Open Beta Dark Agartha Observations

Secret World Legends General Discussion [Archived] Rebalance Forum
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This time around in Dark Agartha, my new fiery little sidekick was so much fun to have around, I can’t say I missed or cared about losing Crystallized Flame entirely. Use him on Gatekeeper at your own risk though if you are melee; GK will walk up to the little guy and throw a massive AoE down on his head. So have fun watching him slowly die as you twiddle your thumbs waiting for 1) Living Flame to die completely. 2) Wait for the AoE to disappear. 3) Recast Living Flame elsewhere and hope he doesn’t run right back into the AoE you pulled him out of. This is more a case of you may want experiment with when is the appropriate time to cast him and when not to.

The Accursed debuff is an absolute beast. If you aren’t packing two cleanses with you on Gatekeeper, well, good luck. Once that it on you, you will get hit for 2,900-3,100 points of damage. If you are already down in health and/or afflicted with Gatekeeper’s OTHER debuff (Help me out here; it looks like a box full of squiggles and by the time I get to mouse of it, I’m dead) you’re good as gone. It is something that really needs to be watched out for and taken care of immediately by the player. Down below is an example of what happened when I didn’t cleanse it off in yesterday’s Gatekeeper fight.

https://youtu.be/azF7YdM_7l8

Living Flame is a great interrupt for Gatekeeper’s Anima Transfusion. If you run elemental and bring it with you, make sure you have it off cooldown. This is a perfect interrupt for Anima Transfusion as in that Living Flame spawns right after he interrupts and can tank any nasty thing Gatekeeper had planned for you far away from you.

The bugs I had encountered with blade have already been discussed or are well-known about, so I see no reason bringing them up here. I had a fun time in Open Beta and actually can’t wait to see this come online Live.

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Your video is private.

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Fixed. It’s out of habit I make Beta videos private.

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I’m afraid this was not Accursed. According to your own video, you had a foot in the orange goo, and that’s what killed you. Later in the fight, you were taking some ticks of Accursed without any issues.

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I too decided to give DA a try with the revamped Crystallised Flame. I really enjoyed the new mechanic, as it allows a lot more tactical considerations in how you place your pet and yourself, which was awesome and just up my alley. However, my playthrough also gave me some serious concerns that I’d like to highlight here.

I was playing DA on E10 difficulty, with 1077 IP and 1220 CP (Legendary 1 everything except for 1 hit glyph, which was lvl 20), running AR (KSR-43) as main, with Ele (Thermal Inverter) as off-hand. I didn’t manage to complete DA in the time allocated, despite not dying once. My best run, when I went 90/10 AA and very offensive with regard to abilities, I managed 6,600 DPS, or roughly 5.5 times CP. I ended up still being roughly 3 minutes short for a normal DA run.

I also used the same setup as above with Hammer main (Pneumatic Maul) and Ele off-hand. This time around I parsed around 8,000 DPS, or roughly 6.5 times CP, which seems closer to the norm. However, I again couldn’t complete my DA run in time, this time because I died twice at the Gatekeeper coming to grips with the AoEs cast on Living Flame and having to wait for them to go away. Given more practice, or a different set of abilities on Gatekeeper, I would probably have managed to just about squeak over the finish line.

I did also parse both setups on the Nightmare training dummies in Agartha, and the numbers were similar to what I was seeing in DA. So there didn’t seem to be an issue with the DA mobs having too much protection.

Overall, my impression was that the E10 DA mobs need to have their health totals relooked at. Either that, or I am doing something wrong and am parsing well below where I should be. I also don’t know if this affects other difficulties.

Another concern is that AR is now parsing roughly 20% below that of Hammer. Again, I don’t know where other weapons fall on the damage continuum, but that does seem like a very steep DPS nerf for AR. Also, the rule of thumb on Live is to look at doing roughly 10 times your IP in DPS, which I was off by miles on Testlive with all of my setups.

I am interested to hear others’ experiences or numbers or comments in regard to what I experienced.

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This is not even close to being true. My sim results and parses on dummies actually give roughly the same results for both rifle and hammer, and our NY E17 kills also confirm it. I don’t see why it would be any different in E10 gear.

You might want to review your gear and builds. Someone has been complaining about E10 DA lately on discord and about how they were unable to complete it because of the incoming damage being too high, and i’ve debunked that very quickly with a run with blood / fists, and had 4:40 left on the timer by the end. Blood parses currently less than rifle and hammer, so your feedback is surprising, again.

One thing to note is that now, the KSR-43 doesn’t provide you any additional DPS at all. So comparing a KSR-43 parse with a Pneumatic Maul parse is at best inaccurate, as it would be pretty much like comparing a random rifle without any effect at all to Pneumatic Maul.

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Well, I am basing my observation on my own experiences and parses, so it is interesting to hear that your numbers are very different. Short of there being an issue with my build, the actual IP would seem to be the only variable. I don’t see how gear would be an issue, as even different exceptional talismans only account for a small percentage of DPS. Perhaps you would be so kind as to post the AR and Hammer builds that your group used?

I agree that it is not an entirely accurate comparison. Part of my reason for choosing these weapons is that they are what I and a lot of other people use on Live right now, and I wanted to assess how the changes would impact every-day gameplay. However, if weapon choice within a weapon class can lead to such a massive difference in DPS, then I’m afraid we have a familiar problem with AR, except now a different culprit than the KSR.

P.S. I appreciate the edit. I am simply sharing my observations and trying to figure out if the problem lies with me or the game.

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Thanks for the reply. I guess you can understand that without providing screenshots of your builds & gear setups at the very minimum (an additional video could have been even better), it is hard to judge and see if there’s a real issue.

I’ll give you an example. Lately, we’ve been comparing rifle parses with someone during a closed beta. I’ve been parsing 27.5k with full gear, and the other person was parsing around 16k with the same build and seemingly similar rotations. Turned out he had 1 less crit power glyph by mistake (he had 3 hit glyphs), which caused him to lose 7-8k DPS. After that, he had some less powerful talismans as well.

Side note: don’t forget that on testlive, you have no museum and no agents.

I might create a thread for this, or might not, depending on my free time and on how lazy i am.

According to my sim, having a KSR over other bis rifles is a DPS loss of around 5 to 7%. Not even close to justify your low rifle parses.

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I’m uploading my blood / fists E10 DA run with 1018 IP right now, and 2 lvl 1 red hit glyphs. The upload might take several hours though due to my bad internet. From a quick glance, i’m doing around 8333 DPS with this build. As i’ve said, blood isn’t supposed to parse as well as rifle or hammer on the beta right now. And the build itself is nothing fancy, Blaze doesn’t exist anymore as well so no stupid offhand DPS from that.

Unfortunately, that’s all i can do, since now, the testlive is closed.

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I’m afraid I didn’t take any screenshots of my build and gear setups, but I do remember what I have, since it is very similar to what I run on Live. I don’t have time to post it all now, I will do so this evening.

Those numbers are similar to what I was expecting, so if there is a problem, it’s not with the weapon choice.

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Indeed. As i’ve said, your low parses could simply be due to something completely dumb that you didn’t even notice, something in your gear or build that you’ve made on the beta. Human errors are a thing, and i can relate.

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I noticed a couple of times GK was close enough to the edge of the smaller AOE to be hit while he was hitting the Living Flame, but you didn’t hit him. I don’t know if you were just watching to see what would happen to the Living Flame or you thought you couldn’t hit him from there, but there was room.

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Promised blood / fists E10 video. Rotations aren’t that great, i’m not a blood DPS.

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There were a few times I stopped just to see what would happen. It IS Open Beta, after all. I knew I had plenty of time for a clear, so it wasn’t like I was pressed for time.

In the video, yes, the orange stuff got me. I was trying to get information on the fight the next day, because that was the fight that had Accursed and something else, as well. The part where the creep killed me though to me was odd, because I had been standing there fine, and then it killed me. I’m still trying to figure out if that was the parameters of the creep catching up, or if that was the consuming creep and I just didn’t have time to react to it.

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Yes, but you did say “wait for the AOE to disappear”, so the question wasn’t unfounded. One of the reasons some people think they can’t melee DA is that very thing. They don’t realize they can get close enough to AOEs and fire on the ground to hit them without getting hit, so they run out of time.

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Since you’ve been trying to play with the Living Flame as a melee, try removing the simple ground targeting in the options, and manually resummon the flame outside aoes, instead of resummong it inside like it happened in the video at least twice (because you’ve been targeting the GK, which was still inside the aoe).

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Thanks for that. At least we can rule out that there’s an issue with DA E10, which was my main concern. I am certainly not discounting the possibility that I did something dumb, but I did look through my gear after the initial bad parse just to make sure I wasn’t missing a talisman or glyph or something, and there was nothing obvious that jumped out at me, which is why I decided to post my odd observations here.

If there is another round of Testlive, I will triple-check and hopefully have some time to do some troubleshooting on my low parses. Out of interest, here is the setup I was running for my second AR run parsing at roughly 6.6K DPS:

Radiant Tachyon Pigment L1 - Signet of the Ascendant L1 - Intricate Accurate Glyph L20
Radiant Recursive Circle L1 - Signet of the Neophyte L1 - Intricate Fierce Glyph L1
Radiant Egon Pendant L1 - Signet of the Journeyman L1 - Intricate Devastating Glyph L1
Radiant Iron-Sulfur Bracelet L1 - Signet of Nemain L1 - Intricate Fierce Glyph L1
Radiant Cold Silver Dice L1 - Signet of Cruel Delight L1 - Intricate Fierce Glyph L1
Radiant Grounding Line L1 - Signet of Time and Space Alteration L1 - Intricate Accurate Glyph L1
Radiant Razor Fossil L1 - Signet of Quickness L1 - Intricate Fierce Glyph L1
KSR-43 of Energy Mk III - Orochi Thermal Inverter of Alacrity Mk III - Intricate Fierce Glyphs L1

Ice Beam & AR Healing Passive
Burst Fire & its passive
Lock and Load & its passive
Living Flame & its passive
Incendiary Grenade & its passive
Placed Shot

It appears it is not possible to upload the log file of my Testlive session, unfortunately. As mentioned previously, I welcome any ideas on why the parses are so low.

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Wow, well, i’m not even sure where to start, you have a lot of things going wrong in your setup.

This is simply a loss of DPS compared to something as simple as even a Crushed Cities. I’ve been using Fate’s Chosen in my run, which is a very easy to obtain head, and is bis for DPS.

This isn’t a DPS signet. Cooldown reduction for DPS is actually bad because of the fact you’re consuming more energy and more GCDs to cast elites that, at the end, aren’t even worth casting without the damage signet. For DPS builds, we use the damage signets.

Why do you have a maxed out 20 hit glyph in E10, but also a lvl 1 red as well?

Next: regarding your glyphs, you’ve got 5 crit glyphs and only 1 crit power glyph. That’s a mistake that costs you a decent chunk of DPS.

Ring of the Hollow Tree helps a bit in DA in case you can get some occasional interrupts or purges. The cooldown reduction on the other hand is useless.

The Keepsake now provides more DPS with all the weapons.

Are you kidding? Where’s the Military Strap?

That’s not your best DPS option regarding the elite, but at least the cooldown reduction doesn’t make you waste more primary energy. Regardless, you should really go Veteran + HEG. If you want to play with Ele elites, i’d advise to go for Frozen Figurine + Blizzard + Cataclysms.

I guess this was an experiment, but as a rifle DPS, this is basically a wasted DPS slot. Even more so that you’ve also got the AR healing passive (Anima-Tipped Bullets?) that you shouldn’t need because of how this thing tanks for you, Cruel Delight only should be more than enough. That would free up a passive slot for Overclocked Loader.

PS: generic signets also lower your output, particularly the lack of Commando.

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I appreciate the detailed feedback, but you misunderstand my intentions here. I am well aware and never claimed that this was a BIS gear build. It is meant to simulate somebody without interest in getting BIS everything, having some items because they like versatility, choosing some abilities because they enjoy playing with them and checking that they are still able to complete content. None of what you pointed out, with the exception of the glyph allocation, should be making such a big impact on overall DPS.

As far as swapping in the second Hit glyph for Crit Power instead of Crit, that may well be where a big drop in DPS is coming from. But I will certainly not be the only player thinking of keeping their crit maxed. However, it still doesn’t explain the big discrepancy between AR and Hammer, compared to your numbers, since my parses are both utilising the same glyph setup. Also, that may in and of itself highlight a problem, where the difficulty in some content is so unforgiving that getting your glyph balance slightly wrong will not allow you to complete certain content successfully. There are a lot of casual players that I worry about if there is a need to get your gearing spot-on like this, but it would seem the devs are aiming level-appropriate content at the more knowledgeable crowd.

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Ok, i get what you’re saying. But having a Grounding Line for instance instead of a Military Strap has nothing to do in terms of “Versatility”, it doesn’t change your gameplay or rotation in any meaningful way, it just straight out adds DPS. Same things for the majority of what i’ve said. Actually, all of it. I didn’t suggest you to swap out of Living Flame (which would have been a gameplay choice), i just pointed out that you probably don’t need Anima-Tipped bullets if you have Living Flame slotted, which would have allowed you to get more DPS.

Everything i’ve said has nothing to do with “playstyle”, but everything to do with poor gear choices. That’s not an excuse to say that casuals will struggle. DA has a limited completion time, so DPS and builds matter, whether you like it or not. As i’ve also said, museum and agents on live are a good buffer, and that’s something you don’t have on testlive.

So, in this sentence, you’re willingly disregarding all the other 10+ things i’ve pointed out that aren’t about glyphs that might not be a problem in your hammer build. And also, you didn’t post your hammer build.

DA is never been meant to be completable at your top difficulty with bad gear and/or build choices, be it on the beta or on live. People who want to do DA with half-assed builds go on lower difficulties.

PS / edit: there are a lot of casuals that still make their builds & gear properly and that play very well. The ones that make irrational builds with random gear aren’t anything short of bad players, let’s call a cat a cat. Bad players aren’t entitled to anything besides story content.