Guild Wars 2

OK. I’m giving up on the Personal Story. It’s just impossibly hard for me. Yes, I’m sure many of you breezed through these instances with absolutely no issues, but every battle has gotten ridiculously hard. And I’m already being downleveled because I’m higher than the quest with higher level gear. So, clearly it’s my lack of skill.

But that’s not really the point. My question is: What is the impact of simply NOT doing the personal questline at all? It seems like a complete waste of time and energy to even try it, so I’m not. Will there be any long-term impacts to my character since I won’t be doing the personal questline?

Sorry to hear you are having such a difficult time. You are not alone though if you encountered a mission that is extremely hard to complete, not all the missions are balanced at the moment, and not all are balanced for all classes. There is a large thread about story difficulty already about this https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/story/Personal-Story-Difficulty-Unacceptable

A couple things I might try before completely throwing in the towel on story:
1 – Report which mission you are having issues with and why. Anet appears to be evaluating and balancing based on player complaint, so if you tell them which one you are having issues with they may take a look at it and tone it down a bit. No guarantee this will happen until after the Haloween event however.
2 – Play a class that can handle lots of melee at once, like a guardian or warrior and start over. I know that is a terrible answer, but if you want to experience the story without getting too frustrated these classes have a much easier time since they have great burst aoe and strong survivability.

In regards to impact, there is currently no major impact to not completing your personal story. Nothing changes in your home instance after you complete it, the rewards are not unique (in terms of items you would get) so the only thing you are missing out on is the story experience itself.

Thanks for the reply and suggestions. This is on my Elementalist and the particular quest that I finally gave up on was “Ashes of the Past”. I’m finding the personal quest on my Ranger to be challenging, but not impossible. But he has a different questline, so it’s not an apples to apples comparison. But, at least I’ll get to enjoy the personal questline on one character.

I’m glad to hear there is no requirement to complete the personal questline though. At this point, I’d rather just do more area quests and events on my Elementalist than continue to try his personal quest in its current state. It seems like it was a great idea, but not balanced for all the different classes that might be playing through.

Also, take a friend or four with you. It makes things easier.

You’ll need to progress eventually if you want to progress to Act 2.

It a good ideal to take someone with you if you’re having trouble with a personal story. I know you may not want to group with others to handle the Personal Story but it better than waiting until Act 2 to be released and then trying to progress on Act 1 and have trouble finding people to help because mostly everyone is doing Act 2 of Personal Story.

Of a warrior,guardian, ranger and elementalist, elementalist has hands down been the hardest profession to play in story mode. As Ghostwind said, there is a very long thread on the matter.

If that’s the mission where you go in the dream state in Orr, it was crazy hard on my ele and I died many times. If you can’t manage it on your own, friends are probably the easiest answer till they get balance sorted.

OK. I can try to gather up some friends to assist with the personal story instances. But do the personal quest instances scale to the number of players, like the dynamic events? Or are they fixed? So, that whether I enter solo or with 4 friends the battle is exactly the same difficulty?

well the difference isn’t big. Most PS missions are fixed to a certain amount no matter the party size but a few are determined by party size.

I’d imagine that if you don’t do the story, you can’t join an Order, so you can’t buy the unique Order armor. That’s pretty much all I can think of, aside from those nice chunks of XP.

And I may not have given up on my story, OP, but I know what you mean. I have come to somewhat dread story quests on my Elementalist. I ran into a teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling, impossible seeming quest at level 11 on mine, and I managed to die my way through it but I am wondering if I will run into another one that just frustrates me too much.

These missions would be a ton more fun if they weren’t scaled in such a way as to assume the NPC’s are useful in any way. It seems like they balanced the missions around the NPC help you’re given in each, and then forgot to make them useful at all. Ol’ Twiggy is a good example. Most of the time the idiot stands there doing no damage and holds no aggro so you end up fighting all of the mobs yourself.

if an elementalist is the hardest class, well then i am an god in this game lol, every mission i did without difficultie xD. but also remember use DODGE (quote from piccolo from dbz abridged) if you dont want to get damage, if you also can go for an temporarily tanky build for an elementalist that you act as an unbeatable god. In pve i recommend a bit of tankyness, or just be carefull with playing if you go full damage like me :P.