QA rocks. A hotfix went live about half an hour ago that pushed through most of the improvements and bug fixes for this mission. The changes are: 1. All spell effects have been removed from the vulnerability procs, except for the bunnies at the beginning (where it's strictly limited by a script, and I feel it's necessary because the player doesn't control which identical bunny it lands on). This should fix the crashing issue reported here. 2. Seers no longer deathtouch players if they're spotted. Instead, the player is teleported back to Sheriff Knotter Botter and must start their sneak attempt over. 3. NPC HP has been dropped across the board to speed up Mission completion time and make it a more reasonable time investment for the reward. 4. Messaging has been improved on the Shaky Skeleton and Gnome Skeleton encounters. The goal is to make it clear that the Giant player is spawning the Gnome Skeletons when they hit the Shaky Skeletons, and that they have the ability to one-shot Gnome Skeletons. This hotfix does not address the current disparity between Magic and Melee damage. Due to technical limitations, that will need to wait for a client patch. There is no ETA on this yet. Thanks to everyone for your feedback and patience with us today as we worked to address these issues. As always, please continue to report your feedback for the mission here.
I have tried this mission multiple times today, and have crashed every try on the bunnies fight. I have gone in and turned off Radial Flora and Bloom Lighting, and it SEEMED to help a little bit. I at least made it a little bit longer into the fight after that. I am running 3 toons (boxing) with mercs...warrior and shaman on one box, and bard on an entirely different box. The Bard just stops responding, yet I can camp her out, but cannot do anything else. The Warrior and Shaman usually do the same as the bard, however there have been times I have had an error saying that my NVIDIA drivers have quit responding and restarted. This is the only time that has occurred, in this instance. All toons, the only way out is to camp and restart, sometimes bouncing clear to desktop sometimes to character select.
We got to the part with the Shaky Skeletons and didn't have any problems killing the gnomes or the 1 shaky skeleton that I aggro'd. However, we're left with the other shaky skeleton that cannot be killed and there are no gnomes spawning to help make it vulnerable.
Hey Marike, If the player in your group who has the Giant buff on them hits the Shaky Skeleton with a spell (that giant buff also gives his melee and ranged hits a chance to proc spell damage, if I recall), it will summon a Gnome Skeleton from the Shaky Skeleton's waist. So the trick is for the Giant player to alternate hitting the Shaky Skeleton to spawn Gnome Skeletons and then hit Gnome Skeletons as they spawn to make the Shaky Skeleton vulnerable for the rest of the team. I hope that helps!
Hey Fanamila, Really sorry to hear about the problem you're having with this. It sounds like the drivers really hate something about the spell effect being used on those bunnies. Have you tried updating your graphics drivers? It's possible that will fix it if there's a newer version. Other than that, I'm not sure there's much I can do. I believe your case is pretty specific and tied to the drivers, so I don't feel comfortable disabling those spell effects for everyone. They're fairly essential to getting through that first part. That spell effect only exists in the Mission during that first step. Perhaps you could get a friend to complete the step without you (it's very low-threat, so it's not too dangerous) and then have you jump in afterwards? Sorry I don't have a better solution.
I believe the trap spam issue only occured if ya get two skeletons upo n the trap. Also, disabling the mini-skeleton damage kind of makes the boss just a high hp skeleton then. I (mostly) solo'd it in 5 hours, 20 minutes before the hot patch.
I have not tried the mission yet, but am I the only one disturbed that it sounds as if we're playing as QA for this mission. We have a test server where people can pre-test content before it goes live right?
Thanks for the reply. We ended up restarting the mission and aggro'd them both simultaneously. Then we spawned a bunch of gnome skeletons and rather than me going on an insta-killing spree, I killed one or two gnome skeleton to make the shakys vulnerable, which ended up being enough to kill both shaky skeletons. I don't know why we werent getting any gnome skeletons to proc/spawn from the second skeleton that was up during our first run, but it didn't take us very long to get back to that point. Mission definitely doesnt take longer than 40m with 2 people.
Just ran through this mission again moments ago. Monumental difference with the particle effects now under control. Overall the changes pushed in the hotfix have made this an enjoyable mission. After this morning's tragic efforts I told myself I would never do this mission again. Now, I expect to repeat it a number of times while it is available. Fine work Augur, and great response time. Thanks.
He does have a few more mechanics going on than the earlier skeleton bosses (he incorporates all of their mechanics, including the stun and AoE attack), but you're right that's it's a much more manageable fight without the gnome damage. If this were a permanent mission, I would have been a little more cautious preserving a more detailed and strenuous final fight. For a temporary mission with some cosmetic rewards, though, I chose to err on making sure that people are able to finish it without dying repeatedly. Our major releases do go through a public beta testing server, but this year's anniversary content did not. We did a lot of internal testing on the missions, but there are always things that the playerbase as a whole will uncover that you can't find in smaller test groups. That all said, this mission was fairly experimental in its design, which is why I immediately jumped on these forums when it hit live to make sure I heard about any potential issues in time to fix them before the weekend. It's not ideal, I know, but I'm hoping that, in the end, the content is fun for the people playing it. I'm glad to hear it worked out, Marike! 30-40 minutes was our target mark for this mission, accounting for the fact that it could include much lower level (and potentially less experienced) players as well. Spacing out those Gnome Skeleton kills is definitely the way to do it, if the Giant player has the patience Thanks for the kind words, Tobynn. I'm glad we could convince you to give it another shot! This was my first major content (larger than a quest) added to the game since I joined the team, and I learned a lot from this. I'm eager to take everyone's feedback here and the general design lessons I learned from this and apply it to my next project.
we beat this first time, although took a while. only way to heal seemed to be by tap procs?? we were war, sk , rog ranger. only loot we got was a grow potion??? i got fair chunk of exp. was kinda fun but very quirky
Had bugged version. At almost the end, i killed 1 shaky at trap, and another spawned, happened 3 times so far Got it completed, but had 5 shaky up at end.
Big Bug: It appears those on the Zek server do not get the HP and regen buffs (possibly the giant/attack/healing buffs too, but they can't exactly get far enough to check). Guessing any PVP flagged characters would have this issue (although, I'm not about to flag myself for PVP, so uhhh, can't test it myself!). This effectively makes the mission undoable for them.
Something in the task bounces off the Giant's buff that allows you to vulnerable mode the mobs, the major problem with this is the person in the giant form has to gate out or die to basically replace them to get a new Giant so you can continue making the mobs vulnerable (since Neringa wont allow anyone else to do it while they are still in zone)
Thank you for the changes, this makes me want to do it again just to see how much easier less harder it has gotten. To put in perspective melee vs. spells damage, yeah, I was seeing 32 million strikes. I was using Disruptive Persecution (paladin AA - their best friend for DPS) which is far more reliable than a melee proc. So during a vulnerable period on a giant skeleton, I could auto-attack and maybe get in 5 million damage with melee procs, -OR- I could cast Disruptive Persecution, Glorious Vindication (some nuke + twinheal buff), and Laudation. I could easily have done 20% of the skeleton's health with spells alone, while my melee proc damage could only manage 5%. So again, I could melee for 10 million, or do up to 70+ million. Simple choice really. That's why I said it's a kick in the teeth when the final reward is a pet illusion item which holds next to no value to any melee class anyway. The experience reward is less than a certain quest in RoF that can take less than 5 minutes to complete, so to a lot of melee classes the replay value just isn't there.
The Defender of Ak'anon buff (the one that boosts your HP total) also has some hefty passive health regen on it to speed up downtime. Unless it was changed, the loot at the end is random, with a chance at a lot of different things, including a scaling aug and some other cool stuff I'd rather not spoil if it hasn't been found yet. Can you clarify what happened here, please? There are supposed to be 5 Shaky Skeletons at the final battle at the gate (you even have a quest step for killing them). Did you have 5 Shaky Skeletons dead and then 5 more spawned? Thanks for the heads up on this. I'll send an email to the team that's in the office this morning and also look into this when I get back into the office on Monday if it's not fixed by then. Can you explain this a little bit more, Riou? I'm not entirely clear on what's happening. The Giant player is attacking a mob, and it's proccing the vulnerable mode debuffs but they're not applying? Are they never applying, even though it says they are? Or applying some of the time? For a quick solution, Rouan's suggestion will work. Asking for the Attack buff will lower your height and allow you to request the Giant buff again. Yes, the imbalance caused by the unfortunate timing of maths from armor (and possibly AA) modifiers makes spell casters significantly more effective in the mission, which is not good. The changes to NPC HP should make it very doable for melee classes still, so it's not as brutal of a grind for them. A real fix will be coming in the next full patch, since we're unable to hotfix Spells. (Well, technically we could, but we'd have to repop every single zone, which would crash the server if more than a few people are online.) It's a small consolation, but the final reward for the mission does change, and includes a lot of stuff that melee can use
Seems to be bugged on AB, got to the giant skelly part which needs the giant player to hit it to spawn gnome skellys............gnome skellys not spawning. Any suggestions? NM fixed it by evacing and getting giant again
well on povar Steamfont just crashed and none of the npcs for this task/mission is up or the groundspawns
Really enjoyed this one, was great fun, it worked well. I'd love to see more of this especially if it means no more monster missions. We managed to kill the healer merc we had with us, which meant we didn't have a healer, but with the damage the mobs were kicking out and our buffs we didn't need one.
