Now it's finally here and... I'm not sure what to think of it.
On the plus side, apparently they were able to iron out most of the bugs after all. I had to relog once during the story quest because Bowdaar didn't appear where he was supposed to be, but other than that that was it. The only other issue I had was not a bug per se, but simply bad design: there are several quests for the Eternal Championship that come from a terminal, but for some reason they were designed in such a manner that you have to pick them up in the opposite order in which they are listed... or you will end up with all your weeklies saying "pick up the main quest" (which you already have) and not actually progressing when you kill bosses. (This happened to me, prompting me to re-run the whole thing soon afterwards just to get the quest done. I suppose it's at least partially my fault for not paying closer attention to the mission instructions - but it's still unintuitive and daft to have it work that way.)
Since the sales pitch was that the Eternal Championship (which, somewhat annoyingly, can be shortened to EC, causing confusion with Explosive Conflict) was going to be content that would give solo players a chance to challenge themselves, similar to WoW's Proving Grounds or Brawler's Guild, I guessed (correctly) that it would be tuned for people playing dps characters... but I still decided to go in as a healer anyway, because that's just how I am.
I found the whole thing surprisingly challenging and died several times, despite of being in full 224 gear. Lack of dps was simply a problem. Even with my most faithful companion I only have an influence rank in the twenties, and even more importantly, some fights require an annoying amount of companion micro-management (if that's where your dps is coming from), with bosses temporarily becoming immune to damage, numerous add spawns, and all kinds of crap that you're supposed to move out of. As far as the latter goes, you can compensate somewhat as a healer, but making sure that your companion stands in the right place and attacks the right thing can be quite a nuisance. During my first run I used M1-4X (my highest influence companion), who is ranged... and he repeatedly nuked himself to death on bosses that had mechanics that meant that they could only be damaged in melee and would reflect everything outside of a small circle around them. On the brawler with two adds, I constantly had to change him from active to passive and back again to make him run into melee range of the constantly moving combatants. During my second run I used Choza Raabat, a melee companion, instead - this went a bit better in terms of control, but with an influence rank of only ten things felt very slow and he didn't always do enough damage to out-aggro my healing, forcing me to tank as well.
The weird thing is, I couldn't even tell you if I find the whole thing fun or not. Sometimes I got pretty frustrated by dying. "This is bull, how are you supposed to survive him hitting that hard when I can't even keep up with the damage as a healer in full 224? It's impossible to deal with all those adds at the same time!" And so on. But then I'd realise that there was some sort of trick that I'd been missing and then I felt kind of clever for sussing it out. For example on the last boss, when he summons the drones that shoot lasers, if you stand in exactly the right spot, they will all take each other out and you won't even have to lift a finger to get rid of them. It's just not that easy to get it exactly right.
I think I could see myself going back there on alts, especially of the dps variety, to see if I can do better, maybe get to understand the mechanics a bit more and learn from that. But not too often, to avoid frustration when I mess up. It also finally provides me with an incentive to raise my companion influence - on regular, run of the mill content I just didn't see it making that much of a difference. The fifteen minute run achievement however is certainly far out of my reach at the moment, and not just because simply loading in and out of the instance already takes a minute or so on my ageing PC.
My understanding is that the 15 minute achievement starts when you engage the first boss and ends when you kill the tenth boss. That should help you quite a bit.
ReplyDeleteLoading in and out is only if you where going for the contest's time run.
Is that how it works? I thought it would work like the timing for the contest, where Musco explicitly said that the timer starts and ends at the mission terminal.
DeleteWell, the achievement is easier to track since all that matters is you are less than 15 minutes in killing bosses. Exactly how fast really doesn't matter. Also, some folks are reporting that the intermissions between bosses don't count on the timer, but since I haven't tried it yet that might be wrong.
DeleteThe contest technically tracks how fast you can do the one quest. I imagine that is to limit the number of attempts they need to track and that people can make per week per character.
As a ranged DPS in a mix of 216 and 208 gear, I pretty much gave up at the Brawler stage where you had to be in melee range to do damage. It just felt so futile and against everything my character is supposed to do. I tried it a few times but it felt like banging my head against a brick wall. Up to that point is was ok and fun enough but damn that level pretty much ruined it for me.
ReplyDeleteI got the impression they specifically put in some mechanics unfriendly to range because they've had so many complaints about bosses being unfriendly to melee in the past! Technically your abilities should work all the same whether you're up close or far away though.
DeleteIs this "solo-raid" type content then? Is it equally tough on tanks or do they fare better than healers?
ReplyDeleteI find it hard to refer to anything as "solo-raiding" because to me raiding is intrinsically about grouping. Haven't seen much commentary from people doing it as tanks, but my impression is that they are slightly better off than the healers but can definitely also run into lack of dps issues.
DeleteFrom my experience on the PTS, each (tank and/or healer) will work, but it really depends on how high an influence level your companion is and which one you are using for each fight. Setting your companion to DPS and being comfortable micromanaging them as needed should let you make it through the fights reasonably well. Gear isn't really an issue as they are doable with 190 gear.
DeleteI would suggest doing EC as a dps first to get familiar with the fights.
I believe they've changed how the 15 Minute achievement worked compared to how it was on the PTS; over there, it was possible to complete the Championship, die once halfway through Round 6, and still manage to complete that achievement.
ReplyDeleteI don't know exactly what they've changed, whether conversations count or not now if they never did before, but something is certainly different as even with no deaths the achievement is very elusive.
In general, the Championship is definitely best-suited for DPS. Indeed, I've noticed several people comparing notes on how to do things quicker (notably DPSing Round 5 down before the Unstable Skytroopers and kiting Brawler and Ripper whilst a DPS Comp takes Crush on Round 6), while virtually nobody has openly considered how a dedicated healer should increase the speed of their run.
It certainly isn't doing much to increase wider interest in healing, which is potentially concerning due to how this is the closest thing we've yet received to "group-content training".
Follow-up:
DeleteYup, they've definitely changed it so that everything counts from combat in Round 1 onwards, conversations included. Whilst I'm not 100% sure that intermissions are an actual part of it, I wouldn't put it past BW to include them in the time.
I timed myself on a couple of completely deathless runs earlier, using StarParse for one and a stopwatch for the other. The SP run had 11 minutes' worth of fight-time (no idea as to overall time), whilst the other (after changing Xalek to DPS Rounds 8 and 9 instead of Tank) lasted 15 minutes and 33 seconds in total - I blame the Doom Droid's posthumous Pulse Node - neither of which resulted in the achievement.
For science!
Delete