I have beat the new DLC in normal, at least I think so there are no new main quests for me to do. The chaos boss by the barrier immediately killed me from full to zero (including the absorption potion effect with 10% flask bonus) with no time to react it’s something he does in melee on the runback when I just stayed away at frost talon length he was fine; maybe he could start the fight with his abilities on cooldown somehow to give you time to react to him spawning in? Final boss was a massive pushover didn’t even proc untamed rage during the whole fight. The yuda moonwhisper trio are a little over tuned I think they killed me quite a few times. A mob by the world tear does crazy high damage whenever he touches you and will kill you very fast if you are not paying attention I can’t remember to be honest but I think his name is chieftain gruldir from what I can see on grimtools.
The worse quest by far was the one that sends you to get 3 random objects from the DLCs this felt a lot like just padding for some reason. From my point of view I have played the game for 2.4k hours I didn’t want to go play through the other DLCs again I wanted to play FoA till the end and this felt to me like a needless interruption whilst I was enjoying the new content. It’s hard to explain but I felt like the game was trying to tell me “you are beating FoA too fast go do something else” which I found frustrating and artificial.
Granted some of these issues are because I was playing solo berserker class and this would be much better with the base HP you get from putting points in the bars of your second class. I also really dislike how I felt their was no MIs I wanted to use for wereraven that I played because they all convert away from the damage type I wanted to use. I never encountered the wight hags horns, prismatic plume crest or calcified sash until I was already lvl 55 and the sylvarria’s root until even later. I am still have yet to find any berserker relics which I kinda just assumed kurn would sell one? Oh well doesn’t matter too much glacier into deathchill worked fine and if I have to I can just craft eye of the storm or iskandra’s balance soon.
Skills wise ice talons works fantastic even on slopes which I know in the past was an issue for forcewave and the like. I don’t really like how cold snap is directional it feels like a re-used rune of hagarrad I would much rather have it do an initial pulse like the ignition skill. The energy cost is definitely overtuned for wereraven I am using 8/16 still after having cleared all of normal. I never use leap run but the leap skill feels great and doesn’t have the problem of getting stuck on slopes or corners like I find rushes my preferred rune do. I supposed the same thing I said about HP for a second class also applies to base energy I will see how it shapes up in later diffs. To be fair after speccing into battle surge + owl & a focus prism it was much better. I only really consider your build to have energy problems if it can’t sustain off of spamming energy pots off cooldown which I still managed to go empty using the -1sec cooldown flask as a high castspeed raven. Usually I would begin to use an arcane spark to solve energy issues but if I’m not mistaken that doesn’t work on skills with no weapon damage % sadly.
I’ll include a Grimtools link it might be helpful to judge some of this feedback I am very experienced so I decided to forgo any defensive devotions and just stack cold damage and cast speed. The far zoomed out view of my opinion of the difficulty for the DLC was that you can cruise through the DLC half asleep most the time but then a random enemy will do so much spike damage that you suddenly have to wake up an pay attention.
In base game grand priest zart is completely insane (I have read recent patches and maybe this is addressed but I fought him before that release) and I took a death to the solael guardian which was very sudden and caught me off guard not something I had trouble with in the past (it’s pretty simple not to stand in purple goop ;P). Cronley did unexpecting high damage that I will chock up to poor aether res at the time. Final boss (log I mean) was a joke as usual I stood in his face and killed him in about 30secs he still does no damage and has no health.
Yes honestly if no one reads the rest of the post that’s fine it’s 90% skill issue lol but this quest really soured the experience for me it should only ask for items in the new DLC zone itself I didn’t like having to go eat my vegetables before I get any desert
It felt like a chore or some busy work very much not what I wanted to be doing for my playthrough honestly if I kept my old chars instead of resetting it would have been fine since I could have just teleport with a merit but as a fresh save it was very tedious.
TL;DR: grim yawn player complains about having to actually play the game haha
Most of what I said is arguable game mechanics stuff but as far as the quest design for this in particular I would love to hear what other players thought as I think maybe I am being uncharitable and it could be seen as a way to make the player “wrap up” all their business in the mainline game before proceeding. I just don’t like that it’s a requirement to beat log to get access to bargoll and get near the end of FG in order to carry on playing another unrelated DLC.
About the part where u have to do some AoM and some near-ending FG… well…
What if we had a choice to get those both main item combos soemwhere else in FoA map. And if you play AoM or FG first then you can collect those items right at spot.
Another important note from me, personally, is the secret faction (you know who), should get at least a portal next to it or at least broader version of him giving quests, rather than RNG 1/X pick.
Perhaps for hardcore players, it would be cool if they could get a potion or smth (only for that mode) which disables dreads pressence for it’s duration. (altho this is really a big if or optional and just a simple idea, shouldn’t be added if that isn’t the devs vision)
And finally, as last resort, I seen peeps complaining that map is empty (and it’s a arctic desert afterall…) but I hope we get more meat in it, more secrets in future and more connection-like quests… but for now I overall enjoyed everything (the only thing I haven’t done yet is the super duper secret quest and a tiny bit more).
I actually have no idea if this is a feature or not I suspect so because I picked up the elder’s memory without ever having the quest but it might be different for something like the embers because you use an interactable object in the environment. Still I can’t imagine ever pre gathering these because on a new char you would definitely want to run up to kurnhold to get the new potion effects atleast way before proceeding ahead to AoM.
I did enjoy the DLC overall though I definitely do second the thoughts of it feeling empty and a bit content light at the moment hopefully this will change with the new dungeon and when I get the extra quests from being higher rep with them aswell as maybe something new in ascendant mode I hope
This is a fair take although with the amount of movement abilities you can have now and the max movement speed buffs it feels alright. The only time I really felt like the map was needlessly large is when I died and had to do a runback which can be solved by spamming safety tps I suppose
I have enjoyed it so far. I think the end boss was a bit underwhelming. The introduction didn’t start till late in the expansion, so the build up was pretty short and the boss wasn’t very involved. I kinda expected to have the chief lady join us or something a la Ulgrim. Previous bosses like Korvaak were much more impactful imho. But it was still good. I enjoy the lore and new areas and monsters and finding new secrets. The new systems are also pretty cool and fun, though I think they might also be responsible for my biggest complaint about the expansion.
Which is the buffs to monster difficulty that came in the patch alongside the release. Adding a new difficulty level was already enough for those needing more challenge w/ the DLC. Buffing the previous difficulties seems like overkill that has invalidated multiple builds and characters for many people. I know people who have already lost multiple previously viable HC characters while just farming in Ultimate. More hard =/= more fun nessicary, if it means less variation. I really think they need to be reverted.
Honestly I found them mostly okay this is a very build dependent issue I suppose. The only obvious and egregious outlier from my point of view was pre nerf grand priest zart which I believe is fixed now although I haven’t gone back to test it it’s a very far run.
If you never got to try it someone should make a mod to add it back zart brought a gun to a pillow fight that guy nuked me from orbit never seen my health disappear so fast haha
Increased all Boss Health scaling with level, by ~32% at level 100 (~15% for superbosses). Some bosses with lower health pools received larger increases. These changes do not apply to the Crucible.
Many older boss encounters have received tuning passes to bring their damage up to modern standards, as was commonly done in past updates.
Along with an absolute plethora of Player nerfs across all the classes
Yeh hotfix 1 solved all the issues I had with it tbh
Still though for a while I’ve felt older content was clearly much easier than newer DLC maybe number increases aren’t the way to go instead new mechanics like sunder I find far more interesting. Maybe something like an mmo style red flashing section of floor you have to avoid would be good.
Player scaling at later levels goes crazy I think the only real difficulty is very early levels before your build gets online properly with devotions and such.
Honestly I like it overall as the game had become extremely easy for years with almost zero challenge in moment to moment gameplay outside of celestials. There also needs to be compensation for our characters getting potion upgrades and ascended bonuses on gear. I’m not worried about it reducing build variety either since it’s only going to filter out the squishiest glass cannons. There are still thousands of viable builds. The increased difficulty made coming back to the game more fun and engaging for me since I was forced to pay more attention while leveling and couldn’t assume I was able to facetank everything like I used to. That said a few bosses were certainly doing insane burst damage in the early game but it’s already being addressed. I don’t see why hardcore players would be that upset though, unless they die to a bug. They literally signed up for their character to die unexpectadly at some point
Yeh I was a harcore player mostly pre 1.3 but honestly with spike damage the way it is and just not being familiar with the content and certain mobs power level anymore I don’t think I will ever play HC again.
The number one example of a HC death that would’ve been something unfair/unreactable was the chaos boss near the end of the DLC which was crazy especially compared to the limp noodle that was berno what a miss.
If you haven’t watched any video guides or aren’t checking grimtools ahead of time there’s really no way to know what will or won’t chunk you anymore other than just trying it and dying once to learn.
Not to mention, any build diversity lost with the difficulty increase is completely dwarfed by the insane buff to build diversity thanks to many new items, a new class and changes to almost every existing item
I kinda of agree but some changes are real head scratchers like the change to fleshwarped shield I used to use on pet builds to have feral hunger bonuses or the change for the messengers repeater (pierce version) to be based around wps now.
Yeah that’s why I’m just playing sc until the game settles with patches/hotfixes. There’s dlc bosses with bugged attacks too apparently so I’m in no rush to lose a hc run to that shit. I’ll let them smooth it out first
