devtrackers.gg
The first change I’m concerned about is buffing the weekly field bosses for higher levels.
I assume this may have been done to address the reduction in channels (which reduced the overall bosses up at any given time) or so bosses would last long enough for call outs or boss markers on the map to be effective.
I see two obvious ways for the devs to address this, either shorten the spawn timer or increase the boss fight. It appears that the later was chosen here, bosses were buffed so they last longer.
The negatives with this decision as I see it, servers that have less players or slow periods (even physera does) will have more players standing around waiting longer (since the reduction of channels) and grinding fights much longer. Additionally, it’s already hard to see the progression in your character since enemies level with you, this change only exacerbates that issue.
For context I recently tried fighting the grass giant post update with two other level 30+ players and it took what felt like 10 minutes to get it to 85% health before someone came in and reset the boss. Then both players left having given up and I was saved by level 5-15’s who killed the bosses in a matter of minutes. Do you see my problem, we do much much less damage to this boss than level 5-15 players, I was carried by new players which should not be the case.
How I might address this is to make bosses scale in difficulty depending on how many players you have so it’s still possible to solo or run these bosses on servers that have less players or slow periods without having to grind the fight for far far too long and so you don’t need to be carried by newer players.
The second change is to dungeons. I’ve only noticed this on two dungeons so far, Sundered and HOTE (ran these post update).
On sundered the second bosses no longer allows players to stand on the ledge to avoid the dmg wall and projectiles.
On HOTE you can no longer skirt the waterfalls if players don’t understand the wind strategy.
Now you might be wondering what’s wrong with this exactly? Well in my opinion this just makes it more difficult for solo runs in two ways. The first is that if you have players that haven’t learned or don’t understand the dungeon mechanics you can get the whole team wiped. An example that already existed of this would be HOTD where the team can be wiped on boss two if one player destroys all the barrier rocks. The second is that more players will choose to run with their guild or pre-made parties because of these potentially unavoidable wipes. This may have a small yet negative impact on dungeon queuing for servers that have less players or slow periods on larger servers, this may also cause more toxicity as more experienced players get upset at these wipes.
I don’t want to jump on the conspiracy theory bandwagon that the changes were in order for more scrolls to be sold but the logic behind these changes does feel a little questionable from my point of view. I would love to be corrected here though.
Not trying to just criticize the update, I still enjoy bless otherwise I wouldn’t be playing it but I wanted to bring up these concerns in the hopes that a constructive discussion can be had and hopefully this is seen by the right people so fixes can be made in the future.
External link →