This was during the Temple of Grenth event in Cursed Shore. There was no visual indication of anything anywhere. It just instantly killed me from almost full health to dead. It completely skipped the downstate as well.
If I remember right this effect is an AoE effect that is announced by the circle, giving you time to dodge. Hoewever, the event can easily be overcrowded, making it so laggy you’ll never have enough time to dodge. Best way to avoid this (or atleast try to) is playing on minimum settings.
Arise, ye farmers of all nations
Arise, opressed of Tyria!
Explode comes from orrian mines and risen plaguebearers. A fun little ‘perk’ is that plaguebearers can be summoned by some creatures, and either run to the player and fail to render in time, or simply appear and instantly explode on someone. Hard to tell which it is, since either way they’re invisible until you’re highly damaged or dead.
Normally it’d take more than one to put you in defeated rather than downed, but once you’ve been downed a certain number of times you are defeated instantly next time.
So that’s what that is! An unintentional side effect of changing one mob of enemies. And weird that they appear as “unknown” in the chat. Thanks Geekfox and Lamefox.
Risen Plague Carriers do not generate red circles, however they do have an animation where they stop, stand straight and look up before exploding.
Of course in mass events they are difficult or even impossible (culling, spell effects) to see.
Risen Plague Carriers do not generate red circles, however they do have an animation where they stop, stand straight and look up before exploding.
Of course in mass events they are difficult or even impossible (culling, spell effects) to see.
It isn’t just large events, I’ve actually fought these guys (veteran acolyte) one-on-one, with nobody else around (also off-peak, so the zone itself was pretty desolate), and for ages I kept getting bombed out of nowhere by ‘unknown’. All I’d seen this whole time were thralls (I think they’re called thralls anyway, the other guys he summons), until on my 3rd attempt I attacked him and all of a sudden I see these plague carriers… promptly avoid them, and kill the stupid acolyte easily. Afterwards it suddenly occurred to me that these might’ve been what kept killing me out of nowhere, so next time I saw one I let it hit me and sure enough, ‘unknown’ using explosion.
Risen Plague Carriers do not generate red circles, however they do have an animation where they stop, stand straight and look up before exploding.
Of course in mass events they are difficult or even impossible (culling, spell effects) to see.
It isn’t just large events, I’ve actually fought these guys (veteran acolyte) one-on-one, with nobody else around (also off-peak, so the zone itself was pretty desolate), and for ages I kept getting bombed out of nowhere by ‘unknown’. All I’d seen this whole time were thralls (I think they’re called thralls anyway, the other guys he summons), until on my 3rd attempt I attacked him and all of a sudden I see these plague carriers… promptly avoid them, and kill the stupid acolyte easily. Afterwards it suddenly occurred to me that these might’ve been what kept killing me out of nowhere, so next time I saw one I let it hit me and sure enough, ‘unknown’ using explosion.
A random player and I were trying to get the skill challenge at the Balthazar temple in Straits a couple of weeks ago. There are several Vet Acolytes there while the temple is contested. Of course, each spawns its own Thralls/Carriers. I was able to see the miasma effect the Plague Carrier emits even though picking out (never mind targeting) the Carriers amidst the sea of Thralls in time was not happening.
Unfortunately, this is yet another type of enemy where high DPS trumps every other build. If you can kill the Vet Acolyte before it can spawn multiple waves of summons, you might have enough endurance to dodge the Explodes. I feel sorry for anyone running around in piecemeal stat blues/greens, though.
The culling problem is a really big deal though. It is hard enough as it is to see what it going on during the Temple of Grenth event. And of course we also have shades flying around, and corruption stacking like crazy. Mix this with invisible exploding enemies that instantly kill you, and you’ve got a pretty unfair encounter. Eventually players still complete it, but with dozens of players dead on the ground through no fault of their own.
If you want to see some really funny culling, do the Melandru event chain, and when you’re waiting for the helicopter, take note of the three main directions enemies come from. In the second half of the countdown, spam AOE in all those places. Then collect your loot.
I have no idea why it’s so terrible there, as it doesn’t (seem to) even require a large group of people participate, nor in an active time of day, it’s like the event is just designed to cull ALL THE THINGS.
Maybe they should borrow some of the servers SOE had for Planetside 2. I don’t think they ended up using all of those, and now they’ve improved their coding a bit we can actually see what’s happening in battles that far exceed temples or lord rooms, without the server catching fire or anything.
this is why I never played L4D. this is also why factions was the last part of the series I ever bought… Even when rendering conditions are pristine, these are cheap mechanics.
See the fun part is, a month and a half ago, with enough people, it was possible for culling invisible champion plaguebearers to do around ~125k damage on exploding, due to the uncapped broken difficulty scaling.
14k is like a breeze compared to that.
Tarnished Coast Engineer and… general alt-o-holic.
See the fun part is, a month and a half ago, with enough people, it was possible for culling invisible champion plaguebearers to do around ~125k damage on exploding, due to the uncapped broken difficulty scaling.
14k is like a breeze compared to that.
Two hits to downed is actually remarkably like one when the things responsible are beyond your perception until it’s too late. Or if you’re trying to maximize the effectiveness of your heals rather than constantly maintain full hitpoints so you can outlast all the other things trying to kill you, it might still just need the one.
Culling is a mess in the game. In large part because simply having a mob, character or NPC slip behind a obstruction results in the client completely forgetting how they look until the server gets around to sending that data (separate from the message telling the client about the location no less).
I tested this during the fireworks event by simply running around the projector.
A single pass around was enough for the plaza to look deserted, then the green names came popping up, followed by a incremental filling of appearances.
This even tho the very same characters had been on screen less than a second ago, and clearly all the armors were loaded into ram (no noticeable HDD activity as they popped into view).
As the mobs are clearly even more fixed in appearances than player characters, why oh why is the client waiting for the server to ok the drawing of their appearances?!
Just died to one on those last night. Wasn’t multiple hits, was just:
“Unknown Exploded” … for all of my Hitpoints on the outside of Lyssa’s Temple
Did not have aggro or damage from anything else…. very strange
15000 hitpoints, Heal spec’d Guardian. If they were enough to get me every path in every dungeon in the game while usually being the last man standing, then it should be enough for this stupid Zerg event.
So I see this issue pops up at other temples as well. 15000 hit points, that must have been a lot of damage from just one enemy. Are these invisible foes just getting ridiculously scaled upwards?
My record is getting one-shot for 30k and a number of times for 20k which will do it on most characters I play. And, culling doesn’t even have to be a factor. Suppose you have a populated event with 3 champs up. The particle blur will be sufficient to mask any animations. Plus you’d never have the endurance to dodge based on animation anyway. The abilities are essentially spammed.
After watching the recent livestream of Anet devs dying over and over in the new dungeon, I’m wondering whether they might have a different philosophy around death in games and the downed state alludes to this. In most games you die because you made a mistake. You do a post-mortem, learn from your error, and hopefully play better from that point on. This promotes learning and skill-based play. The random death idea is not satisfying and does not promote skill-based play. If this is a philosophical element and not simply bad design it would be helpful to know this.
Just got double-tagged for 40,000 damage from 2 of these at once…
I can only assume that such ridiculously high numbers like that are caused by Event Scaling itself on a type of calculation that should really be “throttled” somewhere along its process…. especially considering the game gives us no actual discernible feedback on WHAT causes it… and usually no warning or telegraph either since they don’t produce ‘red circles’ first and may not even be rendering for the player struck by it.
Lyssa in general is too much of a clusterkitten right now. However it worked before, they really need to go back to that format and MAKE SURE that the people guarding the exterior Shrines get full credit and therefore full access to the Chest. This would help the Rendering & Scaling issues immensely…
Yeah, as I was saying to some friends: “If even the game does not know what killed me, how am I as a player to know?”
And 40k damage must be the new record. That is ludicrous. Raine makes a good point. You should be able to learn from your mistakes, but this is something that is lacking in a lot of GW2’s content. There are a lot of random deaths and badly telegraphed attacks, along with sometimes insanely scaled damage numbers. Maybe they should just give all monsters a hard damage cap, so that no monster can ever kill a player in one hit who is at full health.
Ah yes, telegraphing. Telegraph on melee is not bad. Either you dodge early and you’re out or range, or you dodge just right and get the evades. Telegraphing on ranged on the other hand is a mess. Take your average wurm. They telegraph on the windup of their boulder barf, but if you dodge then they still hit you. If their telegraphing were consistent with melee telegraphing, then their boulder should hit where i was standing when the windup began. ut i guess that is a digression…
Ah yes, telegraphing. Telegraph on melee is not bad. Either you dodge early and you’re out or range, or you dodge just right and get the evades.
I haven’t seen it with the ones in Orr, yet, but the Risen Abomination in the holograms ground pound club slam now knocks down out to at least 600. If you dodge early you will still be knocked.
Ah yes, telegraphing. Telegraph on melee is not bad. Either you dodge early and you’re out or range, or you dodge just right and get the evades.
I haven’t seen it with the ones in Orr, yet, but the Risen Abomination in the holograms ground pound club slam now knocks down out to at least 600. If you dodge early you will still be knocked.
I don’t think any mobs should be prevented from 1-shotting…
I just think the AOE damage they do to us, should be more consistent with the WvW rule that “If the player that is the Damage source isn’t in SERVER render distance or hasn’t fully rendered before its telegraph started, then you just SHOULDN’T BE TAKING ANY DAMAGE FROM THAT ATTACK.”
This would completely solve this issue on the Temple of Lyss where both these exploding Mobs, and the Champion Gorrillas are constantly 1-shotting players without even rendering first… It’s bad enough already that Lyssa’s Priestess has 2x as much HP’s as ANY of the Elder dragon’s Lieutenants. (& then teleports & evades half the damage on top of that)
