Screenshot of New Merveil Fight

Cool. More early game desync deaths. Should do wonders for player retention.

Keep up the good work, GGG.

I made the mistake of fighting Mereviel as a summoner.

Great job, folks. It's a fun fight, and I can tell you put a heck of a lot of work into it. You also made the fight completely IMPOSSIBLE to progress past for a summoner.

Let me explain with a bit of storytime. I drop a portal just as I go in (thank god!) and I've got four zombies in tow. They're augmented with the health support gem. Remembering how the fight used to be, I went in decked out in cold resist. Mereviel appears and my zombies go in. Behind her I drop six skeletons and I start spamming those new flaming skull things.

In two seconds all my pets are dead and I'm running like hell. I decide to forgo the pets since they can't last past a quarter second past summoning. I kite with the flaming skull things and finally get her to form two.

Here's the impossibility. Not only am I doding twelve thousand funnels at once, I'm also dealing with upwards of a hundred trash mobs at once. Now, this wouldn't be so bad, if I had some AoE ability, but I don't. I take a moment, pop every health vial I have at once just so I can stand still a moment, and summon every critter I have.

They die instantly. I die instantly plus a quarter moment.

Over and over and over again I tried in different ways. The number of funnels I have to deal with is absurd. The number of adds that comes in is absurd. I can't even kill a whole spawn of trash mobs before more come. It gets to the point where even they can't move because there's so damned many of them.

Now, if I were a newbie summoner to the game, I would've metaphorically thrown the controller into the TV and played something else.

I can appreciate a game trying to give us a challenge. But something like this? On normal? What the hell? Yeah, I did eventually get past it, by finding a fireball gem I put in my stash ages ago. I had to get past that damned boss fight by spawning, spamming fireball, and dying for maybe ten consecutive times just to get room to move. A little over a half hour later, I got one of the sub-bosses dead. I don't even want to think about how long it took me to wrap things up and how many recall scrolls I went through.

I seriously doubt this went out without a lot of player testing. Maybe you should include a summoner in that testing. You know... so in the future you don't make a scenario that's impossible for an entire playstyle. Changing tactics is one thing. Completely overwhelming a player (On NORMAL!) with fifty some funnels and a couple hundred trash mobs is something else entirely.

You guys need to look at this again. Your quality control was out to lunch the day this got OK'd.