This mob, hell most of this expansion, isn’t worth a full-fledged update. Instead of creating a story or comic, I decided to reflect on the quality of code and functionality that we’ve become complacent with.

Allow me to spoil the fight for you (most of this information is available on allakhazam, so I'm not the first). When you reach Kess atop The Ascent, she (he? it? shim?) is surrounded by several “Inactive XXX” statues. As you kill Kess, these statues become “Active XXX” and begin to heal her, one by one. After they heal her (something to the tune of) three times, they becomes “Depleted XXX” and start fighting your raid. At which point you can then finish them off, and resume beating down Kess. After all the statues wake up and die, Kess repops with like 8 more statues. You have to find the trackable statue, kill it, and burn Kess during the rest phase (before the statues repop again, and you have to find the trackable one again, and kill it again… ect ect). This of course comes along with frontal AE dodging, group curing, and melee push issues (since you can't pin dragons).

All of that sounds like a pretty invigorating fight, now doesn’t it? It also seems pretty damn straight-forward and simple. So why hasn’t Wraith downed such an easy, simple encounter before? The answer lies in “fine steel” weapons. You see my faithful reader; the Kess event ASSUMES you have moderate DPS as a raid. If you exceed the ‘recommended damage limit’, SoE writes you a phatty ticket and makes you kill Kess into infinitum. That’s right folks… If you’re ‘too uber’ you lose the Kessdona event!.... You see, the script was written so poorly, that it cannot compensate for varying DPS levels. The rate in which Kess gets healed is hardcoded, and isn’t dynamic. Because of this, we have actually KILLED Kess with most of her statues still standing. What does this do? It pops another Kess (yes you get 2 of them, guess they’re not ‘lore’ or something)! And the statues just stop responding… locking you into this continuous loop of killing Kess, and watching her repop.

“But Mitcheypoo, it’s SoE… we’ve come to expect this!” That’s my point kids. We have becomes too complacent with shotty code, with poorly designed zones, and with broken game content. I’d rather have it done right, then done fast. And, until we stop accepting almost-blank CDs with less than ½ the expansion on them (because the other ½ isn’t done at the time they went live), SoE will keep dishing out the fecal matter.

-Mitcheypoo