Guild Wars 2

Vargamonth.2047:

We’re just not going to agree on this.

Fair enough. If that’s what you like, then that’s fine. Just don’t expect it to apply to a large chunk of the playerbase.

Fort Aspenwood is having problems. We were doing alright after the 5th patch, but yesterday and today have not been good days to fight the holo.

Vargamonth.2047:

I just think that encouraging player to adapt and experiment with their builds instead of sticking to their “chosen one” is something positive.

Vargamonth.2047:

Ohoni.6057:

I just think that encouraging player to adapt and experiment with their builds instead of sticking to their “chosen one” is something positive.

No. A build is something players should be able to get comfortable with. You should be able to set it and forget it. If you get bored with your build and want to change it then that’s fine, that should be an option, but the content should never bully you into it.

We just have completely different opinions in what builds are meant to be.
If the content should never bully any build (anyone can be potentially the favourite for some player) there would be no chance for the game to provide the slightless level of challenge ever.

I’ll admit responding to these is getting a bit difficult to word, but I’ll try.

I think part of it is that there is a world of difference between poking and nudging to experiment and punching and kicking someone to do those same experiments. By bullying a build, one is effectively punching it and it’s users. Making them think about how to handle a new boss is fine. It’s making them go out of their way to deal with build issues that’s problematic.

Personally, I’d say make it so they stop factoring into the scaling after a certain period of time or have npcs make a greater effort in reviving them (kinda like the holo fight). The former would make the scaling issue less of a concern. Them dieing would be a setback, but not as big or permanent a one as currently. The latter can be easily manipulated by anet.

I don’t like the idea of just kicking someone out if they’ve been dead awhile. Fights like the holo fight may not be reentered after teleporting back. I don’t think this is the last time we’ll see fights like that.

Neural.1824:

I was at Red Knight the other day with a group that was pretty well versed on the condition reflection, and I noticed during that time period against the night that I was usually only getting bleeding or at times cripple. There were others occasionally, but the consistency of getting bleed with a little bit of cripple or confusion on the side might go against the random theory.

Warrior Sword combo is bleed, bleed, cripple. Sword/Sword has some decent power attacks, and a block, in it so there might have been people using them. Not fully sure if that explains things or not, but it might be related. It can’t exactly reflect something it’s not hit with.

Edit:

They did it because it broke their loot system and the knights stopped dropping any items at all.

Which is weird on it’s own because they didn’t need to change how the knight’s worked to fix the looting issue. About all I know for sure is their use of “encourage” in the patch notes makes their decision rather troubling. There’s no way this encourages anything; it’s a requirement. Why they seem to think it’s encouragement does not lead to nice thoughts.

Vargamonth.2047:

What I mean is that your main goal should be to finish the event, so if the event needs damage, you should try to bring as much as you can figure among your possibilities.
As I said, worrying about a minor damage being reflected is pointless if the event is likely to fail because a lack of DPS.
It’s like if the enemy would pop retaliation. It might seem unhealthy to hit it at first glance, but if the DPS race fails otherwise, then it’s a sacrifice that must be done (just being careful to not destroy yourself).

It doesn’t really matter though. People are not 100% logical beings. They’re more likely going to react to stuff like this with an emotional response (avoid getting hurt) than a logical response (worth it). Since this is about anet’s design, it’s that anet should work with player’s typical reactions than try to fight them.

Vargamonth.2047:

And yes, I obviously have no idea about the build you’re using.
I could perfectly be mistaken too in my assumption of staff in permafire being the best sustained ranged damage for ele (apart of some eventual Ice Bow).

It’s complicated. It’s Flame Axe’s higher base damage and might vs Frost Bow’s multihit vs player’s reactions to them vs situation stuff (aka I’m going to meteor shower it. Oh no, it moved.), and so on. I really don’t want to get into the specifics as I’m getting tired of said knights. You’re kinda right in that I do use fire all the time though.

I could actually combine the two for even more power, but then I have to gamble if other players are going to screw me over or not. They usually do elsewhere so I haven’t bothered trying.

Photoloss.4817:

Obviously the solution is to give us build templates and/or better inventory management

Alternatively, and probably a better solution, they could design the bosses to be more open-ended. Allowing condition users to break the reflect and cause condition crash would be a wonderful mechanic. Kinda a shame they didn’t do that, eh?

FenrirSlakt.3692:

The extra damage people would get from Might (and Fury) greatly outweighs the damage they would have to endure from Burning.
An even more important part of being a good player is being able to ??ses a situation and pick the best option available.

Expecting a random person, and even fairly decent players, to be willing to hurt themselves for a greater benefit is not going to end well. That’s ultimately the point. If a boss has a mechanic that causes fields to hurt themselves or others, it is less likely to be used in spite of any benefits.

Riku.4821:

Yeah expect this idea these “unique snowflakes” have was the selling point to this game when it came out.. So people ARE entitled for playing how they want.

There’s an additional factor. The devs have been talking about “build diversity” as a design goal for quite some time. Required bosses that want lots of berserker gear is rather contrary to that goal.

Vargamonth.2047:

Part of being a decent player is also about maximizing your chances of success.

Maximizing? No, it’s not. That’s part of min-maxing which is among highest tiers of play. Decent is a long ways away from that. Decent is knowing what your build can do and doing it well enough for most fights.

Also, you’re making some rather large assumptions about my build. I suggest you don’t. Suffice to say, I’m not using burning speed to avoid any attack.

Reikou.7068:

Why is the assumption that these knights are “content for casuals?”

Because they’re the gatekeeper for the scarlet holo fight which is the final boss for the living story as a whole. That’s a really important detail. This isn’t some optional hard-mode boss event.

Vargamonth.2047:

I expect Elementalists to provide some might stacking (and fury through Persisting Flames) with Arcane Brilliance and Wave over fire fields.

And as an ele, I refuse. Fire Fields can actively hurt anyone using projectile finishers during the reflect phase. I do not like placing them then. And when I do, I’ve seen people dodging out of my fire fields or otherwise avoiding them. I personally can’t blame them. Part of being a decent player is avoiding doing stupid things that directly hurts allies.

This patch seems less and less polished by the minute. I just got “Seen better days” daily achievement from killing cannoneer. Said daily is for viewing a vista.

What.

(For the record, a guildy said she got it the correct way too.)

I’m not sure. A lot of people seemed to pick up on the holo’s resistances just fine. For the knight’s, the telegraphs are problematic. Extraction’s telegraph goes away before the attack, implying it’s safe when it’s not. The other telegraph can either briefly flash so no one may see it or it glitches out and then goes faded which… is just plain weird.

In any event, stuff like this does not help people to figure out what’s going on. It’s not the only issue with people not evading, but it contributes.

Zylonite.5913:

• Timer should beep or flash when it is about to expire.

The event timer? I thought it did flash red.

Zaganna.6034:

The condition immunity is a double problem on both power and condition builds. How many zerk build use traits that increase damage (mostly 10%) if the target is bleeding or is having an other condition on it?

It’s worse than just that. As an ele, I refuse to drop fire fields during the knight reflect stage because I don’t like people hurting themselves off of them. No fire field, no might combo.

Yes, I’d like an option like that.

Morfedel.4165:

It does create an issue, though, if your inventory isn’t large enough to handle everything.

It could stop just before or at the inventory fills.

Kalavier.1097:

For all the saying of “removed loot” I just got an assault core and 6 champ boxes from a FAILED knight event. IE, I was at green, green failed. I got those boxes. I got 6 boxes from a failed blue knight event.

I don’t see anything about “nerfed” loot.

“Just got?” As in, today? I said patch 5 fixed that problem. It isn’t an issue anymore.

And yes, technically the loot was nerfed as it went from each knight being lootable, if glitchy, to only getting loot for the event as a whole. In other words, 6*3 to 6*1 per hour. I personally don’t care, and I’m glad it’s finally sorted. But that’s what happened.

Edit: This forum has ninjas.

Kalavier.1097:

IIRC, Patch 3 was to make it so people could actually consistantly get loot for successes.

Nope. That was the one that apparently turned off loot.

Patch 4 reworked Knight mechanics (increasing knight’s defense in the process), and tried to fix loot success, but failed to really solve it. And patch 5 finally fixed loot, but added additional issues.

Edit: Anet said they were taking time to polish the final updates, correct? If that’s true, it does not show with this update.

Now that I think about it, the whole spinal blade path could have had a direct fight with scarlet, no holos or anything. After she goes down, the 4 allies could catch up and have scarlet start round 2 as downed for the achievement.

What could have been.

Wasbunny.6531:

ArenaNet is attempting something completely new to MMO’s by implementing multifaceted content to be released every two weeks by individual teams who are given an average of one month from start to finish to create. This is incredibly ambitious even for a large AAA game company.

If this were any other patch, I’d be more inclined to agree. It’s not. This is their grand finale and climax to their story. If there was any time to pull out all the stops and make sure it was near perfect, it was this update.

Gulesave.5073:

Linnea.5146:

Melanie.1240:

You can do the last part of the event without having to do the Knight/Hologram events. You can skip to the part where the big thing happens and you get to see all the cutscenes (I’m being vague to prevent spoiling the story).

Go to the Diverse Ledges waypoint (lower left corner of LA). There is a purple portal there. If you have the Advanced Spinal Blade backpiece on any character you can enter the purple portal and get into the drill. You don’t need to use the character that has the backpiece, you just need that achievement.

Oh, I wasn’t aware of that detail. Thank you. (I wanted to give the backpack to a lover level character, but play with my main.)

You specifically need to have the Lv80 version of the backpiece, which a lower character wouldn’t be able to equip.

No. The requirement is any spinal blade. I’ve accessed that portal with the lv20 blue one.

Jaken.6801:

However we were never able to inflict any kind of damage on her.

That thought occurred to me today after my last round. She’s at around 75% of her hp, but she’s not really in any obvious danger. Her hp isn’t going down or anything like that. I understand we hurt her while she was in the holo, but there doesn’t seem any reason for her to go down instead of recover.

One other little oddity, she’s marked as an ally during the final confrontation. I can understand doing that so people don’t snipe kill her before the cutscene, but she’s still that way afterwards. I don’t know why she doesn’t go red+determined afterwards (ignoring time constraints).

Kinda minor things I suppose, but sometimes it’s those things that can make or break something.

I get that people afking for achievements is a bad thing, but I think this is a bit much. Scarlet’s laser will target directly behind the Dynamic holo fight. I wish I got a better screenshot of it, but you can still see the telegraph from the laser.

Also, during the micro trinity fight, it appears the micro holos are able to recover hp after getting killed. They still seem capable of attacking. But like the laser, I didn’t get a good screenshot of it.

Edit: I should add the mirco holo issue did not prevent the event from continuing.

Good
Scarlet’s Demise and the npc reactions to it.

Bad
Just about everything else. Some of the decisions have left me dumbstruck.

Ultimately, Fail. Scarlet’s Demise counts for a lot, but not enough to make up for the rest.

Aveneo.2068:

Anyone fight the Knights after this recent patch? If so, do you still feel like you’re only doing ~50% of the damage you originally did? Any servers/overflows feel that killing them in under 6 minutes is actually possible now?

Yes, I’ve noticed the damage difference. A few people have mentioned it. I’m not sure it’s 50%, but something seems off.

I don’t think, baring something TTS, that a 6 min kill is possible.

Auric.3742:

If the heal happens instantly from 50 – 100% do you just have to do an interrupt?

I just watched a mender heal a normal mob. It doesn’t heal instantly to full. It jabs the target a few times, each time recovers a good chunk of hp (15-20% ?). If the knight healed from 40% → 100% instantly, then I’m not sure it was a mender.

Seems odd something like that would be uncapped, but after this week, nothing about those knights would surprise me.

Katastrofi.5816:

The AFKers are STILL there, but now they’re constantly just dying. Now the NPCs that rez downed players are permanently trying to rez them over and over and over again. Please just eliminate this safe zone altogether… Please?

I’d hate to see the repair bill after that.

Honestly, the fact they’re dying means that isn’t a safe zone. Either people will pick up on it soon or well… they won’t.

SirMoogie.9263:

- The knight apply a shield that reflects conditions when up, but I’m not sure what causes them to do this or how long it lasts. Is it random with cooldown, at a certian threshold, or some other factor I haven’t considered? Can it be removed through actions by the players?

As of right now, this is the main contributor to the problem. To answer your questions, it is at thresholds, per 25% hp is my understanding, and can not be removed, period. In addition, reflect allows for a player to get hit by other people’s conditions. So an ele only doing vulnerable via vapor blade (water dagger 1) can get hit with bleed, burn, torment, confusion, etc.

There is no counter move a condition user can do short of changing their build (typically gear, but not limited to that), and the only “gain” is they are useful against the blue holo fight which is less than 1/3rd of the scarlet fight and requires the knights to be defeated first.

This patch specifically only makes things worse via the domino effect. Less people interested in fighting the knights does not help with the knight’s defeat, and previous LS have been rendered dead from loosing interest. As I said, that’s required for the blue holo fight.

Edit: I should add that the condition=lower defense mechanic does not really help the situation, but doesn’t hurt it. This is mainly because of the condition limits already ingame.

I have to agree about the lack of polish. Even doing an heirloom run now is downright unpleasant due to the miasma in hooligans, the green laser, and the cannoneer. Not surprising since hardly anyone bothers to clear out 2 out of 3 of those.

SirMoogie.9263:

“Play how you want” was marketing speech. It was not a well formulated development goal.

While true, they have listed “build diversity” as a design goal. I’m pretty sure they done this repeatedly. The current LS design, including the new Knight patch, appears to be counterproductive to that goal.

Valandil Dragonhart.2371:

At the risk of getting infracted

Don’t get into trouble on my account. If that’s where that train of thought leads, then I’ll see if I can word it better.

Decided to check in on FA and see how well they were doing. All days prior to the patch, if I were to come in at this time, I would be in an overflow. This time, I wasn’t. They beat it, not sure how much time was left, but they wouldn’t have gotten the achievement. It’s pretty clear though that the people participating had diminished considerably.

The grand finale of the living story, the great climax to end the first phase, that’s what this living story is suppose to be. I would have hoped it would have better participation.

kokiman.2364:

I saw so many level 80 characters in, at least, exotic gear that were lying dead in front of the watchknight after his aoe pull. You can have the best gear in the game and won’t contribute anything to the fight because you didn’t understand the, really simple, core mechanics of that encounter.

Then why bother with anything more than “if people learn to dodge the extraction attack* and it’s other mechanics”? You rattled off a long list of power-based things people should do instead of talking about how they should play better.

*This attack’s telegraph is actually kinda wonky. It implies the danger has passed just before the attack. At least it did, I haven’t tried it since the patch. In any case, that doesn’t help.

kokiman.2364:

Fenrina.2954:

They’re not dps checks, but you recommend everyone maxing out their damage… No offense, I don’t think these statements work well together.

No I recommend people to actually try their best. I never implied that they should come with full asc. zerker on a full zerker specced character.

Fair enough, you didn’t suggest zerker. That is true.

That’s not really my point though. All of those things, except one, are to get a person to a baseline level of character power (in the general sense, not the stat). It’s not about how well they play said character, but if that character is strong enough. That’s what a dps check is about.

kokiman.2364:

they […] are not a DPS check

kokiman.2364:

if everyone would come with his best geared character and at least informs himself abuot the event, uses buff food, the lions arch damage buff and skills that support group damage

They’re not dps checks, but you recommend everyone maxing out their damage… No offense, I don’t think these statements work well together.

Valandil Dragonhart.2371:

Heaps of people on here whinging about the ‘zerg’ mentality, and now Anet comes up with a way to improve battle tactics? And still some people moan… >_<

My biggest issue with it is that it is a requirement not “encouragement” as they said. If they wanted players to split up on it, they should have designed it that way from the beginning. They should not force players after the fact when they come up with their own solution.

Saw one overflow succeed, but with ~30-40 seconds left on the clock. The last one was blue which seemed to have the most people. Not exactly reassuring if one wants the achievement.

FANY.6524:

I guess other people are probably happy about this, but I wanted to voice my opinion on the subject.

Honestly… it feels like to me that the devs threw a fit that the players weren’t doing things their way. I’m watching the situation now to see how it goes.

Siobhan.5273:

I think the bolded part is going to be an issue. What if there are 57 people at blue, or green or red? Who is moving, who is staying? This is alot of coordination for an hourly event for LS content. Some servers don’t do this for the 3 headed wurm, and that’s permanent content.

I guess we’ll see. I’m not fond of that change, and it has the potential to backfire horribly if people are having problems taking down the 3 all at once. That’s been the case so far…

Well, I just went into the assault knight fight with a guardian. I can confirm you get other people’s conditions from reflect. It will even list who made that condition on the tooltip. That said, it will only happen if you inflict a condition.

All in all, I can’t say this mechanic was well done.

hendo.1940:

The whole point of this anti condi and anti projectile mechanic is to teach people to adapt, because ANet want to improve the quality of the average player so that they can make more challenging content.

The problem with this is that it’s sending the wrong message. It’s saying “conditions will never be useful, throw them away.” It’s better to say “attack here to make conditions work” or “disable this to disable the reflect” than it is to say “equip a weapon you’re not built for, most of your traits are now useless or actively harmful.”

In short, Anet needs to improve their own quality if they want the playerbase to react in kind. Using a sledgehammer where they need a screwdriver is not a good thing.

hendo.1940:

refusing to drop your ranged weapon

This implies that the person realized the assault knights are laughable at range. It’s actually smart to attack them in this way.

TheReaperTheFourthHorsemen.7894:

How did you get Scarlet’s Kiss, I have trying to get It but no success so far

I got one yesterday from the holo fight’s rewards, but I forget the details beyond that.

Sorta? I selected him one time during when the prime holo bugged (pre-patch). He actually takes a decent amount of damage, but auto-heals back to full at around 25%. I suppose the net result is the same.

Ravion Hawk.4736:

And the fix that A-Net needs about the rezing issue is that after 10 seconds of no active rezing, the dead player and players nearby in a certain radius ALL get teleported to the nearest WP. We are to work TOGETHER, not force everyone to WP when they die. If waypointing was free then I would agree that once you’re dead you should just WP, but I’m not about to force someone to waste their money because someone can’t take a moment to rez another player.

That is a very bad idea, and this event shows why. If a player is forced out of the holo fight, they cannot return, period. On top of that, it’s been quite common to get teleported directly into an attack and either be instantly downed or dead. And, it’s quite difficult to reach a person to revive them if they’re in the middle of one of scarred ground. It may be impossible to properly revive them until after the 10 seconds have passed.

Also, teleporting anyone who’s near the dead person? What happens if I’m close by due to trying to escape an attack? That’s actively harming the players who are trying to participate.

Edit:

I was in an overflow this morning, and we did a 3 way split without much coordination or effort and managed to take them all down in about 9 mins. The next run I was in main, and tried to explain to the zerg, the logic of doing so. I thought the idea of running from knight to knight was wasting valuable minutes. I was immediately jumped on in chat by numerous people and called various names for even bringing the topic up. The rest of the day they zerg rolled it >.< and have yet to come close to 6 mins and I kept my mouth shut.

One overflow I was in managed to beat all 3 in about 8 min by going from one to the other. I think it might be possible either way.

Oh so that’s what that was about. My first reaction to that was to click on her to see if she was drunk or something.

morrolan.9608:

Hang on does this mean you have to wear a spinal backpiece to do the finale and get an achievement?

No. You need the backpiece to access the backdoor to the final area, but you don’t need it to finish the story. Going through with the Assault Knights will also let you reach there.

Found him at the old lighthouse north of Lion’s Gate POI.

lordhelmos.7623:

Ranger with passive bleeds, kills self yay

I’m starting to think you got lucky. Ranger’s Sharpened Edges is a major trait so it can be disabled. There are several others like it for several other classes, but they’re minor traits so they can’t be disabled.

Majic.4801:

And yeah, Warrior+Longbow autoattack only is the ticket. Just stand in the circles and pew-pew with everyone else.

Except a longbow warrior can kill themselves the exact same way (Arms 5). XD

SonicTHI.3217:

Playing out of your comfort zone is one thing. Being forced into a playstyle/build is another. Mind you, you can sit back and spam attacks in this fight, especially if you dont rely on conditions.

That’s more or less what my setup has been reduced to. D/D ele with conjurer, my Flame Axe 1 is pretty much my only attack since it gives me might. It’s not wise to get up close. People keep stealing Frost Bows so I can’t rely on those (despite most of it’s attack doing conditions). And if I drop FA 4 + 2 (might combo), people can hurt themselves off of my fire field.

It’s not even a threat to me. All in all, not really an enjoyable boss fight.

inazuma.7021:

Is she still out at the refugee camp?

Yes.

She’s actually in sorta a “omg” mindset atm. I won’t spoil things further.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Fenrina.2954:

At this point, I’m starting to wonder if I can hurt others by generating fire fields. Fire Field + Projectile Finisher = Burning. I’m not affected either way (even if I was the target of the reflected burn, diamond skin blocks it), but I am concerned about others.

I can confirm that this does hurt others. I’m giving myself conditions through the fields constantly. But I’m not going to blame the people who set them down…I’m blaming Anet for this one.

Wonderful.

Two thirds of projectile finishers are conditions. So any classes can hurt range users through the boss’s reflect.