Neverwinter: PC

Qhue_sl said:

The dungeon boss difficulty is all over the map. I think this is due, in part, to the encounter design team working in a vacuum compared to the class design folk.

Let's say you make a boss and decide to really make it melee unfriendly and encourage high movement and spreading out. In most games this would be a perfectly viable encounter design except for the fact that there are only TWO functioning healing spells and they require staying clumped around the boss in order to function.

Right now everyone is playing "Scissors" which is amazeballs against "Paper" but just plain terrible when coming against "Rock". Because you have so many people grinding out Seals in Epic Cloak Tower (aka free lewt central) they get a high enough gearscore to go to Tier 2 and promptly fall over dead on trash because 'charge in and spam AE knockback' is no longer the award winning strategy it was up till now.

Cryptic has been tight lipped about class fixes and design changes coming up, they most certainly have to be a thing that is coming but lord only knows how soon or what form these will take.

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Some of the fights are straight up retarded. To take 2 recent examples, the last boss of the snow mountain area dungeon, a giant ice ogre and a large amount of his buddies. I tanked that, I sometimes spent up to 10seconds being CCed by repeated knockbacks and knockdowns. Fucking wolves, fucking golems and then the fucking boss itself. I can't guard everything(or much at all), I can't evade dodge and once I get CCed once I get fucking air combod like it's marvel vs capcom. Luckily every once in a while I manage to scrounge up full AP(fairly easily really), then it's CC IMMUNITY TIME, for 10secs. Fight was annoying as shit.

But apparently, they could do worse. I've tried 3 times to do the skirmish in the lava mountain area, retake the bridge or whatever. Last(I assume?) boss is 3 fucking fire giants at the same time, they can do a long range cone pull, a pbae knockback+residual fire dmg, a large normal giant swing attack(like the ogres do) and a strong localized punch that leaves fire shit on the ground plus one of them also do multiple fire circle shit on the ground. Every group disbanded after a bunch of wipes, shit didn't even look close, closest was 2 rogues trying to burn one mob down while the rest of the group was getting mowed down, the constant disables makes it impossible to do jackshit it seems. It's like you get hit by ONE thing, and you can't move until you're dead, which takes maybe 2seconds anyway, unless you're standing in the cleric circle but the cleric either dies, or you get moved out of the circle.

I mean I'm sure with a solid group these aren't so bad but in pubs it was a fucking mess, and what's weird is the rest of the place/game is fairly faceroll, but then suddenly assraping time. I assume in endgame it's the same shit but the encounter design is really retarded, it's the same shit over and over again(avoid ground, adds) and the only way to increase difficulty is to just turn all that shit to 11, by spawning dozens of elite adds, having massive ground aoes and adding a large amount of CC in the mix so you cannot avoid the adds or the ground all the time.

I'm probably done with the game anyway, I've seen all the content almost, still need to do last zone and 1dungeon, no point in grinding further, not a big fan of how the group dynamics work especially at higher level.

Qhue_sl said:

Yeah Im pretty sure that encounter literally has a misplaced decimal point. It has been that way since the very first beta weekend though, so I have to guess that it is wrapped up in some monster content update they are amassing.

To Pyros' point : many of the fights involve a truly chaotic number of adds coming in waves and overlapping cones of destruction / CC / stun / pulling etc. In most of these you can be saved by a competant CW who knows to save a Singularity for when they come and quickly yanks them all to one spot and unloads with AEs while the GWF does the same and BAM all adds cleared in <4 seconds. Sadly most CWs are just plain terrible. Terrible clerics are obvious because they dont use Astral Shield and no one gets healed, but terrible CWs are much more subtle in their incompetence.

I think most CWs don't know what they are meant to do and are happy just throwing glaciers around and looking at the damage meter.

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Yeah those fights I get but like the ones I mentionned have those type of mobs that are immune to CC(elementals and giants), and they also posses massive aoe knockbacks and shit like that, makes it a mess to deal with because if you get close to whack them you get CCed all over the place but you can't stun them/arcane singularity them into a nice pack either. A few of these is alright but when it's a large number it's pretty dumb I think.

And yeah I played my CW for the first 45 levels and I've seen many terrible CWs grouped along with me, some that used the aoe knockback ice daily instead of the aoe pull(like why the fuck would you think that's a good idea when arcane singularity has no target limit and groups mobs for sudden storm), CWs that didn't use sudden storm, CWs that used freezing ray as their main at wills instead of magic missiles especially on bosses, CWs that had any sort of knockback on their setup and used them on shit that wasn't actively running at them or the healer and obviously people who speced retardedly or aren't playing so they do less damage than the healer.