Paenula heart problems
It sounds like there haven’t been enough drakes captured to start the fight. You don’t need to fight to progress the heart.
You can take one of the trapping rifles (I can’t recall their name) and capture some drakes. This will help complete the heart for you.
More details can be found at http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Help_Paenula_train_the_troops_by_fighting_in_the_pit_and_capturing_creatures
G R E E N E R
Even the rifle isn’t working properly. There’s an earlier thread that talks about this.
In my experience the net shot to capture the minotaurs/salamanders was only working rarely (most of the time the skill was locked, even when the beast dropped to less than 10% health — I ended up having to kill the majority). It made the heart extremely tedious to complete, but eventually possible.
I could get the rifle to sort of work once and that was it. No credit for subsequent captures, so no progress to the heart. That’s why I gave up and tried the pit but it didn’t work either. The wiki is a good one. I read it. But the heart doesn’t work like it says, or like it used to do. It worked fine several months ago when I had another character do it.
Yeah, this heart isn’t working properly anymore. Before you would get a prompt as you walked into the pit, asking which difficulty level you wanted (Easy: Drakes, Medium: Sepratists, Hard: Minotaurs). Now, the gates are constantly open, and no prompt occurs when you walk through them.
This is still broken. When entering the pit you are not asked for the wanted difficulty level and so the pit fight never starts. The capture skill on Paenula’s rifle only activates on drakes when the drake dies, which makes capturing drakes impossible. The only way for me to progress the heart was to capture minotaurs, on which the rifle skill (mostly) works.