Guild Wars 2

I found it too easy, to the point of boredom. I was coming here to suggest it be tuned higher.

If its too hard, then level up a bit and go back. Or find some friends. I don’t think it was ever meant to be a snoozefest.

I’m pretty sure you guys would figure out how to justify the end mission of the human circus storyline with 3 veterans and a champion that you’re supposed to solo. One of the veterans has perma stun and knockback.

Sometimes, when there is a problem, there is in fact a problem and your defense force mentality isn’t helping. It’s like the SWTOR forums all over again.

I enjoy the difficulty. Analogously, a strong drink without any edge or bite would be unsatisfying and flat. I wouldn’t want a personal epic story line that I along side my other quests was just a flavor thing but no real challenge, i.e., “oh well I’ll get around to filling that personal quest just to get the achievement”…yawn.
I would much rather have to die and sweat and complain about regrouping than just pushing over the latest personal quest each time.

To be honest the only really hard personal quests were the one where you lose Claw island and the lvl 76 one (don’t remember the names) where you go to the temple of Lyssa. Other than that all the quests were of an acceptable difficulty level. Please ArenaNet don’t change anything. The quests are fine and some people just need to learn how their classes work before they complain that the personal story is too hard. My 2 cents.

Anyone who doesn’t think the personal story is absolutely horribly broken hasn’t played the charr personal quest “Defending The Keep.”

It’s supposed to be for level 26, but I’m a 48 who can’t last 5 minutes in it. The sheer number of enemies thrown at you is unfair enough, but each and every one of them causes poison and cripple. AND they literally spawn in every single place you can run to. I ran down into a room hoping to heal up and a mob of 10 of them spawned in that very room.

Was the mantra of the developers of these events “No fun allowed”? Because they succeeded at that magnificently.

I’ve had the same problem there. Risen enemies have way too much hp, outrun centaurs (pun intended, but still true) and do too much dmg for mobs that spawn in groups.

Also the cannon in that quest has a deadzone where you can’t shoot, slow reload time and very big delay on firing. Aside from that, risen are zombies and are supposed to be mindless yet as soon as the cannon hit em, they agro the player. I finished the quest as engineer by just running in circles while dropping bombs.

I have to actually agree with Smarty concerning the Battle of Claw Island. I’m a ranger… I played that at lvl 75… and I had to call my guild in to help out because I could not down them fast enough, and they mobbed me.

Yes, I’m aware I don’t focus in marksmanship, but I do focus in beastmastery and wilderness survival… and they still killed me. Horridly. Several times over. It was a very, very disheartening story. There was no way I could finish it on my own. My good ol’ engineer, elementalist, and thief friends helped out a ton, though!

With Battle of Claw Island what worked for me was choosing my battles. It’s a big map for a story mission and there is a lot of chaos going on all over the place. In the first half of the mission you have very specific goals, none of which include killing monsters. Just don’t get distracted and try to kill every Risen in your path.

Although the personal story can be difficult at some points, I find it overall easy. If you’re fighting an enemy that is to strong, and you can’t dodge (Running out of endurance or just not doing it right), and you can’t kite. Then back out and go level up first before attempting the quest again. Any quest I have ever had trouble I was easily able to handle with a little strategy & Gear.
Just my 2cents.

Please just get rid of certain enemies being able to regen health, or at least in missions with friendly NPC’s, allow them to rez themselves. Killing Zhaitan’s mouth was a half hour of pure hell, hiding behind a pillar and slowly taking down his health as my “friendly” npcs laid there, in no wag could I rez them without getting destroyed.

Now I’m completely stuck on the Ossuary mission. Get to the “basement” and the mob wave completely destroys my npcs. Which is fine, as I can kite the mob out, a little at a time, afterwards. But whatever that boss’s name is (like a risen skeleton king), he is way to powerful and fast. I tried kiting and he closed the distance faster then I can move, and he seems immune to stunning. He wipes me, goes full health and is making itkittennear impossible. I don’t know anyone who plays this game and I don’t know if a random will help me. Without standing there and begging for hours…

So yeah, mostly not to hard, but some of the missions are a test of my will and emotions.

Well… human thief lvl 80, human guarding lvl 16, sylvari elemtalist lvl 16, human necro lvl 16 and just started a norn ranger as well, I do admit I’m slightly low lvl on most of the chars to make the storylines matter much at this point but throwing in the experience I have from the BWE where I as a lvl 13 guarding completed the finding your parents storyline given (lvl 19) I have to say, I find most of the story missions so far to be way to easy :/
(on other hand I play Dark Souls for kittenz’n’giggles, which most people seem to think is retardly hard for some reason)
The only missions so far I’ve had “issues” completing was the source of orr mission with my thief since it bugged out everytime I used a shadowstep/infiltration type of skill turning completly immune to dmg (aware it’s supposed to do that when it warp back to the pond but the buff should wear off after a while, when I used shadowsteps it didnt) and the purple rainbowspray of doom oneshot me from full health ^^
Was resolved fairly simple by not using those skills though and the eye died in about 4 min

I am still at the early quests (I’m a lvl 29 Mesmer) and ‘till now I didn’t have any problem with story quests. I was able to complete all of them by soloing (or with a single friend) even if sometimes I was slightly underlevelled. And I don’t consider myself a strong player. I just usually kite mobs to avoid damage and rez one or two times.

The only time I faced a hard battle was in a quest suggested for lvl 28 while I was still a lvl 21 player. Mobs killed me immediatly, of course, but they were 7 levels stronger than me, so I can’t complain! XDDDDDDD

Re: “Defending the Keep”

While I finished this successfully on my charr ranger, it could use some tweaks. As mentioned, the siege engines reload too slowly given the speed that the undead advance toward the keep.

Also, I was unable to successfully use the arrow cart to hit any of the undead. After the bulk of the army had advanced to (and destroyed) the cannon, they all bunched up on a group of Vigil NPCs who were fighting outside of the range of the arrow cart. Trying to assist the NPCs or lure them into the range of the arrow cart just resulted in me getting murdered. It wasn’t long before the zombies had blown up the useless arrow cart. I only completed the mission by kiting, graveyard zerging, and sacrificing then rezzing pets and NPCs. It was rather messy.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Are you trying to melee them? You have a cannon and arrow carts to thin out the undead without having to fight them directly. (I had at most 2 attack me at the arrow cart so that I had to release it, and kill them, then go back to bombarding them while they fought the Vigil NPCs.) Also, I’m not clear on how they spawned inside the keep, when there are enemy spawn points inside the keep at all. Did they follow you inside?

What class are you? I just completed it as a L26 thief, but I have a build geared towards story, so take that with a grain of salt.

I’m a level 48 thief. And the zombies run past the cannons so fast they’re irrelevant. Reloading after one shot gives them enough time to swarm the whole roof.

They quite literally spawned inside the keep. I ran down a flight of stairs to a room to heal and a group of 10 of them spawned right in the room.

There is something horribly, horribly wrong with this quest. Even an extra living player going with me would probably be overwhelmed by the sheer number of enemies you have spawning and their status effect attacks.

I have a lvl 80 ele with fully complete personal story and now leveling a mesmer (lvl 54). Not a single mission ‘too hard’ or ‘not soloable’. Sure, some of them are rather challenging…nothing too hard though. Some people dont want to have a slightest difficulty in learning how to play? Well, not a valid reason to dumb the content down for everyone else.

Some of the personal story steps seem require that you have advance knowledge (tried it before) what is going to happen in order to successfully tackle those situations.

Personally I would prefer that story is just that – a story. More demanding content should be elsewhere than in personal story. Resurrects in story break the storytelling and immersion. Benny Hill chase scene was excellent comparison, it sometimes feels like it when circle strafing hordes of enemies that pop out of nowhere. For me personal story is a to-do-checklist in between wonderful dynamic/world events, dungeons and exploring.

I have to admit that I’ve stopped playing the game due to the difficulty I’ve been having with the personal story on my thief.

I’ve been playing MMOs since AO for countless hours a week. I’m not an “elite” player, but I’m not at all new to these games either. I’d like to think that I’m at least average.

However, on my thief it’s been frustratingly annoying since I joined the Order of Whispers. Each story has progressively beaten me into the ground to the point that my patients has depleted each time that it’s taken the fight right out of me.

- Skrit – Destroyer Queen — Simply insane. Only way I beat it was kiting her with a bow till she got stuck on some terrain. I shouldn’t have to break the game to win.

- Claw Island – Again there are some fights with the brutes that are just too much. For a part of it I wasn’t even sure what I was supposed to do so I just kept fighting the mobs around the place getting killed over and over again, adding to the frustration.

- Test the asura gun (whatever it’s called) – The gun worked for crap, or at least I couldn’t figure out how to work it well enough. Not only did it try to give me a whole new skill set I knew nothing about, it also threw a lot of hard mobs my way. I just used my normal skills in the end, but that darned monkey kept throwing me around like a rag doll. Again, I had to use my bow to lure and trick one mob at a time to defeat it. I don’t even recall how I beat the monkey thing, but man, it was just annoying. It was NOT fun.

- Finally the mission where the sylvari mother shows you Orr… I gave up at this point. The first invisible warriors just ripped me to shreds. I felt like I had no chance.

After a while, beating my head against the game over and over just sucked the fun out it. While out in the open fields I do fine, these personal story mission are just crazy high level (on a thief… for me).

I did all of these either at level or a couple levels above. I have a smattering of yellow and green gear. I read up on trick and tips how to play and spec the class. In the end it became clear to me that melee was a death wish. Range and kiting was the only way to go. But that’s not why I rolled a thief. If I wanted to use a bow I’d play a ranger, which I do have and it is mark-ably easier, but with all the time I invested in my thief, I just don’t want to do it all again right now.

So maybe I just stink as a thief, but to me this is a cause for concern. Everyone has a different comfort zone, but out of the multitude of MMOs’ I’ve played over the years none have frustrated me like this one, and I see that as an overall problem they might want to look into. However, if they are more interested in catering to a more skilled player base, that’s certainly fine. I’ll just move on.

Well I had some major problems with the undead abominations (3 of them) int he early human personal story. freaking impossible. BUT i hadn’t spent any trait points and i hadnt been thinking about gear. I don’t know if i would have had the same problems if i had spent those 20 trait points and had all my gear at level 30. Further dying and having gear damaged makes it all the more tedious. You shouldn’t be able to do it with no armor.

I think its actually easier to if your npcs die and you die, to restart the instance from a new angle. This isn’t to say they’re not too hard, but I experienced the problems you’re describing when i was undergeared and untraited. It doesn’t cost much to buy a full set of blues of your level. Just food for thought.

Are the personal story quests supposed to be completed solo or in groups?

I have just spent 5 hours trying to complete one of my storyline quest at lvl 75.

Estate of Decay.
Kill the Mouth of Zhaitan in Kiath Manse.

I play as an elementalist and have after 5 hours of trying given up on getting it done.
The boss adds knocks you down, and the second you get on your feet they knock you down again, so you are permanently knocked down.

My anti-knockdown skill only lasts for 8 seconds with a 90 second cooldown, making it practically useless.

My NPC allies which are supposed to help me are useless as they doe within seconds of attacking, and I am left having to face a champion type mob that has 2 attacks.
one does 3-4k damage per hit, the other puts a dot that does up to 500 damage per tick.

Once I get rid f the adds my allies resurrect, we get him to 50% then he gets invulnerable, and summons adds again.
At this point my allies are killed within seconds again, and while I try to take down the adds he heals up to full HP again.

Between trying to take down the boss adds with their perma knockdowns and the 2 risen that brings artifacts to him, I simply do not have the firepower to take him down.

I have tried everything I can think of, but between the knockdowns and 3-4k damage I simply cannot kill him solo.

Tell me is this quest supposed to be done solo or do I really need a group to handle him?

Right now I really wish I could go back and change my choice of direction as I am now blocked form progressing.

Quest: “Stop Bandits from poisoning the Grenth’s Spoke well”. Level: 8.
Character: Elementalist, Level 9. Human, Raised: on the streets, Regret: sister’s corpse, God: war.

This quest is unplayable. I am dodging and kiting, healing and moving to avoid big attacks. In spite of deliberate attempts to avoid it, I often end up fighting 2-4 mobs at a time and just get ripped apart. Like a previous poster suggested, I tried winning through attrition and multiple rezzes, but I actually could not beat the last enemy “Doc something”? even with all the other enemies dead.

It really is possible that I need to L2P, but I’m not coming from WoW and I understand the need to move and play a balance between damage/(self)healing/kiting/etc. I’ve never run into such extreme difficulty so early in any game, ever. It’s a bit absurd.

If this is a L2P issue – then the devs need to provide more guidance in learning to play. Because I am genuinely trying to learn how to manage this, and failing badly. At a level 8 quest. That’s… bad. Bad for me, obviously; bad for the game because I can’t be the only one, and not everyone is going to have my patience in dealing with it.

Had also issues with The Greater Good, glad to read that something is done about it.

I finally managed to beat the quest by sticking with Fire and rezzing a lot, but yes those ambushes are a bit much. I thought the ambush size might be due to all the NPC allies, but one Bandit Cutpurse will wipe out all of the stupid allies with that spinning move since they won’t dodge it. I also note that attack seems to make them invulnerable/evading/undamageable, not sure if that’s intended.

Then the player is left with 3-4 ambush waves of 3-4 mobs each with no delays between them. So, glad to hear its being adjusted.

So what I’m getting from this thread is that Jeffrey Vaughn is amazing.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this amount of communication and feedback-based updates between game designers and the community.

It would be nice to go back through and re-play some of the story lines that were updated (to see if Set to Blow is doable now), but that’s more of a thread for the suggestions forum. :P

I agree, it’s nice to see a dev interact with the community, something you rarely see these days. I hope they keep up this style of interaction. Too many go silent and the community is left wondering if their concerns are being heard. Keep it up. If you manage to tone down some of these quests maybe I can finally enjoy the story.

14 deaths on “The Queen’s Justice”. 9 deaths on the step before that. 11 deaths on the step before that. I have now spent a rough total of 17 silver and counting on equipment repairs as a result of deaths from Personal Story missions in my 20’s.

Currently a level 28 Elementalist and I refuse to do any more personal story quests until the difficulty on all of them (ALL. Every single one.) is at least reduced by 50%. Several of them also need to be completely reworked, not just have their difficulty reduced, because they use broken mechanics or force the player to give up their powerset for another one that’s far far inferior (and completely foreign).

At present.. the personal storyline missions are BEYOND not fun.

The problem really is that these are stories based on your race vs your profession, and there’s not tuning for someone who is a squishy elementalist or whatever. My main is an elementalist and I specc’d her for support for group play in WvW or dungeons, which means I pretty much can’t do much of anything solo. Also, mobs instantly go for the eles for some reason, so it makes everything even more frustrating. I can literally be standing there doing nothing and the mobs swarm me, while the husband is beating on them and they ignore him (we just did that to test it out). I don’t think I could have done most of the story quests if I hadn’t had a partner (hubby). I know that one in the queen’s throne room where you have little room to kite, I was naked by the end when I solo’d it. I only finished it because I found a place I could get on the rocks that caused the mobs to run back and forth if I jumped between two different places in the area. Otherwise, there was really no way to do it.

Since I leveled my ele to 80, I’ve played several other classes (including the so-called broken necro), and they have all been significantly easier.

The difficulty of “The Queen’s Justice” for elementalist is a bit high, please take a look.

Thanks

My own two cents, add it to the “user feedback folder”:

I have 5 characters right now:

My main is a norn mesmer, level 80 and waiting on the fix for an orrian story mission. But that aside, I found the difficulty peaked during the 40-60ish levels. On that note, I changed my playstyle around then and maybe after “learning” to play I am having little issues at 80 quests (but still, curse that mouth of Zhaitan)

As a 50+ Sylvari Ranger or Human Warrior, life was so much easier for both. Admittedly, I would have preferred to use my warrior as melee for some bosses, but I don’t mind a rifle-kiting warrior if I have to.

Fresh started Asura Engineer, can’t say yet as low level missions are intro mode.

My Norn Thief, ahhhhh now this one is tough. Either I don’t know how to play thief, or soloing personal story is darn impossible. Also a low level, I am failing said “intro mode missions”.

Ok, a bit more than two cents, so in summary: easy when I figured out my class and thief seems a little out of whack.

I’ve been really enjoying my Norn Ranger’s personal story quests. Defeating a giant king, becoming an honorary Gear warband member, and foiling looters at archaeological dwarven dig sites where fun accomplishments.
That said, the one Personal story quest that I had some strong language for was called Bad Blood. Its actually not a hard quest in total, but the very first challenge of it was a semi platformer puzzle with a bottomless chasm (you die if you fall) with a narrow ledge where gusts of wind blow you off if you can’t find shelter every 8 seconds. Even with these qualities, the quest is not too hard. The problem comes from something much more simple: The quest tells you to predict the wind gusts by watching the movement of so flags blowing in the wind. These flags did not help at all. In the end the only reason I barely made it across was because I took to obsessively counting the elapsed time between gust intervals. The flags just need to more clearly show the gusts.

Summary of my thoughts: personal story is especially challenging to new players, and some professions are ill-suited for it, but other than fixing the legitimate bugs (Sovereign Eye of Zhaitan) and tuning the (imo) brokenly difficult parts (Mouth of Zhaitan), the overall challenge is about right. I do feel that new players should get a bigger warning about what they’re getting into, though, because it’s “Ascalon Catacombs Syndrome” – try one part of the game that’s supposed to be “introductory”, get yourkitten kicked, and never go there again. This is part of a larger overall trend that GW2 isn’t very good at teaching you how to play the game well, though, so I won’t get into that here.

Anyway, my conclusion after leveling my Human Thief to 80 and finishing the personal story is this: The difficulty of the personal story missions is largely profession-based, and only somewhat related to skill/build/equipment/etc. Thief happens to be one of the worst professions for doing the personal story, period, a topic I wrote about in great length on the wiki and will probably continue to in the future. That being said, a lot of the challenge can be circumvented with prior knowledge of the missions. Unfortunately the wiki is extremely lacking in this department, and while it’s not hard to write even just a simple walkthrough, I find that actually playing GW2 is more fun that documenting it. Perfectly understandable, right?

Here’s a little background: Thief was my first character and the only thing I played during the beta events etc. While I did a little research on my profession, I never looked at forums or elsewhere for help or support; I made my own builds and tried to figure out better ways to do things on my own. I didn’t bother gearing up at any point on the way to 80 – I just used whatever random junk I got as drops, things that were often several levels under me. Heck, I didn’t even buy gear from vendors or karma merchants. I wanted to get the personal story done as fast as possible, so I went into all missions at the appropriate level (maybe 1-2 above or below sometimes, legit don’t remember).

Probably the biggest mistake I made was putting 10 into every trait line up until I hit 60. I had thought I could just buy the Grandmaster manual and save a gold, but sadly that was not the case, so from level 40-60 I had been running around fairly underpowered.

Anyway, my point is that I was an average, if not downright bad, player. Since I came from World of Warcraft, GW2 combat was entirely new to me and I’m still getting used to it. The combination made my experience not too pretty: being both new and bad at the game, plus playing a profession that is particularly disadvantaged for this style of play.

Overall, I’d say that the personal story is…unfriendly to first-playthrough characters, and downright not fun to do as a Thief, even if I’d known every mission ahead of time. For comparison, I’ve been leveling my Ranger and also playing personal story at appropriate level, without gearing up or anything; I just hit 60. The experience has been WAY easier, and that difference can’t all be attributed to me simply learning the game better and knowing some of the missions beforehand (I made different story choices, so there are some new missions).

Still, I want to make this clear: I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve died in personal story missions, across all six of my characters. Yes, they can be hard, and yes, some are downright bugged or otherwise artificially hard in ways that players can’t do anything about. (The Greater Good is a fantastic example and I’m glad that’s been tuned – that was legit almost impossible for my Warrior to complete, even playing ranged and with a level 80 Thief helping me. There are just too many enemies there that have devastating AoE attacks, and the Seraph don’t dodge them at all. If they could be revived, that would be one thing, but they can’t.) But I can’t relate to people who are saying they can only beat these missions by chain-rezzing, that they die so much all their armor breaks, etc etc. I’m not going to call such people bad players, because I myself am still a pretty bad player – but are we even playing the same game?

Maybe I just got really lucky or made good storyline decisions? I’m willing to share my build and the storyline choices I made, but this post is already long.

I’ve been really enjoying my Norn Ranger’s personal story quests. Defeating a giant king, becoming an honorary Gear warband member, and foiling looters at archaeological dwarven dig sites where fun accomplishments.

That said, the one Personal story quest that I had some strong language for was called Bad Blood. Its actually not a hard quest, but the very first challenge of it was a semi platformer puzzle with a bottomless chasm (you die if you fall) with a narrow ledge where gusts of wind blow you off if you can’t find shelter every 8 seconds. Even with these qualities, the quest is not too hard. The problem comes from something much more simple: The quest tells you to predict the wind gusts by watching the movement of some flags blowing in the wind. These flags did not help at all. In the end the only reason I barely made it across was because I took to obsessively counting the elapsed time between gust intervals based on when they would hit my pet.
The flags just need to more clearly show the gusts.

Dagdraumur.7296:

I’ve been really enjoying my Norn Ranger’s personal story quests. Defeating a giant king, becoming an honorary Gear warband member, and foiling looters at archaeological dwarven dig sites where fun accomplishments.

That said, the one Personal story quest that I had some strong language for was called Bad Blood. Its actually not a hard quest, but the very first challenge of it was a semi platformer puzzle with a bottomless chasm (you die if you fall) with a narrow ledge where gusts of wind blow you off if you can’t find shelter every 8 seconds. Even with these qualities, the quest is not too hard. The problem comes from something much more simple: The quest tells you to predict the wind gusts by watching the movement of some flags blowing in the wind. These flags did not help at all. In the end the only reason I barely made it across was because I took to obsessively counting the elapsed time between gust intervals based on when they would hit my pet.
The flags just need to more clearly show the gusts.

That quest has it’s very own thread going with soem Dev replies in it and worth a look at:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/story/Bad-Blood/first#post183998

Oh yeah, one more thing I wanted to mention: one of the problems with GW2 PVE overall, which is especially notable in the personal story, is that player damage is ridiculously high compared to NPC damage. (I’m not counting WvW because it’s different there – Keep Lords etc. can actually hurt you.) NPCs are mostly fairly sturdy in terms of armor and health pools, but because their AI is generally not very smart – e.g. don’t dodge ever, don’t move out of AoE, etc – they still get killed off pretty easily, even a lot of the veteran/champion/legendary ones. Therefore, it would help if their damage could be uptuned somewhat – that way at least the enemies would be weaked a bit before the NPCs die. Sayeh al’Rajihd is a good example of an NPC that can actually hurt things, although in her case I’d say she is too strong, since she can quite easily solo the entire mission for you.

Moreover, you can’t revive a lot of NPCs – or even if you can, they often die in such a bad position that it’s suicidal to try and revive them. It just baffles me when I see a single Risen Thrall, at my level, being beat on by a dozen Vigil soldiers, also at my level. I can take it out in like 10 seconds but it takes them a minute or more… I know that this is intended behavior in some missions (Battle of Claw Island), but in others it seems rather unfair (Estate of Decay) because you’re badly outnumbered/up against quite powerful foes and could really use the help. Yes, I’m exaggerating a little, but you get the point.

It’s not a problem if the build I’m playing has so much healing or support so that these NPCs don’t die in the first place, or if I am able to deal so much damage (without dying myself) that it more than compensates for their lack of it. Unfortunately there are a good number of incompatible builds out there, and I get the feeling that the average player does not appreciate having to swap their traits (and possibly even buy new skills/equipment) just to complete the personal story.

I still think that “Unacceptable” is a rather harsh and strong term to use, though. It’s okay to be upset about a game’s difficulty, but consider whether you’d honestly use that phrase in real life to a developer’s face.

Personnal story is hard
Very hard indeed when you think it’s a part of the game that’s supposed to be done solo.
Support NPC do nothing except aggro mobs on you and then faint, leaving you alone to save the day.
What I don’t like about them is that feel more like a chore than something Epic.
(well at least till
The RingMaster:
Glad you balanced that one, cause it was boring to run around the place for 15min
casting Chaos Storm and Phase Retreat.

The Queen’s Justice:
Support NPC: all dead in first 2 min
I passed it jumping from one side of the throne to the corner of the room (the mobs don’t jump and go back and around) and killing them one by one.
Was it doable ? Yes
Was it Fun ? Hell NO !

I’ve finished the storyline on a human necro, and I dont recall any major difficulties aside from the bugged mission in Orr.

Asura ele is a whole different ballgame though

Some examples..

Salt in the wound – Plunku + 1 golem is fine, Plunku + 4 golems is a pain in thekitten Especially when your 3 npcs ‘helpers’ died in the first 5 seconds. But I think the main problem I had with it, was the way she teleported onto the spawn point, meaning you could not die & rez the entire mission.

To clarify, even when you died on the far side of the room, and she had fully reset, the moment you respawned at the entrance, the boss and any remaining golems teleported onto the spawn point and wiped you out within 2 seconds. Perhaps it was intended to stop graveyard zerging and learn to do the fight in one go, but it was irritating to have to restart the whole mission each time. Harsh learning curve at level 14 ><

Free Rein – Talking to kudu and zoija, implies you must ‘pass through’ or ‘defeat’ the four types of elementals, 1 by 1, so thats largely what I tried to begin. With 2 elementals at each shrine though, its impossible to kill them, as they almost instantly respawn. I’ve managed to get to kudu a few times, by wall hugging and scraping over rocks, to gank him from behind. Its just not an obvious thing to try.

Especially as, similar to the previous mission, a single death means you need to restart. Kudu teleports to the spawn, or zoija+robot bug at the start.

I saw in an article somewhere, that guildwars 2 doesn’t have a tutorial per se, or any explanation of your class. Its supposed to ‘teach you along the way’, with personal story and skill challenges. I don’t want the game difficulty to be made easier, but perhaps a little bit more explanation about combo’s, and the way classes can utilise themselves, might help people get a better start.

I’m not sure just slowing down the enemy movement speed will do much to make Defending The Keep any less punishing considering the sheer number of them. Remember, the game scales players down to level 26 at most and every zombie has the ability to cause poison and cripple with every attack.

One hit and your movement speed is cut in half, and you loose about 20 HP every second. Considering how little HP you have at level 26, that’s huge.

Vili.8719:

The difficulty of the personal story missions is largely profession-based, and only somewhat related to skill/build/equipment/etc. Thief happens to be one of the worst professions for doing the personal story, period, a topic I wrote about in great length on the wiki and will probably continue to in the future.

I have to agree with this and I wish I would have known this before starting the game with a thief, which, in the end, really ruined my enjoyment of the game. I love the story aspect of this game, but starting as a thief just made it an awful experience. It nearly made me quit the game altogether (and I did for several days), but I’m thinking of giving it another shot with a different profession (one that is ranged with pets/minions since melee really suffers in this game.)

I would almost suggest adding a rating (star) system to class selection in the character creation screen.

Thief – PVE Difficulty – * * * * *

Tera had this on their class select screen. Might be something to look into. That, or as the poster above said, the game doesn’t teach you well enough how to manage your class in certain fights. Or maybe the thief needs to be looked at some more.

I do want to add that when I realized how much easier the game can be with pets/minions and ranged weapons, I tried the two thief skills that spawn minion thieves with a SB and, WOW, it was so much easier. However, for me, if I wanted to play a ranged pet/minion class I’ll just play a ranger or necro, and I think that’s what I’m going to do.

Fix the quest “Killing Fields” please…
Seriously… it’s not fun to shove like 8 abomination owning every npc
then all of them come chasing after you just from trying to aggro one of them.
I’m warrior and I built mine as a tank (sword and shield) they just keep on stunning
you again and again and again until you die.

Difficulty is amazingly high and stupid. I died until all of my armor pieces are broken…

Mission: Mired deep Character: charr warrior lvl15

I’ts doable until the boss, the veteran skale bog, lvl 16 and the quest is lvl 14. I’ve tried every tactic possible, his regen just outheals any damage I can do. I have good gear, I’ve traited to maximize dps, tried to kill him faster then he regens, it’s impossible; tried to lure him back to the surface, won’t work thanks to euryale who for some reason stays in the middle of the pool, and doure doomsday who’s doing nothing, he’s not attacking or anything, just swims between me and euryale, waiting for the first to die to rez him. I’ve looked for guides, yes, they basically say out dps him or lure him to the surface.
I don’t really know what do next, I work for living so I can’t browse the web all the day to find advice, builds or whatever. I bought the game because I thought it suited casual play style, if it doesn’t, just say, I will move to other games. I don’t mind challenging games, but this is not challenging, it’s just frustrating to the point I’m not going to play the game further if it’s a mix of mindless easy gameplay and impossible missions. This really reminds me of GW1 in its earlier months, thunderhead keep anyone?
I work in the software industry, I know how hard it is to deliver a product of this quality and scope, and how easy it is to overlook something like this, but please re tune the difficulty in these missions, they are not challenging, just frustrating.

I just came here to start this topic, but it looks like I’m a bit late.

I made a lv80 Engineer, and now I’m almost a 30 Mesmer, these story quests are way too hard. I can beat them, but I feel like I’m cheating when I do.

I have to single out one enemy, or try to. While other enemies just stand there like an idiot, it’s incredibly game breaking, but really the only way to get through it. My enemies can definitely see me, but I’m not ‘close enough’ for the AI to detect me. If I have to take advantage of a game’s faults like that to get through this stuff, there is something wrong. I understand this is an MMO, and I have no problem with that in the rest of PvE, but I thought at least the personal story quests would be more than what previous MMOs were.

I can’t really suggest a way to fix it though, because I do love the difficulty of dungeons and the rest of PvE, and if the stories were any more do-able, they’d be too easy. It’s a real shame though when I’m level 28, wearing 28 armor, and I run into my 24 story quest, and die in 2 hits from a mob of 8 Risen, while all my NPCs don’t help, at all.

Just cam across this thread, so though I would throw in my two cents. I totally agree that every single personal story line has way too many quests that are too hard. As an altoholic, I have been trying all of them. The difficulty is, as I saw others post, so bad that I have all but quit doing the personal story quests altogether because they are not fun.

I agree that something needs to be done across the board, not just this quest or that quest. Personal story should be all about me, as it is stated by ANet, but it feels more like it is all about the devs laughing at us for not being good enough to fight 20 mobs all at once. Extra levels help some, but not much. Better gear helps some, but not enough. Getting friends helps a lot, but why have a Personal Story that you cannot do by yourself? Seems silly to me.

Anyway, I love GW2 over all. But I currently hate the personal storylines and do not play them anymore.

I’m a character addict, so I have almost one of every possible variation – some I play with friends, others I tend to solo. And I’ve certainly noticed that the difficulty of personal stories varies depending on race, class, and character choices. There’s been more than a few times where I’ve had to wait a couple of extra levels, or until I could get a friend to run one with me, but one way or another, I’ve made it through pretty much all of them. Except – my highest character so far is a lvl 28 Norn Elementalist and I found most of her personal storyline not easy necessarily but doable with minimal difficulty. Right up until I hit the start of the Order set… Now granted, Silent Warfare is set for lvl 30, but even at that I can’t see how it’s doable without a very large group unless I’m missing something somewhere. The volume of NPCs I could handle (eventually) through attrition but the attacks include catapult-style massive hits – it only takes one and I’m down before I’ve even had a chance to get to the NPCs. And the only support NPCs I seem to have are Eir and her wolf. So either it’s bugged or, as I said, I’m missing something because I just don’t see any way to get through it.

“Equal risk/effort should result in equal rewards”. That’s part of my own game design philosophy; while there’s no such thing as a perfectly balanced game, it’s not okay when some professions just coast through content without even trying and others have to fight tooth and nail to do the same thing. The only exception is when the additional challenge has extra rewards, such as being fun in and of itself, or giving better loot – but the personal story rewards are static, and unless you’re a bit of a masochist, the extra hassle of Thieves in the personal story is not fun either. I’m all for “hard mode” type content, where I can choose to increase the difficulty if I want to; it shouldn’t be a punishment forced on me just because of the profession I choose to play. I mean, that almost makes sense in other games with a so-called “trinity”. When I play Final Fantasy and set up my party consisting of entirely Black Mages, I know I’m in for a challenge because I have a very one-sided team and the game was not designed to be (easily) beatable that way. But the whole premise of Guild Wars 2 is that every profession has a little bit of everything – offense, defense, support, healing, whatever – so even though some professions are better at some things, no profession is supposed to be forced into one particular build/role because that’s all they can do.

And the Thief does have a lot of different offensive and defensive options. I’m just saying that the unique setup of the personal story frequently negates the best of them. (I hear Elementalist has it even worse, though, and I sincerely feel for those people, since I thought I had it pretty hard.)

The quote button is missing for me right now, which is unfortunate, so: Averis, that’s exactly what I had to fall back on a lot of the time too. The trouble with that tactic, though, is that in some missions I could really only make progress every 180 seconds while waiting for Thieves Guild to recharge. Ambush Trap alone isn’t really enough. It’s hard to pinpoint specific cases, too, because it honestly depended entirely on aggro luck. Some missions had tons of enemies and yet they mostly ignored me, so in those cases I switched back to Dagger Storm. Other times there were just a few foes, but for some reason they really wanted to kill me, and I seriously needed all the NPC help I could get. I had to retry a few missions due to bugs, but even on a repeat the outcome would be totally different.

It’s not even that I mind playing slow, or playing ranged on my Thief (I like bows/guns), but it’s totally inefficient compared to doing the exact same missions on my identically geared Ranger, who has dedicated pets and much better ranged damage anyway. It’s true that Ranger has significantly more health, better healing options, and better Downed state (for personal story anyway), and it’s true that I know the game a lot better now.

But still… it’s discouraging when I play on my Ranger and just steamroll my way through every personal story mission, knowing that these same missions were hour-plus tests of skill/patience for my Thief. I’m not using hyperbole either. On my Thief, I had to carefully manage my pulls and try my best to only fight a few enemies at a time, or I’d die/have to run away no matter how well I fought. And forget about boss fights: if I couldn’t get Trahearne or someone else to tank, I was reduced to running around in circles and plinking at the foe with my shortbow/pistol for very minor damage, while spending most of my initiative on defensive skills.

My Ranger doesn’t care at all about pulls. I just fire Barrage and hit as many things as possible, and it doesn’t even matter if there are Veteran Risen Abominations or whatever. I know I can beat them, even if I change to melee and don’t kite. Half the time I’m not even using any of my utility skills or my elite because I don’t need to. It’s not like Thief where I have to use every trick in the book, including spamming my panic button elite, just to stay alive, much less kill things reasonably quickly.

I dunno. Maybe Ranger is just one of the best classes for the personal story or something; I haven’t played other professions far enough to be able to comment on that. But the huge disparity in difficulty leads me to believe that there’s at least something to the opinion that Thieves are unfairly shafted during the personal story. At the very least, I think it’s perfectly valid to warn first-time players that Thief isn’t the easiest PvE profession.