I timed it a few times, the kite phase was 200 seconds and then you had a 30 second dps window. So a total of 8:40 as the slowest possible and ~8:30 as fastest possible intended kill time. Once people found the right bugged talis you could kill it in the first dps window though making it “only” 4 minutes.
Honestly I’d be fine with a 4 minute kill time if it didn’t have so many instawipes. If a medium-experience group can clear it with minor mistakes 100% of the time then fine, 4 minutes. When any mistake by anyone, or plain bad RNG, means a new 8 minute attempt, it just isn’t something most people will want to do more than once.
And just generally, I prefer fights where stronger players clear it faster, instead of scripted events governing the entire thing and you either meet the dps check at the end or don’t. MFA 3 4 5 6 and MFB 2 3 4 5 6 all suffer from excessive scripting. They’re still interesting for the story but like SWL’s dungeons, tuned just plain too long.
My group could clear it post-update where it was such a tight window, but we usually just did the first 5 bosses because the rewards vs the time investment into the final boss was NOT worth it even if you could do it. So yea, I was not trying to say that the post-patch MFB6 was fine or anything. It was totally broken.
So to bring you back to the initial discussion of this thread - do you guys agree that the community will benefit from the removal of several elite tiers - E2,E4,E6,E8 or just a different rearrangenent?
Well, Normal, Elite, NM would be enough IMO but that was with a system that wasn’t the kind of grind that makes you want to chew broken glass (outside of AEGIS). However it does make some evil sense for the 10 difficulties currently.
I was hoping we’d see the other dungeons and raids added and they could start those at a higher tier requirement and possibly add another step past 10 so we have reasons to advance our gear.
I don’t think the number of tiers is fixable since they’re what makes the huge gear curve meaningful. The only way it made sense in TSW was because stepping from one to the next was a matter of 10 dungeons + learning new mechanics. Doubling or tripling the grind it takes to reach the next tier would make it that much less likely you run E1s with people who are at all close to the gear it’s intended for (ip50-175 is already a pretty wide range of like, 600 to 1500 dps).
I don’t find a problem with 10 tiers, but what I would do is to introduce upper limits to them. As you mentioned right at the beginning, you find E1 is full of overgeared players and the next few aren’t well-populated. Ideally (for me, at least, I’m sure there’s a very good reason why it wouldn’t work), I’d suggest overlapping tiers so that you always have 3 tiers available to queue in, and that the most over-geared players won’t be more than two tiers above. Of course, I know this doesn’t stop people unequipping a few things to queue for lower tiers and then putting them back once they’re in the group (if we could find a way to stop that, it’d work well).
Quite aside from all this, though, I find the jump from e4 to e5 to be huge. I know the additional mechanics have to be included at some point, but it’d be nice for them to be introduced gradually, rather than all at once.
Using the E5+ guides on here, I can see that Ankh 2 (Klein on the bridge) introduces 3 new mechanics (the reaper, casting Dreaming Shroud and filth on the pillar). If they could have been added one at a time in E3, E4 and E5, it might feel like less of a huge jump. I’m slightly put off queuing for e5 on the fact that there’s so much new stuff to get used to and the other players will probably be used to it already. I know it would require tweaking individual dungeons and each level, so it’s probably a lot more effort than it’s worth to do this.
Tiers are too many in my opinion. If I could go, I would directly queue for E5 so I can play with some interesting mechanics, but I can’t. I have to grind months to get to E5 and by the time this happen, I’ll probably have quit already. Just like any other casual player.
They need to reduce the tiers and make it more of a choice, rather than a grind.
Tbh, i don’t really see a way to balance the dungeons for an IP bracket that wide. Taking e4-6 as an example, you’d need to balance the dungeon so that a group full of people with IP 325 will be able to complete it - because you don’t want to go into a dungeon knowing you’ll take an eternity to kill each boss. That means that for fights with timer mechanics like HR4 would have to be tuned to the DPS output of 3 dps with IP 325. E6 players will have IP between 550 & 650 and are going to roflstomp bosses in the bracket.
We saw in TSW what happens when a group of ql10.x people went into normal or elite dungeons, there was no challenge and barely time to see any boss mechanics. I totally agree that some of the boss fights in SWL need to have their hp reduced, but to be fair, it does mean that we tend to see a lot more of the actual fight mechanics (like Ur Draug’s blue phase for example).
Reducing the number of brackets isn’t going to make them more exciting or fun, they’d either be really long or really fast (it’s already pretty damned close to that anyway), which isn’t going to be terribly attractive to many players.
Your concerns didn’t bother people in TSW that much when some bosses were literally taking 1 rotation to kill. Moreover, even with the proposed changes of squishing the difficulties by reducing their number by 2, there won’t ever be much of stomping (currently at maxed out IP of 1630, the weakest bosses in E10 still take around 30s to kill with 4 DDs and 1 tank), so your concerns, while making sense on paper, do not exist in practice.
Given it is already really close to that anyways, Funcom might be well-advised to make changes that might make dungeon runs “quick and fun” for more casual players.
Seriously, the high-end people willing to stick with SWL’s mediocre multi-player experience despite already grinding away in all red gear won’t leave because their private dungeon runs take another second or three less.
The casual players at the low end, who might notice the entire dungeon misbalance makes running a PUG at-IP tank/healer/triple-dps a chore might be more inclined to stick around if it felt less so.
Reducing the number of tiers might not make a difference to players who have already committed to the gear grind, but it could make the whole thing look much worse for those who are just starting out on their elite journey.
Not if the reduced number of tiers is selected to be simple & rewarding.
Say, “E1-3” turning into a tier with E1 difficulty, E2 rewards and E3-geared powerhouses feeling they really are breezing through this and need a challenge.
Hey, E4-6 provides that challenge when they get there, at E4 difficulty, E5 rewards and with E6-geared powerhouses… you get the idea.
The main drawback of doing 4 tiers (E1-3, E4-6, E7-9, E10) is that it would require splitting current E5 mechanics, introducing some in E4-6 and the remainder in E7-9. Did I mention that would be more in tune with progressive difficulty than the current spike in mechanics at E5, too?