Dungeons - Guardians of Fire
Here is the first boss preview of our map. The heroes and abilities are complete all that is left to do is add more bosses and terrain.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Additional Information:
Zakariahliklikleh and myself worked on this map. We'd also like to thank SweetZombieJesus for providing his excellent library we used for the hero selection as seen in the video Part 1.
What is in the videos
We were a total of 4 players but we recommend playing it with 5. All heroes were level 2 and had 2 abilities to use when facing Ter'Ama. But there is a total of 5 abilites per hero (all unique) and they all have 2 additional higher levels each.
Rory Swann (Tank) : [Level 1] Taunt and [Level 1] Defensive Stance
- Taunt puts you back on top of threat forcing the enemy to attack you
- Defensive Stance has a long cooldown but provides 70% reduction to all damage taken for 10 seconds.
To use his abilites, Rory Swann gains energy for every point of damage he takes.
Egon Stetmann (Healer) : [Level 1] Heal and [Level 1] Guardian Shield
- Heal is a channeled restore that heals life every second
- Gurdian Shield is the blue dome around the tank every so often seen in videos 1 and 2. This absorbs up to 300 damage for 10 seconds.
Egon Stetmann has very good energy Regeneration allowing him to last for a long time in fights (we all die otherwise :) )
Jim Raynor (Damage) : [Level 1] Snipe and [Level 1] Impact Rounds
- Snipe deals a large amount of damage at a target from very long range.
- Impact rounds deals a bit of damage but weakens the target making reducing it's attack speed.
Jim Raynor's big advantage is that he's not energy based. His abilities only have a cooldown cost which makes him very useful in combat. All his damage is ranged physical.
Tassadar (Damage) : [Level 1] Psionic Sphere and [Level 1] Mental Instability
- Psionic Sphere is the photon cannon like orb that Tassadar hearls towards the target. Deals a lot of Damage and splash.
- Mental Instability is a curse that stays on the target for 10 seconds. If it stays it's full duration, the curse detonates and deals damage to the target as splash and also creates a small damage over time for 12 additional seconds on the target. (Looks like the MotherShip Vortex on Ter'Ama in the video Part 1)
This class gains energy based on the damage it deals. His spells are very powerful but require a lot of energy to conjure and thus he needs to use his regular attack often to unload the large damaging spells.
Since the last class (Zeratul) was not used in this video, I'll leave it up to you guys to check it out yourselves. We hope you enjoy the video and would also like to note, this is just the first boss on the map. The published version has a second boss which we couldn't get to but he is much cooler and worth the effort to get to. Also much MUCH harder than Ter'Ama. :D
Ter'Ama:
Cleave (Passive): Every time he swings he cleaves people in front of him.
Bile Bomb (Cast): Every 15 seconds he'll throw some slime at you which ignites into a ball of fire dealing damage every second when u stand in it.
Enrage (Cast): He enrages doubling his damage and his attack speed and his movement speed (hits very very very hard). This happens once every 35 seconds.
Time Limit: If he is not killed within the allocated time, he makes a Final deadly enrage that will kill anything in his path and lose you the game.
There is one last thing I'd like to note, in the video part 2 you could hear at one point the healer on ventrilo tells me he needs to regenerate energy so we used the landscape to our advantage. Basically we waited for his enrage to be used up and then in that window where he moves at normal speed and enrage is still not available we had him chase me (Tank) around the crater of lava on the upper right corner of the map. On future boss releases there will be fights where you will need to use the land to your advantage to succeed.
Update 27/10/2010
Dungeons - Guardians of Fire v1.11 now live and playable on Battle.net
Added Features
- 2 Brand new bosses await the adventurers and in a whole new map extension. This includes new custom trash mobs and boss abilities.
- Fixed some balance issues and UI bugs.
- Fixed an issue where some higher level abilities had no animations/models.
- Attunements now added. If a player has beaten the boss on the selected difficulty, a vote to skip the boss is initiated. All 5 players need to vote "Yes, skip this boss" in order to skip the boss and his minions. Experience gained from killing the boss and his minions will still be given to all players.
- Heroes no longer have infinite re-spawns. Number of lives changes based on game difficulty (ie Easy has most lives per Hero to Hard with least.)
Coming Soon
- Final Boss
- Scores and Rankings
Quite the contrary we appreciate the information and hope to get more of it as it is part of the polishing stage of the map. We hope to make the map doable and playable on all levels and most importantly enjoyable.
I'll answer your questions as best I can in boss encounter order :D
For Ter'Ama, when it comes to healing the tank when he stands north of the boss, the next version of the map released will have this solved by allowing you to use the unit frames on the left of your screen to heal/dispel the target. For the time being, if you are the healer and wish to heal the tank while he stands north of Ter'Ama, selecting the skill and placing your cursor over the tank's location and clicking will work because your heals cannot target the boss (even if you can't see the tank.)
Duration of the first boss's Bile Bomb is constant. The way it works is, the farther you are from the center of the inferno, the less damage you take from it. The splash damage is something like 100% at dead center, 50% at 0.5 radius out and 30% until the edge of the flames. There are a number of ways to counter this attack. First would be to avoid it entirely. When the timer for his cast reaches about 3 seconds, start moving (command your unit to walk in a certain direction.) If Ter'Ama targets you with the fire it will land but due to the projectile speed it will land behind you and will miss you entirely (the fire will remain on the floor but as there is no one there it's not threatening.)
For Drazzan, on Easy mode, he casts the bubble once every 45 seconds. As the healer, I have beaten this boss (with randoms) with and without the Replenishment ability (the dispel.) Mind Link is the ability that he casts which DOTs the target and heals him (the only behavior the Healer can dispel on that boss.) This spell, whether it expires or is dispelled will look for a new target to bounce to. Dispelling it in other words will prove ineffective if it just bounces to a target next to the one you dispelled. Curse of Demise (the bubble ability) cannot be dispelled. But this skill was designed to let any 2 players survive inside it (but barely). In other words, if a target gets hit with the curse and only 1 teammate enters it (at full HP) they will both come out of it alive, but with nearly nothing. Worst case scenarios: Tassadar and Egon Stetmann. Those 2 characters have the weakest HP in the group. If Tassadar is hit with the Curse of Demise and Egon Stetmann is the only team mate to enter his bubble, they will both survive (if they were at full HP when it goes away) but they will have maybe 5-7 HP left each. That said, on Normal, Drazzan gains the aura Psionic Interference which causes about that much damage every 3 seconds or so if you are within his aura's range about 9 yards. Meaning if the Boss is closer to you, then the 2 players will survive the Curse but will die to the aura one tic later. When we originally designed this ability, it was done to require only 3 people inside the domes for a good result. In other words, if all 4 remaining players are inside it, the damage done is very small. I'd need to know more specifics of where the position of everyone was on your encounters. If on the other had there are 2 domes up it becomes near impossible to survive.
Hope this helps :D
Played it again 2-3 times with a few randoms, got to the second boss again. We had one guy repeatedly die and not know why he wasnt moving, swearing he didnt die etc, but the 4 of us that were actually alive at the second boss got him to about 5-6k hp. Hes definitely very doable with all 5 people, but do to me not taking the decurse/debuff remover, he healed too much and hit the enrage timer about 10 seconds after the creep came into play.
Next time if im the healer for sure ill have the debuff remover, but its a pain in the ass to have to remind people of what skills to take before the bosses. Im sure its part of the learning curve to wipe and restart on the second boss with a different skillset, but like I said, you get grouped with differnt people almost every round except maybe 1 or 2 if you are lucky stick around for a second try.
I love the map, I'd love to spend a day learning the fights with a party of people also interested but I dont see that happening with randoms from BNet.
Also, It doesnt seem that you can heal people via their portrait health bar/ "raid frame", and telling the tank he cant be north of the huge ass boss or hes not gonna get heals is a pain in the ass as well. :) The fire also lasts an incredibly long time after its on the ground, so long that if you cant see yourself getup, you are almost instagibbed as soon as you res. :)
Lemme know if you want me to keep tossing ideas at you. I know its your map, and if you intended all this stuff to be the way it is/the difficulty it is on easy then feel free to tell me to stfu. I won't take it personally!
I think we did the first boss on normal, failed the second boss, then reloaded as the same 5 of us on easy. We wiped again because i tried to remove the bubble with curse, then we read the description the THIRD time(On easy again) and all the dps/me(healer) ran into the bubble after it was cast. Im not sure if the tank ran in or not on all the tries but at least 3-4 of us did.
The bubble kinda reminds me of Blood Queen in ICC when 3 people get pact of the darkfallen. Actually a LOT of that fight seems pretty similar to BQ. I just think the penalty for not having EVERYONE in the bubble is pretty intense seeing as there is no gear so to speak, so you can never get gear to help later on.. Like if the first bite dies on BQ (Again with the BQ reference :P sorry.) Eventually you can far out-gear the DPS requirement, and 1 person dieing isnt a huge deal anymore.
Just seems the way it is now, one untimely death wipes the party. I can see if the tank dies, its a wipe.. but maybe port everyone to the entrance of the map after a full wipe, or give the healer a Battle type res heal only useable 1 per fight maybe? But if the healer get hit with the bubble, and noone comes to help him and he gets 1 shot, its also GG because then the tank dies unless hes got his cooldowns up, and even then.. 1 less person in the bubble adds massive damage to its AOE.
Sorry if this seems like a jumble or thoughts at the end, just running some scenarios through my head trying to come up with what might fix it a bit for the easier modes. I'm sure the boss is very doable if you have 5 friends committed to downing the bosses/progression so to speak, but most of us find maps and get assigned 4 other random asshats, a pat on the ass and a go gettem tiger from the lobby before we even get to chat with our teammates. :P
We're still working on balance and mechanics to make it doable on all levels. What difficulty level were you guys playing it on and also, how many people were collapsing onto the bubble? The mechanic is designed so that if even 1 person stands inside the dome, both the person domed and player standing inside it will survive but barely. Keep in mind also that Drazzan has an aura that deals periodic damage to people in range of it.
As for the mob resetting we are looking into it as we speak. Thanks for the feedback. Since I've beaten the 2nd boss on Easy difficulty I would like to see how you guys tried to do it and maybe then I can get a clear picture of what happened.
Note: If more than 1 person gets hit by the bubble at one time, yes, it is almost a guaranteed kill. That's the point of the boss. The group needs to stay spread out at least 3 yards apart each and when one person is hit by the bubble, all 4 others collapse to it. If it happens that 2 people get frozen at once, then the remaining 3 need to stand in the area where both bubbles cross.
I dunno if you guys are superhumanly great at this game or what, but the second boss annihilated the group i was playing with about 4 times.
We stacked after the green bubble/aura and it still one shot/almost 1 shot everyone, i dunno maybe we were just a bad team?
Second, the mobs don't reset when you die/wipe, so even if you wipe to trash and have 5 lives left, you all revive at your own pace, and just die repeatedly one by one.
Otherwise great map, looks like its got lots of potential.
Update 29/10/2010
Dungeons - Guardians of Fire v1.12 now live and playable on Battle.net
Latest Changes
- Drazzan's Mind Link ability is now more visible and working as designed.
- All Bosses will now deal more damage to all Heroclasses except for Rory Swann (Tank.)
- Tassadar's Psionic Sphere energy cost changed to 75 (up from 50.)
- Game will now properly end in defeat when the Boss' time limit is reached.
- When a new attunement is reached, it will now properly display on the screen for the player.
- Rory Swann's Taunt ability now has a sound when used.
- All the player's hero unit frames are now displayed on the left of your screen below the boss information window for all players. This includes their Life and Energy bars.