Guild Wars 2

The inquest enemies (the Asura, not the golems) in the event are receiving so much health that they are absurdly difficult to kill. “Normal” inquest have about 10x the health of an average mob on the map, “Veterans” take 3 people the entire event to down, and “Elites” are virtually invincible. Combine this with the Inquest Golemancers giving all golems carrying a Ley Energy continuous Aegis (which blocks ALL attacks), and the event becomes an exercise in pure frustration.

There is a big difference between making an event challenging and making it frustrating. Thwart the Inquest has definitely crossed to Frustrating. You can’t kill the golems carrying Ley Energy because they have prema-Aegis (provided by Inquest Golemancers, usually Vet or higher). You can’t kill the Golemancers solo because they have the health of a champion. If enough people focus on a Golemancer to down it quickly, the golems run rampant and grab all the ley energy.

Oh, did I mention that even “Veteran” Golemancers have a break bar that is so hard to deplete it makes the Shatterer seem easy in comparison? So you can’t effectively CC the G’mancers, and Aegis stops you from CCing the golems. If you DO manage to down 1 G’mancer, it does no good because there are 3+ more doing the same thing. Adding to the difficulty is the damage the Inquest deals. It’s not really higher than normal damage for mobs of their level, but you can’t just kill the mobs to defend yourself since they have at least10x the health of a normal mob.

So, problem stated. On to solutions:
1. Simplest solution is to reduce the health scaling. Cap it at double or triple the average health of mobs found in Blazeridge Steppes, and do the same cap on the break bars. This will keep the events challenging without making them frustrating
2. Remove Golemancers from the event, or at least remove their perma-Aegis ability. Perhaps replace it with stability and protection to allow the golems to be stopped but keep it challenging.

Closing note: The most frustrating part of this is that the “Thwart the Inquest” achievement. It is currently virtually impossible to achieve unless you get lucky and happen on a nearly empty map that hasn’t scaled up the event. Ironically, this achievement was easy to get on the first day of the event release (when I got it), since it was easy to deny the Inquest Ley Energy altogether. However, now that each Ley Energy can be picked up by multiple entities, Inquest golems cannot be denied the energy and are virtually guaranteed to make it back to the Inquest Lead Scientist. If even 1 makes it, “Thwart the Inquest” fails for that event.

I’m seeing a lot of people just get the Priory and Consortium collections, stop the inquest 10 times, and announce they are done with the events, since “Thwart the Inquest” is virtually impossible. Currently, the ONLY reliable way to get “Thwart the Inquest” is to be in a virtually empty map and participate in an event that does not scale up to insane AND still have a group of players with you who are focused on stopping Inquest instead of collecting Ley Energy themselves.

The problem is scaling (which in this case Anet failed completely). If you didn’t do the event within the first 2 days the lack of people showing up for the event guarantees failure given the fact Anet coded the mob spawn and health for big zergs. So there are only two solutions:

1) Do “current events” within the first 2 days
or
2) Anet properly scales the event to the number of people participating.

Given Anet’s track record it looks like your only option is #1

Interesting that we’ve got two people interpreting this problem in completely contradictory ways. (CaelestiaEmpyrea saying Thwart the Inquest is only possible on a virtually empty map and curtegg saying it’s impossible due to a lack of people.)

I have to say my experience agrees with the OP – this achievement, and the ley line event in general, is much easier to do with fewer people because it leads to less enemies spawning and the ones that do are much weaker. I’ve had events succeed (apparently including the Thwart the Inquest achievement, although I already had it so I can’t confirm) with just 5 players present and seen them fail very quickly with 15-20 because so many golems spawn, many of them veterans or even champions and elites, that even with everyone focusing on burning them down we couldn’t keep up.

The same was true of the Hold the Line achievement (and presumably still is but I’ve not tried that one recently), the one where you have to stop dragon minions absorbing ley energy. For that one I was lucky enough to find one of the less popular events (aka not listed on Dulfy at the time) on a half-empty map so there were just two of us there and that made it very simple to keep track of all the minions and keep them away.

My advice to people trying to get Thawt the Inquest has been to try at off-peak times or wait a few days for the popularity to die down. I’ve also heard people say they got it by sticking around after the Shatterer and doing it while the map was closing.

Edit: A follow on problem is that when the event does fail it’s almost inevitably blamed on the majority of people focusing on collecting ley energy and ignoring the golems, regardless of what happened during the fight. Which leads to a lot of negativity, false information being spread on how the events work and apparently quite a few cases of people reporting other players for griefing because they’re focusing on a different achievement. I know those reports won’t be acted on, but it’s another one that has to be investigated which wastes time that could be spent on actual reports.

The previous event, Bandit Invasion, seems to be the same way. Even with only 1 other player there, the bandit for the bounty spawned as a champion. Thankfully other players showed up.

And that Vic the Iron was a real pain in the neck. He wouldn’t stay still. The only thing he did was occasionally shadowstep to me and constantly lunge forward (indicated by the orange marker on the ground to show his lunge path). There’s no way in hell I could have done it by myself.

Scaling isn’t so much the issue here. It’s that everyone is focusing on gathering the energy that they ignore the mobs.

Ayrilana.1396:

Scaling isn’t so much the issue here. It’s that everyone is focusing on gathering the energy that they ignore the mobs.

Actually, it IS the issue. As an example, earlier today a total of 6 people focused on killing 1 “veteran” golemancer and it took 2 1/2 minutes of dedicated DPS to kill the bookah. During that time, the G’mancer was continuously giving Aegis to every golem in sight. As the G’mancer went down, 2 more vets and a elite spawned. Neither could be killed before the event ended, due to insane health levels. A “veteran” should never be scaled up so much that it takes so much effort to kill, unless it is the “boss” of the event. (And then it shouldn’t be a veteran but an elite or champ, but that’s a separate issue).

Gotta organize a bit but it’s not impossible. Have some people running Essence constantly until the big guy is at your side, then defend it from Inquest until they lose hope. The little machines are the ones you gotta focus on, they are super fast. The big ones can be ignored for a bit because they are so slow. The little golems usually run in packs so AoE is excellent for taking them out. Also if you have Mesmers tell them to use their stun shatter, it helps when they are tightly packed.

Ayrilana.1396:

Scaling isn’t so much the issue here. It’s that everyone is focusing on gathering the energy that they ignore the mobs.

Actually, it’s the other way around.

After the increase in number of energies, people who already got the achievements are are ignoring the energies on the ground, and that leaves lots of energy for the enemies to pick.

So when the overscaled enemies come, they can always have energies to pick, and they can simply stroll back to their base.

Before that people were picking everything, so there was none left for them.

CaelestiaEmpyrea.2617:

Ayrilana.1396:

Scaling isn’t so much the issue here. It’s that everyone is focusing on gathering the energy that they ignore the mobs.

Actually, it IS the issue. As an example, earlier today a total of 6 people focused on killing 1 “veteran” golemancer and it took 2 1/2 minutes of dedicated DPS to kill the bookah. During that time, the G’mancer was continuously giving Aegis to every golem in sight. As the G’mancer went down, 2 more vets and a elite spawned. Neither could be killed before the event ended, due to insane health levels. A “veteran” should never be scaled up so much that it takes so much effort to kill, unless it is the “boss” of the event. (And then it shouldn’t be a veteran but an elite or champ, but that’s a separate issue).

Six out of how many at the event? I’ve been an an event with 7 players and could solo the vets without any issues. It does scale decently.

MithranArkanere.8957:

Ayrilana.1396:

Scaling isn’t so much the issue here. It’s that everyone is focusing on gathering the energy that they ignore the mobs.

Actually, it’s the other way around.

After the increase in number of energies, people who already got the achievements are are ignoring the energies on the ground, and that leaves lots of energy for the enemies to pick.

So when the overscaled enemies come, they can always have energies to pick, and they can simply stroll back to their base.

Before that people were picking everything, so there was none left for them.

I see more people picking up energy than those who are attacking the golems. I was constantly failing before because everyone was picking up the energy. We’re talking about 20+ people. Surely if there was that many people collecting energy, how could the golems possibly be able to get any?

I stated the issue that I have been seeing is that everyone is focusing on the energy. If they focused more on attacking then there wouldn’t be an issue.

Danikat.8537:

The same was true of the Hold the Line achievement (and presumably still is but I’ve not tried that one recently), the one where you have to stop dragon minions absorbing ley energy. For that one I was lucky enough to find one of the less popular events (aka not listed on Dulfy at the time) on a half-empty map so there were just two of us there and that made it very simple to keep track of all the minions and keep them away.

Hold the Line is (or was) possible to be completed solo in Blazeridge, it just required you to be really active to aggro the enemies before they could steal the Leyline energy. Since the Priory base is so close to that particular event, it’ll be a bit harder to get the event not to scale but it shouldn’t be too difficult. Though you can always try other spots for it.

Sadly this isn’t possible for this new event when the Golems beeline for said energy. This Thwarting achievement just doesn’t seem possible with the changes Anet made after the fact. I’ve tried many times, both on maps with 20+ people as well as maps with 5 or less people and the event either fails (on empty or wildly unorganized maps) or succeeds after you’ve already lost the possibility of unlocking the achievement.

Not many people seem to be complaining about this even though it’s quite clearly a problem. I doubt anything will be done, either. Kinda sucks it’s 10 AP instead of 1-3.