Testlive E17 Content Experience

I wasn’t able to test all the E17 content but would like to share my experience with what I did have chance to play. Some suggestion have likely all ready been covered.

Dungeons

Completed all dungeons on E17 Difficulty as a tank using various tanking styles Chaos/Hammer and Shotgun. They all seemed very viable with some being better suited to certain fights. Healer was able to deal with incoming damage well regardless of tanking style though.

Polaris

Challenges in this dungeon were mostly concerning adds (specifically the bomb adds). It took some different strategies then what we were used to on live and a considerable amount more dedicated focus from the DPS to deal with this but it seemed well balanced overall. Healer had considerable challenges with heal aggro on Polaris 5 and the smaller adds during the bosses shielded phase but some better management of tanking cool downs and positioning of healer or timing of heals seemed to overcome this. Overall no major concerns with this dungeon.

Hell Raised

Not much to say on this dungeon. It was surprisingly the easiest one for us to complete. HR5 was challenging due to adds taking longer to kill but overall very manageable and the DPS checks were very fair.

Darkness War

Challenges again were mostly add related. This is to be expected though as most fights on live either ignore the adds mostly or burn them down so fast that they are simply a non-issue. There are a couple fights however that might present issues. DW3 of course has had a long known aggro issue on live where the boss simply targets a DPS in the group regardless of how much hate the tank has generated. It seemed this can happen even mid taunt making it very challenging for the encounter which is now significantly longer in E17 to be completed. This should be resolved before the patch hits live. Another fight DW5 also presented some bugs. After several wipes the boss bugged into a state where he does not go up top. This of course were used to seeing from live but what made this more difficult was that it tends to generate a situation where many more adds are summoned into the playfield. Given the length of the fight and number of adds that appear it was very challenging to make it past this boss.

Ankh

Ankh was one of the more difficult dungeons to complete (It was also the last one we did after several hours so we may have been tired) Mostly Ankh 4 and 5 presented some difficulties but this was again largely due to how we were used to approaching these encounters on live. Ankh 4 required the dps to be a lot more alert to dealing with the scientists and Ankh 5 was a reasonably difficult dps check (we actually winged at the end to clear the fight). I expect most dps checks will improve on live though as at the time our Expertise was bugged and we don’t have access to agents on Testlive.

Hell Eternal

Actually probably one of my favorite dungeons and it felt really good on Testlive. No major concerns and the last fight was considerably more challenging due to its length in E17 but a really enjoyable encounter.

Penthouse

LAG. The filth lives off of FPS. Noticed a lot of lag spikes during the encounter. (It’s quite possible that these were latency drops were due to Testlive server overload as they were not tied to any specific filth event though its worth looking into further). It is a challenging dungeon and was a ton of fun (Completed twice on Testlive) It really pushes the skill of all three roles and promotes a lot of teamwork. I can see it being one of those dungeons people may simply retreat from if its part of the random selection when queuing due to its more unpredictable mechanics and difficulty though. Possibly worth having its own separate sign up in activity finder but not completely necessary. It requires to group to either have strong understanding of the fights or be able to communicate freely through something like Discord so as much as its an amazing dungeon it may not be a popular one unless there is some reward from this dungeon that puts it on par with the other dungeons.

NYR E17
Wont say much on this. I had the honor of tanking this and running a support DPS build in Molov’s raid attempts. It seems like its coming along really well, but most bugs/issues I believe have all ready been discussed. LAG is a major concern in phase 2 (likely a combination of filth circles and adds spawning) but I believe that is being addressed.

Occult Defense

This is quite time consuming so I didn’t have the chance to test this as much as I would like but I did several single waves from 21-33 and one high wave attempt going from 33-44. This was all completed solo and I’m absolutely loving the changes. The hp reduction on the mobs was a genius way of dealing with the OP healing adds that have been an absolute nightmare before. They are still capable of healing the entire group in the healing circle to full quickly but now it is just another mechanic that can be overcome and not something that can lead to certain failure if arcanes are not present due to enrage mechanics. The arcanes were also increased to i think 10minutes on the field which is nice given that later waves can last 7+ minutes. Overall really looking forward to the potential this offers to group mechanics on live especially now with tanking and healing being a thing. It is terribly easy to get the wave 35 achievement now though so I hope there will be some additional achievements added for OD.

That’s about everything! Thank you for this opportunity, hopefully next phase I will get round to delving a bit more into weapon synergies and builds as well as S&P Scenarios.

5 Likes

Unfortunetely I had to work much of the time while this phase of testing was up but here’s some follow up feedback from the second phase of testing:

Blade

Overall the blade changes were really nice. I spent 2 sessions in E17 NYR as blade DPS and each session was about 2-3hours in length so it gave me some chance to get a practical feel for blade outside of testing on the dummies in agartha.

As some had noticed blade parses very high after the changes. The burst damage potential is exceptional with crushing tide and its sustained damage on a stationary target was commonly 28-30k without expose or buffs.

Blade clearly has its struggles as a melee weapon and so this type of damage isn’t always practical in many fights, however, it’s burst damage was a strong element that made it useful in a group setting like E17 NYR. One common flaw with blade that often gets overlooked is its lack of having a group role. It provides no group buffs or cleanses and is the only weapon without a source of expose or debil on its elites. Because of this combined with the fact that it is melee and unable to easily deal with ranged mechanics (like freeing pods in NYR) it is not a popular choice currently on live.

In our NYR attempts blade now had a function. It could store a significant amount of burst damage for hulks and bird or for the final phase which is now more of a DPS check then ever. And it had good overall DPS to the point that it was OK if you weren’t covering another role in the raid.

It’s been stated that blade is a bit overturned ATM and I think theirs some truth in that, but I also feel that without significant changes to blades group dynamics in the future its current state on testlive is not bad.

Shotgun

A suggestion that I’m not sure has been made but I think would greatly improve the feel of shotgun is taking shell reloads off the GCD. Maybe this would be considered too large a buff to shotgun but gameplay wise it would be a dramatic improvement.

Occult Defense

Ok

So no wave 61 but I did have chance to make some long wave attempts and made it to 46 this time before succumbing to the flicker bug. I understand it’s a deep rooted issue but would be nice to address one day in the future. Otherwise no real issues. The potential for running evade or defense now makes OD very interesting for build design.

Tank Commander

Just wanted to see if anything had changed with this fight loot wise and it seems to be untouched in that regard. It’s something on live now that many of us rarely do anymore. At least for myself Ive seen close to 30 duplicate peculiar boxes and haven’t seen the point to run it as the rewards are of minimal value now. Just think it’s a shame for such a well made fight.

That’s all really! Might add some parses to show the results from blade later but otherwise looking forward to the next phase of testing!

OD seemed to be extra easy didn’t it? Was still fun. I made it to 44 with someone using Blade/SG. I brought OS and Cleanup for us, and the rest blade were blade abilities. I only went in once; I wondered how far I could get with Blade with practice. I think I was using hurricane to keep my energy up, and I typically do less damage with Hurricane rather than Tempest since Tempest gives that extra DMG to all blade abilities while inside the swirl.

I could never make it that high with Blade currently. One hit and I’d be gone.

It is much easier yes due to the reduced HP but the mechanics get very intense past wave 40. sadly I didn’t test blade in there though I think it has some good potential for OD now.

For sure. I used to only use blade in there before I got AR/SG/Ele. I could stay alive ok, and could gather like nobody’s business, but couldn’t do nearly enough damage. In beta, I could see their health going down. We also didn’t seem to get as many commanders and special guys like.