Guild Wars 2

When I played through my first character’s personal story, the Sovereign Eye of Zhaitan boss at the very end was my favourite boss of the game – counting dungeon bosses. Its patterns were really well-designed; playing through it took a lot of thought, and as it cycled through patterns over the course of the boss I found it really satisfying to learn how to deal with them and improve how I played the second time. It wasn’t hard (I don’t think we were even downed at all), but it felt challenging and interesting.

The atmosphere is great too; I loved how it references the things that have happened in your personal story. It was a great way to tie together all the threads from the story and really make it feel like it all happened.

…then I played it a second time with my partner when his level 80 character was ready to play, after the nerf. I was shocked at just how badly it was nerfed. We never saw any attack patterns more than once, so it was pointless to try to actually learn and get better at any of them. We also did so much damage so quickly it didn’t even get a chance to finish its dialogue; it was constantly cutting itself off while delivering lines, which completely broke the dramatic tension and immersion.

As far as I’m concerned, the nerf ruined the boss. It went from being a really satisfying, well-designed boss that’s a perfect cap to the pre-dungeon personal storyline, to something unremarkable that makes the story feel like an anticlimax. Please, please consider buffing the boss again, or offering a “hard” mode of some kind.

I second every point of this. To clarify, we played it with two level 80s the first time as well.

It worries me to see this drastic nerf to difficulty, as it implies that the people who want to mindlessly content grind without actually learning to play the game are going to be the target demographic for missions like this in the future.

I agree to this post as well. Granted, I have yet to kill the Sovereign Eye in its new nerfed state but I can say that that encounter was probably one of the most enjoyable ones in the story. I soloed the Eye with a war, and, while it took for ever, the excitement and content of actually besting the boss in single combat (Trahearne excluded) was second to none

I agree too. The boss was a really fun challenge before and when the music started playing at the end whilst we were still fighting it was a really special moment with like goosebumps and stuff, purely because the boss before that was so hard.

Now its like “oh okay… well this is a nice song but did I even need to be here?”

i didnt get it at all, i walked in there with 2 players, we got him like in 5 seconds … oeh, i kinda wish ive done this alone now

Its the way of games these days. Nerf anything the dumbest player have the slighest problem and godforbid any kind of death penalties.

Wonder how todays gamers would handle the rules in UO or EQ.
To me it seems like people dont like any kind of challange. Look at dragon fights, you see some people die over and over again not learning from their misstake and they get the same reward as the most well played toon there. Thats feels just wrong to me.

I wasn’t even aware of this nerf until now, but I noticed it to be way too easy on my ranger compared to my thief.

It was a great boss before the nerf, and more importantly, it was an amazing precursor to having to play through the final dungeon.

I disagree with the lot of you. ;-)

Well, in some ways, but not in others. My personal experience of the boss is that once he makes the clones and starts sending streams of lasers across the floor in all directions, I can’t get close. If one little glowing dart hits you, four more hit your while you’re on the ground. I’ve played my fair share of shmups, and I can dodge for long periods, but one hit and I’m toast, it seems.

Also, my ranger’s autofire just won’t work against this boss, which means I’m hammering 1 whilst constantly dodging. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to take the guy down without being able to get near to him.

However – and it’s a big ‘however’ – I can hardly complain that the boss is too difficult when my pet managed to kill it all on his own while I was dancing around over the glowing bullets.

So the boss, for me, is just broken. And unfortunately, it’s down, I think, to the core game engine – it just can’t do very sophisticated battles. The more complications you throw in, the more it just gets confusing and liable to bug out.

Focksbot.6798:

Well, in some ways, but not in others. My personal experience of the boss is that once he makes the clones and starts sending streams of lasers across the floor in all directions, I can’t get close. If one little glowing dart hits you, four more hit your while you’re on the ground. I’ve played my fair share of shmups, and I can dodge for long periods, but one hit and I’m toast, it seems.

All you had to do is run at them from the side, dodge twice, and you were in the zone where the darts could not reach you. One shot at the real eye and the clones disappear. Not hard at all.

It was my favorite part of the personal story, one of the most epic fights in any MMO. Not because it was hard, but because of the epicness of it. It was not trivial, but just right. For me that fight WAS the finale, not the Zheitan flop. It had only one problem, the fight lasted a bit too long, 3-4 full pattern repetitions would be enough, but he had so much health it took me twice that. I haven’t seen him since, but if the nerf people describe is true, then GW2 has no real epic ending anymore

Thats too bad. My only issue with that boss was the bug I ran into several times when it would decide to turn on god mode and I could not hurt it anymore. Once they fixed that bug, the boss was amazingly fun.