Guild Wars 2

These mobs are a mess.

The reavers spam explosives that seem to have a larger blast radius than the warning circle indicates (i think it only shows the area of the initial poison cloud). And often you can be blasted directly to down if you accidentally miss one or more reavers spawning behind you when a new wave comes in.

The horrors are like reef drakes cranked to 11. They knockdown, they pile on confusion via a large cone, and they can even use the remains of other clockwork mobs to either heal or gain veteran status. Reminder to ANet, confusion in PVE is double the strength of PVP because mobs do not attack as often. This makes 5 stacks of PVE confusion hit as much as 10 stacks of PVP confusion! Try to keep this in mind when you design mobs that apply confusion! Especially when they are intended as the main mobs for events…

And the nightmares, ugh. Weed whackers on legs, with a virtually random reflection shield that makes it equally suicide to either go into melee or stay at range.

All in all, what i see happen now that invasion completions are no longer needed for any kind of achievements are that clockwork events are ignored once the second part of a invasion is reached. This while the molten or aetherblade events are farmed en mass because of the more manageable mob designs.

These are tough mobs but they are designed to take on large number of players. Enemies are meant to be dangerous and although these can be mown down with auto-attacks by a big force they are at least challenging for smallish groups. Ideally all content should have challenge and should require some learning of the mob abilities.

The aetherblades are actually far more dangerous because of the stun fields and even big player zergs take casualties against the aetherblades. Players fight them because of their loot not because of their triviality. They may seem easier to you but that’s probably just because you are in a bigger zerg.

The reavers build turrets on cogs and it is those turrets that explode for the big damage. That’s one reason to finish off the cogs. It’s also a reason not to stand in the middle of a wave when it comes in. I can solo the veteran horrors and nightmares on both my main characters (ranger and thief) so they can certainly be dealt with. Instead of coming to the boards you could perhaps try to do the same?

So clearly i picked the one adventurer profession that is a complete mess…

And i know about the “turrets” (more delayed bombs), but those do not explain the out of spawn nuke that reavers seem to produce sometimes.

Meh, why do i even bother…

I never, ever thought I’d see someone complaining about the difficulty of the clockwork events. But here I am, proven wrong again.

You’re boggling my mind man. There’s so many questions I have about your thought process when making the post, I don’t even know where to start.

Please just uh
Work on your build a little bit.
The only way you could have trouble with the CLOCKWORK EVENTS is if your build is like 3/7/4/16/30.
and you have like full whites.
that are all broken.
and you’re playing with a rock driven into your monitor.
and your keyboard is actually just a bag of rocks.
and even with all that it still might be relatively easy to dodge the two mechanics that do any damage.

@OP:
warning circles are way too small, if you can’t get out far enough, dodge. for that you need to get the timing down, they always take the same time, after a while you can dodge them pretty reliably.
same goes for the planted bombs.
meleeing nightmares only works with very little lag, otherwise just go ranged until you feel comfortable enough – depending on class you’ll have multiple options to attack without using projectiles. as you didn’t state which class, I can’t give you any specific tips, usually you can go for: ground targeted stuff, stuff which forms a line connecting you to your enemy (i.e. the lightning from an ele’s scepter air#1). everything where you see a projectile (arrows, bullets, fireballs, grenades) fly, can usually be reflected.

JoshandSarah.5402:

I never, ever thought I’d see someone complaining about the difficulty of the clockwork events. But here I am, proven wrong again.

You’re boggling my mind man. There’s so many questions I have about your thought process when making the post, I don’t even know where to start.

Please just uh
Work on your build a little bit.
The only way you could have trouble with the CLOCKWORK EVENTS is if your build is like 3/7/4/16/30.
and you have like full whites.
that are all broken.
and you’re playing with a rock driven into your monitor.
and your keyboard is actually just a bag of rocks.
and even with all that it still might be relatively easy to dodge the two mechanics that do any damage.

while I partially agree, you seem to have missed a few things, which very well could’ve lead to the OP’s post:

• clockwork events scale up if multiple players are in the area. they don’t scale down if people leave for whatever reason.
• the non-veteran bronze nightmares created by combining two horrors have about 5x the damage of the silver veteran nightmares – soloing them is very dangerous, I’ve done it but I had to resort to heavy kiting around. I’ve seen groups of 5 or so people get downed near instantly on one of those
• most attacks are very well telegraphed. except that lag was never considered an issue by ANet. 0.5 to 1 second lag pretty much guarantee you get hit during nearly every one of your perfectly timed dodges.
• stunlocking by multiple horrors and to a lesser extent reavers (they only daze though) is possible for quite a while (most I ever did was 10 seconds until I got downed, got a horde of them attacking in turn and no more stunbreakers) and not all classes or builds have infinite stability or stunbreakers at their disposal. some classes will have a hard time dealing with constant knockdowns (ranger and ele ie., while guard or warri pretty much ignore it. engi hates it as well but at least has good blind access)

next time you think it’s necessary to laugh at someone for being such bad players, don’t prove yourself to be one yourself by omitting very relevant facts – it’s pretty obvious you don’t understand much of the mechanics of the clockwork fights and probably just zerged around the whole time, while OP might’ve actually tried to solo some of the events and understandably failed.

Ah yes, sorry about that. I am mainly running engineer these days. This provides me with one non-melee option for dealing with nightmares, the flamethrower. Except that it has a range of around 400, so the thing can take 1-2 steps and be in melee range. Heck, it would not surprise me if its spin attack is about the same range. And this depends on me slotting the flamethrower before going in.

As for horrors, my real problem is their confusion cone. If you are in melee range, you can’t really dodge out of it by dodging backwards. Heck, i am not even sure if you can dodge out of it sideways. And while i know logically that i can dodge through the horror, every gamer instinct i have screams that it is crazy.

The real problem tho is not the attack itself, but the number of confusion stacks it can produce. It seems to me that whatever dev came up with them (and the reef drakes, never mind the wintersday dolls) are more familiar with SPVP confusion than PVE confusion. Confusion in PVE hits twice as hard as confusion in SPVP, meaning that a PVE stack of 8 do the damage of a SPVP stack of 16. And even actions like heals and dodges trigger confusion damage.

And the reaver issue is lag related indeed. When a wave of them ports in just as you get a lag spike, you may find yourself facing multiple spreads going off in your lagged face. But a single one can also be nasty if there is any kind of wall nearby. This because the mines do not vanish like most projectiles do, they bounce back. This leading to a concentrated grouping on the ground. The very same walls may well limit dodging options. Meaning that reavers are manageable fights on flat open ground, but can quickly turn nasty anywhere else. And we do not get to pick on what terrain we fight them.

And yeah, most of my troubles have been after having a sub-event finish, the zerg rush off, and me suddenly finding myself faced with the leftovers. Technically, taking out individual clockworks, even after a finished sub-event, will advance the main event. But the ingrained instinct seems to be that once the medal dings, nothing more is to be gained and one should rush off. Never mind that i don’t think i have seen a single invasion successfully complete now that the living story has moved on.

Never mind that the scaling of meta events seems borked. I witnessed a untouched aetherblade sub-event start out with all veterans, simply because the farming zerg was rampaging around. I was standing there looking at the mobs idling for several minutes before the zergs vanguard reached the location. Leading me to wonder if all sub-events in a meta-event are scaled up based on the number of people participating, not just the sub-event they are participating in at the moment.

Meaning that once a zerg is in motion, never mind multiple such, it may well be impossible for smaller groups to take out other sub-events and so advance the overall meta-event forward.

when dealing with large amounts of enemies, grenades with their respective grandmaster trait would be one of the best options for tagging many mobs as well as dealing good damage.

when a normally spawned nightmare raises it’s shield you can meanwhile clear the rest of the mobs until it passes, or when nothing else remains, it should be easy to simply go flamethrower or toolkit and whack it, while dodgeing or blocking the more dangerous moves.

against the non-veteran nightmares which you get when two horrors combine, only use max-range stuff and kite around if you’re not good at dodgeing their attacks.

if you’re not knocked down, you shouldn’t get more than 2 or 3 confusion stacks, just walk in a circle around the horrors, their cone is actually pretty narrow as far as I could tell less than 90°

getting overwhelmed by reaver spawn should only happen if you don’t keep an eye on the surroundings.
every event starts of with a first wave. once you defeat those, another one ports in – you always have to kill all or all but a few clockwork monsters until a new wave starts. so when engaging the last one, be prepared to walk to the edge of the event circle if you’re alone.
this ties to the other complaint of yours:
people leave finished events because killing the last wave does not proceed the meta-event anymore. so if you’re interested in killing scarlet, you should always go seek clockwork portals, kill all mobs until the last third of it’s bar starts to go down, then run as fast as you can.

aetherblades often spawn only veterans – even if the zerg is on the other side of the map. while clockwork and tunnel machine events are soloable, molten champion and aetherblade events generally aren’t (aetherblades can be picked off one by one, but it’s a tedious process not really worth the effort)
if you want to solo something, go after clockwork portals and make sure you don’t let horrors combine. if you want to tackle any eventtype, post an lfg in mapchat and stick to your party, with 5 people all events are doable.

if you do happen upon an upscaled event (which means, a few people engaged in a clockwork event but left because they found another aetherblade event), there’s not much you can do, just move on to the next event.