Thoughts on new LoS [Shaitan]

#1

I recently went into the new lair of Shaitan and man I’m blown away. The dungeon is actually challenging and a intense fight. Personally I don’t run the dungeon at all but now it’s something fun to run once in a while. The theme and fight suits the theme well. Whats your guy’s thoughts on the dungeon?

#2

Although it’s certainly nice to have Shaitan’s not be as stale as it was before (and no longer having an effective DPS wall by spawning a fuckton of minions), I don’t like that Shaitan’s shotgun is just clustered enough to still hit you when you stand on the edge of the platform.

Aside from that, there’s also the fact that all of the projectiles (as far as I’m aware!) still have “default” sprites.
You know - the generic white bullet, armor pierce bullet, paralyze bullet, pet stasis bullet…it doesn’t really fit the theme of lava that’s going on there.

#3

The rework is cool and all, but I think the biggest problem with Lair of Shaitan has yet to be fixed: It’s a Janus dungeon. It wasn’t getting run before and it isn’t getting run now, except when there’s an event.

#4

Also the whites still aren’t great and the loot overall is scarce but they made it 5x harder

#5

I disagree, the waki is incredible. Other than that though I can agree

#6

I am trying out samurai for the first time and have eastern winds, ronins waki, crossing flames, and ryu’s blade.
I use eastern for chain expose, ronin’s for slow, ryu’s for range and damage. Ryu’s blade has good damage with higher range and a much cheaper mana cost than crossing flames. Since I’m not experienced with samurai maybe I am missing something that makes crossing flames better?

#7

Crossing Flames has much more damage, more than any other waki, while Ryu’s has less than a t5. (But it does armor pierce, so it’d have it’s uses in certain places I suppose.) Crossing Flames also has a higher casting range, and less shots that need to hit for more damage, which is always nice to have. Crossing Flames also gives 2 more attack than Ryu’s, and 2 vit if you’re into that. And I’ve never actually used Ryu’s so I don’t know, but especially given the less casting range and more shots, it appears to be more difficult to aim with.

#8

Agreed, waki is great. I long for a fire waki because it was so fun to use on a samurai. Yeah for real im pretty sure no one runs shaitan from janus. The only reason I run shaitans is from events and random keys.

#9

Ill give deca some credit on the last phase where shaitan shoots a (stream of piss at you) stream of lava beam at you. Also the sprite changes which is cool.

#10

The casting range is technically more because it has shots coming from the end of your screen that go all the way toward your player. Personally i think its more reliable to hit

#11

I hate this dungeon. Its easier to die to mistake and the loot is the same as it was before. Nothing about this dungeon makes me want to run it anymore. I agree with the poster who said its a Janus dungeon the hardly ever gets run except when event. Right now I can’t imagine why I would run it ever again. I got the whites and frankly there was nothing special about them.

#12

I think it should just drop from penta

#13

Another one for the “wtf are you thinking Deca”.

They’ve taken what was a straightforward small 1 minute dungeon and turned it into a divine-pet-essential, multiphase boss in a room which gives you little latitude for error. It reminds me of a harder Reef with much tougher minions (Reef you can at least usually complete with patience since the minions don’t mob you).

Honestly somebody should delete divine pets from the testers and see how quickly they get sick of failing to complete the content they are coming out with. The attitude that sees content like this released is I believe the reason Realm is dying, as it is impossible for most players to enjoy. The goal should be to make the game accessible on a basic level, and then put something to please the divine players on top (why I keep harping on about buffable bosses) because having content that is entirely too hard for casual players just switches us into “nope I hate that” mode. (Edit: the wormhole dungeons do okay for this, with the variable length & increasing difficulty waves).

Edit2: And a bit like the Lod rework, this rework for me also strays too from the original dungeon, though it is not inherently bad to add endgame-level content, it’s doing it via removing existing medium content that is problematic. Had this new Shaitan been handled as an entire new dungeon or a “Shaitan Encore”, with new loot, there would be less gripes I’m sure.

To compare old with new:

Old Shaitan was impossible (for me) to entirely solo (90/90 pet), though I did end a few solo, and completely duod it a few times,
fun enough in a 4-10 group (guild or pub) for a 1 minute dungeon,
going increasingly to a joke easy with a massive group (you literally could afk and still make it through) –
though that in itself became fun at events, since you could do endless chains really fast.

New Shaitan appears impossible (for me) to complete outside of events, unless I let myself be carried by divine players, and the threat the dungeon gives is so high I will certainly never join one on a ‘main’ character.

So, no thanks, I’ll wait for rework 2.0 which presumably will come, as surely key sales will become a fraction of what they were before as I believe people will overall dislike the change compared to the old.
Unless the key buyers ARE the ones demanding harder content, though I doubt it, they usually simply want the loot.

Also, loot, Deca is making this increasing irrelevant, when you have many options for each class, they all become less important. When (dungeon X) is the only choice for a good UT ability of course that encourages players to join it. If it’s only 1 out of 5 options for a good UT, less so. And soulbound robs loot of any value once you already have the item. Also the chest event concept makes us basically a fool to do the dungeon outside of an event. But I’m getting into a general rant about the game now so I’ll stop.

If you haven’t seen the new Shaitan, here is a video of a solo:

#14

This is the reason why I still haven’t set foot in the reworked shaitan. It’s getting screwed multiple ways:

  1. As a court dungeon it inherently competes with Oryx and Oryx 2 which means you will almost never get a group to run it
  2. As a court dungeon it ALSO competes with Thicket, which is the only dungeon in the whole court of oryx that’s worth going to instead of Oryx, and even then you only get 5-6 people doing it if you try to organise it
  3. Despite buffing Janus’ loot for a month or two, Janus has gone back to the Kabam-style drop tables of dropping nothing 99% of the time. I don’t know about other servers, but in Australia people have started to wise up to this and gone back to totally ignoring it, even in 4 lane castles, so if I wanted to enter the court of oryx I’d have to clear the castle myself.

So in order to actually run Shaitan I need to

  • Not want to go to Oryx
  • Not want to go to Thicket
  • Hope we get a 4 lane Oryx castle
  • Hope those 4 lanes actually clear the statues
  • Hope more than 3 people enter the court of oryx
    Then if I’m lucky I MIGHT get an attack potion

It’s just not going to happen.

Personally I’d be in favour of completely removing Janus and the court of oryx entirely, making event bosses for each court dungeon and having them spawn in the realm (or something. Encore wouldn’t really fit, but then again neither does Deadwater Docks from Crystal). It was one of Kabam’s badly thought out ideas that really doesn’t fit the game.

#15

Encore could always be through the standard Puppet Theatre somehow.

Agree with your Court comments (though should bear in mind recently fear of missing the Oryx mark has knocked people out of the standard clear-for-Janus), I’ll repeat my complaint from the time about Court that making it drop ALL the portals, while on the face of it good because it allows full control of your path, a side-effect of the old RNG choice is people would usually grudgingly join whatever dungeon it presented. Though that was at the time when it was only Encore/old Shaitan, which were both easily completeable by a 10+ group. Now people would likely nexus from it if they didn’t get their choice, due to keyopens being far more prevalent.

#16

People used to nexus if they didn’t get their choice even back then. I think all portals dropping is better than 1 portal dropping, but they’re both bad gameplay.

#17

Ah, my group might have had skewed perception due to EUW containing a lot of Endless Torment skull searchers (it did earn its name back then for its rarity :wink: ) when it was the only (questionable) good UT skull, or simply because players wanted Court when we had no inc (when they were way rarer).

#18

shameless plug


Jk, very shameful plug. I thought that would be logical at the time, but from all the backlash I realized that it might not make a ton of sense.

#19

Encore could easily be handled this way. Make it a 25% chance to drop after the Puppet theatre boss is killed. It is an Encore so lets have it.

#20

I’ve uploaded a new solo of it, where I do it under 3:30 minutes. I find it quite comfortable to do it after some practice runs.

From my experience its not too hard to get into the court on EUW if you’ve a 4 lane castle. I would like the guaranteed loot to be better, but I’m not sure what would fit. There’s already so many places that drop life/mana.