With the upcoming “Phase 2” change to risk/reward in dungeons, do you think CoF Path 1 needs to be re-examined?
As things stand, this path is both substantially faster than any other dungeon path, but also much easier. On top of that, the most favored approach is to take 4 berserker-equipped warriors set for pure damage, plus 1 mesmer. All encounters are resolved by just hitting things as hard as possible, with minimal thought.
Ideally, dungeons should be considered to become more difficult the higher leveled they are, ranging from AC being the practice introduction to dungeons, all the way up to Arah putting everything to the test. This dungeon path completely breaks that.
So I guess the topic at hand is a) Do you think this is a problem? b) If you think this is a problem, what change(s) would you suggest to resolve it?
Here’s my suggestions : (Spoilered in case you either don’t care about what I suggest, or want to think of your own first)
[spoiler]
The Slave Driver / Effigy needs some kind of interesting mechanic, otherwise it’s just focus-down the slave driver mindlessly.
I suggest a combination of the Lovers from AC SM and the effigy from CoF SM – when the slave driver is close enough to the effigy, the effigy has a damage radius around it. This means you need to consider the effigy’s location, and work to pull the two apart.
The Acolytes take far too long to drain the engineer’s essence, meaning there’s plenty of time to focus them down before they even put a dent in the bar.
There’s a DE in Diessa with flame legion shamans conducting a ritual to pollute the lake. The best way to win this is to CC the shamans as they appear, before they get into position, as pure damage while they do the ritual isn’t enough to stop them in time. Something similar for the acolytes would make this a more interesting encounter : They spawn further away, and need to move to drain the essence, but while they are there it drains a lot faster. It’s no longer about pure damage.
The rolling boulders and the door parts are fine as-is, but it’s worth noting that the door controller’s health doesn’t reset (Probably a bug?).
The boss has an interesting crystal effect, but the regen just isn’t very much. There’s no incentive to destroy the crystals when you can easily out-damage the healing effect. Boost the crystal’s healing power, make the crystals also buff his damage, and increase the damage on the purple “shockwave” attack.
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