My problem with convergences

[Blck Drgn Roku.9387]

I'm trying to do public convergences once a day. It should be (i think) an enjoyable big fight where i get the loot in the end, pretty much like any other meta. I try to do the convergence next to reset, so i have somewhat of a schedule i'm comfortable with. Problem, surely many have already guessed, it sometimes the "randomness" tends to go towards a very "screw you all" mood, giving us only sorrow, and with the new patch, umbriel. I'm not against having challenging content, but please don't have it as a random factor. If i want something difficult, i should have the choice of doing it, not having it on my face because the chances decided to screw me with sorrow getting with the back on the wall or umbriel throwing his axes around zojja when we try to heal her. I can only do convergences once a day and failing it because the boss was randomly made too hard for ppl that don't understand that "red circle is bad" turns it into a very frustrating experience where i end up feeling i just wasted 30 mins of my time.

My main issue with sorrow: he moves too far too often, making it most of the time staying in the most unfavorable position for the players with its back against the wall when he does the wing flapping. 

My main issues with Umbriel: too many things are happening. The arrows for the axes don't portray how big the axe throwing is, same as with Eparch's cross attack in the fractal fight. Then each axe moves with a very short and almost non-visible warning to where it moves, doing it constantly when we have to keep an eye on the boss to simply not get a big hit. Too many jumps in a very large zone means he'll end up from one side of the isle to another, so we have to chase him while avoiding axes that ROOT us (why? wasn't the dumb amount of bleeds they leave enough so our cleanses remove only one and get screwed anyway?), and also we need to pick up orbs to give to zojja to the other far end of the isle. And finally we have to kill his clones first to have permission to cc the main guy so we are allowed to go to the next isle.

I write this as a player that mostly plays alone, doing my little part in big events. I know these fights can be done with people that know what to do, but in most cases we're paired with people that seem to have toasters as a pc, making lots of effects not showing on time (i have plenty of those from time to time) or others that just don't understand (yet) that big red circles mean you die.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

I seriously recommend not doing the public version of convergences. 

If you can, check the Lfg for a organized run. 

These are much smoother. 

Even the CM versions. Except for umbriel, which can be messy, these were some of the smoothest runs I ever had. 

[Surelia.2651]

Will second @DanAlcedo.3281's advice.   Given the issues and I will add also the literally constant amount of leechers who do absolutely nothing, it's really not worth doing them this way unless you just cannot log on when an lfg group is being run.    I have completed night 200 public runs and, since the update especially, I now find them simply unbearable. 
I switched to doing only ones in LFG where the commanders assign roles, islands, etc. and have seen all issues reduced to zero.  Completed two gold CMs two days ago this way.  Give it a try; it's nice to be in company with others who want to get things done, not just watch everyone do it.

[Zera.9435]

Sorry bro, I wish you were able to do convergences more often.  Umbriel and Sorrow just kittening suck, no matter the situation. All I can say is keep on keeping on. Once a day is more than enough, but sneak in extra runs if you're able. Remember that Umbriel is still new and people are still getting the hang of it, in time more people will get the hang of it and it won't fail as often. The nice thing about the extra bosses is that the odds of getting umbriel or sorrow are 1 in 3, so you will get a kitten day once in a while, but most days you won't. Just get angry and power through. Familiarize yourself as best you can with the rotations. There is nothing you can do about the other players. Let's just hope they read this. Get mad! Make life take those lemons back!

[KindredPhoenyx.8976]

I just had a total 1% wipe on Umbriel's split phase and I've never hated this boss on public more than I do now. That was a 30 minute waste of my time with a 3 hr time gate on my suffused rune.

Edited May 31 by KindredPhoenyx.8976

[Healix.5819]

I've never had a problem with public (100% success rate, ~150 runs). Just don't join late - I've joined a few minutes late twice and there was obviously far more leechers.

I've only seen the new one twice, but there was nothing notable about it. Ignore the axes (getting RNG'd has been too rare to care about), don't stand in the obviously marked death spots and look away from everything when prompted seems to be about it. Most people never move unless the boss moves, so the AoE usually gets 10-20 people downed, but it ultimately doesn't matter.

Sorrow, I've always found to be one the easiest. I have noticed that 99% of players never use glider skills, when the bosses that start with a break bar makes it an obvious opener. Note the anti-grav circles on Sorrow allow you to jump and glide to use the CC bomb, or you can get intentionally hit by the lines instead to raise you up.

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

5 hours ago, Blck Drgn Roku.9387 said:

I'm trying to do public convergences once a day.

That's your problem, you're trying to do it in Public instead of Private.

2 hours ago, Healix.5819 said:

I've never had a problem with public (100% success rate, ~150 runs). Just don't join late - I've joined a few minutes late twice and there was obviously far more leechers.

I've only seen the new one twice, but there was nothing notable about it. Ignore the axes (getting RNG'd has been too rare to care about), don't stand in the obviously marked death spots and look away from everything when prompted seems to be about it. Most people never move unless the boss moves, so the AoE usually gets 10-20 people downed, but it ultimately doesn't matter.

Sorrow, I've always found to be one the easiest. I have noticed that 99% of players never use glider skills, when the bosses that start with a break bar makes it an obvious opener. Note the anti-grav circles on Sorrow allow you to jump and glide to use the CC bomb, or you can get intentionally hit by the lines instead to raise you up.

Had my first ever fail right now, figured I'd do a public Convergence, since it's a Special WV objective, sat around at the portal, joined as soon as it opened aaand half the instance was AFK and we wiped at 60% on Umbriel.. probably more than half the instance, since I saw maybe 20 people on the boss at the end, most of them were floor tanking.

[Trejgon.9367]

Didn't meet Umbriel yet so cannot comment on that one, but I am doing convergences in public, and had Sorrow yesterday and we had no issue with it, no tag no coordination.

[Blck Drgn Roku.9387]

3 hours ago, KindredPhoenyx.8976 said:

I just had a total 1% wipe on Umbriel's split phase and I've never hated this boss on public more than I do now. That was a 30 minute waste of my time with a 3 hr time gate on my suffused rune.

dude, i think we were in the exact same run today

[Sarge shot Grif.6450]

They're just boring. Boring to the point that I'm buying the T2 armor skip every time I start a new collection.

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

51 minutes ago, Trejgon.9367 said:

Didn't meet Umbriel yet so cannot comment on that one, but I am doing convergences in public, and had Sorrow yesterday and we had no issue with it, no tag no coordination.

Umbriel makes Sorrow look like Big Nose Ted. Dude dashes around, AoE on top of AoE, instead of throwing you around you get rooted on Umbriel making Umbriel the Anti-Sorrow.  It's a fairly interesting boss, but with people standing close or on Zojja that boss makes short work of her due to the AoEs and attacks.

[Blck Drgn Roku.9387]

So far this week i tried public convergence once a day. Only did it twice this thursday. It went: Sorrow, Umbriel, Sorrow, Umbriel, Umbriel, Sorrow (success), Umbriel. Guess how i feel about "chances".

[rotten.9753]

3 hours ago, Blck Drgn Roku.9387 said:

So far this week i tried public convergence once a day. Only did it twice this thursday. It went: Sorrow, Umbriel, Sorrow, Umbriel, Umbriel, Sorrow (success), Umbriel. Guess how i feel about "chances".

It's possible that each week has a different set of bosses to draw from.

[Leger.3724]

8 hours ago, rotten.9753 said:

It's possible that each week has a different set of bosses to draw from.

Feels like every week is Umbriel in public just to kitten with the playerbase. I've done 10-12 publics and one has not been Umbriel.

And of course Umbriel is the toughest for reasons explained in the OP - he moves constantly, his AOEs move constantly, people like to clump up and eat the AOEs and suddenly you're down 20 kittening people and Zojja can't be healed anymore as Umbriel zooms around the kittening map being a pain in the kitten to DPS causing Zojja to take more damage.

It's a poorly designed fight for a public convergence. It should have been private squads only. Such a joke. I just want to casually grind the suffused pieces. And Arena Net has decided 11/12 times I get Umbriel for a 50/50 chance at failing.

My other option is join the toxic cesspool of mediocrity that is 'competitive' end  game pve groups.

[rotten.9753]

1 hour ago, Leger.3724 said:

and suddenly you're down 20 kittening people

Well, that's the problem with the average GW2 player, they didn't learn to move out of AoE for 12 years but that's not the reason to design fights without deadly AoE.

[TheNurgle.4825]

On 6/2/2024 at 4:05 PM, Leger.3724 said:

And of course Umbriel is the toughest for reasons explained in the OP - he moves constantly, his AOEs move constantly, people like to clump up and eat the AOEs and suddenly you're down 20 kittening people

This is nice overview of GW2 playerbase. Someting similar can be said for new fractal. In most MMOs you need to move around, dodge, heal and so on. Also on one side you have complaints about bosses being golems with no movement and when ANET listen and design bosses so they are not static golems GW2 playerbase can not handle it.

[MercurialKuroSludge.8974]

10 hours ago, TheNurgle.4825 said:

This is nice overview of GW2 playerbase. Someting similar can be said for new fractal. In most MMOs you need to move around, dodge, heal and so on. Also on one side you have complaints about bosses being golems with no movement and when ANET listen and design bosses so they are not static golems GW2 playerbase can not handle it.

Clearly you haven't done Fractal CMs much, becuz most ppl like the oldest 3, 2 of which has the boss moving moderately, Nightmare and Sunqua.
Umbriel is a copy pasta of Kanaxai who forces you to afk 25% of the time, I wonder why ppl dont like fighting him?

[Blackmoon.6837]

Third day. Third convergence fail.

I think I'll just stop this map. 😄

[Sobx.1758]

Private squads (""private"", they're still open for the players in lfg) are better than public ones since there's less slacking when people realize they can be kicked for leeching/afking. Even with that, I tried a few public runs in the last few days and succeeded. If leechers are an issue, start playing with comm tags to reduce the number of leechers.

Edited June 7 by Sobx.1758

[Nidome.1365]

People saying "Don't do public" that is a stupid comment.
Convergences are general content, a public event and therefore should not require private levels of organisation - only CMs should require that.
Public events should be built for the average player/general pug groups, the problem is that Umbriel (and to some extent Sorrow) are badly designed. One of the main mechanics of the convergence is that you are required to pick up essence and heal Zojja, however most of the time Sorrow drops a reverse gravity AOE on the area essence is dropped restricting that collection, and Umbriel drops multiple very nasty spinning axe AOEs on the essence drops and sometimes on Zojja making it very hard to collect and deposit essence, also when the axes spawn the hitbox is larger than the warning circle that appears beforehand, with the axes themselves not always being completely visible.
Unless something has changed you are meant to get a random boss spawn, and don't find that out until it spawns, although this week it seems that I've had Umbriel twice as much as every other boss put together.
Anet should revisit the mechanics for Umbriel.

[Heibi.4251]

I've had nothing but Umbriel all week. 7 times I think. Lost track due to the non-randomness of the whole thing.

[Sobx.1758]

23 hours ago, Nidome.1365 said:

People saying "Don't do public" that is a stupid comment.
Convergences are general content, a public event and therefore should not require private levels of organisation - only CMs should require that.
Public events should be built for the average player/general pug groups, the problem is that Umbriel (and to some extent Sorrow) are badly designed.

No, they're not a "stupid comment", it's your lack of understanding of those posts. It has next to nothing to do with any "private levels of organisation"(??) or "not being built for the average player", but everything to do with being able to kick out leechers and afkers by the commander. That alone significantly reduces -or removes entirely- players waiting to hit the boss a few times at the last minute in order to get their rewards for next to no gameplay.

23 hours ago, Nidome.1365 said:

Anet should revisit the mechanics for Umbriel.

No, not really. Literally walk out of orange/red circles.

Edited June 10 by Sobx.1758

[Blck Drgn Roku.9387]

This week was somewhat normal for me. Got Umbriel twice, managed to kill him once (which is too much an effort). I believe that right now he's the most problematic fight still, since he keeps jumping around and his axes kill everyone with they poorly marked ranges (becaue their arrows are too small and don't show how far they go together with way so many things happening during the fight one can do nothing about them even if you see them coming). I tried looking for groups as the friendly comments said, but the only ones that happen to show are CM and i don't want to either do cm nor spend 10g for a key myself, much less daily. 

I really hope Anet is working on tuning Umbriel down, because right now i've faced him around 10 times and managed to kill him only once, by sheer luck, because i've had groups that lost twice in the final split, when he's at 1 hp. I really don't mind it being a hard fight, but his damage is too high both because of his large hits and his small innumerable ones. So far i've never worried much about zojja getting hit too much except by sorrow, but umbriel does WAY too much at the same time and i honestly don't understand yet if the boss can do direct damaga to zojja or not. A big problem that makes a fight fail with sorrow is when he runs and parks right where zojja is, making the recollection of orbs a waste, because the moment we pick them up, zojja gobbles them up and then we can't heal her when she needs it. With Umbriel happens EVERY TIME because he keeps jumping towards her.

So far every time Umbriel appears, the map chat fills with "ugh" and things of  the like (and my internal hate screams) because most of us already know this convergence has been a wasted 30 mins for us all.

[The Ghost.3087]

Umbriel fight needs to be recheked by the devs. There are too many things happening and with so many people on Umbriel you cannot really see sometimes the circles or the axes which leads to a huge failure since more than half the team dies due to the KO Numeric circles under the mass of peeps which are not visible due to the many players on top of them, SOMETIMES. That's one problem, the other problem is that Umriel axes leave too much bleeding stacks on the players and their pathing is not clearer or more noticeable, literally you have second to react before those axes start moving if you notice it and for some reason they pull you and stun you? Really? REALLY?!! You should remove the pull at least, stun is fine if the axe crosses you, not fine if it pulls you in its circle and stuns you and bleeds you... certain death. NOT FUN!

 

Simply it is unrealistic, and it needs either better noticeable warnings for the circles of death (the five numeric circles), and the axes, or simply take their damage down with 50% if not damage, bleed stacks should be 75% cut down this is NORMAL instance not a CM. And even in CM the bleeding stacks should be 50% less, so peeps can actually manage and healers can heal. On top of that, those axes shouldn't be able to hit or stack on Zojja, lets be realistic, a player doesn't know when those axes will go for them, and if they are on Zojja at that time, which happens 99% of the time, those axes simply stack right on top of Zojja and bleeds her to death which ruins the fun and makes the instance unbeatable. Same goes for the numeric circles. Those should give proper warning to the player with flashing red screen or something that the player can instantly notice and have enough time to react. It could start with yellow flashing and then slowly build up speed and turns into red flashing. That would definitely help out with the circles and axes, just like the eye flashes yellow screen for the player if they are looking into it. And for god sake stop putting such huge amount of damage on normal instances. THAT IS INSANE and NOT FUN for the players. Even in CMs that isn't fun at all.

 

Are you trying to make a content that completely ruins players fun or are you trying to make a content that players can actually enjoy from all aspects? If it is the first, you will lose tons of players within months, if it is the second, then start working on those fixes and balances faster and sooner. Taking a month is not an option because that completely bleeds players out. Those things should be your TOP priority. Fixing new content bugs, and unfair fights due to mechs or visibility. YOU NEED TO START PRIORATIZING THIS, ALREADY! 

Edited June 16 by The Ghost.3087

[Sobx.1758]

21 hours ago, The Ghost.3087 said:

Umbriel fight needs to be recheked by the devs. There are too many things happening and with so many people on Umbriel you cannot really see sometimes the circles or the axes which leads to a huge failure since more than half the team dies due to the KO Numeric circles under the mass of peeps which are not visible due to the many players on top of them, SOMETIMES. That's one problem, the other problem is that Umriel axes leave too much bleeding stacks on the players and their pathing is not clearer or more noticeable, literally you have second to react before those axes start moving if you notice it and for some reason they pull you and stun you? Really? REALLY?!! You should remove the pull at least, stun is fine if the axe crosses you, not fine if it pulls you in its circle and stuns you and bleeds you... certain death. NOT FUN!

 

Simply it is unrealistic, and it needs either better noticeable warnings for the circles of death (the five numeric circles), and the axes, or simply take their damage down with 50% if not damage, bleed stacks should be 75% cut down this is NORMAL instance not a CM. And even in CM the bleeding stacks should be 50% less, so peeps can actually manage and healers can heal. On top of that, those axes shouldn't be able to hit or stack on Zojja, lets be realistic, a player doesn't know when those axes will go for them, and if they are on Zojja at that time, which happens 99% of the time, those axes simply stack right on top of Zojja and bleeds her to death which ruins the fun and makes the instance unbeatable. Same goes for the numeric circles. Those should give proper warning to the player with flashing red screen or something that the player can instantly notice and have enough time to react. It could start with yellow flashing and then slowly build up speed and turns into red flashing. That would definitely help out with the circles and axes, just like the eye flashes yellow screen for the player if they are looking into it. And for god sake stop putting such huge amount of damage on normal instances. THAT IS INSANE and NOT FUN for the players. Even in CMs that isn't fun at all.

 

Are you trying to make a content that completely ruins players fun or are you trying to make a content that players can actually enjoy from all aspects? If it is the first, you will lose tons of players within months, if it is the second, then start working on those fixes and balances faster and sooner. Taking a month is not an option because that completely bleeds players out. Those things should be your TOP priority. Fixing new content bugs, and unfair fights due to mechs or visibility. YOU NEED TO START PRIORATIZING THIS, ALREADY! 

I don't recall a single time I somehow wasn't able to see the numbered circles. The circles themelves are big enough and the numbers appear above everyone. At this point I'm convinced it's not really possible for them to be "invisible because of the players". Zoom out and pay some attention. You should be able to simply run out of them -and that doesn't even count any movement ability or dodging. Perhaps they're not "fixing" it, because there's nothing to fix about it.
The paths of the axes are visible as well and pretty sure their arrival place is marked by slightly dimmer orange circles. Also condi clear is part of the game.