The Dead Ends: The Dungeon that gives unending despair

[rewd]

it isnt needed for someone to learn their job even at 90 as crazy as that sounds. the games content is so easy that people dont have to be good.

Not to mention you can get to 90 with PvP/Beast tribes and learn absolutely nothing about the job.

[HollowedDoll]

Well to be fair the only thing giving me despair is that minion droprate.

[game_enjoyer]

genuinely blown away by the reception dead ends has gotten since release. it's no harder than any other msq content. it's on par with msq anyder, mt gulg, ala mhigo, bardam, or even azadaal. on top of that, it's another dungeon warrior players can solo heal

[Jirah]

One mechanic doesn’t make the entire dungeon “hard” and we need to come to grips that SE raised a bunch of spoiled brats that don’t care about mechanics even several expansions deep.

I don’t blame the player base for being carefree since they have gotten nothing to really make them cautious for 40 levels, but let’s stop the hyperbole, it’s not that hard and one mechanics doesn’t spell “bad design”

[Jirah]

It's really impressive how many people get to 90 and learn absolutely nothing at all about playing their job or role.

*sips tea*

[Veranolth]

*sips tea*

[TheMightyMollusk]

The only really terrible thing I've noticed was a marauder the other day. Why.

[Packetdancer]

genuinely blown away by the reception dead ends has gotten since release. it's no harder than any other msq content.

I think the thing isn't that the dungeon is any harder than others, but that the mechanics are not ones that players are necessarily used to seeing in dungeons, combined with penalties for failure that are also not ones they're used to seeing in that context.

And it's not just one or two "I don't see this in a dungeon often" mechanics, but more like a small pile of them.

I mean, for starters there are very few dungeons that inflict Doom, and I can't think of any other that inflicts two variants of it (the "Esuna to cleanse" and "heal-to-full to cleanse" versions). Moreover, one of them -- the first boss -- doesn't use the normal Doom debuff, so more than a few healers in there for the first time don't seem to notice and Esuna it. (And it's very inconvenient for controller players to read the tooltip associated with an unfamiliar debuff icon, as they cannot just easily mouseover it to read the description.)

Another example: exoflares are not a super-common mechanic in dungeons to start with... and the fact that the traveling puddles of Yuck in the first boss do not have the normal exoflare telegraph (the ">>>" in the circle of bad showing the direction of movement, as opposed to the visual tell of the wind current) has seemingly thrown some players for a loop, especially first-timers to the dungeon.

The second boss seems less prone to disaster, but the huge number of missile target icons seem overwhelming to some players in there for the first time, who panic.

The third boss has another Doom (the heal-to-full variant) if you get clipped by a mechanic, which I've seen healers overlook. Add to that the fact that it's another example of orange/red/yellow on orange/red/yellow mechanics a'la Phoinix; I've encountered some colorblind folks who literally cannot see the Prance puddles clearly against the bright golden grass, so aren't sure which is the safe spot to first stand in. (You can tell by watching where Ra-La lands during Prance, and thus recognizing where the safe spot is, but that does seem likely to be marginally more difficult than actually seeing the real extents of the AoEs.)

None of those mechanics are difficult, but taken as a whole and combined with Doom variants as penalties? That does seem to make the dungeon a little more intimidating for some players -- and thus a little more likely to have stumbles or missteps than many dungeons do. Like I said, I've only seen one genuinely disastrous run of Dead Ends... but I will grant that I've seen a lot more avoidable deaths to mechanics in there than in the other level 90 dungeons.

Conversely, take Sigmascape (for instance); none of the mechanics are really anything significantly different than things we've already seen in many a dungeon. And if you fail one all you ever get is a vuln stack, which is far more standard.

I actually like the Dead Ends, and I agree the mechanics aren't objectively difficult. But I think they are unexpected for many people, so I also understand why a lot of people don't like the dungeon.