Did all dungeons on 12-14 multiple times as tank or DPS, although much of my feedback will be oriented at improving the experience at a +10 level while considering the impact scaling has on the difficulty.
Halls of Atonement
Feels overall the most different, so figured I’d start here. The change to the Gargons doesn’t really seem like it accomplished its goal, as they play overall the same and if anything are more annoying since its not bound to their auto attacks (if I’m understanding it correctly).
The biggest thing I noticed is that the amount of count you get from just pressing W and going through the instance without going out of the way is pretty low. A lot of the first area just doesn’t give that much count, and the second area has a lot of the mortal strike mobs which are very obnoxious to play, so you end up just doing like the entire first area and doing your best to skip as much of the trash between the first and second boss…which is pretty much exactly what I remember, and feels weird that with such an open dungeon, this is how we’re deciding to play it.
Regardless, I would say the Groundskeeper change is incredibly obnoxious and it would be nice if they didn’t scatter in such random directions. I feel like the Gargoyles only giving 2 count is pretty low considering how much health they have, even if they are relatively easy to play with, as they’re just everywhere in the instance. You feel obligated to play them with bosses or big pulls and at least as a tank, they’re really annoying to manage due to the positioning constraints they enforce, and they don’t give a damage buff or whatever they used to do, at least from what I’ve noticed.
Beyond that, the bosses felt mostly fine, the visual clarity improvements of course go hard. But, let’s talk about the last boss, which I feel has been turned into a PUG nightmare.
So, none of these massive changes that have been done were listed in the patch notes, but this fight is almost unrecognizable. The dungeon journal also does not mention that the statues can collide and do massive damage to you, which is like the prime wipe condition now. I even had to go back and watch some old videos of it just to make sure I wasn’t going crazy. Erupting Torment now working off of statues as well as the boss, instead of just the boss, combined with Telekinetic Toss now being insanely punishing if it collides with another statue makes this fight unnecessarily complex. I think one of these changes should probably be removed, ideally the statue change as this one is needlessly convoluted in how it works and is incredibly PUG unfriendly, as one person can throw away all the care put into proper baiting.
Tazavesh: Streets of Wonder
This dungeon plays so much better than it used to that I won’t really spend much time here. It just universally feels better to play and the changes understood a lot of what made this dungeon, for most people, pretty unfun back in the day.
It feels relatively quick even though it’s a 5 boss key, and many of the pulls play better than they used to. It seems like the miniboss cheese was fixed with the tethers, although I’m not sure if people were just messing it up.
The only thing I will say is that it’s very easy to go over count if you go left. I didn’t have anyone go right and didn’t play that way myself which was probably a mistake in terms of being able to give good feedback.
I do feel the Frenzied Nightclaws felt a bit too crazy as the Wild Rip was blasting and you typically want to play that with the Direhorn with CDs, which results in some pretty nasty overlaps.
During the Bazaar event, on the second item trade, the adds spawn quite spread out and become active instantly, and it’s near impossible to get aggro on all of them as a tank even if you’re frame perfect without someone dying.
Beyond that, the trash felt pretty smooth in terms of difficulty distribution and all the bosses were mostly fair. Zo’gron seems the obvious exception as the Final Warning shield scales pretty out of control at the moment and needs like a minimum 20% nerf unless you want comps of only super meta comps to be able to kill it, even with all 5 players having the buff. The Rotten Food could also overlap with the window of you refreshing your buff and zone you off of it unless you near instantly refreshed it, which seems a bit unforgiving, and because of the aforementioned tuning of the Final Warning you can’t exactly not refresh the buff. In general, Rotten Food being such a punishing ability throughout this event, as it was in the old days, still feels a bit off to me.
I did notice that on So’azmi, as the tank, the most dangerous part of the fight was simply taking the portals as on tanks that need to be in range of their target to heal/mitigate damage, the boss being able to continually hit you with Energy Blade while you also have the Phase Slash bleed was quite scary, possibly the most threatening part of the instance which feels unintended given you’re literally not in melee range of the boss. The dichotomy of doing an extended portal trip (such as when you need to take all 3 portals to get to the safe spot of a Shuri) while you’re getting absolutely blasted and unable to do anything about it is quite strange.
So’leah’s Gambit
I think overall the dungeon is fine, although the first area is still the hardest part in a really annoying way. The Fish Stick changes make it slightly better, but on higher keys it is still quite oppressive and it really should just either be interruptible or go on CD when stopped. This area is also quite obviously really not built for the current world of asymmetry of classes with uncapped AoE. Going through this area with a FDK or Boomkin and then going through with like a fury warrior or WW monk would be comically eye opening in this regard, but perhaps cherry picking those classes isn’t the best faith argument.
During the intermission of the first boss, if you cancel the clue display at the console it just goes on CD for like 10s so you can’t see it again for a while. It also takes a few second for each image to appear. I think you either should just have to click it once and it stays or if you’re really going to make someone afk there, all 4 runes should appear instantly.
The second boss feels like it could use another 10% HP nerf to be honest, at it can go really long and one bad bait can kind of ruin the fight still.
The final boss needs the fixed HP intermission treatment, and the Ritualists really don’t need the Reinvigorate cast. You could remove it and still preserve much of the difficulty of the pulls in this area.
Edit: After playing Halls of Atonement a little bit more, and not skipping as much in the second area just to see how it is, the Reavers are like insanely unreasonable mobs. The Mortal Strike ability is cast far too frequently and lasts for far too long (5 seconds of 50% healing reduction? Many classes have so much passive healing/absorbs that this is affected by that it’s a massive damage taken increase, in reality. This ability would still be extremely harsh even if it lasted 2 seconds).