It’s very linear and doesn’t give you many options on routing.
It’s full of flying which is boring AND punishing on mythic+ as each wipe wastes even more time than usual.
Visually it’s just the same Bastion assets you see outside, nothing special.
Also, the trees tend to get in your way of vision when trying to zoom out to dodge stuff which is very annoying.
So overall not very good, but the most deciding factor is that it runs like absolute trash. It’s by far the worst optimized area in the game’s 16 year-old history. I’ve never seen a place that consistently gives you half the FPS you get anywhere else in a particular expansion. Even on the lowest settings it’s terrible since you can’t turn off whichever effects are causing the lag.
And I guess it’s fine if you have a good PC where the FPS drop is like from 100 to 50 or something, but from 30 to 10-15 it hinders the gameplay greatly. Yeah I know, get a better PC, but I think it’s unacceptable to have one single place in the game that has tremendously higher spec requirements than everything else. This should never have passed testing.
Spires is one of my favourite dungeons. I’d take it over anything except Halls and Mists, which are about equal.
My PC is so ‘good’ that it doesn’t even meet the system requirements to run WoW, and I don’t notice any of the performance issues you described. Visibility can be a bit awkward in some spots, but changing the camera angle tends to fix the problem.
What settings do you use? How much FPS do you get in Spires and other dungeons?
And yeah, it’s possible that it runs crap only on some PC’ like mine which has AMD Radeon (not good I know, but it didn’t have problems with WoW previously), but plenty of people described this problem here and elsewhere.
I agree with BFA’s dungeons being better (in fact, BFA is better than SL in almost every way except for gearing)
I’d say the SL dungeons are decent, middle of the road. I really like Plaguefall and MotS, but that’s about it. Still better than what we had in MoP and WoD.
I admit the highest I’ve run it on tyrannical is +15, while you’ve gone one key level higher, but I don’t have much trouble for it. With the CD reduction to brand, I can have that or meta up for most of them, and during his air phase, I just stay behind the bird and let my CDs reset. If I don’t have anything else available, the shield from the scale trinket is good for one hit or I ask the healer for an external.
That you can overkill the content with a high-end PC doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem. It’s by far the worst “optimised” one, as someone else analysed probably due to the amount of shaded pixels.
The dungeon splits in two at one point and you can choose which way you want to go entirely. I think because of this it’s one of the least linear dungeons in SL.
it all depends if your team can handle the big trahs pack just before 2nd boss and 2nd boss itself. its the hardest part of dungeon - and the only part where i seen groups fall apart. and if your group dont overpull on first pull of dungeon - especially on sanguine week.
in general i whenever i do +15/16 most problems are self created by copying to much of MDI pulls - like +16s Mists i did yesterday - did 3 of them - 2 groups did the "stupid pull " of 2 first trash packs with little adds healing big adds when dying - wasting ton of time , ton of deaths and groups breaking apart - then 3rd group just pulled 1 group at a time and we nicely timed it with like 6 minutes spare. last week most problems i seen in SoA for example was people just pulling everything in very beggiing of dungeon - why … to save 20 seconds and risk wasting it anyway due to time reduction tied to deaths ?
I’ve tried that big pull at the start of SoA a few times at the request of dps, but I’ve never found it any more efficient than chaining 3 - 1 - 3, with some overlap between the goliath and the packs of 3 before and after it. Unless you have a group that’s really hot on interrupts, the big pull just isn’t worth it.
As for the pack before the second boss, I cc one and spear the others, and we’ve taken to using hero on the pack on fortified weeks rather than the boss itself. The boss dies so fast with the pride buff that using hero on it as well wastes a good amount of both. (Of course, we save it for the boss on tyrannical weeks, but the trash isn’t so much of a problem then.)
As for Mists, I’d never even consider pulling those 2 packs together. Just not worth it.
I don’t think it’s that bad, SD or De Other King’s Rest is way worse.
You have 2 path options after Kintara and Ventu, a few trash packs are easy to skip.
My laptop isn’t the highest budget out there, but Arden drops my FPS way more than any of the Bastion dungeons.
The visual matters (like Kyrestia’s wings blocking view) are mostly fixed and even then, you can rotate your view as needed. The only place SoA resembles is Elysian Hold itself, so definitely differs from the rest of Bastion.
If there is indeed something bad, it’s Tyrannical Ventunax, if you don’t BL/Hero it, you’ll be busy dodging black swirlies 24/7. The other are the goliaths on Inspiring, as then you can’t kick the partywide AoE, and that really hurts on Forti. You could argue Devos might also be bad, but if I’m around, trust me, I’ll mass dispel the magic dot’s after her air phase.