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5.10.1 PTS Refresh #1 (11th of January, 2019)


MattPucevich

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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...
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[*]Some Geonosians have been embiggened and embeefened!

 

Admit that you put those two words on purpose there, because you knew I would have to look them up on Urban Dictionary again. :eek: (Granted, I guessed correctly what those would mean, but still: again a first time for me to read those words.)

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I went through my recordings to try and figure out why Pheromonic Blast is sometimes casted twice in a row. Whenever the ability showed buggy behaviour, it fell into one of three categories:

  1. After the second Growth Hormone cast
  2. When a player dies
  3. After a Royal Summons cast

The ability was bugged during both the first and second PTS build, and the bugs manifested in the same way.

 

 

 

of 12 times this bug occured. In these cases, it always happened 30 seconds into the boss fight when the boss casts Pheromonic Blast for the second time. For reference, at the beginning the boss is using the following abilities in this order:
  1. Growth Hormone
  2. Pheromonic Blast
  3. Melee Attack
  4. Melee Attack
  5. Growth Hormone
  6. Pheromonic Blast (does nothing)
  7. Pheromonic Blast
  8. Overhead Skewer
  9. Kick Out

As you can see, the boss uses Growth Hormone (#5), then it casts Pheromonic Blast (#6) on a random DPS. The cast finishes (the cast bar has no indication that it was interrupted). However, the impact VFX is missing.

As soon as the #6 cast finishes, the boss immediately casts Pheromonic Blast (#7) again, often on a different DPS but it can also hit the same player again. This time, the cast again goes through but it also shows the impact VFX and it destroys surrounding eggs.

 

In some tries, the boss uses the abilities in a different order, like so:

  1. Growth Hormone
  2. Pheromonic Blast
  3. Melee Attack
  4. Melee Attack
  5. Pheromonic Blast
  6. Growth Hormone
  7. Overhead Skewer
  8. Kick Out

In other words, the boss would first cast Pheromonic Blast (#5) and then cast Growth Hormone (#6). In these tries, we would never get two Pheromonic Blast in a row.

 

So it looks like this bug only occurs if the boss casts Growth Hormone before Pheromonic Blast. I hope this helps with reproducing and fixing this bug.

 

 

 

However, this is not the only weirdness with Pheromonic Blast. The cast

, as expected. The ability is then recast on another player. However, this second cast will always interrupt around 0.9s to 1.1s of the 4s cast, it never goes through. Finally, the boss would cast the ability for a third time and this time it finishes and will actually destroy eggs.

In this case, the bug is that the 2nd cast should go through if that player stays alive; there's no need for a third cast.

 

 

 

Finally, the Pheromonic Blast cast can also interrupt if it's right after the Royal Summons cast, without anyone dying or stealthing out.

where this happens.

As you can see, the boss casts Royal Summons, then it casts Pheromonic Blast but it is interrupted 3s into the cast. The Pheromonic Blast would then be casted a 2nd time and this time it finishes and destroys the eggs.

In 4 out of 5 tries, the second Pheromonic Blast cast would land on the same player as the first one but this may just be RNG and not be significant.

Edited by Jerba
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