Reviewing the Ruins

I said in my Elom story review that I was planning to write a separate post about what the Ruins of Nul flashpoint is like from a gameplay perspective. I ended up delaying this a bit since Bioware had to temporarily disable the flashpoint's bonus boss due to an exploitable bug shortly afterwards - I'd only had a chance to kill it once on solo mode at that point and didn't want to write a review until I'd had more opportunities to experience every encounter, including the bonus boss, multiple times. Fortunately last week's patch ended up putting the bonus boss back in, so here we are!

Visually, Ruins of Nul is... appealing. It doesn't have the breathtaking beauty of a Traitor Among the Chiss, but neither is it just a row of monotone corridors the way many flashpoints that take place on a starship or space station are. The scenery is mostly grey rock, but some of it is covered with snow, and in general the landscape is dotted with trees with bright red foliage. Not to mention that the skybox is dominated by a seemingly perpetual (partial?) solar eclipse, which makes for some pretty striking views if you take the time to pause and look around.

The overall length and pacing of the flashpoint is very good in my opinion, in that there isn't too much trash between bosses, and individual pulls don't take ages to die. The only slight criticism I might have on that note is that a disproportionate number of trash pulls are of the type that bursts out of the ground or suddenly appears out of nowhere - which is a fun gimmick every now and then, but can get a bit tedious if overdone, as it makes it hard to plan ahead when it comes things like pulling, kill order and crowd control: Stuff just appears and then you might as well AoE since everything's already in your face anyway. One has to wonder whether this was a conscious design choice to avoid the amount of trash skipping some groups like to perform via stealth in older content, where the trash is more predictable.

Another interesting pacing choice is that after the first boss, you have to advance to a locked door and then double back to pick up key stones for it - you can't go to pick up the key stones directly. It's not too much running around, but I still wonder why Bioware did that. There's also a small cliff in this area that's already inspired the usual pug nonsense of wasting ten minutes to try and climb up that one rock wall instead of killing two more easy trash pulls.

The boss fights are honestly... pretty good! (More on the Malgus bug later.) The first boss has a very straightforward strategy (to spread out in a cross-like formation around it), which is nonetheless important so as to avoid overwhelming your healer with swipe damage.

The second encounter has you facing off against a giant AI defense system ("player vs. wall" as I saw someone describe it) in a fight somewhat reminiscent of Directive 7's Mentor, which is a boss I always liked and whose mechanics we haven't really seen Bioware try and take inspiration from before, so I'm here for that too.

The bonus boss is a bit... odd. In multiplayer mode I like the strategic aspect of having different group members pick up different debuffs before the fight according to their role, but the fight itself can be a bit annoying. It basically has you facing off against three droids that have massive damage reduction shields, and the only way to temporarily remove them is to move around so that they hit each other with specific special attacks while trying to attack you. It's not a bad gimmick in theory, but in groups it's been my experience that - since two of the droids appear to have random aggro - it's very easy to end up with one guy being targeted over and over who never aims the attacks correctly, causing the fight to just drag on and on and on.

I will say that I've seen this encounter inspire some pretty funny "yelling at group members" moments though, mostly due to uncertainty about what to call each of the droids due to their awkward numerical names. Most of my guildies seem to have adopted Vulkk's nomenclature of Big Guy, Sword Guy and Floaty, though I think I've also heard Sword Guy get referred to as "skinny dude" or "jumpy one". In one run with Mr Commando we also had this rather Jarg-and-Sorno-esque exchange:

"Kill the Warden Unit!"

"Which one? They're all Warden Units!"

 

 

Before we get to the last boss fight, I guess it's worth calling out the "stairs boss" here, a gauntlet-type challenge between the bonus boss and final encounter. In it, you need to run up a narrow mountain path with some holes in it while adds keep spawning in and attacking you, plus giant red targeting circles appear under your feet every so often.

I kind of wonder what the design meeting for this part of the flashpoint was like: "Red circles are so old hat right now... how about we make players dodge red circles while also giving them minimal room to manoeuvrer and forcing them to fight at the same time?" It sounds like it could be a fun challenge on paper, but I've got to say the reality is... not that.

Fighting adds on a narrow mountain path could be fun if you could knock them to their deaths, but most of the time this doesn't work and they just bug out. Having to run around to kill them all while also dodging holes in the floor and red circles is just a bit much, especially on the higher difficulties, where all four party members will spawn red circles at the same time. Now, Bioware had some mercy on us here and you'll only actually be harmed by your own circles, but with how little space there is to move, it can still be hard to tell where one person's circle starts and another one ends. Bottom line is, I've probably had more wipes and random deaths on this gauntlet than on some of the bosses, and it doesn't feel super fun in my opinion. It's not an awful idea, but at least from my point of view it would benefit from having some aspect of it toned down a bit: make it viable to knock down the adds, make the red circles smaller, less frequent, or easier to tell apart... any of these would help.

Finally, the Malgus fight at the end manages to strike an interesting balance between having Malgus use abilities that we've also seen him use in previous fights and that he is well known for, such as Force lightning and powerful pushes and pulls, while also adding something new to show his increase in power. If anything, I was just slightly disappointed when I realised that the phase where he zooms around the platform at super speed is actually really easy to avoid by simply standing on the outer edge of the area, as he won't follow you there.

Of course, the thing about this fight that has had everyone talking is that a significant number of players were experiencing a hard to reproduce and awkward to squash bug that would cause them to get yanked under the floor or something, followed by insta-death. Having run the flashpoint at least a dozen times, I've never experienced or even witnessed this myself, so it's been rather odd to hear all these complaints about what a complete show-stopper that fight was for some people while trying to progress the story. It was definitely weird how it either seemed to affect people never, ever or all the time. One and a half months in and Bioware hasn't been able to officially state that they've managed to fix it... though the last patch did make some adjustments that apparently did solve the problem for some people at least.

In general, Ruins of Nul has had a rather odd launch period. Considering how everything Bioware adds to the game nowadays is supposed to be evergreen content, I try to primarily look at flashpoints from the perspective of how they'll feel to replay later down the line, but at the same time first impressions matter a lot, and players that have a very bad experience with a new flashpoint the first time they try it might never even want to give it another chance.

From that point of view it was interesting to see that Nul was initially tuned to be quite brutal, while also being one of only seven or so flashpoints available each week for more than a month. Some people quickly learned to fear it after repeated wipes, but because it was so new, my impression was that players were generally a bit more willing to soldier on and persist through difficulties, figuring that it was just a matter of learning the tactics. I've definitely felt that this mandatory crash course of having to deal with Ruins of Nul as your random over and over again, week after week, has served to accelerate the learning curve of the player base as a whole, where in previous expansions it would take people much longer to get the hang of a new flashpoint.

Still, I'll fully admit that I was glad when they opened up the flashpoint selection to the full set again with last week's patch, as well as hitting Nul with a well-deserved nerf bat. Especially the second boss with his bazillion adds was initially extremely demanding in terms of dps and healing required, and is now less so (without having been turned into a complete cakewalk, mind you). I hope that what with the Malgus bug and the harsh initial difficulty, players won't be too turned off from giving Ruins of Nul another try, as I think it's a pretty fun flashpoint overall that gets more things right than not.