Guild Wars 2

Right now, to get exp, gold, and loot from an enemy, you have to do a certain amount of damage to it to “tag” it. Even if you’ve hit it, if you haven’t done enough damage it won’t count as tagged. This damage seems to be a percentage of the enemy’s HP.

That means that no everyone can get credit for a mob kill. You have to fight over exp and loot by seeing who can do damage the fastest. If you try to use supportive skills, then you will be rewarded with 0 exp, gold, or loot. This encourages everyone to go full damage build and spam AoEs.

It also means that some professions have a MUCH easier time getting loot and gold. Elementalists can just stand back and spam huge AoEs to tag all the mobs, whereas Mesmer, the class with the worse AoE in the game, will struggle to get 50% of the. They’ll have to run into groups and risk dying to try to shatter with illusionary persona, because that’s their only reliable AoE damage. Mobs die so quickly that Chaos Storm won’t do enough damage to tag in Orr.

Tagging changes DEs from a cooperative experience into a competitive experience. Everyone is fighting to do damage to mobs before the others kill it. It’s back to the same old MMO style, where you cringe whenever an Elementalist joins the DE because you know it will be harder to get loot and money now.

Ranger use traps for their most reliable AoE, which have longish cast times to be used actively and do a lot of their DPS through conditions ie over time which have their own draw backs but there is another problem I’m seeing. People are pulling stray non-event mobs onto the traps that have been set up and triggering them before the big mobs turn up. The ranger traps are on cooldown and the big mobs arrive and my ranger gets no loot or experience because everyone else nuked them down with direct damage while I was unable to do anything the system cared about. Good luck to you if you are support, because they care even less about resing and healing. Support is also in a bad situation.

I’ve even noticed with an elementalist in Queensdale I was able to take out most centaur invasion mobs very quickly and get grossly large amounts of loot while the people around me were getting very little loot because I was doing so much direct AoE damage and they were struggling to compete. Compete. We aren’t playing together any more, we are playing against each other because the loot system strongly favours direct damage, is inefficient for conditions and control and completely ignores support.

The game needs a new way to decide loot drops. AoE direct damage has become the only way to get loot and experience from mobs once enough people turn up. It’s noticable at all levels of play and there is a dramatic difference between the loot of an AoE direct damage dealer and a single target or support player.

I agree. I recently came upon the Straits of Devastation with my engineer. When I realized the zone had no heart tasks and instead, a focus on dynamic events, I was thrilled. It seemed like a fantastic opportunity to do what I had enjoyed the most leveling up. The problem was that there was a such a high concentration of people doing the events, that enemies would practically evaporate as soon as they showed up. It became less a fight against enemies and more a fight to throw grenades out quickly enough to tag them for loot.

Eventually, I just got sick of it and went to Frostgorge Sound instead to do the rest of my leveling.

The same thing happened to me. In order to get loot I have to spam my aoe on the mobs as soon as I see them or I get no loot. Atm, it is more like I am fighting with the rest of the players to tag the highest amount of mobs as posible.

This happens to everyone is a problem indeed. I think it’s bad scaling, as some mobs have huge HP even when there are only a few players around, while others are very easy solo even if there are 20+ people participating.

Y u mad its vydia.6324:

This happens to everyone is a problem indeed. I think it’s bad scaling, as some mobs have huge HP even when there are only a few players around, while others are very easy solo even if there are 20+ people participating.

I agree. The problem is not tagging “per se”, but bad scaling of the “time to die” of the mob. It has to be much slower with more people around.

VirtualBS.3165:

Y u mad its vydia.6324:

{snip}

I agree. The problem is not tagging “per se”, but bad scaling of the “time to die” of the mob. It has to be much slower with more people around.

Agreed, though this would depend on the level of damage to ‘tag’ a mob being a flat number rather than a percentage, or at the very least being a percentage that scales to number of people participating. If it taks 5% of a mobs health to tag it, only 20 people can get credit for it no matter whether they have to do 5% of 10000 or 5% of 500000.

Agree it is pretty awful, had experienced this in the Cursed Shore. AoE classes like Elementalists deal such insane AoE damage over such large areas, I end up with 0 loot even though I see people claiming they have full bags already. Add 5 fps to the mix and I can barely land one or two hits before all the mobs are dead. They are basically insta-killed by the aforementioned AoE. This has actually driven me to use the flamethrower and grenades to tag mobs in events, these are no match to the kind of AoE certain other classes can deal. Grenades especially are vulnerable to lag.

Every mob you even touch should count as yours. Fighting with other players over % is against what this game stands for.

I’ve noticed this as well. I started with a ranger. Thought I was doing really well with axes/traps. Now playing dual axe warrior and omg the amount of loot and exp! In most cases it pays off for me to run head first into the mobs and spin2win, go down and get a rez. I do enough damage in that time to tag every mob and get the exp/loot from it. With a ton of added MF and bonus exp its just awesome.
Now if they could just add a way to increase events during the slowest hours of the night. During the day I level faster in a single zone than its ment for. At night I am lucky to get 2 levels in a 6 hour play with the lack of events.

VirtualBS.3165:

Y u mad its vydia.6324:

This happens to everyone is a problem indeed. I think it’s bad scaling, as some mobs have huge HP even when there are only a few players around, while others are very easy solo even if there are 20+ people participating.

I agree. The problem is not tagging “per se”, but bad scaling of the “time to die” of the mob. It has to be much slower with more people around.

That’s the solution I was thinking of as well. Simply making the mobs far more durable when a very large amount of people shows up would be rather nice.

It would be nice if the mobs had more hitpoints / scale up better, would make it more fun as well.

I agree with all this. we need multipul 80 instanced zones to spread ou the population. As it stands your lucky to even see the mob mostly all I get are numbers and a death animation. which is really annoying I want to see whats going on in the event not just stand in one spot spamming a attack hoping to hit something I can’t even see. because the game hasen’t rendered it yet.

Agreed with OP………

I’m always angry when I get a silver medal on big bosses events even staying alive the whole fight with my control warrior.

Yes, this is a huge problem with events. Mob tagging didn’t use to be so restrictive and you’d get credit just for damaging a mob. I often only get silver or bronze if more than 10 people are doing an event and I’m playing a non-aoe profession. Heaven help those that revive others or use support skills in large events…they get nothing but warm fuzzies for their efforts.

It’s a problem for me, too. As far as I observed, it’s only necessary to make at least 1 point of damage to tag an enemy. It promotes an odd and wrong gameplay style: I don’t want to kill enemies, I just want to tag as many enemies as possible to get as much loot as possible. The killing is done by somewhere else in the crowd.

It also punishes supportive actions like healing, resurrecting, or condition removal, which would be very useful fighting strong enemies with crowds. But I don’t do it very often, since I forfeit a ‘gold’ reward more often when I use healing skills or resurrect. Exclusively spamming “1” is the most reliable way to always get gold reward. This is wrong!

And sometimes, I run to an event area over a long distance, because some NPC waved at me and told me about the event. I instantly ran to the area, and as I arrived, I saw the last enemies of the event falling by the huge mob one second before I was able to hit (tag) them. Frustrating. I should not have been directed to such an event in the first place.

Totally agree. I am an elementalist and I am usually obliged to dps through the fight because most of my damage comes from DoTs and classes like warriors with high DD would kill them before I get my credit if I decide to do some CC before it.

In boss fight, when there are a lot of players, this is even more obvious unless you are over-leveled in that zone.

I was trying to prioritize heal/cc/cure to help dying players in the first week but then find myself receiving bronze or even no credit frequently, which then ‘teach’ myself that I need to forget my concern on other players. This does not sound right.

That’s a great idea, and I think it really hits the nail on the head for why I really HATE joining the Orr zerg.

It becomes a chore to do damage. Imagine if instead of the waves of normal mobs, waves of all veterans or even champions started spawning. You would feel a lot more epic being part of a giant zerg because you’d be taking down ALL veterans or even champions.

And it would be so much easier to tag and get credit for a kill, rather than just adding more waves of normal mobs that are simply additional sources of stress (kitten gotta drop my AOE before everyone else… kitten I only got a quarter of those mobs tagged).

Playing my mesmer I’ve started to hate seeing the zerg coming into participate in DE; I’ve given up on Straits of Devastation since it’s a huge zerg farming ground for the events.

Participating in a DE and only getting two pieces of loot which end up being just random junk and a white (even though I’m switching into full blown ARPG mode stacking as much magic find as possible) is maddening.

Engineer here and in DE where there are alot of people I use by flame thrower. I do get more than my fair share of loot. I Tried using my rifle but I could barely hit one target before it went down. Something should be done.

It’s a bad sign when I find myself thinking: “I should rez that downed player, but if i do that, I won’t tag the group of the group of mobs that showed up and i might not get credit for the DE”

I think all players should be tagged as group in a event zone at the time and that should help with tagging, and also reze’s and heals should count as an event participation.
Just my thought.

Limnage.9581:

Elementalists can just stand back and spam huge AoEs to tag all the mobs […]
It’s back to the same old MMO style, where you cringe whenever an Elementalist joins the DE because you know it will be harder to get loot and money now.

Our AoEs have either long cooldowns or delays, or tick way too slow for this situation. Therefore I barely get any loot at all from crowded DEs as Elementalist. Unless I change my playstyle to something extremely twitchy and completely unfun. At the same time I seem to have no problems getting gold contribution every single time in the same events. Also, the amount of XP and Karma I receive (~17k/378) for an event indicates that I don’t fall victim to those rumored anti botting measures.

Compared to veterans, which seem to live long enough, normal mobs seem to die in half a second once they go vulnerable. Something must be simply off with the scaling.

I also noticed normal mobs in crowded events in Orr seem to go as high as level 84. Which is funny as they usually have no time at all to attack anyone, but if they do players are getting one or two shot. This seems not fun at all. Why don’t they get their health tuned up a lot and their level tuned down a little? I think this would fit the purpose of making events fun much better.

Necro here. I can load a build with 10 AoE attacks. I figured out the tagging from the get go and have been getting mad loot and exp from tagging insane amount of mobs using my massive AoE in very short amount of times.

I agree, it’s a ridiculous system. I don’t fight to have good fights, I fight to tag as many mobs as possible.

As an Engineer, who likely has the best tools for quick AOE, this really isn’t fair for other classes. My flamethrower can tag entire groups with one blast and a quick strafe, most other classes don’t have that kind of mobility with their AOEs.

The events really need to be looked into.

My experiences mirror the others here, dynamic events that spawn waves of minions disproportionately reward builds that can deal burst area damage by awarding the lion’s share of drops to those characters. As numerous events in Orr use this model, and as Orr is the only reliable place to get quality drops, this encourages every player to spec entirely for burst area damage at the expense of all other play styles.

As a Guardian I often find myself getting shafted due to playing a supportive role.
In events such as Jormag I sit amongst the people with Charrzookas popping off heals like crazy, ressing anyone around me who needs it and just generally doing whatever I can to keep friendlies alive. I’ll get a few hits in on the boss, either when the shield goes down or when the bomb bots get to him, then I’m back to being a healbot.
The last time I did the event I only got a few hits in on Jormag himself, and a few on the adds spawned, spending most of my time healing my backside off … my reward? Nothing. 10 or so minutes spent helping the collective and I get nothing to show for it other than seeing other people complain about crappy rares.

When trying to farm the trolls in Frostgorge Sound I have to swap to a staff as I don’t have a scepter, and melee weapons mean I miss out on about 90% of the mobs. The staff, as I have just found out, doesn’t do enough damage for me to have “tagged” the mobs, so I spend most of my time getting nothing.
Changes really need to be made!

What’s really fun to think about is that the people that have tag-dedicated builds will hit the diminishing returns on drops incredibly quickly, and then continue to tag enemies that drop nothing for them while people that haven’t been able to tag mobs continue to not be able to tag mobs.

I wish all of these events hadn’t been bugged during the first week, would have been my only chance to farm that easily.

As discussed on reddit, some event need a slight change like the one at penitent waypoint where mobs simply need more Hp, those events don’t seam to scale at all in fact when i’m thinking about it, they are not challenging at all. They could also change the rhythm of the mob wave so that people couldn’t spam their aoe or something like that. Most big event have really nice challenge, there are some event where the boss at the contrary is just too dangerous like the Zaithan eye spawning at reliquary vault POI that literally one shot everyone.

This is really a problem. While increasing the number of mob spawns adds to the event, after scaling for about 4 people, it needs to switch to HP increases. Normal mobs die way too fast in large groups. It has become the ultimate game of “mob tag.”

Bomber builds have become insanely popular because they are the only way to compete. In addition, you have players ignoring event objectives just to farm the spawns. Go watch a Claw of Jormag fight. You can see over half the players will sit and wait for the adds to spawn because they want the loot. Rather than finish the 5% of the wall to instantly kill them, they are all back at base playing “mob tag.” How else are they going to get lucky and get a Corrupted lodestone? You sure aren’t going to get it off the dragon itself. Objectives are being ignored due to the insane game of “mob tag.”

Also, Champion and Veteran mob HP is stupidly high (at level 80). It can easily take a group of 5 people around 10 minutes to kill one champion which provides the same loot as a normal mob which is vaporized in 10 seconds. This causes a few problems:

1- No one wants to attack the stupid things unless there is nothing else to attack. People don’t want to waste time attacking the giant damage sponge when they can easily get 10 times the loot by hitting the little mobs. Consequently, you have these mobs that one shot players and never die just running around while everyone plays mob tag on the normals. Heaven forbid you find one in the world, because 15 minutes later, you’ll end up with the same loot you could have gotten in 20 seconds. There is absolutely no reason to waste that much time and effort.

2- If you switch targets and the veteran or champion is below ~66% HP, you aren’t getting credit for it. You can’t tag the mob because you’ll never do enough damage to “tag” it. You may spend over a minute attacking the thing, but it isn’t enough to get credit.

Dosvidaniya.3260:

This is really a problem. While increasing the number of mob spawns adds to the event, after scaling for about 4 people, it needs to switch to HP increases. Normal mobs die way too fast in large groups. It has become the ultimate game of “mob tag.”

Bomber builds have become insanely popular because they are the only way to compete. In addition, you have players ignoring event objectives just to farm the spawns. Go watch a Claw of Jormag fight. You can see over half the players will sit and wait for the adds to spawn because they want the loot. Rather than finish the 5% of the wall to instantly kill them, they are all back at base playing “mob tag.” How else are they going to get lucky and get a Corrupted lodestone? You sure aren’t going to get it off the dragon itself. Objectives are being ignored due to the insane game of “mob tag.”

Also, Champion and Veteran mob HP is stupidly high (at level 80). It can easily take a group of 5 people around 10 minutes to kill one champion which provides the same loot as a normal mob which is vaporized in 10 seconds. This causes a few problems:

1- No one wants to attack the stupid things unless there is nothing else to attack. People don’t want to waste time attacking the giant damage sponge when they can easily get 10 times the loot by hitting the little mobs. Consequently, you have these mobs that one shot players and never die just running around while everyone plays mob tag on the normals. Heaven forbid you find one in the world, because 15 minutes later, you’ll end up with the same loot you could have gotten in 20 seconds. There is absolutely no reason to waste that much time and effort.

2- If you switch targets and the veteran or champion is below ~66% HP, you aren’t getting credit for it. You can’t tag the mob because you’ll never do enough damage to “tag” it. You may spend over a minute attacking the thing, but it isn’t enough to get credit.

Increasing Mob heatlh will help but it won’t solve the main issue, the tagging system does not reward everyone who was involved. What needs to happen is anyone who does the following “tags” the mob and has a chance at loot: A. 1 pt of damage B. Heals or buffs someone who has done 1 pt of damage C. Places a debuff on the enemy or D rezzes a player that took damage from an enemy.

Now some may say that gives too many people loot. To that I say, THAT’S THE POINT. If everyone is getting their fair share of loot then there is no competition. If people are getting loot no matter what they’re doing in an event they will do what they like. Isn’t that the point of ArenaNet’s design? Currently people aren’t helping others because it doesn’t reward them. Why am I going to buff others around me when they are competing against me for loot? Removing that competition promotes a better community and that is what ArenaNet wanted GW2 to be based around.

I agree that the tagging system also needs work. the problem is mainly with zerg ball dynamic events but has issues else where as well. i have died quite often in dynamic events as a mesmer where i have run into the middle of the fight in an attempt to hit at least one mob enough so that i get credit for the event. of course once you go down very few people will help you because they too are trying to tag some of the enemies in order to get credit for the event. also in some boss battles you can be wailing on the thing the entire time but if there are enough people there you might only get a bronze medal or maybe no credit at all.

i would be curious to hear someone from arenanet’s opinion on the matter. i remember bringing this up on the forums during the beta and nothing really has been done to fix it since then so i wonder if this is how they intend dynamic event to be played or if they are just trying to figure out a new “tagging” system / alternative way to give loot in dynamic events..

thanks in advance,

Shaden

Signed.

As a thief, I need to be on guard for a mob of enemies to spawn, then run in the middle of them and just spam shortbow 2. But when it comes to veterans then I can just forget about it, even if I switch to dagger/dagger and maul on it from 100% HP to death, there have been occasions I got no credit for the kill. I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m not running a full class-gannon power/precision/crit damage set, which a lot of players do.

Limnage.9581:

Right now, to get exp, gold, and loot from an enemy, you have to do a certain amount of damage to it to “tag” it. Even if you’ve hit it, if you haven’t done enough damage it won’t count as tagged. This damage seems to be a percentage of the enemy’s HP.

That means that no everyone can get credit for a mob kill. You have to fight over exp and loot by seeing who can do damage the fastest. If you try to use supportive skills, then you will be rewarded with 0 exp, gold, or loot. This encourages everyone to go full damage build and spam AoEs.

It also means that some professions have a MUCH easier time getting loot and gold. Elementalists can just stand back and spam huge AoEs to tag all the mobs, whereas Mesmer, the class with the worse AoE in the game, will struggle to get 50% of the. They’ll have to run into groups and risk dying to try to shatter with illusionary persona, because that’s their only reliable AoE damage. Mobs die so quickly that Chaos Storm won’t do enough damage to tag in Orr.

Tagging changes DEs from a cooperative experience into a competitive experience. Everyone is fighting to do damage to mobs before the others kill it. It’s back to the same old MMO style, where you cringe whenever an Elementalist joins the DE because you know it will be harder to get loot and money now.

I still go into water to slow down mobs and have an AoE heal (I have a couple points talented into water since I maxed out fire and air on master and a +50 healing power armor piece), but that’s only after I do enough damage to ensure I’ll get gold. I agree somewhat with the tagging as someone could hit something once, run away, and still get credit. Sometimes I’m annoyed that I hit something too late or joined an event too late and only get bronze, but it’s no big deal.

defi.4127:

Signed.

As a thief, I need to be on guard for a mob of enemies to spawn, then run in the middle of them and just spam shortbow 2. But when it comes to veterans then I can just forget about it, even if I switch to dagger/dagger and maul on it from 100% HP to death, there have been occasions I got no credit for the kill. I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m not running a full class-gannon power/precision/crit damage set, which a lot of players do.

I remember in some other game I would gem evade and some block because I needed to “balance” out my offensive stats! My guild (with IRL friends) was a bit annoyed that I’d roll on tanking gems for my rogue. This was in the Burning Crusade areas and it actually helped quite a bit while leveling and I still had a decent crit chance and hit, but I learned quickly to ditch that and go full offense (meet hit cap, rest into crit) and carried that mindset over here, which in turn isn’t recommended! Still, I think “well, elementalists weren’t designed to be tanks” and went full offense. I won’t even bother with the GM book as 20 talent in an element is as far as I intend to go to have some healing and survivability.

I’ve always done fairly well in DE in the past, I think I’ve only gotten silver or bronze when i showed up near the end. However, I participated in the dragon DE in Sparkfly Fens last night and got robbed. Had to be 70 or so players at the event, and I was stoked to be part of such a large group.

I was buffing and debuffing, rezzing people, the normal stuff I do at a mid-sized DE, and to my suprise and consternation, the event ended and I got nothing at all. I was livid, 20 minutes of waiting, 15ish minutes of fighting, to end up getting screwed because I was a nice guy to my fellow players.

I’m more collected now, but would like ot hear that A-Net is at least looking into it, because currently being a selfish player who wouldn’t rez someone you’re fighting on top of is currently the blessed play style. This is a terrible flaw in a muti-player game.

Grimgold, you should look at the official response in this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/events/Event-Participation-Problems-In-Large-Groups/first#post94386

Because it looks like that is an issue being investigated already, which is good because I agree with you that it is a big deal.

xenogias.1768:

I’ve noticed this as well. I started with a ranger. Thought I was doing really well with axes/traps. Now playing dual axe warrior and omg the amount of loot and exp! In most cases it pays off for me to run head first into the mobs and spin2win, go down and get a rez. I do enough damage in that time to tag every mob and get the exp/loot from it. With a ton of added MF and bonus exp its just awesome.
Now if they could just add a way to increase events during the slowest hours of the night. During the day I level faster in a single zone than its ment for. At night I am lucky to get 2 levels in a 6 hour play with the lack of events.

Good luck getting any loot after tagging a butt load of mobs as it appears anet wants to punish us with diminishing loot and experience/karma for our valiant efforts, meanwhile the bots bot on while i retire from play until this is fixed..

+1 to OP. Everything you do in an event should give you some sort of credit. Games like Battlefield have figured this out. You get credit for every supporting action you do, and can rack up a higher score than players who may have had more kills than you.

Going back to the old system where just tagging is all that matters would be even worse.

The main problem is that certain AOE classes can put down tremendous damage in a controled PVE situation while others cant.

I had to skip to the bottom, but I did read some comments…

Would like to see a dev response, is damage to the mobs the only thing that will lead to rewards?

Other things need to be included for getting rewarded in a DE, not just direct damage.
Reviving
Heals should count as direct damage
Damage from others using your fields
(feel free to add to the list)

Once fixed, make sure to show us how we contributed with stats in the events result, i.e. amount of heal put out.

As far as the comment for level 80 zones, there coming for sure, have to give them some time to put out a new expansion. I’d rather see all the bugs in this one squashed as a priority, let’s not even get into that in this thread. rolls eyes

I can see DE’s can be tricky to get right and not open them to abuse. However, Anet really needs to get these down long before any expansions come out.

For me this and a lot of things are just present because of one main problem: Events are no-brainers / zerg fests with many players!

If those events are still challenging (what would at least include mobs which don’t die in an instant, and more challenging, more hurtful (AOE) attacks) with more players, these problems wouldn’t be (that) present anymore!

Just the thing with that supportive players, that help other players to survive and ress downed players (as far as even necessary with those no-brainer events), wouldn’t be fixed by that change to the events! So, this should be looked into beside the challenge of the events!

I want to play my ranger with sb/lb. Unfortunately, I had to drop lb for the axe/wh combo. When it’s a zerg of players attacking normal mobs, I’ve learned that in order to get tags and loot, I need to equipment my axe and spam the tab and 1 keys while strafing so my tab keeps targeting different mobs, popping QZ and my other swiftness buffs as often as humanly possible.

Of course, when we’re defending a single point like a bridge or a doorway, I usually barely notice that tab actually targeted anything before the mobs are dead.

When the DE is against a single mob (e.g. a champion), I take out my shortbow and do everything humanly possible to flank to stack bleeds, again using QZ and rampage as one, etc, as often as possible.

The most fun I’ve had recently was when another ranger and myself randomly met up in a cave with a cave troll champion. It took a little bit but we took the troll down. The loot and chest was kinda lame, but I just enjoyed the experience.