Guild Wars 2

In an attempt to reduce the amount of farming the latest update increased the health of holos and also made them invulnerable to damage until they spread out. I believe that the problems were that they were killed too quickly and could not be targeted fast enough for people to get credit. I think the main problem was the ability of AoE to kill them so fast that they went down before people could get to and tag them (even for those at the holo spawner already). I think that these problems were solved with the introduction of spawn invulnerability. AoE is no longer extremely effective and, therefore, increases the amount of time each holo is “active”. Increasing the HP of the holos goes too far in my opinion. While I can understand people being upset that they cannot farm them as easily anymore, that is not the main reason I bring this up. I am a level 80 with full exotics who was solo killing holos on Brisban (level 15-25 zone) for the past few days to try to get the 300 achievement. After the update today, I noticed that I was having a moderately difficult time (maybe just a tad less challenging than orr creatures lets say) beating them alone. This was fine for me but I was hearing a lot of map chat complaints that lower level players who were the “right level” for the map were finding the holo group very difficult to impossible to beat alone. While group play is encouraged, I don’t think forcing lower levels to group up to beat these things to get the achievement is fair to that section of the playerbase. Anyone else have thoughts on this?

I’m only level 65 atm, and the past couple days while doing my storyline/map quests I’d go along and kill the holograms and being able to get by with about half of my hp. But after today’s update, I can barely do 1 without dying (and sometimes I do) and it honestly makes me want to almost give up on this event. It’s hard enough trying to save up for 100k taffy for the wings. Plus I see level 80 people camping the areas where I’m at, and they’re not exactly eager to wait for anyone else. Some have been pretty nice and I’ve farmed some holos with them, but since I’m 65 I don’t exactly have the luxury to go spend 1s+ to go from waypoint to waypoint to go and get these with them.

All this has done is push people into farming lower level zones with mobs that are still one hit. The HP increase was not needed on top of the invulnerability.

I don’t like this change.

1) In a level 1-15 zone I’m having some problems killing the mobs with my level 22 thief. I still manage to kill them by using rally at my advantage but sometimes I die.

2) If there is a well geared level 80 there it is way worse than before because before, even if you was low level you could still do an aoe and tag the mobs while now you have to decide which mobs you want to tag and if you are lucky you get credit for 2 or 3 while a high level character can tag and kill them all still pretty fast.

Imho, farming this things is now slower, harder and even more boring than it was before. I was doing it for the achi and to sell the dragon coffers to make the money for the wings since 100k candies is so insane that when I first saw it I thought it was a bug and they were going to fix it.

Well Anet does want to keep removing any kind of good/easy farming from the game…
Not sure how the hell we’re supposed to get 100k candies now (unless they are trying to force us to buy rich dragon coffers, since those can give a better candy drop rate).
If anything this was only needed in the starting level zones. Anything but those first few should not have gotten these changes (except possibly the unvul change).

Spindelhalla.2139:

I don’t like this change.

1) In a level 1-15 zone I’m having some problems killing the mobs with my level 22 thief. I still manage to kill them by using rally at my advantage but sometimes I die.

That’s because the changes were pretty obviously balanced around a zerker warrior, not the other 50% of the game players.

The thing I liked about the extra HP is that if someone pops the holo by themselves, the fight will actually last awhile. So if you are in the area and see the holo spawn on your map, would have some time to get there before they all go poof. I was just in Gendarran Fields on a very poorly geared 80, and doing them by myself was nontrivial but perfectly doable. I don’t know yet what it is like for chars who are to the level of the zone. But this was a huge improvement over the first days of the event, because you didn’t have to camp the spawn points to avoid having them crushed right away. You could actually move around a bit and have some time to get to the holos when activated.

If you open holo in the middle of the mobs (low level lots of yellow mob), when they invulnerable, stay away from them. They will tag nearest mob. Then just kill them with help of other mob. (although I am lvl 80, I fight holo in lvl 70 – 80 area. This is what I do.)

Not really surprised, the extra HP has punished the non-zerkers without really producing any extra threat to the zerkers.

ANet either need to tone down the effectiveness of crit damage in PVE, or up the effectiveness off defensive stats. Until then DPS, particularly burst AOE DPS, will rule all.

The OP, IMO, is completely wrong. The increase in HP is good, as it allows people a better chance to get there in time to tag the mobs. The initial invulnerability is bad, because it now makes it harder to reliably tag the mobs. Why is this bad? Before the change, I would tag and then decrease my damage output considerably if others were at the node. to ensure that they also had a chance to tag. Now I have to be much more aggressive to ensure that I get full contribution, making it harder to make sure everyone gets a share.

My suggestion? Give the mobs a few seconds of protection as they fan out, rather than invulnerability, so that people have a few seconds to tag where they are much less likely to kill the mobs outright. This would make the orderly sharing of nodes a lot less stressful.

^ This <—- was not a long enough sentence.

Welp, next time be careful what you wish for. People will quickly lose interest in these and you’ll be soloing the groups. Glad I have all my stuff finished already. Quickly falling TP prices + this =‘s means I and many others won’t be farming them anymore.

Aberrant.6749:

Welp, next time be careful what you wish for. People will quickly lose interest in these and you’ll be soloing the groups. Glad I have all my stuff finished already. Quickly falling TP prices + this =‘s means I and many others won’t be farming them anymore.

But if players don’t farm them anymore, then supply will diminish, and TP prices will start to rise, which will drive people back to farming, which will increase supply, which will drive TP prices down, which will make players not farm them anymore… ok, my head hurts now..

locoman.1974:

Aberrant.6749:

Welp, next time be careful what you wish for. People will quickly lose interest in these and you’ll be soloing the groups. Glad I have all my stuff finished already. Quickly falling TP prices + this =‘s means I and many others won’t be farming them anymore.

But if players don’t farm them anymore, then supply will diminish, and TP prices will start to rise, which will drive people back to farming, which will increase supply, which will drive TP prices down, which will make players not farm them anymore… ok, my head hurts now..

I only see that happening for the coffers from people trying for the tickets if anything. The price drop will slow, but I don’t see it stopping… the “hardcore” mobs from the wintersday event that gave socks etc. didn’t stop people from constantly undercutting.

Fiontar.4695:

The OP, IMO, is completely wrong. The increase in HP is good, as it allows people a better chance to get there in time to tag the mobs. The initial invulnerability is bad, because it now makes it harder to reliably tag the mobs. Why is this bad? Before the change, I would tag and then decrease my damage output considerably if others were at the node. to ensure that they also had a chance to tag. Now I have to be much more aggressive to ensure that I get full contribution, making it harder to make sure everyone gets a share.

My suggestion? Give the mobs a few seconds of protection as they fan out, rather than invulnerability, so that people have a few seconds to tag where they are much less likely to kill the mobs outright. This would make the orderly sharing of nodes a lot less stressful.

My only problem with this proposed solution is that it does nothing to alleviate the hardships that the lower level players are currently being stuck with. Unless they lower the HP of the holos or lower their damage output, they are potentially shutting out part of the playerbase.

As for helping to lengthen the time holos are active without invulnerability, protection would be a start. But another reason that it makes sense to let them spread out before letting them being attacked is that it trivializes the combat not to do so. Standing on top of the spawner and spamming aoe abilities, even with protection, is getting “free” damage on the mobs and letting no real combat at all take place. This doesn’t seem like that is what was intended with holo fights.

This really doesn’t change anything with AOE damage, it just makes us wait a few seconds to group them up and go wild.

How about keep both the hp and the invulnerability, but just lower the damage on them so lower lvls can actually do them.

to be honest you’re not supposed to even be fighting dragon minions until a higher level, this only made them harder for the lower levels that are actually leveling and running across these in the wild.
some random warrior or guardian in full exotics is still gonna down them in less than 5 secs flat, since none of them are ranged mobs

This reminds me of the presents from Wintersday, and I think that’s much more reasonable: a good solution. It is not possible to have monsters that preclude zerker warriors from chewing through them but are also bite-sized enough for lower level characters. Those are mutually exclusive, and I think this is the right call—it actually encourages folks who are struggling to work together.

Just tested it. Health levels are fine. Can still solo the Halo’s just fine. Can we go back to complaining about drop rate?

HP increase was fine. Only takes an extra two seconds to kill.

The HP increase is perfectly fine. The fact that multiple players have the opportunity to actually hit a holo makes it better.

yep thats it for me for farming. im not gonna buy zerker gear for farming holograms.i went into the high lv zone because they were empty and as i barely do pve i started exploring a little. and the wing i gave up on already.100k is ridiculous…