Ky'veza Season 3 Weirdness

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
1

So decided to jump into ? Ky’veza this evening just to check out the fight.

I’m in as a 678 Ilvl frost mage.

The fight it self is really cool and I enjoy it, however, in the hour or so that I’ve been tooling with this I have encountered a couple weird things with the fight.

  1. Brann, as per usual, does not dodge the 3 giant pull in circles consistently. once every 4 pulls he’ll dodge out of the way but beyond that he just stands there.

  2. To add to point 1, because we cannot direct brann to stand in specific spots I’ve been taken out by this mechanic because Brann just so unluckily happens to be standing right on top of, or near where the 3 random circle spawns in. This is unsurvivable having 2 of the 3 circles overlapping/stacked on top of each other and is completely out of our control.

  3. I also, and this could be that I’m just an idiot, cannot find ANY type of indicator of where the 4 circle will be spawning so I’m left to scramble and hope that its not where i ran or where brann has planted his feet.

  4. The charging adds that have to run through her, seems incredibly tightly tuned. Which is fine, its a really good challenge, but if you are a class using a pet or brann pulls agro during the duration of this mechanic for whatever reason your dead.

  5. Also the mechanic mentioned above is so tightly tuned to being through her physical body and not her hit box. If the red line is just a hair off the side of her its a wipe, which based on how the adds spawn in is nearly impossible to control consistently/handle.

Its a really cool fight over all visually and fun to do IF you’re lucky with placements but its still leaving a good chunk of the fight up to RNG which is a big issue with the underpins fight. This fight, especially on ? difficulty shouldnt be cleared by luck or out gearing it, but by simply learning and executing the mechanics.

overall it seems a bit… finicky at the moment? Curious to see how it feels over the course of the season.

3 Likes
2

It feels…ok so far. The biggest problem I have is with the Dark Massacre. Especially on ??. The lines don’t have to go through her. You need to be facing the clone as it hits you. While the mechanic is different, you are right it is finicky. Especially on ?? when you start needing to have do 6ish of them.

I managed to get down ? with decent effort. But the sheer amount of stuff thrown at you in ?? feels a little much. I’d feel much better about the fight if the “face the clone to not die instantly” wasn’t very strict. Coupled with the fact that the spawn animations for each clone can overlap with each other. Means you can think only one spawned in one space but it was actually two.

This fight is also ridiculously unforgiving compared to the first two. You might have been able to eat a mechanic or two depending on how important it was for the previous two. Here a mistake hits you for 80 million.

(Ok after a few more attempts to learn the Dark Massacre ghosts have been upgraded to awful. Having to make 6 split second camera swings with a narrow angle cone of facing is horrid. Circle placement in ?? with the half death zones also can be weird. 6 Knife ghosts in a row that can also spawn on top of you turn into a mechanic floor vomit quickly.)

The previous bosses had more mechanics you had to deal with within a few seconds, or you would have time, but a limit. (Think the adds on both Zek and Underpin. They had to be dealt with before they got out of hand). It feels like this fight has multiple mechanics you have to do with in a second. This is more reflexes than anything.

3 Likes
3

Here’s some general feedback with the ?? difficulty, which I’ve progged on as a 686 Havoc DH to 30%.

Gameplay

This has been a general trend with high tier Delves and these secret bosses, but it is really, really lame getting gearchecked by white swings. At high stacks of Death Mask (her stacking 5% damage increase), I’m taking melees of around 1.1M. This makes Nether Rift INCREDIBLY deadly, so much so that it is pure RNG if you can live it, as if Brann happens to die during or before it without putting down potions it is simply not possible to live it multiple times.

I usually save Netherwalk for bad RNG in this case, but even using Blur and Sigil of Spite + Sigil of Flame to spawn a bunch of souls and then eat them as I get low, I’ve been 100-0’d from 100% unavoidable damage if the aforementioned situation with Brann happens.

I get that gear would partially help resolve this (although, what are classes with significantly worse self-healing supposed to do here?), but I’d rather be checked by the soft enrage rather than just getting punched to death.

I’m also unsure if Nether Rift or Ky’veza is bugged, because sometimes my death log shows me as taking relatively steady damage, yet my actual health bar is yoyo’ing as if I’m taking 6M DMG in a single instant, even though the actual flat damage should be around 4M max. I’ll begin logging some attempts tonight to see what’s going on there.

Visuals

This fight is like One-Armed Bandit, but in reverse. Everything is so gosh darn dark I am squinting half of the time to see things, which is not great for a fight where being a hair off will insta-kill you.

In particular, I have found it significantly more consistent to turn off my UI, which is a fairly standard ElvUI + WA Class pack setup. I don’t have anything flashy, and the entire middle of my screen is clear, but between the name-plates and damage numbers I often find things such as the red indicator from the Twilight Massacre being obscured, as well as the Invoke the Shadow mechanic being much harder with the UI on.

I would suggest adding more visual prominence on those abilities in particular, and it would also be great if the Nexus Daggers was a little more defined in their edges, as this version is significantly faster than in Mythic Place, and I’ve found myself dying to “Phantom Hits” as well (feels very much like some other mechanics where because of the low time-scale, your client cannot realistically feed your position to the server at a gameplay-consistent rate, so you will die to a Dagger you dodged on your screen/client). I’m not sure what can be done about that in particular as that would essentially requiring a nerf to the mechanic, but at least making the visual clearer would help

I’ve also found that Twilight Massacre is very inconsistent in recognizing when the player is “facing” it. The way to remedy this currently is to constantly strafe while the mechanic is happening, turning your camera gradually instead of requiring full on 180s.

This also makes the mechanic simpler to deal with, which could be a part of it, but I definitely feel as if doing it this way has resulted in way less “debatable” deaths, where I felt and saw (on the replay) myself clearly facing the mechanic, but still dying. From my current understanding of the Event-Driven system of WoW’s combat and scripting engine, this is probably just because of the associated PLAYER_STARTED_TURNING event likely having a forced listener event that updates the player state more frequently than the default handler.

Anyways, it’s a fun fight held back by a few questionable visual choices and the typical Delve difficulty of just making everything melee you 100x.

7 Likes
4

Beat the fight on ?? as Guardian (684) in about 2.5-3 hrs.

The fight feels like it’s going to be very inaccessible just because of how quickly you have to react to avoid instant one-shots all throughout the fight. Pretty much in agreement with the other posts here on the fight, and I can’t comment on the damage intake because I was a tank (seriously, I laughed when I saw the stacking damage buff, because her melees are irrelevant and what’s the difference between 50M and 60M on abilities?)

Main points of frustration I had:

  • Nexus daggers are hugely random in difficulty, particularly “how many clones spawned near me” determines whether a set is trivial or feels borderline impossible to dodge without a speedboost.
  • I will reiterate Glory’s point that two+ sequential Twilight Massacre clones spawning directly on top of/very near each other can make them very hard to see. Given how quickly these fire, misreading their order because the portals were practically on top of each other and you missed the 2nd spawning in is almost certainly a death.
  • DPS Brann won’t reposition the portals if he decides to hop on his gryphon during that portion, and he’ll stay standing in the portals and die if the timing is particularly bad. This isn’t actually that big of a deal since reacting to a weird portal placement is much easier than anything else in the fight, but losing Brann’s damage because he’s dead is lame.
5 Likes
5

After a few hours of try on the ?? difficulty (about 3),

I wasn’t able to do much to be honest. I am definitly not the best player mind you but the speed and precision this fight require is kinda insane.

-I can’t say much on this since i went in as a tank, but her auto attack sometime went really hard, i can’t see a mage, or in fact any dps with low or no sustain at all do anything against this.

-visual clarity, with how everything is a one shot mechanic. Nexus dagger are a real mess to see. if you do play a bit with your gamma and brightness setting it become managable. Twilight Massacre add are super easy to lose track of spawning of top of each other or on the edge of the screen (under base ui element) even a camera max distance.

-Dark Massacre the facing the add mechanic, this require a stupid level of precision and speed and sometime even while facing the correct one, if the angle is a litle bit off its a death sentence.

-slower internet might have a problem just doing the fight properly

-while healer bran can do the fight just fine, dps bran is well quite something else

While the fight is super fun, it might bit a bit too punishing or fast for what it try to achieve.

1 Like
6

I keep having this fun issue where Brann jumps on the gryphon not moving, then he revives as the next set of circles is coming out but because I’m moving he snaps to me dropping circles on top of each other.

Edit: I’ve also had issues with Invoke the Shadows, where the shadow clones start to dash then stutter in mid air not ending on one of the dots like they are suppose to do. Then on another pull she just didn’t do the mechanic, she split into the six clones then didn’t dash or do the channel she just kept doing her other three mechanics as if I completed the event but was not targetable.

1 Like
7

Luckily I don’t have to worry about Brann griefing due to death’s advance but massacre facing is idiotic due to server side checks basically forcing you to release facing extremely early to update. Lost about 3-4 very low percent pretty much 100% kills on ?? to inexplicably getting hit by a massacre when I’m absolutely facing it. Also streaming it to others’ amusement getting absolutely RNG’d completely out of my control.

4 Likes
8

Got it on ?? after about 40 attempts total. Swapped to blood after my abom stood inside a massacre making it impossible to see.

I’d say a little less than half were my own error, rest were just clones bugging or server update issues for facing. Had one attempt where 3 clones didn’t jump at all and upon finishing the sequence 12 total spawned that could be clickable. (Didn’t guess right btw)

With 50 extra item levels it will be insanely easy but the bugs definitely need addressing.

9

Managed to get ?? down after a few hours of attempts. I will also echo that DPS Brann on his gryphon will not move and he will screw up the Void Zones. Sometimes this is fixable and just requires more creativity, however sometimes this will be a Brann RNG run killer. I was lucky that I’m a DK and any bad placements were handled by Death’s Advance.

Massacre got easier/slightly more fun to deal with as I got more practice. And I regret somewhat calling them “awful”. However they still are a step back from more recent moves for enemy ability transparency (e.g. new, much better demarcations for swirlies/AoEs). If the player had a “Heroic Vision Cone” that popped up during it to show what is actually safe, I would enjoy the mechanic more. A lot of its frustration comes from the feeling that you did something right, but the game says no. And the disconnect between the two.

I’m a tank, so I can’t speak to the unavoidable damage from autos, or if she can crit like Zek’vir.

10

My experience was the opposite, and I just killed hard mode today. Maybe once every 15-20 pulls, Brann would fail to jump away from his circle before the pull and damage began. The small number of pulls I had on normal difficulty also mirrored this behavior.

Never seen this either. On normal, Brann always jumped to his own spot away from the third circle, which always gave me as the player a rough idea of where I should then head to form the triangle. What spec are you playing him as? That information would be crucial to this feedback.

There are only three. You, Brann, and a static one.

This is not how Dark Massacre works. You have to face the add as it charges you; the boss has nothing to do with it. It sounds like you’ve conflated the Mythic mechanic from her Nerub’ar fight with what they implemented here. If you die to it again and check your death recap, the spell’s tooltip also indicates what is required.

Aside from the random Brann death to portals every now and then, as a DPS player the fight is very controllable on both normal and hard mode. The diciest parts for me were always when a knife clone would spawn right next to me and cut my immediate free space by about 80% as a result; this is still recoverable and is just a reflex test. It got me a decent bit.

Their goal here was clearly to bring the fight up to an actual Legion mage tower-level of challenge, if you were trying mage tower challenges in Nighthold gear when they first launched, with RNG much less of a factor and no “home stretch” possible; remain consistent 100% to 0%. Keep in mind that we are also exceptionally undergeared for what the fight is tuned for. I was into my 5th cycle when I killed hard mode, but likely would be inside the 3rd cycle or just starting the 4th cycle in 697-700 gear or above (with 697 being the T11 delve recommendation, for reference). People getting to try this later on still have to be perfect, but not for quite as long.

11

Yeah as melee you get significantly more uptime. Meanwhile I was doing maybe 12% a cycle :confused:

12

I’m having a heck of a time with the clone dudes on “??” difficulty. I’m staring at their face and still getting slammed. I’ve made it through a wave of them, but never through the 2nd. Even tried the backpedal trick in case the game/server didn’t update my position or point of aim but just turning my character. I can still be locked on the guy and get deleted.

13

I stumbled across someone talking to someone in game about the guys that dash being hard to see or get aimed right. They suggested making sure you have anti-aliasing turned on. I normally run with mine turned off since most things in game don’t look noticeably different with it.
I went into the instance and turned on AA and went for a pull. It is SO much clearer which one is dashing at any given time and ground effect from them to you gives a very good way to line up your aim to be dead on them.
I didnt fail a single on of those guys on the next pull. I made it past the cup game and on the next set of lines I cornered myself and got nuked.
TLDR, turn on anti-aliasing for this fight if you normally have it off. It makes the outline affect on the dashers way more noticeable.

14

This is where I’m having issues. I’ll flop over even though I’m 100% facing the mob. I’ve tried the back pedal trick to no avail.

Edit: I feel like if it were slowed down by even 0.5 seconds it would negate any lag. Seems to be only the case when the next one is a complete 180 from the last.

2 Likes
15

Dear Blizz get rid of : *
Dark Massacre - Ky’veza will summon a clone a small distance from the player, this clone will charge and deal massive damage unless you are looking at it. This happens three times in a row. This can be very difficult to begin with as you only get a few seconds in between each charge, practice will make perfect.

In the Single ? and that fight will be good to go.