Guild Wars 2

Recalibar.6482:

“Reduced the health of each Assault Knight by 25%.”

Looks like the casuals won.

Yeah, that argument doesn’t fly here at all. Lower population servers should be able to beat this event, just like the higher population servers. I’m lucky to be on Aurora Glade, where we are able to beat this regularly. But I see tons of people guesting to AG because it is impossible to do on their own server. That is bad.

Recalibar.6482:

“Reduced the health of each Assault Knight by 25%.”

Looks like the casuals won.

Oh whatever, get over yourself.

This was not done as a ‘oh we need to appease the casuals’ move. This was done so lower pop servers, off peak players, and overflows could more readily gain access to the holo fight. You think people enjoy failing repeatedly, hour after hour due to no fault of their own? Not all instances can field 150 players, its just that simple.

Gotta be on a “good server” guys… Its the prerequisite.

MAGpie.7962:

Gotta be on a “good server” guys… Its the prerequisite.

I do not believe it is intended in the context you, and several others, are taking it. People really read way too much into simple wording…

Kaiyanwan.8521:

kokiman.2364:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

If servers do not have enough players to get 150 people together at LA for the living story event, the great final, something is seriously wrong.

Why is ANet so resilient to the idea of server merges. The population of those servers must be abysmal.

Because they know the exact numbers and you don’t.

And from what I experienced ingame, they really do not want to share those numbers ever.

With people paying real cash for the privilege of server changes, they have a reasonable expectation that they will not be removed from their chosen home, even if they go inactive. So you can’t merge servers without causing a PR issue.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

MAGpie.7962:

Gotta be on a “good server” guys… Its the prerequisite.

I do not believe it is intended in the context you, and several others, are taking it. People really read way too much into simple wording…

You are probably right.

However, if these events were not seemingly (and yes, I say seemingly, because the lack of information and communication from Anet lends a lot of power to assumptions) set up for “good” servers, reading about how many “not so good” servers do have trouble with them, perhaps those types of wordings would not be ripped apart like this.

Astralporing.1957:

it’s enough to check for servers without LA overflows

How do you do that without spending your guest options?

Did it 3 times on overflow yesterday. It’s an easy fight with enough people.

illutian.7630:

Gulesave.5073:

All three have the same mechanics.

Even if you don’t inflict conditions on crits, many players carelessly lay down combo fields around the knights, leading to most of the damage I personally take during these events.

Ah, then my suggestion would still work. As you would just run into one of the buff zones that already spawn. In order to be cleansed of conditions.

In the maps I was on, ppl used them as a condi clear zone anyway. When the came up, we went to them and everyone spammed their condi clear aoe skills on ppl, so we all got rid of them. That was a nice group play effort

Hm… I don’t know if it actually helped that much.
I tried it again last night and event still failed. I don’t think the problem is just huge health pool, it’s extreme unfriendliness to condition classes and “encouragement for users to split up” that pretty much screwed up the event chain It’s possible but way too difficult for herding cats of random users to achieve something with mechanic changing over and over.

Oh well. I got lucky and finished the meta and everything before the whole event chain got tuned for “moar difficult content!!” crowd I hope they like it.

Sariel V.7024:

Astralporing.1957:

it’s enough to check for servers without LA overflows

How do you do that without spending your guest options?

Having lot of friends help.

Also… “Reduced the health of each Assault Knight by 25%.”. So again, faced with a problem (in this case – bad scaling and accidentally raised toughness), Anet, instead of fixing it, makes a cheap workaround that doesn’t address the real issue.

Recalibar.6482:

“Reduced the health of each Assault Knight by 25%.”

Looks like the casuals won.

Now now, don’t be bitter. Understanding is the key. People with jobs and their own lives do have the right to enjoy the game as much as hardcore folks who play most of their days.

Astralporing.1957:

Sariel V.7024:

Astralporing.1957:

it’s enough to check for servers without LA overflows

How do you do that without spending your guest options?

Having lot of friends help.

Also… “Reduced the health of each Assault Knight by 25%.”. So again, faced with a problem (in this case – bad scaling and accidentally raised toughness), Anet, instead of fixing it, makes a cheap workaround that doesn’t address the real issue.

I won’t defend their actions, but if the choices are:

1.) Get the scaling formula/mechanic correct in a month’s time — well after the conclusion of the event.

2.) Put something in place so the event is still challenging, but with a higher success rate.

I think most people would go for option 2. Now, this goes without even mentioning the corner they painted themselves into to be in this position in the first place, but I’ll take a little pragmatism at this stage.

Long term, scaling absolutely needs a look and I am optimistic that the dev team has learned a lot from Season 1 of the LS. I, personally, look forward to the feature and balance patch and season two.

digitalruse.9085:

Astralporing.1957:

Sariel V.7024:

Astralporing.1957:

it’s enough to check for servers without LA overflows

How do you do that without spending your guest options?

Having lot of friends help.

Also… “Reduced the health of each Assault Knight by 25%.”. So again, faced with a problem (in this case – bad scaling and accidentally raised toughness), Anet, instead of fixing it, makes a cheap workaround that doesn’t address the real issue.

I won’t defend their actions, but if the choices are:

1.) Get the scaling formula/mechanic correct in a month’s time — well after the conclusion of the event.

2.) Put something in place so the event is still challenging, but with a higher success rate.

I think most people would go for option 2. Now, this goes without even mentioning the corner they painted themselves into to be in this position in the first place, but I’ll take a little pragmatism at this stage.

Long term, scaling absolutely needs a look and I am optimistic that the dev team has learned a lot from Season 1 of the LS. I, personally, look forward to the feature and balance patch and season two.

I don’t see number two working. The skill level of players is all over the place although the bell curve leans more to the lower. If you make content that’s “challenging” but with a higher success rate (conflicting ideas imo) then you risk having the same content being a faceroll for everyone else. I don’t believe there’s a good middle ground for this.

Ayrilana.1396:

I don’t see number two working. The skill level of players is all over the place although the bell curve leans more to the lower. If you make content that’s “challenging” but with a higher success rate (conflicting ideas imo) then you risk having the same content being a faceroll for everyone else. I don’t believe there’s a good middle ground for this.

If everyone just ran full zerker gear, defeating the watchknights in even under 6 minutes would have been an easy task, even at their former health.

But no, people refuse to run the best gear, then complain when Arenanet punishes them (and, by extension, everyone else when they fail the event) for using less than best-in-slot.

The normal attacks can down a player within 4 attacks in berserkers. Most people do not know how to do damage mitigation which makes the whole roll berserker to win belief incorrect. Having just berserkers, but no skill, does not guarantee a win.

Apparently TTS was able to do it since they all went melee on warriors and were able to spam banner between themselves. At least that’s the story I have been hearing.

Recalibar.6482:

“Reduced the health of each Assault Knight by 25%.”

Looks like the casuals won.

Call the Whinebulance for recal!

CrossedHorse.4261:

In the maps I was on, ppl used them as a condi clear zone anyway. When the came up, we went to them and everyone spammed their condi clear aoe skills on ppl, so we all got rid of them. That was a nice group play effort

Nice team work

illutian.7630:

Currently, my server, Borlis Pass, is unable to kill even one of the Knights.

…so thanks, Anet, you once again…ruin an event by assuming every single server has the population and coordination to take down Legendary Boss mobs.

This also means I will not be able to get past 10/15, possibly even 12/15, on the ‘This Is My City!’ achievement.

…when will you learn.

Didn’t know whole gw2 population guest on Desolation

illutian.7630:

Currently, my server, Borlis Pass, is unable to kill even one of the Knights.

I would like to apologize to you for this, as all the hardcore BP Commanders transferred to Maguuma. But worry not. There are still people there who coordinate Teq runs, Temple runs, and LA runs. You just gotta be online when they do.

Look for the THCS guild. They’re one of the best BP guilds around.

Autumn Frazee.3158:

Thank you for reporting this, we realize that is is difficult to get full maps during non peak hours or that it is hard to get a full overflow to coordinate for these fights, we are currently working on easing the difficulty of the Assault Knight fights to better allow servers to participate in the Hologram Fight.

That would be pretty awesome actually. It isn’t fair to the smaller servers that they can’t even beat the Knights. Please allow them to stand a fighting chance!

While making the knights a bit easier helps address the symptom, I don’t think it addresses the root cause. Having players segregated into servers where populations in specific maps and at certain times will vary can lead to under-manned events that are designed to only be successful with a larger crowd.

I play on BP and even though I was present a few times when we took down the knights and Scarlet, I’ve witnessed many more attempts that failed. Part of it likely is lack of coordination or player skill, but the real reason those attempts failed was that there simply were not enough players present.

My point is that there actually are more players interested in fighting the knights, but we’re separated by artificial boundaries of our home servers. So many people feel the need to guest to another server to find a larger group – I don’t think that should need to happen. I know this has been brought up before, but I just wanted to voice it one more time – I wish we could go to a district system for maps rather than home servers (for open world PvE.) That way you’d have a good chance that district 1 for nearly any map would be fairly full at nearly any time of day, and if it wasn’t full, you’d know there weren’t other players behind the invisible boundary of another server.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I would like to apologize to you for this, as all the hardcore BP Commanders transferred to Maguuma. But worry not. There are still people there who coordinate Teq runs, Temple runs, and LA runs. You just gotta be online when they do.

Look for the THCS guild. They’re one of the best BP guilds around.

Pssh, not your fault or the fault of any other player.

ArenaNet simply needs to get it that making events require other events that require a very high number of players and then add to that ridiculous abilities that require raid-like coordination for an open world boss fight isn’t exactly wise.

The same stuff I saw happen on the Knights is the same stuff I saw when World Dragons, Kazzak, Doomwalker, and most especially the AQ World mini-Bosses were attempted in that certain other game.

That company realized that players aren’t going to work together, and that most will do their own thing, unless they specifically got together for the fight. —Thus leading to a bunch of kittened of players, who then come to the forums and…‘pet kittens’ (cause I know the word is filtered :P )

…I just don’t get why ArenaNet doesn’t understand this.

You want hard event fights? Fine, put them in an instance.

OR

If you must make it a world event. Then make it so the bosses can be weakened using the game environment (ie Aetherblade Cannoneer*). This way, only a handful of players need to know what to do. But the boss will still be too powerful for said handful to take down in the time allotted.
—You still need the grunts; even though you’re the Commander.

*but not something that requires the mob to be dragged to the debuff…unless you guys are going to put in an actual Threat Table that doesn’t get whipped ever few seconds.

Algreg.3629:

The high fail rate and the meagre rewards compared to the time needed are the reasons people don´t show up.

Fail rate? The knights pretty much kill themselves after the 25% nerf…
And meagre rewards, I dunno. Core + 6 champ chests for ~10-15 minutes of AA + the occasional dodge is pretty good. Slightly worse than QD ofc, but then I’d rather poke a rusty fork into my eye than run QD champions.

So far my experiences this past week with guesting. Go to guest, put into overflow, wait for to be put into main, main comes up saying its free—-and put into another overflow. That happened a lot, with once exception, the main came up, clicked to join main, and it came back network error!

Carighan.6758:

Algreg.3629:

The high fail rate and the meagre rewards compared to the time needed are the reasons people don´t show up.

Fail rate? The knights pretty much kill themselves after the 25% nerf…
And meagre rewards, I dunno. Core + 6 champ chests for ~10-15 minutes of AA + the occasional dodge is pretty good. Slightly worse than QD ofc, but then I’d rather poke a rusty fork into my eye than run QD champions.

Where is this server that is able to get the 6 minute kill nonstop? Even primetime on JQ can not get enough people shuttling guildies into LA to get it since everyone has it. The fact that the PERSONAL achievement requires a full zone even after the nerf is indefensible and the scaling should be fixed. The spider achievement shouldn’t have been so easily griefable/failable as well.

Oh, the 6m achievement? Meh. It’s just an achievement, what’s the big deal?

Some people must have every achievement. If they don’t get them, Game Over.

True , it just an achievement, its very name says its achievable. However, no matter your personal kill level, the event is down to everyone reading off the same page. It seems to me anet is looking through with rose tinted glasses. Their take is they want us to be ‘self educating’, which is all fine and good in an ideal world, but fails to take into account the individuals motivation for being at these events. Some just want to get their drops and leave whilst others will do some hits and go afk, effectively ruining it for others.

I just really hope that the dead line on the 18th is pushed back by a week in recognition of the bugs that needed to be sorted out, to give everyone a decent shot at it.

Shadey Dancer.2907:

So far my experiences this past week with guesting. Go to guest, put into overflow, wait for to be put into main, main comes up saying its free—-and put into another overflow. That happened a lot, with once exception, the main came up, clicked to join main, and it came back network error!

You can’t get into main that way when guesting, which I assume is done to give priority to players native to that server. You have to run back and forth between map portals if it’s full. If main is not hardcapped, you can get in if you are in a party with someone who is in main when you enter the map. Otherwise, hang out by one of the map entrance portals and when the message that main is available comes up, run through the exit and come back in. You may have to do this over and over to get in. Ideally, you want to try this well before the event begins before it’s hardcapped.

I guested to BG during primetime yesterday, and there wasn’t a single successful 6 minute attempt out of the three consecutive events I participated in. People were AFKing and taking up space, scaling the events without contributing to them. During the first attempt, only 7 people out of around 40 to 45 at the Static knight had buffs. For the other two, there simply weren’t enough people in the zone. We’re taking BG primetime here. I don’t have a problem with this achievement requiring organization, but when the most heavily populated North American server can’t regularly complete the achievement, that should say something. These events should be readily completable with any reasonable number of people. Maybe 5 or even 10 people per knight shouldn’t be enough, but 20 to 25 seems like a much more realistic and reasonable amount to expect from non-full servers. That’s an amount you can scrounge up pretty easily, generally speaking.

I absolutely loathe whomever it is on ArenaNet’s team that thinks it’s fine to make time-limited achievements, that has you depending on a hundred+ other players doing what you want to do. Because nothing screams personal skill and the ability to achieve something, like that which is gained from depending on a huge amount of other random players of varying levels, willingness to adapt (e.g., not run around with full Condi-weapon(s)/spec and using buffs/food) and interest in seeing something through.

I bet it’s the same person that decided the Marionette achievements relying on a hundred other players was a good idea (though Marionette ones was way more doable), but wanted you to rely on even more players this time around, during a seriously stupid game design of an encounter which punishes you for using Conditions, when every second skill, every single profession has, deals some sort of freaking Condition. (No really, that’s some brilliant game design right there! . . .)

So much for play how you want to play as well, this is pure zerker-fest oriented. It’s what I consider to be the worst encounter in the LS content (and game as a whole for that matter). With so few days left, and after fails upon fails upon fails at the Six Minutes to Knightfall achievement, spending the entire day attending these stupid encounters (12+ hours a day, 12+ tries, all fails (The stupid Knights are always above 50% when it times out!)), I’m starting to lose hope of achieving this last achievement I’m missing. And with that, this becoming the first LS achievement category I have not fully achieved. The completionist in me is really annoyed by this.

MrsKryten.5104:

Shadey Dancer.2907:

So far my experiences this past week with guesting. Go to guest, put into overflow, wait for to be put into main, main comes up saying its free—-and put into another overflow. That happened a lot, with once exception, the main came up, clicked to join main, and it came back network error!

You can’t get into main that way when guesting, which I assume is done to give priority to players native to that server. You have to run back and forth between map portals if it’s full. If main is not hardcapped, you can get in if you are in a party with someone who is in main when you enter the map. Otherwise, hang out by one of the map entrance portals and when the message that main is available comes up, run through the exit and come back in. You may have to do this over and over to get in. Ideally, you want to try this well before the event begins before it’s hardcapped.

You Sir are the Man (or lady—-or Quaggan or—well you get my meaning) Success on third try—a very BIG thank you goes to the Deso commanders for their patience and leadership, even in the face of afkers.

I too am getting frustrated with the knights. I have only beat them once when a few good guys from TTS went to other servers to help other players. I don’t understand Anet and I’m really disappointed in this event. I hope they take this lesson and not create this type of criteria for any other event.

I have never seen the Knight event completed, despite trying several times every day on various servers since release. And forget about the achievements! They are not attainable with skill, time, or even money; 100% luck of server draw. There is nothing I can do, personally or with my guild, to complete all Living Story achievements, and this is extremely disheartening.

I have to go to YouTube to see what the Prime Hologram and Scarlet fights are like. That’s how I get to experience Living Story content. Fun. Stuff.

The most aggravating part is that I actually did complete the Knight events and Hologram Prime. Three times. Unfortunately, I did during the first couple of days after the new chapter was released, and of course the various bugs prevented me from getting any loot and the hologram’s health stuck at 0 and it never died, so no achievements or cores for me. So I figured I’d give it a week and try it again once the bugs were fixed.

Now it’s impossible to even kill the knights on my home server, due to there being maybe 30 people per knight, and so I’m going to have to try to guest to a server with a high enough pop to kill them.

I’ve found that the assault knights actually scale very favorably with low numbers. Over the past few days I’ve managed to consistently down knights with between 5-10 players. And these are completely random players who just happened to be at the event, no organization or anything. The hologram on the other hand scales very poorly with low numbers and Anet should have a look at that fight to make it more manageable for low populations.

I think the problem is that Anet wants EVERYONE in LA to do the knights when they come up. 50 per knight = 150 players (zone cap). Want to gather heirlooms? You CAN’T! THE KNIGHTS ARE UP!!! If you gather heirlooms, the event FAILS!!! Oh no!!! (rolls eyes). You really cannot give players several options and expect everyone to pick the same option at the same time. That’s just bad design. IMHO, it would have been better if they made the knights need 25-30 players per knight, not 50. Then the AFKers and heirloom gatherers and JPers and vista lookers wouldn’t cause the event to fail. “Play the game your way,” and listen to everyone beg you to help at knights.

Kaldrys.1978, I’m on EBay, and last night we had a hard time getting everyone at ONE night, let alone all 3. We had over 20 at the blue knight and when the time ran out, it was still at 25% health. I’d love to know how on the Six god’s green Tyria you could possibly do it with 5-10 players. Everyone have ogre pet whistles/fire ele powder/seed pods?

The way that Anet scales open world content is very strange. Ever tried the Inquest Mark II Golem with a small group? It takes about 5 minutes. However when the world boss train comes around that event takes a good 15 minutes or so.

I can’t account for what the other people at these events were doing or what builds they were running. Like I said there was no coordination. Personally however, I was using a staff on my elementalist fully optimized for dps (zerker gear, bloodlust stacks, vigil valiance buff, scarlet potion) and I believe that due to the low number of people present, my individual impact wasn’t diluted by the hoard of AFKers/nonressers that frequent these events. I’m on Yak’s Bend by the way. Not sure if anyone can vouch for me but I usually attempt the green knight at off peak hours with high rates of success.

LOL, doing my blade kills for daily in LA tonight, prime time. According to map chat, 10 players on green and around 5 on red. Event failed of course. Saw so may players asking how do they do the holo fight and their sad responses when told they can’t, try another server. Not surprising. Happened with the marionette as well. You either do the content when it is first released or good luck getting it done. This whole event was just so bug ridden and badly planned out, it just made things so much worse as no one wants to be bothered with it any longer.

For about 6 months now Anet have choosen to make content harder to do, requiring considerable group co-ordination and that group can be 100+ players.

Tequatl
3 Headed Wurm
Marionette
Knights/Hologram

Obviously this is the way things are going to be from now on.

If your server or you as a player can’t handle this you need to rethink your options. Move server if that’s the problem or join a big guild or improve yourself as a player.

If you can’t or are unwilling to do those steps perhaps GW2 is not for you?

ShiningSquirrel.3751:

LOL, doing my blade kills for daily in LA tonight, prime time. According to map chat, 10 players on green and around 5 on red. Event failed of course. Saw so may players asking how do they do the holo fight and their sad responses when told they can’t, try another server.

Interesting.
These “so many players”, couldn’t someone have told them to come to the spots at ~:00? If they’re “so many players”, the knights would easily go down (since ~80 people total will always succeed, and ~50 can succeed).

I too have issues with. Maybe 10 peeps in all of the arch. No way to take this guys down with so few people. Would like to change my server. Any suggest? K8

Just a thought, but with population issues so prevalent why can’t these events be more like Edge of the Mists? A universal, multi-server, ‘infinite overflow’ space where low-pop servers can participate alongside the numbers from high-pop servers? Might solve a lot of these kinds of problems.

Carighan.6758:

ShiningSquirrel.3751:

LOL, doing my blade kills for daily in LA tonight, prime time. According to map chat, 10 players on green and around 5 on red. Event failed of course. Saw so may players asking how do they do the holo fight and their sad responses when told they can’t, try another server.

Interesting.
These “so many players”, couldn’t someone have told them to come to the spots at ~:00? If they’re “so many players”, the knights would easily go down (since ~80 people total will always succeed, and ~50 can succeed).

Nice trying to twist what I said, but you fail in your attempt and reading comprehension as well. The players complaining where the ones who had just failed fighting the knights. There where nowhere near even 50 players on the map, so not sure where you are getting this “80” players from. On the entire map, I would have been surprised if there where more then 40 players total. With a large number of them running around just trying to do their daily, and more fighting the champs, it was amazing they where able to take down a single knight in the time allowed so there was no possible chance of 3. When 10 or more players are all asking the same question in a population the size of what was on the map, that’s a large portion of them.

Stop trying to support a poorly done patch and a failed event. If we do not call anet on their failures, they will never improve.

DaikonSamurai.6714:

Just a thought, but with population issues so prevalent why can’t these events be more like Edge of the Mists? A universal, multi-server, ‘infinite overflow’ space where low-pop servers can participate alongside the numbers from high-pop servers? Might solve a lot of these kinds of problems.

I really like this idea. It could be better than what is occurring now. You expect interest to fall off towards the end of an event as people get their achieves but it started happening with the patches and continuing issues. It has also been a combination of how this event was done by ANet as well as player issues/satisfaction with how things were going.

The event isn’t that population dependant as many people think.
I’ve seen the Green Knight go down with no more than 5 players at any moment, most of the fight being done by just a couple of them.
There are many reasons for the zerg to be potentially better. If it’s not possible to properly zerg every knight and the average player is not going to contribute enough damage wise (no buffs/consumables, defesive/condi spec, a hard time surviving, etc.), however, it’s probably wiser to zerg only one of the knights (the red one, which is closest to a WP) and let small and somehow optiized groups to handle the other two.

MAGpie.7962:

Gotta be on a “good server” guys… Its the prerequisite.

This is true , never beat the knights on my home server. So i guested on jade quarry , they beat the knights almost everytime.

There is definitely something not-quite-right (to put it mildly) about the scaling on the knights, as evidenced by the fact that just today I have seen a group of 5 do better than a group of 30 (neither killed it, but the group of 5 were a lot closer)…