Guild Wars 2

I want to start this off by saying I’m one of the folks who haven’t been able to complete the Liadri fight yet.

I would like to also state though, that this is not due to the intention of the devs in the difficulty of the fight. I believe that there are other factors that have lead to the hardships a lot of players face that are not directly related to their skill.

1. Orbs are indestructible to ranged characters. Often times they spawn on the opposite side of the arena, and due to them being un-rangeable, they become one of the few things in this game that can’t be properly dodged. For some of us this is a crap-shoot. 50/50 chance in this situation that where the unreachable orb spawns will also be a dark beam field to insta-kill us.

2. The dark beam fields are very hard to see when they are charged up. Because of the close-proximity of the camera the entire fight, you can’t tell if you’re in a field or next to a field. The faintly-red aura on the ground is incredibly difficult to make out, even if you’re not color blind. When you’re standing in it (or not), you can’t see the entire area, so you can’t even tell if you’re about to get nuked.

3. Speaking of the camera. The arena walls make our ability to see what’s in our surroundings ridiculously impossible. Often times you’ll be standing next to a light-field trying to drag in the horrendously slow shadows, only to get killed by one that spawned directly next to you that you couldn’t see because the camera wanted to focus on your shoulderblades instead. I would much rather take the chance of falling out of an un-walled arena, than to continue being oppressed by the poor camera control it gives me with walls.

4. Some classes just aren’t suited for this fight. As a Thief I have trouble being effective AND having over 14k health. Yet no matter how many dodges and teleports I have available, the biggest threat to me in this fight is the necro-hands that hit me even when they don’t hit me. Running at full speed? They hit me. Running slowly, they hit me. Changing directions after it’s fired? Still hits me. I only have so much HP, and unlike guardiands/warriors running around with 20k-24k health, it only takes a few necro hands before I’m down for the count.

Anyways, sort of a rant, complaint and suggestions. Please don’t call us unskilled just because we can’t beat the liadri fight. We probably could if not for some of the inherent shortcomings of the game, such as its poor field visibility coloration or kitten y camera.

Thanks,
-Lore

Treat the poor camera as part of the challenge. People that killed Liadri had that camera too. It’s not just you.

As to your thief, my friend got Light up the Darkness achievement (8 orbs) before I actually did. He was using a thief and I thought he had a huge advantage due to invis. I’ve seen a lot of thieves own liadri.

Also, about the color, I’ve seen people do Liadri on max settings, ie blinding effect is present and still manage to get 8 orbs and kill her. The way I see it, there’s so many people that beat her already and they all had to go through all of your issues.

LoreChief.8391:

As a Thief I have trouble being effective AND having over 14k health.

You’re joking, right? There is no way a thief is talking about not being effective…

And you do know your HP means nothing since it is relative to vitality, right?

I’m sorry but the camera should not be part of the challenge, it should be fixed. In a game of such high quality it’s a shame that the camera mechanics are so crappy.

While I agree that having a challenging encounter like Liadri in the game is a good thing, I do agree with the OP that it could be tweaked to reduce overly aggravating factors:

1. Fix Orbs being obstructed when shot at with ranged weapons. Unless this was something done deliberately to discourage people from using ranged weapons against Liadri, this is just an extremely frustrating bug.

2. Change the floor textures to a solid material. Most of the times when I die to Shadowfall, it’s because I couldn’t clearly distinguish which was the part of the arena with safe spots. I’m well aware of the pattern in which the Shadowfall strikes, but it’s annoying to stop moving in a place I believed was out of the circles when in fact I was just within the edge of the last circle, something I missed due to the grated flooring.

On a related note, I’m not sure it was really necessary to have the circles expand in Phase 2. Having one half of the arena being covered by Shadowfall probably would have been challenging enough. I’ll live with it though, as this looks to have been part of the intended challenge.

3. The camera in the arena is more unfriendly to larger characters than smaller ones, but this isn’t a new issue to the game. In general you can compensate by picking an arena where the light pools don’t spawn right at the edge, but it’s still annoying. Having an “open top” arena probably would have helped a lot.

4. The Blinding effect could just be removed altogether. As it is, most players just disable post-processing to bypass it, rendering the “challenge” moot.

5. One last issue that’s been plaguing me (which isn’t ANet’s fault, but I just want to mention it) is that the Visions aren’t always consistent with the distance at which they detonate. I know they’re supposed to explode when they touch you, but I’ve seen them detonate even when they were still a character’s width away from me. I suspect this is due to latency, which is out of ANet’s control, but one way they can compensate for this for future Gauntlet encounters is to give the Visions a 1/2 second casting time before they detonate. This gives players who are on the move that extra bit of leeway in case lag is hindering them from spotting the precise locations of the Visions.