Guild Wars 2

AerosAtar.3198:

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)…

The scaling still somehow favours higher populations.
The ability to stack conditions (specially vulnerability) is a clear advantage, and there must be a reason on top of that for the event to usually succeed when the attunement cap is near to maxed even if you still can expect the same upleveled characters and completely random builds in the battlefield.
The event, however, still scales and a 5-man group can perfectly outperform a 30-man one as long as the average damage output is higher.

I’m fairly sure that there’s something weird going on with the scaling, evidenced by the fact that I’ve gotten better results with 3 random non buffed upleveled characters joining me than soloing (so it’s not exactly about average DPS).
I wouldn’t be surprised if the event would “hard” scale every fixed amount of players (lets say 5) with just a minor soft scaling inside each bracket, which could make a 31 man group to have a quite harder time than a 30 one.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised either if the “hard” scaling (or just any form of scaling) would stop at 35 or 40 people, which could explain why maxed events succeed so easily and why knights used to explode when mass zerged, prior to the changes.

In any case, the Knights are soloable with an extreme DPS spec and easily doable with 3-5 man group as long as the DPS output is decent (which will hardly happen on a 30 man zerg).
That’s why I suggest an uneven distribution for low populated servers. A couple of 3-5 decent DPS man groups should easily take care of two knights, while the masses could zerg the remaining one and benefit from an attunement maxed fight.
This should yield better results than using 20 random characters for each knight fight.

I haven’t been able to test results with a good DPS 3-5 man group (I keep getting upleveled chars and crappy builds with no consuables/buffs at all), but I would’t be surprised if a group like that could defeat Knights under the 6 minute mark and the strategy could work also for the Knightfall achievement without having to completely rely on guesting and/or organzied communities.

There is definitely an issue. I just solo’d Green and, while I didn’t manage to kill it (obviously), I did manage to do a surprising amount of damage (see screenshot), especially considering I am using a build that is in no way optimised, a Rare scepter and PVT gear. Incidentally, I didn’t use any boosts/consumables/etc and was only using skills 1 & 2…

ShiningSquirrel.3751:

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.

Again, I fail to see where it failed.

Two things went really bad:

• The first implementation.
• The bugs.

But the current design as it is now makes sense. Split into three groups, fight knights, pretty easy and fast fight too, get 6 champ bags for it + chance at core.

Now you say “Yes but players no longer go there, so people can’t do it”. To which I say, why not organize then? I mean, what do you want ANet to do, give you a mail to your mail account “Please log in at 19:00 tonight for your dev-organized run on the main event”?

People do manage to organize in most MMOs.
Look at another thread here, people are organizing runs on the knights.

Or did you expect ANet to make it so that people are sorta-coerced to go there every hour, on every day? See, that’d consider worse than not enough people being there without external organization. It’s story-content, I’ll do it once for the story, why should the game sorta force me to do it again?

But if you don’t want to force people to go there again and again, you will end up with less and less players per server towards the end (follows).
So? Organize, and guest over to form groups.

It is pretty easy, and this is much better than kind of content where you have to run the event day in and day out for 2 weeks to get anything of it. People did complain a lot about missing the story after all, so now you can see the main story part in one evening easily, always. Which is a good change, no?

Again, I really don’t see what the devs did wrong, here. It’s hardly their fault that players find it easier to write a complaint post on the forums than a “Join on me at HH:MM on server X”-post.

Yes, the scaling is a little funky.

My guess is it isn’t based on number of people or their damage, but rather time. I think time is the major factor in the scaling of the knights.

Case in point – the Champ Wurm Queen in the “Escape from Lion’s Arch” LS patch ALWAYS died at the same minute on the hour every hour – no matter if 5 people were attacking it or 50. It just seemed to “time” its death at an exact minute every hour, so it always died no matter what and people got their loot.

Time – just my theory on the funky scaling.

Icealen.3802:

Yes, the scaling is a little funky.

My guess is it isn’t based on number of people or their damage, but rather time. I think time is the major factor in the scaling of the knights.

Case in point – the Champ Wurm Queen in the “Escape from Lion’s Arch” LS patch ALWAYS died at the same minute on the hour every hour – no matter if 5 people were attacking it or 50. It just seemed to “time” its death at an exact minute every hour, so it always died no matter what and people got their loot.

Time – just my theory on the funky scaling.

But what you describe isn’t weird at all.
In fact, it could be an example of perfect scaling. A boss attacked by 50 people should have 10 times the HP of the one attacked by 5 so, as long as the average player damage output remains the same, it should take exactly the same amount of time to take down.

Since yesterday the issue seems to have changed from it being population based, to it now being because of scaling. To which I still feel an EotM overflow system would go a long way in solving. With infinite overflow and maps shared between servers, population gaps are all filled so scale effectively becomes one size fits all for all servers aside from the last overflow map, whose members have a high chance of getting into a well populated overflow anyway as long as they keep trying.

I think it could also solve the problem of late-comers to the event who log-on to find most everyone else has already done everything. They just get pooled among all the other late-comers from every server to create a sizeable force.

I’m not well-versed in the digital voodoo that happens behind the curtain, but from what I’ve seen in EotM, this seems like a solution well within reach for future LS content.

Aerinndis.2730:

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.

Thanks! And yeah an EotM overflow system won’t solve things like “reflecting conditions makes all my characters/builds useless!” nor solve crippling bugs. The bugs are going to happen day one no matter what since they’re pretty much unforeseeable, so I don’t really see how Arenanet can handle them better than they already have with all the patches. As for class/build crippling boss mechanics, that can only be reduced in future content with careful thought and consideration, which hopefully can be allowed for once addressable problems are solved and set aside.

This achievement has caused me more grief and frustration, combined with an absolute disdain for Overflows and lazy players.

It’s like it took the worst parts about raiding and then put it under a microscope.

Never before have I been so fed up with the game.

I want to do this achievement, but I can’t. Not because I’m incapable but because the game won’t allow me to.