I just wanted a centralized place for feedback on Delubrum Reginae (Savage)—what worked and didn't work, what could be better, what I'd like to see in a future version of this type of content.
Fights are well designed
Above all else, I think the most important thing to praise is that the fights are fun, engaging, and well-designed. I found them to be about the level of the most challenging Extreme mode primals, but with the added difficulty of the raise restriction, which elevates them to "Savage" difficulty. Considering some of the later points mentioned below, I wouldn't be averse to relaxing the raise restriction and designing future Alliance+ content at the "Extreme" difficulty instead of "Savage", especially if it allows more interesting fights. Also considering that a wipe on one of the later fights requires up to an hour to reclear the old fights to get another try at it, some kind of checkpoint system would be appreciated if it maintains its difficulty.
48 is too many people
There's a reason why World of Warcraft no longer has high-end raids with this many players. With this many required players, you actually need 55+ players who are "on call" to be ready to raid because coordinating so many people at the same time is near impossible. 24 players (three 8-person statics) is much more reasonable and you can even get away with making the fights slightly harder as a result. Please consider this suggestion in conjunction with the above, i.e., if you lower the number of players, it's reasonable to increase the difficulty and add more raise restrictions, but if you keep the same number of players, it may be wise to lower the difficulty.
Rank 15 and 700k mettle requirement doesn't make sense
Consider the purpose of queuing restrictions in this game up to this point. Level and item level requirements are obvious: you need to be at least this strong, gear-wise, to have a chance at completing this fight. Extreme and Savage unlocks after completing normal mode. The purpose these prerequisites serve is to 1) make sure players complete content in the correct order, and 2) make sure players are strong enough to have a reasonable chance of completing the content. However, for Delubrum Savage, there's an additional requirement of Rank 15 and 700k mettle which doesn't fit in with the way the rest of the game designs queuing restrictions.
Unlike level and item level, Rank 15 doesn't actually increase your stats at all. It makes certain high level Lost Actions available but the level these actions unlock at is fairly arbitrary. Considering Rank 15 requires almost 10 times as much mettle as Rank 10 (the end of the Southern Front story and the requirement for Delubrum normal mode), it's a very big hurdle to cross. Who does it lock out from Delubrum Savage? People who don't have lots of time to grind a tremendous amount of mettle. Savage 8-person raiding in this game is not a huge time commitment. You can make progress with just a few hours a day over time. In other words, it's accessible. Delubrum Savage, which already suffers from needing to coordinate a huge number of players (see above), further restricts the pool of available players by imposing this huge rank and mettle requirement.
Mettle loss as death penalty is misguided
What is the purpose of imposing a penalty for death? In Eureka, it made the world feel dangerous because it was an open zone where anything can surprise you around the corner. In Baldesion Arsenal, it prevents you from going back in again immediately because you level down and no longer meet the level requirement for going in (and also because level correlates with strength in Eureka zones so you won't be strong enough to win). In Bozjan Southern Front, the death penalty has a similar purpose as Eureka.
In Delubrum Savage, neither of these previous purposes apply. Dying in a raid doesn't feel "dangerous" because it's expected that you die multiple times in a raid during progression. And because you can't rank down in Bozjan zones and rank doesn't affect strength, there's no need to regrind experience to meet the power level requirements like with Baldesion Arsenal. Instead, every death in Delubrum Savage represents a future time commitment, but it has very little penalizing power in the raid itself! Assuming there will be higher ranks in the next Save the Queen area, every death means that you will need to do 2-3 Skirmishes/Critical Engagements in the future to make up for it. However, you're free to die all you want in the raid itself, all the way down to zero mettle and there's no negative in the moment. The raise restrictions in Delubrum Savage achieve the purpose of making the content challenging already. There's no point to also forcing people to grind mettle back up in the future on top of that. If anything, it only discourages people from continuing with the next phase of content when it releases in 5.5. The recent buffs to mettle rewards in Castrum Lacus Litore alleviate this somewhat but this remote penalty is still weird.
Conclusions and moving forward
Overall, I'm excited for the future of more challenging Alliance+ scale fights in this game. I hope next time there will be fewer hurdles and restrictions to allow a broader selection of players who can gain access to the fight as it was very challenging to get a stable roster with such a (comparatively) small pool of players who meet the 700k mettle rank 15 bar. Whether the difficulty is tuned higher or lower based on number of required players is up to taste. I was actually a little surprised that the Savage version required more players than Normal mode; I was expecting the opposite. The next one doesn't even have to be tied to large-scale Eureka-style content either, or it can be much earlier in the storyline to minimize barriers to entry.
Continue reading...
Fights are well designed
Above all else, I think the most important thing to praise is that the fights are fun, engaging, and well-designed. I found them to be about the level of the most challenging Extreme mode primals, but with the added difficulty of the raise restriction, which elevates them to "Savage" difficulty. Considering some of the later points mentioned below, I wouldn't be averse to relaxing the raise restriction and designing future Alliance+ content at the "Extreme" difficulty instead of "Savage", especially if it allows more interesting fights. Also considering that a wipe on one of the later fights requires up to an hour to reclear the old fights to get another try at it, some kind of checkpoint system would be appreciated if it maintains its difficulty.
48 is too many people
There's a reason why World of Warcraft no longer has high-end raids with this many players. With this many required players, you actually need 55+ players who are "on call" to be ready to raid because coordinating so many people at the same time is near impossible. 24 players (three 8-person statics) is much more reasonable and you can even get away with making the fights slightly harder as a result. Please consider this suggestion in conjunction with the above, i.e., if you lower the number of players, it's reasonable to increase the difficulty and add more raise restrictions, but if you keep the same number of players, it may be wise to lower the difficulty.
Rank 15 and 700k mettle requirement doesn't make sense
Consider the purpose of queuing restrictions in this game up to this point. Level and item level requirements are obvious: you need to be at least this strong, gear-wise, to have a chance at completing this fight. Extreme and Savage unlocks after completing normal mode. The purpose these prerequisites serve is to 1) make sure players complete content in the correct order, and 2) make sure players are strong enough to have a reasonable chance of completing the content. However, for Delubrum Savage, there's an additional requirement of Rank 15 and 700k mettle which doesn't fit in with the way the rest of the game designs queuing restrictions.
Unlike level and item level, Rank 15 doesn't actually increase your stats at all. It makes certain high level Lost Actions available but the level these actions unlock at is fairly arbitrary. Considering Rank 15 requires almost 10 times as much mettle as Rank 10 (the end of the Southern Front story and the requirement for Delubrum normal mode), it's a very big hurdle to cross. Who does it lock out from Delubrum Savage? People who don't have lots of time to grind a tremendous amount of mettle. Savage 8-person raiding in this game is not a huge time commitment. You can make progress with just a few hours a day over time. In other words, it's accessible. Delubrum Savage, which already suffers from needing to coordinate a huge number of players (see above), further restricts the pool of available players by imposing this huge rank and mettle requirement.
Mettle loss as death penalty is misguided
What is the purpose of imposing a penalty for death? In Eureka, it made the world feel dangerous because it was an open zone where anything can surprise you around the corner. In Baldesion Arsenal, it prevents you from going back in again immediately because you level down and no longer meet the level requirement for going in (and also because level correlates with strength in Eureka zones so you won't be strong enough to win). In Bozjan Southern Front, the death penalty has a similar purpose as Eureka.
In Delubrum Savage, neither of these previous purposes apply. Dying in a raid doesn't feel "dangerous" because it's expected that you die multiple times in a raid during progression. And because you can't rank down in Bozjan zones and rank doesn't affect strength, there's no need to regrind experience to meet the power level requirements like with Baldesion Arsenal. Instead, every death in Delubrum Savage represents a future time commitment, but it has very little penalizing power in the raid itself! Assuming there will be higher ranks in the next Save the Queen area, every death means that you will need to do 2-3 Skirmishes/Critical Engagements in the future to make up for it. However, you're free to die all you want in the raid itself, all the way down to zero mettle and there's no negative in the moment. The raise restrictions in Delubrum Savage achieve the purpose of making the content challenging already. There's no point to also forcing people to grind mettle back up in the future on top of that. If anything, it only discourages people from continuing with the next phase of content when it releases in 5.5. The recent buffs to mettle rewards in Castrum Lacus Litore alleviate this somewhat but this remote penalty is still weird.
Conclusions and moving forward
Overall, I'm excited for the future of more challenging Alliance+ scale fights in this game. I hope next time there will be fewer hurdles and restrictions to allow a broader selection of players who can gain access to the fight as it was very challenging to get a stable roster with such a (comparatively) small pool of players who meet the 700k mettle rank 15 bar. Whether the difficulty is tuned higher or lower based on number of required players is up to taste. I was actually a little surprised that the Savage version required more players than Normal mode; I was expecting the opposite. The next one doesn't even have to be tied to large-scale Eureka-style content either, or it can be much earlier in the storyline to minimize barriers to entry.
Continue reading...