So I beat ?? Zekvir. Despite doing so and feeling a sense of accomplishment at it, there are a several issues I noticed while grinding it which I really think need to be addressed as they honestly made things far more difficult than the encounter had any right to be.
While I was able to make up the difference with pure skill and planning, I can see several legitimate gripes on this encounter that honestly should of been corrected and reported by Quality Assurance Testers before this fight ever went live. What follows is a list of these issues.
The Good, The Bug, and the Ugly
Issues:
1.) Zekvir’s Model often displaces the add you have to kill or stands inside it forcing players to make macros to target the Egg Sac. This seems a bit on the over the top side. If a player is actively trying to target eggs but Zekvir’s mass is preventing it, that is not a player issue, that is a design flaw.
2.) Brann’s Dispels are too random. I think players would do well in having the ability to command him to do it. I died far too many times to Enfeebling Spit not because I wasn’t dispelling it, but because Brann’s randomness forced me to burn my dispels at janky times. Finally I stopped trusting him and just ignored him outright. Another issue that is not of the player’s making, as they do not and cannot control this NPC.
3.) The webs as decorations on the roof of the Room obscures vision. In a fight like Zekvir, most players will zoom out completely to have a good view of the whole room. Having these decorations feels like a deliberate Troll move, especially when walls and webs block your vision completely at critical points. Poorly designed.
4.) Collision on the ledge with the stairs. Another very bad design decision, as not only does it block movement in a high movement fight, but it also completely hides the telegraphing of Zekvir’s moves. Given Zekvir’s preference for dropping Egg Sacs here, one can assume the Devs just didn’t care enough to remove it since it was a part of a pre-fabbed map and thought to artificially increase the difficulty by blocking a crucial part of the encounter in this one area. Poorly designed.
5.) The Door Corridor should be totally sealed off. Not a hallway with the door. Zekvir’s got a habit of despawning randomly when he enters it thanks to Brann Dead Brann jumping around and often jumping out of the door to make Zekvir follow him and leading to a reset. This happened to me at 3%. Should not be a thing. Poorly designed.
6.) Want to know what kept killing me? Well aside from human error on my part in trusting Brann knew how to dispel, and getting killed by Enfeebling Spittle; when he did not… The main issue was Zekvir’s Melee. Also before you ask, no obviously that wasn’t happening when I was actually getting the potions.
The issue was that more often than I care to remember, Brann would suddenly stop dropping potions entirely. That’s your NPC which I have no control over. Honestly… Brann’s Healing style makes a strong case for him actually being Donald from Dark Legacy.
There’s a solution to that also. As with his Dispels, can we either have the ability to call for the potions or at the very least get a bar where we can see a cooldown for when he’s actually going to drop them? Because I believe that this is bugged.
Post-Mortem:
Overall, the fight was fun, but would of been far more enjoyable to learn if these issues were resolved.
As it stands, I feel like I beat it in SPITE of the above design flaws.
Unfortunately, when I couple it with the shop offerings; the fight felt less like it was tuned well or designed to be a challenge, and more like it was designed to be a brick wall for players to beat their heads into; and to get players to buy tokens on Flasks, Runes, Potions, etc. more than anything else.
Which brings me to the final bit. The rewards for surmounting such a thing…
A void zeppelin is a trash reward, and you guys know it full well. Try to make such fights worth our while by giving us the Mage Tower Weapons. Zekvir was easily a harder encounter than anything I faced in Legion’s Mage Tower.
As I see it, players who beat a superior challenge should be able to access those rewards the same as those who got it the original way. Anyone trying to hold pixels hostage for the sake of their uniqueness, is a detriment to the game.
Thanks for reading. Hopefully Underpin is an interesting one.