So yeah, my party got dredge bombs in our 49.
Firstly, the panels were ridiculously easy. As usual, we skipped most of the mobs up until getting into the room with thief stealth. When in the room, we cleared left side of 3 normal dredge and the veteran (killed vet to see if he got nerfed). We didn’t clear the other side opting for stealth as per the normal. So pretty much the same.
For the bombs though:
The huge pack of dredge (20 or so) that was the first big pull in the bombs room was removed. Instead it is replaced by 8 or so dredge, a few veterans and a few normals, easy to kill.
ALL the hostile dredge other than that are removed. In their place is a bunch of turrets that hit for ~9k damage to anyone unstealthed trying to pass them, where they aim is visible by Scarlet-like Rifle Plasma Rifle shots (e.g. bright orange aoes, like the new bloomhunger).
There is a place where you can walk into “concealing dust” to get 15 seconds of stealth, you can stack this to get over a minute of stealth, so 4 or 5 stacks for a minute, which renders thief useless.
The bombs are no longer in their old spots, instead they spawn in a room near the start of bomb area. They spawn 3 at a time, and we needed to get 9 to the door.
When you pick up a bomb, you must be in stealth on the way to the door because of earlier turrets that shoot anyone out of stealth. You also can’t blink or portal to the door with a bomb as you lose the bomb. On the way, there are Security contractors who reveal anyone they get near (about 300 range radius), so you have to avoid the security contractors on the way to door.
For the first few bombs you place (it seemed to be for each of the first three), another security contractor would spawn to block progress. And sometimes a few more mobs would be on the way too, but as long as you stayed in stealth those mobs would not do anything to you.
Once you got nine, you could blow them up with a detonator very close to the door, which is no trouble. So the hard part is simply getting the bombs to the door.
Overall, it seems MUCH more PuG friendly, while on the opposite end of the spectrum, it’s much more annoying than the old way if you’re not in a PuG, as it was very simple to portal, stealth, drop bomb, portal, wait 2 minutes and repeat once.
Regardless, it seems that once players get used to this, it should not take very much time, it should be less than 5 minutes, even in bad groups, and it seems possible to fully solo if you’re not a kittenty player and you don’t get PuGs aggroing the mobs and killing you.
Rabso was kitten easy. No dredge spawn with him, at all. When we pulled him he summoned his veteran as par the course. We pulled him to the back, scorp’ wired him to the door, and beat him up. Untraited Wardens still work. For his attack, there is now an Orange AoE tell similar to the turrets and new Bloomy, to make it excruciatingly obvious when he’s going to do it. In other words, if you get hit you have to really suck. Also, we did not notice any dredge at all spawn, so I’m assuming they spawn at the car, and since we pulled away we didn’t have to deal with them. This made the clown car a 30 second encounter, on 49. Much faster than before.
Ice Elemental boss seemed the same.
As for other fractals, we did Swamp, Mossman and Bloomhunger (we’ve done 4 fracs post patch), Harpy, Cliff, Molten, Aetherblade, Duo, and Maw. None of those seem to be different except for Bloomhunger. All of his AoEs are now super obvious because they are orange tells, even the ones in the water are easy to see now.
As for ascended chests. We got 20 daily chests so far.
Two 29 dailies (before and after reset), one 38 (after reset since we did one pre-patch before reset), and this 49 after reset.
4 ascended boxes, one weapon, 3 armor. I’d say it’s “probably” improved, but we could have had great RNG, looking forward to see the LoD spreadsheet soon when they get a much greater sample size.
