Before anyone replies, none of this has to do with the damage values or bugs of the fight. It’s addressing the specific mechanics that are just inherently designed poorly.
I’ve been slamming my head into this at 652 ilvl for about 2 hours on my Outlaw rogue. I’ve had a lowest pull of about 30% before adds started spawning in the rafters and just burned me down. In all these attempts, I’ve noticed a number of things about this fight that are difficult for a multitude of bad reasons.
Now, I enjoy these as much as the next person. I was slamming my head into Zekvir with similar pulls until the nerf, and mage tower was no different back in legion when I was getting 10% pulls on both the DH challenges week 1. (I quit playing before they finally tuned it, unrelated to the game.) But, there’s a ton of flat unnecessary difficulty that relies on RNG instead of actual skill expression.
The clicking mechanic on the bombs. Not only are they designed horridly, they don’t respond half the time. Aren’t clickable a large chunk of the time. Seem to require you to interrupt your rotation for them to notice you’re doing it. The interaction key specifically doesn’t like to function, and clicking them is both miserable with the Boss’s hit box and with the fact that some of us don’t use MMO mice and keybind a large chunk of our keyboards instead. This feels ridiculously bad to almost be forced to click because the button given doesn’t respond unless you stand still, stare at the bomb, and hit it. Why this wasn’t something you can walk up to and kick just by proximity is beyond me. I’d infinitely prefer that, if you’re going to force me to kick something directionally.
The adds themselves are just not necessary in the form they’ve been added. I understand trying to create the attention rift to force us to juggle a few things while keeping ourselves alive, but this was not the way IMO. They would have been absolutely fine being a ticking, ramping damage if you let them get out of control. The lines just weren’t necessary with the 4 other ground effects happening at once.
The shield shouldn’t be on a timer once it’s triggered, and the fact it’s on a timer instead of a health percentage creates an unnecessary and annoying interaction that just removes player agency. There was an opportunity to give players the ability to control the timers on the shields by managing their DPS and starting it during a good timing window. This rewards positioning, attention to the health, and clearing adds. Instead, you create annoying chaos by just randomly throwing out the shield every, what, 30-45 seconds, which lines up with absolutely none of the timers inherent to the fight. So, once again, what could have been an amazing player-agency moment is relegated to flat RNG on the timer line ups. We should be rewarding intelligent play and skill expression, not relying on ridiculous timer overlap RNG.
The amount of floor “swirly” mechanics, just in general this patch, but also this fight. “Move constantly or die” is not a fun or engaging experience for a lot of classes. Even for those of us that can do it, it’s not fun to constantly be moving. The one thing I felt Zekvir did properly was avoiding that by creating positioning and interrupt moments to offset the constant floor nonsense. I feel this fight is a step down, just trying to use constant movement as difficulty, instead of giving any sort of counter play mechanic that would give an opportunity for skill to shine. Simply replacing any of these crappy swirls with a single add that needs to be kicked or incapped in some way, similar to the caster adds in the Awakening the Machine event, would have actually given this fight an iota of engaging challenge.
The lack of reset for abilities, passives, and consumables at the entry is a repeated failure. Part of why I hate doing these just comes down to not having the ability to walk in and start the fight again right away. Why is there not an option to reset CD’s on everything as you wipe? I don’t care if you have to pay some NPC 50 gold for it. The simple fact that I have to wait up to 2 minutes just to attempt this fresh is a failure in itself, and was a failure on Zekvir as well. These are supposed to be challenges of skill expression, but nothing about making the players idle for minutes between pulls supports that. It encourages players to just leave.
If any one of these pain points was addressed, I feel this fight would be infinitely more tolerable to attempt. Personally, I’m exhausted with “challenging” design, especially in solo play, being relegated to “how many abilities can we throw at you simultaneously before you blow a gasket.”
TLDR: The bombs and adds as a whole, the shield being on a timer instead of health percentage, the overuse of movement and floor mechanics, and the eventual lack of resetting after an attempt lead to a miserable experience that transcends any balancing issues and bugs that may exist.
There’s other tools in the game to create difficulty. You can create moments requiring either CC or interrupts. You can create LoS positioning checks. You can force the player to puzzle solve positioning while doing damage in some way. Heck, you can even just throw in adds that require focus, or use the buff/debuff system to create moments to engage and disengage with the boss. This game has so many ways that difficulty can be created, why are we just using the worst ones that are just RNG overlaps and visual chaos?
Sounds half baked, the title sounds cool so i’ll probably just wait for the final stages of the tier when I’m as geared as I’m going to get as a filthy casual lol
Currently have him down to 7%. Its a bad fight. its not “cope cus bad” either because if I wanted to I could just wait to outgear it and one shot it. The fight is just all baits and rng. Boss decides he wants to leap across the arena to brann? gg I cant dps the boss for at least a few seconds. None of the mechanics are actually fun or unique, the footballs are simply tedious, the swirls and frontals are elementary. Its just a overwhelms you when you fail at the clunky mechanic fight. Id rather they go back to making class specific fights with us only getting them once per expansion if they can’t make interesting class-wide fights
If we start including the bugs to this fight, it’s just flatly unacceptable as far as released content goes honestly.
Multiple things force you to walk out and reset, and sometimes become issues in the middle of pulls. The adds spawning in the bleachers randomly. Brann just randomly losing his AI functionality. Half of the curios don’t function properly at times. The printer curio specifically has been doing a total of 200k dps for me, which is miles below what others are claiming it does. Plus, the fact that Brann just doesn’t use his kit half the time and instead gets stuck in a loop of “avoid mechanics” at the best of times.
If we can’t release good challenge content, and make it a challenge of skill, not stat checking people, then I just don’t want them to release more of these honestly.
The concept is fine, but the release state of these has just ruined the experience. Considering mage tower was doable RELEASE WEEK with normal raid gear for most classes, these just feel bad to be losing to what is essentially a failure of design repeatedly.
Honestly, the way these go, it’ll probably get nerfed into a point that it’s a joke to do again and remove any enjoyment that might have existed before. I don’t know why they make these “challenges” if they aren’t going to actually test them.
I agree. The entire fight just is entirely not enjoyable, and it’s not even because I’m dying. It’s the act of 90% of the fight being “kick the ball that doesn’t work” and the other 10% being “chase the idiot robot that jumped to Brann across the room”. It just isn’t fun, even with the best case scenario, when everything is taken in totality.
the thing is I can’t even justify chasing it. It’s literally not strategically feasible since my strategy with this fight has been just to bait as much oil and robots onto walls in the room so he isn’t spawning 2 mechs on opposite sides of the room. The time it REALLY feels bad is when he decides to jump across to brann and put his shield up. like ???
That’s mostly been my best attempts as well. Cram them into a corner and force the bombs to spawn near the adds so I can minimize the amount I have to move.
Even then, he does exactly that. Jumps across the room to Brann who is enjoying a bowl of cereal or something, and starts his shield. As melee, I just walk into fire at that point.
I’m not sure if I agree or disagree on most of the points, but I am pretty confident that the bomb mechanic was to make this encounter more fair for melee classes, which generally have greater mobility than ranged.
Zekvir was harder for most melee classes than for ranged, as killing the egg added an extra dimension of risk beyond normal dodging of stuff.
So I think they just wanted to turn the tables on that.
This is what kills it for me. Normal Delves reset CDs. Zekky reset CDs. Why doesn’t this?
I’ve slammed my face against this, total, five hours. Tens of thousands of gold on repairs, potions and other resources. And then waiting 10 minutes in between pulls to add insult to injury.
I’d keep going if I could just get right back at it. It just really kills my motivation to do it though.
I could go on over how this fight sucks so much compared to Zekky, and no, I understand a number of classes like Warrior has issues on Zekky. I get that. But the issues with this fight are universal. I could be any class and be having mostly a miserable time just because at it’s core, it sucks.
I don’t think they’d have an easier time with the bomb mechanic. The bomb drops are heavy RNG. You can only slightly determine where they drop and if it is even a pixel out of range, you’re probably wiping or risking eating a Molten Cannon, Flamethrower or one of the bits of AoE vomit.
Sure not hitting the boss with melee while bombing, at least range can kinda sorta still do damage while kicking bombs.
It’s just bad. And I love challenges, I love smashing my face at something and feeling like I’m improving as I go at it. This ain’t it. Sometimes the fight ends at 90%, sometimes at 50%. Kinda depends on how bombs go.
At least Brann isn’t instagibbed at the start anymore. That’s a plus.
Too many mechanics and not enough testing and dev time has led to one of the worst fights I can recall in recent memory.
Gave it a couple whirls and once I figured out exactly how much nonsense is required, I stopped, and I straight up will not be back.
Zekvir annoyed the crap out of me. But I managed. I hoped that he was a one-off for ridiculousness, only for blizz to quadrupple down with UnderPin.
I won’t be going back there until Midnight and I can just one shot it and forget about it. It’s terrible game design by people who seemingly never even tried to play this game
Interact key is a must, I don’t know anyone crazy to do it with clicking the bombs. Even then it’s still a tad harder than it needs to be. The way I done it was running towards the bomb and lining up the add while spamming interact, when I got in range it would instantly kick the bomb in the direction I was facing and that helped, but if you came in form the side it was very difficult.
If you have enough DPS you can trigger the first shield before the second adds show up, now the timers should all match up where you can clear the adds before the next shield shows up. It’s just a matter of getting some RNG luck on the lines and stuff you need to constantly dodge that will instantly kill you.
And yes the fact the entire fight does not reset on you, at all, your abilities, lust debuff, the adds, it’s terrible. Many times I got down to 20%, pop drums and die, then have to wait out 10 minutes before I can go again is silly.
There is almost no reason to do it after this patch, you don’t get the good achievements or rewards. Coming back later would get you a hat. Just gear up some more, it’s quite doable once you get some tier and a higher iLVL, even easier if you have a tank spec and some levelled curios.
Just to be clear about what I mean… with Zek, ranged had a distinct advantage in killing eggs.
With the bombs that you have to physically go to, that ranged advantage is gone.
And typically melee are more mobile than ranged… not always, but on average. And not by much, but by some. So I think that on the balance, melee does have a somewhat easier time here.
