Sepulcher of the First Ones Feedback

WoW Community Council

#1 - March 2, 2022, 12:24 p.m.

Another feedback post, for us all to add our thoughts about the new raid

After 2 and a half hours last night my guildmates and I had cleared 6/11 Normal, missing only Halondrus and Anduin. Here are my inital thoughts.

There is ALOT of trash. I’m glad a lot of it is skippable, with invisibility, but there is just a lot of it. I’m having flashbacks to Blackrock Foundry.
Vigilant Guardian feels very long for an opening boss, especially when compared to the other first bosses we’ve had this expansion in Shriekwing and The Tarragrue. Our kill included getting the 2nd and 3rd orbs at the same time, and was still our second longest kill time of the night (would have been the longest if not for a messy Artificer kill)
The downtime on Vigilant Guardian is also weird. You’re just kinda sitting in the bubble waiting for something to happen, whether it be adds spawning or the explosions starting.
Skolex has a weird interaction that might be a bug? We had a stack point in melee range to have the boss burrow to clear our dust stacks, and each time we stacked up, we got nuked by the blue swirls that target players. We tried waiting to stack until immediately after a set of blue swirls hit the ground, but still didn’t have enough time to get our debuff cleared. Our ending strategy involved baiting the retch in one direction and taking warlock portal well out of melee range of the boss, which worked quite well, but doesn’t feel like the right interaction.
Artificer is a great fight. The only issue I experienced was at times the portals were hard to see amidst the traps, brown swirls, and other effects going on, mixed with the floor color. I’m sure that will come with familiarity though.
Dausegne was easier once we saw the projectile that indicates where the first ring is coming from. Looking forward to this on higher difficulties when we have to stagger going through the circles.
Prototype Pantheon was probably my favorite boss from last night, and not just because I’m a frost DK. This fight has just about everything. Important interrupts, unique dodge mechanics, adds that have to die before the room fills up, and a heroism phase against 4 targets.
Lihuvim, I think I need to see on higher difficulties. It seems like the boss is doable without having any yellow puddles on the ground, but we had tons, and room to spare for the final phase. This is one of the biggest boss rooms I can remember, which makes it much less punishing (but also more punishing if you’re out of position before the add phase). Seems like a great fight.
Aesthetically, the raid is beautiful. Artificer, copying some mechanics from his encounter in Castle Nathria, was different enough to feel like a completely different boss, despite sharing a few mechanics.
The loot felt fun! We were lucky enough to kill a boss that drops tier gear, and saw 3 tier pieces drop in our 26 man group.
Lastly, and most importantly, as of yet none of the bosses feel the same. They are all distinct, yet they all work together. First day score for the raid is a solid 9/10. Only held back by the few things I mentioned above. Can’t wait to get through the rest of it and move up in difficulty.

Aelthas

Lead Encounter Designer

#4 - March 4, 2022, 5:18 p.m.

Hello! Thank you for this feedback. It’s similar to other threads we’ve seen here on the forums (and via other channels). Based on the feedback we’ve received, we’ve already been able to quickly make some changes to the Anduin, Vigilant Guardian, Artificer Xy’Mox, and Prototype Pantheon fights. As always, we’re publishing all the details about those changes within the same day that we make them here:

Hopefully those fixes are addressing the feedback and concerns you’ve raised.

Our encounter design and QA teams really want to hear ever more feedback from the community, so please keep it coming!

Cwnannwn

WoW Developer

#28 - March 14, 2022, 7:55 p.m.

Hello!

It is easy for us to remove entries for mechanics that are removed entirely. In the case of Skolex, the Ravening Burrow mechanic isn’t gone entirely in LFR, it’s different, and that it wasn’t changed by release is a bug that slipped by, which happens.

So what Skolex needs is to have the text entries involving the spell on LFR re-written, and that includes the Overview, the role based bullet points, and the spell description itself. Once that’s done, it gets passed to our localization teams across the globe which will translate it into all of the languages we support! Then QA is checking it, making sure everything’s right, and giving the thumbs up.

That’s a lot of people involved in a bug fix working across some vastly different time zones, so changing text is actually rather tricky. Compare this to the Wormhole Jaws mechanic, which we just removed on LFR after seeing the wing open and finding it wasn’t really a clean, clear, or fun experience. That was super easy, it wasn’t changed, it just got pulled entirely, and it’s easy to remove from the LFR dungeon journal. That’s something that’s done by one designer and verified by QA, no extra translation steps necessary.

This feedback is valuable though, we’ve seen and heard it from multiple sources, and we’ve already gotten started on an update for the Skolex Dungeon Journal entries! That update will have to be deployed in a full patch in the future though.

Laridae

Senior Game Designer

#37 - April 6, 2022, 5:56 p.m.

Thanks for the notes! These are useful for us to cross reference with our internal data points that we gather as well.

On that note, we internally gather data on things like how many times any group loses to a boss before killing it, fight duration, etc. These can be separated by raid difficulty, raid size, average item levels, date of kill, and more. If a boss shows up as out of band for a particular difficulty given its place in the raid, we open conversations to resolve that outlier. It’s not often that we might make a boss harder (especially in LFR), but certainly if data shows a boss to be too tough, we’ll take a deeper look at it.

On the topic of the dungeon journal, these are good points. At a high level, we try to have the dungeon journal describe to players what a spell does, and not how to handle a mechanic. An example previously mentioned is that Painsmith’s spikes in the dungeon journal tell you they do a bunch of damage if they hit players, but it doesn’t mention spike patterns or moving walls of spikes. Similar to that, the Lords of Dread and Rygelon dungeon journals should inform players what a spell effectively does, while at the same time not giving instructions to players as to how they should solve the mechanic. Experiencing the mechanic first hand should always be the most informative method for learning a boss. That’s not to say we always hit these points though, we’re constantly looking to improve on visibility and clarity in boss fights and the dungeon journal itself.

Thanks once more for the feedback points and bug reports though! For us, data points should not be the sole determining factor for making decisions–player sentiment and feedback also play a very important role.