We beat it on Sunday confirming for the devs that the bug was related to the shadow aura. Nice try on trolling again though. Move along.
This raid isn't overly hard, and comparisons to Mearatas or even Drusella's Vault exaggerate its difficulty. That said, bugs notwithstanding, this is a really good raid. It has mechanical complexity and encourages everyone in the raid to understand and react to the mechanics. The progression of figuring out those mechanics felt very satisfying when first learning it, and I find it fun to repeat. I want to specifically highlight that from the perspective of a caster DPS player, the Expenditure of Flames procs are fun. Beyond causing big numbers, there's a science to maximizing its proc rate/damage that encourages you to play differently. It's very similar to the Highly Flammable/Freezable debuffs on Drusella's Vault or banes on Mearatas conceptually. While I don't think these should be in every raid, I'd rather see more mechanics like these that empower players rather than those that are punitive. On paper they often can achieve the same result, but the former feels a lot better psychologically. It also would be nice if more classes (e.g. melee) could better participate in some of these mechanics. I'm sure the raid was notably less fun after repeatedly running into bugs with Grolik's unlock; I'm glad TR was eventually able to get past it. That said, I wanted to highlight the positive design elements of the raid despite those issues.
John Rambo: Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off! It wasn't my war! You asked me, I didn't ask you! And I did what I had to do to win! But somebody wouldn't let us win!
Don't get me wrong, working right this may be the funnest of the 6 raids in CoV so far. We specifically had a trying time with the bug even though some don't think its a bug. Overall this is a everyone's involved, well thought out, fun raid.
Soo.. is shadow aura proc ment to unlock Grolik and fire proc ment to jump grolik to 87 snd lock him. That is what happened this past week each time we hit grolik and had fire proc on he went from 60 one time to 87 and even though we we vulnerable message he never unlocked again.
if you tripped the mechanism healing it to 87, chances are incredibly high that you invoked the bug by successfully delivering 4 shadow orbs in succession to the shadow aura in one cycle (it has nothing to do with flame proc). this is the bugged out behaviour. the shadow orb into the shadow aura is not supposed to be locking or unlocking grolik, and is what absor has fixed. you can workaround this one of three ways: 1. fail all the shadow orbs (this way you dont have to keep track), or, 2. count how many you have and dont exceed 3 while grolik is up, or 3. sustain a bit more dps on grolik while also working guardians so that you push him down before you get more orbs. after the next patch, you wont have to do any of these things as it will (hopefully) be fixed. on a side note: for the troll under the bridge, we started seeing this bug back on beta, where it was acknowledged as a bug months ago, it just wasn't puzzled together the criteria until last week. i have no doubt we would have beaten it on T2 open day had we known what stopped it from happening, but it is what it is. Lord knows we tried just about everything under the sun including varying levels of dps, which I think is why we saw it everywhere from 28% until just under 80. It wasn't a lack of ability or effort, and it was monumentally frustrating. Interestingly, most guilds that actually ran into the problem believed the key to avoiding it was slowing down the dps (which didn't seem right to me, and turned out was not the case, obviously) and it became obvious that the people who were seeing the bug that had it randomly go away didn't seem to really have a good feel for why it stopped. So, frankly, if you don't wish to see it as a bug, then that's you with blinders on, not the way the event was intended since Ngreth first attempted a fix to it way back in early November. I'm not even sure why this matters to you or is a debate. Something was broken, now, hopefully, several tries later, the fix will hopefully be successful. Its time to let it go.
Having the no orbital explosion and rule of three achievement sez you're wrong about the so called bug
Who's wrong? The devs who looked at the source code and confirmed the faulty script? Of course your achievement list (which we all know has never in EQ history been broken...) is far more authoritative than them.
fun event...FRUSTRATING event, buggy as heck, lot who beat it saw the same bug..stay strong for those of you beating your heads against a wall on it, you'll get it !
Glad you are the one who gets to decide if the event/code is working as the devs designed in rather then the devs themselves.
This raid is still stupid. I really really loved it when it first came out, but now it's just annoying, high chance for everyone blowing up, high chance for the event to bug and perm lock, it's become completely un-fun. That's on top of getting mages to run over and CoH everyone, because clearing is a bigger hassle than raid leaders playing matchmaker with the raid tool for 15 minutes. I can hardly wait to get to T3 and maybe never come back to this one.
Notice I said as you guys describe? If the event is progressed properly 5 shadow orbs to the shadow aura does not lock Grolik. The root cause is not progressing the event properly and only then will 5 shadow orbs allegedly trigger said "bug". I always hate agreeing with Szilent..... but when he's right he's right. Sorry if I'm the jerk in the room.
The devs have not only confirmed that this is a bug but they also confirmed the steps to reproduce it. As the devs have not only confirmed that it is a bug and how to reproduce it I am not sure how there can be any question about what is happening. Here are the steps the Absor posted in the bug thread. 1: Successful shadow orb delivery into shadow aura. 2: Barrier falls indicating the unlock mechanism was triggered. 3: Regen of Grolik to 87%.
Honestly, if you are going to dispute the devs ruling you should explain what you mean by "event is progressed properly". What is it you think other guilds are doing wrong in progressing the event? If you dont want to say then sure I understand your reticence, but you should understand that your claim makes very little sense without that explanation.
Forgive me if I am wrong, but I believe its 4 times in the same cycle. The cycle resets when he flows into the ground and pops back up. If you successfully put 4 shadow orbs into the auras before he flows back down, is this when the lock happens?