Guild Wars 2

Jeffs.2183:

One thing I loved in GW1 was finding areas to farm and creating builds around them…

That was amazingly fun. I still remember my awesome necro build for solo farming Flesh Golems in the fire islands! To bad this is completely gone in GW2 as mobs are so few and far between and we have so few skills.

On topic: This is terrible. I think a health buff to these minions could possibly solve the problem. You don’t even need berserker gear to finish these guys fast. I use knights + carrion and my guardian greatsword #4 followed by #2 pretty much finishes them in maybe 2 seconds. Give yourself stability and you don’t even have to get up from being knocked back.

Why not camp the spots like the campers?

More (like five times as many) spawning points, have them spawn more often. Isn’t that all we really need?

Also, get rid of the KD on activation. If there are lots of people around the projector, the person who activates it is unlikely to get any kill credits as the holograms will be dead before they recover from the knockdown.

Ye gods, this is insanely bad design.

Edit: I’m also seeing suspiciously bot-like behaviour from a lot of players. They’re appearing right next to projectors just before they reset, killing the holograms then disappearing again.
Has the API for timing these things been released? That’s the only way I can see these people are able to do this so accurately.

Mungrul.9358:

Also, get rid of the KD on activation. If there are lots of people around the projector, the person who activates it is unlikely to get any kill credits as the holograms will be dead before they recover from the knockdown.

This ^ is why I gave up on the holo-emitters last night.

At first I didn’t understand why there was a mob of 15+ players standing around a hologram without activating it. I thought they were waiting for more people, giving other players the chance to run up. Now I know, they were just shuffling in awkward silance, trying to not be that person.

Mungrul.9358:

Edit: I’m also seeing suspiciously bot-like behaviour from a lot of players. They’re appearing right next to projectors just before they reset, killing the holograms then disappearing again.
Has the API for timing these things been released? That’s the only way I can see these people are able to do this so accurately.

That would be bad…

The ridiculous thing is, I’ve spotted these 2 major problems after only having found 4 projectors this morning. I can’t believe this got through QA.

^ I posted in map chat something to the extent that if I find any foul play, expect to get reported. Because someone was bouncing around the zone after every freaking projector. What I don’t get is, if this person is way pointing, they are spending a heck of a lot of money on it.

A fair way would be to party up and depower a bit so everyone gets a shot in. Heck grab some white labeled weapons and run around. You’ll still wipe them in a second or two.

There were 4 of us camping 2 spawns last night. With lvl 1 white swords as it was the only way for all 4 of us to tag them . After some time, in comes random guy. We ask him politely to use a white lvl 1 weapon because they die too fast. He ignores us and proceeds to kill when we activated. needless to say, only 1 of us managed to tag 1, the rest nothing. We move to next spawn – he follows. We ask him again to change his weapons. Again he ignores us. One of our guys is starting to get to the edge of reason and so instead of starting a brawl out came the exotics, stability and activate. I tagged 2, the other members of my team fared similarly. We did that for one more spawn, then the guy gave up and left. We switched back to our white lvl 11h swords.
So I guess theoretically we “won” the KS war. But having to fight it, I found very distasteful. This is the first time I had to purposively KS in GW2 and I did not like it. This thing really needs to be changed asap.

PS: Stability works.

I didnt find this too problematic generally (as time of posting this) areas like queensdale are difficult do this but i went to higher level areas were things not die instantly so you have maybe 5 seconds to react if your close e.g dredgehaunt cliff are a good place for this

The practicality is not the sole issue. Yes, there are empty spawns and empty servers. But this is the first thing I have encountered in GW2 that encourages KSing. Therefore it is bad, whether you are on the winning or on the losing side. Even if you are alone in the middle of an empty zone, it is still bad.

Yeah. Bad design. Yesterday I tried to wait for 1 to spawn minions and got 4 kills… will take ages waiting to get the 300… and moving around will need you to be fast and/or use waypoints(costing money).

They should at least have made it like with the chests at previous events:

Show all the locations permanently on the map so it is easier to walk between them… and not show it only if active(this makes the fast speed buffed people with lots of money port to everything and run there too fast).

Tons of more minions(best would be an event that scaled with the amount of players nearby) and faster respawn rate would also help…

or: every player can open it once and gets an individual cd… this way 5 players nearby each one could activate it and more players = more to destroy and kill.

tovadaun.6304:

I’m not sure about Champs. Maybe in the higher areas, but for the majority the areas are lower lvl ones. I know, they provide a challenge to higher lvl characters. I understand. However, on the flip side, do we really need another Champion Krait set loose in the lake, like in Caledon Forest? No one will ever go kill that thing, and it terrorizes every single new player on the map trying to get completion. Hundreds of lvl appropriate-80’s are in that area per day (and that’s a conservative estimate) on every server to kill the Jungle Wurm. No One Kills That Thing. So what now, there would be rampant Holo Champs in the 1-15 and 15-25 areas on top of the ones already there?

Oh but the champs get killed relatively often. And the Krait champion in particular is a rather easy one that you can kill solo or with two or three low levels.
The actual problem with those mobs is that they have the same ludicriously low repawn times as other events. Seriously, the event respawn is total nuts. You finish an event or event chain, you literally just need to open your inventory and sort out some items and boom it’s back on.
And it doesn’t even seem to be tied to server population. Yesterday I was guesting with a guildie on a medium population server, we killed the Champion Shark in the lake in Timberline Falls. The fight took us probably 1 or 2 minutes. I then went to the Quaggan heart merchant 10 metres away to sell some junk and my guildie said “The Shark is back up”. So its respawn was faster than the time needed to kill it.
I understand you want many events so everyone can have his fun doing them but this is just out of hand. It also makes all events feel so incredibly pointless. You try to immerse yourself into the world and your character but you are always made aware that what you do is utterly useless. At least make the respawn times lower in higher level areas because you often see events half done for hours before you decide to finish them because there’s so few people actually doing them outside of Queensdale and Orr.

/rant

On topic, I don’t like the holographic emitters for reasons pointed out above as well.
BUT I think it will cool down once people got their achievements. It’s a whole month of the event after all, and the chests drop just as regularly if not more often from regular mobs anyway.
It’s still awful design in my opinion.

Mungrul.9358:

Also, get rid of the KD on activation. If there are lots of people around the projector, the person who activates it is unlikely to get any kill credits as the holograms will be dead before they recover from the knockdown.

Ye gods, this is insanely bad design.

Edit: I’m also seeing suspiciously bot-like behaviour from a lot of players. They’re appearing right next to projectors just before they reset, killing the holograms then disappearing again.
Has the API for timing these things been released? That’s the only way I can see these people are able to do this so accurately.

More likely, they are using Guesting to shuffle between their home world and two additional worlds. I only swap when the spawns are over farmed, or there is someone rush killing the spawns to prevent others from tagging mobs, but I’m sure me popping in on a node made some people suspicious who hadn’t thought of using guesting.

Can we get an official response please? Will it be fixed or not?

Silver.3284:

There were 4 of us camping 2 spawns last night. With lvl 1 white swords as it was the only way for all 4 of us to tag them . After some time, in comes random guy. We ask him politely to use a white lvl 1 weapon because they die too fast. He ignores us and proceeds to kill when we activated. needless to say, only 1 of us managed to tag 1, the rest nothing. We move to next spawn – he follows. We ask him again to change his weapons. Again he ignores us. One of our guys is starting to get to the edge of reason and so instead of starting a brawl out came the exotics, stability and activate. I tagged 2, the other members of my team fared similarly. We did that for one more spawn, then the guy gave up and left. We switched back to our white lvl 11h swords.
So I guess theoretically we “won” the KS war. But having to fight it, I found very distasteful. This is the first time I had to purposively KS in GW2 and I did not like it. This thing really needs to be changed asap.

PS: Stability works.

This can’t be the intended way things go. o_o

I think the holograms just forget to scale up.

I do hope that this will be looked into.

The official response is probably “wait and see, there’s going to be more to it than what we have so far.”

My problem with the holograms isn’t that I’m impatient, my problem is that this system favors a first come first served thought pattern.

It’s far too easy for someone to camp and kill—regardless of the good intentions of others who ping the nearest waypoint.

Honestly, I believe a possible solution involves making the holograms have much more health and spawning them within a 240 radius around the center will be more helpful to the players. Of course, there are many other solutions that are a much better course of action, but this is just off the top of my head.

I think more hologram mobs should spawn and it should be like the presents were, anyone can loot from the bodies. That way there is no KS.

Yeah.

- Holoprojector should have way longer cooldowns, so camping next to one would be a waste of time.
- The enemies spawned should come in waves within an event, not all at once, so fast killers can’t do them in a couple of attacks and people can see the event and still have time to arrive.
- The waves should scale to the people present, so it’s not just 4 enemies even if there’s like 50 people around camping the holoprojector.
- And, of course, they should have had better skills. I haven’t seen anyone getting downed by them, ever. Most of them die before activating a single skill. Remember the protecting fire shield that required you to push the enemies outside to damage them? Those required stopping to think for a second instead mindless button mashing.

DeWolfe.2174:

What I don’t get is, if this person is way pointing, they are spending a heck of a lot of money on it.

Run around the map and get 3 emitters in 5 minutes, or waypoint around and get 3 in a minute – ~4-5s waypoint costs.

Coffers sold for 13s a piece in the beginning, now for 5s. With 1-4 coffers dropping from an emitter, do the math

The event lasts for an entire month. Let the impatient ones get done first and the crowds will thin out.

I should point out that yesterday was day 1 of the event. In a couple more days most people will have the hologram kill achievement and less people will be interested in those nodes. Hell, I was getting more coffers from the moas nearby than I was from some of those holograms in Ascalon.

Stark beat me to it.

Scaling them will not fix the issue for high DPS classes that farm. This is especially true in low level zones. A lot of the time people are by themselves so scaling won’t do a thing.

I personally will wait if I see someone coming otherwise I will start it and kill everything. I don’t have the time to wait for people that are slow. It’s not difficult to look at a map, see where one is, and rush to it. Most people do it and I have no problem waiting if I see them coming. For those that are not getting credit for kills, you need a DPS class that has AoE/cleave.

Arduin.3029:

DeWolfe.2174:

What I don’t get is, if this person is way pointing, they are spending a heck of a lot of money on it.

Run around the map and get 3 emitters in 5 minutes, or waypoint around and get 3 in a minute – ~4-5s waypoint costs.

Coffers sold for 13s a piece in the beginning, now for 5s. With 1-4 coffers dropping from an emitter, do the math

Probably better in the long run to sell the coffers. You’ll make enough gold to buy one outright much quicker than getting enough candy.

This wasn’t so bad last night, managed to farm the minions a bit and get 100 or so chests. Today has been terrible though, feel sorry for people who can only play at prime time, no chance of getting that “So Lifelike” achievement.

Seems like the only way to actually get any is just to camp them, so forget trying to actually play the game and come across them?

Did this achieve in the early hours this morning when hardly anyone was on, but last night it was next to impossible to even tag a hologram and to be honest it made me feel really bad about activating them. Even if you waited for someone to get there, unless they went in with aoe at the exact same time as you, half the mobs were dead before one or other of you touched them.

The hp on these things is a joke, so remove the need to kill the things.

Change the projector to be like like resource nodes where everyone can use the same one getting the drops automatically and they just release balloons or something

Actually I would love they put this in the medium (45 – 65) area like in wintersday. The mob will be not easy, but it worth for partying.

Fiontar.4695:

Actually, that’s not a fair representation. Yes, you could get the gifts that popped with out fighting the mobs, but the mobs also had their own loot tables very similar to what we see with this iteration. It was always better to kill the mobs for the loot.

This isn’t a Wintersday thread, so I’ll try not to digress too much. However I saw a lot of people just open the big gift, grab the small gift inside and just run away. The toys wouldn’t de-spawn quickly, so you’d see groups of toys just hanging around. Regardless of what the loot table was like (I forget, to be honest, if they dropped anything worthwhile), I saw this behavior quite often.

FateOmega.9601:

Why not camp the spots like the campers?

Because it’s not fun? In any way?

I don’t know about you, maybe you think the reward is enough to make it worth while, but ten minutes of inactivity followed by ten seconds or less of fighting, followed by ten more minutes of inactivity (lather, rinse, repeat) makes me want to spork out my eyes.

I do agree with some other posters that things will calm down as the event goes on, but I have to wonder why it’s a problem in the first place. Consider a dynamic event — anywhere. It scales with the number of people around. Since day one, this has been in the game because the developers know that more players means that they’ll need more things to kill. How did the hologram projectors miss this obvious treatment as well?

I had to report someone earlier as they gave me verbal abuse over whisper for doing a projector before they got to it. I didn’t even see them and did it quickly, but this shouldn’t be happening in GW2.

people are going crazy trying to nuke them as hard as possible. It takes barely any damage to tag them folks. I’m in a starter zone on a level 10 against level 80’s in exotics and having no trouble tagging all of them. You just have to tap them, not nuke them.

OY!

I just found myself a fairly quiet map (Fields of Ruin), worked out a run path and went between each Hologram killing them as they came up. Sometimes another player would join me, and I’d wait for them to reach the node before activating it. As a Staff Ele, all I really needed to do to tag the group was drop Lava Font on the node before activating it.

Ended up with 79 Hologram Kills, 69 Zhaitaffies and 41 Coffers for about an hour and a half of farming. And I was still taking time out to do my Daily while doing it. At this rate, I’ll have completed the achievement in 4 days, and with some nice loot for my trouble too.

Agreed OP, seems a bit odd considering pretty much everything else in the game doesn’t imitate the old server-wide node, every man for himself model. I don’t know why they chose these holos of all things to do a total 180 but it’s certainly rather lame.

Mungrul.9358:

The ridiculous thing is, I’ve spotted these 2 major problems after only having found 4 projectors this morning. I can’t believe this got through QA.

Anet has QA????

I agree with the OP that it is a massive design flaw. I spent a couple hours last night farming the achievement on my lowest char (12-20) porting around the lowest population zone i could think of to get it. The one thing that bothered me most was that I was actually worried another player would come along and kill everything before i could tag them. That’s the polar opposite of what Anet said they were going to do since development day 1. I don’t quite know who got fired or quit since then but they really need to come back because this isn’t what they promised.

Yeah, a map I was on earlier, as soon as one popped up there was somebody at it. The person was usually down-leveled and killed the mobs almost instantly. If you got there more than a couple of seconds after it was activated you were lucky to get a taffy. lol

very poorly done, imo.

The thing is that the mob health balance is pretty much spot on … if you are fighting them in a level-appropriate zone. So what is needed is either a radical improvement to character downscaling or some kind of effective disincentive for high level characters to farm holos in low level areas.

The flip side, of course, is that as a relatively low-level character, it is quite cheap to waypoint all over the map; although if you’re of the right level for the zone, chances are you don’t have 100% completion, so the waypointing option isn’t really there.

Yeah, it’s bad design. I don’t really get bothered by it though because I am completely used to things like this from previous MMOs, and this is nowhere near as bad by comparison.

And at the end of the day, it didn’t take me long to finish the achievement, so whatevs.

binidj.5734:

The thing is that the mob health balance is pretty much spot on … if you are fighting them in a level-appropriate zone. So what is needed is either a radical improvement to character downscaling or some kind of effective disincentive for high level characters to farm holos in low level areas.

The problem is not just the downscaling of players. It is also that the mobs don’t seem to take into account how many players (of any level) are present. So it doesn’t seem to matter where I go with my level 80 (please take into account that Orr doesn’t have holo-emitters…) – A) my gear is always overpowered and B) as soon as there’s more than 1 player it becomes an affair of seconds. And this is true for all the nodes I picked up on the way to my achievement, in various zones of different levels. As a general rule, the random normal mobs spawning around the holograms and harder to kill and do more damage.

binidj.5734:

The thing is that the mob health balance is pretty much spot on … if you are fighting them in a level-appropriate zone.

I’m not sure that’s accurate. I have to admit that I haven’t tested myself, since all of my current characters are level 80. But I heard a few people report that they were killing the holograms in one or two hits even on brand new characters.

The new patch today supposedly raised the health of the minions. They might live longer now.

Simple solution go guest on vabbi server or any low population one, the holograms are in many zones in different places, add different servers to the mix and it is not too difficult to come across them if you want. Also people are not going to be camping them the whole event. Some people will but not most.

I’ve just done a couple and their health is noticeably higher. They’re still easy to kill on your own but you have to actually make an effort to bring them down in seconds.

Danikat.8537:

I’ve just done a couple and their health is noticeably higher. They’re still easy to kill on your own but you have to actually make an effort to bring them down in seconds.

Agreed. It seems perfect now — not so much health that you’re spending an eternity fighting these, but enough so that people still have a chance to tag them.

I’ve heard complaints that the initial few seconds of invulnerability is bad, but I think that’s because those people still wanted the fast kills with one tiny AoE. Personally I feel that the spreading out is another good change.

Nicely done, ArenaNet. Thanks for listening.

I also found the improvements helped. I was able to run back and forth between about four or five nodes this time and most of the time I was able to reach them in time to tag at least 2-3 of the holos before they went down even if the holo was activated before I arrived. My biggest complaint about the event before was that you either had to risk missing the holos by moving between them or stand still in one place forever and wait. Feels much more active and co-operative now. Thank you A-net.

It’s only 8 and a 3rd hours camping a quiet holo solo… 2 clicks per 8mins is awesomely fun gaming. eyetwich

Mungrul.9358:

Edit: I’m also seeing suspiciously bot-like behaviour from a lot of players. They’re appearing right next to projectors just before they reset, killing the holograms then disappearing again.
Has the API for timing these things been released? That’s the only way I can see these people are able to do this so accurately.

Me and a buddy had a rotation of 4-5 spots with in a good run distant away or a wp near them. After awhile you get a good idea when one is going to pop. isn’t hard to get to the nearest wp, run up, kill it and wp out.

BobbyT.7192:

Me and a buddy had a rotation of 4-5 spots with in a good run distant away or a wp near them. After awhile you get a good idea when one is going to pop. isn’t hard to get to the nearest wp, run up, kill it and wp out.

Yep. I found a good location with 4 – 5 spots in both Gendarran Fields and Fields of Ruin. If nobody messes up the timing, I can hit all of them in a single pass within 5 mins, and then head back to the start to wait for 2 or 3 mins for the first spot to respawn. (And you can do events in the area in the meantime too to pass the time.)

Nkuvu.2570:

This isn’t a Wintersday thread, so I’ll try not to digress too much. However I saw a lot of people just open the big gift, grab the small gift inside and just run away. The toys wouldn’t de-spawn quickly, so you’d see groups of toys just hanging around. Regardless of what the loot table was like (I forget, to be honest, if they dropped anything worthwhile), I saw this behavior quite often.

Annoying as it was the first time I got ambushed by a random gang of Princesses in Lornar’s Pass, I can understand it. The toys were often more powerful than other monsters in the area in low-level zone – possibly because they were statted at level 80 and downscaled, and we all know that doesn’t actually create a perfect match.

On the other side of things, some of the toys weren’t all that fun to fight against unless you happened to have the right counter. Ventaris would kill you with retaliation, Princesses with Confusion, and golems stunlock you to death (at least then you didn’t need to worry about retaliation and confusion). i don’t think there’s any profession, let alone a single build, that has good answers to all three (professions with boon removal usually don’t have good access to Stability) and when you don’t know what’s going to come out, it could often become a case of “hope you get something you can deal with, leave if you can’t”. Especially if you were playing a character that was of the appropriate level for the zone.

As i have come to understand lately, mobs at different levels have strikingly different health. If you can find the same mob in a starting area and in a later area, the one in the later are is likely to sport a much higher health than simple scaling would account for.

You can test this by using the same skill as a opener in both instances and observe the amount of health bar that vanishes. If the scaling was linear the amount that vanished would be the same. But that is far from the case.

And these are the conditions that ANet think they can simply downscale the characters to fit…