I wasn’t really directing any anger or anything at you. I’m just baffled that the OP is arguing balance when they don’t even have access to gear that has more than 2 stat buffs. Hope you didn’t misunderstand!
No worries, no offense taken :-) It was a good point.
One other thing, OP — it also helps a lot to make sure your gear is up to level and the highest rarity available. The difference between running dungeons in blues/greens vs. rares/exotics is night and day. Rares become available at either 35 or 40, I forget which, but get them as soon as you can. Use runes and sigils to help beef up your tankiness if you need to, also.
And you can get level-appropriate rares from the dungeon vendors, too — doesn’t help much with your first toon, but it’s super useful when you make an alt and have some extra tokens laying around.
Ele is a rough class to learn, especially at low level. I’d stay away from zerker gear until you get a better feel for the active defenses and blinds/blocks/dodges are all reflexive. Eles have a really low health pool and there is little room for error. Try running good old PVT Soldier’s gear (ducks and hides) or knight’s.
(Soldier’s gear has a bad rap, but it’s a good choice if you’re looking for a tankier build while learning.)
Or if you’re looking for a tankier DPS experience out-of-the-box, try rolling a guard or a warrior. They have much higher survivability than eles. But you’re not going to get a tanky DPS mage. I think that’s a law somewhere :-P
This used to really kitten me off…xD But yeah, you just get used to it. Staying on top of her so she won’t throw it is probably the best advice.
Dunno what class you are, but a mistake I’ve made from time to time is to pop a Wall of Reflection too long after she teleports. She jumps again, leaving the wall at her old position and fires a ball at me, standing next to the wall. I teleport/jump to her, ball hits wall and reflects to her…swearing ensues!
Even without that though, the ball is buggy as hell. I’ve actually watched it follow a trajectory that lands far away from me, and still down me on the other side of the arena. Always have a block/dodge ready when you see that ball come out.
Good luck, and have fun soloing her! Soon you’ll get to know the joy of having the abomination reset at 5%! ;-)
Source: 4+ years of HPC C++ software development experience.
….
But wow — where are management’s priorities?
don’t know how it is where you work. but where i work and have worked, management priorities are always on the money side. even at cost of delayed critical system stopping errors
so, there is no reason to expect fix for something that is just ‘annoying’
Yeeeeeep That’s why we’ll have a 3 new gem-only outfits next patch but Lupi will still be optional rolls eyes
BUT PLEASE PLEASE do not go for a lazy option by removing some places/adding walls, since there are way too many ways to get around GL apart from the coral.
Instead make killing GL a condition for getting the final reward in p1+2 aswell, just like it is with p3+4.
Well, it’s been over a year and there have been several suggestions that would be trivial to implement. The ideal solution of transferring ownership when the host drops would probably be difficult to add, but any competent programmer could easily (a) add a check to prevent the host from being able to get kicked while the instance is active, or (b) at least just add a special icon to the party UI so we know who the owner is.
But as I said, over a year, and not even a 5-minute band-aid fix to what is probably the single most frustrating bug in the game. Sad.
Source: 4+ years of HPC C++ software development experience. I’d say “hire me and I’ll just kittenin fix it”, but I’ve seen glassdoor. :-(
Edit: I’m not trying to call the devs incompetent — I’m actually quite impressed with how stable and fast GW2 is, considering the complexity of the systems involved. But wow — where are management’s priorities? Maybe make one less armor set for the gem store and instead fund a developer to fix some of the serious issues with the game?
Good point. To clarify, I didn’t mean to kitten on devs, they work on what they’re told to work on. I’m just trying to say that it’s pretty clear that dungeons aren’t a priority for whoever calls the shots. These bugs either don’t get addressed or get kitten fixes (*cough*alphard*cough*). Meanwhile they’re cranking out 2 LS updates per month, and of course, tons of new items for the gem store!
I think this thread is an awesome idea — not because I expect these bugs to be fixed/grab ANet’s attention, but because it is truly impressive to see the amount of old bugs/glitches/etc that have piled up while they’ve been chasing Scarlet around.
Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to completely deallocate resources for an entire area of the product to develop a storyline that doesn’t even tie into Tyria’s existing lore? Just sayin’…..
Enough ranting from me, gonna go crawl back into my cave and (speaking of lore…) wait for ESO to come out.
All, please report these bugs and leave the number you reported and any ticket numbers.
I’m quoting myself so you guys see this again, please report the bugs you listed and give me numbers so I can edit my post. Also look out for FAQ edits incoming.
Edit: FAQ updated
I reported the bug in-game a long time ago. I’m not sure that opening a ticket number is really needed either. :/
As much as I’d like to see the developers take an interest in the dungeons, most of these issues are long standing bugs. They have been reported countless times, brought up in forums, mentioned in support tickets….and they haven’t even been acknowledged. I really don’t see the point.
#HireHrouda (Whatever the reason he was let go, at least he understood customer relations. It doesn’t take much to appease [most] of us…just kittening talk to us.)
Arah p2: That can’t seriously be how Alphard’s bomb is supposed to work…
Arah, all paths: Make it a requirement to kill all bosses to get rewards. If a boss can’t be skipped without map glitching, defeating it should be required in order to get rewards. There, I just fixed 99% of the Arah exploits for you (adding a slow-acting poison effect to the water would fix the other 1%, but let’s start with the easy one…)
Resets only happen when:
- Party leader logs onto an alt
- Party leader leaves group
I have had login server issues in the past during login server maintenance where my party has been disbanded randomly, but I don’t think it has been anything prevalent and was only during scheduled maintenance periods. It is also possible that your party leader was lying and did one of the above two things to reset the dungeon. ANet has confirmed that they are looking for resolutions to this.
A couple of kitten necros kicked our instance owner the other day in AC — we’d already made it all the way to Kholer!
Remove him? kitten , he’s optional, just run past him…
Also, as long as one party member can tank, his attacks are really easy to dodge/safespot from range. Try to get on some stairs/rocks/something else that will put you a little higher than him and the shockwaves won’t get ya.
Just because he can’t be stacked or safe-spotted doesn’t mean he should be removed. If anything, we need more trolls/Lupis/etc…
Hodgin’s AC path: Burrow room south of Kholer, if a player is on top of the burrow in the SE corner of the room when it reaches 0%, they are teleported to the other side of the door next to the burrow. Happens a lot.
I haven’t been around in a while, but this morning I did a youtube search for Lupicus Skip and sorted by date. Get ready for the next round of sellers.
To beat this dead horse: walls don’t fix anything, there will always be ways around them in a map like Arah.
I know, I know, I might as well be talking into my armpit, but whatever.
I’ll run with ya any time bbox :-) You’re on my “shortlist” for Arah already, lol.
Alq, I noticed the same thing yesterday, I even tried my ultra-safe AoE evade — dodge back twice then teleport to lupi. There were new AoEs directly under him after the first wave. Maybe they’re not new, but I don’t remember that happening before. It seems like just getting close to, but not under him works (i.e. just stay outside of the AoE in his hit box). Grab me if you ever need a fifth, seems like we haven’t run together in ages.
I didn’t either for the longest time, lol. Then one day I was running in a low DPS group and suddenly we were surrounded by inquest techs in the middle of the fight xD
None of us know what happened, it’s a very ‘WTF?’ moment the first time it happens. We all figured it was a glitch at first (after all, it is Arah!) ;-)
Honestly the changes the last two patches seem promising. Like I just said in another thread, at least they’re giving some attention to dungeons. Arah p2 is in much better shape than a month ago. Sure, I’d rather they had fixed other things, sometimes their priorities leave me truly vexed, but maybe this is just the beginning.
It certainly is refreshing to see that they are starting to pay attention to the dungeons again. But I can’t help question the methods that they are using to ‘fix’ them, since these fixes seem fundamentally flawed. Short of going through the length of each path and placing huge invis walls confining players to the intended route, such fixes will always be ineffective in a map with geometry as complex as Arah’s.
And imo there are no universal rules for dungeon bosses, each one of them seem to have personal mechanics regarding WP/reward/unlocking stuff – there is no magical button that would made all bosses in dungeons a must have to finish and there is no need since they can fix jp so well.
Last thing, some of dungeon bosses are designed to be optional so the problem is not skipping them, but exploiting maps in order to skip. That is prolly how anet sees it and it would explain all invisible walls fixes.
All we can do is speculate. And I hope you’re kidding with the “they can fix jp so well” bit ;-)
Bosses like Kholer are clearly optional — but Lupi and the first several bosses of p3/p4 are clearly not. There is not a way around them that doesn’t involve jumping off of the path. So why not just make them required to get the reward? If skipping the boss means no reward, who’s going to bother with JPs in the first place?
they have mechanisms for checking bosses before rewards. Arah Path 2 already requires all bosses except for Lupi to be defeated or there’s no reward.
Now you say they have, but are you sure mate? They are suppose to have a mechanism for spawning WP after boss fight and yet there are/were some cool ways to ignore that. If those changes are so simple to make as you say they are, lots of stuff would be fixed by now. Always remember RIP TAFU – it was easier to cut off the path than change it a bit.
Let’s put it this way: I design software for a living, and if they made an operation like making a boss fight required for dungeon rewards more difficult than adding walls, changing world geometry, etc….that would be a very poorly designed system.
After spending >1000 hours playing this game, I’d be very surprised to hear that the codebase was that bad. I’ve seen one actual crash in that time, and I don’t recall seeing any other issues that indicate bad software practices. Sure, there have been some bad balance/design decisions or overlooked issues with skills/traits/geometry, but the codebase itself appears solid.
But no, I’ve not seen their code or design methods, so it’s possible that they’ve hardcoded the required bosses in assembly or something crazy that would make it difficult to change. Possible, but not likely. To be an kitten and speculate, it’s far more likely they would just keep a list of some sort in the dungeon attributes that specifies the requirements necessary for giving a reward, including required bosses.
In the last part of my post I wondered if there are technical reasons preventing what would otherwise be a sound fix for exactly this reason :-)
You make another good point about TAFU. I would have assumed that fixing TAFU would have just been a matter of tweaking some balancing parameters on the final boss. Maybe the state of the code is worse than it lets on…or more likely no one is left in the company that knows how to change these things, hence why we see world geometry changes instead, as that should be a design system used elsewhere in the game that more developers are experienced with.
Again, this is all pure speculation. Just like the rest of the dungeon subforum xD
To fix that, or other dungeon issues like instance owner etc, you would have to redesign major parts of hardcore PvE content.
I disagree — they have mechanisms for checking bosses before rewards. Arah Path 2 already requires all bosses except for Lupi to be defeated or there’s no reward. It should be a simple matter to mark other bosses as required — no redesign necessary :-)
Your question is just silly mate, its just like asking: why is Brie still spawning in all paths?
Heh, that is a good question…They already have path-dependent bosses that only spawn on certain paths (e.g. the abomination)…
I really don’t expect an answer given this subforum’s track record of either ignoring or deleting these types of questions. I’m merely hoping against hope that some mature dialog about this aspect of the game might happen. There is a huge rift forming between the developers and the players when it comes to dungeons, and it’s not good for either group.
First off — I’m not demanding a response from the development team, I’m not even going to explicitly ask for one. I just want to explain a frustration that many of us have with the way Arah exploits are being handled and leave the topic here in case anyone involved would care to comment. IOW, please don’t just delete this post as “Addressing a thread directly to ArenaNet Staff”. I’ll be happy to edit out any offending bits if there are problems with it.
To the issue:
Arah has many exploits that involve skipping large portions of the paths, often resulting in players being able to bypass bosses completely and get rewards for only finishing a fraction of the path.
The way this has been handled so far has been to put up invisible walls, modify world geometry, remove waypoints, etc — in essence, playing whack-a-mole with these exploits. Things like removing waypoints are especially irritating, as it makes the run far more difficult for legit runners (e.g. the tar elemental wp in path 1 — since that was taken out wiping at Lupi requires a long run that is quite difficult for inexperienced players, and make pugging extremely annoying). Yesterday’s patch is a good example of this, as some new invis walls appeared in an attempt to prevent players from skipping from the starting zone to the corrupted lights (p3/p4), or from Belka to Alphard (p2), etc.
It’s been less than a day since the patch hit, and players are already reporting that they’ve found ways around the ‘fixes’. Furthermore, many of the old skips haven’t been addressed and are still exploitable (anyone up for a swim?).
It has been suggested on this forum many times that most of these exploits could be easily and permanently fixed by requiring all bosses in a path to be defeated in order to get the rewards. For instance, the first 3 bosses of p4 are optional, as is Lupi in all paths (optional in the sense that finishing the dungeon without defeating them will still give rewards for the path).
If skipping any bosses would keep people from getting their rewards, players would stop skipping bosses and selling the path illegitimately. Legit sellers could still sell the paths, and we’d know that they worked for it. This fix also seems much easier than redesigning the world.
All of this just begs the question:
Why not take steps towards making the dungeon unexploitable in general, rather than making small, ineffective changes?
Am I missing something here? Are there technical issues that prevent it?
I’ve always loved the ‘jumping puzzles’ in Arah. I don’t use them to exploit and get rewards, I just have a lot of fun exploring the dungeon with them and seeing some of the really cool views from the top of the ruins, or jumping to a particular boss to practice soloing them when I don’t have a lot of time to work my way though them. In my view it would be awesome to do away with the invis walls altogether and just leave the proposed boss requirements, but I realize that that’s not very likely.
Arah is about the only thing left in the game that I enjoy. The bosses are fun and have interesting mechanics Most other PVE content is now trivialized by the almighty zerg, or too difficult to do solo (e.g. Tequatl). Arah is (was) a haven for players like me who enjoy taking the time to explore a map and being challenged one-on-one against interesting bosses. Every patch that adds annoying mechanics (Alphard), invisible walls, or removes waypoints takes away a huge part of why I still play this game. After the last patch, I feel pushed farther away — not only because of the ‘fixes’ that only serve to make the path more frustrating (while not addressing the exploits), but because the dungeon community continues to be ignored.
here it is! pls anet tell us, is this intended or not?
Good luck mate. I tried several times and many routes (forums, support tickets, etc) trying to just find out if the Alphard insta-bomb was intentional. Very polite requests, asked nicely, made a clear description of the behavior and why it seemed like a bug…
Every attempt got ignored or infracted. As players, we just don’t matter.
I think Brie is hard so that ppl wont get the invulnerable buff to kill Alphard. It’s probably just a hot fix, and fixing the whole map may be more complicated that we thought.
I think that’s why, too….but it’s a kitten-poor fix — the party gets phase shifted before she dies. If she resets at 10%, the player fighting can just AFK out of Brie’s range at 50% and let the party faceroll the rest of the dungeon.
It didn’t fix anything.
The proper way to fix this is to contain the phase-shifted buff to players in Brie’s arena. I’m not holding my breath, though.
you can skip lupi!… but arena.net went the wrong way to “un-exploit” arah… now all ppl are f***ed… brie is rly hard to handle now for 5ppl teams… no way to do it solo anymore… BUT: Why you dont fix your buggy blocengine? alot of “exploit-portals” are aviable… in the whole map… you improve bosses instat of fix the real problem… now you f***ed the whole community not only the “exploit-sellers”…. GJ (and sry for ma bad engl.)
This is standard operating procedure. Players have been requesting sane fixes in Arah since launch — as in, make bosses required, and don’t give dungeon rewards until all bosses are defeated. Bam — problem solved. Players can skip bosses for ‘fun’ reasons (for instance, skipping to a boss to practice soloing…also it’s just hella fun to jump around on top of the Arah ruins), but the dungeon can no longer be exploited.
Instead, they just make the mechanics ridiculous (re: Alphard’s bomb, and apparently Brie’s new reset “mechanic”) that don’t really even address the problem and just make the run more frustrating for the folks who are running it legit. Alphard used to be a fun fight. Now it just makes me cringe, especially with a PUG. As pointed out — sellers can still swim-to-win, find new jumps, etc…invisible walls and terrible, nonsensical mechanics are band-aids. Band-aids precoated in AIDS, specifically.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if they would just fix their kittening game. There’s no way in hell it should take this long to associate a wp with the proper boss. Grab a dev, have them spend an hour on it, call it a day. Save your users tons of frustration rerunning the first half of p1 every time they make a mistake.
And I didn’t know about the tar wp opening after killing the stargazer. Guess I should go visit the corrupted lights more often on that path -_-
I’d hope that you could just submit a ticket with the time/dungeon/your account name and the powers that be can lookup who was in your party, and hopefully even who kicked you. If they can find out that the party later advertised spots for sale, I imagine that there should be some action taken (I’d say that this behavior should earn a permaban…it is the ultimate expression of kittenishness).
But I really have no idea, that’s just a guess. Best of luck to you in getting a red post reply to this thread!
I’d guess that they’ll just send everyone 20% worth of Essence of Luck via mail as they have with other adjustments (e.g. the Karma refund from the other day. God I love these guys…). That way people who have great boosts from chests/gear conversions will receive a bonus that’s appropriate for their MF level (that is, worth less than it would be to someone with no existing boosts, since the consumables count for less as MF% increases).
I really doubt they’d just level everyone out at 20% — the GW2 team tries to be fair and has done a good job of it so far (e.g. the Karma refund again), and I’m sure they’ll do something reasonable to let people keep what they’ve earned :-)
I take “all current players” to include those without MF gear — they’re not going give everyone, MF gear or not, 20% regardless. That would be a huge shaft to players that have built up their gear sets, and that doesn’t sound like something the designers would do.
I only have one set of MF gear, and I’m a pretty chill guy — I wouldn’t be rioting :P But judging by how some players throw a fit over speculation and complain about everything arenanet does, they would need to prepare for the hordes of bitter farmers with 30g+ worth of MF gear for multiple characters if they just yanked the stat and dropped them to 20% ;-)
In any case, this is all just more speculation. Let’s see if I can get an official response on this post, or a source with an unambiguous answer.
“In order to get everyone started on this new system, all current players will receive enough luck to get to +20% magic find.”
That sounds to me like all accounts will start off at 20% regardless of current gear. ArenaNet has mentioned a couple of times that people who have built MF gear sets will not lose their stats — capping the initial boost to 20% would cause riots in the streets of Tyria :-P
A couple of quick questions about how magic find stats will be transferred to the account bonus:
1) Will we need to be wearing our MF gear when the update hits to apply the boost to the account bonus? Or will our highest MF gear be selected from our bank/inventory from all characters and use to determine the bonus?
2) Will runes/etc that aren’t attached to a piece of gear be applied to the account bonus, or are those stats just lost?
That’s why we’ll have a 3 new gem-only outfits next patch but Lupi will still be optional rolls eyes