ToF CM may need some adjustments

[Drag You Down.2615]

44 minutes ago, Salt Mode.3780 said:

Adding the fact that the comp requires cvirts as the only dps to cleave malice is also an issue. The problem is the fight at its current state isn't meant for the 5% it is meant for the 0.1%. 

Ye, which I don't think it is a great idea for marketing and design both. You can be difficult and you can be desperately difficult, but you can't make it physically IMPOSSIBLE for too many people.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

9 hours ago, Salt Mode.3780 said:

The problem with the boss even without the current bug has way too high of an hp bar for the amount of time needed to fight it. Again I don't understand the philosophy of higher hp = harder boss.

I can explain this.  Doing high DPS in this game is actually quite hard, since it requires consistent split-second input chains in either exact sequences or specific priorities, as divined from weeks of research on the matter.  This requires days, sometimes weeks, of training just to get a single rotation for a single build down, and many times only for a few bosses.  Thus, HP sponges' difficulty comes from the fact that merely functioning properly in this game is a a great difficulty.

It's one of my biggest criticisms of this game.  If you regard the raid builds as a standard, then the vast majority of the game is full of secret pitfalls that exist to reduce your effectiveness.  Previously the game was based more on mechanics than DPS races, which made this kind of design acceptable, but if we're getting into the realm of hard DPS checks, then Anet is going to need to acknowledge that most of their game is designed to make players fail at them.  

[Cyninja.2954]

There are 2 main issues here atm:

1. the encounter is HEAVILY influenced by rng and which rotation of enemy abilities you get. This would be fine, but the disparity between the NPC abilities makes this a huge issue

2. the HP was/is not in sync with the timer. I believe the best tries before the recent nerf/fix was 21% and 25% from SC and Teapot respectively. We got it down to 40% on our best try with consistent 50-60% tries, depending on rng. It was clear as day though that something was off day 1

Minor issues with the fight:

1. it incentivizes class stacking, in this case cvirt, which is the only class with: ranged, pierce and high benchmark. Usually adds would benefit power classes, but none of those come even close to cvirt. It would be nice to have more flexibility eventually

2. the question asked in this thread is: who is this for? While I think having ultra hard fights, at least as CM, is fun. The question needs to get asked:"how many players are supposed to complete this" and along those lines:"how many players will regularly complete this"?

3. the timer should be doubled or even tripled. Timers in this game have been used historically to end encounters as a method to prevent to much cheese. It was almost never a "top end" dps check. If the timer were extended, different approaches to group composition would open up. There already is a penalty mechanic in place, the boss buff stacking on failing mechanics, there is no need for a timer on top. If a group wants to run 4 healers, do all mechanics properly for 30 minutes, I say: let them.

4. bugs, lots of bugs which need squashing

 

As far as release, I'll stand by what I said earlier: I prefer an over-tuned fight on release than under-tuned. The question only becomes: where should the fight end up at difficulty wise.

Edited February 29 by Cyninja.2954

[Drag You Down.2615]

47 minutes ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

The question needs to get asked:"how many players are supposed to complete this" and along those lines:"how many players will regularly complete this"?

I have mentioned this question before, and I think probably they don't have a clear answer for this question in mind. Or they do have, but they would not consider what it could bring.

[Gendalfs.7521]

1 hour ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

If a group wants to run 4 healers, do all mechanics properly for 30 minutes, I say: let them.

100% this.

[luigiormario.7305]

12 hours ago, Salt Mode.3780 said:

The problem with the boss even without the current bug has way too high of an hp bar for the amount of time needed to fight it. Again I don't understand the philosophy of higher hp = harder boss.

I think the philosophy of it comes down to if you don't have a tough dps check then you can just run extra healing and facetank a bunch of mechanics. It seems to be that or make everything a one-shot. Not saying that it should be as high as it is necessarily, just that I understand the need for higher HP. 

[maxwelgm.4315]

Funny how EoD strikes already had the timer issue figured out for all CMs:

- For Mai Trin, the hard enrage timer is relaxed enough that many class compositions can kill it

- For Ankka, a per-phase timer that nearly resets ("inevitability of death") and is relaxed just enough to allow for title runs using more defensive comps

- KOCM, the timer is just straight up huge  and only there to prevent full healer groups. Mechanics are the real challenge

- HTCM, the timer is just the arena filling up with a reset in each phase

Which new approach did Anet introduce or which approach they chose to replicate? None, it's just a huge HP bar for the time they give and that's it. It's probably going to be a "prog it once and never repeat" type of thing like Gazed into the Void, rather than a "you prog so hard and now you're even having fun with it" like HTCM. It would be a shame though if even the base encounter (without empowering all the skills) goes down the way of GitV too.

Edited February 29 by maxwelgm.4315

[Jedrik.3109]

18 hours ago, Salt Mode.3780 said:

Don't know where you are getting your numbers from but no 24k dps is not the average even if all 8 players excluding healers but lets say they did 5-8k dps were to perform it you will not have enough dps to kill the boss. Hard content does not mean higher HP as EoD cm strikes were not like that. Those 40k bench are also often retaken over and over again to get magic numbers to get the highest record damage on a golem that has every debuff and personal buffs up at all time so golem benchmarks should never be taken seriously. Again if I recall the highest bench on Cerus normal was 33k.

Adding the fact that the comp requires cvirts as the only dps to cleave malice is also an issue. The problem is the fight at its current state isn't meant for the 5% it is meant for the 0.1%. 

Nothing about your post is "based" or "triggering" its just factually wrong. 

Factually wrong? Well it had the desired effect i wanted. The averages of the pulls that the top 3 groups is literally near this (with small variance) getting to 30%. If you believe the dps will go up in the last phases yeah..no. Will it be enough to beat it. No one knows the last phases haven't been seen. And this is a great thing.

Again I fundamentally disagree with how difficulty is gauged be this forum. And the percentage of what you all feel can accomplish the fight is sophomoric. And the same ridiculous things where said about Dhuum initially. Actually the same was said about Chak freaking Gerent.

I fundamentally do not believe all content should be approachable by all skill levels of gamers. There should always be something to grind against. This constant nerfing has not had any positive effect on the mentally of the community nor the engagement of group content. It has largely hurt it.

I hope this new direction of group content holds firm with what seems to be my minority opinion. 

[Jedrik.3109]

19 hours ago, Salt Mode.3780 said:

 

 

Edited February 29 by Jedrik.3109
Double post

[Drag You Down.2615]

2 hours ago, Jedrik.3109 said:

I fundamentally do not believe all content should be approachable by all skill levels of gamers.

I agree with this, 100%.

But there should be a base line for how many people can engage in the challenging content. When the percentage is too small, it will seriously hurt community and the game profit in a long run. Also, pushing dps check boundary is going to intoxicate the power creep, no doubt.

[Drag You Down.2615]

Btw, I have see dps penalty in other games before. If you don't want a boss to be cleared too fast and skip all mechs, dps penalty is actually more fun and useful than dps check.

For example, if Cerus's health is dropping 1% for less than 3 seconds and continue for 10 seconds, the next time he summons embodiment, he will summon one with another random one at the same time.

Or give it a timer, if Cerus phases before a certain time, for example, the first phase is happening before 1:30, he will gain 15 more stacks of empower in the beginning of next phase.

Also at the same time, add something like a soft enrage timer. Like one stack of empowerment per 20 seconds. Dps penalty and soft timer at the same time can help the designer balance this.

Edited March 1 by Drag You Down.2615

[Salt Mode.3780]

8 hours ago, Jedrik.3109 said:

Factually wrong? Well it had the desired effect i wanted. The averages of the pulls that the top 3 groups is literally near this (with small variance) getting to 30%. If you believe the dps will go up in the last phases yeah..no. Will it be enough to beat it. No one knows the last phases haven't been seen. And this is a great thing.

Again I fundamentally disagree with how difficulty is gauged be this forum. And the percentage of what you all feel can accomplish the fight is sophomoric. And the same ridiculous things where said about Dhuum initially. Actually the same was said about Chak freaking Gerent.

I fundamentally do not believe all content should be approachable by all skill levels of gamers. There should always be something to grind against. This constant nerfing has not had any positive effect on the mentally of the community nor the engagement of group content. It has largely hurt it.

I hope this new direction of group content holds firm with what seems to be my minority opinion. 

Don't know what desired effect you want but you aren't getting it. As I stated previously this fight is impossible to beat because the math doesn't add up it's as simple as that. There has never been an encounter in GW2 history that has this kind of HP pool in an instance. Dagda CM the boss HP pool is close to 57 million normal mode at 47 million, Cerus you went from 47 million to 130 million HP. Again it only takes simple math to calculate the possibility of the fight instead of making assumptions that players are simply not good enough. If your sample size is on the top 3 groups then it is a very weak and small sample size to pull info/comparison on.

Edited March 1 by Salt Mode.3780

[maxwelgm.4315]

7 hours ago, Drag You Down.2615 said:

Btw, I have see dps penalty in other games before. If you don't want a boss to be cleared too fast and skip all mechs, dps penalty is actually more fun and useful than dps check.

For example, if Cerus's health is dropping 1% for less than 3 seconds and continue for 10 seconds, the next time he summons embodiment, he will summon one with another random one at the same time.

Or give it a timer, if Cerus phases before a certain time, for example, the first phase is happening before 1:30, he will gain 15 more stacks of empower in the beginning of next phase.

Also at the same time, add something like a soft enrage timer. Like one stack of empowerment per 20 seconds. Dps penalty and soft timer at the same time can help the designer balance this.

Exactly, and Anet didn't have to look further than their own game since Ankka already has the perfect transition from NM to CM to hard CM title run.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

i'm feeling like instanced content in this game is dying fast. the next fractal challenge mode coming in summer will have 250 million health, force players to stay permanently spread out and provide all their own boons, and have 10,000 toughness so you only bring ranged condition classes.

 

i wish i was being sarcastic here, but players keep calling out these decisions each time a new instance comes out, like fractal 99cm, 100cm, and more recently cosmic observatory. we keep asking for new instanced encounters to be more similar to stuff like raids (mechanic heavy and not dps-cc-heal checks), or even earlier strike missions from pre-end of dragons era (like boneskinner), instead of exponentially increasing both powercreep and the need for it.

 

its okay to do checks, but they need to be used very liberally and as a part of mechanics rather than working against them; and for the love of everything, please reduce the powercreep and quit designing new encounters around it, effectively embedding it in the game forever!

 

if it goes too far, then we'll never be able to escape it.

Edited March 1 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[AliamRationem.5172]

After doing a little math (130M/600s = 216.66k DPS) under the assumpion that 2 healers + 2 boon DPS = 2 full DPS (216.66k/8 = 27k DPS), I glanced at wingman stats for ToF normal mode and found that parsing 100 logs from the past 6 months of normal mode and filtering out support roles, only about a third of all specs had at least one log that topped 27k DPS and only cvirt and scourge had more than 3 logs shown in that range. 

Presumably, there are more mechanics to deal with and higher health on the adds in the CM as well as a longer fight period as normal mode doesn't typically last 10 minutes.  All of which would contribute to lower DPS against the target of 130M health.  On the other hand, there were a few logs that were up to 31k (at least one I believe was an SC player) and 100 logs on some website isn't exactly a representative sample.  So, this is probably technically possible.  But it does suggest that the tuning on this DPS check is beyond anything the game has seen before and even very skilled guilds will probably be stacking cvirts to make it happen at all.

[Jumpin Lumpix.6108]

so much for "play your way" Guess they got rid of that moto back in 2015 with raids.  Love how when raids came out the biggest hurdle was the timer.  Feels great doing all the mechanics correct, nobody makes a mistake, does decent damage, and oh no the imaginary timer ran out, you lose.   This caused TONS of people to quit raids and never look back when they came out.  Glad to see they're keeping with the tradition and haven't learned anything.

Edited March 1 by Jumpin Lumpix.6108

[Cyninja.2954]

19 minutes ago, Jumpin Lumpix.6108 said:

so much for "play your way" Guess they got rid of that moto back in 2015 with raids.  Love how when raids came out the biggest hurdle was the timer.  Feels great doing all the mechanics correct, nobody makes a mistake, does decent damage, and oh no the imaginary timer ran out, you lose.   This caused TONS of people to quit raids and never look back when they came out.  Glad to see they're keeping with the tradition and haven't learned anything.

The biggest hurdle for raids was NEVER the timer. Not at release, not after, not now. At release things like alacrity where insanely busted, distortion was not simply aegis but actual immunity for the group and druid was a healer on steroids.

When HoT released, the existing trinity in this game for instanced content (granted, the only challenging instanced content where higher rank fractals which most players ignored) shifted from defensive support which gives aegis (basically guardian), offensive support which blinds (basically elementalist) and dps without healer to alacrity, quickness, dps with dedicated healer.

The motto "play your way" has always only applied to open world content and irrelevant easy instanced content.

But yes, there is a shift in design ever since EoD for instanced content, and it goes hand in hand with the insane power creep which gets added into the game. In this case the target health pool is simply to high. likely to keep the race for first kill going. All the while strikes in general require every member of the party to pay attention, unlike raids.

Edited March 1 by Cyninja.2954

[Jumpin Lumpix.6108]

2 minutes ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

The biggest hurdle for raids was NEVER the timer. Not at release, not after, not now. At release things like alacrity where insanely busted, distortion was not simply aegis but actual immunity for the group and druid was a healer on steroids.

When HoT released, the existing trinity in this game for instanced content (granted, the only challenging instanced content where higher rank fractals which most players ignored) shifted from defensive support which gives aegis (basically guardian), offensive support which blinds (basically elementalist) and dps without healer to alacrity, quickness, dps with dedicated healer.

The motto "play your way" has always only applied to open world content and irrelevant easy instanced content.

thats not true their moto was literally "play your way" because there was no trinity and they implied you could do all content in the game with pretty much any build you saw fit to use. THen they came out with raids and just ignored it, while still saying it and not addressing it.

 

People ran out of time when raids came out because they didnt bring it pure dps which was required and nobody knew it.

Edited March 1 by Jumpin Lumpix.6108

[Cyninja.2954]

Just now, Jumpin Lumpix.6108 said:

thats not true their moto was literally "play your way" because there was no trinity and they implied you could do all content in the game with pretty much any build you saw fit to use. THen they came out with raids and just ignored it, while still saying it and not addressing it.

and that motto never applied to challenging instanced content.

[Jumpin Lumpix.6108]

Just now, Cyninja.2954 said:

and that motto never applied to challenging instanced content.

thats not true show me where they said play your way specifically dosent apply to "challenging instanced content" whatever that means.

[Cyninja.2954]

Just now, Jumpin Lumpix.6108 said:

thats not true show me where they said play your way specifically dosent apply to "challenging instanced content" whatever that means.

I don't have to show you anything. You likely never participated in challenging instanced content during vanilla, which as mentioned was ONLY high level fractals.

I did, as well as for any challenging instanced content after. It was never "play your way" at the top.

You can believe me, or live in your "but they said" world. Reality was different in high end fractal groups. That never changed except that the actual roles were made less fluent with alacrity and quickness and dedicated healers.

[Cyninja.2954]

5 minutes ago, Jumpin Lumpix.6108 said:

People ran out of time when raids came out because they didnt bring it pure dps which was required and nobody knew it.

The amount of times groups ran out of time was insignificant in comparison to the amount of times groups wiped to mechanics. The timer was never an issue. NEVER!

[Jumpin Lumpix.6108]

Just now, Cyninja.2954 said:

I don't have to show you anything. You likely never participated in challenging instanced content during vanilla, which as mentioned was ONLY high level fractals.

I did, as well as for any challenging instanced content after. It was never "play your way" at the top.

You can believe me, or live in your "but they said" world. Reality was different in high end fractal groups. That never changed except that the actual roles were made less fluent with alacrity and quickness and dedicated healers.

yes i did participate in it quite a bit so again you're assuming and just guessing as to who i am lol?.  So you cant prove what you said, like I thought, so I stand by what I said which IS WHAT IT IS.  Since ive played guild wars since launch  Its nice that your experience wasnt play your way at the top, mine wasnt either WHICH WAS MY POINT. They said you can, and you CANT.

They're still doing it today with this CM. ANd no I DONT BELIEVE you that they said anything addressing this issues at all.

[Jumpin Lumpix.6108]

Just now, Cyninja.2954 said:

The amount of times groups ran out of time was insignificant in comparison to the amount of times groups wiped to mechanics. The timer was never an issue. NEVER!

really well the timer was an issue for almost every raid group i was in for the first 6 months and i ran  full zerkers at the time and still do.  Oh and i was also in top raiding guilds in wow and FFXIV so yah i know how to play.

Edited March 1 by Jumpin Lumpix.6108

[Cyninja.2954]

19 minutes ago, Jumpin Lumpix.6108 said:

really well the timer was an issue for almost every raid group i was in for the first 6 months and i ran  full zerkers at the time and still do.  Oh and i was also in top raiding guilds in wow and FFXIV so yah i know how to play.

Hmmm sure. The good old "but I raided in other games, I am a good player" argument. As have I, but I've also raided in this game: https://killproof.me/proof/rLDW/strikes

Timer was almost never the issue and it can be proven mathematically. For example: VG needs around 6-8k dps per player to be beaten in time (and it's not a hard enrage). That was given with autoattacks alone with proper boon coverage. With proper rotations the output was 3-4 times over and more on release (and this applies to every raid boss fight where possible dps exceeded needed dps by 3-4 times, always).

Edited March 1 by Cyninja.2954