Tiers 9 through 11 balancing (See post #4 for current status)

Tarutao said:
This sounds like an outright nerf to the fight; I'm aware of that. However, if you're reading this thread, I trust that you're level-headed enough to hear me out on this before getting upset, so I make two statements beyond the basic "this is a tier-appropriate change". First, this is just under consideration. No action has been taken or will be taken until we're confident it's a change for the best. Second, it would go hand-in-hand with an upwards change in the quality of the loot. Such a change would require quite a few decisions in the process.
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Nah, not angry at all if you change him. Like I said in my post about him earlier, he is pretty easy after the initial rats are dead. I think we end up with healer mana about 40-50% usually.

As for loot, well it's alright. We've just had crazy amounts of caster shoes drop from him. With a lot of people having Murkflower shoes already, they are in the "oh well no one wants them I'll guess I'll roll for them" loot. The main reason we kill him is to try to get a robe.
 
Xoranath, Companions

The bump in HP's would be appropriate with a bump in the loot. Either adding one more item with classes not already in(or mildly in) his loot table or changing a loot or two to include other/similar classes would be nice. Just my two cents.
 
Changes to The Void Worm in tonight's patch.

Spires Class Bracer droprates adjusted as part of the previously mentioned fix. The amount of disease counters on the debuffs has been lowered by about 1/3. You still need to make some effort to remove those, but this amount shouldn't be unreasonable. The occasional issues where players may have been hit by the AE twice simultaneously has been fixed.

What hasn't been changed is the UI display situation. Until further notice, you'll still need to rely on the "fully cured" message or checking your own buffs/debuffs with /charinfo to determine when you no longer have one of the debuffs. Another thing that hasn't changed is the mob's HP. The proper order of things is to make sure the fight's mechanics are working properly and then considering the difficulty tuning.

tl;dr The Void Worm should work after patch, but that doesn't mean it's easy.

Edited to add: As always, see Post #4 in this thread for where my focus is prioritized.
 
Hey Tao, the issue of dot icon being removed but having to rely on cure messages is also still happening with Ansaag in TOT. Thought it would be easiest to post here.
 
he said that wasn't fixed and i doubt it can be fixed until 3.0, but who knows

there's a lot of higher tier fights where you have to read the text and not rely on UI elements so its good practice!

also tao i wasn't trying to be negative, i don't think there's anything wrong with klikil aside from the fact it 1) drops no healer items and 2) the other items are pretty bad. a meh offhand only weapon, a nerfed bracer, boots that are okay for necros only, and an okay robe and caster offhand. this is just my opinion as a former person who was once on that tier and making the types of decisions of what mobs to kill for a guild.

i actually kinda like the fight, it requires some quick action in the first minute of the fight to get everything under control. it did used to lie beyond a MUCH harder fight (pre-nerf animation) but i feel like with the retuning of animation, the whole thing goes fairly smoothly now in terms of progression.
 
cian2 said:
also tao i wasn't trying to be negative
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I know.

cian2 said:
i don't think there's anything wrong with klikil aside from the fact it 1) drops no healer items and 2) the other items are pretty bad. a meh offhand only weapon, a nerfed bracer, boots that are okay for necros only, and an okay robe and caster offhand. this is just my opinion as a former person who was once on that tier and making the types of decisions of what mobs to kill for a guild.
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That leaves open the question of whether it's too "meh".

cian2 said:
i actually kinda like the fight, it requires some quick action in the first minute of the fight to get everything under control. it did used to lie beyond a MUCH harder fight (pre-nerf animation) but i feel like with the retuning of animation, the whole thing goes fairly smoothly now in terms of progression.
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Well, there's disagreement about how smoothly the progression goes, and that's why there's still a question here. Some people have said that Klikil is as easy as Yk`sil, and that's not good. That would be fine if Klikil was an encounter you could just walk to without doing any progression within the zone first (like Animation is, actually). In that case, we could just lump it with Yk`sil and Guardian and Zo`rel and say the loot is way less meh.

I'm still holding out hope that some sort of adjustments can be made to make the loot not underwhelming without making it "wow that's a good item" and to adjust the encounter to feel like a Tier 10 encounter instead of a Tier 8 encounter with a hellish first 60 seconds. Maybe increasing Klikil's HP would create that without sacrificing the nature of the fight and it's rather distinctive beginning.
 
Slightly off topic but this is probably the best place to ask... Is the new Thaz tiers 10-11 or is it considered something else by the staff?
 
I don't think there is or will be anything official with that, but if I had to place where I expected the playerbase to judge their Tier listing a year from now, I'd say the lower wings will be listed as Tier 10. The mini bosses are probably on the lower end of Tier 10, and the wing bosses at the harder end of Tier 10. I suppose time will tell.

The lower wings are only the start, though. I'd bet that whatever zone boss or zone boss equivalent thing exists or will exist for that zone will one day be listed as Tier 12.

Edited to add: As a disclaimer, I should note that while I'm incredibly and deeply familiar with the Lower Earth wing, I'm only passingly familiar with Lower Water, and basically unaware of details of the other two outside of one really awesome mechanic each of the Lower Fire boss Lower Air boss. Judging from things I've overheard, though, I'd suspect that even though it's been attempted more than the other three wings combined, Lower Earth is probably the more difficult of the four wings. Who knows for sure, though?

Edited a second time to add: I do really look forward to the day when people have done enough in Thazeran's Tower to intelligently argue over which of the lower wings are harder. I'm still eligible to raid those wings other than lower earth, cough cough.
 
Cambrai said:
Nah, not angry at all if you change him. Like I said in my post about him earlier, he is pretty easy after the initial rats are dead. I think we end up with healer mana about 40-50% usually.

As for loot, well it's alright. We've just had crazy amounts of caster shoes drop from him. With a lot of people having Murkflower shoes already, they are in the "oh well no one wants them I'll guess I'll roll for them" loot. The main reason we kill him is to try to get a robe.
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Honestly, all the shoes would need for more people to want them would be + 1 ft, or even + conjuration to go with the helping DoTs aspect of the gear.

I am Jeanval, and I approve this post.
 
Back from travelling... and nobody has touched The Void Worm. Sigh. I suppose I should move on to others for now.

(1) The Void Worm -- Boss HP tweaking on hold until someone actually tries to kill it.

(2) The Ancient Guardian Trio -- Killed by CW once in June, otherwise last attempted since April 29th. Tweaks to the damage done by the smallest of the three guardians on hold until someone actually tries to kill it and either I can watch or someone can get me a parse of it.

(3) Iskkath's Experiment -- Boss HP tweaking on hold until an on-tier fight actually tries to kill it. That said, CW has killed it in the last 10 days, so I'd like their input on the length of the fight, the mana intensity, how difficult it was to heal, a couple details only someone familiar with the fight would think to mention, and so forth.

I'd like to put these in the "done" category soon.
 
Hugh - SB

We considered VW last night, but figured we'd wait for you to be around (someone said you weren't) and had other stuff we wanted to try again anyway. Was Iskkath ever messed with since maybe January? Our last go at it a couple thought it was doing extra nukes. I personally couldn't tell any difference though. If these are up we may give them a go next raid if you're around.
 
To the best of my understanding from talking with everyone that had the capability of changing the Iskkath's Experiment encounter, the only changes that didn't get reverted are a change in the mob's HP, a fix to the droprates of the spires class bracers that I announced in this thread, and (unless I'm mistaken on which encounter this was) a fix of a typographical error in an emote that should not effect the difficulty of the fight at all.

If he's doing an extra nuke, that's not intended, and I really would love to see timestamped parses (or someone doing the fight in front of me) so I can hopefully figure out and fix that issue. I haven't seen any extra nukes in my testing, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. After all, there was an issue with The Void Worm with double nukes that has been fixed but was there all along and didn't get noticed. At least the penalty for failing to cure those diseases for a while is less-certain death now. That said, outside of his AE damage, Iskkath's Experiment does still do melee damage on the tank.

Interestingly enough, the fight I think I could most compare Iskkath's Experiment to nowadays is Enchanter Apprentice Klikil... lol.
 
So, I finished that post, then re-read your post.

You mean the Iskkath the Mindful encounter, don't you?

To my understanding, that one was untouched. I'll report back if I find out otherwise.
 
Yeah, mindful. Honestly at the risk of certain guildies reading this and getting annoyed with me, I really didn't feel like Mindful changed. I kinda thought we just blew it.
 
Oh, my. That is by far the most difficult to understand boss npc script I have ever tried to understand. Fortunately, 90% of it is related to that ... "amusing" part of the fight... but I digress. I'll probably go adjust some inconsequential things in the fight (think "typographical errors in emotes" level changes), but I'm hearing a lot of "I didn't change it" and after seeing that script, I really believe it. The 10% of the script that isn't related to that "amusing" part of the fight seems to match with my personal experience doing the fight.

Edited to add -- I'm referring to Iskkath the Mindful.
 
Alright, I'm looking at Conglomeration now. Can anyone shed light on which part of the fight is causing issues? For ease of discussion, we'll refer to the 5 versions of "Conglomeration" as Big, Red, Yellow, White, Blue based on their con.

I suspect the issues with this mob are just understanding the different AEs of the 5 types, and if anyone that's done the fight recently (well, recently-ish, he was last attempted 70 days ago and one-shot) cares to discuss it, we might find something worth adjusting.
 
The main issue that I feel is the time required to kill the blues before they kill you either needs adjusted or the hps of the blues need adjusted. I understand this can cause issues as guilds get better dps gear and tomes partially hurting the balance but that is the nature of being higher tiered.

Unless I completely wrong on that emote/ae which I could be. When you combine that with the tanking requirements makes this fight very difficult until you overtier it significantly.
 
Thank you for that specific information regarding difficulty with AE damage.

That said, you said "the tanking requirement" ... when is this an issue? Are you using 1 tank or 2? Do you mean that a tank is dealing with both reds or 1 red and 2 yellows simultaneously? Is the tank damage an issue for the big mob? Is the melee damage from the blue ones adding up to problematic amounts?

These sound like facetious and/or condescending questions. I know, and I'm sorry for that. Please understand that it looks reasonable to me from what I've, and for that reason, I need to ask these questions so that if there's something wrong that I'm not seeing (cough cough void worm cough) that it can be addressed.

Thanks again for being part of the discussion. I know a lot of people are getting fatigued by it.
 
I am not saying it is an issue I am just coupling the two. We usually would use 3 tanks. It has been a while since I have done the fight but 1 tank (usually me) would yank initially and then when it splits i would tank the one that would be tanked and flipped back and forth (also 1 mess up on the flips can kill tank/almost wipe raid iirc) an would burn other and when it splits mez/tank etc until blues then burn like crazy.

I am trying to be as descriptive as possible w/o totaling giving it away for those who have yet to try it.
 
Well, I'll give a little bit away: it's Scitterchomp, 18-man Tier 10 mode, basically. At half health, each type splits into multiple of the next type, kill tons of the last type and win. Each of the 5 versions has it's own HP (and other stats) and damage output and types of AEs. The types are differentiable by their size and by the color of their /consider messages at level 65 (hence the color-based names I suggested).

I haven't had a chat with the Dev Team about this yet, but I didn't think the AE from the Red type was as unforgiving as you describe based on what I saw on paper. That warrants looking into it further. Also, I need to pitpick about the damage from the Blue type. They do melee damage to their target as well as doing AE damage after an amount of time, and that forces the raid to kill the final Blue type mobs rather quickly.

However, the question is ultimately rooted in the type of damage that is the issue with the Blue type. The obvious two strategies are "AE like mad" and "assist and focus them down one at a time" to handle the groups of 6 Blue types. Each has its pros and cons. AE like mad, and you might have all 6 alive when they start AEing. This is risky. Focus them down, and you'll probably get a few AEs before they're dead. In both cases, you have to consider whether you want to have a tank try to pick up aggro on them first. This mitigates the amount of melee damage to consider on the raid, but it does cost valuable time before the Blue types start AEing.

This fight is actually much more strategy intensive than it is given credit for, so I have to ask about whether it's a matter of the melee damage making the AE damage kill a few people (not sustainable) or a matter of AE damage wiping the raid.

... and all of that leaves out completely the question of the AE from the Yellow type... which I think is probably the most important thing to understand in order to theorycraft/stratcraft for this encounter.
 
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