Baelsar's Wall might need rebalancing...

So when the expansion finally did drop and while everyone was held up with instancing problems for the MSQ my friend (a returning ARR player) had been able to get his item level above 230 due to the reduced cost of i260 gear in Idyllshire. Since I was helping him blast his way through the story I queued up as geared tank for Baelsar's Wall. While the initial pulling and the managing of aggro was a bit weird at first, it wasn't too hard to do, and I imagine that anyone who has had to play 30 levels of it won't be so bent out of shape. For the most part, despite the party being made up of myself and 3 new players, we made it to the second boss with few setbacks.

The Armored Weapon is where everything went down the drain. Two major mechanics seem to have been changed drastically for the worse. First, at the start of Phase 2 when a ton of adds are summoned, I noticed a severe amount of damage coming at me despite my cooldowns. Literally a single volley from all of them brought me to just over half my HP, meaning a tank at around the minimum ilevel would be screwed if the adds existed for more than 5 or 6 seconds. Secondly, when he casts Dynamic Sensory Jammer and then puts an AoE underneath a player there's normally plenty of time to get out of the circle, but the time between him setting up the AoE and it executing seems to have shortened because that time frame doesn't exist anymore.

Our first time through with me as a Tank ended in failure because we spent over 30 minutes flailing at that boss and couldn't get past it due to 3/4 players being around minimum item level. When I went through a second time as heals (specifically Scholar, which is the same type of healer we had before), I noticed that the patch hurt our maximum MP pretty severely, and unlike my tank, my healer was only around the high 240s in terms of item level. Aetherflow was only restoring a minimal amount of MP, meaning that you have to take Lucid Dreaming if you plan on doing any sort of damage during a fight that could be mildly heal intensive. I'll be honest, pre-4.0 it was insanely easy to heal, but they may have restricted what they can do a little too much.

When we finally caught back up to the Armored Weapon I thought it would be a piece of cake since the tank we had was just as geared (PLD) as I was and this time I was able to heal. While doing the fight I noticed that I was very quickly running out of MP when I tried to help with damage. Oddly enough too, when the adds spawned he took insane amounts of damage equal to the amount I had taken earlier. When I asked him about he said that even Hallowed Ground wasn't stopping the damage output from the buggers. It makes me think that just maybe these adds weren't balanced with the consideration of very small MP pools for heals and for the loss of Parry which would help with large pulls.

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Originally Posted by The_Last_Dragoon

that a severe lack of parry.

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That was pretty funny.

On topic, I've also noticed that I seem to be taking more damage across the board on my PLD. Massive pulls that were no problem before are suddenly difficult. Healing, too, is harder. I've never let someone die in Brayflox NM before, but now I can check that box. :(

I don't know why it seems this way. I really haven't the foggiest.

They've re-designed things. On my WAR doing HW dungeons I'm getting hit pretty hard, and it's noticeable that the healer has to take care of me more.

But I'm also having to use Cooldowns more. I can't say for sure but to me it seems they've upped the dmg so tanks take more and healers have to heal more and DPS are having to carry the heavy load.

Right now what's coming from all this is everyone is learning their ROLES and not just mind-numbing running through things like a zombie as much. I have to use Rampart in pulls, DPS need to reduce agro via abilities. I've seen SCH's heal me and run out of MP while doing Damage. From looking at this and all over, it seems they've made things a bit "tougher" because we're all connected by the same chain of events.

What the learning curve is now is using the abilities you didn't think you would ever have to. For example, melee have access to some sort of TP regen. A warrior may need to over power a bit more and they will need to call on a Goad.

I am currently seeing the need for support from my party, though we're so use to not asking for it that it's a new thing.

Peoples (not singling out this thread at all I mean if you look at any forum subject) initial reaction is to think something is wrong. Well there might be, but not so much with the game but with us. We have gotten so use to the lack of synergy and co-op gameplay that now that it's becoming something more major, we don't know what to do. Myself included!

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Originally Posted by dragonseth07

That was pretty funny.

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Honestly, I was falling asleep when I posted this and I felt the need to submit it before I started losing my train of thought. I'll correct it though, XD

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Originally Posted by Leigaon

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I was mostly pointing at a mechanic for the second boss in Baelsar's Wall that is required for the HW MSQ being much harder than it should be because of the loss of Parry and Piety. The fact that an overgeared tank or healer would have trouble with it is reason for rebalancing because in the situation where all the players are at or near the minimum item level of 230, the fight becomes insanely demanding of the players.

I feel I should point out that parry does still exist, we only lost parry as a stat on gear (and you should have been avoiding that like the plague anyway, so no "real" loss of parry%). If I had to guess (I haven't run these dungeons again since SB) the tank was probably trying to spend as much time in dps stance as possible, which is much harder to do now in SB.

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Originally Posted by Keldon

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Parry seems to occur much less than it used to, and I believe it's because it is a flat % chance instead of something that was boosted by gear. This is somewhat supported when you consider that when Piety was dropped from the main stats it also suffered a major reduction in total MP for a healer.

Additionally, not only was I the tank the first go around in attempting the dungeon, but I am sure that the Paladin did not drop Shield Oath during the fight in question that I believe needs rebalancing.

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Originally Posted by Leigaon

What the learning curve is now is using the abilities you didn't think you would ever have to.

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I found myself contemplating using Repose on Bardam's Mettle because even with Divine Benison readily available the tank was taking a lot of damage. This was funny for me because I remember when using it or Sleep on the second boss in Brayflox was the thing to do.

All fights are balaned around min i level sync settings ? Did you run the duty on that setting ? IF not then there is no balancing issue to discuss

I did this the other day off a roulette. I noticed on PLD I was taking more damage than usual. Then I realized I had no oath on when we got to the first boss XD

I also ended up with the other duty added at that time with the volcano diremite end boss and not realizing shield oath was off till we got to the second boss. Wish lvl sync would stop turning it off if I'm still at a lvl where its available. >.<

Mobs have direct hit for one, and not at an uncommon rate. You do get. 60s CD parry chance in role actions. But in general incoming damage has gone up. Gotta be a bit choosier with your defensive CDs and healers are spending more GCDs being healers (some find this to be horrible for some reason, dont ask me).

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Originally Posted by Darty123

All fights are balaned around min i level sync settings ? Did you run the duty on that setting ? IF not then there is no balancing issue to discuss

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The problem is that the dungeon can be pretty difficult (specifically the second fight) even with an adequately geared party, I'd imagine it would be even harder at min ilevel since the tank won't be wearing full i260-70 gear. The problem is that this fight was balanced around a party of ilevel 230 back when healers and tanks were naturally stronger and it wasn't re-balanced when the nerfs and optimization was implemented in SB. I'm not saying it's impossible, especially if the players are experienced, it's just that this dungeon is required for the new content and it is now exceptionally harsh on players who are new to the content.

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Originally Posted by The_Last_Dragoon

Honestly, I was falling asleep when I posted this and I felt the need to submit it before I started losing my train of thought. I'll correct it though, XD



I was mostly pointing at a mechanic for the second boss in Baelsar's Wall that is required for the HW MSQ being much harder than it should be because of the loss of Parry and Piety. The fact that an overgeared tank or healer would have trouble with it is reason for rebalancing because in the situation where all the players are at or near the minimum item level of 230, the fight becomes insanely demanding of the players.

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Don't move or cast during sensory jammer and you won't get knocked up allowing plenty of time to get out of an aoe

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this easy face-roll dungeon, even while leveling and doing MSQ.

It might be because the gear of a level 70 player is getting synced down to a level lower than someone in, say, Alexandrian gear, but that shouldn't be affecting stuff like the sensor+telegraph combo.

I ran the Gladiator job quest on an alt the other day, and I had to try it several times before I cleared. Even though I knew what I was doing, my gear was quite poor, and the enemy gets a healer who does nothing but heal. Including the very strong black mage you're expected to kill on your own.

I think the devs need to have a quick run by all of their pre-SB content just to check that everything is still balanced properly, because it looks like the severe change in game mechanics might be messing up their earlier balancing.

The only part I had an issue with was the Armored Weapon.

I popped both DRK native defensive buffs, used my combo to apply Blind, and I still got so low I had to hit Living Dead to have a backup in case I died.

I completed a synced minimum iLevel run of this dungeon on, approximately, July 10, so under Patch 4.01 conditions.

Party composition was:

• Tank - Warrior (me)
• Healer - Astrologian (PuG)
• DPS - Ninja (my friend)
• DPS - Dragoon (Pug)

The entire run was completed with no wipes and minimal deaths (I don't remember any crazy circumstances occurring.) Our dragoon went AFK/DCed during Boss #2 and never returned, so we completed everything after Boss #2 with a party of three.

Specifically regarding Boss #2. I didn't notice anything especially unusual about the damage being taken by our party (obviously we were getting hit hard at minimum iLevel), but I was in my tank stance the entire dungeon and rotated though all my defensive cooldowns, trying to time them to be as effective as possible against anticipated incoming damage. I don't believe our healer was doing much DPS, as they were healing most of the time. (continued...)

(...continued)

All Boss mechanic timings appeared to be normal to what I experienced immediately pre-SB, and I have run the dungeon at least 20 times in the past four weeks (glamour farming for Filibuster sets).

There is time to wait for the Extreme Caution debuff (red dots) to wear off and then immediately exit from the AoE circle from Diffractive Laser so as to not take damage from either attack.

My question for the original poster regarding the difficulty they experienced on Boss #2 would be, "was anyone in your party taking massive damage hits from the Dynamic Sensory Jammer (Extreme Caution debuff) mechanic?" That should be a zero-damage mechanic for all party members. If anyone gets hit by that attack they're going to lose 80% of their HP in a normal run (and probably 95% of their HP at minimum iLevel.)

I've done Baelsar's as a PLD after 4.0 and I didn't notice much of anything wrong.

But then, I was...

A). Using Shield Oath and not Sword Oath because "EVERYBODY MUST DPS HARD!" these days. Screw that. I'm a tank. It's my job to not take any more damage than necessary.
B). Using defensive cooldowns (including Bulwark! Bulwark is awesome when the boss spawns all of those adds).
C). Using Clemency rather liberally (Especially after Bulwarking my Oath up to 100 in a few seconds lol).

I've always played defensively, and guess what? SE expects tanks to play Defensively. Who'da thunk it? A Tank is supposed to play Defensively. Mind = Blown for some people, I imagine.

If I wanted to deal Damage, I'd go as a SAM. I'm not there to deal damage, though. I'm there to keep the stuff interested in me, and to take as little damage as possible, or shall I say, eat up as less of the healer's MP as possible.

And seriously, if you are first-timing Baeslar's or any other x0 - level dungeon with minimum I-level, just stop.

Please, stop.

They have Tomestone Gear being so easy to get for a reason. You've had TEN FREAKING LEVELS to grind up Tomestones of Poetics. Every single day that passed between you dinging Lv50 and you arriving at Baelsar's Wall gave you opportunities to run Roulettes for not only XP, but also Poetics. You can buy Poetics gear the moment you step foot in Idyllshire, and there's NO Reason, None, to not have 2,000 Poetics by the time you step foot in Idyllshire which is way before you get to Baelsar's (or any of the other Lv60 dungeons).

Idyllshire is ~Lv58. That's two levels to buy Lv60 gear ahead of time so that you've got it the moment you ding 60.

Why are you in Baelsar's at minimum I-level again?

Never had any issues with this dungeon period (except for the second boss my first run). Not sure why people are tripping out about dungeons hitting harder. I mean, honestly sometimes I wish there was a little bit more of a challenge... I really enjoyed the mechanics of the bosses in this dungeon though!

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Originally Posted by Levram

Specifically regarding Boss #2. I didn't notice anything especially unusual about the damage being taken by our party (obviously we were getting hit hard at minimum iLevel), but I was in my tank stance the entire dungeon and rotated though all my defensive cooldowns, trying to time them to be as effective as possible against anticipated incoming damage. I don't believe our healer was doing much DPS, as they were healing most of the time. (continued...)

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No, the main problem with the boss on the second fight was the almost glitchy damage that was happening from the adds that he creates from Distress Beacon. I've been doing the dungeon recently on my PLD that I'm leveling and the damage output of these things has dropped considerably compared to when I did it during that first week of Stormblood. Back then, Hallowed Ground wasn't even stopping their damage, so I'm pretty sure that this was fixed by one of the oversweeping bug fixes.