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Lady Dominique Feedback Thread


JackieKo

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Please answer the following questions about Lady Dominique. If you are able to provide a VOD of your experience with this fight, please feel free to post it here or send me a PM! Videos of the encounter are incredibly helpful for the designers!

 

Background

  • How often do you participate in Operations and on what difficulty?
  • What role did you play on PTS?

General

  • What are your overall impressions of Lady Dominique?
  • What are your top three suggestions for improving this encounter?
  • Please indicate if you tested Story or Veteran mode. Did the difficulty feel appropriate?
  • If you were unable to defeat the boss, what gave your team the most trouble?
  • Did the length of the fight feel appropriate for a final boss?
  • If you encountered any bugs (even known issues), please describe them in as much detail as possible.

 

Mechanics

  • Were there any mechanics that were unclear or confusing?
  • Did any mechanics seem trivial or ignorable?

 

Role-specific

Tank

  • Did you feel engaged for the majority of the fight?
  • How did you manage Dominique's tank swap abilities (Desublimating Shadows/Shadow Mass, Shadow Resonance)?
  • Considering this is Story Mode, did the damage you received feel appropriate?

DPS

  • Did the health of the adds feel appropriate?
  • Did anything feel particularly punishing to your Discipline?

Healer

  • Considering this is Story Mode, did the fight's damage output feel appropriate?
  • Did any abilities stand out as doing too much damage?
  • Were there times in the fight you felt like you didn't have anything to do?

 

Edited by JackieKo
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Didn't get there with my group today, but another player helped me jump into their instance and see the final cutscene - I assume this is a known issue, but the lack of "Sound FX" in the final cutscene w/ Lady Dominique when you walk in the door is really noticeable (I heard voice and music but no scary whooshing sounds or anything like that.)
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How often do you participate in Operations and on what difficulty?

Multiple times a week on Nightmare difficulty.

 

What role did you play on PTS?

Tank

 

What are your overall impressions of Lady Dominique?

Looks good, its fun, love the arena design.

 

What are your top three suggestions for improving this encounter?

Allow the boss to move at the start of the fight. Feels really weird that it is stationary.

Make the boss shield itself before it dies and stay shielded until you finish the couplings mechanic, because currently the boss dies before you get enough adds to explode the couplings.

Increase the damage required to break the Devastation cast, as currently the cast was usually broken within the first two seconds.

 

Considering this is Story Mode, did the difficulty feel appropriate?

Felt fine, except that u can skip most mechanics currently.

 

If you were unable to defeat the boss, what gave your team the most trouble?

Not applicable.

 

Did the length of the fight feel appropriate for a final boss?

Could be slightly longer, which could be achieved by giving the boss a shield (as i mentioned before), we killed the boss in 4 minutes and 30 seconds.

 

If you encountered any bugs (even known issues), please describe them in as much detail as possible.

The boss died before the attractors were defeated and we were unable to defeat those attractors due to them having a shield with no way to remove it. After everyone stucked, we were unable to respawn (attractors and the ship stayed alive).

The boss was sometimes spotting Aria even when facing the other direction.

Automatic jetpack only worked sometimes, more often you just died from fall instead of it saving you.

You can interrupt attractors, which seems wrong?

 

Were there any mechanics that were unclear or confusing?

The boss seemed to reset aggro occasionally, was a bit unclear when or why. As the shadow debuffs didn't mention anything to do with aggro.

 

Did any mechanics seem trivial or ignorable?

Exploding the generators wasn't required as the boss dies before the buff even gets close to expiring.

Tank swap was ignorable.

 

Did you feel engaged for the majority of the fight?

Yes, was fun.

 

How did you manage Dominique's tank swap abilities (Desublimating Shadows/Shadow Mass, Shadow Resonance)?

Ignored both, played solo tank. Felt almost no effect from the debuffs on me.

 

Considering this is Story Mode, did the damage you received feel appropriate?

Damage should be higher from the Boss, maybe lower from the Monstrosities.

 

EDIT:

After looking at videos of another group killing this boss, i have noticed that the boss is actually supposed to shield before dying, but in our case, It seems we have skipped the shield and killed the boss early. So this should be fixed.

Edited by WendaWenda
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Yesterday, we killed Lady Dominique in SM on the fourth try. We are a semi-progression raid group running VM/MM content so the difficulty felt on-par.

 

Kill video (healer POV):

All our attempts: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1493641884?t=1h40m10s

 

When I first saw the

("dangerous scaffolding can lead to fall risks"), I was worried. In the past, Matt has made no pretense that he likes killing players, so I was afraid that with this boss, he'd try to top all previous attempts.

Instead, yesterday we discovered a very enjoyable boss fight. The knockback mechanic is not nearly as bad as we feared; as long as you stand on the upper walkway, you will survive it. There's enough time to position yourself correctly and you can even optimize where you land to reduce the time it takes to run back.

While we were able to kill the boss, we did not figure out all mechanics but it was getting past midnight so we had to call it. We will spend more time next Friday.

 

A few notes:

  • Please change the intro cinematic from a KotOR-style overlay to a regular dialog. The KotOR-style overlay hides half of the screen. There are no player choices here, so you can just use a normal dialog without any overlay.
  • In the first phase, the yellow and orange AoE look very similar. We could differentiate them by looking at the debuffs but please add a stronger visual differentiation.
  • We still do not understand whether ARIA is our ally or not. Obviously, the goal is to destroy the Conduit Regulators, so the mechanic appears to be to point the boss away from ARIA so she won't notice the hacking attempt. Still, we were expecting the placement of yellow/orange voids to matter but that did not appear to be the case; we could place them anywhere.
  • Having the adds from the trash groups appear during the boss fight was a nice touch. Once we understood we had to kill the Drouk at the conduit, we could easily beat that phase.
  • The two Attractors spawning late in the fight felt weird, like we could interrupt all casts but it did not seem to matter. And when the second set of Attractors spawned, they were shielded so we could just ignore them and burn the boss.
  • The Recursive Blast ability felt very buggy. The visual indicator stayed active after one player died, so at some point I had three Recursive Blasts on me and didn't know what to do.
    We have no idea what triggers the knockback; do you need to move apart, out of LoS or stack together, or is it bugged? And what is the correct position to stand in? Very often, nothing happened even though the Recursive Blast cast clearly finished.
  • Jaca Fatal appearing mid-fight didn't make much sense without knowing the story but in any case, his Ship Turret was an enemy with 30m HP so you could attack him. Shouldn't he be a friendly?
  • In the final phase, the jetpack no longer works even though the temporary ability remains visible. This feels like a bug.
  • The final burn phase felt very anti-climactic, like we could ignore all mechanics and just burn the boss. That is fine for a burn phase but I'm thinking it might be bugged and not intended.

 

In general, the boss fight feels like a worthy conclusion to a new operation. The mechanics are fun (despite some bugs), not overwhelming and feel correctly tuned for SM.

It does feel weird that IP-CPT is so much harder than any of the following bosses. I definitely think IP-CPT needs to be significantly nerfed, and there should be a clearer step up from each boss to the next.

It is disappointing that one boss had to be cut, especially after we've been waiting so long. But I won't criticize you for that, project management requires difficult decisions, and instead I thank you for releasing the operation early on PTS; otherwise we'd never have known there were five bosses to begin with. Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing the operation go live, whether with four or five bosses. Though I wouldn't mind getting the cut boss added later as a bonus boss maybe?

 

I do need to talk about the trash groups. Bugged or not, it appears that one stealther can skip to the boss and after one boss pull, the elevator becomes available for the rest of the group.

Now, I know that in the past, I said "Don't allow trash skipping." and it is one of my worst mistakes ever. I do believe that the unskippable trash groups are the main reason no one runs Mutated Geonosian Queen even though the boss itself is perfectly tuned.

So while it is possible to skip all of the trash groups in R-4, I'm leaning towards "working as intended". You could maybe add some stealth detection or buff the adds but you should not require everyone to clear the trash, especially if there are handicapped players having trouble beating the jumping puzzles.

Of course, there are some players who think "no trash groups are the best trash groups" and going forward, I do think that no lair boss should have trash groups.

 

Finally (I've mentioned this before), players can duel inside the operation. This is not possible in any other operation so I'm thinking it is bugged and should be disabled.

 

How did you manage Dominique's tank swap abilities (Desublimating Shadows/Shadow Mass, Shadow Resonance)?

 

We played with one tank and it did not seem to make any difference. The 15 stacks on the tank were easily healable.

(Of note: We killed all previous bosses with one tank as well, so it would feel strange to require two tanks on the final boss, especially since with 7.0 Activity Finder, you can no longer switch roles mid-content)

Edited by Jerba
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Killed her and virtually have no idea what the boss does. First two tries we played around a bit to figure stuff out (like difference between kick void and placed void which could seriously have more different colours) and got to the phase where we had to kill adds near the generators. Next try we focused on dps again and just skipped that phase. No idea why, then some arrows appeared or something and a bunch of adds. We then just burned the boss down and that was it.

 

So, it's not clear to me what makes the friendly robot slicing generators survive and what kills it (boss facing perhaps? That didn't seem to do anything though). Not clear why the generator phase where they get shielded triggers and why we skipped it(I guess just dmg but we also played with 5 DPS as the tank dmg was insignificant). Don't really know what the arrows from the adds do and those stationary adds channeling something but running into each other seemed to do something.

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