Baelsar's Wall might need rebalancing...

[The_Last_Dragoon]

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.