Darkhold really "easy" or merely what we were warned about by Matsui?

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Originally Posted by Delsus

If its whoever has hate on the tank, im sure that if the tank is decent they should always go to the tank if its whoever has hate its not hard to manipulate to win.

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That's not the point, the ghosts form a circle around the person with the aggro. It's pretty easy to hold hate on Batraal in comparison to ogre, however the (I think) most popular method of tanking batraal currently is to keep him stationary with the tank standing between Batraal's legs so that he is able to avoid all or at least most of the ghost AOE's. However this creates a barrier around batraal that makes melee DD maneuvering difficult.

What you can do to address this problem is to have the tank completely joust the ghosts, by moving every time the ghosts disappear (since they will reappear at his location when they begin the move). In order to do this method the tank's healer has to move with the tank, and what makes that difficult is that when Batraal ~30% starts doing his frontal which has a wide (180 degree) radius the mage has to carefully coordinate his movement with the tank so that he does not accidentally get hit by this (as batraal will sometimes fire it off during the move).

Or it is possible you could just have the tank move enough while minimizing the healer's movement so that they still get hit by 2-3 ghosts, but the melee are free to do damage.

However I rarely see either of these strategies, most groups simply use the stationary tank method because then they don't have to worry about the ghost movements at all really. I'm saying if people weren't able to overpower these bosses and soak that damage as easily, forcing them to joust the fight would be significantly less simple. It wouldn't be the hardest fight ever, no, but it wouldn't be as insultingly simple to execute as was implied in the other thread "tank batraal in corner, kill skeletons, pop circles" (no mention of ghosts which I consider a/the main intended obstacle of the fight).

Stop saying joust.

The only point I agreed with OP on was the Doc Mog quote, which really weren't his/her words.

I think a simple and easy solution would be allow people to unlock different diffuctulites to the dungeon. Everyone starts off at level one, And once you beat it, level 2 will be available, and so on.

Increasing the level increases the level of the mobs inside, as well as changes the boss fights slightly. Going off the same scale of leves with a max level of 5. Those players seeking a redicilious amount of challenge would find it, but only after they have completed the previous levels :)

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Originally Posted by DoctorMog

I disagree.

The purpose of my previous thread was to illustrate that a good encounter in a video game should be one that challenges players even after doing it a thousand times.

Learning a fight takes very little time and provides very little content if the fight itself proposes no challenge.

Batraal is a good example. It took us a few tries to learn the fight, and now we kill it regularly with no degree of difficulty.

Batraal however could have been a very challenging fight had he been reworked to provide a bit of randomness to the fight. Maybe he should have run into the eyes on a whim, that would have made it interesting. Or something, ANYTHING that would give the fight something to make a player who had done it fifty times go "oh crap"

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Makes me think of how the FFXI's limbus proto-Ultima fight was. Even with a seasoned alliance you always had that oh sh-- moment somewhere in the fight. I am sure we'll get this eventually, i think they did a pretty decent job with darkhold at giving content that even a pickup group could enjoy while giving most groups a real challenge with teh speed chest restriction. The avg ls does not have 8 players with all r50's lvl'd. My group has 3-4 ppl who are very OP'd and another 3-4 with 2-3 50's and the other 10+ are 1-2 50's and usually missing some sub skills.

I think both sides of the argument have a point. Can't people agree that this was a reasonable first dungeon (regardless of personal expectations for game difficulty in the long term)? Because of the uncapped implementation of Toto-rak, this is essentially the only "endgame" content. Personally, I don't think SE could afford to make it incredibly difficult without alienating a massive portion of the player base.

Do I find the strategy in the dungeon a little easy? Sure. But I think a huge factor in how quickly players were able to farm this dungeon is due to the unlimited access. Even the groups that cleared the dungeon in the early going were only doing so because they were ready to tackle the content for endless hours, in an attempt to lock down a strategy. Even a 12 hour timer would have prolonged this dungeon content for months. I'm not saying that's what they should have done, just that groups literally made 20 attempts on the dungeon on day 1.

As far as future difficulty goes, this highlights the flaws in the Armoury system, in my mind. You either design something difficult for the multi-r50s or difficult for the single-r50s (or you start limiting the cross-classing, in some manner). It's incredibly difficult to balance content for everyone with such an open-ended class system.

Really well-written post. It does indeed sound like there might be a way to make the fights a bit more exploit-proof.