Guild Wars 2

First off, I would like to say that the Gauntlet was a fantastic idea. I absolutely love it and the difficulty.

How it was implemented, however, not so much.

The Gauntlet arenas are held above a large zone that has a very large number of players. What does this mean? FPS lag. The absurd number of projectiles/players that need to be loaded when they should have no impact on a Gauntlet fight is absurd.

Camera limitations within the Gauntlet. Why do the Gauntlets have to be in an extremely small dome that severely hampers our camera movement? Especially for fights where kiting is needed, we get zero visibility of our character, the mob we are kiting, nor the battlefield itself.

The Gauntlet arena floor is also an issue. Red AoE circles are very difficult to see given the texture of the arena floor. Taking the extra time to locate these circles often means death for fights like Liadri.

Liadri’s particle effects are also a massive pain. In phase 2, it is very difficult to get your camera out of the shadow spikes she summons. This wouldn’t be too big of an issue, except when your camera is locked inside a shadow spike, your framerate tanks to below one for 1-3 seconds, which most of the time results in death. That small chance you survive goes away when you repeat the same process 2-4 more times to finish the encounter.

I understand alot of this was made to look good visually, and it does, but even top end PC’s are struggling to keep a decent framerate during these Gauntlet fights, let alone the camera limitations and other shortcomings. Most of the more difficult fights become less about a players skill, and more about how well their PC can handle the various sources of lag, and if they can somehow find a way to deal with the camera limitations.

What would fix this is a solo instance for the Gauntlets, where players would fight 1v1 on a SOLID surface that is not encased in a small dome. Only then would this actually be a test of player skill.