Guild Wars 2

I don’t know what the three knights were like before the latest patch, but as things stand right now, this content is pointless. I’ve been playing every battle for the past six or seven hours. In every case, the players on my server coordinate and distribute themselves among the knights. In every case, they pick up the appropriate buff. In every case, they go easy on the conditions when appropriate and lay them on thick when appropriate. Only a few players fail to dodge the pull, and only a few stay downed for long. Even with all these people doing the right things, I still haven’t seen more than one knight taken down.

What an unbelievably boring waste of my day.

I hope the other servers are making progress. (Maybe high population helps?) There’s no satisfaction to be had on my server. It’s just not fun at all.

There are several other threads discussing this, and the suspicion that I and many others have is that the Knights are scaled up to require 50 players to beat by default. This is extremely unfair to players on low-pop servers or who play at quieter hours, because it means they are effectively locked out of the Scarlet fight; no matter how good they are at DPS or individual skill, they just can’t make up for the loss of 100+ players when fighting a boss with health in the millions.

Content should be designed in a way where no more than 80% of the map’s population will be actively participating.
Why? Because there are always players that are on the map which are there for some other reason, there will be players which don’t have the slightest idea of what is even going on in the map and then there are trolls and some individuals that are just not skilled enough – This easily makes up for nearly 20% of most map populations if not more. In other words requiring each night to have 50 dedicated players is basically asking for a failure.

The Knights should only require 30 players and any more should allow that Knight to be melted. If a map stacks players on one knight, that will not allow them to complete the others and that is understandable.

But at its current state, most servers cant even beat the 3 knights, forget the 6 min achievement which is still bugged after 3 patches……….
There is now less than a week left for this event to be completed and no sign of this achievement being fixed.

Update: I guested my way onto a high-population server and was lucky enough to get out of the overflow just before the event started. We killed all three knights! It’s the first time I’ve seen more than one go down!

Sadly, the game immediately crashed, so I have no idea what happens after you kill all three knights.

/me cries.

ZilentNight.5089:

The Knights should only require 30 players and any more should allow that Knight to be melted.

I very much disagree. The game should not reinforce the notion that the right answer to every challenge is to throw more numbers at it. Also, setting the threshold to 30 players per knight already requires 90% population of a soft capped zone taking part to just that event — an unrealistic expectation in the large majority of situations.

In my opinion the only justifiable approach is that a properly equipped and skilled five player team should be able to take down a legendary, just like in the dungeons. That is the baseline that every open world event should honor. The presence of any additional players above that number should just make the fight more interesting — not necessarily harder or easier — by unlocking new abilities (new skills, adds, boons etc.) on the legendary.

Maybe I’m lucky or maybe because I’m in a med-high pop server (I really doubt this is the reason) but I’ve rarely failed the Assault Knights since this LS started.

But this is not the main thing I’d like to add to this discussion. Yesterday I was doing the Knights event again, and it happened we had only 10-15 players at Green. It was melting like I have never seen it after the 50 cap patch. Red was full and Blue was also close to the cap and they were struggling. We reached the first condi phase faster with the small amount of players than the other two groups. When our knight went down we’ve just hit the 30 player mark and with every joining person the knight’s HP went down slower and slower. We ended second after Red. And after all the event also succeeded.

I don’t think you necesseraly need 40-50 player for a knight to take it down. But it scales with the players participating in the fight.

tmakinen.1048:

ZilentNight.5089:

The Knights should only require 30 players and any more should allow that Knight to be melted.

In my opinion the only justifiable approach is that a properly equipped and skilled five player team should be able to take down a legendary, just like in the dungeons.

Think of this like your open world bosses, did they intend Tequatl to be killed by 5 players? No….
My response is a solution to open world bosses such as the 3 Knights, the 5 man solution will only work in instanced content fights.
30 players will allow the players to still kill knights and keep it some what challenging, where now you no longer need to hard cap a map and have everyone on the same page.

Zaxares.5419:

There are several other threads discussing this, and the suspicion that I and many others have is that the Knights are scaled up to require 50 players to beat by default.

They don’t require 50. Did them yesterday with group compositions that had around 35 each. There isn’t going to be an exact number for everyone as gear choices add a bit of luck to this. Condition players being an obvious source of damage issues. For example, I’ve just been switching my condition mesmer’s major traits around and utility skills to compensate, also running with more condition removal than normal.

tmakinen.1048:

ZilentNight.5089:

The Knights should only require 30 players and any more should allow that Knight to be melted.

I very much disagree. The game should not reinforce the notion that the right answer to every challenge is to throw more numbers at it. Also, setting the threshold to 30 players per knight already requires 90% population of a soft capped zone taking part to just that event — an unrealistic expectation in the large majority of situations.

In my opinion the only justifiable approach is that a properly equipped and skilled five player team should be able to take down a legendary, just like in the dungeons. That is the baseline that every open world event should honor. The presence of any additional players above that number should just make the fight more interesting — not necessarily harder or easier — by unlocking new abilities (new skills, adds, boons etc.) on the legendary.

Are you crazy? That would mean the GW2 would have to scale…. What a crazy thought!

I personally think if Anet refuses to put the time and effort in to make their game function as they advertised then these event should be instanced like the scarlet hologram event.

ZilentNight.5089:

Think of this like your open world bosses, did they intend Tequatl to be killed by 5 players? No….

This is the Living Story, not a permanent open world raid like Tequatl. These are two completely different game formats, further apart from each other in objectives, requirements and intended audience than personal story and explorable dungeons.

Just as surely as turning personal story instances into explorable dungeon content would kill PS for the large majority of the playerbase, turning LS into raid content has the potential of killing not just LS but all of PvE, considering ANet’s insistence of betting their chances on LS.

I don’t know. I enjoyed taking out the tower from the last living story thing. But this Lion’s Arch battle is really aggravating. Myself and some friends played it for a few hours and then just gave up partially out of boredom and partially out of raging since the players on our server couldn’t get it together to kill all the knights. Bleh! It’s actually worse than that terrible ‘save the refugees’ crap that kicked off the Living Story stuff.

Here’s my 2c on the Knights….

I do believe that each Knight should be doable with ~20 people per. Perhaps not so much so as to make the 6min achievement possible, but at least doable. This could potentially allow for off hour and low pop servers to more easily field players and take them down more reliably.

Beyond that, the Knights should simply scale (individually) if more people take the buff. I do not believe that more players = melt boss. More players should = harder boss. But again, not so hard that it’s not doable in a reasonable amount of time with average geared players (some people are playing on upscaled chars for example).

tmakinen.1048:

ZilentNight.5089:

Think of this like your open world bosses, did they intend Tequatl to be killed by 5 players? No….

This is the Living Story, not a permanent open world raid like Tequatl.

I agree with your reasoning but Anet intended this LS to be quite grand and they wanted all the players to flock to LA. Which is why this content was designed to be both grand and feel epic.
Having the ability to kill the knights and then the hologram with 5 players would just not feel like it was truly epic. Instead it would kill the entire content for me personally.
So with their intention in mind, I feel the knights was a good idea but requiring a large amount of players to kill them was not.
This is why I posted stating getting 30 players per Knight is not that difficult for overflows.
With all that said, would I want them to continually design content that requires me to rely on other players? No, in future updates I would rather like to see the bosses scale as well but for something that is meant to be this epic. It should require a certain threshold of ppl to beat the fight and maybe 30 is not the right number but 5 is also too few.

Event is obviously bugged, and we can only hope for a hotfix.
Sadly, Anet is silent which in my opinion only means that it will never happen.
And since there is only week left of this event, I doubt many will do this properly, especially 6 minutes to nightfall achievement which only lucky ones got in first day or 2 due to bugs without even killing a single knight.

I guess the rule: “do it all first day or don’t bother” applies for entire LS, as only more and more bugs are up, until everyone gives up and event is over.

indeed, waste of time!

ZilentNight.5089:

Anet intended this LS to be quite grand and they wanted all the players to flock to LA. Which is why this content was designed to be both grand and feel epic.
Having the ability to kill the knights and then the hologram with 5 players would just not feel like it was truly epic. Instead it would kill the entire content for me personally.
So with their intention in mind, I feel the knights was a good idea but requiring a large amount of players to kill them was not.
This is why I posted stating getting 30 players per Knight is not that difficult for overflows.

Well, I said 5 players for a knight, would mean a minimum of 15 players for the holo fight, but that’s a somewhat irrelevant detail.

However.

I agree with you on wanting to have epic content. ‘Epicness’ requiring large amount of players isn’t the problem. Game mechanics that undermine the effort are. Last time I checked, Yak’s Bend main zone couldn’t scrape together enough players to defeat a single knight. Again, this is a symptom of an underlying problem, not the problem itself.

The first problem is that party size is currently restricted to five, and that’s the only useful organization tool available at the moment. Doritos look fancy but as a commander you cannot pull your squad to a dedicated overflow. Raid style content necessitates the use of voice comm; that tool is not provided by the game either, breaking the idea of spontaneous open world organization right there.

The worse problem is how instancing is handled. GW1 got it right. GW1 didn’t have main instances at all, just sequentially named overflows. By default, the game filled each instance until the soft cap before starting the next. You could also choose a specific instance from the list until the hard cap was reached. This way, everyone except possibly those in one or two tail end instances had the right number of players around. GW2 broke this beautiful system by introducing default server zones, leading to a situation where a large majority of main zones are non-viable because of lack of population, and a few stacked servers are being guested like mad, pushing almost everyone into anonymous overflows. This is just bad design, further widening the gap between the haves and have-nots.

Thus, like you, I am all for epic content. It’s just that the current game mechanics are insufficient for properly supporting that content. Until ANet gets its act together, I am firmly of the opinion that they should take the inherent limitations into account when creating content.