Glad to be back testing once again. This will be my first impressions on the dungeon, and I’ll make a comprehensive list of more nuanced observations after I’ve done the key on more challenging levels.
Prior to this week, I had done this dungeon a couple times on Heroic, so I was already familiar with the mechanics and layout somewhat. My first run just a little bit ago was on a +10 Keystone level and comes from the perspective of a melee DPS.
Trash to Azhiccar
There is a lot of pathing variety here you can see right off the bat, and this area has overall the easiest feeling trash. You can get a lot of decent count here, but you can also choose to skip most of the area and go to the boss right away to put lust on CD as soon as possible.
While I think that more veteran players will understand the Hungering Devourer MIasma mechanic on the lieutenant mobs, mechanics like these should, moving forward, have better snap communication that this is something that you might want to stack for. Everyone was running away from each other until I explained the mechanic to them. Besides that, you can already see a trend of far less kicks/stops required that persists through the rest of the dungeon.
Azhiccar
A pretty good boss imo with decent cadence. I think a couple seconds more on the Toxic Regurgitation would be nice to open up more strategic placements, as otherwise right now, the best option seems to have everyone stack, the two people with Toxic Regurgitation stand still, and everyone but them rotates, then they rejoin. This is also in part because the Frenzied Mites spam jump constantly, so I mean you would have to stack anyways to kill them in any remotely quick time-span, and they do hurt.
The Devour mechanic, with Dimensius being the antagonist of this season, immediately felt fresh and surprisingly non-frictional, and is probably instantly one of my favorite implementations of it. Initially, I thought we would just need to kill the adds before it begins, but I like that we get two separate add spawns, and want to blow one up and keep the other CC’d until we can get to it, and that the suck is less about us and more about the adds. Just a nice, fun fight to play. Well done.
Trash to Taah’Bat and A’wazj
I think this is the more immediately problematic trash, in that the Overcharged Sentinel’s feel needlessly disruptive and never worth to pull unless you need to. With how easy it is to path around them, or how easy it is to pull one aside and Shadowmeld it, I can’t see anything but the one in the boss’s room being pulled ever past the first week. Besides that, there’s definitely way more casts in this area, but still not overkill besides if you pull too many Wastelander Ritualists, which is not necessary at all to time the key. But, because the timer and force count is lenient, makes this not a particular issue, and will only be a factor at high keys. But because the difficulty is consolidated here, you can aptly prepare for this pull and make certain to have all available utility.
I’m saying a lot of words to basically say that THIS is exactly how interrupt heavy packs should be done, and that this whole dungeon is a massive design improvement trending towards where keys should be going. Whoever made this place definitely gets it. Well done.
Beyond that, I felt the trash was appropriately tuned here. I think the third area is probably where tuning would change things the most.
Before I speak on the second boss, I’d like to talk about this dungeon’s difficulty, because I anticipate it being the focal point of this week’s discussion as more people get in here and voice their opinions.
Yeah, it’s not hard
We were DC’ing every so often throughout the key, with this being a complete PUG and the tank pulling pack-by-pack, and we still timed it with plenty of time to spare. Our damage wasn’t even that stellar, (4.4M, 3.5M, and 2.7M with the tank doing 2.27M and the healer 400k).
We had deaths throughout, with at least 1 on every boss as well. It wasn’t all that clean.
But it felt fair
Never once in this key did something work in a different way than your intuition would believe. Mechanics were clearly communicated. Counterplay was apparent. Things felt like they had appropriate health. I definitely felt like we could have played way faster even for a first time run.
And I think that’s fine. I think that is good. I want to stress this, because people will mistake all of the above as “too easy”, “undertuned”, etc. Let key levels handle these issues. The dungeon will become more difficult as things gain more health, as you’re forced to combine the packs we did apart, together. I can promise you that.
This dungeon is about playing your character well. I think Floodgate was almost there, which is why I loved it so much immediately last season as well, even though it was a bit overtuned in its first PTR testing. This came out just right. This is where keys need to trend to. This is the ideal.
Anyways, back to it.
Taah’Bat and A’wazj
This one felt a bit off on the pacing for me. It seems as if the Binding Javelins are meant to be a bit of a race to kill, but you can stack them close together in melee and they die relatively quickly. And, you have a little bit too much time to kill them. There’s also very little happening in between abilities for pretty much everyone, and it just feels a bit too empty here in terms of mechanics. I know this may initially seem strange based on what I just said above, but like I said, I think it’s just the pacing. Add another cast of Binding Javelins just before the intermission, or even one during it, that goes on 1 person, and I think this fight hits the intensity it seems it is trying to reach.
Trash to Soulscribe
This trash has one pretty glaring issue, and that is that you’re incentivized to skip the vast majority of it. The little siphoning rods that grant you haste aren’t worth pulling the inefficient packs near them, and everything has way too much health for the investment. Specifically, the Wastelander Pactspeakers are far too present and make chaining them into other packs relatively unwise for the frequency in which you would need to do so to make this area worth doing. I think they could use the Paladin tech from Priory where they cannot cast their Erratic Ritual within 4 seconds of the other, and same thing with the add they spawn. That, or their health should be brought down about 10%, or their count increased by 50%. Besides that, it’s definitely the most varied area, with the Burrowers feeling a bit random and sneaky, but I didn’t dislike playing it. I just wish it felt like the game wasn’t actively telling me not to pull big, then give me mobs with needlessly high health pools for their complexity.
Soul-scribe
A fun boss, but definitely feels a bit off in terms of the goal it’s trying to achieve. To me, this boss seems to want to be about balancing spatial awareness and protecting your soul. The time you are given is pretty much perfect, and I wouldn’t want that to change at all. What misses for me is that there’s almost no decision making to be had here. The souls spawn and you pick them up. This is especially confusing with the intermission, in which currently all of your souls can initially spawn in the cones, making it so you simply have to get them all.
To me, going into this fight, I imagined I would be forced to prioritize which souls to save, basically an on-the-fly puzzle I’d have to solve to get the souls that would be hit, and then get the souls that would be hit at a later time. Currently, none of the mechanics impose that choice upon you. It’s simply a “Hey, look at your screen–where is your soul? Go get it. Ok, don’t stand in anything”.
If that is the intent, and my interpretation is incorrect, then the pacing simply has to be faster, but my gut tells me that would just leave in a rather unsatisfying experience that becomes about twitch reflexes and naturally hurts some classes more than others.
Cool boss, but again, it misses the mark for me.
Overall verdict
I think this is a 9/10 dungeon from the first impression. It looks cool, has good bosses, well-designed trash (for the most part), and really hones in on what the feedback over the last few years has been regarding keys. I think a lot of my thoughts in each section may seem to lead in different directions, so I’ll offer this as sort of a summary of what I think they all amount to.
This is a good dungeon that is just missing the variety in choice. There is freedom, but no incentive to explore that freedom. The main focus in tuning this dungeon should be allowing further exploration of routing, otherwise it will turn into a very scripted experience, which I think would be disappointing due to the potential of this key.