Guild Wars 2

Very small and situational bug that we ran into yesterday – when I moa morphed a harpy during the jumping puzzle, it became immune to damage. We’ve seen this before in other dungeons and assumed it was because the harpy couldnt attack us. The bug came when the harpy left moa form – it remained immune and we had to close with it (under fire) and melee it down.

Did it fight back?

I know if the NPC doesn’t fight back you can’t damage it past the 1st hit.

I’ve heard of this bug happening in TA with the Big/Small tree troll boss.

VoxShatterfall.5470:

I know if the NPC doesn’t fight back you can’t damage it past the 1st hit.

As a moa, it probably couldn’t fight back, since it had no ranged attacks.

But I think the fundamental design flaw here is precisely that: the fact that players have to allow themselves to be hit otherwise the AI throws a tantrum and becomes invulnerable.

It’s just nonsensical. Take the bats in the grawl fractal, for example (a very obvious example, but by no means the only one). The developers decided to put some of them on small isolated platforms and not give them any ranged attacks (and, although they’re bats, apparently they can’t fly across the gap). The result is that ranged players can’t kill them.

Players are forced to walk to the enemy and “play against themselves” to work around what is essentially a game bug – if not a coding but, at least a bug in the design of the combat system.

If players can hit a mob, they should damage it, period. If Arena Net thinks this will make combat “too easy” in some places, what they need to do is give the mobs realistic ways to counter this (use a ranged attack, fly or jump towards the player, etc.).

It’s as if they’re trying to “protect” the mobs’ right to have fun at the cost of the players’.