Tomb of the Bug Lord… Mythic/GOA Q&A type people, if I may have your attention please ;)

AAAAGH!

AAAAGH!

And thrice AAAAGH!

Ok this post is not Mythic bashing, but is instead a cry for help. Please for the love of Nurgle’s festering buboes, just fix this bloody dungeon.

I’m in a fairly contented place in WAR right now, but Tomb of the Vulture Lord is doing it’s utmost to change that. The last 3 runs in a row we’ve had to quit because of bugs on the third boss. Considering its not a dungeon you can just decide to do on a whim, this situation is more than a little annoying. Also with the limited EU in-game support, whenever it goes tits up you’re forced into quitting the instance entirely. I often think GOA get an overly hard time from the player base, but sorry chaps, your CSR responses are so slow there’s no point asking for help. I don’t plan on sitting in a dungeon for 24 hours…

I would write in-game bug reports, but the text box is actually too small! So Mythic please consider this as my bug report submission:

First run

Lag spikes (for want of a better term). As ever the dungeon is affected by what is going on in the outside world. City siege? LOTS of lag spikes. Zone locks? Lag spike. A trial account player in Nordland does /fart? Lag spike. It is incredibly annoying to wipe on a boss you have on farm, just because the game has paused for a couple of seconds and the bosses attack/ability timers go all out of whack and he wtfpwns you for 14k damage in 1 second. BTW could anyone confirm: does this lag spike lark happen on US servers?

A lag spike causes a wipe on the third boss and we release, but now the doors prior to the swinging axes are locked. We wait, yet nothing happens. The way is shut. We do a /partyresetinstance which normally teleport you in-between the outer doors and lets you get back inside, but nooooooo. We get teleported to Praag??? We would have gone back, once again cleared the longwinded trash before the third boss, but a few seconds later Order lock Land of the Dead. Denied…

Second run

Lag spikes! Ugh…

Third boss vanishes below the floor…

Lag spike!

The boss reappears amongst our healers, instant bombs and we wipe.

Deja-vue… The door is again locked. Not wanting to risk the /partyresetinstance free ride to Praag again, we leave the dungeon by the exits. However, the colossus has been spawned and we can’t get in while that is going on. 15 minute cooldown afterwards as well, yay. This was followed by a series of unfortunate events that prevented us continuing the dungeon, again.

Third run

AAAAGHHHH! Lag spikes!

First boss in the carrion phase is now ignoring Quake… odd, I’m sure he didn’t before?

Third boss… Ok this might take a while…

Lag spikes screwing up the bosses ability/attack timers. Instant bombs, delayed bombs, bombs turning into teleports, you name it.

One the first attempt the bosses ranged attacks were doing astronomical damage, it seemed like he was ignoring wards.

Repeatedly ignoring taunts.

Not registering threat properly. Normally I can tank this bugger using the odd taunt and sodding Ravage, but this time no matter what I did he would lose agro and go for our Shaman (that I had guard on). After the second wipe we basically tested this out and he went straight for our Shaman even if he did nothing at all. Not clearing threat from previous wipes?

I’m standing next to the boss, yet I am getting “can not see your target” messages.

The boss sunk through the floor numerous times. Thankfully I managed to drag him out most times, though this caused all sorts of problems when combined with the threat related issues. Also on several occasions once we got the boss back onto the ground level his AoE bomb graphics stopped appearing. Alas, the bombs still worked.

Melee DPS running out of a bomb and still getting killed, despite the fact he got out so quickly and so far that he was actually BEHIND our healers at the time of death…

The boss took off and flew through the air and started attacking us from around head height.

Eventually we killed the boss and the loot plus PQ chests both dropped correctly. After everyone got their loot, the boss suddenly respawned on us. He then instant bombed, killed those next to him and started his ranged streams of poo attacks. An achievement I think, wiped by a “dead” boss… Can we get a special title? ;)

I believe it was at this point that I eloquently expressed my feelings on the matter, “fuck this shit”. No bloody way I was going to continue further in with it playing up like that. What was doubly ironic was we had a guy with us that hadn’t been to the dungeon before and up until that point he’d been saying how much he was enjoying it. What a marvellous introduction to Vulture Lord it turned into eh?

What I find particularly frustrating with all of this is I have killed everything in the dungeon before. I only need the Tyrant Chest and a couple more Funery Masks and I will have full Tyrant. Yet it is proving impossible to complete the armour set because the dungeon flits between working perfectly and being utterly broken. This run of 3 weeks worth of utterly broken is far from amusing and to be quite honest is also utterly unacceptable. I mean for crying out loud, it’s the third sodding boss, we’ve had him on farm for like a year or something. Yet now I can’t get past him because of things completely out of my control??? I’m curious though; do the American servers suffer with the same problems? Is it the dungeon at fault or is it all linked to these lag spike type issues we’re cursed with on the EU servers?

Whatever the root of the problem, it’s something that results in a poor “quality” experience for the user. And you know what, we already went through this exact same situation with Lost Vale. Would the big competitor release a dungeon in this state? One thinks not. Actually what makes this even more frustrating is Tomb of the Vulture is actually a brilliant dungeon. It looks amazing, has good boss fights and other than a few pacing problems (trash before the 3rd boss and the 6th boss fight itself) is a really fun instance. If it weren’t so bug ridden it would be considered an MMORPG classic dungeon.

To the folks from GOA and Mythic that read my rambling, whilst I’d love an acknowledgement, at the least please can you pass my list of problems to someone that can actually do something. ;)