Guild Wars 2

Suggestion thread got nowhere. Comments in Dynamic event threads similar to this issue, also nowhere.

Anet, something seriously has to be done about invisible Legendary and Champion enemies. Doing the temple of Balthazar is a nightmare, watching half your zerg suddenly get downed. Why? Well, because an invisible Champion abomination just ran up to em all and smacked em without them even known it was there. Oh, and don’t get me started on trying to target the Priest of Balthazar himself, because he’s invisible too. Being a Necromancer, this is bad. My light armor cannot really withstand his close in attack but I can’t exactly dodge it since he is invisible!

While we are at it, the temple of Grenth. Do you know I tell the groups I lead into this temple to just randomly attack empty space? because I know champions are going to attack jonez, and as always, they are going to be invisible. Especially the invisible champion wraith. He is a pain, that is for sure. Honestly, Grenth comes down to luck. Occasionally our guardians beat culling and can see it coming just in time to get up the line of warding. It comes down to luck though. Sometimes they remain invisible long enough to come right up to Jonez and kill him.

Please Anet, Legendary and Champion enemies are existential threats. Not only to the event we are trying to accomplish, but also to our Armor repair bill. I can get it if they were invisible due to a legit ability innate to the Legendary or Champion enemy. But these are no abilities. Its simply the server giving us the middle finger and preventing us from seeing some of the most dangerous enemies in the game.

Legendary and Champion enemies should NEVER be culled from our screens. If you want them to be invisible, design]the event around the concept, not foist it on us through some poorly thought out coding design.

I think the community deserves an answer to how this is to be addressed, since I have seen it repeatedly and consistently brought up in every discussion about the problems with Orrs dynamic events.

Aeros.2046:

*Legendary and Champion enemies should NEVER be culled from our screens. If you want them to be invisible, design]the event around the concept, not foist it on us through some poorly thought out coding design. *

^
+1000

Culling is a major problem in the game and has been for me since January when they attempted to fix culling. Prior to that, for me, it was episodic, annoying when it happened, but not a basic problem in open world PvE. The more they addressed culling (primarily in WvW), the worse it got. It’s now a pervasive problem on every level and ruins immersion even when you are not dying to it.

That said, I don’t think it’s the major problem with the Temple fights. Why? I’ve been in a fight with 3 champs and countless vets and been hit for 30k. Due to the particle blur there was effective culling in that any useful info from animations was obscured. And, even if you do manage to see a stray animation, are they targeting me? I can’t afford to dodge every attack as many mobs spam attacks.

No, the major problem is not culling. It’s not about difficulty either. Difficulty or challenge describes a scenario where skill is required in order to succeed. Situations where there are multiple champs up spamming highly damaging abilities, 30k hits from the particle blur, and continuous major CC are not challenging. They call for no skill and the only lesson they teach is that your error was entering combat on this one. The major problem is the design of the encounter and I think a lot of it comes from the desire to make the encounter challenging. Personally, as one who has played every major MMO, I think they are confused on the genre. MMO’s address a wide, diverse player base and generally the open world is not designed to create failure > 90% of the time. The idea that everything’s fine when events continuously fail betrays a misunderstanding on the developers part, not the players. Scaling difficulty is usually addressed in instanced encounters and this allows everyone to enjoy the content of the open world and for everyone to find their level of incompetence in dungeons.

The major problem won’t be fixed until Anet changes their design vision. And, given how entrenched it appears, I wouldn’t be looking for interesting, appropriately challenging encounters anytime soon.

No enemies should ever be culled. I don’t care if I can see a zerg either. Enemies and party members should be exempt from culling period.

Poor you it’s been like that since beta and you still hope and use the official forums to fix the game…

This is a server problem and that is why they are avoiding the problem, I remember way back in the day during DAOC playing on servers with a lot more people then is on a GW2 server and doing sieges, now then there seemed to me to be a whole heck of a lot less lag then we are experiencing now, especially in PvE, kinda odd don’t ya think. I just think NcSoft gave Anet some of their old Lineage 2 servers for this game, cause whatever they are using, they sure aren’t up to date and if they want more players then they are gonna have to get better servers and get rid of the lag and all the bugs instead of adding bugs with each update. >.>

+1 to the OP. This is a huge issue. The number of times I’ve instantly been killed by invisible exploding enemies in Temple of Grenth…. argh… And what happened to the down state? Are some of these enemies hitting multiple times at once?