It's not a questionable differential in gear that gets you six players (let alone 54) that will actually pay attention and make correct decisions for 20-30 minutes. The necessary skills are not magical, not "talent", we're not talking "must be Pavarotti", but they're far from common. They are not raid gear-based, and it's not inappropriate for select challenges in each expansion to test the real divide between Good, Okay, and Just_Doodling_Along players.
Both of those things can be mitigated. You can choose to fight the cactus in locations that won't have you getting punted very far at all. You probably can get bad luck on the mana drains, though with a few different healers, that's never killed me, and the cleric has either 'not had' or 'didn't use' staunch recovery. Maintaining mana on this one can be tough on the cleric, but there are a number of ways to preserve and recover mana and my default assumption will be that there was something that the cleric/group could have done to improve the clerics mana recovery. We've always had some tough missions/achievements in the game (Tower of Rot 2, Burn out, plane of war, TDS timetrials, crypt of sul, a number of achievements in RoF/VoA). I'd like to see some kind of scaling achievements/missions where you can really push it as far as you think your group can handle, like some other games do (e.g. many, many levels of difficulty that a mission can be scaled up by, with better rewards depending on which difficulty you beat it on. ..or items that evolve based on the difficulty level beaten). That way group players could still beat the mission while raiders would have something fun to do outside of a few hours raiding once a week.
e.g. Cactiiki mission could have 50 level of difficulty. The difficulty that the mission is right now could be difficulty level 20. You would choose the difficulty level when creating the instanced. The first 20 difficulty levels would be unlocked by default, the next difficulty level up would be unlocked each time you beat a previous one. Players would debate on the forums just which difficulty level was even possible to even beat: If i change this and add this, maybe we can beat difficulty 34?? The point being to make difficulty level 45-50 basically unattainable. They could just scale the mob hp/attacks up slightly each level. Maybe throw in another mechanic or special item every 5-10 levels if wanting to allocate more dev time toward it. Evolving items would be really encouraging to get players to aim for higher difficulties.
So I read all 6 pages and not sure what's going on with this event, or should I say the posts about it. It says a set which to me means 2, but it seems to be people are talking about 5, one person said 6. It was nice to know that the burgeoning don't count because the 1st time we were under the impression that any mob counted and the burgeoning do not. One thing for sure, is that unless this was tweaked/corrected, that you do not need 5 mobs. We only had 2 pitiful up for the entire event and they merged. They were up for a while before they merged so not sure on the timing. The boss was at 35% when they merged so not sure if there have to be up together for a certain amount of time, the boss HP is a factor (35% seems pretty specific), or what drives that merge. On page 3 which was 2018 the ACH reads the same as it does now, and Absor was indicating that the mechanic has been working properly the entire time. So the only thing that I can confirm, assuming nothing has changed from 2018, is that it only takes 2 pitiful to make the atrocious, not 5. That part I can confirm. Since this is the first time I have tried this ACH, I can't confirm anything else posted in this thread as any kind of accurate. I don't know if the merger is time based, boss % based, or if any other mob type but pitiful counts. It would be nice if ACH weren't intentionally vague. Just say a set of pitiful.
Is brown thumb working? We killed all the disc mobs, sprouting, on the ground. We only had a few burgeoning spawn during the event. None of the discs matured. I think one sprouting might have spawn as the boss died, but it didn't mature. That shouldn't cause a fail, but could it?
Yes, brown thumb is working. The sproutings all have to die. If you have a sprouting still up as the boss does, you fail. DPS boss low and right after you kill the sprouting finish off the boss.
