So did some wipefesting on Red yesterday. Overall it seems a lot like unexpected Dxun NiM on live with 6.1 release. The new stuff is cool too, my group liked it overall. There are some weak points and leaks though that made me want to post here.

• Are there any mechanics that seem broken or inconsistent? Any that are particularly confusing?
  

So I have two main things to tell:

• Bull looses its Boss Immunity upon engaging combat. Stunning, pushing, pulling...lots of fun. Guess not intended.
  
• When we pop flower (spores) it emits blue light and gives us protection from the Red Venom. Then light disappears. But protection keeps being updated on players to its full duration for the next 30 seconds. If it is intended, I ask for animation to stay there for the duration of protection deliverance. If it is not intended, then spawn rate of adds makes this fight way too hard. Group has to move from flower to flower all the time and looses dps to it. Also adds are doing big damage, we cannot DPS boss with adds around.
  

 

• Are any mechanics or encounters made too hard, or too easy, with certain group compositions?
  

Explosion caused by tank stacks can be abused with Sonic Rebounder. On 30 stacks its a 70k reflect, 7 people reflecting it is 490k damage to boss.

 

• How do these encounters feel relative to other Master Mode content?
  

Its feels good so far.

 

 

 

Edited March 11, 2020 by Prog

Can we finally have Commando being able to cleanse Hissyphus? At the very least. Having Jugg/Guardian Endure Pain/Enure to work would also be logical.

Charging Bull often spawns with an invisibility cloak for some people but not others within a raid group (same as it did when HM Dxun was on PTS). I presume this is [still] unintended?

Charging Bull often spawns with an invisibility cloak for some people but not others within a raid group (same as it did when HM Dxun was on PTS). I presume this is [still] unintended?

It seems inconsistent too. Some pulls, the bull is invisible for me, and some pulls, I can see it. Also, bulls don't always despawn after a wipe. Speaking for the Red encounter. Haven't tried the others yet.

Had a PTS raid tonight, tested Red and Holding Pens. Here is the deal:

 

Red:

Flowers on Red don't seem to respect the change you mentioned in the last post. They keep emitting Phosphilapse Corona for 30s as before.

All other Red changes are in order and it feels like a solid NiM fight now - less Flower duration will result in more movement, less dps and longer fight. Not sure if you did your math right there, to me it seems like this is on the very edge and calls for solohealer or even solotank which I bet is not intended.

The damage on small adds from melee attacks seems surprisingly wrecking (and it was before, but at least green puddle wasn't doing anything - paired with slow adds' its quite a pain). Red is actually doing way less damage if tank avoids Acidic Jet and healers can half-afk before adds spawn. Not sure how intended is that, maybe re-balancing of Red/add melee attacks damage is a good idea since solo tanking it and Resiliencing/Emergency Powering/Enuring Festering Wound 30 stacks is quite easy and due to Red's large body can be done away from the group.

 

 

Holding Pens:

Sound crackling cases are very often. Reaps our ears.

Overall the fight seems surprisingly very well balanced. And our team loved the mechanic a lot. Never thought that correct group running can be turned in such an exquisite mechanic. Very well done!

I am not sure if there is any enrage timer and if its intended - sometimes we were able to go on with 5-6 stealth revives like on good old Coratanni->Ruugar transition. If there is an enrage, then we just didn't progress long enough to get the punishment, but for research and learning purposes it feels great to have the pull going in such manner.

We weren't able to kill the boss cuz bad, but at least we opened the first gate \o/ Hopefully getting to see Pens #2 tomorrow.

Also bulls on holding pens seem to be stunnable but dont have Red's stun limit. Probably something to add for overall complexity

 

Also @Camera Two I have your discord id from Friday and some logs to send, but discord says your account doesn't accept friend requests Please add me if you want the combat logs: nom#7342

Edited March 14, 2020 by Prog

My team worked on Red tonight and last night and also looked at it when it was temporarily available on the live server. So far, we've been trying to deal as much damage as possible to the boss before the adds spawn, so we've been staying at each flower until it refreshes three times and then move. The tanks have been swapping as soon as their Festering Wound falls off and they've been standing away from the rest of the group when it explodes. We've been able to get him down to about 45-50% by the time the adds spawn.

 

A significant portion of our strategic discussion has been focused on avoiding the adds as much as possible. We really don't have a clear idea of how we'll be dealing with the adds. When we tried the fight when it was available on live, we didn't see a consistent behavior with how and when they would spawn and haven't gotten enough pulls on them on the PTS to see more clearly what happens. Our current impression is that they start spawning at a specific location and then after that they continue to respawn on a timer, but we're not certain. Next week we plan to immediately take the boss to the location where the adds spawn and just see how the remainder of the fight looks so we can deal with the adds.

 

Besides them hitting hard, it's also difficult to target the little ones since they move so quickly often erratically. Sometimes they walk away from us. It would be super nice if they moved more slowly and in a more consistent way. It would also be nice if they spawned. Our current strategy is to either CC them with 60 second CC abilities like Whirlwind and Concussion Missile or stun them and burst them down. For the big reek, we understand that we get to stun them 3 times before they enrage and that we need to hit them with Acidic Jet. That only takes off about 50% of their health though, so we aren't sure if we're supposed to have him up for two jets (though that seems to take a long time) or just kill him after 1.

 

We're also not really sure what to do when we reach the part of the fight where it forks into three paths. Our current thought is to split into two groups since we don't want the DPS to be in the same path as the Reek and Red with the tanks since there isn't a whole lot of room.

 

The Hydrochloric Pool and Acidic Jet also doesn't seem to be consistently point in the correct direction either. We've had many instances where the Pool gets dropped in a location that is different from where the tank is standing at the end of the cast and Acidic Jet has changed direction when the tank taunts mid-cast.

Okay did Pens again, some feedback:

 

When Shrieks die they put a yellow circle. Its real range is way bigger than visual shows. I estimated 20m range. Can we get a proper visual for this important mechanic?

 

Predator Droid seems to not always go on a target with yellow arrow. If yellow arrow (debuffed) target drops aggro, he goes on its last tank (highest threat basically).

 

So I said everything i perfectly balanced earlier, taking that back. The dtps seems slightly unmanageable.

Predator Droid actually does seem to do quite big damage. Bringing a shadow tank there is a bad idea overall and guardian/vanguard cannot tank it without a heavy defensive cooldown reliably.

Reaper Cats do insane damage - 300k Devour. If we skip Flare for just 1 second we loose 1+ raid member. I do believe it implies you aren't allowed to spend even a split second without Flare, but what if you make it slightly less punishable, like 200k or 250k so people don't have to do a combat res or raidwipe due to just 1s delay on Flare.

 

 

And yeah wanted to go Huntmaster after Pens and that Trandoshan kill button still doesn't work.

Edited March 15, 2020 by Prog

Noticed Red occasionally turning around unexpectedly when in small pathways. Tank is standing in front, slightly strafing, then suddenly he turns around (and cleaves the group which was behind him). It is not an aggro issue, boss is still on tank. Best guess is like when the tails clips the side of the rocks he kind of suddenly turns around. Noticed it happening in a few different occasions.

I've been hearing other groups have had a fair bit of success with a 1 Tank, 6 DPS, 1 Healer composition on Red with the goal being to kill the boss before the Reek spawns. I'm really not a fan of non-2-4-2 group compositions being viable or optimal in nightmare fights. The Reek (and maybe the other adds too) should spawn based on the health of the boss, not on a timer and probably not based on geography either because they just encourage players to find ways to avoid getting them to spawn. Really this should be done in HM too where it is currently optimal to use 5 or 6 DPS. The Festering Wound debuff should have a much stronger effect in order to force a tank swap.

the damage taken/healing required on red seems strange, we had less than 26k dtps on red so ran it (again) with only one healer without any issues. not sure if that is how it was intended, at least I hope not

I hope you guys realize this is the first boss of the instance. Imagine complaining cause some groups found an easier way of killing a boss. The reek is still bugged. On multiple pulls of Red the charger just would not be visible for some raid members which is horrible. Cheesing bosses is like the most fun part of raiding. They have already buffed Reds health so to even attempt 6 dps would require players who know their class.

 

Red is fine. The only change is fixing the Charger so you can see it.

 

Second boss is good.

Cheesing bosses is like the most fun part of raiding.

 

What? So bringing 6 DPS to turn an interesting boss into a tank and spank is the most fun part of raiding? And not like, you know, learning mechanics and doing them well? Guess we disagree on this one.

 

My group kinda likes the mechanics of the reek, apart from the buggy side and spawn point RNG. Probably moving to % or something is a good idea, or some whole other thing we haven't thought about.

What? So bringing 6 DPS to turn an interesting boss into a tank and spank is the most fun part of raiding? And not like, you know, learning mechanics and doing them well? Guess we disagree on this one.

 

My group kinda likes the mechanics of the reek, apart from the buggy side and spawn point RNG. Probably moving to % or something is a good idea, or some whole other thing we haven't thought about.

 

Yeah pretty much. Whatever makes the boss fight easier for your raid team is the optimal strategy. It's like that in every game. Constantly buffing a boss because some team found an easier way to do it is discouraging to lesser skilled or more casual teams. They have already raised the HP by 10 mil from HM.

Nightmare is the mode in which group balance between tanks, heals, and dps should be most strictly enforced. If there's a way to successfully do a current content nightmare boss with fewer tanks or healers it should be adjusted until that way is no longer possible. Edited March 17, 2020 by FridgeLM

Here's some further feedback from <Ordinance>'s raid that we didn't get to Camera Two

 

Red

The damage intake on Tanks in particular felt very counter-intuitive, at least for me and my co-tank. For the vast majority of our pulls that reached the fourth flower position (around 3.5-4 min) between that time and when we exited the cave around 1-2min later our highest damage taken had shifted from Eviscerate and Festering Wound to almost all Envenomed Bite from the stalkers. While this was not always the case pull-to-pull it seems that the bosses damage is almost entirely in Acidic Jet and Red Venom, both of which are mechanics that are avoidable while the unavoidable melee damage is considerably less than the small ~350k HP stalkers that melee for 70k on dps and healers. For us at least it would be a lot better if some of the melee damage in the fight shifted from being on the Stalkers to the Boss, not only to prevent solo tanking which groups are inevitably going to do, but also to increase the healing requirement as a whole throughout the course of the fight as we've also seem some groups soloing healing due to the low boss damage on tanks. I also personally think there is some merit to dropping the overall difficulty of this fight a tad in order to provide more access to aspiring/prog Nightmare teams since this isn't something like Tyth that is intended to be highly intricate, however, that being said I'm perfectly content with the current difficulty of the fight.

 

As far as the mechanics of the encounter are concerned we were all fairly satisfied with how they are generally, however, as we haven't pull the boss that much I won't be giving any concrete feedback about the mechanics yet since most of our players aren't really paying that much attention to the nuances of them currently.

 

The First Holding Pens Encounter

As a whole after our first night of testing this fight we were actually quite happy with the Nightmare changes currently, the inclusion of an actual Boss in the fight definitely made some of our members enjoy it a lot more, so big ups to whoever designed the Predator Droid.

 

As far as that droid is concerned there was one major bug that we noticed while testing, that is if the dps targeted by the stealthed boss uses their stun break immediately when he pops out he would go right back into stealth and target the next dps, effectively extending the time between when he pops out. This was very easily reproducible and definitely should get fixed asap if it's not known about currently. We also noticed that sometimes if the droid got pushed to 90% as he was doing the second AoE cast he would do zero damage to the group and other times he would do damage, it would be good to know which is intended. As far as the rest of the fight is concerned there are still issues with the exploding shrieks de-syncing and dropping their yellow circles where they are not which is still fairly annoying, additionally the mini-nefras (I forget their name) could target the dps who was being tracked by the Predator droid and pull-stun them into the group as the buff was expiring which, under the right circumstances, could lead to a raid wipe.

 

As a side note from reading the rest of the thread I 100% agree that you should not be able to drop tanks and healers on a Nightmare fight in order to trivialize encounters like Red, and if it's being encourage for groups to do that instead of properly doing the fight with a standard comp as intended then the fight needs to change(and yes that includes a certain stealthy boi that we did just that to a couple weeks ago).

My raid team and I tested Red today and while the fight is different and will be killed in this iteration, we found a few issues that need fixed.

 

The first thing we noticed is that DPS get flower refreshes off the corona virus buff that prevents stacks. However when our tanks tried to get that they were denied no matter how hard we tried. Either remove the DPS refresh or allow tanks to get it. My recommendation is to allow the tanks to get 1 refresh 15 seconds in. So 1 minute from flower to flower. This makes the fight slightly shorter.

 

The second flower area a random bull spawns there like 15% of the pulls we did. That is a bit odd. Consider removing the bull here because its not hard to deal with and only prolongs the fight. Is it a bug? Who knows.

 

The bull needs to be fixed. Having a tank not be able to pick it up because they cannot see it is going to frustrate raiders if that hits live. This is THE most important fix that this fight needs.

 

A rare bug we encountered was acid jet hitting the raid while Red was facing an entirely different direction. That only happened once.

 

A special note to the developers of raids. I am extremely concerned about the testing for Red. All of the posts on the forums are from players in Top-End guilds, which does not represent all raiders at a Nightmare level. Red is the entry boss to the new raid and should be accessible to most Nightmare capable teams. Having another raid at the level of Gods of the machine will alienate some of these teams and deny access to fun NEW content due to skill gap. While

Gods of the Machine was a fun and well designed raid, it was tuned to the top raiders in the game and having back to back raids tuned that way will bum some people out. Consider Nightmare power buffs (DF/DP) to appease the elitists and then remove those and add nerfs down the road so that bosses can be accessed by more of the Nightmare community. I believe this will increase interest in Nightmare raiding as well as bring back some of the old raiders of the game. Big brain I know.

Edited March 21, 2020 by Hercology

So with this trandoshans being around with amazing changes and huntmaster not really seen ye mucht, can we get a kill button for pens for easier testing? Pens 2 only became killable since yesterday (according to patch notes, not sure if anybody tested it) and Trandoshans already received 2-3 updates since last time they were accessible. There are also no devs around at EU raiding times to ask them for 'kill pens for us plz we wanna test trandoshans etc'. Pretty please

 

And I second what Hercology says about Red - this corona lockout thing is not nice, it breaks the concept and overall makes some classes that are bad for movement (sniper turret style I am looking at you) kind of garbage. It shouldnt be memeful easy boss, but right now you are making it way more complicated than just 'entry level test' boss. Think about casual players, how else will they access these new lit set bonuses except farming Red and not being able to do Pens!

 

Also I genuinely wonder why PTS is down every time my EU team is ready to test some bosses

 

@Hercology a rare bug with Acid Jet hitting other direction than VFX shows is not so rare here on the other side of the Earth. It is latency-based and solution we found is: 'if you are main tank. don't touch those movement buttons much when Jet is soon, your screen position and your server position are not very synced' it still means some desync in Acidic Jet itself, but the fact that you encountered it once and we encountered it a lot just proves me that it has something to do with lag.

Edited March 21, 2020 by Prog

My raid team and I tested Red today and while the fight is different and will be killed in this iteration, we found a few issues that need fixed.

 

The first thing we noticed is that DPS get flower refreshes off the corona virus buff that prevents stacks. However when our tanks tried to get that they were denied no matter how hard we tried. Either remove the DPS refresh or allow tanks to get it. My recommendation is to allow the tanks to get 1 refresh 15 seconds in. So 1 minute from flower to flower. This makes the fight slightly shorter.

 

The second flower area a random bull spawns there like 15% of the pulls we did. That is a bit odd. Consider removing the bull here because its not hard to deal with and only prolongs the fight. Is it a bug? Who knows.

 

The bull needs to be fixed. Having a tank not be able to pick it up because they cannot see it is going to frustrate raiders if that hits live. This is THE most important fix that this fight needs.

 

A rare bug we encountered was acid jet hitting the raid while Red was facing an entirely different direction. That only happened once.

 

A special note to the developers of raids. I am extremely concerned about the testing for Red. All of the posts on the forums are from players in Top-End guilds, which does not represent all raiders at a Nightmare level. Red is the entry boss to the new raid and should be accessible to most Nightmare capable teams. Having another raid at the level of Gods of the machine will alienate some of these teams and deny access to fun NEW content due to skill gap. While

Gods of the Machine was a fun and well designed raid, it was tuned to the top raiders in the game and having back to back raids tuned that way will bum some people out. Consider Nightmare power buffs (DF/DP) to appease the elitists and then remove those and add nerfs down the road so that bosses can be accessed by more of the Nightmare community. I believe this will increase interest in Nightmare raiding as well as bring back some of the old raiders of the game. Big brain I know.

 

If I can ask, how were you guys doing the fight, my team went back into Dxun NiM today and was very easily able to pick up the new positioning in Red, we actually ended up finding it almost easier to deal with the bulls since they always spawn in the same place. In the end, everything just seemed very consistent for us and we ended up killing as well. Perhaps if you give insight on how you did the fight maybe what the problem is that you're having can be solved.

Caustic Plume doesn't seem to react to extreme heat sources as described somewhere before.

Here is some feedback from my group.

 

Containment Protocol trash encounters:

• New group added at elevator tends to fall under floor, often evading.
  
• Organic Purge seems to do quite a lot of damage to adds, simply kiting Combat Medics kills them within ~30s.
  
• There is a chance for player to receive 2 stacks of Organic Purge and they stay up even in the room with Titax. Had to wait for person to naturally die, we revive and debuff doesnt reapply luckily.
  
• Now the worst: battery seems to clone itself under some unknown circumstances...and it keeps reappearing even
  after we use elevator. It basically keeps re-spawning in Titax's room every time we wipe. And sometimes you choose to stand in Fires of Greus instead of accidentally picking that battery. We even though this is intended and you had to carry it up to Apex...alas we couldn't make any stims off this battery
  
• The biggest laugh I had was wiping on Huntmaster and seeing battery spawn on top of my body.
  

 

Now down to Mutant Trandoshan Squad. Overall design of the fight does not feel pleasant (I mean its NiM but still). To minmax everything and fulfill the DPS check we need close to ideal boss killing on rails (especially with amazing short Titax torpor - we loved it, no sarcasm, really). But the fact that Divebomb, Crush the Weak and Titax Strike involve big repositioning of corresponding boss and don't have a very strict timer (kiting the boss literally delays his Titax Strike from 20s to 30s, easy)....it means that bringing these bosses to rails at appropriate time is even more of a problem and it all comes down to a bit of luck regarding timer correspondence and hence frustrates those who rely on skill (all NiM raiders).

You'd say Titax Strike doesnt involve that big repositioning if we do a tank swap, but he becomes tauntable only after running 10m towards pushed target or it is that famous desync. Also you can tell that Divebomb and Crush the Weak are both skill check - target person could move in the right position for everyone's convenience. But their circle is same color so person doesnt know which boss he is targeted with. Also Divebomb 3s cast time doesn't really provide reliable repositioning chance. Overall boss is difficult and fun, we like it. But it is rather clunky to deal with.

So suggestion I have is:

• Change color of Divebomb/Crush the Weak to be able to quickly distinguish them
  
• Increase cast time of Divebomb on the price of idling time Greus has between Divebomb and Pyroclasm (literally 2-3 standing waiting doing nothing) or on the price of Pyroclasm.
  

Also as I've said in the previous post we didn't seem to catch any dependence of Caustic Plume to extreme heat sources.

And yeah Pyroclasm kind of lost its reflect component, not sure if intended, but it kinda makes RDPS > MDPS again. Not cool

 

I don't know how this is still a thing, but why the hell Titax Strike stunlocks so badly. Can't we make it work like Impel on Revan? You literally have no warning of being stunned to death unless you were lucky to be in cool position. This is super clunky if you include boss' big hit box and his tendency to dance around the player changing the push angle by 30 or even 60 degrees.

 

Stairs:

We hate you, Matt. Not being able to jump on stairs down is the worst feature ever. We are glad on PTS you can access elevator without stairs down, but seriously...I know its a good troll, but you gonna put time run there right? Imagine all the hate? Terrible, absolutely terrible...

 

Huntmaster:

So its nice...fun...everything, maybe not tuned well enough, we only damaged him to 70% at best when he goes first lake. I guess it could be possible to push him to 35% with <2 lake phases but requires some mad skills and add management being a bit RNG does not help...so biggest and most disappointing things we encounter on Huntmaster:

• Huntmaster's position being desynced and melees can't hit it (I know its not new but you tell you release NiM on June - please fix it!)
  
• Huntmatser's position being desynced and group cant protect itself from Powershot Volley (I know its not new but you tell you release NiM on June - please fix it!)
  
• Light moves, Huntmaster teleports and immediatelly after does Egg Shot, oneshotting the guy who had the debuff already and had no idea about boss teleport (I know its not new...)
  

Now last one seems to be the biggest problem. Boss doesn't teleport midcast. So if flare moved out of him during the cast he will teleport only after. This often leaves tank who takes Penetrating Shot outside flare and hence adds jump on him....you imagine what happens next. Alternatives are a) group being outside light b) tank being in light with group, PENETRATING them all. All I am saying is that with groups' perfect movement and Firestorm Grenade placement it is still impossible to maintain desired inside-flare uptime and avoid all the unnecessary damage that often oneshots you. I know its NiM, but it is really bad design here. I say flare movement should be synced with boss casts. On HM it was easier to deal with since tank could stay out and get aggro of wild animals. Now animals seem to have higher threat on fresh person to exit light even if tank outside has just taunted the adds. Its ok - makes fight harder, we love it. But rendering situation when it is not fortress and standing inside light is impossible due to boss' casts...that puts big frustration on our souls.

 

Bird mechanic and Kolto Missile is hated by part of our team, but overall is fine. Still this doesnt make this fight to feel like a complete NiM yet, just saying. Everything doing big damage is cool, but needs more mechanical additions, really.

 

And yeah melee unfriendly raids...come on, this gets worse and worse. Aggrotable of Lurking Beasts leaves mdps no chance.