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Hive of the Mountain Queen on PTS! How to Get Geared Up and in, and What to Expect.


MattPucevich

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  • Dev Post

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:

  1. Create a new Character.
  2. On your origin world, near where your character starts, you should find a "Level Booster" terminal, and an "Odessen Teleporter" terminal.
  3. 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).
  4. When you have as many credits as you'd like, click the "Odessen Teleporter" terminal to be moved to the Odessen landing area.
  5. 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!

Edited by EricMusco
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I went out and tested what I could given that I could not muster together an operation when I'm out there by myself and unguilded (the bridge to nowhere said I needed to be in an op) but I did learn that gear set bonuses still do not stack:

 

230: https://imgur.com/9nQMSSr

252: https://imgur.com/zuydQMm

Edited by xordevoreaux
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Why do you need PTS for a single boss?!

Come on... you ignore people's bug reports and suggestions on PTS (gearing and other stuff) and 5.10.1 will be released as broken as 5.10, you are wasting everyone's time.

 

How bad the developer team of AAA studio should be if they can't release fully working boss?

 

Also I can see that you keep removing posts from this and other threads, so much for "open communication"...

 

At this point, it's not about completeness, as mentioned when the developer said the release on PTS was a first pass. That the PTS is open at this early stage of development for this op suggests a greater willingness for input from the player base before the operation is completely coded, which subsequently suggests the dev team's willingness to be flexible and adaptable as coding progresses.

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Why do you need PTS for a single boss?!

Come on... you ignore people's bug reports and suggestions on PTS (gearing and other stuff) and 5.10.1 will be released as broken as 5.10, you are wasting everyone's time.

 

How bad the developer team of AAA studio should be if they can't release fully working boss?

 

Also I can see that you keep removing posts from this and other threads, so much for "open communication"...

 

I fail to understand how putting ANYTHING on PTS can be considered a bad thing. People asked for more stuff on PTS for ages and now that they are putting even single boss encounters there, you are mad and angry...

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Can the Hive of the Mountain Queen have this music?

:D:cool:

 

All that and nothing about a patch....wow...

Why do you need PTS for a single boss?!

Come on... you ignore people's bug reports and suggestions on PTS (gearing and other stuff) and 5.10.1 will be released as broken as 5.10, you are wasting everyone's time.

 

How bad the developer team of AAA studio should be if they can't release fully working boss?

 

Also I can see that you keep removing posts from this and other threads, so much for "open communication"...

 

MattP designs the operations. Get a clue, and get your own thread.

Edited by Rion_Starkiller
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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 )

 

They should be polysynodal and work as fast and be as meticulous as you can on both. Still waiting to play kedi under bug on my main character .... can't progress beyond the first mission due to the simple fact that i can't summon major anri. Bug that i reported right away and over a week ago.

 

P.s.: which Bioware or the devs did not deem to reply, frustrating from ym position...

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The op boss and tunnels look great and thank you for adding a hidden short cut. ^^ Bomb area,, did nt kill us ... honest..

 

I was a healer so i can only speak from that point of view we under man it with 7 people 2 healers 1 tank 4 dps

it was very easy . I saw the yellow and red circle but was nt on voice chat to understand what they were.

 

was SM bolstered? everything just seem super easy .

 

 

Now on to Hard mode

 

 

Besrkers add some nice dots .. that hit hard so it was fun fight. some of the add guards the queen etc. at 7 man 1st pull we got it to 42 % system with the adds is nice . ofc if u hit the eggs... your in for problem with a short buff..

 

I would imagine VM 16 man this is beyound easy as a team member can die and take the short cut back and be back in the fight with in 20 secs

 

 

as a super special snowflake I demand ^^ a title for clearing this boss

 

the title should be " Killer queen"

 

its a hell of a good rock song so why ^^ not

Edited by Murder_Toys
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  • 2 weeks later...

My biggest concern is the balancing of this new boss. Let's consider the following four types of raid groups.

  1. Casual group: can kill all SM bosses and the easiest VM bosses
  2. Determined group: can kill most VM bosses, and none or very few MM bosses
  3. Semi-progression: can kill all VM bosses, and most MM without GftM and Brontes etc.
  4. Hardcore progression: can kill all MM bosses

 

TL;DR: SM should be clearable by raid groups A-D as well as PuG groups. VM should be easily clearable by C & D, and with a lot of work also by group B. Outside of bugs, the boss is correctly tuned right now IMO.

 

We are an above-average group ©; we have killed all bosses except for GftM MM and are generally good at mechanics though we are usually low on DPS so we can't "burn through" boss mechanics like hardcore progression groups (D). On PTS today, we were fully equipped in 258 gear. Even on the live servers, by the time the boss releases, we will be in full 258 gear except for the MH/OH (right now we are only waiting for weekly caps to reset so we can hit Legend reputation). (Our biggest gearing concern is not so much the lower stats from the 252 MH/OH but that we will not hit the Alacrity breakpoints required for 1.3s/1.4s GCDs without using additional Alacrity augments.)

Today, we tried the boss for 4 hours. We killed it in SM on our first try. In VM, in our best try we got to 40% when the soft enrage starts (4 minute mark). With more time invested, I am confident we could kill the boss in the current form so we'd need to find a way to increase DPS. Outside of bugs, the boss is tuned correctly right now IMO.

 

 

From a gearing perspective, this boss reminds me of the Colossal Monolith on Ziost. Back then, most of the gear tier was released with Ravagers/ToS in 3.0, while only the MH was released with 3.2.

We are now in a similar situation with most of the 258 gear available from the Ossus daily area, and the MH/OH only dropping from the Mutated Geonosian Queen.

 

In theory, this is a great way to manage gearing. Progression players (D) can kill the hardest bosses to get gear, while semi-progression groups (B+C) will have to wait slightly longer and can then face an easier boss to catch up with gearing.

However, in practice this hardly works. In 3.0, the Coratanni exploit disrupted the gearing process, giving players BiS gear way too early. In 3.2, the Monolith fight had a weeks-long bug where the Breaking the Rift channel would auto-interrupt; that way you could ignore the most important boss mechanic. Now in 5.10, you can get nearly a full 258 gear set without entering GftM MM or any operation at all.

 

 

I estimate that the 6.0 expansion will arrive around 3-6 months after 5.10.1.

Ideally, above-average raid groups like ours © should need at most 2 weeks (8-10 raid hours) to kill the boss. Afterwards, you still have to kill the boss 7 more times so that everyone in the raid group gets the loot.

This will be faster than 7 weeks because we can do split runs (most progression players have legacy gear with multiple alts), though you have to consider that some players may have multiple classes or there are substitute players (i.e. more than 8 players per raid group).

So for those groups ©, having everyone with a 258 MH after at most 6-8 weeks is a fair timeframe. This leaves enough time to enjoy the content in the nerfed state but not enough time to get bored before 6.0 arrives.

 

Determined raid groups (B) should not be able to kill the new boss that fast. If they put in a lot of effort, they might kill it in 2 months time.

I remember during 2.X/3.X, many HM raid groups (B) had no trouble with DF/DP HM but then Rav/ToS HM turned out to be too difficult, causing those raid groups to lose interest and then disband. Similarily when GftM VM released, the bosses were too difficult for them so the sticked to the older VM operations. Now that GftM has been nerfed with 5.10, these groups may finally have a chance to kill it but from what I heard, most of these groups are currently progressing on bosses like Revan VM and have no interest in GftM, and I don't see them having an interest in this new boss either. However, in one year from now during 6.X, I can see these groups (B) wanting to progress on it then, and by that time the boss will be nerfed enough that these groups have an easy time on it.

 

Yes, a tuning like this means that hardcore groups (D) would complain that the boss is too easy. On the other hand, the game desperately needs easier raid bosses than GftM to cater to determined raid groups (B+C).

PuG groups will have a hard time in VM but I don't think that this boss should be puggable in VM.

 

 

I'll have another post on the boss mechanics.

Edited by Jerba
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From a level design/environment design perspective, the whole operation looks great. There are a lot of funny surprises (ledges and explosives) and players are introduced to some of the boss mechanics (Geonosian Royal Guards and Mutated Eggs) on their way to the boss.

In other games and movies, I'd consider the mechanic of adds hatching from eggs to be overused (e.g. Onyxia) but in SWTOR, it's only been used in one Rishi heroic (The Great Beast Hunt) and the trash mobs before SCYVA, so I didn't find it too repetitive. But please don't use this mechanic again in the next operation or it will get really boring really fast.

 

After four hours, we have figured out nearly all mechanics of the boss fight and have developed a good strategy to deal with it; we just need more time to internalize it.

 

 

Bug reports

 

Without a doubt, the most critical bug is that you can return to area start while the boss fight is active. Please ensure that players cannot release during the boss fight, otherwise dead players can just run back and rejoin the fight.

 

Shortly before the boss room where you need to plant the first explosives, it is possible to jump through the wall on the left side. That way, you can bug your way into the boss room without planting any explosives. Please fill the holes or put an invisible wall there to ensure players must use the explosives.

 

When knocking trash mobs off a ledge, they don't always die, sometimes they turn invisible but the group stays in combat. Eventually, they will show up again. Please ensure that if the mobs fall down, they are immediately killed.

 

 

In some tries, when the boss casts Pheromonic Blast for the second time (around 27 seconds into the fight), the cast bar would finish but the ability would not go through; instead the boss would then cast the Pheromonic Blast again on another player. Video:

 

A core part of the boss fight is figuring out which eggs are red ("empowered").

The Growth Hormone ability where three eggs are turned red has three beams that connect the boss with these eggs (example). However, when the boss moves, the direction and length of the beams is not updated (

), and you no longer see which eggs are being turned red. Please ensure that the beams stay connected to the eggs even if the boss is moving.

 

 

Suggestions

 

Our tanks had difficulty noticing when they'd be stunned by Overhead Skewer. (Our strategy is that the tank uses his stun break to avoid the subsequent Guillotine; one GCD with no advance notice does not give enough reaction time to execute a tank swap).

Please either turn Overhead Skewer from an instant to a casted ability or add a red raid warning text for the targeted player, that way tanks can counterplay this mechanic more easily.

 

 

Similarily, the Staggering Strike from the Geonosian Royal Guards is very hard to notice. As far as we can tell:

  1. The guards first cast Concentrate for half a second. This is a very short cast and easy to miss.
  2. The guards will then cast Staggering Strike; this is an instant ability. It deals as much as 170k damage to a healer/DPS. The only way to notice it is that the targeted player receives the Staggered debuff for 6 seconds and the guard now has two additional buffs: a taunt immunity, and a 4.5s GCD.
  3. The next action by the guards will be Execute, which immediately kills the player if he still has the Staggered debuff.

Maybe we are understanding it wrong but the intended strategy seems to be to wait for both Concentrate and Staggering Strike, then wait an additional 2 seconds and then put a 4 second hard stun on the guard. By the time the stun expires, the player will have lost his Staggered debuff and the guard will be dead before it can cast Concentrate a second time.

The advantage with this strategy is that the downtime of the add is minimized; you get plenty of cleaves to destroy eggs without spawning adds. This is especially helpful with red eggs to avoid the Geonosian Berserkers, or with cracked eggs so they won't immediately be destroyed by the boss' next Rallying Call.

However, in practice we would just keep the guards stunlocked so that they wouldn't even get to cast Concentrate or do the cleave. It shouldn't be possible to ignore the mechanic like that IMO. How about decreasing the cooldown on the cleave ability? Right now, 9s (even with the alacrity buff from the boss) is way too slow to destroy many eggs. With e.g. a 3s CD on the cleave, groups would be much more encouraged to not stunlock the guards.

Also, is it intended that the guards are supposed to be tanked? The Staggering Strike deals way too much damage on a DPS or healer unless he uses defensive CDs. The two guards spawn around 10-15 seconds before Rallying Call starts, which means one tank will still be busy with the boss and can't taunt a guard. Our solution was to have the off-tank take one guard while we would put a 60 second mezz on the second guard. Once the boss goes into Rallying Call, the other tank can get his guard (and by this time, the first guard would usually already be dead). Maybe decrease the damage on Staggering Strike so that DPS/healers can survive it.

 

 

Please ensure that red eggs are much more noticeable from a distance compared to blue eggs. Increase their size, make the red glow more luminous or add a circle below them.

 

 

Also, please ensure that the Geonosian Berserkers look different than Bantling Lacerators. One simple solution would be to change their toughness (right now both are elites = gold). For example, change the Bantling Lacerators to strong (silver) or change the Geonosian Berserkers to champion. That way, you can easily see how many Berserkers have spawned by looking into their nameplates.

 

 

Right now, it takes four spits from the Caustic Drones to destroy an egg. This takes way too long and makes it unlikely players will make use of this mechanic. First of all, the hitbox on the eggs is too small; unless you are standing directly on an egg, the spit will miss. In addition, while healers have the immediate threat, most likely a DPS will get aggro before the 4th spit, meaning the egg will not be destroyed. If you have friendly NPC nameplates disabled (which I'd recommend on this fight), there is zero feedback on whether the spit hit an egg or missed it. Also, the debuff from four spits is already stacked so high that you have to spend so much time healing yourself that you don't get to heal the group anymore.

Please ensure that any spit from the Caustic Drones will one-shot an egg, and that the hitbox is slightly bigger. Otherwise, there's no point adding this mechanic if players will not use it.

 

 

My main concern, as always, is that groups with enough DPS/HPS can just burn through the boss and ignore all mechanics. There are some barriers in place (e.g. the instant kill abilities, and the Berserkers that quickly wipe the group if you don't handle the red eggs) but it's not enough reward to follow the mechanics IMO.

You need a combined raid DPS of 32k to kill the boss before the 4 minute mark where his more punishing mechanics start, which is not much. There is some downtime while the guards are alive, so let's call it 3 minutes and we get a raid DPS of 43k which is still easily reachable by good groups.

At the same time, there are groups that don't have that high DPS. For example, in our best try the boss was at 40% by the 4 minute mark, with more practice we might hit <30% but not anywhere close to 10% as I'd expect other groups to reach.

Ideally, paying attention to mechanics should be rewarded by giving more leeway when it comes to DPS checks. Instead, this boss fight is so short that top groups may not even notice the difference between blue and red eggs, or cracked and uncracked eggs. They might kill the boss before the 2nd Rallying Call finishes which I don't think is intended.

How about moving the Pheromonic Multi-Blast back to like the 6 minute mark but increasing the downtime on the boss (where he takes less or zero damage)? That way, the boss will cast Rallying Call at least a third time and players have to pay more attention to mechanics. The Pheromonic Multi-Blast can be treated like a soft enrage which should be the start of the soft enrage where you start ignoring mechanics, with the Save the Queen! channels being the burn phase where you focus on the boss.

Edited by Jerba
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January 4th, 2019 (part 1)

 

We tested the Mutated Geonosian Queen for another 4 hours today, paying special attention to the tuning of both SM and VM, compared to the difficulty targets:

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.

 

 

TL;DR: The boss' hitpoints are way out of whack.

  • SM is too difficult in both 8-man and 16-man. The hitpoints need to be decreased by 30-40% to account for low-skill players or else those groups will wipe because they're overwhelmed by adds, or hit hard enrage if they have good healers. And maybe add stacks of Determination like in WoW to make the fight easier with every wipe.
  • 8-man VM is slightly too easy in that the fight is over too quickly (by the 4 minute mark); the boss' HP can be slightly increased by 5-15%—but not much more than that, or it is no longer beatable with 248 gear.
  • In VM, the 4-minute enrage (Pheromonic Multi-Blast) is too punishing, so if the fight duration is increased (due to higher boss HP), the Pheromonic Multi-Blast (and possibly other stuff) must be nerfed significantly. Any such nerf would require extensive PTS testing to ensure the balancing is correct.

 

 

Our today's progress

 

Today, we started with 8-man VM in 258 gear (+4% mastery bonus from guild perk). If you remember, last week we hit the 4-minute phase with around 40% left on the boss. Today, it was much easy. At the 4 minute mark, the boss was at 20% HP and we were able to kill the boss at the 4:30 mark. This had two reasons: One, we executed the mechanics much better:

  • Placing Pheromonic Blast inside red eggs to spawn individual Berserkers early
  • Not stunlocking Royal Guards so that tanks could use the cleaves on the eggs
  • Correct use of timely stun break on Overhead Skewer, and stuns after Staggering Strike
  • Stacking the adds on the boss for more AoE and uptime on the boss

Also, we had a more experienced DPS player this time, and the higher DPS made a big difference.

 

Then, we decided to try 16-man SM with 8-players, using 248 gear. After reading that 8-man SM is three-mannable(?), we figured it should be trivial to 8-man the 16-man SM. However, as it turned out, the boss had way too much HP. With 248 gear, we hit the hard enrage (7m50s) when the boss was at 27%. With more time invested, we might have killed it.

 

Following that, we did 8-man SM. According to your forum post, players should not need gear for SM, bolster is enough, so we removed our gear (except for an empty main hand). The average SM player will be better equipped of course, say around 230 gear rating, but we are also very skilled players and know the boss mechanics, so this should even out. Yet it turned out that with a SM player's average DPS of 4k, the boss has way too much HP and the fight takes too long. By the 6 minute mark, too many mistakes piled up (e.g. battle-rezz on cooldown and another player died) and we wiped with the boss at 15% HP. Ideally, a SM group with 4k DPS per player should have already killed the boss by this time Eventually we put on a few more 248 pieces and then we were able to kill the boss.

We did notice that the Geonosian Royal Guards dealt too much damage in 8-man SM if a DPS had aggro, so please nerf those adds in SM.

 

Finally, we went back into 8-man VM with our 248 gear. Unlike earlier in the night, this was not a breeze. We faced similar difficulties like last week—getting into the 4 minute phase with 30-40% HP on the boss, and then wiping because of Pheromonic Multi-Blast. The main issue is that each player had lower DPS, so e.g. 8k instead of 10k. This meant the adds lived longer and there was less time to focus on the boss. In addition, players were losing concentration.

However, I'd say during these tries, we had a experience similar to what a typical VM raid group would face. Considering that the boss is supposed to be tuned for 248, it should not be buffed too much. Yes, the fight duration must be increased but the 4-minute soft enrage must be nerfed. More on that later.

 

 

Hitpoints

 

Current boss hitpoints:

  • 8-man SM: 6.2m HP
  • 16-man SM: 14m HP
  • 8-man VM: 7.7m HP
  • 16-man VM: 17.3m HP

 

As you can see, on 16-man the boss has more than twice the HP than on 8-man, which is correct.

But when comparing the HP of SM and VM, it is only a 25% difference. A typical SM player does around 4k DPS while a typical VM player does around 8k DPS. Therefore, I propose the following hitpoints instead:

 

Proposed boss hitpoints:

  • 8-man SM: 4m HP
  • 16-man SM: 9m HP
  • 8-man VM: 8.5m HP
  • 16-man VM: 18m HP

 

(The adds' HP should be adjusted accordingly by the same amount)

Edited by Jerba
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January 4th, 2019 (part 2)

 

I really like the multiple levels of enrage in this fight, leading to a steady increase in difficulty as the fight goes on.

  • 0:00-4:00: normal boss fight
  • 4:00-6:30: first soft enrage (Pheromonic Multi-Blast)
  • 6:30-7:45: second soft enrage (Save the Queen!)
  • 7:45+: hard enrage (Royal Indignation)

I don't remember seeing something like that in SWTOR before, where the boss' phases are not triggered by boss HP but by time elapsed, and I like it very much. (This does mean that top-DPS groups will kill the boss without seeing all the phases but this boss should be balanced for mid to above-average skill groups, not for high-skill groups.)

 

Usually, the difficulty increases over time because if you lack DPS, you will not kill adds fast enough, have less uptime on the boss and will eventually wipe due to the number of adds or due to hard enrage.

As a raid leader, this is a tough problem because no matter how you change the strategy, you won't magically get your DPS players to perform better. You rely on hacks like stacking adds so they die in AoE but there is only a small amount of solutions.

 

On the other hand, with this multi-level enrage, there are multiple places where you can experiment with your strategy and try out new ideas. This makes for a much more enjoyable experience, especially when your group is wiping on a boss for multiple weeks in a row and unless you as a raid leader find a way to progress, the group loses motivation.

 

(Going off on a tangent but this is very noticeable on Tyth MM, where if you have trouble managing the first add wave, you have trouble thoughout the whole fight and there are not many places to adjust the strategy.)

 

 

Back to the Mutated Geonosian Queen.

On SM, we could notice this multi-level enrage very well. Over time, more and more adds would spawn and the fight became more hectic. But it was a very gradual increase in difficulty and no steep learning curve, until we hit the hard enrage at the end.

 

On VM however, the first soft enrage (4:00) is already too strong. Until that time, it is a very steady increase in difficulty with some breathing room during Rallying Call. But as soon as Pheromonic Multi-Blast starts, we would wipe within 30 seconds.

I attribute this mainly to the damage from the outer yellow circle of the Pheromonic Multi-Blast. When three players get the void, you have two choices:

  • Either the players spread out so that the circles don't overlap, and then there'll be dozens of adds spawning which cause FPS drops and wipe the group if there are some Berserkers among them.
  • Or the players stay together, slightly apart so that the inner red circle would not overlap but with the yellow circle overlapping. That way, players would only get a single Pheromonic Blast DoT, not multiple, and they would not hit as many eggs. However, this resulted in the rest of the group standing in up to 3 yellow circles and taking as much as 3 * 30k = 90k damage with every Pheromonic Multi-Blast. This is not healable.

 

 

While I am in support of increasing the HP of 8-man VM so the fight lasts longer, the Pheromonic Multi-Blast must be nerfed in VM. That way, the burn phase (where you focus on the boss and ignore the adds) can start with the second soft enrage (Save the Queen!).

We thought of the following two solutions:

  • Only place the Pheromonic Multi-Blast on two players, not three players. (Maybe add another soft enrage somewhere between 5:30 and 6:00 where three players get it, but when the Multi-Blast starts, at first only two players should get it.)
  • Decrease the damage from the red outer circle, e.g. 10k instead of 30k. The red outer circle from the earlier phases (a single Pheromonic Blast) does not need to be nerfed, only the Pheromonic Multi-Blast damage requires a nerf.

However, I am concerned whether these changes lead to a net improvement. Right now, the boss is nearly perfectly balanced in VM. The only issue is that the fight is too short compared to SM, and I am not sure if it is worth it to increase boss HP for the sake of VM players reaching the "Save the Queen!" phase. You risk severely imbalancing the fight unless there is plenty of PTS testing, but right now we're the only group giving actionable feedback and I don't expect there are many weeks left until 5.10.1 releases.

Edited by Jerba
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January 4th, 2019 (part 3)

 

All in all, I'd say that VM is not a walk in the park. Even in our first hour where we ended up killing the boss on VM, we had a couple wipes.

  • For example, our tanks were frequently dying because they forgot to use their stun break after Overhead Skewer. The boss really should have a cast bar or do some special animation (similar to the Guard's Staggering Strike) so tanks will easily notice when they are stunned.
  • But we also wiped whenever we got too many Berserkers. This happened whenever the DPS didn't place their Pheromonic Blast on a red egg in the first minute. Eventually those red eggs would hatch and the Berserkers would kill 1-2 players, leading to a wipe.

So despite the low boss HP, players must follow mechanics as a single mistake is very punishing. Therefore, please be very careful when increasing the boss HP. Without corresponding nerfs, the boss will become too difficult for VM groups.

 

 

I was happily surprised that you can easily stealth rez multiple players during the Rallying Call cast. During the last year, it has become much harder to stealth rez players since you'd randomly be put into combat. It's great to finally get a boss again where you can make use of stealth rez.

And no, there's no need to add a random AoE ability to prevent stealth rezzes. If a DPS player is dead for a minute until getting a stealth rez, you lack a lot of damage. So having a stealth rez is no guarantee your group will be able to kill the boss.

 

 

Bugs and suggestions

 

We are concerned that at the beginning of a raid, a stealth player can walk to the tunnel, place the explosives and unlock the shortcut by himself. Yes, trash is boring and players want to skip it but this will lead to hostile behaviour in SM PuG groups.

Imagine a new player's experience, first time seeing the operation. Of course he wants to explore and see the instance. Instead he's being told: "No, wait here until player X has run through, then kill this first trash group and go to the boss."

In a recent patch, you added a door to the NAHUT trash that only opens after all trash groups have been killed, and the same thing MUST be added to the Hive of the Mountain Queen. Don't allow trash skipping.

 

 

When the boss dies, all adds automatically despawn. However, we noticed that the Caustic Drones would not despawn, they would remain while all other adds disappeared:

(This was in 8-man VM).

Please ensure that when the boss dies, the Caustic Drones will despawn as well.

 

And as I'm sure you are aware, the boss drops no loot and grants no achievement upon kill. This must be fixed before the boss is released.

 

On the phase entrance door on Ossus, the VM icon is not centered. Please fix the phase door so that the icon shows up correctly. (Screenshot)

 

 

I noticed that on 16-man VM, the Berserker adds have a new buff that reduces AoE damage taken. This buff is not present on 8-man VM, is this intended?

But please don't remove it; I think this buff is a good idea for 16-man.

 

 

Last week, I reported that Pheromonic Blast would sometimes interrupt and then be casted again on a different player. Today, we noticed the same issue during multiple tries. Often it happened with the second Growth Hormone but it can also happen later in the fight.

One of our theories is that it happens whenever the boss changes its target (e.g. because a tank taunts). The second Pheromonic Blast happens at roughly the same time as Overhead Skewer where our tanks sometimes swap, which could explain the increased occurrences. But this is just a theory, we don't have exact steps to reproduce.

 

 

In SM, I did not see the Growth Hormone cast that turns the eggs red. Instead, a single egg would randomly turn red. Very rarely, there'd be a blue beam connecting the boss to the egg. However, once the boss reaches the "Save the Queen!" phase, she'd constantly cast Local Growth and turn three eggs red, similar to VM's Growth Hormone.

Please ensure that even in SM there is a visible Growth Hormone cast and a beam connecting the boss to the egg so that players become aware of this mechanic.

 

 

During some tries in VM, it felt that the boss' Growth Hormone ability will sometimes target eggs that are already destroyed. I looked around the room and only saw 2 new red eggs, not 3 red eggs as expected.

Please verify that Growth Hormone can only target alive eggs and will ignore eggs that are dead.

However, as mentioned previously, the beams frequently show up incorrectly; they often disappear into the ground. I mentioned in last week's post that this happens whenever the boss is moving. That is not accurate; this bug will also happen when the boss is standing still. We assume that it happens whenever the targeted eggs are not in the player camera's field of view ("frustum") but we are not 100% sure.

 

 

And don't forget to look at the bugs and suggestions from my previous post last week.

Those are all still relevant, except for maybe the Staggering Strike from the Geonosian Royal Guards, that was mainly a L2P issue. Today we were better able to deal with them, and saw that they have a very noticeable animation during Staggering Strike. Also, we didn't stunlock them so our tanks were able to destroy nearly all red eggs using the cleave from the Guards. So I no longer think that the Geonosian Royal Guards require changes.

Edited by Jerba
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January 4th, 2019 (part 4)

 

To better describe our experiences and the strategy we used, here are four videos from today's raid.

 

 

  • in 258 gear. This was around 30 seconds into the Multi-Blast phase. When the phase started, the boss was at 12% so we could just burn the boss before we were overwhelmed by adds. You can see that I place ground markers on the red eggs so that DPS know where to place the Pheromonic Blast. Any Berserkers receive a target marker so DPS can tell them apart from Bantling Lacerators and focus them. Tanks try to use the cleave from the Guards to destroy eggs. Both Caustic Drones are harpooned together by the tank for AoE.
  • . Here we 8-manned the 16-man SM in 248 gear. We didn't expect the boss HP to be this high so we hit hard enrage. Other than that, the fight was very easy because we were overgeared.
  • . We wanted to test if 8-man SM is truly beatable with bolster alone so we removed our gear. Our DPS players had around 4k DPS each, and we also had multiple mistakes accumulating over time, causing us to be overrun by adds. IMO, the boss and the adds should have lower HP in SM so they'd die sooner. Keep in mind that the average PuG will even have less DPS than us in this video.
  • . After SM, we went back in VM, this time with 248 gear. Unlike before, it turned out to be much more difficult because of 1) lower gear = lower DPS and 2) players had less concentration because it was late.
    The boss was at 40% at the 4 minute mark, and then the Pheromonic Multi-Blast killed us. I imagine many VM raid groups will have a similar experience to this video. They don't have high DPS so they need to continue killing adds during Pheromonic Multi-Blast, they can't burn the boss yet. Therefore, the Multi-Blast must be nerfed in VM so it truly is a soft enrage and doesn't kill the raid.
    The boss HP felt fine; if it is increased too much, VM raid groups will not be able to kill the boss. So anything higher than a 5-15% HP increase would be too much IMO. This means top-DPS groups will kill the boss very quickly but they are not the target group for this boss.

Edited by Jerba
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Just noticed that there is a new PTS patch to download but the PTS server is still offline. Our weekly raid starts now, so if you can get the servers online before 3pm Austin time, we'll take a look at the changes and give feedback. :)
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Today, we tested the boss for two hours after the patch in both VM and SM.

 

We found all four datapads and got the achievement (but there were no rewards for it). The datapads despawn once they are clicked but the progress still counts toward the whole group.

Unfortunately, it doesn't count for players that are outside of the instance. I can see this being a problem in SM PuG runs but it's not a big issue.

The kill achievements for this boss are still missing but I assume that is a known bug.

 

We noticed a few changes on the trash mobs (toughness changed, new abilities, small adds no longer respawning while champion add is alive). All in all the trash felt fine, good job.

Unfortunately, a stealth player can still run through and plant the explosives without killing any trash group. Please ensure that the explosives can only be planted after you kill all trash groups to improve the experience for players in SM PuG groups.

 

We started in 258 gear but without setbonus. For some reason, the armor pieces we purchased in a previous PTS patch lost their setbonus.

However, the gear currently sold by the vendors on Ossus and Odessen does have a setbonus, and it stacks with the 248 gear.

Please ensure that when 5.10.1 launches, players won't lost their setbonus on gear that they already own. Hopefully, this was just a PTS glitch and won't happen on the live servers.

 

In VM, we killed it in our 7th try (5m06s,

, DPS/HPS values). Our concentration was not very high and we were primarily testing mechanics. We noticed the following changes compared to the first PTS build:

  • Boss HP increased to 8m health (up from 7.7m).
  • Berserkers now take reduced damage from AoE attacks in 8-man VM (previously, this only happened in 16-man VM).
  • It feels like Berserkers deal more damage than before. If you don't hard stun them and quickly kill them, even a single Berserker can wipe the raid.
  • You can no longer return to area start during the boss fight.
  • It felt like it is much harder to stealth rezz now; I was randomly brought in-fight. But I didn't pay enough attention to be sure.

These are all good changes. In my previous posts, I argued for a slight HP increase, and this 3.7% increase is the right amount. The way it is currently tuned, the boss should still be beatable with 248 gear as long as groups pay attention to mechanics.

 

A couple issues remain, I already reported them before:

  • Berserkers and Bantling Lacerators still have the same toughness; they are both elites. This makes it difficult to notice when Berserkers spawn. Please decrease the Bantling Lacerators' toughness from elite to strong (silver).
  • Sometimes, the boss' second Pheromonic Blast is still interrupted and then casted again on a second player. (
    ) Edit: Check this post for details.
  • Pheromonic Multi-Blast starting at the 4:00 mark is still overpowered in VM. It feels more like a hard enrage than a soft enrage. I doubt any group lacking DPS will survive this phase for long. It feels weird that the SM fight can last much longer than the VM fight. But this is not game-breaking; the tuning is fine at the moment. Any change risks upsetting the balance, so it's better to leave it alone.
  • Caustic Drones do not automatically despawn when the boss dies, unlike all the other adds.
  • There is still no announcement for Overhead Skewer (e.g. via cast bar). Today, our tanks didn't have problems with it because by now they have learned to expect the stun. However, players new to the boss fight may still have problems with it and require an announcement of when the stun happens.
  • Red ("empowered") eggs are hard to notice. Please improve the VFX so players can quickly notice them without the raid leader having to use ground markers.
  • The blue beams from Growth Hormone do not correctly connect to an egg, especially if the egg is far away. Please ensure the beam always hits the egg so that it is easier to identify red eggs.

 

After we killed the boss on VM, we tested it in 8-man SM. We removed most of our armor pieces to simulate a SM group, and the fight was no challenge for us. We first stopped damage at 10% to see all the soft enrage/hard enrage phases and the damage was still easily healable until the hard enrage. Then, we killed the boss without any damage stops but with our lower gear. (4m42s,

, DPS/HPS values)

 

We noticed that the boss HP in SM was not changed, it is still at 6.2m HP. Previously, I asked that it should be lowered to 4m HP. I now realize that this would be way too low. In SM, you can survive through the soft enrage, so the HP does not have to be much lower than in VM.

Still, I'd probably reduce the HP to around 5m to 5.5m HP. Right now, you need a combined raid DPS on the boss of around 20k-25k which might be too high for some PuG groups; not sure.

 

 

Anyway, we noticed the following two bugs:

  • After you kill the boss in VM, you cannot return to area start; the option stays greyed out. Please ensure that this option becomes available as soon the boss dies.
  • It is possible to enter the acid exhaustion zones near the outer walls
    . I was able to reproduce it every time by using my Scoundrel's Exfiltrate. Other players were able to reproduce it without using any special movement abilities, they just walked in and took zero damage even when they continued standing in it. The same issue can occur with the exhaustion zones at the very last trash group.

 

 

In VM, we now noticed that the spit from the Caustic Drones applies a slow-ticking DoT on the eggs. In other words, you don't have to hit the eggs four times; once is enough. Then you just wait until the DoT kills it. Also, the hitbox seems to be much bigger than I thought.

Therefore, we changed our strategy to make use of the spits.

  • In the first two minutes, we still use Pheromonic Blast to call Berserkers early and our tanks will use the cleave from Royal Guards to destroy eggs.
  • However, as soon as the Caustic Drones spawn, we kill one drone and keep the other drone alive throughout the boss fight. The off tank will grab the aggro and use it to destroy any red eggs. At this point, DPS will place Pheromonic Blasts only into blue eggs to avoid calling Berserks.
  • At 10 stacks (the maximum), the Caustic Acid debuff deals enough damage on a tank that it is no longer healable. Therefore, our tanks will swap at 6-7 stacks, or our Shadow tank would just Force Lift the drone until his stacks expire.
  • When the Royal Guards spawn for the second time, we'll put a 60s mezz on the Caustic Drone so we don't have to worry about it. Afterwards, our tanks continue killing red eggs with it.

I'm not sure if this is intended. If you make correct use of the Caustic Drones, you won't get a single Berserker past the 2 minute mark and can just burn the boss without worrying about adds. In VM, it shouldn't be possible to just mezz an important add for 60 seconds.

Maybe add a mezz immunity to the Caustic Drones and an enrage if they live too long.

 

 

 

Finally, I want to talk about the loot.

Currently, the boss has the same loot in SM and VM, it drops a single box with a random 252 piece for your spec (the same box you receive when doing 10 dailies). For SM, the loot is fine (maybe add a purple reputation trophy and some Relics of Ossus) but in VM, it must drop a 258 piece. Most players capable of running VM will already have full 252 gear if the raid launches, so they'll kill the boss once for the achievement and then never enter the instance again.

Ideally, players should be encouraged to run the content for multiple weeks. Otherwise, it will turn into another fire-and-forget content like Star Fortress, Eternal Championship and Uprisings.

 

Also, we noticed that the 258 gear vendor now sells MH and OH for 1 Monumental Data Crystal, 8 Masterwork Data Crystals and the 252 MH/OH. Those are acceptable prices in our opinion. Apparently the Monumental Data Crystal drops from a weekly quest similar to the world boss weekly. In that case, do you need to kill the boss in SM or VM? If it is just SM, my group won't be very motivated to do VM.

The MH/OH is the only 258 piece they are missing, and with just two alts doing SM they can easily become BiS and don't have to enter VM.

 

 

Anyway, thanks for letting us test this boss on the PTS. We've seen all the mechanics now so we won't look at it again until the next PTS build, which I understand will be the final patch before release. The encounter is in a pretty good state at the moment, with only a few clean-ups and bug fixes left to do.

In my opinion, the balancing is mostly fine. Outside of small adjustments, please don't change it. However, we only tested 8-man so I can't comment on the 16-man balancing.

Edited by Jerba
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  • Dev Post

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 :D.

 

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.

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