Thank you for the recap. It's sometimes difficult to know where you should be during one of these in order to hear everything. And to be fair, this was one of the largest crowds I've ever seen at such an event.
Monsters at EM events will have a combination of attacks and powers, of which the reverse life leach, which effects all life leaches so far as I know not just the Vampire form one, is only one. When you see that message, if your only life leach comes from Vampire form it is easy enough to work around it by coming out of Vampire form
That's a fine explanation of what the tainted life effect
is, but with all due respect, I don't see the point of it.
You can stand out of harm's way spamming summons, or spamming heals on a pet or whatever, or you can run in and try to smash the monster in the face with an axe. If you do the latter, it might actually hit you, and amid such a crowd you have zero chance of reacting in a timely fashion if it chooses to do so.
Aha, but if you choose to do the latter, you ought to have to additionally handicap yourself by canceling a core buff and/or switching to an inferior weapon, since all good PVE weapons have leeches. Because... well I don't know why.
I have a small handful of suggestions to make regarding encounter design. Take them or leave them as you see fit.
No matter what you throw out there, no matter what powers you give it, if the Atlantic zerg horde can get into its rhythym and really start dumping on it, it will fall in very short order. To extend the encounter and add a bit more interactivity than mashing Vas Flam ninety times in a row, you need to keep the crowd off balance. This means lots of target-switching and lots of secondary spawn.
Holding the event in Wrong was a great idea. Now if one or more enemies had been given full necromancy casting, they would have cast animate dead on all the spawn corpses, and recycled them as a constant stream of flesh golems and such. Not only that, but player-created energy vortexes and other uncontrolled summons would have (through some quirk of design) ignored those flesh golems and allowed them to harrass the crowd with impunity.
The Dark Father bone-throwing script is another one very well-suited to this. Once enough rotting corpses and lich lords begin to pile up, people are going to HAVE to quit burning the boss to defend themselves. Bennu did this once in Ilshenar and half the stuff was popping up as paragons and it was great. Plus the lich lords can cast animate dead.
Maybe that area-effect lethal poison attack one of the bosses has? That would be great for giving even a massive crowd something else to think about.
You gotta make it dangerous to even be in the vicinity of these things. If all it can hurt is the one thing it's targeting at a time, it'll never give the Atlantic zerg horde the least bit of pause, even if it's one-shotting everything it targets. Now maybe the stuff tonight had some powers like that, but if I didn't notice them, it probably wasn't enough.
Anyway don't take this the wrong way. I love Bennu and I harrass him like this all the time. I know there's only so much you can do amid 400 screaming players.
