Sepulcher of the First Ones Feedback

Community WoW Community Council
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Another feedback post, for us all to add our thoughts about the new raid :slight_smile:

After 2 and a half hours last night my guildmates and I had cleared 6/11 Normal, missing only Halondrus and Anduin. Here are my inital thoughts.

  • There is ALOT of trash. I’m glad a lot of it is skippable, with invisibility, but there is just a lot of it. I’m having flashbacks to Blackrock Foundry.

  • Vigilant Guardian feels very long for an opening boss, especially when compared to the other first bosses we’ve had this expansion in Shriekwing and The Tarragrue. Our kill included getting the 2nd and 3rd orbs at the same time, and was still our second longest kill time of the night (would have been the longest if not for a messy Artificer kill)

  • The downtime on Vigilant Guardian is also weird. You’re just kinda sitting in the bubble waiting for something to happen, whether it be adds spawning or the explosions starting.

  • Skolex has a weird interaction that might be a bug? We had a stack point in melee range to have the boss burrow to clear our dust stacks, and each time we stacked up, we got nuked by the blue swirls that target players. We tried waiting to stack until immediately after a set of blue swirls hit the ground, but still didn’t have enough time to get our debuff cleared. Our ending strategy involved baiting the retch in one direction and taking warlock portal well out of melee range of the boss, which worked quite well, but doesn’t feel like the right interaction.

  • Artificer is a great fight. The only issue I experienced was at times the portals were hard to see amidst the traps, brown swirls, and other effects going on, mixed with the floor color. I’m sure that will come with familiarity though.

  • Dausegne was easier once we saw the projectile that indicates where the first ring is coming from. Looking forward to this on higher difficulties when we have to stagger going through the circles.

  • Prototype Pantheon was probably my favorite boss from last night, and not just because I’m a frost DK. This fight has just about everything. Important interrupts, unique dodge mechanics, adds that have to die before the room fills up, and a heroism phase against 4 targets.

  • Lihuvim, I think I need to see on higher difficulties. It seems like the boss is doable without having any yellow puddles on the ground, but we had tons, and room to spare for the final phase. This is one of the biggest boss rooms I can remember, which makes it much less punishing (but also more punishing if you’re out of position before the add phase). Seems like a great fight.

  • Aesthetically, the raid is beautiful. Artificer, copying some mechanics from his encounter in Castle Nathria, was different enough to feel like a completely different boss, despite sharing a few mechanics.

  • The loot felt fun! We were lucky enough to kill a boss that drops tier gear, and saw 3 tier pieces drop in our 26 man group.

  • Lastly, and most importantly, as of yet none of the bosses feel the same. They are all distinct, yet they all work together. First day score for the raid is a solid 9/10. Only held back by the few things I mentioned above. Can’t wait to get through the rest of it and move up in difficulty.

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I completed all of Normal Sepulcher through Anduin week one. My main gripe (aside from Anduin) was that literally all the raid mechanics were basically recycled from other dungeons/raids. The lore throughout the raid was a bit odd to me too. There seemed to be a disconnect in the raid as to why we are fighting these bosses who are inside a vital location of origination. I expected more grandiose bosses for a location which is supposed to be the foundation of the universe. I also didn’t appreciate that there was no achievement for Anduin, and no explanation or note as to why we could not progress. Players just simply become mind controlled without reason when trying to continue after Anduin. It just felt very poorly written

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Last night, my guild downed Halondrus and put some pulls in on Anduin and heroic Vigilant guardian.

First off, Halondrus was awesome. The inconsistencies we saw in our first 2-3 pulls were able to be fixed with some strategy and communication, and then we were able to kill the boss shortly thereafter.

Anduin… its a great fight, and to Mornnah’s point, very unique. The tuning just feels very extreme for a Normal difficulty boss. A little context here:
My guild killed the first 7 Normal bosses in 5 pulls or less.
We killed Normal Sylvanas in 2 pulls.
We did 11 pulls on Anduin and barely got to the Lich King, and never all of us.

Now, this is not a sob story begging for the boss to be nerfed. I love the challenge, I want to overcome it.
But, it leaves me wondering why the difficulty scales as high as it does for this boss?

Lets talk about some of the mechanics. The mechanics of this fight are generally easy to understand and hard to execute. That’s great. Much better than a hard to understand, easy to execute mechanic IMO. I’m looking forward to doing more pulls on it regardless.

I don’t have a lot of comments yet on Heroic Vigilant guardian as we only had time for 2 pulls, so we haven’t seen the last 15% phase yet, but so far I have the same issue as I had on normal: Downtime.

As we saw with previous bosses, like Sylvanas, downtime on a boss where you can’t attack anything, and you just have to stand around waiting for the next thing to happens feels off. Halondrus is actually a great example of this. The fight traverses more ground than most any boss (except maybe P2 sylvanas), but you keep attacking the entire time you’re moving, so it feels like a mechanic, not downtime.

I’m not sure what the fix for this is on Vigilant Guardian. Maybe it’s having the next set of adds spawn sooner, or when the current adds hit a certain % of their health. Would love some feedback on this design and what can be improved.

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Hello! Thank you for this feedback. It’s similar to other threads we’ve seen here on the forums (and via other channels). Based on the feedback we’ve received, we’ve already been able to quickly make some changes to the Anduin, Vigilant Guardian, Artificer Xy’Mox, and Prototype Pantheon fights. As always, we’re publishing all the details about those changes within the same day that we make them here:

Hopefully those fixes are addressing the feedback and concerns you’ve raised.

Our encounter design and QA teams really want to hear ever more feedback from the community, so please keep it coming!

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Approximately what time would these changes have gone in? Wondering our attempts on Anduin were pre-nerf or post-nerf.

Thanks for the great work on this raid!!

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This is less related to the raid, but I noticed this this morning and I believe it’s very important to find a way to fix it.

[Album] imgur.com

The groups that have a voice icon you cannot see which difficulty their group is, so unless it is specified in the title/comment you don’t know what you’re signing up for.

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Encounter Visual Issues:

  • Halondrus Heroic - The lines which indicate the shielded adds are a faint white colour on a white floor. The strata of these visuals is also on a lower layer to other lines so they’re very hard to see when they’re together.
  • Xymox - Barrage during rings are difficult to see as they share the same colour.
  • Lihuvim does not have a cast bar for Resonance. You just kind of taunt?
  • Lihuvim Matrix Automa does not have any visual indicator of the damage reduction Aura.
  • Dausegne ring patterns are qutie difficult to see visually as the animation for this is in the sky. Could this be made clearer and more towards the ground level?

Unexplained Mechanics:

  • Halondrus casting Lance during the walking Phase. It’s a very short cast bar on the boss and it is not indicated in the Dungeon Journal.
  • Artificer 30% Soft-Enrage is not indicated in the Dungeon Journal.

Trash in raid:

Adding in ways to prevent skipping is ok. But there needs to be a reason for groups to actively want to kill trash. There’s far too much trash in the raid. It eats up a lot of your compressed raiding time window, so of course groups are going to wait to skip them. They are there to kill bosses not trash mobs.

Right now you just kill the ones that give rep and skip the rest. Adding in more ways to prevent skips just builds animosity.

The BoEs in the raid largely share the same slot as tier so why would you want them? You can’t craft tier from them for a long time and by then you’ve got tier already.

Query:

There was a post to say that Lihuvim was not intended to give 90% damage reduction inside the Add radius, but it clearly states this in the dungeon journal? Seems pretty intentional to me. Additionally, there’s no reference to this on Mythic. Does this mean that there’s no reduction at all for Mythic?

Off-topic:

What are the benefits of doing non-tier bosses? The loot as a whole is fairly stale in the dungeon and a majority of trinkets are not interesting. This is especially true of the tank trinkets where I actively don’t want to loot any of them. The only benefit that I can see is to max out your vault :expressionless:

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On this topic, and to comment following pantheaeu’s comment about trash.

I noticed Blizzard increased mobs that can see stealth. I find that odd, if you notice people skipping the trash enough, why would the solution be to make it more annoying to skip trash? There is an absurd amount of trash to fill the raid, but I don’t understand the sentiment of “forcing” people to do such a high amount.

I feel players skipping it en-masse should show maybe the trash count should be reduced or not make it increasingly more annoying/difficult to skip said trash. While stealth detection is a mechanic and makes sense for mobs to have, just seems like the reaction was a negative instead of a positive.

Sometimes I feel it’s healthy to look into why players are doing something or treating aspects of the game a certain way, and use that as feedback for a positive.

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I haven’t run enough Sepulcher yet to say whether I think there is too much trash or not. But I’ll offer what may be an unpopular opinion: I think raids should have some trash pulls. Boss progression can be a bit stressful and we take it seriously. We like to keep comms mostly clear during boss pulls, and in between pulls so we can get into the next pull as quickly as possible.

Trash serves as downtime. This is when people can make jokes, and chat about what they watched on Netflix, and laugh at whoever just got booped off the edge of the platform. It allows us to shake off the stress of what might have been a tough progression fight and cut loose a little bit before the next one.

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I would like to emphasize the annoyance of this visual bug. It seems to be very prevalent with Heroic.

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Will edit this post with the other 3 bosses when I get a chance to do them. This is STRICTLY an LFR perspective, please keep that in mind when replying :slight_smile:

Also, I rarely advocate for nerfing an LFR boss. So if I do, then it’s usually from past experience in understanding how LFR players play and if they will or won’t improve.

EDIT: First 3 Bosses Down:

Vigilant Guardian - Honestly, this is kind of a boring boss, especially Phase 2. But it’s the first boss so I don’t expect amazingness. That said, normally when there’s a one-shot mechanic, it gives you a giant pop up. That’s not the case here. When he’s casting Exposed Core, the only warning is in the chat log, not on the screen. Also, the energy bar is tiny, I literally didn’t notice it, so I died to the Exposed Core the first time as I didn’t know when it was coming.

Skolex - Pretty basic fight. Only thing I’d really say is I wish you guys were more uniform in animations that mean “get out” compared to “stack here” - this animation is used very often for things to NOT stack on, but in this case you do want to stack.

Xy’mox - Sigh. I thought you guys learned about one person being able to wipe the entire raid mechanics and how they don’t belong in LFR. If any portal gets put in the wrong place, the raid might as well jump off the edge, as it’s a wipe. The rest of the fight is fun. Having to dodge the rings with the portals is a joy, and if you have people who know how to use immunities, popping the traps is easy. But it’s so easy for a single person to troll this fight.

EDIT: No longer an issue, they nerfed the damage of genesis rings in LFR, so it’s no longer a wipe if someone trolls the portals. :slight_smile:

From a normal perspective, this boss was actually pretty fun.

Halondrus - Okay, this is actually a fun fight. The fight feels perfect at 5 stacks of Determination, and from what I’ve heard from friends, that’s about when groups manage to down him. So a bit of tuning might be necessary cause I don’t think it should require determination to feel good.

I also believe the orbs should be knocked back further in LFR when you hit them. It feels like there’s too many orbs spawning because it’s such a short knockback. I was juggling a dozen orbs by myself. The problem with the orbs isn’t that there’s too many, per say. It’s that most people who join LFR just mindlessly attack. We explained to block the orbs multiple times each pull and it ended up with the same 3-4 blocking orbs, which puts a very big health toll on the people doing orbs. And phase 3 was a nightmare to the point the tanks started helping us.

The first wall Halondrus puts up needs a bigger delay. This was BY FAR the most problematic part of the encounter. Even I died 2 times to the wall, and that was with using Aspect of the Cheetah. Unless you pre-run to the corridor, there’s a good chance you will die to the wall.

Phase 3 needs to be less chaotic. From what I’ve seen, it’s fine in Normal+, but because LFR has a bunch of people who don’t care, they will use heroism at the start of the fight, and as such… it becomes a wipe. There’s just not enough time to kill him with how many orbs spawn if heroism isn’t available. So I would personally suggest lowering how many orbs spawn, or have phase 3 trigger a heroism reset, for LFR only.

Also, because people will say “if you don’t do mechanics, you shouldn’t be rewarded.” I do agree with this fully in most cases, however, for LFR in particular, it’s usually ~5 people doing mechanics, and those people are being punished if you punish the other ~20. This would be like having a M+ mechanic where if one person failed a boss mechanic, your key instantly failed. Unfair, right?

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I just did most of the new LFR wing and had to leave for a kid thing after 4 attempts on the 4th boss. I think a lot of people are going to find it harder than they were expecting. I started at 2PM EST and had to leave at 4:45, so almost three hours. It went 3 wipes, 4 wipes, 0 wipes, 4 wipes and I had to leave without the last kill.

Probably half the raid were people who knew it from Normal+ already and the other half was seeing it for the first time and didn’t know the mechanics (I fell into the latter group but I learn mechanics pretty fast). About 4-6 people would leave every pull and need to be replaced and we cycled through a few tanks along the way that didn’t seem to know the fights or in some cases how to tank.

I have a feeling that any runs that happen after Tuesday or Wednesday every week will be a real slog as most of the experienced raiders will have done it already for the week. This first wing was tougher than the first wings of the last two raids on the first day. Mostly the fights just have more critical mechanics in the first wing than the previous raids. It was a lot like the third wing of the previous two raids difficulty wise.

The gear iLvL wise is terrible, after just two weeks of ZM I already more or less match LFR, I’m not exactly sure what the rationale for the gear being nothing but cosmetic right out of the gate is considering it will take many weeks longer than ZM to gear up.

With that said I think it’s great, the fights are really cool and it looks fantastic! I’m sure I’m going to get a lot of enjoyment out of it. It really does look amazing!!! Great job!

EDIT: I went back a little later and did the last boss Halondrus. Just wanted to make a note that after 5 wipes it came down to me stopping healing and running around in travel form in circles around the boss for the last 20-30 seconds hitting all the balls until the boss died. Not sure if that’s what you had in mind but that’s what it takes when only the top 7 dps are doing more than 2k dps.

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So far my experiences of the first wing of LFR haven’t been great. Been in a few groups now that get stuck on the first boss, dying to the exposed core. Seems people don’t realise it’s coming or to stand in the shield. There have been times when people have been stood in the shield and still died.

Maybe this boss needs looking at again and adjusting for LFR, then again it could be that I have just joined bad groups.

I will try LFR again and hopefully get to beyond the first boss

From what I have seen of the raid it sure looks very nice and fancy though, really like architecture and aesthetics

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I did LFR yesterday. I can’t comment on the first boss because I popped in at the second boss. My group one-shot both Xy’mox and Skolex. I thought Xy’mox was super fun! I’m glad the portal mechanics stayed in, because those are what make the fight so great.

Halondrus, also a super fun boss in LFR! (I have not seen Halondrus yet in normal/heroic so it was my first exposure to this boss.) Pretty tough–we needed four pulls to kill him. My group also had one of those people in it who singles out low dps to kick after each failed pull. But we also had somebody who pushed back and first was like “no,” and then said “who made you the boss?” and that put an end to kicking people. That person is my hero.

But Halondrus as an LFR fight–difficult, but super fun if you can heal or dps on the move! I loved the walking phases. Also loved the Earthbreaker Missiles mechanic, which creates a nifty little puzzle each time where first you have to spread out to place the circles, and then you have to find a way to get safe before the second hit.

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Oh, and as for Skolex, having the burrow points come up on their own in LFR, rather than requiring the whole raid to stack–which is never gonna happen in LFR–was a great decision. They often came up super close to the raid and I wouldn’t have minded if we needed to move a bit farther to reach them. But that was a great way to make Skolex work in LFR without removing the mechanic entirely.

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Halondrus in LFR is really difficult, with the kind of grps you get. You can join with 220 ilvl no legendaries no enchants nothing required, which is ok and fine… But i don’t feel you can kill Halondrus with a full grp of only 220 people. Yesterday we wiped 2 times without even getting the 5 % buff, because our dmg on the shield was to low and we died pretty fast to the dmg that came in there because we only had 3k hps heals. We managed to get 3x 5% buff as we got a 8k hps heal and then finally killed the boss.

Overall I spent over an hour on that 1 boss, for a raid difficulty that should be for beginners this is a very long time as we only died because we we’re lacking dps and hps.

I’m fine with the other bosses but I also felt that they require a lot of heal in comparison to older LFR raids. I also died on the first Boss, while standing in the shield.

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I finished the last three bosses of Sepulcher today. I will admit I am infuriated with utter disappointment over the end of the raid. I will try my best not to give spoilers. The entire lore writing makes absolutely no sense! The cinematic walking into the jailer shows a link between a location in which we are not at and have already conquered. Then the end cinematic includes a question which is never answered. I am just dumbfounded over the disconnect between the raid and the lore. It’s such a disservice to the players.

Aside from that feedback - Lords of Dread is a lot of fun! I know the playerbase will eventually make a WeakAura or add-on to negate the “Among Us” mechanic, but I’m glad to have been able to play and learn that mechanic without it. Walking into Rylegon was confusing - again, no understanding why we are fighting him. The Jailer fight was also extremely disappointing from a “why are we here?” Stance. Also the fact that the players are able to fight a “Titan” of Death unbuffed puts our lore power levels absurdly high. At least during Legion with Argus we had the buffs of the other Titans and our artifact weapons to try to justify it. At the end of the current campaign we also received a crown to negate domination yet it never made an appearance into the raid for us to proceed after Anduin. I just felt so disappointed with this raid from the idea of exploring an important location of origination and that all the mechanics were recycled :confused:

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Anduin (Normal)

Downed this last night with the guild.

What a fight. Easily my favorite boss in all of Shadowlands thus far. When poorly executed, you will continually wipe in the same place until the execution gets better. Its hard to have one of those “luck pulls” to make massive progress in a single pull.

One thing that I found annoying/frustrating was not knowing where the P2 adds were going to spawn. On heroic all 5 spots are always occupied, whereas on normal there were only 3, which seemingly spawned randomly. It was hard to coordinate quickly which adds were being CC’ed and which we were killing. I think either having 5 adds in normal with a much longer cast time, or that are grippable, etc, or having set spawn locations for them would make this part of the encounter a bit less RNG than its heroic counterpart.
I also think that one of these changes would appropriately ramp up the difficulty of the boss in heroic (non-grippable/shorter cast time/etc)

All in all this fight was awesome to progress on, and its very much a dance. Personally I like fights that are hard to progress on, but relatively easy to reclear, and I feel like Anduin will fit that bill.

Edit:
Forgot to add,

We did also notice a few visual bugs throughout our pulls. Occasionally, Anduin’s Kingsmourne cast to send people downstairs did not show the full visual of the semi circle on the ground.

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Just a note on Halondrus, which we killed in normal difficulty last night. It can be a little frustrating when we get the Earthbreaker Missiles during the walking phase and the circles disappear into the uneven terrain so we can’t place them as precisely as we’d like. I like the ability happening during that phase; it adds a lot of fun chaos. I just wish the visual for it were more consistently visible.

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I think the Jailer should be dropping a universal tier token that can be redeemed for any tier piece. Right now there’s a major issue being shown by how many guilds are not only avoiding him, but how bad the tier acquisition feels and we’re expected to “wait” till week 8 and the RNG needed to have 2pc/4pc rn.

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