Personal Story: "Beast of War" and "To Kill a God"

[acapela.2468]

These final chapters of the Path of Fire personal story were amazing... but not in a good way.

Sohothin kept "dropping" (i.e. unequipping), randomly but often. Had to watch for this continuously, and use the special abilities button to get it back.

On numerous occasions (I would estimate 20+), Sohothin would drop and not re-equip. Engaging the special abilities button was ignored. Had to commit suicide and restart from checkpoint to recover it.

When approaching an area where the Forged and Branded were fighting, even while still out of range, they would all forget about each other, focus me, and subject me to ranged attack. Most/all of them. All at the same moment. The sudden and combined force of this actually one-shot me a few times. No way to zoom through on a mount, there were objectives I had to reach within each grouping. And no way to pick at them from the edges to engage a few at a time, they all focused me simultaneously, and generally stuck with it until I went down.

Dodging Balthazar's AOEs (or repositioning to avoid them) only worked about half the time. Requiring carefully timed dodging and/or precise positioning (or facing, or anything else of the sort) as a mechanic in a complex encounter is an iffy design approach in an online game. Even fairly modest latency can leave the player character looking like they are in good shape as far as the client is concerned, but absolutely in the wrong place at the wrong time from the server's perspective. "Sudden and unexplained death" was a common outcome.

The whole sequence is too long. No breaks/checkpoints. And on top of this, my service provider did their usual "preventive maintenance" (i.e. rebooting their network glue, disconnecting all users in my area suddenly, at a random time, and without warning) in the middle of my first attempt. Had to start ALL OVER AGAIN.

In the end, I gave up trying to do anything cleanly, did my best to prolong the agony, and just "retried from checkpoint" (aka "graveyard zerged") my way through the whole encounter.

Other than all of these issues, and a number of lesser ones, the encounter was a lot of fun!

I have not even looked at the achievements associated with these two chapters of the story... and I suspect I never will. Whatever finesse is required to accomplish the achievements is going to be completely impossible for a player of my modest skill (and with my equipment and on my internet connection). I have always been of belief that the basic content of the personal story (not necessarily the achievements) was intended to be solo-able. Perhaps I am incorrect in this case?

My $0.02.

[Ignigknawt.7869]

Sounded like you just had a lot of unfortunate technical issues, which sucks, as I found the instance to be very solid when I played through it. I definitely agree about the check point thing, the instance is WAY too long not to have a system in place. I was on discord with a couple of unfortunate guildies who had to restart it multiple times, it wasn't fun.

[Sithis.3564]

Did story with my Reaper and DragonHunter and never had any problems you mentioned, except that I did get downed/killed on my DH during the Beast of War part (probably because I rushed to get the achievement and I did all of them). The checkpoints were close enough that it wasn't a problem for me. Your issue with Sohothin seems to be connected to a bug or key bind. Never happened to me.I'm no raider, I don't do fractals and the mechanics of this fight weren't that hard. Most of the time You don't need to dodge even, just step to the side or move behind him to position yourself away from the marks on the ground.

[Ashantara.8731]

You might want to try and repair your game, as the whole "randomly unequipping" issue does not sound right to me (never encountered it, and I did this story mission at least eight times). Also, check if your keyboard's contacts are clean.

[lynspottery.6529]

@Ashantara.8731 said:You might want to try and repair your game, as the whole "randomly unequipping" issue does not sound right to me (never encountered it, and I did this story mission at least eight times). Also, check if your keyboard's contacts are clean.

To Kill a God:I ran this instance with a friend tonight and we spent over 45 minutes and multiple deaths trying to accomplish this without success. Why this particular story event is so out of wack makes me think its bugged. So I placed a bug report in-game for this.

"Randomly sword unequipping" (without special action key to re-equip) was an issue for me in this story instance. And not only that, but when Aurene appeared, there was no circle on the ground near Balthazar's shield for me to use to coordinate attacks with her. As for the special action button that the wiki stated would allow me to re-equip the sword, that action key never showed up.

There is a problem if the "helpful" items that are supposed to be available to the instance owner never work properly. I went in with a friend to two man this and the silly sword would disappear in the middle of combat and I would end up with my axe/torch and longbow instead. Considering that the sword basically was useless for 1/2 of this event, we never got past the appearance of Aurene. What's more, if you two man this instance, and the instance owner gets downed, how on earth is the partner to do anything without the sword? I was downed several times and Balthazar's shield never dropped for my partner.

As for your points for repairing the game or checking to see if my keyboard contacts are clean, don't make sense when everything else works just fine. So the sword disappears and the help circles to coordinate attacks don't appear ??? This seem to be a bug in this ointment of a story instance.

[Haishao.6851]

I imagine you dropping Sohothin mid fightBalthazar: I am fire! I am War! What are you?"kitten" -pick up sword-

[RoseofGilead.8907]

@lynspottery.6529 said:To Kill a God:"Randomly sword unequipping" (without special action key to re-equip) was an issue for me in this story instance. And not only that, but when Aurene appeared, there was no circle on the ground near Balthazar's shield for me to use to coordinate attacks with her. As for the special action button that the wiki stated would allow me to re-equip the sword, that action key never showed up.

There is a problem if the "helpful" items that are supposed to be available to the instance owner never work properly. I went in with a friend to two man this and the silly sword would disappear in the middle of combat and I would end up with my axe/torch and longbow instead. Considering that the sword basically was useless for 1/2 of this event, we never got past the appearance of Aurene. What's more, if you two man this instance, and the instance owner gets downed, how on earth is the partner to do anything without the sword? I was downed several times and Balthazar's shield never dropped for my partner.

As for your points for repairing the game or checking to see if my keyboard contacts are clean, don't make sense when everything else works just fine. So the sword disappears and the help circles to coordinate attacks don't appear ??? This seem to be a bug in this ointment of a story instance.

This thread is the first time I've heard of anyone having an issue where the sword was randomly unequipping itself. Personally, I've done the instance six times now, and I never once had the issue of the sword unequipping itself or the issue of the blue circle not appearing. The fact that this phenomenon seems so rare is why some might suggest that you (and the OP) might have a problem with the game files that may require a repair of the client. Maybe also take a look at your keybindings to make sure you don't somehow have your weapon swap/drop bundle key set to something weird.

As a side note, you don't have to ever use Sohothin during the final boss fight. There's even an achievement for never using it while fighting Balthazar. The sword is not necessary.

[dusanyu.4057]

@Haishao.6851 said:I imagine you dropping Sohothin mid fightBalthazar: I am fire! I am War! What are you?"kitten" -pick up sword-

Tyria's Biggest butter fingers!

[lynspottery.6529]

@RoseofGilead.8907 said:

@lynspottery.6529 said:

To Kill a God:

"Randomly sword unequipping" (without special action key to re-equip) was an issue for me in this story instance. And not only that, but when Aurene appeared, there was no circle on the ground near Balthazar's shield for me to use to coordinate attacks with her. As for the special action button that the wiki stated would allow me to re-equip the sword, that action key never showed up.

There is a problem if the "helpful" items that are supposed to be available to the instance owner never work properly. I went in with a friend to two man this and the silly sword would disappear in the middle of combat and I would end up with my axe/torch and longbow instead. Considering that the sword basically was useless for 1/2 of this event, we never got past the appearance of Aurene. What's more, if you two man this instance, and the instance owner gets downed, how on earth is the partner to do anything without the sword? I was downed several times and Balthazar's shield never dropped for my partner.

As for your points for repairing the game or checking to see if my keyboard contacts are clean, don't make sense when everything else works just fine. So the sword disappears and the help circles to coordinate attacks don't appear ??? This seem to be a bug in this ointment of a story instance.

This thread is the first time I've heard of anyone having an issue where the sword was randomly unequipping itself. Personally, I've done the instance six times now, and I never once had the issue of the sword unequipping itself or the issue of the blue circle not appearing. The fact that this phenomenon seems so rare is why some might suggest that you (and the OP) might have a problem with the game files that may require a repair of the client. Maybe also take a look at your keybindings to make sure you don't somehow have your weapon swap/drop bundle key set to something weird.

As a side note, you don't have to ever use Sohothin during the final boss fight. There's even an achievement for never using it while fighting Balthazar. The sword is not necessary.

Unfortunately, I can't vouch for the "repair game client" files working, because I had just done the repair two days ago before this encounter. So if it is a corrupted game file, the repair did not find one. As for the keybinds, I use all default keybinds, except to adjust the ones for the mounts to use z,x,c,v (respectively), and changed the use of Numlock key to R for run (since I sometimes use my number pad in combat).

Looking into the keybind chart, I found that the special action key is bound to the "." as default. I never use the period for anything and its not anywhere near my game keys on my keyboard, so I can't understand how that could not be active when the game is supposed to provide the special action key when its programmed for certain events. Just seems odd that all this failed for my encounter.

It would be nice if a dev dropped in to help with reasons why this might be happening after I used the normal processes to clean up the client. I did this repair after the last patch because my UI and my game client launcher grew to gigantic proportions. I got the ui back to normal but the launcher still takes over almost my entire monitor screen....I've not see anything being reported to fix it. Nothing else on my pc has changed to cause that to grow so large.

[RoseofGilead.8907]

The sword acts as a bundle when you're equipping it. You have to use the Drop Bundle action (bound to the ` key by default, same as the Weapon Swap default) to switch to your normal weapons, not the Special Action Key. Once you're using your own weapons, then you use the Special Action Key to reequip Sohothin. Maybe you have something strange going on with the drop bundle/weapon swap key? That's really the only thing I can think of for something as strange as the sword randomly dropping on its own.