I feel like I’ve been posting this in every other living story forum, but I plan to continue until its fixed.
Kill credit on scaled veterans and champions is not working correctly in large zergs. At the moment its evident with door events in the labyrinth. Being in a group greatly increases your chance at kill credit, but I’m certain the system isn’t working properly.
Note to readers: Kill credit means loot and EXP off a corpse. NOT event credit. Event credit is working perfectly fine.
Current scenario:
Zerg is attacking the grand viscount candycorn thing, you (or your party) makes it to the fight a little late (say it has 65% HP left) and participate through the whole event. Does your party get a champ bag? No.
OR
You are alone and open the door to spawn the candy corn and score the first 5-10 hits on it then run away. The zerg makes it to the boss later and finishes it without you. Do you get a champ bag? Yes.
Old situations:
Scarlet end event boss post HP scaling patch = Difficult to get kill cred on unless she spawned on you. (Again, event and achieve cred worked properly, but her loot would not drop.)
Scarlet end event boss pre HP scaling patch = You had a 100% chance to get kill cred if you could arrive in time and deal damage.
Ember farm = Guardians had the best chance at kill cred because they had spamable and instant AoEs. This meant a full party of them was more likely to have one player score one of the first hits on an ember before the other classes.
Currently working:
Champ zergs in Queensdale and Frostgorge do not hit this kill credit bug. When they get really big they kill champs before you can get to them because the champs are not scaled. Because they aren’t scaled, you have to be one of the first to hit them to get in on the action anyway. Having a party increases your chance of reaching that low level of damage required for cred faster. The way it’s intended to work.
The issue and how to fix:
The issue is that champs and veterans with proper zerg scaling seem to hit the kill credit cap sometime around the same time they would have died had they not been killed. So getting cred on them is just as much of a race as trying to outrun a zerg to non-scaled enemies.
This means a player without a party would have to hit a VERY powerful skill at JUST the right time in order to race the partied people for kill credit. In cases like the ember farm where parties were prevalent, it came down to which parties had the best professions for tagging the most enemies the fastest.
So you’re probably thinking: “Do more damage and be in a party, what’s wrong with that?”
Well there’s a few things wrong with it:
1. There’s plenty of scenarios where a player can come in and deal an upwards of one million damage to an enemy and not get credit
2. It stops becoming about who’s actually helping with the kill and starts becoming about who got there first
3. One of the advantages of GW2’s open world system is supposed to be the ability to coop with other players without a party. You can party up for increased efficiency, but it should not become totally and completely neccesary
4. No matter what zerg scenario you’re in, you have to race the zerg
5. The kill credit damage threshold is not supposed to be a very elitist style difficult thing to obtain favoring certain builds and professions
6. There’s no way the system is working like it’s intended
7. Support builds aren’t viable
To fix it the system needs to be thoroughly tested on ArenaNet’s side. At some point the server maxes out and decides not to give kill credit to anyone who reaches the damage threshold after that. If it can be fixed without messing up the server load (it should be fine, like i said, achievement credit works fine) then the issue might be found in the scaling code.
If it can’t be fixed without breaking the server then it may be necessary to either decrease map populations or replace large scaled enemies for multiple and scattered non scaled enemies.
This is one of THE MOST frustrating bugs for me. I really want to just hop in and zerg on my own accord, but instead I find myself having to do stressful party micromanagement and don an elitist attitude ready to kick anyone who dares so much as AFK to fetch a drink.