Encounter Times: Teetering on the Brink of Insanity
Many people have been in Hammerknell for a while now,
many more are stepping in every single day for the first
time. With the exception of Murdantix, there is one
common denominator for all of the fights: they all last
more than 10 minutes. If you've been progressing through
Hammerknell since it's release you might be teetering on
the brink of insanity right now.
One of the major problems we see with Hammerknell is
that the encounter take so damn long and quite often one
single mistake wipes the raid. While most of the fights,
mechanically, are fantastic and fun; they wear on most
people. Just from personal anecdotal evidence, players
are quitting due to stress and fatigue.
Let's take a look at Sicaron for example. If you don't
have a raid full of Prestige Rank 8 Warriors all doing
3k dps, the average fight time is around 11-12 minutes.
The whole fight requires precise placement of the
bubbled bombs and later on in the fight, a quick and
precise rotation of purging, and a rigorous eye for
cleansing the raid.
At any time during this fight, if someone missing a
purge, cleanse or overlaps a bubbled bomb, the raid
wipes. There is no room for mistakes or error. If you
are not on your game, you lose.
While expecting players to play amazing is not a crazy
expectation, the problem is that when everything is
going well and in the 10th minute a purger lags for a
second, or his mouse twitches, or he simply missing a
cure, everyone dies and you have to start all over
again. You have to sit through the first 10 minutes
which you have down, all over again.
Now for everyone else not purging or tanking or whatever
else, you're just standing in one place rotating through
your dps and occasionally placing a bomb. It's extremely
boring doing this for 10 minutes straight over and over
as you learn the fight.
The stress and drag of doing this over and over as
you're learning the fight can really wear on people, and
the enjoyment of the game drops.
Imagine if each encounter in Expert Darkening Deeps was
10-15 minutes long? Just the encounter time of the first
four bosses in Hammerknell is equivalent to the time it
takes for a full clear in Drowned Halls. Just the boss
encounter time!
I don't mind intense fights, but give me bursts of
intensity. The Sicaron fight doesn't really start until
the purge rotation starts kicking in which is about
halfway through. Why not increase the purge rotation
time but decrease the overall time of the fight? Why
can't the fight be 4-5 minutes long instead of 10-11?
Another perfect example is Zilas, though at least this
fight is fun and less stressful since you can easily
recover from mistakes. However it takes way too long.
Nothing happens in the first 40% of Zilas' health.
Outside of debuffing and trapping Imps or whatever else
your strategy is, you're just pounding on the boss.
There is zero strategy.
Why is that first 40% of the fight there? Why not just
cut the hitpoints in half and get to the fight quicker?
If the raid wipes 5% due to unlucky mage rotation, or an
unlucky "It's Laser Time! Shit an Umbral spawn! Fuck!
Two Mages!", which can happen quite often, you're just
tacking on an extra 4-5 minutes to the fight that can be
spent having fun and not falling asleep.
What is the point of all these long fights? Why can't
fights be 3-5 minute affairs of intense and skillful
play? The majority of the fights ramp up extremely slow.
The only check in a really long and slowly developing
encounters is to see how much caffeine you have. If
developers want to create really long and intense
fights, then save them for final bosses and not the
first three entry level encounters.
It's poor design. It's killing people. Stop it.
No one wants to spend a whole night wiping in a raid,
but it's part of the game and most people can put up
with it. Most players, when they wipe, want to get back
to the challenge and try again, but when you tack on
recovery time of ress'ing and buffing then tack on an
extra 8-10 minutes of the encounter just to get back to
the part you died, then people start throwing in the
towel and not bothering anymore after a few weeks.
River of Souls and Greenscale's Blight had some fun
encounters, and the only lengthy ones were Alsbeth and
Greenscale which happen to be the last boss encounters.
Plutonus had an average fight time of 3-4 minutes and
that fight was really fun! The encounter started right
away and if you wiped, you could jump right back in and
get to the part your screwed up on and try again.
Hammerknell should be the same way... fun.