Feedback:User/MularcTemplare/New Fractal Designs/Ancient City Fractal
Ancient City Fractal[edit]
In this fractal, players will venture into the Ancient City and attempt to protect the Queens before either the plauge, and the chaos created by it, swallows the city whole.
- Objectives
- - Help Enforce the quarantine
- - Fight your way through the city
- - Find the Queens in the plagued sector
- - Subdue the Plagued Queen
Walkthrough[edit]
Players will spawn in this fractal a short way away from the city proper. Leaving the outlook will initiate the fractal.
- - Help Enforce the quarantine
As players approach the city, a sunspear ally will approach them and wave. Once they reach the main sunspear line, the event will activate.
This section is fairly simple; players must let as few citizens as possible move past the highlighted line. The citizens themselves are not hard to deal with, and will turn back once they reach 10% health. Whilst they will not directly damage players, they will subtly do so; for each group that makes it through, players will be dealt and amount of damage. (The size of the group goes down as you go up fractal levels; at level 1-9 a group is classified as 10 NPC's, but at level 50-59 it would be per NPC.) If all players are defeated the event restarts. To complete this section players will need to holdout for 2 minutes.
Once the event is completed, players will be ushered into the city itself.
- - Fight your way through the city
For the rest of the fractal players will mainly encounter hostiles. They are generally normal enemies, however there will be veterans thrown into the mix like most of the other fractals.
There is a couple of things to remember when dealing with these enemies. Firstly, they will always be under the effect of the Berserk buff, making them hard to deal with as groups. Secondly, they will occasionally cough, causing an area of poison to appear around them, and thirdly, whenever one of these foes is defeated, they will spawn 5 scarab foes. These are immune to damage but despawn 5 seconds after they spawn, they will apply a stack of poison and bleeding with every hit, quickly causing nearby players to have heavy condition damage.
The main problem with this section of the fractal is that hostiles will not be immediately apparent; all the NPCs within this section will be neutral, and will only turn hostile or allied when players move within 500 range of them. Given that the fractal is made of mostly enclosed spaces, players will need to move slowly through. Very occasionally, the NPC will instead run off, and a Djinn will spawn nearby. These Djinn can be avoided, but can easily down the group of players with large AoE spikes (the fire Djinn) or large single target hits (the water Djinn).
Although the path continues in a generally South-North direction, there are several dead ends. Some of the these dead-ends contain traps, some temporal artifacts which will give all players a short boost (such as quickness, less damage, double damage for the next skill ect.) and some will contain powerful enemies. These will change each time the fractal is entered, so that this section is not a matter of memory.
Once players reach the opposite side of the chasm they passed when first entering, they will find a Sunspear outpost, completing the section.
- - Find the Queens in the plagued sector
Once players reach the Sunspear outpost they will immediately be attacked by a large group of plague victims; from now on players will not find any neutral NPCs, and any NPC should be treated as hostile.
Be careful through this area as the party is not the only feature that will kill plagued victims; with this area players will encounter traps, which can outright down and kill both players and NPCs. With careful timing, players will be able to move through, however they should be aware that as scarabs are immune to damage, they can easily move through these traps. Once players move through, they can close the doors to the previous sections by pulling the tomes off of the sections within the walls; this will stop the large numbers of scarabs from building up more then expected.
Whilst most of the traps players will encounter will be wall or floor traps, players should be careful when moving through doors; some of them will have falling traps above them to crush unwary players.
Once players make it to the North-western corner of the city, they will see the Queens up a short flight of stairs. Moving into the area will cause the door to shut behind players, and start the boss fight.
- - Subdue the Plagued Queen
This boss fight is slightly weird; players will need to be mindful of the other Queen, as if she dies players will be downed, causing the fight to reset. This is made more complicated by the fact that half the damage that is dealt to Plagued Queen is also dealt to the other Queen. The other queen is able to be healed, however has a large amount of health, making a persistant healer not enough to balance the fight.
The boss herself is also quite complicated. Players will almost immediately notice the persistent aura of flies hanging around her; moving into these will damage players and apply a stack of torment every 2 seconds they stay within the area. She will also leave a trail of poison as she moves, which she will constantly. She will exclusively attack in melee, with each hit dealing a large amount of damage to players. As she focuses her attacks on a player (for example if a player chooses to tank the damage rather then dodge.) the aura of poison will increase in size temporarily.
Beyond this, there are only two other mechanics to worry about. At each 10% health, she will call for help, which will send several plagued guards running into the room. As with the other plagued enemies in the fractal, they will spawn the scarabs once killed, and should be dealt with slowly whilst kiting the boss. The number of these guards will increase with both the fractal level, and how low her health is (an extra guard per 10 fractal levels, and an extra guard per 10% health lost. This starts at one guard running into the room at 90% health and caps at 20 guards spawning at 10% health and 50+ fractal.)
The last mechanic players will need to worry about is her focus fire. At semi-random intervals, she will ignore the players and target the other Queen exclusively. This period will only last 5 seconds, but she can deal a large amount of damage in a short period of time.
Once she is defeated a group of Sunspears will break through the door, leading the other Queen away. This will stablize the fractal.
- Achievement
Time Out of Place - Find, and use, all the temporal artifacts in the Ancient City Fractal.
