Guild Wars 2

I’ve done this event succesfully 30 times in the past 4 days, i commanded 29 of those so i guess i’m in the perfect position to give feedback and help Anet understanding what the players think (at least in 1 server). However, my english is not perfect and i hope it’s in an average level to be understood.

Here comes the tale of Scarlet’s end. My server is the spanish server, Baruch Bay, and we are among the casual type. It’s truth that my server killed the Three-headed wurms (2 days ago) but we also have a lot of casual players and a semi-competent teamspeak community, here’s what happened in this event.

The first day community
Going to Lion’s Arch blind-mode, we tried to understand the fights, 2 commanders did actively got in control of Lions Arch and kept constant contact in TeamSpeak to try this out. we spammed the map channel to get people for the event and help while commenting our thoughs, the community was really nice.
Eventually we were having always among 30-40 players in teamspeak and 100 randoms in the map (lucky for us, the people in lions arch recalled our names from events like Marionette and 50% of the randoms follow directions). We always had around 120 players following around and doing this events.

What now?
The 3 knights
At first, we tried to kill them separately and failed. We tried to kill 2 at same time and then go to last one and suceeded, then we tried to kill them 1 by 1 and suceeded; Zerging them 1 by 1 was the fastest way and we would stick into that for the next attempts. We tried to identify everything in the fights but it was too chaotic and random, and it took us 15 tries to finally understand their phases. We were suceeding, but we were never sure why it was sometimes easy and sometimes hard. The mechanics are here explained.
- The Knights swap phases each 25%. The phisical phase is intended to be damaged with only phisical damage and critical hits, since it reflects conditions. The condition phases is intended to be done completely with condition damage, since they can’t reflect it anymore and there’s a buff that tiers up to 50 and we believe that it’s somehow an special “vulnerability” debuff that tiers up with conditions.
- They jump down when they do the ranged aura, we must dodge when orange circle dissapear. They put another orange circle, to be dodged 1 second after it appears, wich affects only melee players. They also make a rotation of 3 hammer attacks that attacks melee players (even behind).

Problems understanding the fight
The first day, zerging them was easy to be done. The first one always died in 1 minute, the second one died in 3 minutes, the last one died in 5-6 minutes. Why? that was the question. We though they were differents, we though blue had more armour or red did something special, but it was not that. We started in a different one and swapped the order in 10 tries, and the result? The same. The first one always died in 1 minute, then the other ones were harder.
We wanted the 6 minutes achievement, and since we had the same players zerging them 1 by 1, why it was harder to kill 3rd one? We had no clue, we still don’t. Scaling? maybe, but that’s something that i’m not sure i’m able to explain here. At a point we had 3 players trying to kill 1 knight while everyone else was in another one. At different tries we had 0 players in a knight to no trigger the scaling but it didn’t work either.

Our best try zerking them out? took us 7 minutes, not enough for achievement. Then the patchs hits and we are forced to not kill them 1 by 1. By that time, we were completely encouraged to kill all 3 at same time, but a problem had been created: Bad habits.
Our server people were used to zerg them 1 by 1, and we had to explain try after try that we should NOT zerg them anymore. I must be honest and say that i had to “lie” in the map channel for the first hours, saying that if 1 died too early, the event fails. Nevertheless, we were not doomed. Our server was never used to do the same rotation, we were always swapping the order to kill 1 first and that’s what saved us, since the players were always asking commanders wich one would be the starting point, instead of being used to start always in same places (as i heard from overflows). Now we just had to explain how to kill the 3 at same time instead of saying where to start.

First serious tries after patch, second day
3 commanders (the 2 that were always together, Me and Arcadia, and then some randoms commanders that did 2 or 3 tries) decided to give it some tries. We spammed the chat again try after try asking people to go to teamspeak. At peak times we had 50 players in teamspeak and 70-80 in the map channel. It was a double task to synchronize it but not impossible. Since we are not elitist people by far, we had no ragequitters and that’s good for this times because we were ready to fail.
We tried to fill the 3 places with 50 players, and our first tries had 50 50 20. That was good a bit, 2 knights died fast, then everyone did run to the 3rd one and… almost failed, because only 50 players could hit.
- New mechanic was added, the calibration numeric status for coloured pools. We noticed that only 50 players could hit, but all our tries had 120 players in the previous day. We never had 150 and that was an issue… or not? It was NOT, romours and urban legends of needing a full map went away in a blast, what blast? we tried 35 40 35 and win.
We had 35 players at green and 35 at blue, and 40 in red, and surprisingly for us, we won. We never had to sent people to the other knights. Was that good? why? if one knight is killed, it’s a waste of players if they don’t go and help, right? OPPOSITE, helping would be a problem, because it would had broken the next phase, holograms (explained later).
Anyway, we noticed a very big problem with the Knights: the 6 minutes achievement. It was at that time impossible for us to complete it since knights were dying in 12-15 minutes.

The last 13 tries our goal was always to get 40 players on each side, and we used teamspeak to know real-time calibration in the 3 sides. If one side had less than 35 players, we sent from the other ones (even if the other ones didn’t had more than 45), the goal was always 40 and not 50. That was a complete outstanding strategy and we suceeded try after try, never failing.
At that time, my server became not just “a desert place where people can’t do events” but a server where “we can! we need to focus, we are doing it!”. This events encouraged our hearts more than anything, and we kept trying over and over removing the need of going to an overflow, although the achievement of 6 minutes was still off the limits.

But yet, we didn’t understood the fight
Today, at morning, the green one (mine, green is mine always! xD) had 40 players and died in 6:20 minutes, when the usual dying time is 13:00-15:00. Why did it died so fast? no clue, we did nothing different. We tried again, tried to replicate it, almost same players, took us 14 minutes… there was something fishy there.
It happened 2 more times in the evening, always green dying too fast and the other 2 took some time to catch up. However, even if we killed green too fast, NOBODY from green was ever going to help them, and that was the key to success in the next events, the holograms (ok ok, time to explain that)

The portals to holograms
At the first tries, our server were zerging the knights, and because of that everyone joined through the same portal. That created a problem, rooms were capped and only 50 players could land in a room. Since not 150 players were participating, the game did send us to different rooms and the result was 50 50 20. The room with 20 players always failed. Our server were swapping the knights order and because of that we noticed that faster players were sent to always the same platform (nearest to portal) while the other ones were sent to overflow platforms. Fixing that was impossible in the zerging phase.
But then the patch changed that
The patch that forced us to kill the 3 knights at same time forced us to be 40 on each knight. That was ok, and after some tries we realize “hey, if 40 joins each room, we could succeed. That would work for us as well with the holograms, same as works with the 3 knights, instead of 50 50 20”.
Yes, it worked. That’s the reason of why after 1 knight dies, we spam the channels asking that NOBODY ever goes to help the other knights. Sometimes we just sit down and talk for a minute or two while the other players kill their knights, but that’s just perfect, everyone knows why we are waiting and feels like friends near a bonfire.
When all 3 die, then we just joined the 3 portals, 40 on each side, it’s a perfect solution and we not only suceed the 3 knights, but also the 3 rooms because of it

The holograms
The first times, this was a very confusing fight. It was already started, and we were losing achievements before we even noticed, hitting by laser at the entrance door. Nobody was doing damage and then some players were doing small amounts of damage, and we noticed the colours. Reading the boss description and more researching made us adapt in the fight and pick up the 3 colours in order to deal damage. That was a learning phase that i love because it took us so little time to do, it was so intuitive that it made me smile. Challenging, fun, doable, all in first try.
The first hologram died quite easy, but then someone said in the chat that it was a lie, holo was a 80%. What? are you blind? no… wasn’t a lie, there were 3 rooms. In the first day, a room always had 20 players, that room always failed, it was bad luck if you land there? that wasn’t unfair, we had to fix it and we didn’t know how. (It was fixed later on, joining 40 on each side, but i still don’t like how Anet handled that).
Anyway, first hologram dead, they split into 3, what do we do now? Focus on 1! Yeah, we had the same stupid idea to zerg them out as we did with the knights. And it did worked quite well. Blue was always first killed because it had more health and then green and red died fast. That spawned 18 enemies, we were just stepping in 1 colour and hitting the right enemies (and wrong ones, it was chaos! it was fun!) and eventually that lead to final phase were everyone did hit the central violet hologram while scarlet was spawning more little ones on us that we tried to kill.
Sigh… I can laugh when i remember how blind we were in that try, everything was wrong with us. Took us a lot of tries to polish our strategy, but we made a pretty much solid strategy that works great. The mechanics missed in that chaotic attempt were really these:
- The phase 1: We need the 3 colours to hit, for 60 seconds the attunement worked and then we had to pick 3 colours again, they would appear together. That would only work for the first 25%, at that point the red and green always appeared together but blue appeared always in the front. The duration was then reduced to 35 seconds and the only “safe” way to go to the opposite place if lasers were around was across the central hologram, hoping that real Scarlet wouldn’t put a dome in there.
- The phase 2: We noticed that we only had to pick 1 colour, the one of our enemy. Blue was only vulnerable to conditions, and she could put a Shield that prevented the next 50 conditions, her attacks were just frontal areas. Green was creating a dome that reflects projectiles and doing some Area attacks that were focused on 1 player, it also created trees near her that explode if you step on. Red was easy to deal with, no special defense and her only attacks were fire areas and a powerful melee wave that push people back.
With that mechanisms, we noticed what to do and it was really too easy: Condition players to blue, Melee players to green, Ranged players to red.
That was the perfect way to deal with them, but that wasn’t everything. They 3 appeared at same time, and if killing the knights at same time was possible, why wouldn’t we do the same with these enemies? Specially when their “despawn” time was about 20 seconds exploding randomly. We had to try, and we did, the results were outstanding: Killing them 3 at same time removed the 18 little holograms phase. We could skip a phase if nobody screw it and that was great because it was a gift to coordinated groups against random ones.
- The phase 3: Eventually we noticed that central hologram was inmune to damage and nobody was suppose to attack it, and for each enemy killed it would deal some damage to central one. 4 waves (4:30 minutes) was enough to kill last phase, we just had to do 2 things: Kill the 20 little ones or rez people. When we realized that we would get hit by a massive laser if we fail to kill the 20 little ones, we just had in mind that we would need to rez people, but that wasn’t an issue since we would had a break of 20 seconds because nobody was suppose to hit central hologram, we just had to wait for little ones to spawn and it was at that time not a challenge anymore but a nice way to slow down things before the end.

The achievements
We had to do achievements and everyone was trying, but failing. The 2 in the holograms phase were hard, In Tune and No more Tricks (i think, my english is not good for this things).
- No more tricks was fun to do, hard, challenging, even funnier with TeamSpeak, since everyone was having a blast trying and when someone failed it and sweared we all had a funny moment. Specially fun when someone made something stupid (like i did). In my case someone said in the TS that a mesmer portal leaded to a blue colour, so i did go and used the portal… and i landed in a laser… and i died… and they were laughing at me! But i had a fun time hahahaha. Everyone did, messing up with the commander makes a social event even more fun and creates a good atmosphere
- In tune is the one that took me most time to get, 29 tries. Finally done, i failed often in it because of a lot of random fails. Since i’m a warrior, i was always trying to melee the 1st phase hologram (with the 3 attunements) but at 25%, when it dissapears, i was slow moving back and i did hit the 3 new small holograms with my sword because they appear in center before moving to their positions. Automatically failed because i did hit the 3 of them without the right attunement xD. On the next attempts i did run back at 30% and decided to only hit with single ranged attacks. Then i failed in phase 2 often because either scarlet spawned the wrong colour beneath my feets or a condition did hit while my attunement dissapeared. It was quite tricky but totally doable.

The AFK players
Eventually some players were being AFK near the door where nothing hits to get the achievements. We noticed that, and what did we do? Punishment!. The 50 players in the teamspeak were actively trying to spawn the 6 blue enemies and moving them to the afk players, so they would die and lose the achievement. It was fun and it was a good punishment for not helping us with such a group event. Some of them noticed what we were doing and started helping us with the events, eventually surrender or went to overflows to complete the achievements. Why this behaviour? because it was “encouraged” in some famous blogs that i personally hate now. This behaviour should never be encouraged and everyone should try hard and not the easy way. Cheating and leeching is something that our server don’t support. Those blogs also suggested a broken strat that made our server fail marionette when we had a perfect working strategy, but that’s not something to be discussed now.
Anet decided to patch the problem of the AFK players by making lasers fall from the sky and hit in the places near the door… and that was too much fun for us. We noticed that some players didn’t know about it, and they went there to get their “easy achiev” but then they faced the reality and got hit by the lasers. When that happened, the laughs in the TeamSpeak were loud.
We were not mean, just understand us, everyone was doing their best… and 4 players trying to leech from the others? not cool.

The best things that Anet did
- The npcs in the holograms phase, they are inmune to all damage and always Rez players. It’s really awesome when heal-tron goes to rez you. Or people asking Kasmeer a kiss when they are being rezzed by her. Ellen kiel was not much liked, though.
- Holograms fight is completely intuitive if you pay attention in a focused try.
- Knights are NOT a hard DPS test, since it’s done with 35-40 casual random players with no zerk equipment.
- Holograms fight is doable with 25 players if they don’t spawn the 18 little ones and skip that phase. Allowing to smaller organized groups to have a chance.
- Punishment for AFKers and Leechers
- Punishment for groups not killing the 3 holos at phase 2 at same time, challenge is up.
- Hard achievements, but not impossible to do.
- Achievements doable to do even if you die.
- A troll scarlet! Throwing domes when you are trying to get a colour.
- Exact number of players in one side or another. We know exactly how many players are hitting red or blue because of the calibration, that not giving numbers randomly it’s great I wish we would had a numeric visual of people in Each line in the marionette T.T

The bad things of the event
- Too small window to repeat. Our server is always struggling with that problem. We start the knights at minute 0. They die near minute 10. Then we have 30 minutes of Holograms fight (sometimes we beat her in last minute, if the 18 appear). Then people does the final story + cutscenes, wich takes about 10 minutes also. Then they land in overflow and need to come back to main server. So… we used 50 minutes of an hour, next knights appear in 5 minutes and fight start 5 minutes later. It’s not enough time to teach the new players into what to do and explaining how to get into teamspeak and such things. Also not enough time to do the other events such as Spider and Canoneer, and there’s always people in need of those, so… we can’t complete everything. The event should had been repeated each 90 minutes, not 60.
- Knights scaling is bugged/broken. We still don’t know why sometimes green dies in 6 minutes and sometimes in 14 with the same exact players and the same exact skills. I’d love an Anet response on this. Clarification about the condition powering up buff would be sweet because even if pay attention that’s something that we, as players, are not getting.
- The shortcut for scarlet to have the requirement of spinal blades. The casuals players that will never kill the 3 knights because they hate zergs and they don’t have spinal blades would miss the end of the villain. Since almost everyone follows up the living story of the game for almost a yer, everyone should have an easy chance of see her end, specially if a “shortcut” is made.
- Changes to adress zerg 1 day later. The bad habits created by it affects even today, when people that logged 1st day and then they come back now face a new reality and some of them are closed-mind people that still tries to force you to zerg them 1 by 1 even if that won’t work anymore. This should had been foreseen and fixed before launch.
- Confusing NPCs with commander tags. At least give them green tags, not blue ones that confuse players.
- Triple coordinated events without the tools to manage them. We required to use voice chat to synchronize us without an in-game voice chat (weird thing, since 9 years old MMOs even have voice-chat for such things as raids). Commanders squad should be voice-connected, giving directions is way too slow for a timed event.
- Broken areas from Primordial hologram. The melee one hits even if you dodge. The lasers hit 2 seconds after the visual area dissapears, creating apparent invisible damage and destroying achievements.
- The menders healing the blue knight are not cool, that should had never been part of the fight, it discouraged an entire try when we noticed that blue was full-healed once, and most of us did think it was a bug.

Thoughs overall
I had the fun of my life, my entire server is having fun, this event is so awesome if done right that we keep going and going, 30+ tries.
My server is loving this event, but it’s because the same 3-5 commanders are explaining and doing the full event at each hour, we are even 10 hours consecutive there. The big learning proccess that we did requires a lot of patience, i’m not sure if we would had make it if there was always different commanders trying to complete it.
Anet did a great event, but it requires of some synchronization where teamspeak is encouraged. We know for sure that we would not be able to understand the fight if we didn’t share our thoughs while on-combat and fixing numbers of players between one or other knight on-the-fly in the first 3 minutes.

I hope you like the reading :P have fun!

Bumping this thread to ask this to Anet again (and help others servers on the bosses mechanics):

- Knights scaling is bugged/broken. We still don’t know why sometimes green dies in 6 minutes and sometimes in 14 minutes with the same exact players and the same exact skills. I’d love an Anet response on this. Clarification about the condition powering up buff would be sweet because even if we pay attention that’s something that we, as players, are not getting.

An enjoyable read. Thank you for sharing. =)

that was a long read xD

happy to see someone that really enojoyed the event, for me it has been kind of lame cause i can never get into the main server, it is always half empty overflows… still managed to beat the knights a couple of times before the fix

A long read but very similar to my experiences as well. Thank you. The scaling of the Knights and how they take damage don’t seem consistent.