Here's my full Belfry review since the changes...
Alright, I decided to quit whining and give Belfry a 100% legit attempt to complete. I play late night always due to work, kids, and being a college student. When I am online, usually general chat is empty, and I play a server other than Atlantic. So doing the cute hold hands with 15 people to do everything in this game is out of the question for me. So as a result of that, I have a 3 monitor setup, and pay for three accounts to legally multiclient some encounters (not multibox).
Now previously, I did the roof with a simple setup of a sampire, a bard and a tamer. Took me about a hour and a half to complete all rooms and the roof.
So let's begin.... doing the Belfry "as intended" minus having the ability to do it with other functioning players.
Attempt number one.
-I begin as I previously did, sampire whirlwinds the drakes, bard disco's belfry, I get the feather, I port up and start smacking her around. After about 8-10 swings my sampire freezes and falls off the roof.
-Again I go back up, start swinging away, I get frozen right at 20% health and since I can no longer swing my character dies mid air while falling off. Well that was "fun".
-Res up, kill drakes, hop back up, sampire misses 50% of the swings and died after the second para tick.
-OK, now this is getting annoying.
-Res up, kill drakes, get feather, go back up and do this until Belfry is at around 40%. Now I notice that when I fall off he start spam healing himself.
-Fall off at 40%, by the time I get back up hes at 42%, fall off at 32%, get back up and hes 40%. I die at 35%, res and get back up and hes 45%...
-Ok really??? and now I get the "this encounter will end in 5 minutes" message.
After a bit of a rage clean my house break, I attempt Belfry again, this time I use my tamer to go up.
-Going up with a tamer is much easier, no deaths, just say "all kill" and hide.
-Belfry gets to around 40% and starts spam healing.
-Get knocked off, kill drakes, get feather go back up.
-I will save everyone from the wonderful percentage spam, and just say that I ran out the full 30 minutes timer attempting to kill him having him spam heal almost all of the damage done before I was thrown off the roof.
So unless there is another "easier" way to do it that hasn't been fixed yet, I honestly have no idea how people are doing this in time "as intended". Regardless, this is how I have completed this encounter for over 3 years, and now I have to consider rebuilding my setup and characters to try to do this again. As it stands right now, this is a dead encounter for me, which honestly really makes me upset because it was one of the things I enjoyed doing outside of pvp.
My recommendations:
* If you guys are going to leave the encounter like this you need to remove Belfry's ability to self heal... Honestly...
*If the encounter stays like this, multiple feathers need to drop off the drakes and not just 1 per spawn of them, and increase the timers on them.
*Allow more damage to be done before Belfry begins the knock off.
* Make belfry "weakened" when he reaches 40% health and remove the knock off mechanic at that point.
Other than that, I won't be attempting the roof again anytime soon. I hope you listen to my voice and the voice of several others. Making content more difficult after its already been out for over 3 years is not the best way to do it. Thank you.
Now previously, I did the roof with a simple setup of a sampire, a bard and a tamer. Took me about a hour and a half to complete all rooms and the roof.
So let's begin.... doing the Belfry "as intended" minus having the ability to do it with other functioning players.
Attempt number one.
-I begin as I previously did, sampire whirlwinds the drakes, bard disco's belfry, I get the feather, I port up and start smacking her around. After about 8-10 swings my sampire freezes and falls off the roof.
-Again I go back up, start swinging away, I get frozen right at 20% health and since I can no longer swing my character dies mid air while falling off. Well that was "fun".
-Res up, kill drakes, hop back up, sampire misses 50% of the swings and died after the second para tick.
-OK, now this is getting annoying.
-Res up, kill drakes, get feather, go back up and do this until Belfry is at around 40%. Now I notice that when I fall off he start spam healing himself.
-Fall off at 40%, by the time I get back up hes at 42%, fall off at 32%, get back up and hes 40%. I die at 35%, res and get back up and hes 45%...
-Ok really??? and now I get the "this encounter will end in 5 minutes" message.
After a bit of a rage clean my house break, I attempt Belfry again, this time I use my tamer to go up.
-Going up with a tamer is much easier, no deaths, just say "all kill" and hide.
-Belfry gets to around 40% and starts spam healing.
-Get knocked off, kill drakes, get feather go back up.
-I will save everyone from the wonderful percentage spam, and just say that I ran out the full 30 minutes timer attempting to kill him having him spam heal almost all of the damage done before I was thrown off the roof.
So unless there is another "easier" way to do it that hasn't been fixed yet, I honestly have no idea how people are doing this in time "as intended". Regardless, this is how I have completed this encounter for over 3 years, and now I have to consider rebuilding my setup and characters to try to do this again. As it stands right now, this is a dead encounter for me, which honestly really makes me upset because it was one of the things I enjoyed doing outside of pvp.
My recommendations:
* If you guys are going to leave the encounter like this you need to remove Belfry's ability to self heal... Honestly...
*If the encounter stays like this, multiple feathers need to drop off the drakes and not just 1 per spawn of them, and increase the timers on them.
*Allow more damage to be done before Belfry begins the knock off.
* Make belfry "weakened" when he reaches 40% health and remove the knock off mechanic at that point.
Other than that, I won't be attempting the roof again anytime soon. I hope you listen to my voice and the voice of several others. Making content more difficult after its already been out for over 3 years is not the best way to do it. Thank you.
Why fit in when you were born to stand out? -Dr. Seuss
Comments
That is why I went through the effort to document doing it the "proper" way without any corners being cut, to show how difficult the encounter is when players aren't finding a work around for it. I would rather them fix these key elements before we get to a case where no one can do it. As it stands now, only tamers with flying pets can.
As you say, the healing must be taken out.
The bells shouldn't spawn 2 drakes per person, they should just spawn 2 drakes period, for the person ringing the bell. One of them should drop the wings.
Failing that, the bells should at least not spawn drakes on people up in the freaking belfry, and should drop more wings.
The pointless cooldown on the bells should be removed as well.
The pointless duration on the wings should be removed as well. Or at least, increased 10x.
While they are at it, they should also increase the pointlessly short timer at the end of the roof that prevents you from looting even a fraction of the gold when you're up there.
Just to add my own experience, we do it as two tamers, and we can barely finish it in 30 minutes if we're lucky. And that's thanks to word of death. The last 30% usually goes: kill drakes, go up, cast word twice, get kicked off, then dragon heals 50-60% of the damage I did before I get back up.
We don't have any flying pets yet, we're waiting for them to bond, but I'll feel zero shame in exploting the hell out of them since the encounter designer clearly had no idea what he was doing here.
You know there is a serious problem with the design when the belfry is harder than the roof.
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geeez
Me.
I was unable to complete any of this on my pure mage - and I still am.
So in a way, I'm glad to see it being made harder for other classes, it is re-balancing them to the level of my class.
Sure, I can run in with some flying pets and get this done, but why should players be literally forced to exploit encounters in order to complete them? I would much prefer doing things the proper way, even if it is a little more difficult. But to be completely unable to do this the proper way is just ridiculous.
Mages can tag along and do the floors. (until now) They just couldn't cast EVs or certain spells on the roof. A more inclusive fix would have been to eliminate the spawn from all followers or summons. Then left the belfry alone.
But they want fewer returning players to be able to do the fun stuff.
First run
I wasn't moving as fast as I could, but I wasn't going slow either. Got into Belfry, took a minute or two to get situated with where I wanted to fight at, then started with the bells.
Even with only 2 people, the drakes have pretty high wrestling. But kill all 4, find the wing, go up on the ledge and do ~1k damage and get pushed off.
Rise and repeat pretty steadily for several minutes until the Greater Dragon gets around 40%. At this point you can see his AI is prioritizing casting heal, as he is healing himself a lot. By the time I get a new wing and get back up there, the dragon has usually gained 4% life (in EC, don't know actual health value).
Rise and repeat, with the Dragon healing often, but eventually get the dragon down to 8% health. This is where it really becomes tiresome. It seems around 8-12% the Greater Dragon AI will mana dump on nothing but heals.
I get a wing, get up on the ledge, take dragon from 8% to 0%, but get pushed off before it dies.
By the time the bell timer reset, and I can kill the drakes and find the wing, the dragon was always back up to 8% health (one time it got up to 12% because I was a bit slow).
This goes on for about 10 minutes. 8% to 0%, knocked off, Dragon spam heals itself while I find wing, 8% to 0%, repeat.
I made some mistakes, I'll admit. At one point I missed like 5 swings in a row (even with it discorded) and had to run off the ledge without doing the 1k damage, otherwise I was going to die. This led to an interesting discovery, the damage threshold doesn't reset with each wing use. So I get a new wing after running off, and only did about ~400 damage before getting knocked off (since I had done around 600 the prior attempt). This small mistake became a hug timesink and setback.
At this point in the fight I was not going slow, everytime I got pushed off the ledge I had to wait for the bells to reset, it could not have been done faster.
Could not kill the dragon this attempt. It simply healed itself too much. I got kicked out at the 30 minute timer.
Second Run
This run I went in much more focused and with a plan of attack. I sped through everything as fast as I could, bells as soon as they were up, fighting the Dragon at the edge to get knocked down as fast as possible (though this didn't matter much, as I was often waiting up to 15s for the bells to reset after getting knocked off).
I take the Dragon down pretty quick to the 8-12% mark, where it again begins spam healing. I would estimate I spent about 5 minutes in this "phase" of the fight, before I actually managed to kill the dragon with my last swing as I simultaneously started getting pushed off the ledge. I consider this pretty lucky, as I was worried I would get stuck in another 0% to 8% loop due to it's spam healing.
I ended up successfully killing the Greater Dragon in just under 16 minutes.
Thoughts On The Encounter
Some people's arguments for a more difficult roof encounter are that "this is an MMO" and you should "Find a Group". However, the Belfry encounter is actually designed in the exact opposite way. The Belfry becomes harder with more people:
- Timer on ringing the Bells
- 2 Drakes per person
- The Drake's Wrestling scale with how many people are in the encounter
- 1 Wing drops per bell "ring"
- 120s timer on the wing
So the more people you bring, the more drakes you have to kill, and the tougher they are. It will also take longer to find the corpse with the wing on it.So yes, I was able to do it on my second attempt in under 16 minutes, but it wasn't a cakewalk. It needed basically perfect execution and the encounter itself was very frustrating.
Suggested Improvements
- Make 1 wing drop per "pair" of Drakes. This way a bell ring allows the entire group to go up there and make progress.
- Or change the AI of this Greater Dragon so that it does not spam heal itself when low health
Either of the above changes would go a long way in making the encounter less frustrating for people.I'm not looking for easy mode, and do enjoy challenging encounters. I appreciate encounters that have thought behind them and require you to pay attention. The problem with this encounter right now, is no matter how technically skilled you are, you can still end up failing it due to the RNG of the Dragon spam healing itself.
Now, if the Dragon emoted before it started pushing you off, and you had 2 seconds to side-step the "wind" from it flapping its wings and avoid being pushed off altogether, that would be awesome. A technical encounter with some skill involved around timing and positioning.
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The way i used to do it was with two tamers. After getting the wings both pets would attack Belfry(usually 2 Cu's or 1 CU and beetle). The tamers would stand in the middle of the platform and when one pet would start getting pushed tell it to follow you so it would walk around the push. Never had to use the log out / log in trick to get the pets back up there either. The downside for not getting pushed off the platform is the whole push cycle you're not doing damage.
We can complain all we want on the forums. I prefer a more direct approach. I'll be cleaning out a couple houses and closing those accounts. If they dont want to listen to us here thats fine. I'll hit em in the pocket book.
ICQ
695356108
I complained about any specific belfry change when it was proposed to me in May.
Also, since when can we re-open closed threads?
I don't recall writing a full review with proposed real issues and solutions in another thread that has already been locked.
Regardless, the Stratics rules do not apply over here. Two different forums and what-not.
Who said what, or complained about what way back in March is completely irrelevant now, and has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
We have a new problem, and people should be allowed to express new reasonable solutions and ideas to fix it so we can all get back to enjoying the game.
And have pets remain in game until full log out.
It's clear they wish for the encounter to be done "this way". Now we just need to show that some of the features of "this way" make it too difficult and they need to be toned down. Leaving it alone or reverting it at this point is a unreasonable solution.
The auto pet logout is a feature and mechanic of the game that has been around for over a decade. It affects all areas of gameplay for tamers, and will not be a change specific to just THIS encounter, without affecting them everywhere else. Something that massive will need to go through extensive testing to make sure it doesn't break something else, or cause people to start losing their pets. Again... unreasonable solution in dealing with the current issues of this one specific encounter.
Why are you requesting a specific change for belfry? Why not fix every part of the game?
But guess who isn't complaining right now? Tamers. Why? because they are still using the work around that they have been using, which is flying their pet right on up there, negating all elements of the encounter. Who would go through the effort of logging in and out 20 times when you can just fly your pet right on up there?
You have been on a crusade against pets auto stabling since like 2012. Call me sceptical, but it seems to me that you came up with a theory, or perhaps heard of a handful of people logging in and out for this encounter, and you decided that this will be your solid and amazing reason to be against auto stabling. But ironically, it never was the real problem, and tamers haven't missed a beat after these changes, and it has absolutely nothing to do with logging in and out.
So again, your arguments and proposed solutions have absolutely nothing to do with the current problem or topic at hand.
There was never a reason to use the log out/in pet trick for the Belfry key room.
This was accomplished in one of two ways. 1- Use Flying pets to completely bypass drakes or 2- Stand in the middle and tell the pet to follow you when it starts getting pushed.
I never had to log in/out to summon my pet here.
ICQ
695356108