Attack of the Boss Bug
Wolcen has thrown up something of a… Fairly major bug I would say, in it’s final campaign boss encounter. It’s very reminiscient of the Zul’Aman ‘Door Boss’ in that it really isn’t meant to be the difficult part of the encounter. But it is. And it seems to be quite bad in the current patch version (1.0.4.0).
I’m still going to tip-toe around what the final campaign boss of Wolcen is. I’m sure there are many not yet ready for that spoiler. But it is a multi-phase affair. Three phases, in fact. And in the final two out of the three phases it is possible to render the boss completely stuck, immune to further damage and unbeatable.
If you manage to get your encounter stuck in this way — you only really have two options:
- Die. You can spawn some adds by damaging the lower-right orb in the boss arena which can help with this, as the Boss itself will have stopped engaging with you.
- Exit to the Main Menu. Then re-enter a game and cross everything you have that it doesn’t happen again.
The theories around what causes the boss to get stuck are numerous. The one that seems most accurate to me being that heavy DoT damage (i.e., the use of skills like Anomaly or Tears of Etheliel with the Stalactite Rain modifier) causes it. Another theory suggests that any damage dealt two seconds into or out of the shield-mode transition will cause the boss to get stuck.
Good luck not damaging at all during those windows though. One person suggested you could get the boss near to the point of staggering and then just run around until they shielded. This approach did not seem to work for us. The point of attempting to shield seemed very much tied to the remaining HP. (100%, 75%, 50% and 25% remaining.)
When I first came to this boss, it was on the previous version of the patch (1.0.3.0) and the bug certainly existed, but it seemed less reliable. It saw it on a few of my attempts, but it wasn’t ‘too’ bad. Now though, it is far more difficult to not hit the bug. So I hope for everyone’s sake that we see another patch this week to sort it out. The developers have acknowledged the problem, so fingers crossed.
In the meantime, if respeccing your character and leveling up a new set of non-DoT based skills doesn’t sound appealing (especially since I couldn’t even guarantee it’d work for you) there is another work around of a sorts. It is possible to jump into the game of a friend who is in the Champion of Stormfall game-mode, and it will unlock it for you also.
So if the main reason you don’t want to wait for a fix is to gain access to join your friends in the end-game… Well, there you go. You can. With a bit of a minor skiperoony, which you could come back to in campaign mode once the patch has dropped.
Failing that… Yep. Let’s just hope it’s sorted this week. They worked through the server issues fairly quickly, so I’m pretty hopeful with that out of the way they can.
Still fairly frustrating though!
