Guild Wars 2

I killed them dozens of times and as I can agree that it can be very nice experience for a new player but it does not give anything to veteran players. The loot at the end is just unrewarding if I say that politely. The dragons do need revamp either in encounter behavior and also in rewards. As I saw Grenth revamp I’m quite sure that Anet can provide very nice boss improvement if they have time. Let’s start with rewards revamp.

Each dragon phase and pre-events should award player specific percentage to final loot generated in the chest.

Example for Claw of Jormag event:

Crystal 1 – 10% rare, 0.5% exotic
Crystal 2 – 10% rare, 0.5% exotic
Crystal 3 – 10% rare, 0.5% exotic
Crystal 4 – 10% rare, 0.5% exotic
Phase 1 – 15% rare, 0.75% exotic
Phase 2 – 15% rare, 0.75% exotic

Total: 70% rare, 4,5% exotic in a chest if every encounter was player part of. This percentage contains chance for one rare/exotic. You can get more rares/exotics in a chest but the chance is lower. I would personally divide it by 3. In this case, chance for getting second rare is ~23%, 1.5% for second exotic, ~7.6% and 0.5% for third rare/exotic and so on. Blue tier of gear should be completely removed and minimum green tier (masterwork) is awarded. The maximum number of gear from chest should stay the same.

Please keep in mind that the encounter must be revamped too for meeting such generous loot upgrade. Let’s see some ideas for CoJ encounter revamp. Dragons should have scaling turned on but from specific minimum (15+ players)

Crystals:

Monsters should spawn continuously and not like it’s now once the crystal meets specific damage percentage taken. The monsters should be stronger and that encounter should not allow small group to destroy crystals. Minimum should be 15 people for crystals 1-4. Also fighting these monsters need more group oriented behavior not just zerg. E.g. we have crystal spawning trolls. The troll will generate an aura protecting the crystal. In case the troll won’t be killed and pulled away from crystal, the crystal is immune to damage. Every crystal should have different way how we can destroy it.

CoJ phase 1:

First get rid of safe spots. E.g. on the right edge of the rock where almost nothing can hit you (reach you). Incoming crystals should be prerequisite for destroying ice wall. It means that we need to kill all elementals and then we can proceed and continue in destroying the ice wall. E.g. we can freeze all cannons (providing specific “melting” debuff to ice wall) and once all elementals are killed the freeze status breaks and cannons can shoot again. It will force people to move more and not just stay on one place. Also covering that blind spot with CoJ abilities will help too.

CoJ phase 2:

The phase 2 is more or less balanced only problem there is people inability to do proper things like guarding NPC’s carrying bombs, destroying ice pillars and so on. What needs to be covered is again the blind spot on the right side of the rock..where nothing can reach you except of fear. People need to clearly know that this is not the way.

Make sure we can destroy the left and right side with elementals. Right now they have too much HP and the time when CoJ spawns them again is too short. We should have an opportunity to ease the encounter.

Bug fixes (again mainly CoJ event).

- get rid of fear chain – please remove two fears in a row..it is just stupid and makes remove conditions useless.
- make fear just one time ability and not on going ability. Especially visible in Tequatl encounter when I remove fear but I’m hit with a fear again because it is still running. We need to have our abilities useful.
- get rid of red circles delay under destroyed ice pillars in CoJ phase 2. Problem is that when you destroy that pillar, the red circle shows even if the crystal is destroyed. This delay is problematic because you destroy the crystal but the NPC can still step on the place and die. Which is pretty annoying. It needs to be synchronized. Destroyed pillar = removed red circle immediately.
- get rid of ice pillar collision once the destroy animation is played. We destroyed it, right, so why the hell these small shards do have so destructive effect on NPC carrying a bomb? HP is zero, pillar is down (the debris is falling) and the NPC can be still destroyed.
- lower leap damage for champion wolf. I have almost 25k HP p/v/t armor and I’m still insta downed. It’s not even funny and honestly almost impossible to avoid.
- do NOT reset the HP from phase 1. In case we are able to generate a lot of damage, we should not be punished for that and so phase 2 can be shorter. Even if we get CoJ to 25% in phase 1, it is reset to 50% in phase 2. Sorry that is not really nice and well designed. Either fix phase 1 or keep it like that without resetting the HP to 50%.
- make sure that bomb kit (what throws grenades) does not disappear when I use first ability. It should stay like flamethrower. It makes this tool useless.
- improve hit collision system on you crystals. It is pretty hard to hit them. Well this problem is across whole game (e.g. boss encounter in HotW). It does affect melee fight and using flamethrower significantly.
update
- sync ice wall HP bar with actual destruction. Even if the ice wall does have HP bar 0, it is still absorbing damage and we need to wait up to 10 seconds until it is really destroyed. It’s slightly breaking proper tactic regarding carrying a detonation charge to Claw and also avoiding “freezing” debuff properly.

I’m aware that such changes can prolong the encounter twice (or not if played well). The reason behind that is to provide decent reward, better feeling you defeated something strong (not stupid = safe spots like the place pretty close to Shatterer where mainly shard prison can reach you and then nothing, any safe spot around Tequatl, safe right side rock area in CoJ encounter). I believe that if the adequate reward is provided the encounter can be improved significantly. There is dozens of improvements which can be applied to any dragon encounter within the game. This is just fragment of it.

I think if you get rid of the safe spots on phase 1 you’d have to lower the HP of the wall considerably, or lower the frost damage getting near that zone does, because with the way it currently works that wall has a load of hp and would take forever to get down even once. Maybe make it so the crystals fall constantly and destroying them does a fair amount of damage to the wall.

Other than that, A+#1 post:)

The wall goes down pretty quickly if you use explosive charge instead of charzookas. Problem is that most of the ppl do not really know that using them is much faster than standard way. However, it’s slightly harder. You just need to use proper dodge rolls when running to ice wall and vice versa. For example in a group of 5-10 ppl you can get down the wall in one minute or sooner if I exaggerate a little bit. It is really going down fast. I would suggest to try that and you will see. :-)

I would disagree about ever needing 15 people for the crystals as for two of them there are safe spots where archers can sit and take no damage while taking out the crystals. In one spot there is no way for any monster to even reach them. The only way to change this would be to punish ranged fighters by moving the crystals farther away form the safe spot. Personally, I like as a ranged fighter that there are spots I can sit and snipe at a distance without having to get in the fray. To me, this is as it should be as archers should never be used as front line fighters. After all, the longbow does more damage the farther away you are from the target.

The loot from a dragon chest is why I don’t do dragons at all anymore. Greens and blues? really? no thanks. The fight takes way too long and is too epic for that kind of ‘reward’.
Get rid of the blues and greens from the drop tables and I’ll frequent the dragon events, until then I’ll do more lucrative and satisfying events.

i stoped doing draons completly after i got a full chest of blues. im sorry but i dont want to do the draons anymore. im jsut watin for they day when say tea kettal comes out and says rarr and everyone looks at him and says go right ahead.
think of the release videos and look at the game emblem a dragon. yes elder and ancient dragons are hear going to destroy the world. you would think we would get better loot from that lol.

They need to make dragon events are low possibility to actually win, and hence ramp up the rewards when you do win.
If you look at Sunless, I think what they could do is have him on a timer to kill before he razes the area and village around it. But he has to fly in and out, land, smash the place up while on the move, etc. If you can kill him before he smashes up the area you win, but it’s tough.
If you lose then the community has to do certain things to rebuild the village which should take a decent amount of effort and time so he isn’t farmable. Once it’s rebuilt dragon is on a timer to come back and repeat.
What would be even better is that he does this to random villages on the map.

laibros.3490:

The wall goes down pretty quickly if you use explosive charge instead of charzookas. Problem is that most of the ppl do not really know that using them is much faster than standard way. However, it’s slightly harder. You just need to use proper dodge rolls when running to ice wall and vice versa. For example in a group of 5-10 ppl you can get down the wall in one minute or sooner if I exaggerate a little bit. It is really going down fast. I would suggest to try that and you will see. :-)

I’ve tried the charges and they’re way too much of a pain to use effectively. I always end up dead in the middle of the field because the frostbite is way op…you can’t dodge out of the frostbite effect, and half of the time the ice chunks don’t even render before they knock you all the way back to the cannons. Thinking about it, blowing up the ice wall is stupid anyhow. It should be defending the cannons so they can blow up the ice wall really.

To Nazgul:
My point is to make dragon fight more epic like encounter and force (try to teach) ppl to cooperate more, learn tactic and work as team. The minimum 15 ppl are necessary for successful ice crystal destruction. E.g. right now the second crystal spawns 2 trolls. If two trolls do have that aura, more ppl might be needed for kiting them. However I’m talking about unskilled people. That should be always possibility for finishing the event in very organized groups (5+). Two people can easily kite them and rest can damage crystal.

To Rizzo:
I agree, that must be learned. Avoiding ice shards is really easy but sometimes you must dodge into opposite direction which is unnatural for normal front camera view. However Anet did kitten good job regarding timing demo charges and timer on frostbite. So when you’re running down from ice wall with frostbite it expires almost every time when you’re again running towards ice wall and once you’re here you’re healed because you were out of combat (you can have speed buff up, it is still fine). Once you master that, you will find out that this way is much better than charzookas.

As i said before. Make them spawn once every 24h, guaranteed 2 rares (could be cores/lodestones as well) and 30% to get an exotic. This way they’ll be WORTH doing and couldn’t exactly be farmed since its once per 24h.

laibros.3490:

To Rizzo:
I agree, that must be learned. Avoiding ice shards is really easy but sometimes you must dodge into opposite direction which is unnatural for normal front camera view. However Anet did kitten good job regarding timing demo charges and timer on frostbite. So when you’re running down from ice wall with frostbite it expires almost every time when you’re again running towards ice wall and once you’re here you’re healed because you were out of combat (you can have speed buff up, it is still fine). Once you master that, you will find out that this way is much better than charzookas.

Might just be me but that doesn’t sound like a fun thing to do, I’d rather stand in a safe spot and shoot the wall consistently.

Regardless I’m doing this fight with my Mesmer now so I need neither charges nor Charrzookas.