Guild Wars 2

I know there is a similar thread(s) about down leveling in story missions being a problem. I get that, and maybe the solution is to remove that. But I think the problem is more in the design of the missions.

Some missions are relatively straight forward, some might even call them easy. And in some you are dying so much that all your armor is broken and the ending cinematic is you in your underwear (if you just don’t quit out of frustration). I haven’t had the latter happen until last night doing a mid-40 lvl story mission. Now I’m not the most uber player out there but I’m not idiot. I think I have a handle on my character by level 45+.

The fact that I kept dying over and over again COMPLETELY took me out of the flow of the story. And the focus of these mission is on the story right? It was not fun and I debated whether I should do something else non-Guild Wars related for a while. I stuck with it out of sure stubbornness but was that what the devs intended to happen? For me to continue to play out of spite?

Problems I’ve noticed over the handful of “hard” missions (not sure what else to call them):
- Usually ALL my npc “helpers” wipe extremely early leaving me to solo 5-10 mobs the same lvl as me or higher.
- Death penalties still apply and there is armor breakage with no opportunity to get it fixed unless you give up all your story progress.

My suggestions would be to do one or all of the following:
- Make some of the npcs “un-downable” so at least some aggro is being pulled off the human player so they can engage in a more manageable fight or rez other, downed npcs.
- Have npc helpers already rezed when you reload from check point.
- Make armor unbreakable during story missions. Because if your dying so much that your armor is unwearable how is a naked character going to help you get through any better?
- Maybe take another run through of the story lvl missions now that they are out in the wild. They may need to have fundamental changes made to make them more accessible
- Include a hardcore story mode for player who think the current difficulty spikes is flawless as is.

I know there is an option to bring people along into story missions and it should stay that way, optional. I feel sorry for any new MMO players who may not have the skill/patience to endure things as they currently stand.

Yeah some missions seemed almost impossible, I joined up with some friends to complete some of the more difficult quests. The AI has a tendency to completely ignore the allied NPC’s for the most part, and even if they take some aggro they die rather quickly anyway. The same goes for a majority of the later dungeons. I don’t think they received as much balancing seeing as they couldn’t be mass tested during the beta.

Some missions need to be balanced better difficulty-wise. I’ve had some missions that were a walk in the park, while others were tough as hell. It doesn’t really make sense.

I had to pay someone a hefty coin to accompany me on my lv45 Storyline mission. I just could not do it with my Elementalist. now i am stuck at lv48 mission (the one right after it), and at level 65, i still could not beat it.

make the armor unbreakable, and NPCs invincible, and i may have a nicer time in them. i don’t want to sound like a broken record, but not being able to complete a level48 story mission at level 65 is not fun, at all.

im not a pro player, and am interested in seeing where my character ends up after all of this. but i have explored 55% of the entire map, and am almost to level 80, and i pretty much forgotten about my storyline since giving up on it (for now).

The level 30-40 story missions for the Priory were terrible. Only one helper NPC but totally useless. Almost zero dps and dies very quickly. I am VERY HAPPY when she died later. Actually all the missions become easy after she died and was substituted by other NPC. It makes me feeling like I was soloing a nightmare mode 5-man instance. It was a week ago and I hope they have fixed it already. If it is so hard for a skillful player which is 20+ level above, imagine how it can destroy a casual player’s impression on the game.

Just gonna pitch in my two cents.

The difficulty issues I’ve run into come not from challenging individual enemies, but from unavoidable gankfests. There are some missions (I remember a Nightmare Court one in particular) where ~5 or more enemies spawn, set their sights on you, and attack with a vicious narrow-mindedness, downing you within seconds. Even dodging and defensive utilities only delay the inevitable as it’s the onslaught of basic attacks, not big, telegraphed strikes that are doing the damage.

Really I just think that the NUMBER of enemies in particular missions needs to be reduced or otherwise mitigated. I haven’t run into anything impossible yet, and overall I’m absolutely loving the personal story for what it is.

I believe most of the difficult missions are where they give you an NPC or more to join you in the mission. To offset this they decided to add additional mobs for them to fight. The problem then arises that the Mobs will still either focus their attention on you, or they will take out the weak NPCs with little to no issue THEN turn their sights on you while you’re still taking out another one.

I believe they need to rethink how the NPCs go about ‘helping’ the players in Missions. There were only a small handful of them where an NPC would rush over to start reviving me if I went into a downed state, a majority of the rest they just kept auto attacking like a mindless beast instead of lending an actual hand.

I understand why they wouldn’t want an NPC to do all the work as that wouldn’t be very heroic, but a few ideas that could alleviate some of the issue people have with difficulty.

1) Tune the monster AI so they lose focus more of a downed player (Only if there’s more NPCs/Players around) – Of the times I’ve died it’s been when I was instagibbed by a swarm of mobs that had some nasty CC abilities that chained together and kept me from reacting at all till my HP dropped to nothing. And after that, they kept focusing me while downed, while any NPC “Help” was not able to peel them off of me.

2) Make the NPCs take a more Support Role – I like this option. Make the NPCs focus on providing buffs or soaking actual damage, while still not having them do a lot if any damage. They should be tossing out Protections, Shields, maybe Cripples, etc. Have them prioritize rushing over to help get you up from Downed over any other action. From my experiance most of your “Help” charges into battle blindly auto attacking without anything else interesting going on with them. Combat along side the NPCs needs to be a bit more Dynamic! It would help make them feel a bit more alive then they currently do in most parts. (A few Missions they do come and help bring me back up, but I think a good 90% of the missions they didn’t do anything but get killed a few moments into a fight)

- I like the above more as I’m sure a majority of players enjoy building for Damage, which means they’ll lack survivability options. No arguing about if this is their problem, or that they’re stupid, it’s a legitimate way to play, if they enjoy ripping mobs to shreds let them. But without a lot of survivability, if a group of mobs spawn and decide to focus the player, then having the NPCs lend a hand to help offset that choice would be grand. It’s a balancing act to figure out how long the buffs/debuffs and how often they can use them but it should help with the difficulty problem.

3) Give a few NPCs an actual “Taunt” specific to them – A bit of an extreme suggestion perhaps, but if anything this would help with mobs being ‘stuck’ on the player with never switching their target. In a big group of mobs, it seems designed that only a small few of them will be on the player, but with the way NPCs die off easily plus their lack of any visable damage, a monster tends to turn it’s vision on the players and goes all out against them. Giving the NPCs a way to ‘peel’ one mob off of the player (On a long cooldown, maybe once a combat at most) would go a long way into making the fights more fair then they are at times.

I wouldn’t say implement all of the above at all, but those are the 3 sound options I could come up with.

(Just a tidbit, I completed every mission, before the last one of course XD, solo as a Human Necro, no minions, and did a good majority of them before the recommended levels. I completed a level 55 quest, the Pale Tree Future Vision one, at level 51… I pillar humped like a boss and the last guy got stuck on the stairs, it’s the only thing that saved me from having to quit and do that longkitten mission all over again later. Didn’t even break my armor! Though came close lol)

I have found the majority of the Personal Story missions to be either entirely forgettable, or memorable for the wrong reasons.

On my Mesmer (first character created), I was trying to do them when I hit the level of the mission. Now I know Mesmer is a different sort of class, but I finally quit leveling the Mesmer and rolled a Guardian out of my frustrations in the Personal Story missions. I quit leveling the Mesmer at level 16 (it is now 28, but I my next Personal Story mission is, I believe, the level 16 human circus/off the streets/I forget one).

I rolled a Guardian (level 80 since Labor Day), and I had gotten so frustrated with the Story missions (Sylvari/no idea/no idea – but I chose Vigil) that I stopped them at 53. The ONLY reason I went back and did them to 71 was because I wanted to 100% Straits. I have 100% on Cursed Shore, but not Leap, and I don’t know if I have to do Personal Story for a PoI in Leap or not (I’m like 50% there). I’ll probably go back and finish the whole Story because 1 – I am still wearing my level 25 or w/e back item and 2 – it’s part of the game and I like to finish stuff (unless it’s just “that bad”).

But I won’t be finishing that Sylvari Guardian’s Personal Story because of any fun factor.

See, nearly every mission starts with talk/follow/talk, then a cutscene ends and 10 mobs spawn all around you in a circle and all rush, mob you and kill you. Then you come back and pull them one by one, tediously, and get through the mission. This was much more noticable on my Mesmer than Guardian, but that’s pretty much every mission.

Your NPC helper AI is always terrible, so they are, generally, not very much help at all. And if they die some missions simply stop working, even after you revive them.

One mission in particular I remember being laughably bad was one that, without many specifics, has you defend a place. This defense takes part in waves, and in between each wave there’s talking, and the next bit of fighting takes place slightly away from the last.

Well this one particular NPC has a habit of running off and dying – in pretty much every mission. In this mission, on queue, the NPC runs off and dies. And dies in a spot where, after the cutscene, the NPC is in a spot that I don’t need to go to, but has a huge army between me and the dead NPC. So I choose to leave the NPC dead (because the mission is easier now that said NPC is dead).

After a few rounds fight/talk/fight/talk, there’s a bit of talking, and then that NPC magically shows up and makes this gigantic sacrifice and saves everyone else’s lives.

Except the NPC was dead for 95% of the mission, and no one went and revived the NPC.

Kind of took all meaning out of the end of the mission (and what happens is so telegraphed from the beginning, anyhow).

Other than bugs (lots of bugs in Straits and Cursed Shore with events) and WvW queue times, the Personal Stories are, IMO, easily the worst “feature” of the game.

I’m sure that was not the intent, but nearly all of them are worse, in quality of design, than the Guild Wars 1 campaign missions (which also involved a lot of mindless, relatively easy, killing that simply always took a little bit too long to be fun).

And the NPC AI is most definitely of weaker quality than GW 1 Hero AI.

I don’t ever really miss GW 1 except when I’m on a Personal Story mission – when I ALWAYS miss GW 1. I really want a “stop being stupid” ability I can use on my NPC allies in Personal Story missions.

Bregah.7365:

I don’t ever really miss GW 1 except when I’m on a Personal Story mission – when I ALWAYS miss GW 1. I really want a “stop being stupid” ability I can use on my NPC allies in Personal Story missions.

Well GW1 didn’t have that either, not for henchmen anyway. Heroes were an improvement but that is because you can set their skill bar and position them to avoid AoE. On the other hand at least GW1 henchmen can still carry their weight in battle. They may not have been the best but at least they were mostly better than nothing. At least they tried to use skills at appropriate times against appropriate enemies.

I really hope the devs are reading these personal story complaints. Made me quit out of the game really angry.