Crimson Halls Hotfixes

The Blues popped by the official forums today to announce some hot-fixes to the encounters in the Crimson Halls (Blood Prince Council and Blood Queen Lana'thel).

Blood Prince Council

• Prince Keleseth will no longer melee players. So if you get knocked into Keleseth or happen to move by him, he won't swipe in between his casts and kill a non-tank.
  
• The first Shadow Resonance should appear earlier in the fight, which will allow the Keleseth tank to have more orbs on him or her if Keleseth is empowered second instead of third. We didn't want which Blood Prince was empowered second to be a major element of the difficulty in the fight.
  
• We reduced the melee damage for the Princes by 10% for the 10 player difficulty. They were doing less damage than the 25 player before the hotfix, but this change lowers the damage further.
  
• Empowered Flames will now run out of power after shooting fewer firebolts in the 10 player difficulty. We did not change the initial impact damage.

The first change, the change to Keleseth, makes it easier if you decide to use a ranged tank on the fight. There has until now been a danger of being knocked into melee range of Keleseth from a Shock Vortex. Normally, if Keleseth's primary target is out of melee range, he only casts spells. But if you were unlucky enough to get bounced near him, he would take a swing at you. A quality of life change, but a welcome one nonetheless.

The second BPC change is a much needed change. The Dark Nuclei are the only way to successfully tank Keleseth during his time with the Orb. It wasn't a huge deal if he was the third Empower target, but if he was chosen second, there was little time to gather the necessary Nuclei to survive his attacks, almost guaranteeing death.

The final two changes affect only the 10-man version of the encounter. It seems they were made to further tune the encounter for 10 players. Speaking from experience, this encounter is difficult with 10, especially when trying to reduce the damage of the Empowered Conjure Flame ability. Melee damage suffered greatly because of this. The melee damage reduction should alleviate some healing stress. I imagine tank damage was not supposed to be the healing challenge in this fight, but rather the Keleseth tank's damage and the random AoE.

Blood Queen Lana'thel

• Blood Queen Lana'thel will only be available after the Blood Prince Council is defeated.
• Blood Queen Lana'thel's Essence has a longer duration.
• Kinetic Bombs no longer aggro Blood Queen Lana'thel during the Blood Princes encounter.
• Blood Queen Lanathel should no longer cast Vampiric Bite on pets.

The first and third change listed are fixes to what are essentially bugs. See, within the BPC fight, there are orbs that need to be kept in the air. Lana'thel's platform is above where you fight the Princes. Before the fix, the orbs could float up close enough to Lana'thel to activate her. BPC is a tough fight as is; having to fight them AND Lana'thel is asking a bit much.

I can't comment much about how the change to Lana'thel's Essence will alter the fight as I haven't yet seen the encounter in person, but from what I've gathered players were letting the first target die to avoid having to deal with the mechanic of spreading the debuff to other players. Check out a fight strategy for more info on what I'm talking about here.

Overall, these changes should make the fights behave more like what is expected of them. The encounters have been defeated since release, so they weren't impossible, but they required a lot of dumb-luck (even with perfect execution). I'm looking forward to getting back in and trying these changes out first-hand.