Wildstar Dungeon Feedback- Stormtalon and Ruins of Kel Voreth. August 1, 2013

Hi folks, we're in the boring doldrums between the wrapping up of CBT3 and the start of CBT4 which may come as early as next week. With nothing much going on, allow me to gossip for a bit. One player who has a fancy-schmancy core tester account and is letting it go to waste is Dulfy, yes, she of GW2 fame, who was invited to the exclusive private testing pool last year, but she hasn't touched the game in months. Where's the love, girl?

Down to business, here's a dungeon writeup on Stormtalon and Kel Voreth.

"After a lot of effort I was fortunate enough to do Stormtalon's Lair and Ruins of Kel Voreth before the server went down on Sunday. Overall they were really enjoyable and I like what I’m seeing from initial group content. I took the time to jot down notes and feedback for both dungeons, as well as some general thoughts on several overlapping trends.

Stormtalon's Lair

Trash

The trash in this dungeon was actually somewhat of a challenge, but mostly for the wrong reasons. They have an abundance of health which makes things really drag on and become a chore after a while. My biggest complaint about the trash (and only real standout for the dungeon as a whole) is the unavoidable, stun/DoT attack that that you must get out by rapidly tapping F.

When I first experienced the ability I was playing a support healer role in my group, along with a second main healer. If either myself or the other healer were stunned we could just heal the other through the damage until it broke. It was annoying but not really a life threatening experience. However, the second time I did the dungeon I was solo healing it. Three out of the four times the skill landed on me I died before I could get it off. The one exception was when I had my absorb on and survived with a sliver of health.

Now I have absolutely no problem with a skill being unavoidable. I also don’t mind a mechanic killing me in one use, regardless of if the trash does it or not. What I am at odds with is when I can’t actively avoid a mechanic like I would a telegraph, AND it can easily kill me. The most powerful and punishing skills should be the ones that you can actively avoid. That way you have no one to blame but yourself when you are hit by it. Dying quickly to something I can’t dodge feels cheap.

There were also a few occasions where the Tempest elemental placed juggling tornados, but nothing to be overly concerned about.

First Boss: Blade-Wind the Invoker

I was pleasantly surprised by the scope and scale of the telegraphs in this fight. It was the first time I saw a telegraph that eclipsed the entirety of the room, while also having multiple shapes within it. Because I was so captivated by the amount of movement needed and the freshness of the encounter, I didn’t really mind the lack of real strategy required. It is essentially a tank and spank fight that requires no real coordination by the group. Simply hit the boss until a new phase begins, hit the adds until they die, and then kill the boss.

Simple, but in a good way.

I could see this fight being very challenging on a higher difficulty, but for an introductory fight it works fine.

Second Boss: Aethros

This fight can feel really chaotic but it’s a good change of pace from the first encounter. It’s a bit of a difficulty spike at first but only because of the importance of Armor Break. There are three things that I have issues with but only two of which are actually balance related. They are:

Phase 2 - Adds

The adds are dispatched far too easily which makes them little more than a nuisance. There isn’t any real strategy involved and they are only up for a matter of seconds. You could literally remove them and no one could really tell the difference, because they are that inconsequential.

If there were A LOT more of the adds and they attacked targets at random (a la the Tempest’s) it would require a party to approach them differently, such as grouping up. The adds could have a stacking debuff that does more damage as the time goes on, so you would want to down them all with great haste. Or, you could need to down them before the next phase starts—instead of their deaths triggering the phase—otherwise they would chase (maybe slow?) you through the tornado gauntlet and wreak havoc.

Basically this phase feels like unnecessary filler when it could be awesome instead.

Phase 3 - Teleport

The teleport to the beginning of the tunnel feels really abrupt and jarring. If it wasn’t for someone in my party telling me it was going to happen I would’ve been even more confused than I originally was, and that’s saying something. If the transition was a bit smoother and/or prefaced with an animation or obvious announcement, it would be a lot more enjoyable. As of now it’s just disorienting.

Phase 3 - Tornado Gauntlet + Storm Attack

I personally love this phase. It is really intense and feels like a race to save yourselves. The only shortcoming is the fact that a.) it’s not obvious you need to interrupt him (see the next boss for more on this) and b.) the attack doesn’t do that much damage. Obviously if you were running through the tunnel and it went off it would kill 2-3 people that weren’t high on health. But if you ignore the mechanic and stay at the entrance there isn’t much to worry about. If you don’t at least hit him a little bit before the attack launches it should do even more damage, increase his own damage, or heal him X amount.

Third Boss: Stormtalon

This encounter really feels like an end boss fight in every way. It is adequately long, entertaining, and all of his skills fit perfectly with the theme of the dungeon. My only real complaint is about his channeled skill that stuns you in the beginning and collapses onto himself. The damage is spot on and the combination of the stun and shrinking telegraph is fun, but people don’t inherently know you can interrupt it—just like Aethros’ large attack.

This isn’t really a problem with the boss, so much as it is the way that Armor Break is presented to the player. There is never really much emphasis on cooperatively interrupting enemies. Furthermore, for a class like Spellsinger which is the one I’m playing, there aren’t many options for contributing to the synergy. When the success or failure of a group hinges on whether or not you interrupt skills together, the mechanic should be really fleshed out long before you are presented with the scenario.

Aside from that the encounter feels like it’s tuned the best and is really enjoyable.

Ruins of Kel Voreth

Trash

The trash in this dungeon is far more forgiving than in Stormtalon. Sadly most of it feels really optional and just a nuisance. Because the dungeon is so spread out it is very easy to dodge most of the trash packs. There isn’t really an incentive for clearing them and they don’t reward enough loot or experience to go out of your way to do so. Most of the additional trash we killed just to explore a bit and see what they did, rather than out of obligation.

First Boss: Grond the Corpsemaker

This is the only boss in the dungeon that took us more than one attempt and is also the only thing we wiped on the entire time. We initially tried to focus down the boss but had a great deal of adds jump on our DPS Spellsinger, which caused her to kite and drop all damage on the boss. Eventually we were overwhelmed by the adds and wiped.

On the second attempt we tried to control the adds while burning down the boss. But the fight ran far too long and the adds spawned at a much faster rate than they could be killed, causing the healer to run out of mana, and so we wiped again.

The third attempt we decided to ignore the adds almost entirely and just burn the boss. We positioned the boss in a corner and kited the adds in a half circle around him so they didn’t obscure our damage lines. He died very quickly this time without much effort.

It is a very chaotic fight with a lot of random elements happening at the same time. I feel like groups will instinctively want to burn down smaller adds as they spawn which will, at least in our experience, cause them to wipe. There seems to be little-to-no control over how the adds are amassed as well. If there is some additional gameplay mechanic that we didn’t notice in our three attempts, in regards to how the adds function, I'd love to know.

Second Boss: Slavemaster Drokk

When he summons the individual tethers it becomes a DPS race between your healer, tank and their respective tether. If neither can get out before the boss spawns and he heads over to the tank, the tank will die without being able to do much of anything. Not a single person in my party was able to get out of their own tether before this happened, including our main DPS that was a down-leveled 36 Spellsinger. If a geared DPS can only get through roughly two thirds of the tether’s health in the allotted time, it’s asking a lot for the tank or healer to do the same.

I’d suggest that the tethers have less health or defense, because 10k is a hefty amount. At the very least it should be low enough for the DPS to get out in time to break the tank/healer free. Making it so low that they could get themselves out would make the fight too easy.

During the second phase when he goes behind the force field and starts to summon Destructoid Bots, the bots didn’t actually DO anything for us. They just continuously spawned and sat there until they explode into smaller bots, that proceed to spread throughout the room and detonate. The damage from the small bots is minimal and no real threat. I also think they were immune to damage because I wasn’t able to harm them before their timer went off. If we were able to kill them and/or they applied some sort of stacking debuff/dot for being caught in more than one, it would make that phase matter or at least make the following one challenging. Which leads me to my last point.

In the final phase the Slavemaster’s damage output is entirely too low. His white damage is almost non-existent which allows for effortless kiting by anyone that pulls agro. None of his abilities are threatening in the least and the expanding circular telegraph is too easy to avoid, and does virtually nothing when it does land.

My group had two people die during the tether phase—one of which was the tank—and still managed to kill it without much effort, from ~50% HP to dead. The remaining characters were a down leveled 36 pure DPS Spellsinger, 21 Healer/DPS Hybrid Spellsinger (myself, chipped Finesse and Insight in every slot) and a 20 DPS Stalker.

All we had to do was have myself and the other Spellsinger kite until it died, without ever really coming close to a wipe after the first phase. We one shot the boss.

Third Boss: Forgemaster Trogun

Let me begin by saying that, for the second boss in a row, my group had our tank and a DPS die very early on in this fight. However, unlike the first boss where the mechanic felt like it wasn’t tuned right and resulted in unfair deaths, these deaths should have been avoidable.

When Trogun did the growing AoE Damage that causes you to lose control of your character, our entire team spread out. The two that died weren’t able to get out of it without sustaining an enormous amount of damage. Coupled with the fact they ran in opposite directions of one another AND the healer (myself), it meant that Trogun picked them off the second he continued his assault. Had they been fully topped off in health, fled together, ran with/to the healer, or got out of the AoE slightly faster they would have lived.

After their deaths the boss still had just under half his health remaining. We did just as we had on the previous fight and had the two Spellsingers kite the boss until death. The healer ran out of mana at about 20% but the other Spellsinger was using some heals for this fight, which helped keep the two DPS alive.

The only real threat for the final phase is the growing AoE which is trivialized by using a teleport or well aimed dodges. I used Gate out of it second the ability started and suffered only minimal damage. Had gate not been on my bar I would’ve certainly died due to my being mana starved.

What I find funny about this encounter is the fact that the relatively short gap between his telegraphs is what made the fight doable with three people. Had he simply auto attacked us we would’ve been wiped in no time.

Experience and Loot

I was level 20 when I first did Stormtalon and I returned to do it a second time when I was 21, followed up by Ruins immediately thereafter. The experience gains were very bad in both dungeons. I typically expect to get anywhere from ⅓ to ½ a level from an equal level dungeon, or more if there is a bevy of quests tied to it. I gained somewhere around a 1/5th or 1/4th a level during my first Stormtalon run at 20, and even less in my second at 21. What makes matters worse is that it took a pretty long time for my group to do it since several of us were new to it.

The XP gains in Ruins were slightly better overall but the dungeon felt like it took longer as well. Across three runs I believe I earned a little more than half a level of total experience. In contrast with pure grinding or questing for experience, it is far from an attractive alternative.

The loot didn’t fair much better either. I might not the best person to judge the loot since I went through great lengths to craft and win the best items from challenges. But the items I did see were either minimal upgrades or instantly broken down for salvage and chips. Aside from the new slot items like Implants there was nothing of real value to be had for me or my party. In fact, soloing and duoing was far more profitable and at times yielded superior gear at level 20. When you take repair costs into account I believe I had a net loss in currency from running the dungeons.

Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed both dungeons and feel like they are some of the best introductory content—be it dungeons or otherwise—I’ve seen in a long time. They aren’t a walk in the park but they also aren’t exceptionally punishing either. As the dungeons progressed they felt a lot more comfortable and less intimidating, especially in the case of Stormtalon. I could see them being far too easy for a group of experienced players on their second characters, but that is what other dungeons and higher difficulties are for. What is a much more pressing matter are the potential gains (or lack thereof) for doing either dungeon.

It seems like there is no tangible incentive for clearing the dungeons at level 20 or 21. The recommended level for Stormtalon is 19/20, so it’s quite odd doing it at 20 just to see such poor rewards, or one level higher and getting none whatsoever.