Guild Wars 2

Debois Guilbert.6413:

LameFox.6349:

Debois Guilbert.6413:

• Veteran Karka retaliation that lasts forever: annoying

I was grouped with someone earlier who was instantly downed by reflecting a karka’s projectile at it (the kind that causes poison IIRC) and hitting the retaliation for numerous ticks. It was pretty funny. I need to find a way to do that to people in WvW…

Several posters have discussed ways of dealing with the things I found annoying, and while that is great, it misses the point. I can already deal with them fairly effectively. I suppose why I found these annoying is that 1. I can’t really use them myself and 2. all the effects would be enormous fun to use against other players in WvW. Retaliation that lasts more than 30 seconds, muhahaha. Life bar reset, haha, jokes on you buddy. Karka hatchling effects, let the rage quitting commence. Really effective confusion, oh wait, Arenanet decided that was hurting the game.

I suppose I am also still burdened by the memory of fighting the Ancient Karka. It went on so long and became so tedious that I can recall sorting my inventory during the battle just to pass the time… and that was before the life bar reset.

Good point. Funny how mechanics that they admit aren’t fun and could ruin the game, anywhere else but in Southsun, somehow make perfect sense for the mobs in Southsun.

This game, over all, is incredible, but when they make design mistakes, they really go overboard with those mistakes and then often, stubbornly, cling to them.

Fiontar.4695:

Good point. Funny how mechanics that they admit aren’t fun and could ruin the game, anywhere else but in Southsun, somehow make perfect sense for the mobs in Southsun.

This game, over all, is incredible, but when they make design mistakes, they really go overboard with those mistakes and then often, stubbornly, cling to them.

To be fair, What’s game breaking in the hands of a player in PvP and what’s game breaking for a mob are two different things. Fights with players are supposed to be relatively fair and even. Mobs aren’t necessarily intended to be on “equal ground” with a player, often being adjusted on purpose to have only a few tricks up their sleeve that are designed to be learned and countered. They have these mechanics adjustments accordingly because AI simply can’t play as well as a player does, and AI is designed to be defeated while players are designed to have a 50/50 chance of defeating one another. I think southsun is challenging, but I don’t feel that it’s broken in any way.

The problem is not the control spam directly, it is the amount of mobs clustered together with it. Especially when bigger mobs have a special boon that makes them virtually impervious to control spam.

Never mind that a single control effect landing can make or break a PVP duel, because of the health each side has. Mobs on the other hand, even trash mobs, can simply ride trough multiple applications of control because of their health pool.

meaning that control on mobs are borderline worthless, while control on characters are potentially overly effective. Especially when it comes from a recently spawned mob right outside of view while you’re trying to avoid the stuff from the big mob you’re already in a fight with.

This is what made early Orr so infuriating. Masses of mobs with pulls, knockdowns and so on. Especially as aggroing one meant you would get 3+ of them running towards you.

Thing is that with the focus of the game on active defense, you need to really be able to focus on specific mobs so you can avoid the big attacks.

I had previously been furious with the champ at the end of the svanir chain in wayfinders, but actually found myself enjoying it once. This was when i was doing it with only one other player, and because of my build the champ focused on me the whole time.

This allowed me to focus on tells and learn the pattern. This because there was no other mobs running around, nor any players spamming massive particle effects.

I honestly do not see why ANet felt the need to give big mobs defiant, as usually they simply end up being swamped and held in place by the mass of melee range targets. Unless they wanted to avoid one or two people champ farming by control locking. Not that the drops are conductive towards that anyways.

I don’t particularly like the reef drakes. Taking on one or maybe two, fine. Learn the animations and dodge/interrupt. If a bunch of them come along while you’re doing a basic event, like an escort quest, they become exceptionally dangerous for a bunch of basic mobs. Blanket cc or chained cc isn’t fun from trash waves. I’d rather see the ‘retreat’ ability in fewer of these drakes and only one or two of these ‘retreat’ drakes come in any wave of mobs.

Something to note: The karka ‘reset’ isn’t really a reset. Adult karkas are intentionally a two-stage fight, and the second stage has subtle differences to the first (less durability, for instance – notice how it invariably takes less time to kill the second stage than the first?). Essentially, the second health bar is the karka equivalent to our downed state – they’re not at quite as much of a disadvantage as we are in our downed states, but a karka in the second health bar is definitely at a disadvantage.

It’s a mechanic that they certainly could have made clearer, though.

deviller.9135:

Im Mudbone.1437:

aspirine.6852:

Just saw a complete group of around 20/30 people get one shotted by an event of champion karkas. I take it back that the content is for groups, annoying one shotting champs with out of control animations are not fun in my book.

That and being repeatedly snared/immobilized by them, why no cool-down on that annoying skill.

There is. Vet/champ karka either do: lay eggs (2 times)/poison >>> immobilize (2 sometimes 1) >>> jump for ground shake/rolling. Champ Karka ground shake will 100% down you. You can evade it right after this champ jump and achieve maximum height. Or if your latency is a bit bad (not trully bad), you can evade it just after she jumps.

What skill you need to survive in this island:
Condition removal (if you have more than 1 is better)
Other ? Stability or something along that (which can wake your character faster).

ps: this may be hard for thief (well they have stealth) and necro (poor class….)
Tips: never do vet karka if you are solo, its wasting time. If you want karka shell better play crab toss or kill young karka.
Note: almost all native events in this area are group events.

A lot of adult karka have stability for their control protection rather than Defiance stacks. You can steal their stability and retaliaton with Larcenous Strike as a thief (just keep stealing until it goes away, you can afford to if you have a good initiative engine). When they don’t have Stability, you can use the CnD-TS combination to crowd-control them right back. Sword-2 gives you condition removal and the ability to say “See ya, wouldn’t wanna be yah!” to powerful attacks, only to jump right back in and resume circling as soon as the danger passes.

I can’t say I’ve soloed one that way yet like I have with guardian and mesmer – I’ve had other players show up every time – but I certainly think it’s plausible.

I turned up at Southsun expecting Karkas to be the toughest mobs around, only to find my party wiped a couple of time by the amazing Drake horde straight from Nothingness during the patrol event.

Simply solution would be to give us a male and female version of those Drakes. With only the females doing the confusion, very fittingly.
So that the difficulty could be a bit easier to finetune.

PopeUrban.2578:

I like to think southsun is essentially zerker build hell because the mobs tend to have nasty control or damage return skills, or in the case of the riders, bounce attacks and boon theft. Sure things are easier at ranged, but that’s the entire game for the most part, and it’s pretty much a known fact that in a ranged versus melee damage arms race, melee wins by a pretty darn good margin as long as you can keep swinging. It’s not that you can’t run zerk out there, you can run anything anywhere if you’re good. it’s that the mobs are designed to steal your might, immobilize you, hit you with confusion and retaliation, and do a number of other things that make most “standard” zerker builds a lot more susceptible to serious harm out there.

Yeah I suppose ‘standard’ builds might not take it too well (though the much maligned signet warrior need not actually have any boons to steal, in theory). Though I think that isn’t saying much on its own since those seem to be pretty heavily specialized. I wouldn’t be surprised if given time and incentive people started finding configurations of them that would work in SC.

PopeUrban.2578:

Good information on retaliation, I honestly thought it was related to output, which is why it always does such awful damage. I don’t see it enough that I ever bothered to look it up. I was under the impression that’s why people were complaining about it, because it hit them harder. Thanks for teaching me something new! (Is it obvious I’ve never rolled a guardian? Heh.)

Well, in a sense it does hit some harder than others, but rather than due to damage output it’s related to attack speed. The flamethrower’s autoattack used on a target with retaliation is horrible, for example.

digiowl.9620:

The problem is not the control spam directly, it is the amount of mobs clustered together with it.

In all fairness, that’s largely what makes it ‘spam’. :P

Overall the mobs on SSC just seem imbalanced in difficulty to rewards. The young karka and young reef riders are easy and not a problem. But the “normal mobs” (eg. Reef Rider, Karka, etc.) are harder to kill—they have more hit points and they hit a lot harder. As a full berserker d/d elementalist, I’m accustomed to being able to kill normal mobs quickly without much effort and certainly without using my healing skill. However, on SSC, I often use my healing skill twice just in the process of bring down one normal mob. I daren’t dry to kill the veterens, let alone the champions, solo.
I don’t mind the challenge—challenge is what keeps things interesting—but I am a little irritated that for all my effort into killing these mobs, I more often than not, get nothing for it. There is an imbalance between the effort required and the rewards rendered. I am happy to report that (with the settler support buff) when you do get a reward it’s typically either a mat or green item. Even so, I think the mobs should either be quicker to kill or give good loot (mats, green or better items) more often.

LameFox.6349:

frogshake.2419:

snip

-Ignoring for a moment the various replies which would make it obvious I don’t just keep using the build from the first post exclusively (and quite possibly class – but if I didn’t give that away before I suppose I have now), what exactly do you consider a ‘style of play’? Because if you’re referring to the fact that ranged attacks render everything on southsun a sad joke while melee needs contend with things like chain pulls into drake acid spit, then I’d say I definitely oppose that on principle alone, even though personally I’m happy to use my assortment of ranged weapons/kits I’ve accumulated on my classes. Hell, I even made a mystic speargun for my engineer just to farm SC, and I pay so little attention to water content I had to replace the starter breathing mask at the same time.

Yeah, I’m talking about adjusting the way you play, e.g. which weapons you use, depending on the mob you’re fighting. So, if you want to stay in melee range, better bring some stun breakers for the drakes and quite a bit of condition removal. However, not every class will do as well as another in melee range when fighting drakes, obviously. A gurdian will have an easier time since they are able to shed conditions very quickly and have ready access to stun breakers, e.g. stability.

Sure, CC is annoying as hell, but it’s (usually) avoidable by adjusting the way you fight a particular mob. If you don’t like that, fine, I guess there’s nothing I or anyone else can say to convince you to just go with the flow (ugh, lame phrase, I know).

LameFox.6349:

frogshake.2419:

snip

-‘If you can avoid it, [a control effect] makes no difference.’

Were I saying that avoidance didn’t work, there probably would have been a ‘try’ in there somewhere.

LameFox.6349:

being saturated in control effects just isn’t enjoyable in general. If you can avoid it no difference is made, if you’re constantly stuck in it until death it’s frustrating, and if you have the resilience to ride it out and save some stability just in case (i.e. my approach right now) it’s tedious.

Okay, so you were saying that even if you avoided the control effect, it would still be annoying and no difference was made, i.e. no difference with regard to it still being annoying? Then your phrasing confused me because the triple use of “if” in that sentence made me think of three different propositions, as in 1.) avoiding CC altogether makes no difference, 2.) being stuck in CC until death do you part is frustrating, and 3.) you get into CC and ‘stun-break’ out of it and manage to get through the fight, which is tedious. Because clause one is ‘missing’ – from the way I read it – an adjective referring to the annoyance of the fight, I understood it the way I did. Anyway, I am pretty sure I get you now.

PS: I apologise for my unnecessary snideness in my earlier post.

aspirine.6852:

frogshake.2419:

Debois Guilbert.6413:

• Veteran Karka retaliation that lasts forever: annoying
• Veteran Karka life bar reset: annoying
• Reef drake confusion that lasts forever: annoying, especially for mesmers after the 50% WvW confusion nerf.
• Karka hatchling effects: annoying and repulsive

1. Strip the boon.
2. The reset has a reason: remove the shell, then you can kill it. Pretty cool to me. Plus it’s a type of veteran that is at least somewhat challenging to fight. Also, you do understand that you don’t have to fight them, if you don’t like their mechanics, right?
4. Annoying? I think it’s a pretty neat machanic, it’s a veteran after all. Also, just dodge to remove them. Repulsive? Never play Half Life. Seriously.

1. Ok I have an ele and warrior there, How do I strip the boon? I am not a very good player but since I hear other people saying it I think it’s not just me.
2 Agreed, that is one of the nice things, Anet could have made it clearer to us by giving the armour health another colour. I did not know that and even see(must be blind or something) that the armor came of during the fight. I just thought wtf happend to this health.
4 Agreed, it’s more annoying than doing anything else, and I also thought about HL, and that is never a bad thing

1. Hm, well, okay, you got me there, those two aren’t really well suited for that task, true.
2. Yeah, I guess I somewhat agree. I am not entirely sure at the moment, but don’t Veteran karka have a little icon under their health bar indicating that you have to remove the shell first? Well, maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
4. Half Life ftw!

frogshake.2419:

(truncated)

Sure, CC is annoying as hell, but it’s (usually) avoidable by adjusting the way you fight a particular mob. If you don’t like that, fine, I guess there’s nothing I or anyone else can say to convince you to just go with the flow (ugh, lame phrase, I know).

The problem isn’t fighting single or small numbers of mobs with control effects (or at least, is very rarely. Outside of potential glitches like the on-the-spot karka roll very few things continually apply control by themselves, and I can’t really think of any in SC off-hand). That’s the kind of thing we’re designed for, with a handful of stunbreaks to choose from and/or combine, and our two consecutive dodges. What tends to make it more irritating is groups of creatures with control, since a stunbreaker or dodge only works for one (or simultaneous) pull, knockdown, and so on. We then need to rely on less well-distributed things like stability and invulnerability.

With single-target skills it doesn’t always matter, because mobs in an event may target multiple players (I suspect this is what they were counting on when designing this stuff). This often doesn’t seem to be the case though, and occasionally for whatever reason you get people who are in effect called primary. Pulls are an easy one to figure out, since iirc proximity to a mob is important for most. So if someone gets pulled and ends up nearer to the others, they can be targeted by more, or (thinking back to old-style Orr, and the fractal with grawl) even yanked into aggro range of ads which then continue the chain.

The drakes iirc are multi-target, I’m pretty sure I’ve been pulled with another player to a single one when we were farming them on warriors. So then it’s even easier to get chained, and it can even happen to a few players at once (right into the acid puddles, naturally), hence when groups of them show up at the same time in events, it can lead to hilarious/irritating results as I think someone was describing a few posts ago.

frogshake.2419:

Okay, so you were saying that even if you avoided the control effect, it would still be annoying and no difference was made, i.e. no difference with regard to it still being annoying?

…

If you avoid it, it’s not annoying, but neither is it any different from avoiding any other attack. In the hands of AI, which doesn’t enjoy anything one way or another, it doesn’t add anything for better or worse unless it works.* But because when it works it’s a detriment, it should be used carefully in order that it be important [to deal with] without being a constant source of frustration.

Basically the same as damage, just without the necessity. While it would be exceedingly dull if enemies dealt no worthwhile damage (and somewhere a breeze rider shuffled uncomfortably) at the same time when something does a lot of it, it should be in specific well-telegraphed attacks leading to more interesting counters than ‘carry more health’ or ‘sidestrafe in circle at range’. If very extreme it really belongs on rarer things like champions rather than miscellanea like reef drakes (just not little champions which are rendered invisible by a group’s attacks on them).

Incidentally I meant that it was tedious when, accepting that you’ll be getting more incoming CC than you have ways to negate it, you stack loads of vitality and toughness to just endure it until it’s over, or until you really need to use (for example) balanced stance to get out of there. This may not actually be viable for all classes, but I use it for the warrior on occasion since they can gather quite an outstanding barrier of life – even if they don’t repair it too well.

*Though I should clarify this isn’t always the case, for instance the way the tornadoes and shockwaves were implemented in MF meant that (when they worked) they could make gameplay different even when you were successful in countering them. For instance reflecting the tornado could send enemies flying everywhere, which was hilarious, and the shockwaves could even be avoided by a player who had spent all endurance and evasion skills by timed jumping (granted in the longer term some tweaking would have been in order, but given the time they were around it’s hardly shocking).

Incidentally I think that was a pretty good example of how to distribute the effects as well. You didn’t get a whole room full of the guys spamming shockwaves so that no amount of jumping was enough. Even the oozes weren’t so bad if we ignore the whole room of them simultaneously firing the multi-headed attack (I got to finish them off – from a distance – solo quite a few times thanks to that attack and warriors’ easy and plentiful access to stability).

Annoying has always been the central adjective for Southsun. Its reflected in the lack of waypoints and how those waypoints are constantly being contested. It’s reflected in how mobs have multiple ways to inhibit player movement when all you’re trying to do is run someplace because of the lack of waypoints. It’s reflected in the very terrain design – those volcanic terraced pools that form into steps may look pretty but they inhibit dodging and will jam your character if you’re unlucky.

From top to bottom, everything about this zone was so irritating I always avoided it until now.

I think part of the issue is that these kind of mobs seem like they should belong in a non-story mode dungeon. You step into those knowing the difficulty will be teeth-grinding. IMO that kind of thing really should be limited in the open world to things like specific mob bosses or single point, isolated locations but in Southsun the whole zone is designed that way.

That said, I find myself growing used to Southsun since the Living Story has made us return. I guess I would even say I’m having some fun there now running the zone now that there are more players present and doing it groups of friends.

But it’s like bagpipe lessons or something, the kind of fun that you’re really not sure you’ll want to keep doing. For now, the Living Story is making the return to Southsun entertaining and I am pleasantly surprised by that.