Guild Wars 2

path 2 boss phase, won’t activate. npc is lead to the targeted area and event won’t activate.

She mostly triggers it fine. My guild has been trying to experiment with figuring out what causes her to bug out (or more properly: how to reliably prevent it from happening).

First, a general work-around: if Detha isn’t following you properly (or is dead), have the party waypoint to anywhere (ideally, to Kholer’s location, assuming you killed him). Second, be aware that, like most dungeon NPCs, Detha follows the closest party member to her — if you want her to stay with the group, the group needs to stay together.

There are two ways that seem to be potential reasons for her to bug out. I’ll outline what happens and then explain what we do to work around them.

1. In the “pit room,” if you wipe and return, you can sometimes finish the event without trigger all the completion requirements. The surest sign that there will be an issue is that you are able to get the chest by killing either The Breeder alone or the little gravelings alone (but not both at the same time). Another signal is if she fails to announce it’s time to move to the next phase. If this happens, you might as well re-roll the instance.
2. In the trap room, if some of your party gets there early and she lags behind, when she arrives (late), she sometimes fails to recognize the trigger spot. (We think the first is more likely the issue.)

Preventing #2 is easy: just stay together and make sure Detha remains with you on the way from the Pit phase to the Trap phase. (Waypointing to Kholer’s location can help.) When you enter the pit room ensure Detha is with you and not out fighting oozes; if she is, you’ll have to help her kill them. Regardless, don’t enter the big orange circle in the trap room until she’s ready.

Preventing #1 is conceptually easy, but sometimes hard to execute: finish killing the Breeder while you still have gravelings to trap. This isn’t necessary to complete the event successfully; it just ensures that nothing goes wrong. If it looks like the party might finish gravelings first and then wipe, I recommend leaving combat or even wiping and starting over — redoing that one fight beats restarting the path.

Of course, another way to prevent potential issues is to run with an experienced group. I’ve never seen a problem if everything dies quickly and on schedule, with the party sticking together.

tl;dr there’s definitely a bug that ANet should fix. My comments are meant as a work-around while we wait for soon™ to happen.