Guild Wars 2

If your overflow is even remotely understaffed, you’re better off dropping your current knight at the first hint that you won’t be successful and go to fight for attunement spots on one of the Blue or Green knights.

If you’re Red, you’re just outta luck, period. Whichever of Blue or Green goes down first will have their party go to the other knight; the people that were fighting that other knight all along aren’t going to leave theirs to help you, because they finally just got a chance at loot. The folks from the first knight aren’t going to help you, because chances are too much time has passed now for it to matter. Your desire to be a team player by starting at Red works against you, in the end.

It seems to be that there’s only two scenarios:

A. Your overflow is booming, and you just zerg down all 3 knights like normal, except with 50 per knight instead of 100 roaming.
B. Your overflow is underpopulated, and you’ll be lucky to get one knight down, let alone two.

Has anyone managed to ‘play smart’ and take down all 3 knights despite a lack of numbers? I would love to hear how you accomplished it.

I’m not sold on this “need 50 per knight” bit I keep hearing.
Right after the patch, I was on YB home server. We had about 25 at green, and roughly equivalent numbers (+/- 5) at red and blue. We killed them in maybe 10-12 minutes?
I don’t recall anything special being done. We had 3 commanders who simply did stack-counts and made sure all 3 knights had roughly equal numbers and we just fought.

I saw some players not dodge the pull and get downed. A few full on died, but they didn’t stick around for too long. I didn’t see any summons (fire ele / ogre)…

One thing I want to say though, is that this battle can be done without dodging. If you sit on the close side of the attunement circles you can usually walk your way out of the attacks.
1) Pull attack.
This one is simple. The pull doesn’t pull at close range. If you look at the orange area, there’s a circle in the middle that is not part of the pull attack. Walk adjacent and wait for the gear animation. When the gears appear, walk backwards to get out of the follow up attack on those that were pulled. Literally, you have enough time to slowly walk backwards after the gears appear (you can walk right over the gears while the animation is visible) to get out of range of the follow up attack.
This means you can continue attacking the entire time; no loss in DPS by dodging.

2) Blowback attack
Turn around and walk out of the circle. If you’re sitting in the attunement circles, there’s usually enough time. You only need to dodge if you were in the middle of casting something big and waited for it to finish before getting out of the orange.

My only other tip is go ranged. I am a D/D ele at heart. While a good D/D ele can get in there and do fine, I found that it was easier to just stand still with a staff. Further, the D/D rotation typically involves a number of condition-heavy attacks like earth(5) and fire(2->5) that render those attacks null and void. With the staff, just sit in fire, Auto-ing while putting down 2 and 5 on cooldown. When the condition phase of the knights come up, add water and earth to the mix of staff attacks.

I was in a overflow a few hours ago that was 50 on blue, 35 on green and 20 on red. Blue finished first and went to green, green finished about a minute later and went to red and red finished with 1 minute remaining. When moving from 1 knight to another, only high DPS players should go. There’s no point wasting a slot on a subpar DPS unless there’s not enough people for the minimum scale.

If you could get a group of only berserkers that know how to play, killing the knights is much easier. You could probably kill all 3 knights with only 40-50 people, but that simply isn’t going to happen under normal circumstances.

The first time I did it on the first day we split into 3 groups and did it. We got to the ship and finished the holo and killed scarlet. I missed the chest because I did not see it before I went into Scarlet.

I read there is a timer that starts for the holo battle when the first Knight goes down. So like the Wurm you need to try and take them down together. If you do you get to the holo battle with space to spare. If you are late you can come in in the middle of the holo battle. The zerg system starts the holo battle too soon, takes away your time to finish it and win.

I don’t understand how this 50 man thing works. If you got too many players how do you know who has the buff. I usually manage to hit the knight and try and keep track of my damage to her. If I stop doing damage I run through the colored circle again. It seems to work but who knows.

There needs to be a Clear Idea of who is in the battle and who is not before it starts. And I’m not sure how many players are allowed in one overflow at a time. Lets say the overflow only holds 150 players that’s 50 for each Knight, but how do you know if your on the knight or not because as I said I run in and out of the circles and get the buff and do damage. The last time we finished I stayed where I fought because I was told if you didn’t you would not get credit or loot for the battle.

Perhaps when you enter the knight area before the battle you should get a screen notice that you are the 36th player for the blue knight battle and when you get past 50 you get a message the battle is full and that red need 16 players and green need 12.

But what if there are more than 150 players in the zone who’s gonna tell the 151st player they been working here but now they can’t play.

This was not thought out. This was badly planned. Anet should know that if the players can find a way to make it easier they will. I did enjoy the zerg of all 3. I also enjoyed doing it with 3 groups. Too bad there can’t be a way to make everyone happy!