Guild Wars 2

Arena Net’s policy regarding events is that a player should never be able to intentionally cause an event to fail. That is not true with the temple of balthazar.

Because the event is a timed DPS race, everyone’s first priority must be to deal damage to the boss at all times. If anyone is defeated, they should immediately waypoint and run back in order to deal more damage to the boss. Playing defensive is not an option because if the priest is not killed within the time limit the event fails. However, most players are completely ignorant of this and treat it like any other event. This includes attempting to ressurect defeated (not downed, DEFEATED) players. Because of this, one defeated player can prevent three other players from dealing damage to the boss, greatly reducing the chances of the event’s success since one player resurrected slightly faster than if they walked back is worth far less than the damage the ressurrectors could be doing if they continued to attack. Furthermore, attracting ressurectors just leads to the ressurectors all getting killed themselves by a stray AoE. Essentially, a defeated player is a trap. It lowers the group’s DPS, and makes other players more vulnerable.

Ultimately this disconnect between how to do events normally and how to do this event causes the players who understand the event to become frustrated with the others, and creates a lot of discontent and anger between players.

Please change the temple of balthazar to be within your design goals so that players cannot cause events to fail. The simplest way to do this would be to prevent defeated players from being resurrected at the temple of balthazar. This would make it so that players are not tempted to waste their time resurrecting defeated players, and make it so that it is clear to players that they should run back if they wish to continue to participate.

The problem isn’t in players rezzing defeated players, the problem is in the obscene damage and HP pool priest of Balthazar has. This isn’t intentionally making a DE fail, as I doubt players that are rezzing defeated people are going “kitten ima make us lose” in their head, if anything it’s just unintentional. It’s like the fire elemental, trying to revive players is typically a death trap as youi get smacked in the face by his or the fire imp’s AoE spam. The only difference here is that there is now a time limit in which you can kill Balthazar if they lose. I’d reccomend increasing it to something more reasonable (MegaDestroyer gets 20 minutes, usually dies in 15), or to just dramatically lower his HP pool so that attempting to rezz fallen allies doesn’t lead to failure because those people weren’t adding to the deeps.

edit: kitten is a swear word that gets censored? lol wut?

The ressing downed people is only small problem there. Its the amount of Hp that boss has and the amount of damage it does, this event pretty much makes melee attacking worthless since it takes like max 2 hits from the boss and ur down from 20k to zero. The heal that boss has is what makes it hard/impossible to be completed in that time. We had 30-50 ppl attackin the boss, got it down to about 50% during 4 minutes and then he healed himself back to 100%? that leaves us about 5-6 minutes to get killed which to me seems just impossible. I dont know if there is a way to prevent the heal from happening, such as killing the other boss? but if there is no way to prevent it, this event seem just impossible unless we go recruit whole tyria to weapons for this.

Please don’t twist my words. I never said that reviving downed players was bad. Reviving downed players is totally fine. It’s reviving DEFEATED players that is the problem. Whenever I run this boss I see about half the people either sitting defeated during the fight, or rezzing people who are defeated. I know that if we had these people actually contributing we’d be able to succeed.

yes, also meant defeated players here, my bad.

Until I see a group go at it who actually tries to DPS him and not sit around dead or rezzing ignorant wastes of space on the ground, I’m holding off my judgement as to whether the event is too difficult solely due to the priest’s HP.

Here’s a novel idea:

Instead of a boss fight that isn’t difficult just because it has obscene amounts of HP and kills everyone with one hit, how about ones that involve tactics and strategy more complex than just “Shoot with ranged weapon, die, respawn, repeat.”?

Shooopa.5632:

Here’s a novel idea:

Instead of a boss fight that isn’t difficult just because it has obscene amounts of HP and kills everyone with one hit, how about ones that involve tactics and strategy more complex than just “Shoot with ranged weapon, die, respawn, repeat.”?

We have one. It’s called “dodge”. You obviously aren’t dodging his attacks.

Strill.2591:

Shooopa.5632:

Here’s a novel idea:

Instead of a boss fight that isn’t difficult just because it has obscene amounts of HP and kills everyone with one hit, how about ones that involve tactics and strategy more complex than just “Shoot with ranged weapon, die, respawn, repeat.”?

We have one. It’s called “dodge”. You obviously aren’t dodging his attacks.

And you obviously aren’t familiar with video games concepts more complex than “Push button, watch thing happen.”

There is nothing remotely interesting or even challenging about an enemy whose entire arsenal of attacks are just one-shot kill melee strikes. You stay out range, keep out of range, and after 10-20 minutes of rinse-repeat you win. If that counts to you as a “tactic” then you should never, ever attempt to play God of War, Serious Sam, or Shadow of the Colossus.

Endless repetition is not a tactic. It’s a time-waster.

His strongest attacks are not melee, they’re ranged. His fireball teleport and his banners specifically. His point-blank stomp, on the other hand, isn’t a one-shot attack. Even I as a glass cannon Mesmer can survive it.

Oh boy. I only watched videos of him and didn’t think the teleport in itself was an attack. That’s just punishing.

Honestly, who thought that was a good idea?

Surely a large health bar and instana-kills are not what the majority of gamers consider to be the only criteria for making a boss challenging is it?

I told you dodge. Quit acting like you’re completely helpless. Beyond that you can also use instant-revive skills like Illusion of Life.

Strill.2591:

I told you dodge. Quit acting like you’re completely helpless. Beyond that you can also use instant-revive skills like Illusion of Life.

And I told you, if you call repeating 2-3 actions for 30 minutes or so “tactics” then you are far too easily amused and should just stick to watching ceiling fans instead of playing games.

Start acting like you have a functioning brain and read my posts before mouthing off junior.

Shooopa.5632:

Strill.2591:

I told you dodge. Quit acting like you’re completely helpless. Beyond that you can also use instant-revive skills like Illusion of Life.

And I told you, if you call repeating 2-3 actions for 30 minutes or so “tactics” then you are far too easily amused and should just stick to watching ceiling fans instead of playing games.

Start acting like you have a functioning brain and read my posts before mouthing off junior.

Why don’t you try actually doing the encounter. You obviously have no idea how it works if you think it lasts 30 minutes.

Playing Devil’s Advocate here Shoopa, the encounter is only 10 minutes, since that’s the timer imposed on you to defeat the priest.

But this guy is the pinnacle of zerging. People are going to die en masse, it’s inevitable, and thus you just really need a huge swarm of players to chip him down before time’s up. The level of interactivity this fight has is dependent on how often he targets you and wether or not you’re in range of banner drop. It’s a dance of death if he seems to hold a blood vendetta on you, a snoozefest if you’re ignored the whole fight.

Painking.4703:

Playing Devil’s Advocate here Shoopa, the encounter is only 10 minutes, since that’s the timer imposed on you to defeat the priest.

But this guy is the pinnacle of zerging. People are going to die en masse, it’s inevitable, and thus you just really need a huge swarm of players to chip him down before time’s up. The level of interactivity this fight has is dependent on how often he targets you and wether or not you’re in range of banner drop. It’s a dance of death if he seems to hold a blood vendetta on you, a snoozefest if you’re ignored the whole fight.

And therin is the problem. It’s not a boss fight. It’s a cycle of waiting/respawning/more waiting. And the only real way you can win is by having enough people attacking at the same time.

There are no tactics involved if all it is “start running if he sees you.” It’s not how a game should play. Yes it should be challenging because it’s a late-level enemy. But this is not how you make him that way.

No one said “start running if he sees you”, that was something you came up with all on your own. Everyone who actually played the event and knows what they’re talking about has said “dodge and keep fighting”. You’re inserting an argument into this thread that has no place here, and have repeatedly shown ignorance of how the actual event in question functions.

Acolytes-champ-priest, dodge…make sure to pop your cc breaking abilities when you need to, rez the dead asap…dps the boss down, hope you are not surrounded by newplayers that run INTO the circles and keep telling people to spread out as much as possible=win. anet, please do not, DO NOT water down this event for those that cannot adapt to the fight…this guy is a royal pain in the rear which makes this fight extremely rewarding when we finally kill the dang priest.

Acolytes-champ-priest, dodge…make sure to pop your cc breaking abilities when you need to, rez the dead asap…dps the boss down, hope you are not surrounded by newplayers that run INTO the circles and keep telling people to spread out as much as possible=win. anet, please do not, DO NOT water down this event for those that cannot adapt to the fight…this guy is a royal pain in the rear which makes this fight extremely rewarding when we finally kill the dang priest.

All that is fine. The only thing I want them to do is add something to tell noobs that you shouldn’t rez defeated players in combat.

The boss is actually quite easy since the only real strategy required for killing him is just to tell map chat to not rez defeated players. Anet needs more bosses like this, because this is honestly like the only boss in the whole game capable of taking down a zerg.

I agree, we need stuff like this in end game (current end game). Treat it like a dungeon boss, its pretty much the same thing, bosses resets if your party is wiped and doesnt get back xD We need dungeon ish bosses in normal PvE here and there for some real challenge XP The dragons and big bosses like that are way too easy. Balthazar presents a real challenge, so does Lyssa

they should change all the temple bosses to this

Any1 mind explaining the heal? We were on track to kill it within time and then boss jumped from 50% back into 100% while we definently had players in the area. That just one time bug?

Yea, lets whine about the 1 hard DE in the whole game. deal with it.

Most of the rage I’ve seen is from people saying that we shouldn’t start the DEs leading from the pact rally point to the Temple of Balthazar without having all three invasions there and ready to attack. The best we have done so far is two.
Is the attack on the temple manually launched, or is it automatic ?

If it’s manually launched, why is ANET letting one person waste all that work from everyone else by launching early when everyone talking wants to wait ?

If automatic, why does it launch with only two of the three invasion routes ready ?

Strill.2591:

Shooopa.5632:

Here’s a novel idea:

Instead of a boss fight that isn’t difficult just because it has obscene amounts of HP and kills everyone with one hit, how about ones that involve tactics and strategy more complex than just “Shoot with ranged weapon, die, respawn, repeat.”?

We have one. It’s called “dodge”. You obviously aren’t dodging his attacks.

It’s a bit hard to dodge AOE circles that you’ve been AOE feared into. Those are what kill me most of the time, and it’s very rare that I even see my downed skills before being defeated by a follow up attack.

Yesterday I noticed that most of the groups DPS was focused on a champion that spawned with him, not the boss.

If automatic, why does it launch with only two of the three invasion routes ready ?

I can answer that. It’s because the central invasion event chain is completely disabled, probably due to bugs. You can’t even start the first event. I don’t think players are penalized for it though. They probably just set the balthazar event to start when the northern and southern events complete.

I find the Temple of Lyssa event chain to be far interesting. It still requires coordination to hold all the generators while providing a challenging fight that is not just a series of instant-kill attacks.

When I first did this even back in the first week I assumed it failed simply because we didn’t have enough people. I’ve never returned to it (it’s bugged most weeks anyway) but I hoped it would work out fine with more people. It’s dissapointing that the event is exactly the same as before and that players are just as hostile and upset by the experience, which was the same thing that happened on my server (Fort Aspenwood at the time) four weeks ago.

I think these events should be challenging but I didn’t really enjoy that one. The same with Lyssa, the co-ordination and player number requirements just didn’t work out with our population. I get they intend for these to be casual raids for guilds who want to work together with a challenging enough goal, but this player number requirements and organisational requirement are turning these event areas into dead zones the majority of the time.