Arah Path 4: Will you please give the NPC a gun?

Arah Path 4: Will you please give the NPC a gun?

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: spreadsheets.9805

spreadsheets.9805

I would like to know the thought process behind making a friendly NPC in Arah Explorable who can only attack in melee.

It doesn’t matter for the most part, but gets really annoying when you fight Giganticus Lupicus. During the first phase of that boss, when a grub gets spawned at the NPC, the Lupicus will swallow it near instantly, because the NPC is hugging Lupicus like a big dumb-dumb. There is much less time to kill the grub than if it spawns at range.

So at that particular boss, having the NPC with you is actually detrimental to your groups performance. It’s annoying to be handicapped like that, to have mistakes forced upon you. Even if the whole group acts according to a sound strategy, if they get unlucky, they will get a couple of buff stacks onto Lupicus. And there is not a lot they can do to stop that. Pretty much the only way is to lure the NPC into a mob pack first and have him die, thus removing him completely from the Lupicus fight. That doesn’t sound like an intended mechanic and it sure as hell is not immersive. I don’t want to be forced to kill off a friendly NPC.

I hope what I wrote makes it reasonable to urge the Anet Dungeon Team: Please remove this unnecessary and annoying flaw in an otherwise pretty skill-based and fun encounter. Either make Lupicus not spawn grubs at non-player entities (This would be great, as it fixes problems with uncontrollable pets like necro or mesmer summons.) or just make the path 4 NPC a ranged attacker.

Arah Path 4: Will you please give the NPC a gun?

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: zencow.3651

zencow.3651

Doubt they’d do that anytime soon. He only needs to be alive as you enter the room for the cut-scene to start. Better off just sticking to that you’re doing and kill him off.

Quasi-elitist dungeoneer and missing Gw1 GvGs greatly.
“GW2’s PvE is almost as bad as the PvP.”

Arah Path 4: Will you please give the NPC a gun?

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: spreadsheets.9805

spreadsheets.9805

Doubt they’d do that anytime soon. He only needs to be alive as you enter the room for the cut-scene to start. Better off just sticking to that you’re doing and kill him off.

I’m just not going to do this path again, anyways. But I do feel bad for those who do run it .

Arah Path 4: Will you please give the NPC a gun?

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: zencow.3651

zencow.3651

Meh,the larger proportion of rage is at Simins later on in that path. I’d prefer they fix the spark imprisoning/persistent health reset at 50% rather than on timer bugs (after first stealth she’s meant to stealth again after 40 seconds but instead she stealths immediately again at 50%) first.

It’s just so silly that we have to go out of our way to break their game and how buggy arah is (leashing NPC in path 1 so it doesn’t die and bug out on reward door, having to use invulnerability to get past spider glitch past path 2’s puzzle, saving sparks for after simins reappears from first stealth on path 4), and do stupid things to make Arah work and has the terrible unfinished game feel. #Gw2wasn’tready

Quasi-elitist dungeoneer and missing Gw1 GvGs greatly.
“GW2’s PvE is almost as bad as the PvP.”

(edited by zencow.3651)

Arah Path 4: Will you please give the NPC a gun?

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: spreadsheets.9805

spreadsheets.9805

Meh,thelarger proportion of rage is at Simins later on in that path. I’d prefer they fix the spark imprisoning/persistent health reset at 50% rather than on timer bugs (after first stealth she’s meant to stealth again after 40 seconds but instead she stealths immediately again at 50%) first.

It’s just so silly that we have to go out of our way to break their game and do stupid things to make Arah work and has the terrible unfinished game feel. #Gw2wasn’tready

I’m pretty sure the way to beat Simin is intended. It says in the mob description that she only hides, which already hints at using a couple of players to keep hitting her while she is invisible.
As for stealthing immediately again: I suspect that the cooldown begins to run as soon as she stealths. So the longer you take with decloaking her, the less visible time. Up until the extreme of stealthing basically immediately again.

In general, I agree on the “unfinished game feel”.

edit: could you please tell me more about the issues with path 1 and path 2? I can’t remember ever encountering anything like that, so I’m interested.

(edited by spreadsheets.9805)

Arah Path 4: Will you please give the NPC a gun?

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: zencow.3651

zencow.3651

I dunno when I did it she wasn’t taking damage in stealth even with poison/mega glass cannon DPS, while running sparks legitly within 10 seconds broke her out of stealth but she re-stealthed at 50% instead of on timer.

Only when we kept 1 spark up out and imprisoning only 4 after the her first stealth and waiting for her to reappear at the usual 80% then did the encounter seem to work properly. Oddly though with the 1 spark up we got her down to 20% before she stealthed a second time at which point we trapped the last spark and finished her once and for all.

Screamed buggy to me!

Edit: Path 1’s NPC only attempts to open the door once after the Stargazer is down so if the firewall’s still up she will die from running into it and will not attempt to open it again, leaving you with a broken door. Best way to circumvent this is to keep the person with the NPC far away back and just have someone solo the last boss so she doesn’t die. If the npc is bugged out the only option left is to brute force through the door using teleports targeted to the left side of the door to get in a stuck position then from there aim your teleports on the ground on the other side to hopefully get into the room.

At the end of the Path 2’s puzzle, a mini-‘cutscene’ occurs in which a golem appears to distract the spiders. It consists of a bunch of spiders attacking an invulnerable golem suit. However, occasionally this magic golem will appear BEFORE you reach the end of the puzzle, causing the spiders to be in your path and due to their mass AoE melee spamming on the invulnerable golem it’s impossible to get past them to unlock the waypoint beyond without an invulnerability skill. You will also die when teleporting to said waypoint if not previously dead due to the proximity of that clustercharr to the waypoint.

Path 3’s second bosses’ mark skills don’t seem to ever trigger but that’s fortunately to our advantage.

Quasi-elitist dungeoneer and missing Gw1 GvGs greatly.
“GW2’s PvE is almost as bad as the PvP.”

(edited by zencow.3651)

Arah Path 4: Will you please give the NPC a gun?

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: spreadsheets.9805

spreadsheets.9805

Haha, wow. Thank you for providing some insight, but still I am amazed. I’ve done quite a few runs of just about every dungeon, but I never encountered the bugs you describe. It actually frightens me a bit that there might be even more bugs that I don’t know yet.

But, regarding Path 3 second boss: I think he is working as intended. As far as I have observed him, the marks he uses don’t get triggered by players standing on them, but by another skill he does. The boss spreads marks across the area and then blows them up.

Arah Path 4: Will you please give the NPC a gun?

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: zencow.3651

zencow.3651

Oooh I remember hearing something about that.

Oh and I forgot to mention how the NPC just messes up your efforts to move sparks at the Simins encounter, you’re forced to kill him off there too. Before off if they just removed him entirely lol.

Quasi-elitist dungeoneer and missing Gw1 GvGs greatly.
“GW2’s PvE is almost as bad as the PvP.”