I’m putting this in the “bug” section, due to spending 4 hours fighting this boss with a 4 man guild group and getting constantly, to 35% and then wiping…for over 4 hours.
I have to say, a majority of your 5 man encounters are of a rather poor/cheap quality that only illustrates the deficiencies of the team who had worked on them. Only by the community finding ways to use walls, corners, and other such devices to negate the poor/cheap quality of the design, were they able to develop speed clear strategies.
Apparently, Togunn and his “Wicked Rodeo” is an extension of these poor design philosophies. And to illustrate, lets take a look at what that issues are here:
1. Dull environmental hue – does not allow proper vision of obstacles and damaging elements in the area, well enough to avoid them. Many times, we wiped simple because we could not “see” the spinning sand on the ground. To resolve, please take away the “dream-like” colors for this encounter and give us a normal hue of textures in which to fight in, so that we can see the obstacles and hazards
2. Power balance against a 4 man group – As far as I knew all content scales to the amount of people in your group. Obviously, this content was not and there was no note in the achievement stating we would need a 5th. Only after getting through the most painful of mechanics, were we able to realize that the missing 35% damage was actually a 5th member. Had we known this at the onset, we would have prepared a 5th player to run suffer through this poor encounter. To resolve: Put a warning on the achievement that it requires a 5 man group or the suggested party size is 5 players (WE CAN’T TELL WHAT YOU BALANCED THE ENCOUNTER FOR!!!)
3. Physical placement of player character and hazards – Every attempt at the fight found our party members constantly wiping to an obstacle or attack that was dodged well in advance, in preparation, yet time and time again, the damage payload that had been dodged would still be delivered to the player at the end of the dodge. To resolve, use better obstacles and play test the mechanics more.
4. The need for “Caithe” – Although some of Caithe’s attacks are really nice and do more than enough damage to supposedly make the encounter go smoothly, the elementals just kind of wander off on their own, making it very difficult to dps them down via the #5 skill, which ultimately negates her usefulness in the encounter at all. To resolve: options should be placed here, after the story has been cleared to allow the player to not use her, and instead use their normal class
5. Lack of “Dimishing Returns – This goes for a majority of the content in the game, which is only further highlighted by this encounter: GETTING CROWD CONTROLED BY PVE MONSTERS IS NOT FUN!!! No one likes to be feared, immobilized, or otherwise. If you must use these in your PvE content, please place a diminishing returns on them, as they are quite annoying and just expotentionally exaggerate that “cheaply-made” feeling that you get from even trying the content. Its just not fun and a large reason why a majority of players avoid Arah Explorable dungeons like the plague. Your speed runners may enjoy it, as they’ve found ways to negate or break it, but for us normal level players, it just adds and adds frustration, which turns into anger for this product. To resolve: Lessen the duration of the CC effect after each sequential effect, so that it will eventually have no effect. Either that, or make the environmental/spell effects do less damage, so that the crowd control effect can be effectively mitigated.
6. We also found that only the player who started the instance could use gemstore vendors. I wasted 2 BLTP vendors, in which i placed them and then could not use them, because i was not the owner of the instance. This too, needs to be fixed.
Because this is a recommended achievement to obtain in-game armor skins, we will get a 5th and hopefully not end up wiping on this for as long as we did tonight.
Since this is newer content, please clean this mess up and resolve the issues.