I know that I’m probably going to catch some flak for this but I feel like I need to bring this up. Going into the next expansion could the design team in charge of story instance difficulty balancing please tone the difficulty back just a tad. Head of the Snake is probably the worst example of how utterly painful it is to do some of these as at the end of the final story instance my character was in his undergarments because of how many times I died, res’d, ported into the room and was instantly rushed by the mobs as well as the boss mechanics. I wanted to bring it up back then but knew I was overly frustrated so didn’t. After the newest LW episode and several of the boss battles I need to finally do so and hope it’s not to late for the design team to evaluate the level of overall difficulty in this section of the game.
I understand that you want to bring the difficulty up some from the core story instances where you could get by with a couple dodges and auto attacking. I’m in favor of that. However being trapped in small spaces where you’re meant to dodge around while pulling off mechanics at the same time as trying to kill mobs that spawn and healing yourself at the level of some of these fights is a tad much. I honestly feel like I’m playing Guitar Hero on Hard mode while looking at a DDR screen on Trick difficulty from all the flashing circles I have to dive around while doing the core mechanic you want me to on top of everything else going on on screen. While the final instance of the newest episode wasn’t as kittennake’s tiny room of camera clipping and mob pouncing on you pain, there were either distance detection bugs on where the “edges” of the circles are or you need to be much farther away from them then what appears to actually be “outside” those circles leading to quite a bit of overall frustration with several of One Path End’s boss fights. With how many spawn during the final boss fight and with how “instant death” the “it’s going to land here and do a bunch of damage” stage before it can be, it’s a recipe for annoyance that honestly shouldn’t be as frustrating as it has been.
These instances aren’t Raids. You now have Raids to make content that is overtly mechanically challenging to appeal to the players you seem to want to appeal to in that regard. These instances aren’t supposed to be frustrating to the point of making me want to walk away from the game. The Head of the Snake final boss fight did that. I wasn’t as close as that on some of this newest episodes but they were utterly frustrating at points when they should have been an enjoyable challenge. A Crack in the Ice’s final boss fight was a far better target in terms of overall difficulty combined with trying to use a mechanic. There was room to move around to execute the required mechanics that didn’t cause the camera to clip into walls or confine you to barely able to move around mobs, the mechanics weren’t overly punishing if you failed once or twice but allowed you to learn and get better without killing you off with a “haha you just barely were in the circle of death after using your dodge charges to get out of the ones that are spawning all over!”, and the mobs that were in place didn’t all swarm all over you like a swarm of angry hornets (or in the case of the white mantle, jump down on you like a rockslide).
I know that some people are going to read this and instantly want to post a "well just ‘git gud’ " or similar response, but I don’t play games like Dark Souls for a reason. I like some challenge but I don’t like the Dark Souls school of “we’re going to kill you over and over and over until you memorize and can execute a perfect pattern.” If Head of the Snake and One Path Ends are going to be the benchmark difficulty levels for the expansion I’m going to have to step away from a game I actually enjoy. I want to play the next expansion but not at the cost of being utterly frustrated through every single story instance that features a boss. HoT instances weren’t frustrating to this degree, as much as Tangled Depths makes me never want to step foot in that area again.
Please take time to evaluate exactly how difficult the basic story instances of the expansion are. They aren’t raids, they aren’t supposed to push players away from actually wanting to play your game. They shouldn’t be “press F to kill Zhaitan”, but they shouldn’t be overtly harder than necessary.