Trial of the Champion is one of the dungeons in RDF that I’ve started dreading more and more. Everytime my group kills the first boss, I dread seeing paletress appear with the 3 groups of trash that spawns. I like the paletress fight’s concept of having to reconcile on your past and defeat a boss again, but this boss fight is WAY too overtuned for RDF gameplay.
For starters, the random fixated spellcasts from paletress is hard for any healer to deal with, no matter what class you are it is always dreadful. Having to snap heal damage, which I’ll remind you is also buffed by gamma difficulty, is bad enough, let alone the second phase and how it occasionally fears everyone into the traps in the arena. Both of these mechanics going on cause lots of wipes and end up disbanding groups without getting to the end.
On top of this, the only way to counter this random fixation is by having interrupts. Now with RDF in play, nobody wants to form groups again and get an interrupting class into the group just because of one boss. So sometimes when your group forms with RDF, you might get an interrupter, or you might not, which is just too much of a gamble on an already difficult boss in order to make it playable.
If the boss could just do spells on its main target (the tank) or have the spells have a few second cooldown between casts (she’s absolutely rapid fire on the entire group) that would be great.
Yeah just yesterday had a full 5500+ group in ToC, we did kill it first try, but with a casualty and 2 interrupt classes spamming her on cd and the healer was sweating bullets by the end. It is clearly very overtuned for the minimum gear level you can get in.
The reason it’s hard is because you have to not dps her while you’re dealing with the image thing, but you still have to interrupt her. If you interrupt her consistently while fighting the image you’re good. You do also have to make use of the bonus buffs on the ground.
All in all, a fight that most people don’t understand because it’s not all that intuitive and a bit overtuned for random groups where the expectation is that nobody has a clue and even if they did, plenty of them aren’t well geared.
Yes, this boss is hard…and yes, the RDF factor is huge here. If you’re lucky, you don’t get that boss at all, and when you do…you either get a class, preferably a melee brained enough to focus kick, and it’s a walk in the park (ish), or you don’t and you do indeed have a problem. Best case, you don’t get kickers and heal that as a disco priest…
However, I like the idea of the bosses not being a complete joke - sure, the goal isn’t to have a 5man boss with the complexity of Sindra / LK, but what I like about ToC is that it is actually wipeable, not counting the 1st encounter. And Paletress is not really THAT hard.
What I think is a bit “mistuned” is the fact that you randomly get either of two bosses in ToC and one of them is significantly harder than the other, which should not be the case (perhaps always has been, but should not be). I’m not getting into what to do to even those two up - personally, I’d prefer some complicating adjustment on Eadric, rather than nerfing Paletress, but that’s just my opinion.
The problem is also with the combination of fear + traps on the ground and casting holy fire means someone will die if you dont have fear immunity or range interrupt. I got ppl insta leaving the group when they saw the instance.
Without interrupts or severly overgearing she is hard AF. So for RDF she is a bit overtuned. Outside of RDF she is a very good boss. But with RDF you dont know if you get interrupters or not.
Also a pro tip is to always carry drums of forgotten kings and the wild + having scrolls of fortidtude. It helps a lot if you miss buffs from classes.
I think Paletress is just bad design. The echo she summons is just so annoying and has more health then some full bosses, the fear deals damage (!) And fears you into the gamma mechanics, the random debuff costs your healer precious gcds to dispell and hits for 8k, and she rapid fires holy fire and 12k smites, sometimes twice in a row on the same target that just got the debuff right after a fear.
Is it doable? Yes.
Is it anywhere in line with any other HC gamma boss? Hell no.
Oh yeah! We are in “Nerf dungeons, because of RDF can’t form a decent class balanced group” territory again. The same thing that killed Cata challenging heroics for the sake of players who will abandon the game after first boss in raids requiring more than zerg tactics.