Guild Wars 2

I understand that the overall premise of this quest is intended to be one where the outcome is a disaster, however I suspect that the design isn’t intended to be quite as bad as I’ve found it (after countless solo tries on 3 different characters, I have yet to complete the quest without dying at least a few times) unless the intent is to make it pretty much impossible to complete unless you’re in a group with other players assisting you. I admit, perhaps I’ve missed a clever strategy or two, but the problem (as I see it) is two-fold:

Once you get to Mira, revive her (she’s always been dead when I get to her on the beach, presumably intentionally so), getting back into the fortress without having your Order sidekick engage any enemies seems impossible. Once he does, he becomes locked in combat and never releases…I’ve never been capable of killing every single Risen in an area before at least one of them respawns which means he will never stop trying to fight them because of the respawn rate/qty of Risen and lack of Lionguard distraction(and if they respawn I haven’t seen it).

If you just run into the fortress, Trahearne will eventually leash and follow you, but your Order sidekick won’t. I have never made it back (solo) to the commander inside the fortress without my Order sidekick being dead somewhere back along the route (with a second player in the group it’s possible to burn the Risen down fast enough to release from combat and get back to him, so I suppose another class or a better player might be able to achieve it, but I’m pretty sure I’m at least an “average” ability player and so far I’ve found it impossible…)

Even if you still had the party intact at this point…go back up to the rampart, trebuchet the Risen ship, then come back to the commander who finally concedes (with his dying breath) that all is lost. So off you go to light the signal fire and again, if at any time you attack anything you will presumably lose your Order sidekick because all the mobs will respawn at a rate and density that will lock him into combat. I usually lose Trahearne somewhere in here because his leash is long enough that he gets stuck with something. The only solution is to die and “retry” which resets him back with you.

By the time I get back to the final “help the Lionguard hold out” battle in the courtyard, I’d be only too delighted to do so…if there were any Lionguard alive. But there aren’t. There’s a courtyard densely packed with 20+Risen, an occasional Lionguard spawn who is instantly mobbed and defeated by a horde of Risen (they don’t last more than 2 seconds) and yet somehow I’m supposed to “help” them? I pick off as many as I can handle (since my Order sidekick is dead I’m only getting help from Trahearne if/when I can get near him, anything more than about 6-8 mobs at once will usually kill me and it’s close to impossible to aggro that few of them at one time due to their density) and pray for the timer to end…which it doesn’t so I have to “retry” after death…

And at this point my Order companion miraculously returns from the dead to “sacrifice” himself to buy us time to escape. Talk about a suspension of disbelief killer…

So, as I see it, two things are needed to make this a little more feasible for a solo player:

1. Your Order sidekick needs to be on the same leash that Trahearne is on — so he’ll eventually disengage from combat and follow you if you get too far away from him — and that leash should be a little shorter than it is too. Both characters should appear to understand that our little group’s objective is to accomplish the next step of the quest as opposed to suicidally engaging the entire Risen force single-handedly. If I make a run for it, so should they.

2. Either the spawn rate/qty/density of the Risen needs to be toned down a little, or the Lionguard spawn rate/qty needs to be upped a little in the courtyard. The quest ought to be “believable” when you get to that final courtyard phase — there ought to be some Lionguard for you to “help” — even though the intent is to ensure that the Risen carry the day. What happens (for me at least) is a “suicide yourself solo against an insane number of Risen until the timer runs out” stage that utterly kills the immersion and is, quite frankly, extremely frustrating — only made worse by my long-since-lost Order sidekick resurrecting himself for the last cut scene even though moments earlier his corpse was rotting away down on the beach.

I’m not asking to be able to “win” this quest. I’m just asking for it to be tweaked a little to maintain immersion (and reduce the number of deaths I have to sustain to complete it) when soloing. Or else, have the quest clearly instruct the player to “gather your friends and meet your Order representative on Claw Island” (I have successfully completed the quest that way multiple times while assisting guildmates).

PS: Note that I’ve completed the quest solo on all three characters I’ve run it with; but each time involved multiple deaths and the Order representative’s miraculous reappearance at the end. I don’t view any of these as “successful” completions because, from an immersion viewpoint, if my group wipes and I “retry” then I’ve failed the real objective and am just availing myself of a convenient game mechanic to avoid having to start over from square one. I’ll do that (restart) the first 3 or 4 times I try something but eventually my patience wears thin and I resort to the “retry” which I think of as more of an allowed exploit than a game tactic.

What’s weird, to me anyway, is that this mission is a cakewalk with even just one other person. Maybe I was just kiting poorly solo?

@Synk

With 2 people there are a few key differences that make it pretty “easy” to complete:

You kill the initial mobs faster, meaning there are more Lionguard left alive both inside the fortress and also outside it when you go down to retrieve Mira. If you get into a scrap on the way down there or on the way back, you can usually kill the handful fast enough to release from combat. When soloing it, neither of those is feasible since both companions you have (Trahearne + your Order rep) are essentially useless — they rarely aggro until 10-15 seconds into the fight, rarely do any meaningful damage, etc — so you have to handle everything yourself. You can usually survive those fights without too much trouble, but the time it takes to do it means that Risen are spawning again before you get released from combat which means your companions get locked into the endless and unbreakable cycle. A second player removes that problem…they seem to do 100x the damage that either of the companions do, they can actually attack meaningful targets, etc.

That leaves a lot more Lionguard alive in the fortress for the next stage — or more particularly for when you get back from lighting the signal fire. When soloing this, even if you sprint the entire way there, light the fire, sprint back, and never stop to so much as glance at the many mobs along the way, the courtyard will be full of Risen and devoid of Lionguard by the time you get back — I suspect because a lot of the ones that are supposed to be there died earlier? When you have more than one player, you usually also have a much larger pool of Lionguard still alive in the fortress. Even if you don’t, you can use a completely different (and far more believable) strategy tp actually fight your way to the beacon, light it, and fight your way back. You’ll still have a healthy Trahearne and Order companion, plus two players, which I’ve found to be perfectly adequate to survive the final courtyard defence phase (it can be a little tough and go if you grab too many mobs, but it’s survivable unless you do something really dumb).

That’s why I’m not really asking for a major change to the balance…just a tweak to it that allows a solo player to enjoy the experience as much as a group does/would. Putting a shorter leash on the two companions (or even better, give us a F1 and F3 key for them like rangers have for their pets!) would solve a lot of it, and maybe a look at the spawn balance in the courtyard (if <10 Lionguard are alive in the courtyard, spawn a batch? At very least ensure that there are some there to defend)

The problem with these PSes where there is a never ending battle between NPCs and Risen is that it can be difficult to tell what you need to kill and what you need to ignore. And you need to be very good player to survive if you make the wrong choice because enemies will instantly respawn to take the place of the ones that fall if you kill any that are suppose to fight NPCs and those that respawn will instantly lock onto you. You will then be locked in a never ending battle unless you figure out the ‘trick’ to progress the PS which requires surviving while dragging these enemies around till you fight the ‘right’ enemies to kill and and then kill them while not dying to the swarm currently locked onto you. There are many MMOs that have this sort of thing going on both in instances and in their open world but they all design the respawns to aggro straight on to the NPCs. I have no idea why Anet did not do this.

My instinct the first time I did this specific PS was to help my allies out. This apparently was the wrong thing to do and I spent a long time in this PS. Luckily I was playing a ranger with OP pet tanks so it wasn’t that bad except for the rescue Mira section… I saw she was down but instead of ignoring the NPCs fighting I jumped right in to help clear them out. Unfortunately they instantly respawned and I found I was under constant treb fire. I spent 10 minutes fighting for dear life till I finally decided I had to rez the girl. With the treb fire and enemy aggro I had to do it a few ticks at a time.

This really takes you out of the immersion and reinforces that you are just running a scripted event where you focus on just making it to the next point to advance the script or remove the specific set of enemies required to trigger than next part. This is why so many people ended up running into the bug in the PS ‘Forging the Pact’. People had been so trained to ignore enemies because it could be a ‘forever spawn’ and advance to the green circle that they bugged it out by leaving Trahearne behind.

I think there is something wrong with the Risen mobs. On top of doing stupid amounts of damage, ignoring friendly NPCs to attack the player, etc., they will sprint for no apparent reason. No buff shows, they just move at 200% or so, making them impossible to keep off the player.