Domain of Vabbi Meta -- The Serpent's Ire

I just tried to lead 30 players to ultimate defeat against this meta event 3 times.The breakbars on the second phase are the least interesting and extremely punishing mechanic I've ever seen in an open world meta.I've prepped teams premeta, to no avail. My randoms are not the best players, but we should at least be able to kill one Zealot in the second phase... Right? I inform players of the pre-existing conditions of the fight. I type out squad messages in Word Doc including what skills are preferred from each class (High power burst/cc with low CD). I mark each spawning Zealot so we can move to our places if we tried splitting. I've researched every strat that helps including 30 players using Springer to pop a single Breakbar that will recharge in 10 seconds.

I am just devastated by how awful it feels to take 45 minutes out of 30 players to fail again and again. I am not learning anything , as I've done everything I could have. I'm interested to see the defense for this kind of meta, because if there were any new players trying to help I feel the squad doing the event would be better served to have no new players join at all due to up-scaling and lack of CC/DPS. That is the very antithesis of what a open-world meta should be. Metas should be inclusive, especially those that invest the time to find my squad, read my instructional messages, and execute a squad-based plan flawlessly.

Another foresighted defense I predict is that the meta requires more players. More players than 30. I cannot find anymore players than that, and shouldn't meta events scale in some capacity? I get its all a grey line that adjusts to account for difficulty, but this meta takes the cake with its lack of forgiveness and strict requirements. 30 players is a lot to command by myself, especially with the short amount of prep I'm given to organize them all to subgroups if we decided that strategy.

Again, I'd love to hear a defense for the state of this meta, because us rando's on the front lines have all but given up.

I dont mind the meta being difficult if it actually had worthwhile rewards. Once the incentive isthere, more experienced veterans will naturally gravitate to the content which should increase the likelyhood of the event completing. Anet could also include a right of passage break bar trial for players looking to join the meta to ensure people are prepared.

Everytime ive done it, we have had over 50 players. I agree it scales terribly, but 30 is unlikely to do it in my experience of doing it. If you are advertising on lfg, judy advertise half hour in advance to maximise numbers. The regular EU group advertise like this and almost never fail now.

I cant really defend the state of it, but it needs at least a full squad and as much cc as can be crammed into the fight. I a,most wouldnt mind if the rewards warranted the organisation and effort, but they dont even come close as been said many a time

Killing the first cc zealot is the hardest part remember. Once each dies, the more freed up players can rotate round to join the other groups and the more the bar (i think) slows down as less zealots are powering.

This event is extremely frustrating. I almost always have LFG open on Vabbi looking for people doing this event because I have tried so many times and keep failing. Groups from 20 to 40 players and I never seen us get past the second zealot in the bomb phase.

I equipped all the CC I have, spirit hammer, signet of judgement, axe 3, scepter 3, and trait for extra spirit weapon charge, and it never feels enough. Then 10 seconds later full CC bar and my skills are still on cooldown.

I hate feeling punished for not playing all of PoF when it first came out and all the zergs were everywhere. My schedule never matches up with guilds that run this for the community, so its just impossible for me at the moment. I really hope they change the scaling if nothing else so smaller parties can succeed. I don't need it to be stupid easy, but when I'm doing all I can and I see the squads follow direction and try there best and we still fail, its disheartening.

My post is probably more venting than helpful, but it would be nice to know from Anet if they are monitoring this event to see if it needs to be changed.

Prep time is up to you to decide how early you want to start organizing. If you leave it up to the last minute then that is your choice.

Every build can have enough CC via consumables. Whether or not people are willing to go that far seems like it should be a different discussion.

@Randulf.7614 said:Everytime ive done it, we have had over 50 players. I agree it scales terribly, but 30 is unlikely to do it in my experience of doing it. If you are advertising on lfg, judy advertise half hour in advance to maximise numbers. The regular EU group advertise like this and almost never fail now.

I cant really defend the state of it, but it needs at least a full squad and as much cc as can be crammed into the fight. I a,most wouldnt mind if the rewards warranted the organisation and effort, but they dont even come close as been said many a time

Killing the first cc zealot is the hardest part remember. Once each dies, the more freed up players can rotate round to join the other groups and the more the bar (i think) slows down as less zealots are powering.

One dead also means more time for damage because now you only need 2 bars broken to damage.

I've never seen a group succeed at this event (and still don't have my funerary collection unlocked as a result!). I've given up on completing it, hoping ANet will either adjust it or provide proper incentives to get people interested in actually doing it. But given what a nosedive this game seems to be taking in quality lately, I'm not holding my breath on them fixing anything.

The map have no attractive to me which make me hate to go to that map another thing is the reward after this meta too not worth for me to do it againpeople need this meta to complete their profession weapon collection , Anet Dev should pay more attention to this after all they just pay attention to balance the skill and trait but not balance the PVE gameplay eg. The Shatterer , Bug that might occur in meta when this new world boss mode first came out people will rush doing it on day one after that they don't have the will to do it anymore , so bad luck to new player try hard to get what they want same as Draconis Mons Meta too

Can Teq or TT be done with 30 players?

Teq can definitely be done with 30 or probably even 25 people. Not sure about TT

@Ayrilana.1396 said:Can Teq or TT be done with 30 players?

Teq can be done, base scaling isn't very high

@"tonyajc.2618" said:Teq can definitely be done with 30 or probably even 25 people. Not sure about TT

TT wurms' scalings are quite high

just the base support groups adds up to 25-30 men, 4-5 reflect and 4-5 condi per wurmthe zergs are average 15-25 per wurm (exclude support groups)

http://ttsgamers.com/strategy/great-jungle-wurm-guide/

Sadly, it's all up to rewards. High risk, low reward tends to turn people off. That's why you can always find a map doing the protect Tarir meta as that gives an ample amount of reward.

It's really frustrating to have a lot of collections tied to this meta, and even this way you can't find people to do it.Why? Because it requires a lot of effort, gives no rewards and there's high chances of failing.So, when people do it for the sake of collections they never come back, so it's always harder to find a group to do it.But how many posts we already saw about this on this forum? And not a single word from any dev...

Hello again. You may know me as the Serpent's Ire guy. Not by name, but in your heart. I am here to talk about this event again. However, I'll just link to the three big posts that I wrote about this in the past:

(1): A breakdown of the event as a whole(2): A breakdown of how good each class is at CC(3): How to command Serpent's Ire

That said, I think the lowest numbers that I've ever had a successful run with was about 40. Then again, this is with whatever pugs happened to be around. I have heard rumor of players accomplishing it with much less.

I was on a random guild run last night that did a bizarre three split strategy that was successful. It worked like this:

You have two main groups at the south west and south-east zealots. You have one smaller group at the northern zealot under the POI. The two southern groups will CC and kill their zealot, then move north and kill that zealot, and eventually come to help the final zealot at the POI. The third group's primary job is to CC their zealot, allowing the other two teams to reach the threshold where additional damage can be inflicted. If my health ever improves to the point where I can host again, I'll try that technique on pug runs and see how well it works. Though accomplishing this strat would require two other commanders, because otherwise people will just chase the tag.

Personally, I think that the zealot's defense shield should be reduced from 33% to 20%. That would go quite far in making this event easier. Better rewards would help, too.

@Malafaia.8903 said:It's really frustrating to have a lot of collections tied to this meta, and even this way you can't find people to do it.Why? Because it requires a lot of effort, gives no rewards and there's high chances of failing.So, when people do it for the sake of collections they never come back, so it's always harder to find a group to do it.But how many posts we already saw about this on this forum? And not a single word from any dev...

Those devs have all moved onto expansion 3 so I doubt we'll see any further reworking of PoF. I just hope they don't tie it into any more collections.

I also hope they've actually learned some lessons here and don't repeat these mistakes (a long winded meta event with unusual/failure prone mechanics and very poor rewards) in expansion three.

Break Bars are generally over tuned all across the open world bosses and events.It takes way too much CC to break them,where it ends up not simply rewarding knowledge of the mechanic from the playersbut the builds that are specialised in beating it.It's an issue,but highly unlikely that it will be changed.

I am totally one of those players who found an organized group, beat it and never looked back.

We had two nearly full squads btw. Even then the first part was very hit and miss and we came close to failing.

I think the rewards were something like the item I needed for a collection and maybe 50 of the things that you need thousands of to get anything worthwhile so I do not bother with them. The little envelope-looking things. Certainly not worth doing again.

@Aenaos.8160 said:Break Bars are generally over tuned all across the open world bosses and events.It takes way too much CC to break them,where it ends up not simply rewarding knowledge of the mechanic from the playersbut the builds that are specialised in beating it.It's an issue,but highly unlikely that it will be changed.

Hell yeah, lolWhat about those Champ Hierarchs in Istan?I can't understand why they make the combat confusing like this. They bar shows, but it's impossible to be broken with CC and the best tactic is to DPS 25% of the champ in order to stop the spin. Makes absolutely no fucking sense.