A long ramble about making "easy" fixes to old content.

Con: Literally not a solution. No degree of gearing-down is sufficiently extreme to navigate the mechanics of this encounter.

In order to tank the Stalwart Defenders to enable the exploit-y victory style that's been required for the past ten years, I have to click off Jann/Familiar/Mount buffs for the small DSs they have, because random variation between the splits' hit rate (and so how they take DS hits) gets them out of whack. My own bare hand attacks (no I'm not a monk), off hand only, are WAY too much.

This has to be one of my favorite posts on the forum.

Thanks for actually putting in work versus just taking the easy way out and going "not a bug" and closing it.

"Grok" Always good to see another Heinlein fan. Also, thank you for outlining your thinking process. I've never done what you do every day and it gives me a taste of the experience.

Thank you for the insight into the development and QA process.

Too often we are impatient or unreasonable by virtue of easily being distant observers and armchair quarterbacks.

I know there is so much that goes on behind the scenes that I know the community is grateful for even though it is not fully expressed.

Maybe, but its frustrating when someone posts a bug, other people provide the exact information on what is happening, and its an obvious issue to anyone that plays the game what the issue is, and then its summarily closed, moved, marked not a bug, and given an explanation of why its not a bug that doesn't address the issue or comport with reality.

I mean, most of the time its irrelevant issues or content, but the principle of it drives me nuts.

Thank you for this insight into how deep something "easy" can take you if you want to fix it right!

This was an easy fix.

j/k don't ban me.

Be nice not to have to bring a Necro along with me every time I wanna do this event!

Seriously, you should have posted this years ago!

Since this is already going to be fixed, I'll share a non-exploity solution that can be used while waiting for this old event to get patched, in case anybody didn't know how to get past this roadblock.

A tank with non-weapons equipped (ALEX, trophy, shield etc.) and no DS buffs is used to build aggro on any existing Rear Guards. You bring a Necro to cast a Remote Sphere damaging aura, but first you use a Shaman to AE Tash debuff so that none of the Rear Guards can resist the Remote Sphere damage pulses. You could debuff with the Necro one mob at a time, but it's much slower. The Sphere is the only source of damage, does not get resisted because of Tash, and does not crit, guaranteeing even damage application. The event takes less than 5 minutes to do this way.

It took a few tries, but I completed the event just once using Absor's solution #1. It was a grueling 2 hours on the winning run, using specific abilities, waiting on cooldowns, with worn melee modifiers (like arms/legs) unequipped. It took a few tries because of some abilities critting due to AAs and class bonuses that can't be turned off, huge variance in physical crit damage, and because I tried using low level damage shields to speed things up (golem accuracy to damage/unbalance themselves also varied too much). It's cool that I was able to beat it as a challenge, but also... never again.

Anyway, go forth and acquire illusion clickies, experience old content.

Do you mean easier for lvl 120s? Or potentially easier in era? IMO, the difficulty in relation to max levels is not really important. Theres no way to actually do the event as intended as a max level (I don't think we were intended to tank all 2/4/8 golems). The latter could be addressed by making the penalty golems omega powerful.

Wait, it takes longer than 5 minutes to fix stuff?

Guessing that while Banestrike is a laughable amount of damage in current content, it would unbalance these randomly (and as far as I know there is no way to toggle it off).

This is how we've done it for years. It usually takes us 2-3 tries before we've found all the gear/bufs we need to remove so there are no accidental damage spikes.

Its both the tank and necro get naked, removing any weapons, belts, augs that can proc.

Thank you Absor.

I really like how well you laid out the issues surrounding fixing an event. One of the hardest things to do is manage user expectations. Even stuff that seems trivial take longer than you expect them to.

It is really nice to see developers posting here and letting us gain insight into the ongoing development activities for our obsession.

Its fair to easy for us as players to focus on the negatives and chant 'just fix it' already.

The solution you came up with is pretty neat. You force the people to go through the event completely, with repeating annoyance if they are careless.

My additional suggestion (unless you aren't already done with the work on the script): Scale the NPC's HP and damage output, related to the amount of PCs in the expedition and their average level, so it's more challenging and the chance to fail is lower.

I like the fact that you look for things in content that basically just punish the player for failing and remove it from the event. That's a really good sign that you care about the player's experience.

I highly believe that content should be challenging because that is what makes it fun. At the same time, I also agree that failing on content shouldn't punish the player harshly. There was nothing fun about having to wait a week to retry an event back in the day (looking at you Planes of Power) just because someone screwed up the attempt on accident. It was those harsh punishments that gave people a sense of "screw this crap" and helped lead them to leave the game.

There should be ways to recover from mistakes on raid events. There should never be a hard fail condition. The closer the content is to the top tier of that expansion should take in to account for how hard it is to recover from mistakes while attempting it, but at no point should any of the content have a hard fail condition in my opinion. You can create near hard fail situations like spawning so many mobs that it's near impossible to recover, but the players should have the chance to recover even if it seems impossible.

I applaud your efforts to not punch the players in the face just because they screwed something up while at the same time not just handing the win to them on a silver platter.

Keep up the good work sir.