Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Endgame Eternity Vault encounters

I found the encounters in EV to be really interesting. The bosses are very different and unique and the fights make sure each participant of the group knows what he's doing. I'm going to discuss the bosses, this isn't meant as a complete walkthrough of EV, but more to point out what I think about the different encounters, my personal likes and dislikes and the main things to expect both as a participant and as a group trying to progress through EV.

I'll number the bosses and not name them, in case people want to go fresh and not know what to expect.

1st boss: This is a very straight forward encounter, the mechanics are simple, get out of bad things and use line of sight periodically to avoid a big damage of a special ability. It seems to be aimed to give people a sense of accomplishment by making sure the first encounter isn't too hard. You have to do enough DPS to take down the boss before enrage, but it's very possible. Basically any group that can clear an HM FP can also take down the first boss. Our group managed to take him down on the first try.

2nd boss: This one feels more of a classic WOW like raid encounter. Positioning is important, both because the boss has a forward AOE attack so he needs to be facing away from the group and also because you are fighting on an island in a lava lake and the boss has AOE knockback, so you have to stay away from the edge to avoid getting more damage than the healers can heal. There is also movement to be aware of, occasionally (when the boss uses an ability), the island you are fighting on will sink, before this happens a bridge to a new island will form and your group will have to move to the new island, with the boss and continue the fight there. In addition there are adds that need to be picked up by the tanks and AOE. A pretty classic raid encounter with the expected things to worry about. We wiped once on him as we learned to proper positioning and movement required.

3rd boss: This is where things really start to get unique. The group will have to split up to 2 groups, each with a tank, a healer and 2 DPS. The design makes sure that your group can have 2 functioning groups who can perform reasonably well. You have a bad healer? A weak tank? Low DPS? this is where you'll pay for it. Each group has a simple puzzle to solve, pressing buttons to line up colorful shapes and each button press will spawn mobs the group will have to fight. I didn't really like this "boss", there's no real boss fight and the puzzle is a bit silly in my opinion. We wiped there twice, first because we weren't sure how the puzzle work and again because the other group got swarmed somehow.

4th boss: My favorite encounter in EV, this is where each and every player in your group will be tested and the reason carrying people who are completely not ready for this will cause your group to fail. The way it works is that you will be fighting 8 different bosses, each one in a 1 on 1 dual with a single group member. If you take it "by design", your DPS will fight a low damage high health boss, the healers will fight a high damage low health boss and the tanks somewhere in between. The healers will have to be able to both heal themselves and do some DPS on their boss and the DPS and tanks will have to take down their boss within a reasonable amount of time. When your boss is down, you can help another group member, however there's a catch, as soon as you hit another boss, you get a one minute debuff, stopping you from doing any damage or healing for 1 minute. So you can basically use just 1 ability. This means that your ability to help your weaker group members is very limited, if a healer can't heal himself reasonably well, he'll die, if a tank or DPS can't hurt the boss enough, he'll enrage and you'll wipe. We wiped twice here, once because we didn't realize which player to match with which boss (a healer can't do the DPS to kill a high health mob in time and DPS can't survive the healer mob damage) and a second because one of us didn't hurt the boss fast enough, which was corrected next try with better performance and some help from the others.

5th boss: A very epic fight that I feel is a very good design for an Op endboss. It reminded me a bit of the Lich King fight in WOW. You'll start by fighting the boss on a platform, once he takes enough damage, the group will have to move to the edges of the platform, as the center will collapse. Next you'll have a series of jumps from platform to platform, this is a test of your healers, as people will take fall damage and the platforms have a limited time to stand on before collapsing. This means your entire group will take damage which the healers will have to keep up with. The boss also spawn lightning balls that follow a player and should be avoided, as well as trap people who will have to be released by dps-ing the trap as well as the trapped player will have to fight a mob inside it (Lich King anyone?). During the last phase, the boss will have a shield and the tank will have to move the boss to get it to drop, testing your tanks positioning and control, when this happens, the DPS will have to really do some damage to the boss, testing your group DPS ability, as a healer I was also joining DPS when this happened because of the higher DPS requirement and relative low healing requirements at this point. As you can see this is a pretty involved and interesting fight, which tests all roles of your group. We wiped 4 times here, twice until we learn the drops correctly so people stopped falling to their deaths and 2 other times that took us to learn the DPS burn phases and boss positioning correctly.

This is EV, a very interesting and fun Operation, all the bosses are different and unique, all the characters are tested and need to perform well and generally I feel Bioware did a great job designing it.

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