General Feedback
Overall the dungeons and arena are solid experiences. The daily exalted farm meta is interesting and gives you a reason to check different tiers and different dungeons each day. Loot overall drops at a good clip. I still feel there is more story to explore inside these dungeons and I hope they develop into something more over time. It would also be nice if there were more context clues hinting at where an exit may be for those who want to just rush down the boss. It’s fine slaughtering hordes for the extra area bonuses, but sometimes I just want to get to the boss without wandering around the edges. I’m also hoping to see more features and bosses for Arena to spice it up.
Lightless Arbor
I still don’t feel this dungeon makes you interact with the light mechanic enough to prep you for the boss. This could be easily fixed by redesigning the first root wall you encounter after your first dungeon gate transition. At the moment you can just kill the root wall and stand over top of the bonfire to light it. The boss however forces you to throw the light into the bonfire to work. To avoid later confusion I would ask that the first bonfire has a blockade like the boss that you have to throw your light source over to progress.
Otherwise, you could get into a situation where the player doesn’t know to throw their light at the boss bonfires, like what happened to me the first time I encountered this dungeon way back when. I find this especially important as I never found a reason to engage with throwing my light source outside of the final boss fight. It may as well not even be there.
For the boss fight itself I am very happy with the changes. You finally lowered the damage of the big rock drop along with the titan minions that spawn. No longer am I getting one-two punched by that ridiculous rock drop into the titan spawn slam combo. I still think the big rock drops too fast, but at least it is survivable now.
The heart has been much better since I disabled the move while targetting option in general settings. I saw there was a recent update to try and fix it but I still don’t trust it. Standing still while attacking and attack move works just fine without it. Now I don’t run my face into the Titan Heart trying to hit it. Overall this portion of the fight seems fine. The poison wedge attack DOT is very punishing, but it is also very predictable(usually).
Sometimes the poison wedge attack fires off right behind a safe spot for Spore Beam and that feels super cheap, but I’ve figured a way around it. I worry about this combination for other classes without rebuke, however. All in all the T4 version feels much more fair while having mechanics that keep you engaged.
Reward wise I think the vault is just OK. When I’m at the gear level where I have tons of gold to just drop on a super vault it feels kind of pointless though.
Soulfire Bastion
My first impression was that the rares were overly tanky at tier 4. Especially just starting out in Empowered Monos. As I got more gear this impression changed, but does the HP multiplier need to start at 180%? It’s a bit of a slog before your character gets going. Overall the dungeon feels balanced and the mechanic is ever present and useful. A player should never walk into the fight with Cremorus without feeling prepared. Super well telegraphed and one of the few Boss fights where you aren’t cramped into a tiny area to increase difficulty. Very satisfying overall.
If I had one pain point to discuss it would be that minions don’t get the fire / necrotic shield. This is extremely painful playing minion-based Forged Guard as my minions die nonstop with nothing I can do to stop it. That’s 90% of my DPS just perpetually slashed all fight.
At best, I maintain 2-4 swords at a given time out of 12. That shouldn’t be with 6500 hp minions that take 50% less all damage innately and another 45% less damage from minion power. I don’t even want the minions immune for this fight just let them gain my shield so I get punished for not doing the fight well, but not punished for switching in time.
Reward wise the shop is cool. It’s probably the best out of the bunch since exalt hunting kind of trumps most other rewards at a certain point.
Temporal Sanctum
After running through this place so many times it’s beginning to feel like a hallway simulator. I still very much like the look and feel of the place but don’t feel nearly as engaged as I once was. The mechanic is constantly in the forefront which I think is good, but I don’t feel like it is enforced in the right way.
Unlike any of the other dungeons nothing about the Julra fight is taught throughout the dungeon ( more could be done in other dungeons too but Sanctum is the biggest offender). I would like to see traps and minions that use Julra’s mechanics forcing the player to time shift and less annoying locked doors.
For example, a crystal sentinel could be standing in front of a door opening charging up one of Julra’s big slam attacks forcing you to time shift to avoid it before you pass through. More healing fountains and Divine pillars could be spread out forcing you to pass through certain parts of the Sanctum differently. You could choose to avoid the harder fights or push through while focusing on those priority targets. I think things like that would be far more interactive than running through doors.
Julra herself is still my most hated fight. She’s the only T4 fight that is still just a coin flip on my character. It feels like the fight is more up to RNG than my skill as a player due to 2 things. The first is excusable as she currently has a bug that makes her attacks go invisible from time to time. The second I have a real problem with, however.
That issue would be how she positions herself within her beams. I play point-blank melee. You can’t get more in your face than multistrike and it is hell trying to get damage uptime on her because of it. I know you can move to different parts of the arena to try and make her move, but it is in no way guaranteed. In fact, sometimes I’ll move her out and she will just walk back into an unreachable area.
My Last T4 Julra kill had me sit through 4 extra phases of her waddling herself into the center of her beams. 4 phases of being unapproachable, not to mention even if I could spawn my forged weapons they wouldn’t be able to last long inside the beams. It was frustrating, miserable, and all around just not fun. That is not where the problems end, however.
Her shadow ball line attack deals way too much damage for an instant ability that makes it almost impossible to dodge point-blank (at least on purpose). This like a lot of attacks needs a damage modifier that ramps up as the projectile travels. Point-blank melee feels overly punished by attacks like this. Say it does 50% damage point blank and slowly ramps up to 100% at full range.
Pillar spawning is also not predictable. This can lead to cheap scenarios where you have cleared the pillars, don’t get a chance to clear them again, and are now stuck in the ruined timeline with a full pillar stack. It feels cheap. Please just respawn pillars every time the player shifts into the divine timeline. I’m more than happy to pay the price for a mechanic when I mess up, but Julra doesn’t even give you time in some situations to fail.
Lastly, the DOT mitigation changes have greatly lessened the feel-bad moments from Julra’s 1 shot beams ( they are 2 shots now so you have time to heal), but I would still like a way to interact with them. Some type of console I can destroy or maybe I can trick Julra into hitting something to turn them off. I don’t like cramped fights, especially if the boss can use those mechanics to stop me from doing anything for large portions of time. Let me open up the arena so I can fight her on my terms.
Reward wise legendaries are cool. There aren’t many that benefit minion-based Forge Guard at the moment but the ones I do use feel great. I do wish there was maybe something else I could do when not on the legendary hunt though. The eternity cache and the vault are my most skipped rewards. Nine times out of ten I don’t even bother going to the next zone as there is no reward for me. I guess the boss’s uniques are nice it just feels a bit hollow.
Arena
The arena rebalance feels great damage-wise. Arena Champion Aflrig still feels a bit too avalanche spammy, but outside of that, the bosses feel great. If I would suggest one thing that could spice up Arena I think it would be spawning a guaranteed experience shrine on each map. Arena used to be the best way to farm EXP. I’m not so sure after the corruption rework. Faster leveling being the main bonus would get me more excited to do more arena runs.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I still really like the dungeon system but it could be improved upon. I’d like an easier time rushing to bosses so I don’t have to farm the whole area. The overall maps could also use some spicing up. Lightless Arbor and Soulfire Bastion bosses feel pretty balanced, while Julra is still a major outlier. Lastly, Arena could be made a bit more attractive by offering more exp.
