Crystal that allows you to fight Reklar as alternative to Primal Boon.

I am suggesting a mechanic similar to Falgut for Reklar because the current method of gathering etheral shards to use with one person casting primal boon kills anyone wanting to hunt Reklar and the fact it takes a lot of people. Maybe a new crystal mechanic that allows you to hit Reklar and his adds will help so you have choice of gathering all the etheral shards or the crystal. Perhaps can use the etheral shards in the formula that makes the crystal which would give you buff allowing you to fight Reklar for 60 seconds. I kind of concerned cause no one wants to hunt Reklar anymore.

Personally i don't want to fight reklar because-
-Of how long it takes. This wouldn't be a factor had it not been for the masses of ethereal shards needed - and the fact you gather them from things with 10k+ health makes it unberably slow to do so on a biped, and annoying at best (boring) for my dragon. I didn't mind old reklar because you needed 20-40 shards at most (depending on how dedicated the booner is). Which was reasonably fast to gather - often you could gather that alone as a dragon in the time it took for the whole group to get there. NOW you need waaaaay more shards due to his health boost, and it takes waaay longer to get due to his minions' health boost. Frankly, it's not the fact we have to use them, its the fact it takes so unbearably long to prepare for a fight.

- Reklar's difficulty plays a small part in it, but to me is by far not the largest factor, time it takes to prepare is above all the thing that makes me not want to fight.However as with the next (?) delta allowing his minions to be hit by primal boon, the actually most annoying part of the entire fight ("dont boon take care of the adds we dont want the debuffS PLEASE STOP BOONING PLE- oh the booner died finally i can kill the adds" -my minds voice in most reklar fights) isn't a barrier to his difficulty anymore. I think his large health pool is likely the most deterring factor when it comes to this now.



I think crystals to damage are boring and overused, the spell is a nice mechanic which gives a sense of variety and that's nice.
Also crystals implies a need for crafting and it's a pain in the backside to fly/run all the way back to reklar because of the understandable lack of nearby machines (and also needing craft school skills would be exclusionary - it's already hard enough to find people with a high enough dcrs for falgut, though using intuition/the adventure based craft skill would get around that) - further adding to the time it takes to prepare for the fight.

But - i don't think changing to crystals would help - if i need to gather 90 shards for a reklar fight w/ primal boon (15 minutes of combat time), and i also need to gather 90 shards to make 15 minutes of combat time via crystals, it still doesn't get past the biggest barrier which is the time it takes to prepare, because the time taken to prepare is the same if not longer because one person needs to fly to a machine and back (and potential added time if craft school skills are involved).



IMO - would be better to make ethereal shards drop in multiples, extend the time primal boon works for and/or reduce reklar's as well as the plaguebearing minions' heath, or I migth suggest a tweak to the idea of crystals that reduces shards needed by being more efficient than shards.

-Ethereal shards dropping in multiples: Have minimum drop on them actually be 2, and potentially up to 4, halfing the time it takes to gather at worst - a huge slice to the prepare time. (also has a side effect - primal master quest reuires killing 25 reklar minions and getting 25 ethereal shards. primal master trainer then proceeds to take the 25 shards off of you - so you end the quest no closer to being able to fight reklar. This way - you'd gather 50 shards on the quest, 25 are taken, and then you have 25 to progress towards being prepared for reklar fights. i actually despise this quest just because it takes the shards, lol)

-Extend primal boons time: I don't like this solution as much but it's better than nothing potentially so i'm proposing it. Right now as i recall you have about 6 seconds between each primal boost cast to attack as the booner, this is nice because counting in tens is very convenient due to a small number (to be effective as a booner you kind of have to count to 6 and then recast the boon because of the huge delay it has, 4 seconds of no one causing damage is actually a very long time and it makes the fight very annoying to do.) If primal boon was extended, it would reduce the need for shards (and thus reduce prep time)...but it may also mean the job of dedicated booner becomes an absolute head ache to do because of the concentration and requirment to count to 26 (if it lasted 30 seconds), 56 (if it lasted 60 seconds) and so on-- i think this would dissuade people from wanting to fight reklar just because it would be so diffuclt to find a booner. But it's better than what we got now so. (granted, if it lasted 60 seconds, one may not have to count as much - but personally I still wouldn't like to fight like that because 4 seconds (+ the time it takes for booner to notice which is sometimes a long time) is a looong time to wait in an epic fight lol)

-Reducing their hp: Essentially undoing what made reklar a pain in the first place. Undoing his minions' health back to 2.5k and reklar's health back to 150k (?) would make him desirable again, though with how the devs are about undoing their health boosts i doubt this will be considered - especially his minions' because they took one single gold rage to down and i understand that the devs want it to be harder than that. Reklar on his old health took 60-180 seconds to kill, so a short fight so i doubt they want to reduce reklar's health either.

-Crystals: So to take my original fact that a perfect booner needs 90 shards for 15 minutes of combat time. If crystals were to be made, i suggest that they imitate primal boon exaclty - AoE cast the primal boon effect so unlike falgut, you can still have a dedicated booner because only one person would need crystals. (if each member of the group needed their own crystals it would MASSIVELY increase preparation time). So then, make crystals be at least twice as effective. So make crystals - if we're saying they have a 60 second effect - take 3 ethereal shards to make (and do NOT dear god put a differrent min/max for the skill to create - a flat rate of 3 ethereal shards per 60 second crystal no matter the skill, otherwise once again we cycle back around to needing lots of shards still so prep time isnt reduced + need to find optimal crafter adds to time.) This means that 3 ethereal shards is 30 seconds of non crystal, and 60 seconds of crystal boon time - so if every shard gathered was turned into a crystal then time prep time would be halved in this case.

The following change is already on Blight: Fallen Plague Dragons and Warriors can now be damaged while Primal Boon is active

Thank you for bringing that up Spyrioyo, it was about time
I did not , cause I whined enough about Surtheim..

Thank you Azath- your input-as always- well thought, well written and so true.

Thy Amon for that change- but it will not bring me back to Reklar hunts.
I have no better ideas than Spy and Az suggested- but its no fun hunting him. Something seems not right..

And on a sidenote: ALL my friends and co players, who used to do the epic fights with Flame and me
ALL are gone- noone left- we did that for years- but in the end we had probs to get the "new" epics down
cause we (all very experienced, some uber, all perfectly equipped) needed bigger groups- which we did not have in our time zone. Even not on Chaos..not on the weekends.
It was no fun anymore
*shrugs*

I'm excited that the adds can be hurt when boon is up. I will start going again once that hits live.

Don't really like the crystal idea. It's just the same mechanic in a different form. No need to change that.

The one idea that Azath mentioned, increasing Primal Boon's effect time, I think could be really handy.

So 1) Make primal boon not repeating. Give it like a 5 second cooldown.
2) the primal boon effect on the group goes up from 9 seconds to maybe 30? seconds.

The booner would have to be more on the ball with the timing. It's actually fairly easy right now once you get the hang of it. Let primal boon cast, use 2 melee abilities, 3 max, then allow primal boon to cast again. Once you get the timing right, you can boon plus melee a little and keep it on 100% of the time (except when stunned, mezzed, or wisped).

The downside to making it last longer, is that players who are dead when it gets cast, might have to wait 20 seconds to get the boon effect back. So keeping the recycle short helps with that. someone gets rezzed, the just recast it early. But it not being repeating could actually make it more difficult and lead to having gaps without boon, but at the same time if the booner gets wisped, you still have some time to fight before it fades.

I think that could work. But we can see how it goes after the delta, then comment again.

Azath I am also open to spell being used instead of crystal what I care about is making Reklar more desirable to fight again. I know about the coming delta changes but that might still not be enough. Yes, I am supportive of increase of Primal Boon time to 30 seconds instead of 9 seconds as Guaran but I want to wait and see about after the delta to see if things are improved. If things don't improve then come back to this.