Abyss Dungeon/Guardian Raid feedback

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So, as of last night, I’ve cleared all Abyss Dungeon and Guardian Raid content currently available in the beta.

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On the whole, I thought the encounters were reasonably well designed for an introductory raid tier. Most of the fights had mechanics complex enough to require some level of communication and coordination between members who hadn’t done them before, while still simple enough to be quickly picked up. None of the players I had played with had experienced any of this content before, or done much studying of them, but we were able to learn and beat the bosses in no more than an hour or two each.

Criticisms:

  • Every fight. every, single, one, was extremely undertuned in regards to the enrage timer. With the current HP totals and timers, the enrage timers might as well not exist.

  • The first three guardian raids are just absurdly undertuned in every way. They have no HP, deal no damage, and are just generally completely trivial. I understand that the developers don’t want them to be ‘hard’, but as it stands right now, they are just completely unthreatening.

  • Aside from insta-wipe mechanics, the damage from most secondary abilities in abyss dungeons are extremely undertuned. The only one that felt like it did proper damage was the pizza slice attack in the first Hildebrandt Palace fight. The margin for error for just straight standing in bad stuff and chugging HP pots to make up for it felt way too high, considering how simple most of the mechanics were.

  • You shouldn’t be able to refill HP potions without dying on any of the guardian raids. Especially Tytalos. He’s already pretty easy, that just makes him a joke.

  • Most of Tytalos’ phase 1 abilities doing bizarrely low damage considering he’s supposed to be the final boss of the tier, and how easy they are to avoid. His phase 2 abilities do crank up the difficulty substantially, but it is odd how unthreatening he is in phase 1.

  • Tytalos has oddly low hp for a final boss, there is almost no pressure on the DPS to cconsistentlyapply damage to him during the fight. We played extremely cautiously and killed him with almost 8 minutes left on the timer on our first attempt. Combined with being able to refill HP potions at any time, and it makes the fight much more about outlasting the boss than actually aggressively trying to kill him, if that makes sense.

  • Tytalos currently has a pretty much fixed rotation on his insta-wipe mechanic. After doing his slam, he casts 3 other attacks (rolling boulders seems to count as 2) then ults. This should be more randomized, as it trivializes the mechanic if you can count.

  • Pizza slice shouldn’t be able to be the first ability the first boss in Hildebrandt casts. It’s nearly impossible to dodge, and can kinda insta-fuck an attempt. Likewise with the fire-beam from Tytalos. Instakills, and has super long range. Someone just running up to him from off-screen at the beginning of the fight can get insta-gibbed with no chance to avoid it. It’s just sorta feels bad in the way that it bricks an attempt completely right off rip.

Just my thoughts. Overall, I enjoyed the content, but I would like to see the overall ddifficultycranked up a fair bit before release.

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There are many threads discussing this on the forums already, but I’m glad that there are more people voicing their opinions directly, as this is an issue that has to be changed for launch.

Currently we have the T3 version of T1 content. Back in Korea they released a patch to make pre-T3 content much easier, this was so you could catch up to current content more easily and faster - since there will be a lot less people playing earlier content and it would be hard/annoying to always have to look for people running old content.

However, our version is coming out with only T1 content - and as such it makes no sense whatsoever to have watered down, undertuned content when it is the current endgame of PvE.

Players such as Sywo and Saintone have expressed this concern in a recent podcast with Zizaran and RaizQT, when RaizQT - a relatively new player who had tried the game out in the RU version before - pointed out the fact that less than a week in, despite making lots of alts and trying lots of different content, was already about to beat the final Guardian, and that compared to his RU experience it seemed very underwhelming and disappointing.

Lack of difficulty will lead to under-engaging content and will leave people bored and very disappointed, especially when one of the biggest sells of Lost Ark is the difficulty of endgame content. While Guardian Raids and Abyss Dungeons aren’t meant to be the ‘de facto’ difficult endgame PvE, they should serve as an interesting and engaging introduction, and as they currently stand - they are boring and a huge waste of content that could last us satisfied until T2, but instead will be defeated in a week by the majority of players, and then we’ll have to wait for new content for however many months, all while there is perfectly good content that we just kind of flew over without looking back.

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I’ve never done any of these bosses before. My only experience on RU was leveling a few characters to 50, and dicking around in arena and chaos dungeons etc a bit.

I completely agree that the difficulty is a real issue. ANY half-competent group with experience raiding in other games is going to fly through these fights pretty effortlessly. I PUGed most of these fights with a friend of mine, and by far the hardest part of any of it, was explaining the insta-wipe mechanics to our randoms.

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