Information about Warden Amala

Thanks Andrew, it's reassuring that my thought process about this lines up with how you guys see it. (this time anyway)

I thought this was a lore discussion with a dev providing new information. :(

Too bad, here I was hoping you guys would finally fix the bug where Amalas mesmer portals kick you out of bound:

It's annoying.

here is what I don't get, when Istan launched, it was great, I bought all the things the vendor had to offer for extra efficient farming. Cause, finally, they made a map with a fun meta event, and finally we didnt have to spend most time in an outdated map like SW to get some decent gold reward.The things I bought from the vendor, like the meteor thing...close to a worthless waste of currency cause of nerfs.the entire thing about palawadan, making it an excitable "race" to get it done with 3 characters withiin time, gone.greathall, was great, if well coordinated, doing the event on getting the the gate down quickly, had use, cause then you could do it more then once, making it fun to do, and rewarding..killed and just pointless now. do it once, with the least amount of effort of doing it quickly, same reward, which is, barely rewarding now.You say you have been looking into the event and the map, that map used to be highly populated.Why players get frustrated about other players killing Amala to quick, cause that champion spawn was the only thing left, that made it worth even coming to that map.It wasnt the case players were stalling the event before it was nerfed to death, and became an issue because, once again, everything that made that map fun and rewarding, has been completely annihilated.So, this is my question, what is the greater good about ensuring another dead map on which every event except the once in 2 hours meta, is not being done,and what is so bad about being rewarded for trying to farm.Well I suppose this final nail to the coffin will be viewed as a succes from a certain perspective.Yay back to SilverWaste, again. Great going.

Thanks for preserving the loot, while reducing the toxicity.

One of the biggest things I missed from Launch were foes actually dropping Loot, and Istan was a huge throwback.

I'm glad you redesigned this in the right direction.

@"Lolivia.3219" said:here is what I don't get, when Istan launched, it was great, I bought all the things the vendor had to offer for extra efficient farming. Cause, finally, they made a map with a fun meta event, and finally we didnt have to spend most time in an outdated map like SW to get some decent gold reward.The things I bought from the vendor, like the meteor thing...close to a worthless waste of currency cause of nerfs.the entire thing about palawadan, making it an excitable "race" to get it done with 3 characters withiin time, gone.greathall, was great, if well coordinated, doing the event on getting the the gate down quickly, had use, cause then you could do it more then once, making it fun to do, and rewarding..killed and just pointless now. do it once, with the least amount of effort of doing it quickly, same reward, which is, barely rewarding now.You say you have been looking into the event and the map, that map used to be highly populated.Why players get frustrated about other players killing Amala to quick, cause that champion spawn was the only thing left, that made it worth even coming to that map.It wasnt the case players were stalling the event before it was nerfed to death, and became an issue because, once again, everything that made that map fun and rewarding, has been completely annihilated.So, this is my question, what is the greater good about ensuring another dead map on which every event except the once in 2 hours meta, is not being done,and what is so bad about being rewarded for trying to farm.Well I suppose this final nail to the coffin will be viewed as a succes from a certain perspective.Yay back to SilverWaste, again. Great going.

I think the change had more to do with eliminating toxic behavior than it did to eliminate farming. Just as Andrew said:

" Players unaware of the Champ-centric tactics attacking Amala would get yelled at, when all they were doing was what the event was actually telling them to do"

Every time i went to farm the map like other players, it never failed, always the squad leader and some other players would be calling other players down for attacking Amala. So you have to think to yourself, what right does anyone have to call another player down for playing the content as it's designed? They don't, simple as that. If players kept quiet about it and treated people with respect, we likely wouldn't have seen this change, so players who felt the need to call others down for engaging in the content only have themselves to blame.

Look at it another way, look at Silverwastes, people farm the kitten out of that map still and there has been on changes. There is no way to really circumvent the event, and thus no need for players to come down on other players. End result nothing changes. The Amala change is a player invoked problem.

So to answer your question, there is nothing wrong with being rewarded when trying to farm, but there is everything wrong when players yell at other players for engaging in the vent as intended.

@Lolivia.3219 said:Why players get frustrated about other players killing Amala to quick, cause that champion spawn was the only thing left, that made it worth even coming to that map.It wasnt the case players were stalling the event before it was nerfed to death, and became an issue because, once again, everything that made that map fun and rewarding, has been completely annihilated.

Let's keep some perspective here. Amala will now spawn a fixed number of champions - four, to be precise. Whereas before she spawned anywhere between two and seven, at least in my experience. This might be a slight nerf in that I'd say the average was closer to five or six champs before the recent change. What it isn't, though, is an instance of nerfing the event into the ground and making it no longer worth doing.

A change I would like to see for that event is the addition of a champ loot bag drop to the large elemental Amala summons. For how hard that thing is to kill and for how annoying it is to fight, it bloody well should drop something, but frustratingly doesn't. Or at least didn't - I haven't seen the revamped Amala fight yet.

Just did Amala after the update, when she was dead we were almost immediately hit by the plague of Joko (if I am not mistaken), gate closed and all died. This happened not even 30 seconds after boss death.

@Dreddo.9865 said:Just did Amala after the update, when she was dead we were almost immediately hit by the plague of Joko (if I am not mistaken), gate closed and all died. This happened not even 30 seconds after boss death.

Was there amply time left on the timer for the meta chain?

Rather remove champion upscale

@Andrew Gray.5816 said:Hi, I'm the team lead for the Episode 1 team, and I wanted to give a bit of a background on why we temporarily disabled the Warden Amala fight, and the adjustment we made to how champions spawn in the fight. I’ll start with the champions. A general rule of thumb is, any time it is advantageous to ignore the actual objectives of content, the content needs to adjustment. Not necessarily as an economic safeguard, but as a social one. While the Amala fight often looked like a well-choreographed synchronized swimming performance, with players flowing in a circle of death ever so gracefully across the corpse-ridden great hall, there were times things turned a bit nasty. Players unaware of the Champ-centric tactics attacking Amala would get yelled at, when all they were doing was what the event was actually telling them to do.

We adjusted the way the champions spawn, directly tying it to completion of the event objective. The passive continual spawns will no longer upscale to champions, but there are guaranteed champions at 25% health points on Amala in addition to one at event start. There is no longer an incentive to stall the event. I mean, I’d still recommend you kill the champs as they arrive if you like that sweet, sweet loot, but after the last one shows up when Amala hits 25% health, stalling the event is not going to make additional champion’s arrive. Might as well take Amala out of her misery at that point.

As far as the event needing to be temporarily disabled, that was not directly tied to the “champ farm.” We’ve been monitoring this event and had already determined we’d be making the change to Champion spawns with episode 2. It was, however, indirectly tied to it. While we were making the adjustments, we noticed an integration issue that effectively “rolled back” parts of the event to an earlier iteration before launch. We identified and fixed the issue, but for the sake of episode 2 build stability, we held that fix until the upcoming patch, and disabled the event until that goes out. It should be re-enabled soon.

Thanks Andrew, I was wondering why Amala was always taking such a long time then going down so fast at the last minute. Although given how she hopped around (so I was constantly turning) I am guessing I tagged most enemies in that room anyway. As to the latter .... remember to do git pulls (or whatever your VCS is) and merges early and often. :)

It does get annoying when people cause a change to get around their behaviour. For example, making it so multi-loot will not work dinged people who are not camped out at the start of the event chain as well (and sometimes mungs chests that spawn after).

@DeadlySynz.3471 said:

@"Lolivia.3219" said:here is what I don't get, when Istan launched, it was great, I bought all the things the vendor had to offer for extra efficient farming. Cause, finally, they made a map with a fun meta event, and finally we didnt have to spend most time in an outdated map like SW to get some decent gold reward.The things I bought from the vendor, like the meteor thing...close to a worthless waste of currency cause of nerfs.the entire thing about palawadan, making it an excitable "race" to get it done with 3 characters withiin time, gone.greathall, was great, if well coordinated, doing the event on getting the the gate down quickly, had use, cause then you could do it more then once, making it fun to do, and rewarding..killed and just pointless now. do it once, with the least amount of effort of doing it quickly, same reward, which is, barely rewarding now.You say you have been looking into the event and the map, that map used to be highly populated.Why players get frustrated about other players killing Amala to quick, cause that champion spawn was the only thing left, that made it worth even coming to that map.It wasnt the case players were stalling the event before it was nerfed to death, and became an issue because, once again, everything that made that map fun and rewarding, has been completely annihilated.So, this is my question, what is the greater good about ensuring another dead map on which every event except the once in 2 hours meta, is not being done,and what is so bad about being rewarded for trying to farm.Well I suppose this final nail to the coffin will be viewed as a succes from a certain perspective.Yay back to SilverWaste, again. Great going.

Exactly, nothing wrong with farming as long as you make sure it does not affect the economy (which Istan did because of this, hopefully prices of things will get better now). What is vexing is when people think you should do something a certain way, even though everything is saying otherwise, then throw salt at the people not playing content their way. Like when they are doing their best not to let an event fail.

I ran into this attitude while trying to do the new chapter yesterday with a random party. No fun doing a lot of the work while puzzling out the content with people heckling you for not doing it their way.

Good, I'm glad it was adjusted.

My usual response to toxic people berating others for trying to complete an event, which I saw plenty of at the Great Hall, is "I'm not here for you."

Is killing the earth elemental still a waste of time?

This is a way better solution than disabling drops.

It not only encourages fighting the boss, but the faster you fight the boss, the faster those champions spawn. Champions can be a bit squishy at times, but that's more of a problem with the scaling not kicking in fast enough than how champions appear.

This is the kind of measure that should be kept in something like a a list called "A million things to remember when designing stuff" to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

@Khisanth.2948 said:Is killing the earth elemental still a waste of time?Yes.

On the other hand, the change in the Amala fight was a definite buff in the loot department. Whereas before you were lucky to get 7 or 8 champions during the fight, Amala now spawns anywhere between 8 and 12 (or possibly even more): At each 25% point of health from 100 down to 25, she spawns somewhere between 2 and 4 champions. And since focusing Amala is now no longer bad for your loot, the fight is over faster and you have more time to loot any missed chests after the fight before Joko's plague takes effect.

So overall I'm very happy with the change.

makes you wonder if they're going to nerf the champ spawns for specimen chamber also...