Durumu Maze Improvements – 9/4

Late in the 5.2 PTR cycle we found that the Durumu smoke effects during the maze phase were causing debilitating performance issues for some users’ computer hardware configurations. We made a fairly last-minute change to the cloud effect that wasn’t quite what we had first planned on using, and as you’re likely aware, made traversing the maze more difficult than we had intended.

Last night we released a fast patch (you can read more on these small client patches here) in addition to a standard hotfix, which both work to improve the readability of the maze visual, as well as make the way the maze appears a bit more intuitive. These changes will be noted in a future hotfix blog update.

It being Wednesday and all, we’re eager to hear how these improvements impact your runs tonight and/or later this week. Let us know in the comments below!

Just wanted to follow up with some additional information, as we've seen a few questions since the changes.

In a hotfix yesterday, we changed two elements of the Durumu Eye Sore mechanic, or the “maze” as it’s more commonly known. First off, we applied a small client patch to increase the visual fidelity of the fill graphic itself, giving the effect less vertical height and hopefully making it easier to see the safe spots as they appear. Feedback on this change has generally been positive. Separately, at the same time we made some adjustments to the logic of how the maze is drawn with respect to the movement of the Disintegration Beam. One of the less intuitive aspects of the original maze mechanic was how it would begin drawing behind you, and how the right thing to do was actually to turn around and back up, towards the approaching death beam, in order to safely enter the forming maze. Why would any sane person want to move closer to a death beam?!

We generally are extremely cautious about making gameplay adjustments to encounters once players have already learned them, but in this case the opening of the Halls of Flesh-Shaping LFR wing highlighted the fact that the mechanic was a particular source of confusion to many players, and the longer we waited to make any adjustment, the more disorienting it would be if we did change anything. So what we did was make the maze immediately begin drawing in front of the player as the beam activates, so that you never need to turn around and run towards the beam. This also effectively gives players a slight head-start on the beam as it begins to move. To maintain the same sense of urgency, the beam does move slightly more quickly now, so that it will, over the course of the phase, catch up to players and negate that head start. But the player movement required once you’re actually running the maze should be unchanged. We have noted, however, that at the very end of the maze sequence, it can now feel like the fast-approaching death ray is going to reach you, making it feel like you're stuck between a rock and a hard place. To address that concern, we are making another adjustment today, which will cause the death ray to dissipate a few seconds earlier at the end of the maze.