lag just escalates to the point of 1 FPS for the entire party. To me this means you have some type of deadlocking going on which needs to be removed. I would guess it's something to do with the mob AI.

2) Too Hot To Handle: Tick damage is way too high even for normal. Took a party of well geared people in there tonight with Energy Sheath Fire and anything else people had for fire absorption, and still wiped from the escalating fire damage. In addition, the hit points on the Giant Forgewraiths is way too high. You get more than 2 of these up at once and the raid is over. Again the group I was in was more than capable of doing this raid on normal and I would say the difficulty is on par with an r5 which is unacceptable for a vanilla normal raid.

[-D_Rock-]

So the following things need to be fixed, especially on weekends when friends and family get together to raid to relax after a long week of school or work.

1) Fix the lag issues in the Curse of Strahd raid. Notably, if people starting dying in the heart phase, the lag just escalates to the point of 1 FPS for the entire party. To me this means you have some type of deadlocking going on which needs to be removed. I would guess it's something to do with the mob AI.

2) Too Hot To Handle: Tick damage is way too high even for normal. Took a party of well geared people in there tonight with Energy Sheath Fire and anything else people had for fire absorption, and still wiped from the escalating fire damage. In addition, the hit points on the Giant Forgewraiths is way too high. You get more than 2 of these up at once and the raid is over. Again the group I was in was more than capable of doing this raid on normal and I would say the difficulty is on par with an r5 which is unacceptable for a vanilla normal raid.

I totally agree. it reminds me of MOD when it first came out and was totally blown out of proportion. it needs dialed back for sure. for a normal raid, it surely felt like reaper x amount of skulls at minimum. im not complaining here at all. im saying balance needs to be preserved and devs need feedback to make these raids balanced for all. not just vet players but new as well and think about how they scale things currently. the raid currently is very much unbalanced to say the least. just my opinion. welcome to disagree all you want forumites, but im right and so is the original poster.

[Epicstorms]

I really like this raid and have completed it several times by now, but I indeed think it is over the top.

Raiding guilds should be deciding on the amount of skulls, not whether to run normal or hard imo.

Please let the casual people also have a chance to even run normal, or hard in a full group of decent people.
I like to pug raid occasionally as well, but ... ouch.

In the current state I'm just going to avoid running this in pugs as even normal it a disaster most of the times :P

[Vorachtin]

So the following things need to be fixed, especially on weekends when friends and family get together to raid to relax after a long week of school or work.

1) Fix the lag issues in the Curse of Strahd raid. Notably, if people starting dying in the heart phase, the lag just escalates to the point of 1 FPS for the entire party. To me this means you have some type of deadlocking going on which needs to be removed. I would guess it's something to do with the mob AI.

2) Too Hot To Handle: Tick damage is way too high even for normal. Took a party of well geared people in there tonight with Energy Sheath Fire and anything else people had for fire absorption, and still wiped from the escalating fire damage. In addition, the hit points on the Giant Forgewraiths is way too high. You get more than 2 of these up at once and the raid is over. Again the group I was in was more than capable of doing this raid on normal and I would say the difficulty is on par with an r5 which is unacceptable for a vanilla normal raid.

The fire dmg only really escalates if your group does poorly on puzzles, so there is a player solution for that. Same thing with the red giants, they are avoidable. Mechanics are mechanics.

[slarden]

The fire dmg only really escalates if your group does poorly on puzzles, so there is a player solution for that. Same thing with the red giants, they are avoidable. Mechanics are mechanics.

And this is the problem because it's effectively knowledge-based raid you have to execute very fast in - it's especially tough for puggers because you need a sizable group willing to suffer through the learning curve. If there is one consistent thing I've observed over the years is that when pug raids fails because there isn't enough people that know what to do people bail really fast. People join pugs with the expectation the leader knows enough to lead them to victory.

I think it would be helpful if there was a practice area for the puzzles since you can't simply go in normal to learn the raid as typically happened in the past. Raid groups will have enough people to stick with it and will master it quickly. Pug raiding will be much slower to develop or people will pass entirely - I hope it's not the latter. I had high hopes for Sharn raiding which didn't pan out due to lack of interest.

[Vorachtin]

And this is the problem because it's effectively knowledge-based raid you have to execute very fast in - it's especially tough for puggers because you need a sizable group willing to suffer through the learning curve. If there is one consistent thing I've observed over the years is that when pug raids fails because there isn't enough people that know what to do people bail really fast. People join pugs with the expectation the leader knows enough to lead them to victory.

I think it would be helpful if there was a practice area for the puzzles since you can't simply go in normal to learn the raid as typically happened in the past. Raid groups will have enough people to stick with it and will master it quickly. Pug raiding will be much slower to develop or people will pass entirely - I hope it's not the latter. I had high hopes for Sharn raiding which didn't pan out due to lack of interest.

Every other successful mmo has mechanics you have to learn, altho wow has LFR which dumbs raiding down. Something about this mmo in particular has a player base that just shows up expecting to win. and the devs dumb down raids which is bad for everyone.

[Yamani]

Every other successful mmo has mechanics you have to learn, altho wow has LFR which dumbs raiding down. Something about this mmo in particular has a player base that just shows up expecting to win. and the devs dumb down raids which is bad for everyone.

Problem is this raid is still very buggy. As a ranged the things I was noticing was: 1 invisible fanataics/forge workers(someone else said they where invisible). 2: skulls where floating so high they where going through the ceiling. 3: the sheer amount of evil damage is just to punish specific archetypes with no way for them to negate. Not to mention if you are color blind you can't see the puzzles or even the circle for massive fire damage.

[bracelet]

I sometimes wonder if they care whether people run the content or not. They have never shown a lot of interest in making raids accessible to casual gamers. I personally think that is a serious mistake. They could, in theory, make normal a fairly easy setting with minimal or even no loot drops just to encourage people to get together and learn it. If normal is certain failure for pugs, then the standard response will be why bother?

[slarden]

Every other successful mmo has mechanics you have to learn, altho wow has LFR which dumbs raiding down. Something about this mmo in particular has a player base that just shows up expecting to win. and the devs dumb down raids which is bad for everyone.

The only other games I played had nothing like this raid. In Neverwinter the raids can be hard, but you get a lower reward tier rather than outright failing like this raid. In the other 2 games I joined raids and there wasn't any sort of knowledge gating causing failure like this. And I am a super newb casual in those games and yet never had a problem completing.

As I said if they are going to put these type of things in the game it would be great to have a practice area since even on LN it's ridiculous if the group doesn't know what to do and it's hard to find enough people willing to struggle through the learning.

If anyone on Sarlona wants to figure it out I am happy to learn along with them with one of my winged characters. The usual pug raid leaders I've run with aren't running this raid at the moment. I definitely feel cheated by the xpac since there isn't a pug-friendly raid and am going into no spend mode for a while. I have no issue with difficulty - I have issue with a knowledge gated raid with no real good way for pugs to learn it.

[erethizon]

Every other successful mmo has mechanics you have to learn, altho wow has LFR which dumbs raiding down. Something about this mmo in particular has a player base that just shows up expecting to win. and the devs dumb down raids which is bad for everyone.

Unlike other games, DDO comes with 13 difficulty settings for each raid. With that in mind there is no need for the easiest setting to be too difficult for some groups to handle.

[blerkington]

I sometimes wonder if they care whether people run the content or not. They have never shown a lot of interest in making raids accessible to casual gamers. I personally think that is a serious mistake. They could, in theory, make normal a fairly easy setting with minimal or even no loot drops just to encourage people to get together and learn it. If normal is certain failure for pugs, then the standard response will be why bother?

Agree with the OP that some raids need to be looked at again for lag. Strahd can get pretty silly and the kinks should have really been worked out of it by now.

Too Hot to Handle is in a bad place at the moment. While I don't think any raids should be auto-complete even on the easiest setting, the raids do need to be accessible on normal to less able groups. There needs to be more of a margin for error in the lowest difficulty setting; it's very easy to get to a point in the new raid where it may not be possible to recover.

Two of the guild groups I regularly raid with on Khyber have completed the raid now so this opinion isn't a disguised complaint about my own lack of opportunity. In this case I think the developers have created content that will be essentially dead even for much of that proportion of the population that is still interested in raiding.

It's a mistake to kill the casual raiding scene like this in DDO. People who paid for the expansion have a legitimate reason to expect to be able to run this on the easiest setting even if they aren't plugged into the elite player raiding scene and/or running very strong characters.

Frankly, it just seems like more developer self-gratification and trolling at the expense of the community. There are thirteen difficulty settings for raids so make use of that spectrum to cater to more of your customers.

I'm also not a huge fan of very short raids that would be even shorter if they didn't involve repetition. This just seems like lazy design to me, similar to the shortchange of 2-3 minute long cogs quests. But I'm sure it is good for timer bypass sales just as adding BTC (instead of BTA) artifacts to end chests in Sharn will be good for income from chest rerolls.

Thanks.

[Epicstorms]

Unlike other games, DDO comes with 13 difficulty settings for each raid. With that in mind there is no need for the easiest setting to be too difficult for some groups to handle.

This!

[Vorachtin]

Unlike other games, DDO comes with 13 difficulty settings for each raid. With that in mind there is no need for the easiest setting to be too difficult for some groups to handle.

Unlike other games, ddo gives you just about the same gear on epic normal as reaper 10 (except for chance at minor reaper bonus) so it has to be careful adding another lower casual level. Its a downside to ddo that you can get great loot on casual/normal and on epic/reaper, you should get better loot (not chance at loot) on higher difficulties.

[Yamani]

Unlike other games, ddo gives you just about the same gear on epic normal as reaper 10 (except for chance at minor reaper bonus) so it has to be careful adding another lower casual level. Its a downside to ddo that you can get great loot on casual/normal and on epic/reaper, you should get better loot (not chance at loot) on higher difficulties.

One lightning blast from kor kaza on LN is 400, 1 attack from a skull on LN too hot to handle is 1.1k. Reworking that isnt dumbing it down but balancing it so a majority of the players who bought sharn can actually do the raid. Remember its these players that are paying for the servers to stay up too. Keeping them happy is better then keeping 1 elitist happy.

[slarden]

Unlike other games, ddo gives you just about the same gear on epic normal as reaper 10 (except for chance at minor reaper bonus) so it has to be careful adding another lower casual level. Its a downside to ddo that you can get great loot on casual/normal and on epic/reaper, you should get better loot (not chance at loot) on higher difficulties.

The power gap between the most accomplished and least accomplished players in DDO is ridiculously high. Not only is what you describe not something the devs should focus on, they need to do the opposite. When I step into s quest on reaper I gain more hp than some party members have in total.

The difficulty being discussed is Legendary Normal which is significantly less rewarded than reaper 10 and even elite. I don't even think they need to add a new difficulty, maybe have a teaching mode so people can learn the mechanics where damage is reduced and you don't get credit for a completion. I have 2 guildies I run with regularly and it would be great if we could spend a few hours in a teaching mode and then form a group once we know we have it mastered.

The major issue with this raid in my opinion is that it requires knowledge and acting on that knowledge fast to complete it successfully, but acquiring that knowledge and practicing it is very difficult for pugs because it requires around 12 people.

So Cordovan still owes running with me for a few hours from Movember 2016 so now I know what I will request - too hot too handle until we have a successful completion.

[Odysseus2011]

Here is a reddit post from a few weeks ago that does a great job of outlining the objectives for THTH, while the information is not 100% accurate, (specifically there are two lever/crystal solutions, one for each side, contrary to what the post indicates.). I highly recommend anyone who hasn’t completed the raid read through it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ddo/comment...le_raid_guide/

imo this is why THTH is one of the best raids in recent memory, it is not scaled to power creep. 12 characters with reaper wings can get absolutely destroyed in this raid if they don’t know what they’re doing. Conversely 12 characters with no PL/tomes/Reaper points can complete this raid (the devs completed with 10 first life characters when testing the raid). This raid is scaled in such a way that teamwork is of the utmost importance, no matter how good the individual is; if there is no teamwork then the group will fail.

[Yamani]

Here is a reddit post from a few weeks ago that does a great job of outlining the objectives for THTH, while the information is not 100% accurate, (specifically there are two lever/crystal solutions, one for each side, contrary to what the post indicates.). I highly recommend anyone who hasn’t completed the raid read through it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ddo/comment...le_raid_guide/

imo this is why THTH is one of the best raids in recent memory, it is not scaled to power creep. 12 characters with reaper wings can get absolutely destroyed in this raid if they don’t know what they’re doing. Conversely 12 characters with no PL/tomes/Reaper points can complete this raid (the devs completed with 10 first life characters when testing the raid). This raid is scaled in such a way that teamwork is of the utmost importance, no matter how good the individual is; if there is no teamwork then the group will fail.

Id very like to see the proof of the dev's doing this post going live with those 10 first life characters.

[Odysseus2011]

Id very like to see the proof of the dev's doing this post going live with those 10 first life characters.

The reason the OP felt like the raid was r5 instead of LN was because they did not know how best to address the raid’s specific challenges. This raid gets out of hand very quickly if certain challenges are not quickly addressed, if you address them correctly then it isn’t nearly as challenging as first perceived.

[Odysseus2011]

As for what 10 characters they used, here is what I would guess, or at least which 10 characters I would bring to this raid.

2 Divines / 2 Arcanes / 1 Tank / 5 dps of varying varieties

While any of these classes could work I would emphasize Sorcerer over Wizard; and Barbarian/Wolf/Tempest/Rogue/Inquisitive over Monk/Shuricannon for the most part. Generally higher dps/MRR is a win for dps builds in this raid (but that’s a pretty broad and obvious statement).

[slarden]

The reason the OP felt like the raid was r5 instead of LN was because they did not know how best to address the raid’s specific challenges. This raid gets out of hand very quickly if certain challenges are not quickly addressed, if you address them correctly then it isn’t nearly as challenging as first perceived.

And that is the real issue - not the difficulty - rather there is not a place to learn the raid properly because the raid requires both knowledge and fast execution of that knowledge. That is what makes very pug-unfriendly. the raid fails because everyone is learning - a big chunk of the party drops.

If they simply had a learning mode where you didn't get rewards it would solve the issue.