I think you're confusing difficulty with amount of people needed @Matt. A boss could be doable with 18 people and still be mechanically engaging and demanding vs 30 people and it being significantly easier due to simplified gameplay. What this latest update has done has steered it to the latter. If the goal was to cut down the people required then might as well cut down the maximum sign-ups.
Imo you should try to beat it with 18 people and see how hard clearing the summons is then. I didn't really see anything else that was "simplified gameplay" other than the lower mob counts/shorter buff duration. As for feedback on the boss itself: It is very fun to play with lots of new mechanics. The loot is kinda weird with only few items (many of which untradeable) for such a big expedition.
I really don’t like this change. As i mentioned in the previous page, it was perfectly fine. By reducing the amount of mobs, hard skin buff duration, jailed frequency + amount of players which at this point makes the boss significantly easier to kill. Heros & MM which suddenly become really godtier for VL, back to another somewhat negligible classes is kind of saddening. But where it really hit hard is, that the boss design is specifically tweaked to cater for 12-18 players. The 30 players difficulty requirement imo was just so fun. I’d recommend to revert the changes, buff the lasers, retain the falling golem’s new design and increase the amount of drops to feed 30 players. Spoiler: Alittle more rant While i was actually very tilted with the drops when we got them, yes it probably will kill alot motivation. But yet its HELLA fun, I see myself using my gears to its full limit, contact all our old quitted players to hey, theres a new exciting challenging boss and we need players, you wanna join? Please consider reverting the mechanics. I’d love to run with 30 friends again, and not going around and think about how to reduce players to minmax this hoss.
My friend was in a party that cleared it today. He said the last quest only gives experience. I think it should give a medal that says Von Leon Vanquisher. I think it would be cool to recognize the players that have conquered this challenging boss.
give us chance to clear with pre nerf version just once all that hard work and anticipation gone to waste
I'll start with saying that I think we should've waited on making changes for another week or two to see how parties took on the challenge, what happened to the competitive spirit? I enjoyed clearing it after the changes, even if it is still the hardest boss mechanically in the game still but I think more teams could've beaten the original version too. It's not like Rogue was going to be so far ahead of the server if they got 3 or 4 clears before another group did, the drops we have seen so far don't seem that crazy. I think that if we wanted a boss that required 20+ people to clear it, and want people to do it consistently there should've been some form of questline based on number of clears so that each person running can make some progress, maybe not on the belt but towards other unique items. Even with the suggested party of 12 to 18 it will take quite some time to get yourself a belt with 2 runs a week, especially if you don't have a set running group. Unless we some new crazy drops in the next clears I think it might be tough to motivate people to run it again after getting the satisfaction of one kill.
As an organizer/planner, here's a few more thoughts, along with thoughts on the recent changes: First of all, keeping the drops a mystery is certainly fun, but it does make it a headache for me to figure out loot distribution since there's no way to tell what's untradable (or even potentially useless for a given player) until they pick it up. Maybe changing this to an NPC that lets you spawn each drop (at least until drops are publicly released) with extra time to distribute would help. As for the changes: > Players should no longer be able to smuggle jail keys from the Von Leon fight. Standard bugfix, did it even do anything useful? > Players will now lose the same amount of experience upon death in Aerial Prison (known as Von Leon Jail) as they do in Audience Room. Reasonable, won't affect difficulty Snipe has been disabled in Aerial Prison. > Sadge, but not really much of a change. Certainly not a nerf > Demon Gargoyle Hardskin buff duration has been slightly reduced. Yeah this is a nerf, and heavily indicates towards killing them. I kind of wish the fight was designed more around hitting mobcap and just trying to keep them out of the way > Von Leon's summon skill will now summon 4 Demon Gargoyles instead of 6. Same as previous point > Von Leon's banish skill cooldown has been slightly increased. I feel like this is unnecessary with the other change to banish > A bug which resulted in more players than intended being banished to Aerial Prison by Von Leon was fixed. It did seem highly variable - I feel like the amount was somewhere between 5 and 9, and 5 is probably the correct point for balancing. Imo it should change to target randomly instead of sign/entry order (which I think it does but not entirely sure) > Von Leon's Laser attack has been made more impactful. Good, if the darkness debuff was added this patch it's great. As long as laser can be jumped over like in GMS, that is. Otherwise kind of just f's over melee > Changes were made to the Falling Golem attack to make affected areas easier to see. Good, this just makes it more fair. Having accurate hitboxes isn't really a nerf > Dirty Magic Scroll of the Knight has been changed to one-of-a-kind. Bad change, was nice QoL to stack up in advance. Not really sure why this was made when literally every other boss summoning/entry item allows you to stack multiple up if you wanted to prepare a bunch at once. I see this as just making it harder to organize runs since people will be less willing to farm up extras.
Coming from my personal experience as someone who helped organize and patriciate in the 2nd VL clear. I've gone on maybe 6-8 runs before being able to clear it this time. This run started off with 29 people and was slowly reduced to 22 after couple death timers running out and people dcing later in the run. I don't believe we would have been able to clear if we were 12 people, or even 18 people. Everyone that came to the run played an important part in the end. I felt like the change was necessary for the rest of the server to be able to clear, it shouldn't be a boss that is gate kept by dps check. It might be possible for a group with perfect gear and perfect coordination to be able to clear with 18 people, but for everyone else this was the perfect balance change. After seeing the drops, I can agree that I wish it could cater to 30 people with possibly more nx drops/totems/ untradeable. I also feel like the 500 purification totem quest is brutal, as a NL . Overall I had a fun experience, enjoyed every part of planning and clearing.
With regards to this I believe in our run we saw 15k nx drop in the form of 3 5k. Why not have the equivalent drop in 1k's so that a larger portion of the party could loot.
The new version seems reasonable if this is for 12~18 player run. Maybe for those who like challenges, making a hard mode with some of the revert changes could be cool for 30 player run.
Speaking as MM main I joined two runs so far, one is before patch and the time ran out when 2nd body still got 70-80% HP, another is the 2nd cleared one people saying above(I disconnected at the end though), I don't think the summons of original version are killable at all and my plan was telling warriors just to rush them, even the run after patch with 29 people and nerfs the timer is still tight. Piercing arrow is not that overpower as people thought, in that time of charging(believe me 1.9 seconds is really long for a single strike) anything can interfere you such as debuffs or stun, if you have bad RNG your arrows deal 0 damage due to the hardskin buff also. We can do 300 or 400k yes, but not every two seconds. I have near-perfect weapon and average CGS set, washed to 19k HP so don't have trouble of being 1-hit, I invested much time on this trash class compare to my friends already, those pre-patch Demon Gargoyle were still not killable for me, we are just not all top rankers in the first run cleared. TL; DR: Hardskin nerf is must for most players.
Can I suggest that players returning from jail get spawned randomly on the left or right? Adds some variety and make it less likely for bad stuff to happen to a group of respawning people at the same time. Boss is very fun though, great stuff!
Interesting discussion. It seems like the Staff's intention was to release a boss that requires 12+ players to work as a team to take down in one hour. One could further ask if those 12 players should be required to be absolutely maxed out, cream of the crop, or just above average endgame players. If anything, it simply seems like Staff overshot their design goal, making the boss harder than intended. I don't know how many players would be needed to take down the original boss in one hour; if 12 is enough, or 18? I wonder if the players who are displeased with the changes wish that Staff would have written "Recommended expidition size: 24" (or 30) or something on the original patch notes. It seems more reasonable to discuss if the boss should be a "12 man boss" or a "> 12 man boss". Based on the many sour comments around the forum, it looks to me like some players quickly began viewing the boss as a "24 player" or "30 player"-type of boss, even though this was not outlined in the patch notes. Therefore I think the drama is a bit overplayed, but that's just my little perspective from the outside. I hope you can find common ground on this issue (At least the boss looks cool, mechanically!)
The first clear contained barely any minmaxed characters as most of us were on our secondary or even tertiary characters. A lot of us didn’t even have perfect weapons on these chars. Most endgame bosses on release, for most mmos, do not usually get cleared for months at a time, most comparable and evident to gms currently. Keeping VL the same as it is the game’s current hardest boss is not the worst. Not everyone is supposed to be able to clear it and for those who can should be able to take pride in their progression up to that point. Maybe the current last boss in the game shouldn’t be meant to be cleared by everyone? As @TimK told us, just get good. We definitely did not clear because of our insane minmaxed characters. This is what true endgame progression looks like. It took us easily 100+ hours of theory-crafting and research to get to that point. The auf nerfs made her into a punching bag with no threat of death is just appalling and Von Leon seems to be following the same trajectory. This boss was supposed to be different. Feedback should not be taken from such a small sample size and so soon after a boss comes out, especially not from those who can’t even get past body 1. Increase the drops a bit, edit your post regarding recommended party size, and leave it as it was before. Further down the road this boss would be easily downed by 18 people after working on the new items. If not, at least you will have a bigger sample size to justify it then. Sorry to those who enjoyed the challenge and were so close to clearing, I was heavily rooting for your run to finally succeed this weekend. Looks like you will have to settle for a kitten instead of a lion.
' Maybe the current last boss in the game shouldn’t be meant to be cleared by everyone? As @TimK told us, just get good' this toxic mentality kills this game but then i did not expect something different from Rogue. Ps next time try to write a response that doesn't reek of salt.
Isn't the whole nerf thing being blown out of proportion? All I see in the patch notes is "golems easier to see" "lasers more impactful" "cd slightly increased" "4 Demon Gargoyles instead of 6" and a bug fix. I actually like that its really difficult. My feedback would be to have the rewards scale based on how many people are in the raid. Not a linear scale either, if you can get 30 people in and survive then you should be rewarded slightly more per person compared to a 12 man. Could also scale the HP of VL based on how many people are inside to counter 30 man 20 minute clears. I already see so few runs happening, this is a new boss, one that is very unique, I'm saddened to see it barely even being attempted. I had envisioned smegas everyday recruiting and people coming back to the game for this.
Less mobs and 2-3 rooms only per run give u a ton of space for mistakes and silly deaths, where before it would end your run. That was the difference between casual runs to well organized ones. So yes, this is huge and that means that almost everyone can clear it now.
The purpose of this thread is merely to collect feedbacks from players, please do keep this discussion civil if possible. Thanks.
