There seems to be a fair amount of dissatisfaction and annoyance around the Assault Knights, both here and in-game. I’ve narrowed this down to two major issues, and hopefully the following proposals can go some ways to addressing this.
1. Six Minutes to Knightfall
The #1 issue causing grief about this achievement at the moment is that it seems to be majorly bugged. People from TTS runs have reported not getting the achievement despite killing the Knights within 6 minutes, and there’s been a few (not personally verified) stories about people mysteriously getting the achievement after only killing one Knight. This desperately needs to be looked at, as we only have a week left until the content is over, and we’ve effectively lost the first weekend “prime time window” for achieving this.
2. Assault Knight Health
The Knights’ health/toughness should also be looked at. People have reported strange scaling issues with the Knights before and after the latest patch. I myself was in an overflow where I was at Green with about 20 people, yet we somehow managed to melt off almost 40% of its health in just a minute and a half. Then, as more people showed up, its health jumped up massively until it was back to the usual mega-HP sponge we’re now familiar with.
I have a feeling that the Knights are bugged where they are scaled up to require 50 people from the start. This is rather unfair both to smaller servers (which struggle to fill their main map even on a good day), and even to larger servers, because it means that the entire map must pull together to beat the Knights, resulting in ill feelings towards any players who are on the map trying to get other achievements or just doing Heirloom hunting/mapping. (Seriously, I’ve seen some VERY unpleasant remarks directed to players who are looking for Peter or trying to get people for the Spider or Cannoneer while the Knight fight is going on.)
Failure at the Knights then leads to more anger and blame being thrown around on the map. It’s creating a very toxic atmosphere and driving off players from attempting the content more than once.
I feel that if the Knights were adjusted so that their health is closer to that of the other Champions on the map when facing numbers of less than 50 people, it would give smaller maps a decent fighting chance to not only go up and fight Scarlet, but also to get the 6 Mins achievement. (And likewise, on larger maps it means that players who want to get to Scarlet don’t need to beg or bully other players to join in, leaving the latter free to play how they want.)
So, in summary:
A. Fix the Knightfall achievement so it is properly rewarded to players.
B. Adjust the Assault Knight health levels down to more closely match the other Champion bosses on the map. (At 50 players, their health should be about 50 – 75% of what it is currently.)