Heroic Adv. Bixie War.: They're Everywhere! - Working as intended?

I've tried this HA three times.

The first time I got the treants as my first step and did fine, but I got overwhelmed at the third step where I defend against rioters.

The second time I got the treants as my first step and did fine, then I had to defend against enraged beasts. I did fine, except I only got credit for 13 kills in the end. I had to kill 15 to finish that step. I waited 20 minutes, and no beasts were on track. My theory is that the treant/bixie allies managed to land two kills, making those beasts not count towards updating the step. If that isn't the case, then I don't know. It's bugged. I was frustrated.

The third time everything went okay up until the bixie veterans coming out of the ramp. The damn things hit for 22k frequently, and that hurts even with 130k hp and 10.5k ac on a 7800 aa Paladin. My health was spiking lower than ten percent, and into purple all the time. Eventually, too many spawned, and they overpowered me. Those things hit really, really damn hard. At that point, I gave up.

I don't think I can do this adventure, it requires more DPS than my group can dish out. It's a cool idea for a mission though, but the bug and the difficulty spike surprised me considering everything else has been a piece of cake so far.

One thing I noticed is that you can keep the honey pots even if you fail the mission, so potentially you could go in one mission, do the best you can, loot as many honey pots as possible, restart it, and before you set the events in motion, revive every single injured bixie. The worry I have with that is that one of the steps, that does not vary, is that you have to revive 15 bixies. If you kept them all alive from the start, would it count when that step appears? I doubt it, so I am afraid of reviving any of them.

If anyone wants to help me out on Xegony I'd love it, I just don't have the deepus.

Most of the HA steps will update future ones if you accomplish them, so this will prob just update the future step

Hey again Edrick; hit up myself, Discuit, Terraa etc. We can crunch it out for you. We defeated the group game on day 2-3.

Customer Support only covers content up to but not including the latest expansion. I'm sure you missed it in the fine print when you bought CotF. It's there, right next to the mention that CotF is part 1 of 4 of the expansion and you get the other 3 parts for free later.

Hey all,

Thanks for the feedback on aspects of this Heroic Adventure. I wanted to jump in and confirm a few bugs we're aware of, have developed fixes for, and will be patched soon (tm).

1. The Queen and/or her advisor disappearing at end of the HA -- Fixed: Neither can be knocked unconscious and will lock their HP at 1%. Their damage has been drastically reduced to prevent exploiting.
2. Not getting credit for kills -- Fixed: This was happening if you failed to deal more damage than the guard NPCs to kill an attacker. Guard damage has been severely reduced across the board to ensure this will not happen. Guard HP has been increased to help maintain a similar difficulty level.
3. Spider Matriarchs spawning too many adds -- Fixed: They correctly spawn 3 hatchlings only every 50-60 seconds now. (I believe this fix went live last week)
4. Extra NPC occasionally spawning at start of the mission -- Fixed: Will only spawn at the appropriate step.

As always, please continue to provide feedback on the content in the expansion and report bugs, along with what you find fun and not fun. We use all of this feedback to make better content in the future. Please refrain from personal attacks or being overly aggressive.

Thanks,
Augur

Nylrem is not saying there isn't a problem, he 's suggesting a workaround until it's fixed.
I'm curious about your 1% comment. Are you saying 1% of the EQ population raids? I would have thought it was a lot higher.

The reports are clearly newer than last week. I believe that part of this issue is that the matriarchs show up while the players kill some other mobs elsewhere, and yes, spawn 3 adds every 1 minute. Which become an increasingly overpowering force over time. If the players get there too late, they run into a huge swarm that has already devoured all bixies around. Spawning adds on timer is simply a bad idea in this setup. Why can't they spawn them on hp % instead?

And what about the attackers that come unannounced? You get an emote to reinforce point A. You go there, and there are indeed attackers there. But while you are dealing with those, other points get attacked too! Without any warnings. The worst example is spider matriarchs coming up above while you are killing mobs that come out of the water.

Speaking of the mobs that come out of the water: we've already reported that some of them instantly warp up top right after coming out of the water. That shouldn't be hard to reproduce.

You're a swell dude, Augur. Thanks.

Thanks for the feedback, Axxius. I'll address your points one at a time.

• I will look into adjusting the spawn mechanics for the Matriarch Hatchling.
• Can you give a more specific example of when attackers come unannounced? One of the final wave options has enemies swarm from all entrances, and it should be clearly indicated in the text and chat window that this is happening. If not, it's a bug in the messaging. You seem to indicate that this is happening more often, though. Specific examples would help me track down the issue.
• Anything that includes the words "some" or "sometimes" can be surprisingly hard to reproduce. I'll investigate the issue, but if you can give more specific examples, it will aid me.

augur I can give you a couple examples. the drum hunters and hardern vets come form the water ramp. instead of running up the ramps to get to the queen its like they jump form the water ramp and land just out side of the queens camp.

In my case, I had pretty good luck with RNG and got these steps:

• convert 3 treants
• kill 3 cliknar drum hunters
• kill 6 rioters
• kill 8 hardened veterans
• kill 4 invasion leaders

Each of the above except the 4 leaders came from a single direction. So for each of the first 4 of these I got an emote telling me to reinforce this or that point. However, while killing the 8 hardened veterans (cliknars coming out of the water) I noticed that there were also bixies coming out of the 2 city tunnels (iirc, assassins and riot-themed types) and something else up top (iirc, scouts).

Just get the steps to kill cliknars and watch. I had two of those: 3 drum hunters and 8 hardened veterans. Killed 2 drum hunters near the water, then couldn't figure out where the 3rd one was for a while - track in this place sucks. Finally found it up top perma mezzed by the advisors. And during the veterans step I saw it happen: cliknars walks out of the water, and if they walk on the right side of the ramp (looking at it from the top of the ramp) then they stay and fight the bixies, but if they walk on the left side of the ramp - they disappear and end up near the Queen.

May as well mention here (reported in the Patch bugs thread before): healing the unconscious bixies with honey can result in the final report saying, "We had 20 bixies knocked out by the attackers, and you healed 25 of those". Because I healed some of them twice after they got knocked out again.

Update:

• Discovered the source of the pathing problems inside the Water Cavern area, and fixed it. The water mobs are no longer teleporting.
• Updated the dialogue for the combat report to more accurately reflect what the numbers actually represent. (The discrepancy is caused by reviving bixies that start out as unconscious.)

NOTE: All of these fixes are currently on beta. There is no ETA yet for when they will hit Live.
I will continue to investigate the other issues discussed here.

I'm currently unable to reproduce this bug, even while using the specific steps Axxius listed, or similar steps that could logically be related.

Any additional information players can provide about when they encountered NPCs spawning where/when they shouldn't be would be much appreciated.

Tank mercs will not pull off of a mob that "converts" thats in all the missions they just keep after them, while any adds or spawns the tank mercs party and the tank merc ignores them instead chasing a mob that wont hit it back.

This happened to me one out of three times. I've had two treants steps, and one assassin step. The first time was the treant step, and the "grateful treant," while not agro, was on my ET list, and my mercs wouldn't med because they thought they were in combat.

Two issues I've seen (one mentioned above) is the converted treants will not fall off aggro if you're using a tank merc. These mobs also don't count towards the "kill count" for the step where you must kill 18 attackers. Now, speaking of the 18 attackers step... I don't really have a suggestion *how* but if you get this step and wipe/evac it's almost certain all 18 mobs will pile up on the queen. The queen HP lock fix should make this less of an issue but the rate that the groups of mobs spawn seems way too quick to down a set of mobs before the next is incoming unless you have a mega DPS group. This is especially bad if you get matriarchs as some of the 18 attackers (the add mechanic is still causing issues.

To Lily (I think, posted above) - I wasn't trying to discredit Nylrem, I'm glad that there was a work around since we have no ETA on when this will hit live. Now, my "1%" comment was figurative, I don't know what the actual number of raiders is but I do know it is not the majority; the point was that a stat went out on fixing a raid that broke because of a patch to fix HAs, yet some of the HAs are still very broken but it hasn't taken priority, despite the larger number of people it affects (versus a raid).

Anyhow, much thanks to Augur for the responses- glad something is in the works to make this mission bearable. It's good to see the feedback is taken seriously in some cases.

Update:

• The Treant/Assassin aggro bug should be fixed. I tested with a tank merc, and he properly lost aggro.
• [Forgot to specifically mention earlier] Non-named friendly guards no longer cast spells, as this was the bulk of their damage (which caused players to not get kill credit). Named NPCs will continue to cast spells, including Mez.
• Gave friendly guard NPCs an even bigger boost to their HP to ensure they continue to stay alive during longer fights, even with a wipe or evac.

Several changes made to the step to kill attackers swarming from all 4 entrances at once, to make sure it's possible, even with the changes to friendly guards.

• Reduced the number of attacking mobs to 14, down from 20
• Reduced the kill requirement to 14, down from 18
• Removed Bixiefoot and Treants from the list of possible spawns. Spawns from the forest clearing path will only be weak animals and cultists.

Yay!

This tank not stopping agro happened in another BW instance with moles you had to "save" cant think of the name atm.