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MattPucevich

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  1. Blue maps! Achievements! Our lil op is growing up so fast :`) The Battery.... ... is Fully Charged. Refresh Notes: Nature of Progress Operation General All Modes Achievements have been added for the operation. These include both the standard boss kill achievements, as well as a fun new "Marks of Mastery" category for more specific brands of chicanery. ;D Blue Maps are now in for the CI-004 area. Infinitely spawning creatures (i.e. Red encounter adds, Holding Pens creatures, etc.) should no longer grant Renown. If you find some that still do, let us know! Red All Modes Part of Red's encounter area is now in a cave because the environment artists were feeling arty! It's cool! Lil purple mushrooms growing inside and stuff. Veteran Mode Slightly reduced Red's health Slightly decreased the health of Rampaging Chargers Breach CI-004 All Modes The event should no longer get stuck if players manage to wipe during certain key scripting windows. The ejection splash from Something Ill-Tempered now plays on the ejected object instead of some arbitrary location on the ground nearby. Lake Crab encounters should now properly resset when the event resets. Actually for reals this time. The two final Warden Droids in the control room are now named "Czerka Warden Enforcer Droids" to denote the fact that they're slightly different. Reworked the detonation FX for Incendiary Shrieks to be more readable. The damage of Photoreactive Hypergolicity (the Incendiary Shriek detonation) has been increased by +400%, but is now distributed over 6 seconds. Players can no longer unwittingly damage and/or kill invisible utility NPCs during the Breach CI-004 event (thus breaking the event to varying degrees of severity) Felshade Reapers in the Dark will now deal a small knockback to other enemies they're hitting (in addition to the damage they were already dealing). Veteran Mode Warden Enforcer Droids no longer stand still while they Optimize. Warden Enforcer Droids can no longer self-optimize, as that doesn't go well for anyone else. Players left behind in the pens after the control room door is locked will now be appropriately murdered before being teleported to the control room, as intended. Training Day All Modes Greus' Ayhis & Eru attack channel duration decreased from 3s to 2s, cooldown increased from 6s to 7s. Damage slightly less than doubled. Titax Strike's damage will now (most likely pretty sure) be properly reduced if the target is knocked into a goo tank. The Huntmaster All Modes Something Ill-Tempered is now also living in the pond here. The Thing in The Pond now has more max HP for each thing fed into the lake during the encounter. In fact, there's an achievement for playing with this to an irresponsible degree. Veteran Mode Confused and Infuriated will actually apply its enrage effect in Veteran Mode (it was previously only working in Story). Apex Vanguard All Modes The Apex Vanguard will now actually fire missiles during Zone Defense The Apex Vanguard can no longer use Rocket Salvo while Zone Defense is active because that's cheating (and very confusing). Attempted to fix an issue where the Apex Vanguard sometimes wouldn't regenerate immediately after its initial Photogenesis cast until the lights were turned off and back on again. Updated Acid Blast's ground FX to use a texture (as opposed to a flat orange). It's a tad less bright now as a result. Removed some floating work-in-progress assets from the Apex Vanguard's room. Dimmed emissive reflectivity of the patches of glass in the Apex Vanguard's room Updated Stim Station's visuals, also added a larger monitor on the wall over the station that displays the count of stims in the machine for all to see. Updated Disruptor Pulse and Ventilation Station's console visuals, so now each of the stations' interactive bits are visually distinct. Due to player feedback that the charge state of the battery was too hard to read, we have re-added the continuously pulsing "The Battery is Fully Charged" red text message to Story Mode, and also introduced it to Veteran Mode The previous note is obviously a joke. How could you possibly think we're that awful? Or is it? Story Mode Flare and Stim station overhead symbols are now dimmed to visually reinforce that they're not used here. Veteran Mode Ticks of Contagion will now properly spread Contagion to targets within the radius who do not already have it. Contagion now does something it didn't used to...
  2. *construction noises in background* Polish and PTS iteration are ongoing. Here are some notes for you all. Refresh Notes: Operations (Global) General Lockouts for Story Mode operations have been globally changed to 24h. Nature of Progress Operation General All Modes We have re-enabled lockouts for Story Mode. Consistent with the change noted above, the lockouts are 24h. CI-Synapse Accelerator Serum (more commonly known as "The Stims"): Rewrote the CI-SAS Stim ability tooltip to completely explain all of the wonderful things stims can do. Apologies, it's a little long... [*]Loot rockets should no longer land on a dude in a white track suit. [*]Corrected a spelling mistake in the name of Incendiary Shriek [*]Peacekeeper turrets should be a little more aggressive about exiting combat with things when nobody's around. [*]Death no longer dispelled stacks of tiredness, as it appears that there is not, in fact, any rest for the wicked. Red All Modes Made some adjustment to Synthium Derpridic growths to make them easier to see/use: Growths now have an emissive glow to help them stand out from the environment. Did a bit of hedge trimming around the growths so that there is less context foliage masking their locations. Slightly increased the size of growths to make them easier to spot. [*]Red's Venom is now properly tagged as AoE. [*]Red's Venom damage has slightly increased. Breach CI-004 All Modes Damage from the holding pens coils can no longer be reflected because that's silly. Super Mutant Trandoshan Action Squad GX: Shining Hunter Force of Justice Brigade Musco note: Still not the real name... All Modes Corrected the size of the indicator for Greus's Trandoshan Torch AoE to match the effect size. Story Mode Hissyphis's and Greus's HP has increased a bit in Story Mode. Veteran Mode Titax Strike's damage will now be properly reduced if the target is knocked into a goo tank. The Huntmaster All Modes The Huntmaster encounter now properly cleans up after itself when the encounter is completed (so no more getting stuck with the Lunch debuff, theoretically) The Lunch debuff is now actually a debuff so that it can't be clicked off. Apex Vanguard All Modes Scrubby Sprinkle Spray FX updated! Story Mode Use of the Ventilation and Scrubber stations now consumes one charge of power off of the battery (up from 0). Veteran Mode Apex Vanguard's missiles actually do damage! Apex Vanguard should now actually drop loot and set a lockout.
  3. Greetings! Here are some notes related to operations changes contained within this last PTS update Refresh Notes: Nature of Progress Operation General All Modes CI-Synapse Accelerator Serum (more commonly known as "The Stims"): Use of CI-Synapse Accelerator Serum stims is now instant with a 0.8s GCD (previously it was a 0.5s cast with a 1.0s CD). Appearances and VFX related to stim usage have been updated: There is now a different use animation for self-use versus other-use. There are now different visuals for the single versus the double dose buff. There is now a separate effect on the character for the Overloaded debuff, and a red shatter FX for overdose death. [*]Reaching 100 stacks of tired is now fatal. [*]Unlocking of the elevator at the top of Spaceport Access Stairwell A is now tied to the defeat of a new pull of Trandoshans located at the top of the stairs. Red All Modes Derpridic Blooms no longer have collision. Fixed the seemingly random invisible LOS blocks dotted around Red's encounter area. Breach CI-004 All Modes Lake Crabs should now properly reset when the Breach CI-004 event is reset (previously, a crab would never spawn again after it had been spawned the first time, even if the event was reset) Remaining Flares and Stims will be removed when the Breach CI-004 event is completed. Warden droids now play beam FX to the console(s) whose use they are locking. Story Mode Reduced the maximum range of the Lake Crab's Tongue Yoink ability from 40m to 15m in Story Mode Veteran Mode Reaper health has been increased Super Mutant Trandoshan Action Squad GX: Shining Hunter Force of Justice Brigade Musco note: This is not the real name All Modes Players will no longer take falling damage when jumping down into the Evolutionary Warfare Mutagen Lab Reduced the additional damage taken by the Trandoshans from Death Pact (Was 5/25/100, is now 5/10/15). The Huntmaster All Modes Players will no longer take falling damage when jumping down into the Combat Iteration Testing Arena Players should no longer be held in combat in some cases after the Huntmaster is defeated. Increased range on Huntmaster's default ranged attack to 100m The Deliberate Charger now has interrupt immunity The Deliberate Charger will now ignore the Huntmaster as a target after breaking the Fortress shield, and entertain the players instead. Adjusted the Deliberate Charge "Arrow Parade" target indicator to not fade until much closer to the target, so that it's easier for the target to see regardless of their camera position and zoom. The Huntmaster will no longer shoot after retreated beasts quite so tenaciously when a new Light Point appears. Incendiary Grenade now produces a red text callout with the target's name. Encounters leading up to the Huntmaster should no longer spawn when restarting the phase with a Huntmaster defeated lockout. The Huntmaster's holdout radius is now colored "rorange" to helpfully suggest that standing within it is a very bad idea. Fixed a bug where the visually displayed radius of the Huntmaster's Holdout position was slightly smaller than the effective radius. Story Mode Incendiary Grenade's channel time increased from 3.0s -> 4.5s to give story mode players a little more time to notice and react. Apex Vanguard All Modes Fixed a bug causing the Apex Vanguard's melee attack to do 25% less damage than intended. Zone Defense's maximum ranged increased from 30m to 40m. Fixed an edge case where the Apex Vanguard wouldn't ever start up Darkness Overdrive if brought below 85% health before ever removing the battery. Attempting to use a station without sufficient battery charge will now broadcast an "insufficient battery charge" error to the raid. The Battery Carrier no longer magically becomes untired whenever they plug the battery into a socket. Veteran Mode Added colored pips to the flare station's overhead sign that convey the status of the three flare manufacturing slots. Known issue: These pips are only visible if your camera is within ~75m of the sign. Missile damage increased ~40% Stim station now produces a red text message when it shuts down due to the battery having been removed (to help clarify that the stim station keeps going so long as the battery is left in) Increased the rate of tired gain in Veteran mode by 50% (1 per 3s -> 1 per 2s). Tired is still lost at the same rate (1 per 6s) Fixed an issue preventing the Apex Vanguard from entering its final phase
  4. Hey all, just as a quick update: Now that 5.10.1 has fixed the underlying issue that was causing the MM Izax kill and GftM timed run achievements to reset, and new players can no longer be broken, we're going to be able to run an update over the character database to restore the achievements (and the original time stamps) to players who earned but subsequently lost the achievements. Players who have re-earned the achievement need not fear --the script will simply jimmy the timestamp to the earliest date found in server logs. I realize this doesn't impact a great many people, but for something as demanding as MM Gods we wanted to give credit where it's due. That being said, I can't offer a timeframe for when this update will occur. This kind of database update has to be performed during a downtime, and this specific issue impacts too few players to justify its own downtime, therefore it'll have to piggyback off of some otherwise scheduled downtime as is convenient. So, sorry I can't tell you exactly when, but I just wanted to confirm that those first few clears will eventually be getting their original timestamps back. Look to Musco for updates on when this will occur.
  5. Hooray for sneaking in one extra refresh to play with some tweaks! Unfortunately a couple last second tweaks missed the boat, so you'll just have to see them on live. Note that even though we won't be able to put up another refresh, we'll still be able to make minor tweaks based on feedback for another couple of days, even though we won't be able to put up another refresh, so please continue to provide feedback =) Hive of the Mountain Queen: General: A weekly quest to defeat the Veteran mode of Hive of the Mountain Queen is now available from the Ossus mission board (this grants the monumental data crystal). Note that completion of the Ossus story missions is a prereq for all board missions. The Hive of the Mountain Queen area now has its final loading screen of star-warsy explorers making their way through the hive. It is no longer possible to mount within the Hive of the Mountain Queen area. Hive Goo now actually applies the 33% snare described in its tooltip. Elite/Royal Guards: Elite and Royal Guards now have Alertness (sleep immunity). Staggering Strike no longer grants the Determined buff (taunt immunity) to its caster. Increased cast time of Concentration from 0.5s to 1.0s. Added a placeholder impact FX to Staggering Strike to make it more noticeable when the player is hit by the ability (the final version of this did not make the PTS refresh). The Queen's Overhead Skewer has been updated to use the same FX. Royal Guards (NOT Elite Guards) have a new "Guardian's Resolve" mechanic. Whenever a Royal Guard dies, all other living Royal Guards within 70m receive the Guardian's Resolve buff and become CC immune. Mutated Geonosian Queen: All Modes: The Queen's first use of Pheromonic Multi-Blast will now only hit two targets (subsequent uses will hit the usual 3). Veteran: Bantling Lacerator health reduced by about 1/7. The Queen's health has been increased to compensate a bit for the reduced Lacerator HP (It's ballpark +5% or so). Guillotine now actually uses Guillotine's ability appearance (instead of trying to play the Royal Guards' Execute visuals). The net effect is that the Queen will actually animate during the attack, as opposed to menacingly staring down her target until it explodes. Overhead Skewer's stun can no longer be stun broken. Some things that missed the refresh train: In Veteran Mode, the Queen, Elite Guards, and Royal Guards will show an "Executioner" flavor buff that explains that these enemies powermurder stunned targets. The final versions of the updated FX for executioner stuns (Staggering Strike / Overhead Skewer) will use the same golden core flare impact, while the execute abilities (Execute / Guillotine) will use the same golden "X" scratch impact. This will let players clearly see when each has happened, and visually link the similar mechanic across all the enemies that use it. The Queen's Overhead Skewer stun debuff (Skewer Stun) will have an updated tooltip that specifically mentions that it cannot be broken. Staggering Strike's tooltip will be slighly funnier.
  6. Technically I think this is refresh 3, but I never posted notes for refresh 2, so we're running with it and just sort of combining the notes. I won't tell if you don't. Also no chorus of screams from upping the encounter to 252 so.... I guess we'll run with it >.> More seriously, things seem to be cleaning up nicely. This refresh is more subtle QOL/Readability tweaks, and some feedback items brought up by all of you. I think we might actually squeeze in one more refresh early next week, so that we can get some performance information about our last few FX tweaks... so keep the feedback coming Hive of the Mountain Queen: General: The Hive of the Mountain Queen area now has a placeholder loading screen of an operative trying to stealthily sneak past the Royal Guards Royal Guards now see through stealth. Grenadiers now see through stealth and have Alertness. Viscounts now have Interrupt Immunity Fixed a bug where the Viscount's Pheromonic Blast ability was not properly interacting with pre-cracked eggs. Egg VFX (everywhere in the hive) have been adjusted to make them more readable at a glance, and at range. Cracked eggs' crack light shafts now extend further away from the egg, creating a much more pronounced halo of light Empowered (Growth Hormone'd) eggs now increase in size, pulse, and their fiery uh... anger aura (?) is now red. [*]Hive of the Mountain Queen achievements are now categorized under Operations>Epic Enemies to match other lair bosses. The "Hive of the Mountain Queen" category there now correctly shows its name and has a background image. [*]Trophy portraits have been added and hooked up to the boss kill achievements. Traditional, tasteful, and chic; these framed pieces effortlessly accent any decor scheme, while giving your guests a glimpse into your exciting and adventurous night life. [*]Eggs in the hive no longer show nameplates to improve performance and encounter readability (a lot of green text all over everything isn't tremendously helpful). Unfortunately, as a consequence this means you won't be able to track their health bar when they're hit with a caustic dot. I think the pros outweigh the cons here, but if people feel strongly it can be reverted. Mutated Geonosian Queen: All Modes: Caustic Drones and Elite Royal Guards will now die when the Mutated Geonosian Queen is defeated. Don't say we never do anything nice for you all. One of these days I'm going to make an encounter that resets if you fail to kill the remaining adds after the boss dies. To aid in at-a-glance readability of the encounter state, Bantling Lacerators have had their toughness reduced to Strong (silver star). Their damage/health values have been counter-scaled so mechanically nothing's changed (well, more precisely, they'll be within 1%, subject to the vagaries of rounding error). Adjusted the Queen's ability logic to ameliorate an issue that causes the Queen to occasionally abort her casts of Pheromonic Blast for no reason. It might still happen (there's technically still a race condition), but it should be much rarer. Note that it's still the case (and intended) that the Queen's cast will still be interrupted if the target dies or vanishes, as it is a targeted ability. If this in itself winds up being too abusable, we can pull the ability back one more step to be untargeted, but that's less fun. Tweaked the logic of Growth Hormone (and Local Growth) to try and mitigate an issue where it could pick eggs for empowerment that were in the process of hatching and/or being destroyed. The changes should decrease the time window where this can happen, though I can't guarantee that it's completely gone. Veteran: Decreased the damage multiplier of Mass Pheromonic Blast from 0.5 to 0.4. (So it now does 40% of the base damage of Pheromonic Blast, down from 50%). This should make the burst from Mass Pheromonic Blast a bit more survivable.
  7. I have to say, thanks a lot for taking the time to write all of this up throughout the testing window. Not only is this great feedback, but the organization really helps sort through it. We've been keeping an eye on the feebdack points even if we're just now getting around to responding. Apologies if I don't hit every point here, as you've written quite a bit . But hm. Where to start... Visibility of Egg States: I agree with you about the visibility of the egg states, and we've tweaked the FX to try and make these things easier to spot. The cracking glow on eggs and "crack shine" halo around cracked eggs is now much more pronounced. Eggs hit with Growth Hormones will now grow by ~30% and begin pulsating. The glow should now be a little more pronounced, with some black-red fire aura bits on top. Eggs that are both red AND cracked can be a bit of a ball of light, but the physical pulsing motion added to red eggs should make it possible to tell that an egg is "both" as opposed to just cracked. Differentiating Lacerators vs Berserkers: To be fair, the Berserkers are both physically larger, and also glow red... but speaking more practically, I can understand the point that they're not easy enough to differentiate during the encounter. Dropping the toughness to strong for the UI icon is a pretty good layer of differentiation, so you all should see that in this next refresh. Pheromonic Multi-Blast Let's call it PMB for short. This attack being unsurvivable in Veteran Mode is a bit tricky. I knew the total damage out on that attack was going to be kind of heavy, but the fact that you're still finding it unsurvivable in 258s is concerning. I *am* admittedly assuming that there's some multi-healing (i.e. AoEs and/or HoTs spread outover the raid) going on to keep up with the total volume of the damage, but maybe that's a bit too aggressive of an assumption. In Veteran Mode, PMB does 50% of the base damage of regular Pheromonic Blast (it's 40% in Story Mode). Someone hit by all three impacts would be spiked for ~90k as you noted, which on paper shouldn't be a problem in and of itself (especially factoring defensive cooldowns), but with everything else going on... hrm. While the higher multiplier was intended to capture a bit of the increased coordination of Veteran groups over Story, perhaps the higher base damage is enough. Maybe Veteran should be 40% as well. That'd put the individual impacts at around 24k, and thus the triple at 72k. Pacing and Time to Kill: I don't really mind the way the encounter is currently paced. I think it's fine to have the encounter be on the shorter end of things, and (as you've noted) we're especially due for such an encounter in the wake of GftM's longer than average encounters. It's perhaps a little weird that Story Mode can run longer than Veteran Mode, but I don't think that it's automatically a *problem*, so long as it still feels good in its own right. The story mode groups that I've watched make it seem like Story Mode's in a pretty good place. You can get in, run around screaming, shoot some bugs, have a good time. One note with respect to bolster testing: You said that you pulled your gear off to test in SM. If that meant that you literally pulled all your gear off and were running around naked, you were probably attempting the boss underpowered. To clarify: there's a quirk with the Bolster system in that it will understat any slot that's completely unequipped. Make sure you have *something* placed into each slot. All that being said, given infinite time it might have been interesting to see what Veteran would look like if the boss had another 60-90s of HP. It's a bit irresponsible to try and make that large of a change at this point. Like so many things, it will have to exist in the design of our imaginations *wistful stare*. Trash Stealth Skipping: You're correct that this is problematic, and for the reasons you've mentioned. There's *some* mitigation for this coming in the next refresh (Guards and Grenadiers now stealth detect, there's a new group of mobs camping the first bomb site), but I kind of want to tweak around with it a bit more. We'll see how this refresh goes. If I can at all avoid it, I don't want to have placing the bombs mechanically require that the trash is killed, as it doesn't make a ton of narrative sense. That being said, it's always there as a last resort option. Growth Hormone FX Oddness: This is known, and has been addressed by the FX team. The next refresh should pick that up. Queen aborting her own Pheromonic Blast casts: There was indeed an issue with the interactions of the Queen's ability logic that was creating situations where she would pull off of her own PB casts without reason. This problem should now be, like... 99% mitigated. I think it may still technically be possible that it happens very rarely. The side effect of this change is that in situations where the Queen was previously pulling off of the casts, she may instead wind up picking a lower priority target for the attack. Off center Phase Gate Icon: I think this was fixed in the last refresh, but if it wasn't it should be fixed in this one. Loot: Getting the Monumental Data Crystal should require a VM clear. If you're not seeing that, that's a bug.
  8. We're back! Hope everyone had an enjoyable time over the holidays. This refresh has a couple of tweaks for the Ossus lair. Next refresh will probably nail most everything down, and may be the last, so please poke the encounter a bit and see where it sits for you all. Ossus: Slightly adjusted the art at the phase entrance to the Hive of the Mountain Queen lair (the area behind the phase gate is now a hallway corner, as opposed to the creepy plane of nothingness that was eating the phase gate VFX). Mutated Geonosian Hive: General: Falling into the chasm within the hive will now properly trigger a fade to black fall death (and helpfully deposit your body at the entrance, as is tradition). Some Geonosians have been embiggened and embeefened! Geonosian Viscounts and Grenadiers are now Elite (gold star), up from Strong (silver star). Caustic Drones outside the Queen's chamber are now Strong (silver star), up from Standard (no star). [*]Elite Guards (the big sword bugs not in the queen's room) are now immune to knockbacks. Royal Guards (the big sword bugs in the Queen's room) are still vulnerable to knockbacks. [*]Futzed around a bit with the Geonosian Grenadier's ability timings. Mutated Geonosian Queen: The encounter itself seems to be in a decent spot, if maybe a tad on the short side of things. I'm sticking to my original plan of seeing how this encounter players at 252 instead of 248 with the first refresh. We'll take a closer look at things (and the difficulty feedback you all have provided) for the next refresh. There's still going to be some VFX weirdness with things like the Growth Hormone projectile trails, etc., as our FX people are just now circling back to do their polish pass. As a note, I agree with the general sentiment that the egg states need to be more visually noticeable, and we'll explore some ways to make them pop a bit more, without overwhelming the screen with everything that's going on (which is a major concern for this encounter). All Modes: The Mutated Geonosian Queen will now properly block resurrection/zone in while engaged. Added an activation animation + FX for Save the Queen! that scales based on the radius stack. Reduced Save the Queen's channel time by 0.4s, and added that to the post-channel GCD so that the new visuals have time to play comfortably (2.0s+1.0s -> 1.6s+1.4s). The ability still occupies the Queen for a total of 3.0s, so this won't mechanically change the encounter. Phase Walk is dispelled upon jumping into the Queen's room. Veteran: The Mutated Geonosian Queen encounter has been rescaled from 248 to 252 for funzies (yay PTS)! Let's see how this plays. The Queen's enrage cast (Royal Indignation) now actually enrages the queen in Veteran mode (instead of doing nothing). [VETERAN 16]Fixed an issue where the Queen's Mass Pheromonic Blast was dealing double the intended damage, which was kind of funny, in a way...
  9. These two matters are orthogonal at this point (That aside, I believe Musco's otherwise got you covered -> http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=9680885 )
  10. Oh hi there! Welcome to our little PTS lair boss shindig! So nice of you to stop by! As is tradition, we have a variety of utility terminals on the PTS server, as well as gear vendors, that will help you quickly create a character, get it to level 70, get geared, and get to testing. (which in this case would be the Hive of the Mountain Queen lair boss). Here's the General Flow: Create a new Character. On your origin world, near where your character starts, you should find a "Level Booster" terminal, and an "Odessen Teleporter" terminal. Click on the "Level Booster" terminal to set your character to level 70, and receive 500,000 credits (you can continue clicking the Level Booster terminal repeatedly to receive an additional 500,000 credits per click). When you have as many credits as you'd like, click the "Odessen Teleporter" terminal to be moved to the Odessen landing area. Gear your character with the various PTS vendors located at the Odessen Landing. The following vendors are available in this first refresh: Tier 4 Artifact Gear (248) Tier 4 Artifact Components (248 Mods / Enhancements / Crystals / Barrels / Hilts) Tier 5 Artifact Gear (258) Tier 5 Artifact Components (258 Mods / Enhancements / Crystals / Barrels / Hilts) Augments (228/236/240) and Kits (Mk10) [*]Walk into the phase gate at the end of the Lightbridge to Nowhere at the Odessen Landing to enter the Hive of the Mountain Queen lair area. Difficulty Targets: Story Mode's gear target should be covered by Bolster, so as long as you've got your gear slots filled, you should be good to go. Veteran Mode is targeted for fully augmented Tier 4 Legendary (248) gear. Natural Access: For those of you interested in finding your way into the lair naturally, the entrance can be found on Ossus in the Ossus Canyons area right around (1200,600). State of the Lair: The boss encounter itself (Mutated Geonosian Queen) is mechanics complete and balanced. Final aesthetic tweaking of FX is still ongoing, but art and animations should be most of the way there, so it's pretty much all fair game for feedback. The Hive of the Mountain Queen environment is likewise largely finished (and I, for one, think it looks pretty amazing), so that's all fair game too. Non-boss encounters are still a work in progress. This includes the placement of encounters, the size and types of enemies present, the abilities those enemies are using. Take what you see there with a grain of salt. Feel free to give feedback on what's there, but don't be surprised if you find some jankiness there. See you on PTS!
  11. Greetings all! Over this past 24h or so, it's been really cool to watch groups plugging away at the Nahut encounter and see how you're all attempting to evolve and refine the stock Veteran strategies to deal with the new realities of Master mode. In a slight departure from the norm, I actually want to share some information with you all that may help this process. Specifically, I want to give some details about Nahut's mine launch sequences and patterns. I'm inclined to share this because I don't know that the information is as learnable as it ought to be, given the fact that the vast majority of what is going on during the launches is almost entirely invisible (save for one person). I think it'd be better in this case to at least let everyone know the pieces of the puzzle that are in play. I'm going to spoiler tag this up quiet a bit so people can go as shallow or deep into this as they want, out of respect for anyone who might really want to work at this fully internally. To start, completely unspoilery, here is a desaturated overhead diagram of the Singularity Chamber encounter area, which you may find a useful base for encounter diagrams of your own: https://imgur.com/a/RMH7qIJ --ENTERING SPOILER ZONE-- Prepare the Field (Master Mode): Minefield diagram for Launch 1: Launch timings and patterns (refers to diagram notation): Launch 2 layout and pattern: What happens after Launch 2 is completed (Master Mode Only):
  12. Onward we go, brave testers! There's a skip button for Nahut down now, as well as delicious 258 gear! The components are a little trickier, but I have confidence that you all can handle the execution complexity. As a warning: This is likely the last refresh where Tyth will be playable. We need to start pushing forward and picking at the later encounters, so earlier encounters are going to start becoming unpullable as we go forward. General: Tier 5 Legendary Gear (258) is now available from purchase from ED-5E L at the Odessen landing area. There is also a vendor selling 258 components. To try and ease the total run time of the GftM operation in non-master modes, the health of non-boss encounters have been reduced by ~15% in Story Mode, and ~13% in Veteran Mode. Tyth: Just a couple of odds and ends here, cleaning up things that went wonky with the build. I'm leaving Tyth open this refresh to get a little more information about the power level of the Justice buff (especially when it's actually working as intended). If it's making things too easy, we'll dial it back a bit. All Modes: Lances are no longer taunt immune. Master: The Justice Drones' Energized Overload proc now actually applies its damage buff to players. The Justice Drones' Energized Overload proc will no longer apply its damage buff to Tyth and other Drones. Veteran: Removed Inversion's hinder component, as it was odd to do this in Veteran mode but not in Master mode. Aivela & Esne: No more permanent disco mode, and a little bit of time pulled out of Phase 3 (approx 1 million HP), to pull the encounter forward just a tad faster. We'll see how this goes. Master: Pushing the Nexus from Phase 0 to Phase 1 before destroying all of the Codex Obelisks will now unleash a Codex Feedback shockwave that wipes the raid. Half of the Nexus's Phase 3 health has been removed. The net result of this is that the Nexus has 25% less HP than it used to, and the transition point out of Phase 0 is 33% instead of 50%. Nahut: A little quality of life for Nahut, but not much more, as testers were unable to make much of any headway into the encounter without 258 gear. It turns out Master Mode Nahut is kind of a hard encounter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So, funny story: Way back when, in the long long ago... Candle passes originally hit the first thing in their path (player or Nahut). As it turns out, this was a horrendously mean thing to do. I removed it by simply flagging the player interception behavior as Master Mode only (since we weren't making Master Mode, it was the quickest and cleanest change to remove it). Fast forward to the reality of today, and you Master Mode testers were delighted(?) to discover these new candle interception mechanics. Spoiler: Candle interception is still not an okay thing to do, so that business has been rightly and properly removed. Master Mode: Power Cells will now become usable 6s earlier than before (3s after Candle Pickup, down from 9s) so that players have ample time to pick up a cell and get back to the center. Other players can no longer accidentally intercept candle passes in Master mode. (Nahut can still intercept passes, just like Veteran mode) The debuff associated with the Radiation Field outside the Singularity Chamber should no longer be right-click dispellable. Veteran: Rail Turrets should actually have 20% less HP in Vet8 now.
  13. Okay! Build system gremlins do indeed seem to be firmly under control, therefore we'll be able to get back to a much regular update cadence. Still, due to the lost time we're going to be accelerating the pacing of stuff a bit (at least on the operations side of things) just to make extra sure we can get eyes on stuff with enough time to iterate/implement feedback. Tyth: Apologies for the inversion nonsense, that should be fixed now. Ditto for the questionably functional skip button, which should also be fixed now. Inversion's pull is getting a threat multiplier to offset the DPS loss to make tanking a little more stable. You may still experience some token panic for the first GCD after a pull (when multiple people are pulled), but it should iron out fairly quickly, especially if the other pull-ees don't do anything that Tyth finds irritating. We've been toying around with a variety of other threat adjustments to try and ease this encounter's complexity for tanks (it's kinda nuts). There have been some ideas, and a couple of suggestions from all of you, but nothing that seems to be free of annoying side effects (as in, one change may make strategy X easier/more viable, but prevents players from employing strategy Y). We may yet wind up with an adjustment in this department before all is said and done, but for now we're cruising with the status quo. Master mode players will find one new mechanic related to Justice drones, wherein they'll provide an AoE damage buff to nearby players the first (and only the first) time their shield is sheared off by a Lance. This is intended to counterbalance the fact that dealing with a Justice drone requires more effort, which makes encounter pulls that roll more Justice drones relatively harder. Thanks to the player who suggested this mechanic (you know who you are). Let us see how it plays. Oh, and lastly, the savvy among you may immediately reason that having Justice drones put out a damage buff will naturally increase the raid's total DPS output over the course of the encounter. You're right! To offset that, the Enrage is walking back by 10s to 7:05. No free lunches here! Just less... uh.. less lumpy lunches? I guess? In all honesty, I'm not entirely convinced that the enrage walk back needs to happen (the encounter is already a pretty substantial thing)... So we may just wind up going back to 7:15... In which case I guess the lunch would wind up being free... so... hmm... All Modes: Fixed an issue with Tyth's ability logic that was making his use of Inversion rather erratic. Tyth's skip button will now kill Tyth immediately (similar to the other bosses' buttons), as opposed to trying to be cute by setting his HP to 1%. Inversion's Long Wave Resonance (the pull debuff) now increases threat generation by 100% for its duration. Master: The first time a Justice Drone is hit by a Lance shot, it will release an Energizing Overload, which will increase the damage dealt by all players within 10m of the event by 20% for 10 seconds. Overlapping applications of this effect stack independently. After being hit, a Justice drone will perodically emit a subtle yellow crackle of electricity as a visual indicator that its buff has already been triggered. Enrage timer decreased by 10 seconds [7:15 -> 7:05] Aivela & Esne: The Sisters got their first major block of PTS testing over the weekend, and the encounter has shown itself to be appropriately spicy. You all uncovered a couple of logic issues with the encounter (if there's one thing you can count on with players, it's that they'll find ways to horribly break everything that is breakable ). Unfortunately, there wasn't time before the refresh to work quite all of them out, so be careful about hard burning the Nexus in the initial phase (unless you just really, really like the Nexus's Disco Lightshow Mode). Super Energy Burst seems to be succeeding at causing the mayhem we all hoped for, but it's clear that there's room for some quality of life improvements surrounding the sequence. First, we've made Aivela and Esne leap immune during the sequence (so that players can't accidentally gap close themselves out of existence), and secondly we've changed the SEB sequence to put Remote Access and Spike on a hard cooldown of 18s, so that players shouldn't need to taunt A&E on the platforms to avoid a spike when they return. In terms of pacing, it's pretty clear that the enrage is far too tight right now. We're going to be pushing the enrage back by a full minute [8:00 -> 9:00]. It's unclear that this is the correct solution, as 9:00 is a bit long. We may instead wind up shortening bits of the encounter here and there to bring it back to 8:00, but that's a much more involved process. For now, we'll see how things go with the 9:00 limit. Master: Aivela and Esne should no longer become permanently shielded if phase transitioned during the Super Energy Burst sequence. Aivela and Esne are now leap immune for the duration of their Super Energy Burst sequence, which will hopefully prevent some accidental (if hilarious) deaths. The Super Energy Burst sequence will now place both Remote Access and Spike on cooldown. The net result of this is that players should have ~3s of grace period at the end of the sequence before those mechanics resume. Enrage timer extended by 60s [8:00->9:00]. We may wind up approaching this differently (i.e. shortening the length of the encounter, rather than knocking back the enrage) in a future update. KNOWN ISSUE: Damaging the Nexus to 50% before destroying all the Codex obelisks will result in the Nexus being permanently stuck in Tri-beam mode. Nahut: Nothing to see here... Move along... Master Mode: Power Cell use time decreased to 1.0s (from 2.0s), because that's an awful long time to have to stand still...
  14. First, sorry for the delay in getting a PTS refresh out to you all. The server gremlins came out in full force, conspiring to keep us apart... While their eventual defeat was inevitable --for love indeed conquers all --it doesn't lessen our longing in the meanwhile. Second, thanks a ton to everyone who's been hopping on the PTS. We've had a loooot of activity. Thanks especially to those of you who have hopped on to take a moment to run through Story / Veteran modes, as it's arguably even more important that we get those adjustments correct! Alright. Onto the refresh notes: General: The Ossus Daily Area is now ready for PTS testing, and for the first time players will be able to access the area! *pokerface* Just open the galaxy map, and you'll find Ossus (it's just southwest of Voss). Fixed an issue where players could not purchase items from some of the PTS vendors The 252 Gear Vendor, ED-5E, is now present in the Odessen Landing area! Fixed the issue where Nightmare Crystals could only be used in GotM, instead of the intended behavior of being usable everywhere except GotM. (Checkboxes are hard!!) The Tyth skip button has been enabled in Master Mode, allowing thusly inclined players to bypass the encounter to test Aivela & Esne. Tyth: Overall, Tyth seems to be playing really, really well, but it's become clear the encounter is a tad overtuned in what it's demanding of the DPS, given the chaos of everything else that's going on. We're going to attack this with a series of smaller adjustments in multiple areas (as opposed to a single large adjustment to one facet of the encounter) to get us to where we want to be without ruining the current feel. Therefore, we're (1) Pulling back ever so slightly on the HP of Tyth and the drones, to give just a little bit more moment-to-moment breathing room. Additionally, we're (2) Kicking out the enrage timer by an additional 30s, and (3) Decreasing the drones per wave in Phase 2 from 5 back to 4, since that seems to be just about the survivable break point to begin with. We'll see how this winds up playing, and then adjust again from there. In terms of Veteran mode, the changes to Tyth have certainly made the encounter a lot more viable, but I think we might have gotten to the correct answer in the wrong way, in that everything winds up being so thin that the structure of the encounter is coming a bit loose. While there are no changes to Veteran mode in this refresh, as a heads up: For the next refresh we're thinking of reducing Vet mode's Phase 2 wave size from 5 to 4 (to match Master Mode), while walking back the cooldown increase on Phase 2 wave summoning (reducing it from 36s to 32s). We might also put some HP back on the drones, since it's easier to DPS fewer targets. We'll see. Master: Tyth HP reduced ~6% Drone HP reduced ~5% Standard Drone wave size in Phase 2 reduced to 4 drones (down from 5) Enrage timer increased by 30s (6:45 -> 7:15) Cast time of Inversion increased to 5.0s (up from 4.0s) Fixed an issue where the encounter would occasionally spawn a "blank" wave of drones (i.e. the spawn warning text appeared but no drones did). Fixed an issue where Energy Wave's radius of effect was larger than the ground indicator (by about .75m), occasionally causing rather unfortunate outcomes. Reduced the maximum width of Tyth's high rage Energy Wave by .5m (8.0m -> 7.5m) (in addition to the above correction). Aivela & Esne: We actually did get a bit of exposure to the A&E encounter, in one case due to a fatfingered dev command, and in others through judicious application of Nightmare Crystals. This wound up being a happy accident, because it exposed a couple of things that had gone wrong in the encounter, saving us all a PTS cycle! #HappyAccidents \o/ All Modes: Players standing on any of the four pillars in the Master Repository Core will now take damage while the encounter is engaged. There are no VFX for this yet, but there will be soon. Master: Fixed an issue where the Nexus wasn't going invulnerable when it should have been. Fixed an issue where Codex obelisks weren't going invulnerable when they should have been. Increased the damage of the Codex obelisks' secondary attack by a bunch. (You'll know it when you see it, if you haven't yet) The Nexus's "Disco Lightshow Mode" will now fire properly (Again, you'll know it when you see it, if you haven't yet). Super Energy Burst now does what it's supposed to, as opposed to... whatever you would call the nonsense it was doing before. The base damage of System Shock has increased, as it was insufficiently spicy. The purification sequence will now run during Phase 3. Veteran: Probably fixed an issue that could cause the first Purification sequence to be polarized incorrectly (3-and-1, instead of 2-and-2).
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