Just wanted to chime in with my thoughts on the new raid wing. For perspective’s sake, it’s worth mentioning that while I’ve seen videos on all the content, I haven’t downed the second boss yet.
I won’t touch on the lore here, but since I am mentioning some of the fight mechanics, this may be considered a spoiler for those who haven’t been here yet.
The Good
I love the start of this raid wing. As WoodenPotatoes pointed out in a recent vid, this is a great way to open up accessibility to a raid. It’s a relatively easy encounter that still gives a solid feeling of progression, even when you wipe due to how much you move through the area. I also like how encounters like this and the Bandit Trio allow us to explore more space within the raid area itself. I think the best raids have a mix of relatively easy and relatively difficult encounters and this balances that out well.
I also like the mix of mechanics in the second boss fight. Adding in aspects of the previous boss encounters allows this fight to be relatively complex and involved without being too overwhelming.
The 3rd fight looks like it will be really fun. It has a big, epic feel, similar to the Dragon’s Stand event and appears to be a satisfying conclusion.
The Bad
There’s still quite a few bugs. From last night, my group found that while we regularly got notifications from the very obvious expanding circles where everyone needs to spread out, there was no notification sound for the fixate and the pop up at the top of the screen was very inconsistent. With all the visual noise in this fight, it’s really too hard to see when this happens to your character.
The fixate also seemed to randomly switch to other players with no rhyme or reason. I understand this should happen if the fixated person gets downed, but this happened frequently to players who were still on their feet and healthy.
The construct core golf-like mechanic also was not very enjoyable. Maybe more practice with this will help, but the sense of control on this thing feels very hit or miss. The thing just seems to be very erratic in how much or where it moves, even with someone chasing it using basic auto attacks.
This is not entirely related to the raid wing itself, but I’d also like to see some better class balancing so that groups were incentivized to take a wider variety of professions instead of just stacking more eles.
Finally, while I like the depth that ley line gliding gives some of these encounters, it’s frustrating to have masteries as a hard barrier to people in the group. Requiring basic gliding and even up drafts wasn’t a big deal because of how easy it is to reach those masteries, but to get something as high up as ley line gliding, it requires some serious time invested into HoT open world maps, which isn’t appealing to a lot of raiders, especially since the number of mastery points becomes a bigger hurdle than the amount of HoT experience you’ve gained for this mastery. This degree of gating is starting to feel like the gating in other games with attunements/gear grinding, which is worrisome.
Anyways, overall it’s a really solid raid wing and if any devs read this, I hope the raid team gets big kudos for their work on this. As the bugs get fixed, this area will only get better and if we could get any work-around for the mastery gating (maybe unlock it for everyone just in this wing or make the grind less?), I think we’d all be even happier.
(edited by Dahkeus.8243)