End Game Activities

I wanted to wait until I did all of the things before I posted this, and I just finished my first trip to fight Xesht, so here goes.

The ability to find Olroth in Logbooks and to find an Audience with the King at Ritual Altars seems right. I missed each one once (I wasn't paying attention to the map and only saw Olroth's outbuilding after the fact in the first case, and I just didn't have the favors to buy the first Audience I saw). In both cases, I found them again and was able to fight each boss fairly soon thereafter. I don't farm those activity types, but those bosses feel reachable. I look forward to seeing how those activities improve with the next patch.

As of h, the number of Breach Splinters you get feels pretty good. On a high level map, I have enough time to pick up close to 10% of a Breachstone, and my character isn't even a particularly fast one. I imagine Lightning Spear characters get quite a few. However, Catalyst drops seem really uncommon even on Tier 15 maps. I don't think those things should be super common, but given the number you would need to upgrade a single piece of jewelry, they could probably have their drop rates nudged.

Delirium is my favorite end-game activity, and the duration of the fog feels good. It would be a lot easier to navigate, especially on weird-shaped boards, if there were an indicator for the edge of the fog on the mini-map. Splinter drops in Delirium feel stingy, and if the rate of Splinters on Breach is indicative of how these activities should look, it feels like Delirium Splinter drops are lagging behind.

None of the 3 bosses of the above activities feel oppressive. I beat Olroth, the King in the Mists, and Xesht on my first tries. I was probably at least 89 before I fought any of them (grinding up access to those guys might take too long overall if you want them to be more impactful to main character building), and the fights felt as straightforward as they should considering how over-leveled I was. I haven't gone back for round 2 for any of them, so I look forward to seeing how the harder versions of their fights look.

Simulacrum, however, is nuts. I have tried it twice so far, and I died in round 4 the first time and round 11 or 12 the second. It is preposterously difficult, and in no way comparable to the other end-game activities. Some of the deaths in this activity could be reduced by simply putting the Respawn checkpoints *outside* of the zone where you have to fight guys--those arenas are small, and it's easy to get killed over and over again because there's a hoard of dudes on the respawn point. However, in general, those enemies are crazy challenging for their level, and the difficulty of this particular encounter is way out of line with the other three.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Other people might have different ones.