Guild Wars 2

Yesterday, I was in an organised instance where we got three golds in a row by having small groups of 8-10 people go to each boss, get them down to 2-5% and then stop doing damage until all groups were ready. Once all groups reported they were ready, we killed Boom Boom first, then the other five in quick succession. Worked beautifully, because the bosses scale up to almost ridiculous difficulty when huge zergs are beating up on them, especially Boom Boom.

So today, I logged in to find four bosses left alive (gold and silver rewards were long gone), so I helped out at three of them, then found that between 50 and 100 people had zerged on Boom Boom and weren’t really making much of a dent in her health. The healing turrets took minutes to kill and kept restoring her health. Together with some other people, we started telling people on map chat to move away from her to scale her down, that we needed less people, not more people to make the fight easier and at least get everyone the bronze reward.

They wouldn’t listen, so I came up with an… uhm… alternative tactic to get people away from Boom Boom. Some of the other people caught on, many were fooled and came to Crown Pavilion Waypoint. I took screenshots of the chats – they are absolutely worth the read :-D

The cast:
Discombobulationist – my guardian (aptly named, apparently)
Katma, Octavia, and Drinkmaster – my co-conspirators
Tars – one of many unwitting victims of our jokes (rest of the name blurred to protect his innocence)

(Hmm, image embedding doesn’t seem to work with “img” tags in square brackets…)

After many attempts to tell people to back off from Boom Boom in map chat… Part 1:

[img]http://i1290.photobucket.com/albums/b533/amos-z/Crown%20Pavilion%20Discombobulation/DiscoBob1_zpsdf2b043b.jpg[/img]

Part 2:

[img]http://i1290.photobucket.com/albums/b533/amos-z/Crown%20Pavilion%20Discombobulation/DiscoBob2_zps6db4a8d1.jpg[/img]

Part 3 (by this time I was cracking up and invited two of the other conspirators to my party) – sorry, partial overlap:

[img]http://i1290.photobucket.com/albums/b533/amos-z/Crown%20Pavilion%20Discombobulation/DiscoBob3_zps566c0c47.jpg[/img]

Moments later, everyone lived happily ever after with their bronze reward (except Boom Boom, who probably died laughing).

Beautiful. I liked the last comment the best. “i’m actually starting to get concerned that this worked too well”

best way to trick selfish players, play to their greed.

Genius, mate. :-)

Might have to try a variant: “Swedish girl looking for guy at [Crown Pavilion Waypoint]”

Hah, yeah… for a minute we got scared that everyone would leave Boom Boom and nobody would remember to finish her while they looked for the legendary vendor :-)

the bosses in pavilion don’t scale back down so you actually made it much harder.

Quality.7284:

the bosses in pavilion don’t scale back down so you actually made it much harder.

I keep on hearing this and yet I’ve seen a boss go down after people left him. So many players with so many varied ideas of how the scaling works.

I can confirm, it goes back to it’s original state if you left her alone and let her regen back.

Haha that’s awesome! I used to do that in GW1 when there was a patch. I’d try to patch as fast as I could & get into Kamadan & in chat I would say “OMG ectos are only 2kea get em before its fixed!”. The masses of people to the rare material vendor was hilarious.

This is just too good.

Well I guess if people are mindless enough to zerg 50+ at boomboom, they’re mindless enough to fall for this one. But I’d assume it’s really temporary, and they’d go back or shout out how fake it is once discovered.

I don’t know about the boss’s HP going down if people leave, but certainly the Turret level drops from 84 to 81/2/3 if enough people leaves.

So they do look at map chat…

I’m surprised that even worked. I’m not sure how people could be so gullible.
Its pretty funny. How many do you think you got to move?

Quality.7284:

the bosses in pavilion don’t scale back down so you actually made it much harder.

No, they very definitely scale down, otherwise the few who were left wouldn’t have finished Boom Boom as quickly as they did. I think the boss needs to be left completely alone for at least a short time in order to reset, though.

BuD.7851:

Haha that’s awesome! I used to do that in GW1 when there was a patch. I’d try to patch as fast as I could & get into Kamadan & in chat I would say “OMG ectos are only 2kea get em before its fixed!”. The masses of people to the rare material vendor was hilarious.

Hey, I remember Kamadan! (That would’ve been a great price – weren’t ectos around 7 platinum normally?) It’s getting harder and harder to remember GW1. :-)

skullmount.1758:

I’m surprised that even worked. I’m not sure how people could be so gullible.
Its pretty funny. How many do you think you got to move?

Yeah, we were quite surprised it worked as well. My best guess is that around 50 people moved away from Boom Boom. To be honest, I doubt most of them actually fell for the “buy a legendary for 1g” trick; I mean, I thought we made it rather obvious that we were kidding (crossing my fingers and all when I first said it, and using our best “bad advertisement” voices). I think it was more of a case of people finally paying attention to the waypoint being mentioned over and over in map chat, not having enough time to read it in detail, and we made enough “noise” that they thought maybe there was something to the rumour after all. Plus, some may have just got fed up beating up on a boss without any progress for over 45 minutes. Having said that, I did see at least 10 people running around the inner circle like crazy, checking all the vendors – those ones definitely fell for it, hook, line and sinker. :-)

Steel Fenrir.2791:

I can confirm, it goes back to it’s original state if you left her alone and let her regen back.

you dont have to let her regain her health.

bosses scaling is active. it’s up almost instantly, when someone is range, and goes down once their out of range.
The only thing that doesnt scale instantly is a currently spawned turret, that will stay at whatever level it spawned.

This scaling is the same in openworld pve btw, champs.. it’s just the mechanics and slightly larger health pool that make the scaling much more obvious in blitz.

I’m not sure Taygus. Once we were doing good with a group of people at Boom Boom (bronze already, before the patch), then several people came in and joined the fight, upscaling her. Several people already left her when we asked them to leave, but she didn’t scale down like what you said she should have been.

Not really an issue anymore, after the patch. After things go bronze, boom boom’s healing turrets disappear, and the boss mobs put out less damage and take more damage. Makes the bronze runs somewhat tolerable now, as they don’t take near as long as they used to, even with a zerg doing each boss one at a time.

Steel Fenrir.2791:

I’m not sure Taygus. Once we were doing good with a group of people at Boom Boom (bronze already, before the patch), then several people came in and joined the fight, upscaling her. Several people already left her when we asked them to leave, but she didn’t scale down like what you said she should have been.

It does scale down. I’ve seen Boom Boom and Wiggins both scale down quite a bit when more than one or two people leave a boss when it’s overpopulated. It doesn’t happen instantly, but they do start dropping faster.

Naah, I prefer “Press Alt+F4 for a chance at precursor!” to get some of the useful people into the map.

Great idea, except last night in the pavilions I was in the issue was somebody taking out Kuraii too quickly. They may have been deliberately trying to troll the event.

We could also try, “Hey, the Battle Historian is at the waypoint and he’s got the Mistforged skins available!!!”

Or how about…..“Hey, when did the Festival trader merchant in the center start having mounts for sale?”