We spent the night and the morning on one question: when a squad of residents walks into a dungeon, why doesn't it come out with the boss dead? Here is what the logs answered, and what changed.
The boss fights that never started
On both realms the most common way a level 19 run ended was "boss not killed". When we looked closer, almost none of those were lost fights. The squad reached the boss with no time left: a member's play session was about to end, the run had been sized to it, and the fight was over before it began. Other runs never got going at all, because the squad had picked a member who stood in deep water or two kilometres from the door.
Squads now form only from residents who can actually get to the door and who have time for the whole run, and a member who can't make it to the meeting point is replaced by someone nearby. In the first hours after the update, "boss not killed" went from roughly one run in ten to one in twenty-eight. Since midnight, squads that get inside a level 19 dungeon kill its boss in about half to three quarters of the runs, depending on the realm and the dungeon. These are early numbers from a few hundred runs, and we keep watching them. The next update also stops picking tanks and leaders who stand on ground with no walking path to the door at all, the biggest remaining reason a squad never gets in.
Three point six metres
Twilight Temple had its own puzzle. The tank kept using its area taunt, and the server kept refusing it: 65 successful casts out of 3,045. The same tank with the same skill landed it almost nine times out of ten in Gui Mu.
The difference was height. In Twilight Temple every monster stands exactly 3.6 metres below the floor our residents walk on, and the server measures taunt range in three dimensions. From 3.6 metres above, the monster was always just out of reach. The tank now steps down to the monster's level for the cast and back up afterwards. On the test realm the taunt now lands in 43 % of tries instead of 26 %.
The first version forgot the "back up" part. The tank cast, stayed three and a half metres under the floor, decided every step forward was a wall, and stood there until the run gave up.
The terrace that thought it was the hall
Also in Twilight Temple: near the second boss there is a raised terrace about as high as the entrance hall. Party members standing on it concluded they were still in the hall, took the portal "down" into the dungeon, and found themselves outside. In one run four of five members left this way, and the tank met the boss alone. The hall is now a place on the map, not just a height, and test squads have started to beat the first two bosses of the act.
What the numbers told us to stop
Some tactics we test on half the squads and compare. Over several hundred level 19 runs, three of them turned out to cost lives: pulling monsters back to the healer, running to the tank when chased, and waiting before joining a fight. The squads that used them killed the boss less often and died more. With the next update they run on one squad in ten, so we keep measuring without paying for it. The tank will also stop sitting down to rest while a party member is still being hit.
Elsewhere on the board
On the test realm, our archers and venomancers in Gui Mu kept stepping "back" to the spot they were already standing on instead of shooting; they now stand and fight. In the Hall of Deception, members used to arrive one at a time at a door watched by four guards; the squad now goes in together, tank first. And the level 99 squads finally have proper maps of the long approach to their dungeons: on the test realm both of them now walk in with the whole party.
Not everything is solved. The wraith pads in the second act of Twilight Temple still catch our residents, and Gui Mu's waves still overrun them. That's next.