I always see threads about nerfing the more difficult events. I personally think terror events should be the most terrifying part of a map. In most maps, the events feel like a time-gated cinematic where you’re just waiting for the end of some trivial task. Convocation feels like an appropriately difficult terror event for Cataclysm. I think all events should require some semblance of team cohesion and competency for the game’s “Extremely Hard” difficulty.
16 Likes
As much as I agree with you about 90% of events being tame and dull, I doubt you’ll find much player support for this stance. Even extremely good players barely give a toss about cohesion outside of modded difficulty premades. So making that skill a hard requirement will essentially kill off pub Cata overnight.
4 Likes
Would be cool if it wasn’t included in QP maps or had better rewards.
CoD is notorious for being difficult… without having additional rewards.
A few extra loot die for exceptionally hard encounters would create incentives for harder maps.
More folks are willing to give Skittergate a go because the rewards are better vs other difficult or lengthy maps
2 Likes
The general Cataclysm player doesn’t even take any books… so what should a few dices change? No one plays there for loot, but simply because Legend has become a walk in the park.
Getting back to Convo, I have less trouble completing the map on Cata than on Legend to be honest. But I totally agree with the OP, most of the events really don’t feel very challenging. Skittergate is unfortunately also a rather boring map due to this unimpressive design… after the gate you just walk forever through the snow without any real resistance, then you steal the key from Skarrik’s Chaos analogy aka the Gatekeeper and then the nerved-to-death end event…
Convo on Legend may be too hard for the difficulty level, but so are many other events too easy. For example, I think that in Righteous Stand in the first event you should maybe increase the special spawn timer and get a boss spawn in the arena, this place is made for it. The end event of the map could be made much darker again (maybe even completely dark?), the whole chapel somehow seems much too bright and could possibly also use a little more pep as far as the spawns are concerned.
To be honest, I don’t see the main problem for the poor completion rates in Convo in the fact that the event is simply completely overdone… but unfortunately in the 3pl XP events. While they are attractive to new players, I often don’t feel that players have the game experience to play on the difficulty level (loot is ignored/not used except for heals and that excessively, books are often not taken at all, many don’t even know where they are at all, what is Curse Resistance?, how do you break Shield Vermins block? or kite bosses?). I know not everyone can be a pro right away and do everything perfectly, but should you learn the basics at the highest base game difficulty?
2 Likes
You want to be careful to avoid putting all the difficulty at the end of a long snoozefest level. This is already the case for convo, skitter (mostly) and enchanters. The level is just something to ‘get out of the way’ and grind through so you can get to the real challenge, which is gated behind 15-25 minutes time investment.
Ok, on cata the consistency issue is better, but still.
That said I do think that most end events are actually easier than the level at present which is also bad. They should not be buffed to convo levels (again perhaps on cata it could work, but such a change would KILL legend-, I mean, do you see how much salt convo generates alone? Now imagine that’s every level in the game). However, minor to moderate difficulty buffs could be applied to perhaps 60% of the finales so they can at least cause some wipes or clutches.
I cant speak for the people playing in premade teamas but in QP convo is already a “fail 8 out 10 times” map. Heck i often get people just instantly leaving the moment they realize the map selector has chosen the map right off.
That map is far too damn difficult for a random team to deal with, the balance there feels like it´s built around the assumption that the team has a unchained, Grail knight,WHC and a shade that just instantly delete anything in range.
…
I do agree that some maps are too easy though, but convo is way beyond what they should be and anyone looking for more should be playing above cata.
As i see it, the best present final event in the game is found in Righteous stand, difficult and challenging for a team that cant vaporize bosses and chaos warriors but by no means impossible.
1 Like
Righteous Stand is difficult on Legend only if you are new to the game (and may shouldn’t play Legend right from the start as Unskinner suggested?) or deliberately choose to hold ground in a very poor position. If you do what you should be doing, then almost all specials can be killed upon spawning and you have complete control over the direction from where enemies attack. The event becomes somewhat interesting on Cataclysm due to the guaranteed monster and chaos warriors, but otherwise it’s one of the easiest in the game if played right.
This is going to be controversial most likely, but I am going to go right ahead and say that if played right, Convocation is one of the easiest events as well. By this point I’ve played it many times over both on Legend and Cataclysm in what turned out to be very easy runs, desperate clutches or depressing fails and I will stand by what I say: four people who hold ground together regardless of difficulty and team composition have either enough damage or enough stagger to withstand everything the event throws at them. Things become problematic only when people deliberately choose to split up or if they completely break the instant pressure is applied to them.
The events which I find the most interesting are the ones that actually force the group to move by design, like Hunger, Fort or Festering Ground. Hunger in particular could do with a bit more randomization as the spawns are highly predictable. I think Fort should be evened out a little bit. If you get a Chaos roll it’s very easy, but if it’s a monk spam it can go very bad very quickly. Festering Ground is pretty nice with a good amount of randomization in its waves.
Convocation is fine imo.
Indeed i agree, but i was referring to Cata, and honestly IMO the only time that event because easy is if you have a Shade/grail knight vaporizing the boss. Otherwise it always becomes a mad scramble to deal with everything spawning.
Plenty fun^^
Yes indeed, convo is easy if you pick specifically for it. A team consisting of something like Grail Knight, shade, unchained + whatever can just steamroll right through. Any chaos warrior that dares to spawn gets annihilated in an instant.
But…what if you dont have those guys? What if you have a random team like Handmaiden, Engineer, battle wizard and a zealot? This team has neither the stagger nor the armor damage to fight upfront so easily and 3 of them die in a single bad hit.
I will stand by my own word here, that event is ridiculously overturned for QP because it places far too high demands on teamcomp. Something you yourself seem to realize when you highlight the need for high damage or stagger.
And heck, stagger is actually unreliable because what the heck will your footnight and ironbreaker do when they have 4-5 chaos warriors running them down with 2 packmasters and stormers beyond that?
The only solid way is to vaporize the chaos warriors to make accessing the enemies beyond easy.
I honestly find fort too easy, rotbloods on their own in an open area are not threatening and the same goes for monks. Festering ground is however a bit more interesting due to the lack of space and stagger specialists do shine there.
Same as the first Drachenfells map really.
Can you really stand by that statement not just for premade teams but for QP ones as well? A map with an event that has extremely high spawns with extremely limited spaces with high demands on the teamcomp and weapon choices?
Is such a map really suitable for the QP rotation? Or is it infact a map where you can look at the teamcomp and weapons from the start and just realize that “we cant do this.”?
1 Like
Battle wizard, handmaiden and zealot are three of the most powerful careers in the game, able to deliver high amounts of stagger, staying power and damage with a variety of setups. The engineer might as well sit on a beach chair and enjoy the view. It takes extreme levels of incompetence and poor build choice to fail at anything with that lineup.
One of the easiest Cata qp runs (with randoms) of Convo that I’ve had recently featured an Unchained player who was dead throughout the event, myself as a shield&handgun FK plus a shield&handgun IB and a WHC with rapier&crossbow. We just sat under one of the pillars holding a sorcerer and smashed everything. Of course we lacked the killing power to clear the waves in due time, but between the three of us we had so much stagger that one person was always covered and had the space to snipe dangerous specials, and everything else charging us was stopped in its tracks. You need to go completely out of your way in terms of creating a horrendous setup to not be equipped to deal with an event where all you have to do is hold ground, either by stopping everything or by killing everything.
Like I said in a previous post here, I believe there are a couple of things that could perhaps be addressed as for example the flashbangs, invisible blightstorms or gas rats apparently nuking the plateau without LoS on anyone. But these are minor details. People generally fail because they go out of their way to separate instead of holding ground together and because they panic under pressure.
1 Like
Yeah, pacing is still broken and ambient count is too low. Very boring map.
I’m specifically talking about Cataclysm. However, the idea that terror events should be the hardest part of the map stands for any difficulty.
I feel like this some pretty hard hyperbole. The event isn’t that difficult if you do it correctly. It just takes a small amount of brain power to know when it’s time to drop and when you can stay in the circle. The problem is never comp. The problem is people just standing in the circle til they get overran and die.
There is no official difficulty above cata though. Twitch doesn’t increase difficulty in a fun way for many people, myself included.
Lol. Righteous stand is mostly just standing around until it ends. It’s so boring. the first event is even better than the second one imo.
Conditionally yes. IF the handmaiden has a spear&shield, IF the battle wizard uses the flail, IF the zealot…he actually doesnt stagger chaos warriors at all does he?
I know for a fact at least that handmaiden without spear&shield spends her time in that event running around like a wild horse desperately trying to avoid attacks from all directions while giving basically zero attention to anything else.
Battle wiz without flail cant fight upfront at all, and zealot doesnt really kill chaos warriors quickly nor does he have a good way to handle packmasters. And these guys certainly cant fight off a horde even if they stand next to eachother in a heap.
You dont really? Because the only classes that can quickly and easily kill chaos warriors in melee are shade, unchained and grail knight, the only ones that can staggerlock them are FK and IB. And honestly it kinda seems like you got lucky with specials spawn, 1 gasrat or stormer getting through would have thrown the camp to the woods.
For real, a normal QP team has no answer to 6+ chaos warriors, specials and other assorted enemies running them down except kiting. And while they might not die they also wont progress the event.
Most teams absolutely cant do what you describe for your own example so panicking and running around is far more valid. The team i listed above for instance cant do crap about a large amount of chaos warriors spawning with the rest. They just get overrun and forced to move at which point is a 3 outa 4 chance to fail.
Honestly the easiest runs i´ve had in the place was when i myself played grail knight and had a conc pot funnel in place. I just smacked the chaos warriors out whenever they spawned and that was all it was.
But for scenariors when the team could not do something like that…pure chaos and often misery.
The spear&shield is a trap. If you’re playing a handmaiden with almost any other weapon you are a blender that can easily chew through everything coming your way in that event. Even if CWs are a problem for you individually, you will easily dispatch everything else around them. The flail on BW is another trap. Between firewalk, flamesword or dagger, beam staff, conflagration or fireball she has ways to deal with anything, either by stopping it its tracks or outright killing it. I don’t even know what to comment about zealot, honestly. It’s enough to roll your face over the keyboard with him and victory is achieved. And none of them will be operating alone, but rather as a group.
6+ Chaos Warriors by themselves are nothing between 4 players. No matter what setup you bring, you either have the power to kill everything around the CWs and deal with them on their own, which is a non-issue, or you simply weather the storm and outlast the event. This assuming that people stay calm and keep together. Nothing can save you if at the first sign of danger you bail on the group and drop, at least nothing aside of reverting the event back to the state where it spawned mostly slave rats.
1 Like
Except jumping down doesnt solve the main problem at all.
You only jump down because you either cant kill something or need to escape to survive, but if you cant kill things even if you survive then you cant go back up and make the event progress and thus it´s a deadlock and it brings you back to the first issue.
Can you fight the enemies spawning upfront be it by killing them or staggering them? If the answer is no then you cant win the event.
So how about you download the mods for cata 2-3-4 or what they are called and play with those many people there? Dont drag the rest of the cata population into misery because you think it´s easy .c
If you can call that event on cata standing around without a grail knight/shade on the team then thats a clear indication you are either playing with premades or have simply reached a point where its time to go for mods x)
Possibly that you are playing Shade/Grail knight yourself i suppose.
Bullcrap!
The only weapons she has that can chew through chaos warriors is dual daggers and the spear&shield, nothing else. Glaive is good in theory but its too vulnerable to surrounding enemies during heavies which makes it bad for that event.
Staggering chaos warriors&stormvermin for a sec or two does not clear them, and firesword does 0 damage to them same as elf dual swords.
Zealot…yes he is amazing for just clearing the map and running along but when it comes to stuff like clearing multiple chaos warriors or stormvermin at the same time he seems to underperform with the usual weapons like A&F.
Except they are a massive problem if you cant kill them or stagger them, and even if you can kill 2 of them the remaining 4 can spearhead a horde to rundown a team to death or scattering.
The problem with the present state of the event is that it spawns chaos warriors at the helm of a horde with normal enemies with stormvermin AND disablers + specials like gasrats and stormers mixed in it.
You burn down 3 chaos warriors and now what? Without a tank infront you now gotta start running because no one else can afford to tank the overheads. And even with a tank you are screwed if the chaos warriors last long enough for a packmaster to run into the frontline and grab a tank to have some other enemies kill him in the same second.
Heck if an assassin does one of the long jumps and scatters the team around then it´s also basically over at that point.
As someone who doesn’t have any issue with the event, I can tell you that jumping down does solve the problem. Once too much stuff is on the platform, you just hop down and make a loop back up which creates more space. Then you kill everything and it’s ez pz. There really isn’t that much stuff spawning. It just feels like it when you’re in a tiny circle and they crawl up from almost all directions. Also, you could just sit in the circle if you have enough killing power. Kiting in only necessary if your team doesn’t do much damage, which happens in QP sometimes.
I do play on modded quite a bit, but games can’t always be found on modded. And no one is asking to drag down the cata population. I’m simply asking not to make terror events snooze evens, which almost all are. How does that drag anyone down?
I mean, this event could be hard if it spawned a minotaur. Stormfiends and Bile Trolls just create very little pressure and special pacing is pretty slow. I really don’t understand what is challenging about the event.
I don’t play GK or Shade ever. I think I have like 1 game completed on GK and maybe 15 on shade. If I play cata QP I usually try to run something I wouldn’t normally play on modded.
1 Like
I’m not sure what part of my statement confuses you. Perhaps you missed this:
Which ties into the point that I was making further down the post. You don’t have to clear everything on your own. That’s why you have 3 other people around you. Also I can list plenty of other weapons that deal just fine with CWs: sword&dagger, 1h axe (on handmaiden specifically), 1h sword (this assuming you land headshots).
Between firesword and firewalk you have a ton of stagger power. Firesword kills stormvermin fairly quickly even on Cataclysm, and for CWs it’s enough to stagger them and allow the rest of your team to deal damage or simply create enough distance for you to deploy your staff for example. You don’t have to be a one-trick pony that deals with everything at once with a simple click. Perhaps the real issue with the event is that it requires a minuscule amount of coordination, cooperation and thinking, which surprisingly enough turns out to be a tall order for the higher difficulty levels of a co-op game.
I agree, but if that’s the case it sounds like those people 4 need to get better at the game honestly. Because I don’t really understand what’s absurd in having a mixed horde with ~6 CWs and a couple of specials thrown in on the game’s higher difficulty levels.
The real problem is that people panic and have no idea what they are doing anyway. There are innumerable solutions to this event, based on whatever people have picked for the group composition. It’s mostly a matter of keeping a cool head and filling the role that you are supposed to fill. This is just my experience, but generally when the groups that I am a part of fail, it’s not because the event is unfair, but rather because they make extremely poor tactical choices or run off on their own and get picked off. Ever been in a group where you are actively trying to stay close to someone in order to cover them, but they keep running away from you?
Ere we go again
Convo completion rate ? Guesstimate 15-25%
Other maps AVG completion 50%+
Personal experience Solo OR with cata level team
Convo on legend >> anything (not convo) on Cata
Specials spawning behind terrain and immediately throwing nades making the entire arena Gas - Check
Specials spawning behind terrain and immediately casting blighstorm that is INVISBILE since everything is green and suddenly ur flying - Check
Moving down the arena cuz its a neccessary move and getting BLINDED for 6 seconds which NO other map has? - Check
Specials spawning behind terrain and out of nowhere a 2packmasters and a gutter runner are on top of you - Check
Specials spawning behind terrain and immediately starting to shoot making staying on the platform impossible - Check
A possible bug making 28 specials spawn in span of 5-7 mins for some people? - Check
Loosing progress while not standing on the platform - Check
7 at minimum CHW spawning on top everything else - Check
Only times (in the last year) when in QP I completed convo with randos while having all books was when only appropraite amnout of specials spawned. Roughly 11 not 3 times the amnout
It was such a cakewalk people were baffled why it was so easy
SO objective conclusions
Terror scenarios SHOULD be hard but MUST NOT require X composition to pass (ergo slayer + GK with no ranged weapons being the reasons you died cuz other 2 people may not have the 3 aditional seconds to shoot the gas rat)
Convo is borefest up until the end which means you will loose good 25min+ for nothing
Some maps SHOULD be harder (grain) and Some maps SHOULD be easier (convo)
It woudl be better if difficulty was better spread throughout the level and NOT just the end
3 Likes
At this point defending convo ending should be considered a meme since any other ending with enemies x2 isNOT as ASS as convo is
Its not even a contest
These are impressive made up numbers.
1 Like
I realize there is some disparity in difficulty. I mentioned that in the OP. However, I think convo is at the appropriate level of difficulty for an event in the game’s highest difficulty. Maybe I grossly overestimate the skill level of the player base.