There wasn’t any specific problem with Liadri. The fight just emphasised many of the design issues the gauntlet itself had.
Even if all the hanging cage thing might sound cool at first glance, it doesn’t matter how cool some idea is when it affects so negatively the player experience.
Having a zerg farming right below you achieved nothing but a performance drop, which was quite weird for the only intended PvE combat skill test in the whole game. Even in the absence of a zerg, the unnecesarily huge size of the area was enough to make low profile computers to suffer.
IMHO, the gauntlet should be somehow instanced. According to some other parts of the game, like the submarine path in CoE, the “falling into the zerg” effect should be possible even this way.
Cage walls were probably the biggest issue, which was reproduced again several months later during the marionette event (can’t know if the issue was addressed or not, Marionette cages were just too close to each other).
We usually stand on isolated platforms during jumping puzzles and most of the time there are no camera issues involved. This is a problem entirely caused by walls, invisible or not.
IMHO this kind of walls should be avoided, even if it means that players might fall off to death (could also be prevented by using a low heighted wall around the platform, which wouldn’t create any issues as long as there’s a slight elevation on the camera angle). I don’t remind being able to knock off any NPC, wall or not, on my entire game experience, so I guess this shouldn’t be a problem.
If walls are needed to prevent interaction between platforms, a big flat invisible wall in the middle of nowhere should be enough.
Any other texture, like vertical chains, can also produce this kind of effects an should be avoided. Finding a solution for this without granting players an escape route might, however, be trickier than expected :P
Floor textures were also a problem. As I previously said, there was no epicness at all on being able to spot a zerg fighting below, just annoyance cause the FPS drop. A few big simple metal plates could work better.
Ideally, asura platforms, like the ones on the thaumanova reactor fractal end boss, could do the job without requiring a single vertical chain. On the other hand, it might not be the best option lore wise.
Even if I really hope to find that devs have learnt from previous mistakes and most of these QoL issues have been fixed, I’m quite afraid we’re going to get pretty much the same gauntlet we played last time :S
