Guild Wars 2

From shelter camp in Orr. people literally stop doing the event once he is up because everyone dies and he absorbs all their health. I’m not usually one to complain about changes to farming, but this one is far too OP. I have a 9 minute video of him clearing every player 10-15, every NPC 100% of the time and keeping 90-100% health. Either make him drop a chest at the end, or remove him.. Thx..

Yeah, his AOE literally covers the WHOLE CAMP and then some…don’t know what they were thinking there. But I don’t expect anything soon. Zero response from Anet since this patch and people voicing their concerns about it.

Agree. The best strategy against them, as you can’t get within combat range without dying, is to leave them alone in the hopes that they will despawn. Wholly inappropriate for any DE in open world PvE. I would vote for simply removing it from the game. I wouldn’t greet an attempt to balance it with any confidence.

And the vet spiders that spawn, stay long after the event much like the wraith. And they drop nothing.. Which kind of makes them pointless.

I have no problem with making farming events more “interesting” or even more skill related, but there is a fine line between challenge and brick wall. And that wraith is 1 Chuck Norris joke away from me never farming that side again.

Want to make it interesting and not get rid of him? Make him a boss mob who randomly spawns at a camp who drops a chest (not bonus), and make it so people could actually kill him without the need for hellfire missiles from the sky. He can drop a scepter skin or something..

Just gave up on this guy earlier, along with everyone else in the area. Something really needs to be done about this because it’s not even a scaling issue, just insanely difficult. If a random champion is harder than most world events, then something is wrong.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We looked into this specific spot and it looks like some of our bosses aren’t scaling properly. We’ve got our QA team investigating to figure out what’s going on here, it’s limited to relatively few spots.

Thanks Colin, good news to hear!

Yeah, Colin, that’s great! Make sure to check some of the champions added to the Temple of Lyssa and other meta events in Orr, too. That risen wraith isn’t the only one totally out of whack.

Lol.. as we have prioritized to do the daily and some world bosses and after that some leveling or farming in Orr, we haven’t been able to discover this OP risen yet, but it sounds that today evening (if it’s not hotfixed until then^^) we just HAVE TO look out for it.. xD

This might be the first thread I’ve ever gotten an official response on ^^ Thanks for the info, was worried that we were fighting a new “Mini Armageddon mode” version of SB :P

Navi.7142:

Lol.. as we have prioritized to do the daily and some world bosses and after that some leveling or farming in Orr, we haven’t been able to discover this OP risen yet, but it sounds that today evening (if it’s not hotfixed until then^^) we just HAVE TO look out for it.. xD

Guest on a busy server like TC or others, hang out there when he shows up. Its power was scaled directly to 9000 :P He did not pass go, he did not collect 200 gold, he went directly to our camp and ate everyone like some sci fi thriller. ^^;

Champion chicken seems legit :P

Creepy!
We will be brave and face him to see this gorgeous creature.. and then dead.. well… xD

This also happens in the Temple of Grenth event when the champ wraith spawns. Not only players die but also Jonez is dead fast.

Is this champion a further attempt to scare people away from the tunnel treadmill? Why the ongoing pressure to stop grinders from playing like we want to? So what if we make more gold with circuits like this, and CoF? I’ve got a healthy supply of gold to buy as I like, but I still end up using tokens and karma to buy about 90% of the items I want/need.

Making t6 mat runs easier will bring down the price of the items, not raise them. The current rare crash is a great example.

Ps: I don’t grind constantly, but I like that there is a place to do it when I feel like it.

Geotherma.2395:

Champion chicken seems legit :P

Zombie chickens should not lay eggs, never mind expel them like guided missiles.

The T6 mats are rising in price the longer this thread lives.
I went back to Cursed shore last week and yeah. It doesn’t take long to die by the hands or ‘siphon’ of that Wraith at shelter.
Not only that but I noticed he likes to hang out on top of the Waypoint at times, making it really hard to get back in the fight without another instant death.
I am on Blackgate and there were a lot of people wearing him down. When it was all over everyone got a blue item. Yay, for all the repair bills, here’s your token.
At least have him give me a badge of honorable death token. I can collect them and get a free repair canister. Something to make it worth it.

And thx for the response in the thread. It is always nice to hear from a dev.
And the zombie chicken comment was golden. Made me lol.

Don’t forget about Champ chicken.
it throw… wait… wat ??? .. Eggs and destroy …wait… Wall.. at Penti
Wat’s logic about eggs destroy wall o.O

Also, please make the veteran spider hatchlings at shelter drop loot. Why make us kill like 20 of them without any reward…

FallenTear.3710:

Don’t forget about Champ chicken.
it throw… wait… wat ??? .. Eggs and destroy …wait… Wall.. at Penti
Wat’s logic about eggs destroy wall o.O

Egg throwing is serious business.
http://youtu.be/fbZD6g511ME

FallenTear.3710:

Don’t forget about Champ chicken.
it throw… wait… wat ??? .. Eggs and destroy …wait… Wall.. at Penti
Wat’s logic about eggs destroy wall o.O

They are testing out new kinda siege weaponry for WvW to destroy walls. Every player gets to buy Risen Chicken eggs from Gem store and take down walls when supply is limited.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We looked into this specific spot and it looks like some of our bosses aren’t scaling properly. We’ve got our QA team investigating to figure out what’s going on here, it’s limited to relatively few spots.

Thanks for your response, I appreciate it.

Champion Risen Wraith
Champion Risen Spider
Champion Risen Chicken
Veteran Risen Chicken

From the events that I played, at least those 4 types of mobs seem to have severe issues at the moment. A Champion Wraith with a 20s long 1200 range AoE lifesteal, a Champion Spider that deals massive damage with 1 egg injection and the Champion and Veteran Chickens who shoot eggs at you for 12-22k+ each.

But I believe other people also reported on a Champion Risen Jester able to oneshot people in rapid succession. So you might wish to check up on all event related spawning veterans and champions.

Thanks.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We looked into this specific spot and it looks like some of our bosses aren’t scaling properly. We’ve got our QA team investigating to figure out what’s going on here, it’s limited to relatively few spots.

You may want to have your QA team take a look at all the high level temple-related events while they’re investigating. Since April’s patch, mob scaling for high-level events continues to be hilariously broken.

I’m all for challenging content. When one or two champions can practically AoE one-shot multiple groups of players, something is wrong.

The Risen Priestess of Lyssa alone at the altar took a zerg of over 40 people over 25 minutes to complete. As they are now, the temple events are simply not worth the time and effort.

Some numbers from temple events tonight (first two from Melandru Pre, second two from Lyssa altar event) notice the 127,000 damage in the combat log from Explode, 3rd screencap down:

Temple of Grenth is no longer worth the time investment.. This was a challenging and fun fight

It’s more than a few select areas where the scaling is messed up (it may just be veteran/champs in general), it’s virtually all veteran/champ mobs tied to an event.

This attachment is from the last segment of an event chain in Wayfarer Foothills (1-15) which ends with a champ. I encountered the champ alone, with nobody else around attempting it. Before the patch that broke the event scaling, you’d never see this mob up by itself, because those running the previous events would already be in position to take it out and complete the chain. Not to mention it is in a heavily populated zone, full of 80s running dailys and waiting for The Maw. Shortly after facing it myself I found out why, as seen in the screenshot. Keep in mind my hp as a scaled down level 80 warrior is 1500, and I am using a significant amount of Knights (toughness) gear. Also remember that I was soloing, so this wasn’t an artifact of zerg scaling. This cannot be intended, and I just hope ArenaNet is working on the issue.

Josh Mitchell.1596:

ColinJohanson.2394:

We looked into this specific spot and it looks like some of our bosses aren’t scaling properly. We’ve got our QA team investigating to figure out what’s going on here, it’s limited to relatively few spots.

You may want to have your QA team take a look at all the high level temple-related events while they’re investigating. Since April’s patch, mob scaling for high-level events continues to be hilariously broken.

I’m all for challenging content. When one or two champions can practically AoE one-shot multiple groups of players, something is wrong.

The Risen Priestess of Lyssa alone at the altar took a zerg of over 40 people over 25 minutes to complete. As they are now, the temple events are simply not worth the time and effort.

Some numbers from temple events tonight (first two from Melandru Pre, second two from Lyssa altar event) notice the 127,000 damage in the combat log from Explode, 3rd screencap down:

The concept of a champion plague bearer seems… off.

Hint: They’re the suicide bombers.

Everything in Orr is screwed no one does DE anymore so its dead land. Remove the bazillion DE in the maps Straits, Malchor and Cursed. They are empty and the people who need things like skill points and map completion die 50 times. The events were designed for multiple people but with DE being worthless no one wants them. REMOVE THEM.

Northlander.4619:

This also happens in the Temple of Grenth event when the champ wraith spawns. Not only players die but also Jonez is dead fast.

I did that 2 days ago with some other people. The NPC died in like 10 seconds, lol.

I’d like to hijack this a little and point out that since the patch, at least on our server (Ring of Fire), Temple of Grenth hasn’t been successfully completed once.
I’ve been doing it quit a lot, as prior to the patch I found it was almost perfectly balanced, and was a great way of teaching people that there’s more to the game than simply wailing on an enemy. Sure, it would get frustrating explaining the mechanics to people over and over, but at least it was doable after 2-3 attempts.

Now however, while the first phase with the Risen Priest of Grenth seems okay, the final phase where you have to protect Jonez is impossible, no matter if you take a small strike team to keep scaling low, or blitz it with 20 or more people.
The champion spiders and wraiths could be dealt with, but the problem is the shear numbers of minor mobs that have been upgraded to particularly hardy veterans now.

I’m sure you’ll be able to confirm my story by checking the logs.
Are these events meant to be so hard that they’re only achievable with ridiculous levels of co-ordination by small groups of the server’s best players?

Haha I met the risen wraith yesterday. Impossible. Even in full toughness I can handle the damage (does ~700), but he is impossible to beat because even if the group gets him down considerably during his “downtime”, he just pops life steal and is back to 100% HP. There is literally no way any group can outdps him.

Pointless even once he spawns, better run somewhere else.

For Grenth, the glitch in the system is obvious: Of course Jones should scale just like Grenth! But AFAIK he doesnt. So he melts.

Life Transfer and Egg-laying are supposed to be interrupted, only in theory however.

CC in this game is horribly designed for open world PVE, because the implementation of Defiant stack is a punishment for using CC rather than a reward.

I was in a zerg, interrupting the champion and causing 63 stacks of Defiant due to scaling. This means one single untimely CC mistake will result in a very harsh punishment.

CC won’t work for open world PVE for these reasons:

1) PUGs can never be corrdinated in removing Defiant.

2) It takes just ONE CC mistake to screw up the whole removal effort.

3) The event scaling for the number of Defiant stacks exponentially aggravates the punishment.

4) For many open world champions, soft CCs like cripple, chill, blind, etc only last for some length close to 0 sec.

That’s why most people in open world PVE don’t bring CC weapons or utilities.

P.S. On the subject of the egg-laying of the champion spider, the anticipation part of the animation is the same as its web-pull, egg-injection, and even normal attacks. So, trying to interrupt the egg-laying is a risky gamble.

Furikake, thank you for putting into words something that has been bugging me as a hammer warrior for a LONG time. Defiant just cannot be coordinated effectively in large-scale PvE events.

Hell, even in small scale group situations with otherwise experienced players, many don’t understand how Defiant works and will waste the CC opportunity with a sub-optimal CC skill.

The amount of times my Ranger friend has used Point Blank Shot “because it’s funny” when I’ve been about to hit the mob with either Backbreaker or Earthshaker is infuriating. He didn’t understand for the longest time what the stacks of Defiant were on a mob, and I’m not sure he fully understands now.

And to be fair, this isn’t his fault.

ArenaNet explicitly stated during development that they wanted to move players’ focus away from health bars and the associated buffs/debuffs and on to the mobs themselves.
There is no visual cue on a mob indicating its Defiant status, therefore the ONLY way to properly control a Defiant mob is to go against ArenaNet’s stated design goal and watch the mob’s health bar.

Fail.

Are grenth and balth even physically possible since the patch? I tried both a couple times and Jonez was 1-shot instantly in the final phase of the event both times. Balth was similar, the entire team was one shot by super charged vets.

This is just another example of the QA team not testing properly or they are unable to replicate the population to achieve the same scaling difficulties. Would you guys please introduce test servers for upcoming patches and save yourselves the embarrassment.

Mungrul.9358:

He didn’t understand for the longest time what the stacks of Defiant were on a mob, and I’m not sure he fully understands now.

And to be fair, this isn’t his fault.

I’ve been playing since Christmas Day, along with a couple of friends from other MMOs, I’m not in a guild with vets .. I have NO IDEA what Defiant is at all, let alone what ‘removing it’ means or how it works. I know it’s a ‘debuff’ (or whatever it’s called in GW2) but that’s the entirely of my understanding.

SO yes, I’m one of those noobs that are screwing you up because the game hasn’t seen fit to teach me this kind of mechanic.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Are grenth and balth even physically possible since the patch? I tried both a couple times and Jonez was 1-shot instantly in the final phase of the event both times. Balth was similar, the entire team was one shot by super charged vets.

Our guild has finished Balthazar once. We had 3 parties working on the event together plus all the other people helping that we got involved via map chat. I will say it failed 5 times the first time we tried. The next night we all had a go there were 20 of us in parties and then at least double that jumped into the event from the map. The only time we succeeded. I know our guild brought 10 healing guardians whose only job was to keep the pact alive.
When we got to the boss/priest fight, people shouted out to ignore the champion and only focus on the boss. It worked even with all the dead/near dead players around.

I was one of the guardians and the only thing about the event that bothered me was that I barely got a silver on each leg even though I killed quite a few risen. It was my job to keep people alive with my WvW build and it worked but it is a bit unrewarding in the terms of loot.
It is an activity I’ll do again for any guildies that need the temple but if I wanted to farm the event I’m bringing a build with a bit more DPS.

EDIT: also the successful run was the most people I have seen at the event. Lag and culling was terrible. It could be that we just zerged our way through but I’d like to think that us 10guardians were keeping the pact happy.

Kraggy.4169:

SO yes, I’m one of those noobs that are screwing you up because the game hasn’t seen fit to teach me this kind of mechanic.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that people who don’t know about Defiant are noobs; far from it!
I think it’s a failure in communication on ArenaNet’s behalf.
Here’s a link to the Wiki article explaining the mechanic.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We looked into this specific spot and it looks like some of our bosses aren’t scaling properly. We’ve got our QA team investigating to figure out what’s going on here, it’s limited to relatively few spots.

Well to be honest, your QA team sucks, get some fresh people who play the game perhaps.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We looked into this specific spot and it looks like some of our bosses aren’t scaling properly. We’ve got our QA team investigating to figure out what’s going on here, it’s limited to relatively few spots.

It’s nice to see a response but by “specific spot” I take it you mean pretty much all of Orr.

People have been pointing out the issues for the best part of a week (if not more) in the Dynamic Events section of the forums (multiple threads with zero dev response).

We all understand the issues that can arise and the difficulty in getting it right, but the whole scenario here has been pretty poor to be honest.

These issues are too common. Part of it is these adjustments are not put out in the open for discussion, and the testing is done internally as far as I know. I really wish there was more transparency to these things and opportunities for the playerbase to test them. This kind of stuff is just silly and could easily be avoided.

My biggest problem with this issue is that it didn’t just pop up this week. It has been there for a while now and I see no reason why it hasn’t been looked at before now. If your new event scaling mechanism is ruining these events, turn it off until you can get it right.

Oh thank you dear Lord the way it’s working now isn’t by design! I’m fresh to Orr even though I’ve been playing since launch (yeah, I know, been taking my sweet, sweet time) and I was wandering around Malchor’s other night, saw the Risen Chicken event pop up and thought, eh, what the hell. Went in, cleared out the chicken infestation, no worries, no problems, and then, after they were cleared out, the Vet Giant Risen Chickens popped up. I’ve soloed vets before (my 80 is one of the many, many, MANY zerk warriors) and it hasn’t been much of a problem — some need to be dodged more than others, but in the end, it’s not usually a question of being one-shotted. Until that Vet Giant chicken got me in its sights and BLAMMO! On the ground, down and out seconds later … and of course with it being Orr, I had to find a waypoint all the way hell and gone across the map … fixing these wayyyy overpowered denizens of evil would be most appreciated. Hard to brag about being a bad motherkittener when a chicken takes you out with a single blow.

All events in Orr from the April 30 patch should be reverted to their pre-patch state. Live should not be a test server. If ANet insists on using Live as a test server, they should introduce these changes one or two at a time, say they are testing and ask for reactions.

Thanks to Furikake.4052 for his exposition. I agree that use of interrupts in an open-world DE is not a viable option. Not only does removing Defiant (and being able to take advantage of it to stop a win/lose mechanic) require a level of coordination that can be disrupted by any passing player who jumps into the event, it requires being able to see the champion’s animations amidst the amazing technicolor dreamcoat of particle effects.

It seems as if the only way to complete these events is by bringing enough people beyond the cap for up-scaling to be able to mass AoE the hordes of mobs. This will absolutely kill the spontaneous, “Hey, there’s a couple of us at Melandru, we could use a few more to do the event.”

I can tell you from mapchat on a fairly mature/game-friendly server that Anet is bleeding player goodwill on a daily basis in Orr. I’m willing to give them a “scaling issue” with the champ wraith, spider, and chickens. But game balance is a issue somewhere in most of the zones I play. The temple fights and DE’s are a chaotic mess, not something that you would design as a challenging, interesting encounter. Too often death is by a 30k one-shot that you would have no chance to dodge because with multiple heavy-hitters up you can’t watch all of them at once and besides the abilities are spammed and the particle blur of GW2 combat makes anticipating attacks futile. Level 80 combat simply needs to be re-conceived.

Serval.6458:

The concept of a champion plague bearer seems… off.

Hint: They’re the suicide bombers.

Every time I see any Risen Plague Carrier, I yell “BOOMER!”

A few more shots taken today at Penitent Camp event. Please fix this as this is beyond ridiculous. As you can see we were with only ~15 people there…

Thanks!!

What I think they were trying to do here was have the damage spread/shared with everyone in the group or in a certain area…instead everyone was hit for the total amount.

Aveneo.2068:

A few more shots taken today at Penitent Camp event. Please fix this as this is beyond ridiculous. As you can see we were with only ~15 people there…

Thanks!!

It’s insane, same happens on all server I tried guesting. Orr is even less crowded because of this april 30th patch.

Aveneo.2068:

A few more shots taken today at Penitent Camp event. Please fix this as this is beyond ridiculous. As you can see we were with only ~15 people there…

Thanks!!

Why do people even bother with that sort of damage..i don’t see this as fun, more like mental torture..

I like all those spiders that drop nothing at all and slaughter whole groups .