Last night a few friends and I were waiting for Tequatl to spawn out in Splintered Coast when I realized my bags were almost full, so I headed over to the nearby karma merchant to empty them. Then the ‘defend the supply of energy from krait’ event spawned. No big deal, I’ve run this event a thousand times before. A few other bored Tequatl-campers joined us, and I counted about five or six people total. For me, that’s an amazing turnout for a DE since I routinely am lucky to have even two or three people helping me. This was going to be over in no time!
Everyone died.
We were primarily level 80s waiting to slay a dragon, and every last one of us died. Poison wells sprang up too fast to dodge and the moment you spent your condition-remove skill another AoE would crop up. You couldn’t dodge, you couldn’t run, and sometimes you would be immobilized and then assaulted by poison wells. I can’t tell exactly what changed, but I do know that this event has never played out like this before.
I was playing a mesmer, and I had a few skills that would’ve let me retreat with my life, but one of the things I love about this game is that it’s made me someone who doesn’t leave a fellow player behind. People go out of their way to make sure I don’t die and get stuck in a jump puzzle, and I go out of my way to make sure that if I retreat, everyone else makes it with me. So I stayed, trying to resurrect people who’d gone down. But the poison wells just kept coming, and meanwhile the krait were still physically attacking and swarming us. So I died as well, and we waypointed out and ran back to finish the fight.
This makes me really concerned for enjoyment of the game as a whole. I haven’t fought any of the new risen yet because I signed off in frustration after Tequatl finally spawned so I can’t weigh in on them, but I’m definitely already dreading it.
Fighting the krait made me feel helpless and overwhelmed. The krait have never been fun to fight, even before this. I used to actively avoid having to fight them outside of DEs. This does not make me want to fight them any more. That single DE cost me 2+ silver in repair costs and 1+ silver in waypoint costs. That may not be much in the long run, but it makes running the event more costly than it’s worth.
I’m also worried that this will change the way I play the game, as well as how others play it. I might have to start being someone who doesn’t go out of her way to help others. If I see someone mobbed by krait, I might really have to run the other way because there’s no sense in both of us dying and having to waypoint out with damaged armor. That doesn’t sound exciting for either parties involved.
I disagree with a lot of things that happened in this patch, but I decided to focus on this one because missing out on content is a shame but the way regular mobs behave is something that affects nearly every moment I play the game.
Has anyone else had similar problems with the revamped mobs?
(edited by Arianna.9304)