Hold of Rime: Ascent into bugs

Ran Ascent last night and there was a metric buttload of bugs in here that still need fixing. Some are minor, some are potentially progression-stopping.

Major Bugs

1. Witch Doctor encounter is still buggy as all heck. The following bugs were noted:
   1. Walls can still be walked through most of the time. Even if you're not trying to you can end up doing it just running up to the wall.
   2. The witch doctor's beam start point is still random. A good bit of the time he puts it in front of you making it easy, some times he puts it behind you making you rush. Wildly inconsistant. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be anything to tell you where you should tank him -- you can easily run up and tank him where he is and skip the first wall entirely.
   3. When you wipe to the witch doctor the crit debuff is not clearing on revive.
   4. Perhaps related to the last one, sometimes after you wipe to the witch doctor he will go do his beam thing only he'll stand there and not rotate. The beam damage won't be triggered and he'll sit there... eventually he can start moving after the players while still doing the beam animation. This may be related to the crit debuff not clearing (ie the encounter not resetting) -- both times we saw this happen we had people who had the crit debuff still on them. When we zoned out and back in to clear it he worked properly.

Other Bugs

1. During the task master fight (the guy in the tunnel above the door where you drop down) we got the epics from outside the door to add at one point when some of the mobs below seemed to come charging up. Might be an issue with AEs leaking through, but still should not happen.
2. The samples of growth that are required for one of the missions (Hold of Rime: The Ascent - Growing Alarm are WAY WAY WAY too small and hard to see. We spent somewhere between half an hour and an hour looking for them and only found 3. A mission quest should not be hard to figure out, I felt like I was playing an old hunt-the-pixel adventure game rather than EQ2. Make the objects big enough to reasonably see without having to crawl over every inch of wall. Having more than the required 4 would also give a little bit of leeway in case one is buggy or hard to see as well.
3. The doors across the ice/vine bridge do not function properly after you have placed the crystal and set the zone in growth-mode. We closed the doors during the fight with the riders of rime to prevent the KB, only once we did that we could not open them again from either side. Thus you have to evac or call out if you go back up and drop down again (like we did multiple times looking for those blasted mission quest growth things).
4. If you fall down in the first area (with the platforms) you don't necessarily die. However there doesn't seem to be any way back up without evacing, getting called, or dieing and reviving.
5. Minor bug -- the large room with the ice/vine bridge in it doesn't maintain it's ambient color properly. After the zone went growth-mode it should have that hazy green ambiance but instead kept it's blue when we went back through. Was a somwhat dramatic change when you walked through the door and the color changed that much.
6. The achivement for killing Goredeth Maulhammer does not work. Neither did the one for killing Lord bob -- killed em both and the achievements are incomplete in my journal.

Non-Bug Suggestions

1. Make the access quests for these zones flagged as such. Having them flagged as Hallmark makes them unsharable, which means that people going in to pools and then later here must get the quest themselves -- you can't share it with them even if they meet the prerequisites.
2. A revive-point closer to the witch doctor would be nice. Won't be as big an issue if/when he works properly but it is kind of an annoying run back.
3. Because I can't say it enough, make the mission clickies easily visible and big. We shouldn't have to be climbing all over the walls looking for them.

Quest: The Prison That Kraytoc Built. This quest should be shareable. or the device that you put the tip into should not be available for members not on the quest.
A group member clicked on the item I was searching for, and it became locked so that I could not click on it, which prevented me from completing the quest.

I had a group member who I believe already finished the quest, push the update (which caused something to happen I won't spoil), and was therefore unable to get the update for myself. Seriously, how many times have we seen access quests require group updates and yet the quest can only be finished for one person at a time? It's happened in several places this expansion so far that I've seen. Could we just add this to a checklist when making access quests or something? That all updates will trigger for the whole group assuming a member is on that step? Start with this expansion and work backward (Ascent of the Awakened x4 access, while not even required anymore, still has the quest available, and only one person can get the update in a given zone).

Odd, the clickie triggered the update for all the folks in my group when we used it at the "end" of the zone from what I saw. Sounds like it's a bug where it's not updating properly if the person clicking isn't on the quest then, I don't think it's intentionally 1 person per run.

ZOMG! The "Hold of Rime: The Ascent - Growing Alarm" quest is impossible! After more than an HOUR searching, I finally found ONE update, a small blue crystal, which was (a) tiny and (b) did not render until I was literally standing on it.
This was not an easy zone, and darned if after putting a lot of effort and concentration into killing off the inhabitants if I have the patience to hunt for these ridiculous updates for HOURS! That's nuts!
I /petitioned it as "Stuck" because I simply cannot advance the quest. I have been over this place repeatedly.

I have a fix going in that extends the ice wall collision a little, and that starts the witchdoctor's beam in a specific direction each time. I'm unable to reproduce the bug where he doesn't rotate, so I'm not sure what's going on there. If you can get me any more info on how that's happening, I'd appreciate it =)
I think I've fixed the issue with the crit debuff not canceling on death. Let me know if that still occurs after these changes go live.

I'll take a look at some of the other bugs here today and see if I can't get some of those sorted out.

When we ran this, the first pull of the doctor we did, somebody was too slow and got hit by the beam, 2 people i think, on the second round. He stopped spinning around and did the whole follow us around with the beam running, and beating on us, but unattackable. We might of been able to kill it eventually, the tanks damage shield was going off but that probably wouldn't be enough to counter regen i imagine. As an aside, it would be nice if we could be flagged to of already seen the cutscene, with server lag the way it is atm on splitpaw, it took about 2-3 minutes before we could watch the scene, and one member had to exit game and log back in.

For the Growing Alarm mission, I've increased the size of the crystals substantially, which should prevent them from disappearing at short range, and make them easier to spot in general. I've also added a few additional spawns to make sure completion is never gated by one pesky hiding crystal.

For our group, over 5 or 6 tries, the following happened consistently: if anyone died to the 1st round of lazer, witchdoctor will finish his 360 turn and will remain untargettable (with his laser animation going but him no longer turning). At this point we had to evac. Unintended by-product was kind of cool tho - we had to do it flawlessly to win. Not sure if it's true for 2nd and 3rd laser rounds as the 1st time we got out of 1st round flawlessly we took it flawlessly to the end. It did happen to us once as well that he started chasing us with his laser animation and not attacking or attackable himself, but don't have correlations for that one.

Other note on the zone's difficulty:

While I don't know how easy you intended this zone to be, bosses other than Witchdoctor (let's exclude the last one for a second) were trivial. Half the time we didn't even realize we were fighting a boss because it was mixed in with trash. I understand every expansion needs its Library of Erudin, but this was literally cruise mode. Only thing that was any sort of cool was the ice.

Our pug was fairly rag-tag, lowish dps, 1 healer. Gear on tank was alright, but equivalent to stuff you get from Othimir camp quests and his HP was never in danger of dropping below 50%. Bosses need to hit harder across the board.

Spider definitely needs an AE pushback ability so that the ice comes into play (perhaps a few fences on that platform for strategic positioning).

Last mob's click-on-me-to-win mechanic was very underwhelming When shrunk it was just another trash-mob with 2x the trash HP and when Epic it didn't seem to do much anyway. AE incurable stun/stifle aura while it's Epic (whichever disable as long as can still click the staff), AE knockback to punish sloppy positioning at the very least.

Confirmed that someone triggering the event at the top of the zone while not on the quest (which has to be done, whether anyone's on the quest or not) will not update the quest for anyone who IS on the quest. This is extremely annoying, because twice now I've incurred a lockout because my groupmates fail to read group chat and run off triggering it, essentially screwing me out of my update. It's AWFUL, because there's exactly ONE chance to get the update in a zone, and overzealous group members have the opportunity to mess it up on you by simply not thinking. And guess whoat, I STILL don't have access to the next zone in progression because of this design FLAW. PLEASE make it update on the actual event, not on the trigger?

Thanks for the updates, Fyreflyte. This zone is a lot of fun, aside from the Witchdoctor's bugs. I don't mind walls that I can run through so much as I mind the fact that his laserbeam start point is completely random. Sometimes those buggy walls save us from a buggy laser. =) As Barx also suggested, a revive point closer to the Witchdoctor would be great, though perhaps not really as big of an issue if/when the witchdoctor is fixed.

The access bug needs to be fixed. We ran it last night, killed witchdoctor. At this point I assume we should have seen a cut scene. Instead, the screen went black and nothing would happen. i had to use task manager, kill eq2 client and come back in again, only to find out that this happened to everyone in my group.
At this point the clickie for the next zone access quest was unclickable ( it could have been some1 else , not on quest , click it first - i don't know ). On our way back, only 1 new name has spawned , who had a lot of little adds. Apart from that we had a few more trash and that was it. It didn't feel like everything has respawned corectly.
One other annoying thing is that after wiping to witchdoctor and reviving we still had a dot on us which would kill us again.

Fyreflyte wrote:

As of this weekend, the crystals were still ridiculously small. If this is supposed to be fixed, it is not. If the fix hasn't gone in yet, all well and good.

Banditman wrote:

It's only been two days since I posted that I fixed them, of course the change won't be live yet

I really hope SOE fixes Witch Doctor today. We did zone last night, and he always started following people around after laser rotation and was untargetable. However, we did find that we could target him through an autoattack-set pet (defiler dog). Between his buggy condition, chasing us and one-shotting people, and random starting point for the rotation, we could not get past him. If his starting point of rotation is really supposed to be random (assuming this is just not another bug), then I'm really disappointed -- completing a fight should be based on abilities and strats, not on pure luck of something uncontrollable happening.

Leovinus wrote:

QFE. I doubt it was intended like this.

It seems today after patch the North East wall will not take damage.
----
Oops, during the Witchdoctor fight.

Need more info. Are you unable to target the wall? Is it listing damage taken, but health isn't dropping? Does it say "immune" when damaged? Are the other walls working properly?

Fyreflyte wrote:

We could target it but didn't see any messages when were attacking it, just no damage ticking off the top. The rest were dropping just fine though. We were able to finish the encounter anyway, but had to be creative since we couldn't get through that wall. It was the same wall every pass too that was unbreakable, north east.