Is IB not going on for another couple of hours?
I don't know. I'm at work now. I guess I could try remote play during lunch.
What was your strat for Skolas?
We ran left, smoked the left Servitor, sniped the crap out of Skolas to (hopefully) break the bonds before needing the second Servitor. Then we ran around handling the buff and putting small bits of damage on him, We got past the first mines only twice.
A real problem was how deeply inconsistent his behavior (and thus our attempts each run) became. Sometimes we took out barely a quarter of his health with him getting lucky teleports off and getting way too close to us, other times we burned him all the way down to the mine phase before the adds spawned. As a result of this, even though I'm sure we were making "progress" in total (improving), it felt a little more like any given attempt was a dice roll.
Dude. I feel bad that I wasn't online to help.
I appreciate it, don't feel bad. Really, problem is you can't just have someone jump in to help exactly. All three of us in the group needed the kill, and none of us actually wanted to leave or abandon the run. I pushed the absolute bounds of reasonableness for staying up with work the next day and I basically feel like battered death right now.
I was disco'd as my team killed him after tons of hours of struggle and haven't had the fortitude to try again for a week.
That's brutal. I was getting disconnected by my router throughout the night too...
I get why there isn't check pointing, but, man, I wish there was SOMETHING to keep your progress.
Yeah, I don't know exactly how to solve the problems I have with the encounter (odd as things usually come to me naturally in this vein). But as I told multiple groups there is a natural cadence to teamplay in the raid/raidlike encounters in Destiny that is bitchslapped by the tougher PoE bosses:
- Spend time making it to boss fight
- Wipe repeatedly against boss as the mechanics are learned and adapted to
- Equal or surpass the time spent getting to the boss with consecutive attempts on the boss
- Continue until a) success or b) the real-world time limits imposed on the group members
- If B, reconvene another night with additional preparation/restored energy and morale
This rhythm is very important because the later it gets the more mistakes are likely due simply to human fatigue, and there are documented benefits to simply reattempting to tackle a problem after a break (
incubation). Because Destiny both lacks the "diffusion of responsibility" common to MMO raids with far larger groups (despite the difference in complexity), and also aims to be more accessibly casual in general, the aspects of raid design so far that facilitated this cadence were all overwhelmingly positive ones. The eventual success that concluded each experience with each prior encounter was incredibly satisfying- in my case, even with regard to the particularly reviled HM Crota encounter at level 32.
Prison of Elders spits on point 5 and smushes its face in the dirt and rubs it around mockingly. Not only are you unable to reconvene and simply attempt the boss again even if you have the exact same fireteam, instead having to re-run 4 full rounds of three waves, plus an additional (not particularly quick) boss... if too much real-world time elapses between attempts you are effectively locked out of the encounter altogether when reset hits. In other words, even if I
am willing to rerun the full Arena from round 1, I can't even attempt the same encounter I tried last night for at least another two weeks because "Void Burn version" is gone. I'm a very tenacious personality and it's deeply unsatisfying to have just lost the chance to retry. Another point is that with a 3 person team the margin for error is that much smaller, so even a group that knows exactly what it's doing has
less leeway than in the raid bosses despite the lack of convenient replayability.
I should note i'm saying this all from the perspective of someone who doesn't care too much about the rewards, and I'm okay with the rewards/reward chances that are given for completion. If I were to add in the reward/"worth it" aspect things get remarkably worse. In either raid, reaching step 2 above means I've already had multiple guaranteed loot drops and reward chances which are actually in my pocket- even if I never beat the boss, I keep those rewards.The fact that the full quantity of guaranteed rewards and reward chances are all gated behind final completion is paired with the dead horse of no checkpoints whatsoever, which equals a real insult to injury scenario. It's pretty difficult to process that you can spend more than a dozen hours on this content with no reward doled out at all, not even XP or glimmer.
The saddest part of this is that I actually rather like PoE 35 overall. Each of the preceding rounds is challenging and fun enough, some of them actually fairly interesting loadout puzzles (Round 1 excepted as it's a bit of a freebie). In contrast to some opinions I've seen I certainly don't think a Burn is inherently unfair as an Arena modifier and can almost always be spun advantageously. In these 5 rounds, I found the steady-paced-improvement-with repeat-attempts that I love, and though each required some trial and error, I came out the other side feeling extremely confident about tackling them effectively using a consistent strategy- exactly the way I
don't feel confident about all the time I've spent with Skolas.
At this point with the Burn rollover, against all my instincts I'm feeling pretty compelled to just get in there this week and blast his face off in a hellstorm of Gjallarhorns. I mean I still don't even have my first kill. It's a bit of a shame.
