Guild Wars 2

Just going to chime in that I find the personal story really quite easy, to the point where I was attempting it about 2 levels below recommended while I could. (One bugged quest got me to leave it alone for a while, and by the time they fixed it I was level 80)

The only time I found it hard was when I was 5 levels too low, and the quest was bugged.

For the record, I main an Engineer, Pistol/Shield, rocket turret, rifle turret, supply drop, grenade kit (Which is pretty useless solo, as you can’t kite very well while using it)

Count my vote for “Please don’t make the Personal Story boring by making it any easier”

As for traits, I was built pretty glass cannon on stats for most of my leveling.

Best advice I can give a struggling engineer is:
Mobility: Dodge-roll, kite, and circle-strafe. You’re a guns-only class, think like you’re playing an action-shooter.
Interrupts: Shields are excellent. It’s stacked with interrupts/counters. Double-tap 4 to get melee off you (with an interrupt), double-tap 5 for another interrupt. If you need more interrupts, bring the bomb kit for it’s toolbelt skill.
Damage: Your best mob killer is either the grenade kit or the bomb kit. If you use grenades, learn to double-tap the attack button to fire them fast, it lets you see the targiting reticle better than the “fast-cast” option. Also, if you’re using grenades, trait for them: the number of effects you can stack on them makes them really powerful.

Generally for defence, I focus on interrupts and invunerable frames rather than stats. Full defensive stats only let you take one or two more hits before you’re downed, they don’t let you sit there and eat attacks without moving.

The thumper turret doesn’t help that much either. I’ve tried all of the engineer toolset setups and nothing shines as a particularly good solution for the multi mob encounters. The volume of mobs usually means my turrets break quickly regardless of the type, and as my healing turret goes on cooldown I’m left hanging with unsatisfactory flamer/grenade AOE and no heals of my own.

That and the fact that the mobs just hit REALLY hard in packs of the size they come in right now. Even if I could damage them more, they still rip me to shreds. It’s common for me to lose half of my health 4 seconds into a wave. Individually I’m sure I could handle them perfectly fine, even coming in pairs, but 4+ is unmanageable and makes me a sad panda.

For multi-mob encounters: Bring a Shield!

Seriously, the Engineer’s shield is the best defensive weapon I’ve seen in the game. Both skills can be used to counter ranged mobs, and both skills can be used to counter melee mobs. They’re just excellent panic buttons. Bring along the bomb kit for PBAoE Launch and Blind if you’re struggling, but I never feel the need to.

Ofelie.3786:

The thumper turret doesn’t help that much either. I’ve tried all of the engineer toolset setups and nothing shines as a particularly good solution for the multi mob encounters. The volume of mobs usually means my turrets break quickly regardless of the type, and as my healing turret goes on cooldown I’m left hanging with unsatisfactory flamer/grenade AOE and no heals of my own.

That and the fact that the mobs just hit REALLY hard in packs of the size they come in right now. Even if I could damage them more, they still rip me to shreds. It’s common for me to lose half of my health 4 seconds into a wave. Individually I’m sure I could handle them perfectly fine, even coming in pairs, but 4+ is unmanageable and makes me a sad panda.

Running my engineer I find the bomb kit works best in the personal story line and PvE. Simply wade into a bunch of mobs and drop the smoke bomb then bomb away. I usually drop everyone before the smoke screen combo disappears so they can’t hit me because they are blind. Be sure to take the bomb damage radius trait and extra explosion damage traits in the explosives line.

For vets/champs I simply kite them around in circles dropping bombs along the way. They simply walk right into them. Ranged vets and champs can be a bit harder.

I also have the crate as my elite, the healing kit as my heal, and rocket turret and elixer X I think as my other 2, but they can easily be swapped out for something else. I just use elixer X for the run buff in PvE combined with the healing kit, I’m 100% speed buffed wherever I go with the elixer CD reduction and duration traits.

I run full explosives and then 2 majors into the lines for healing and toughness for PVE.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Unless it’s a “boss” (i.e. they have a special frame around their profile like veterans or champions) it’s exactly the same creature in story steps and the explorable world.

Unless I’m completely inept I seem to have noticed that critters out in the world come in two flavors: the regular variety that are scattered about and the heartier variety that spawn during events that do more damage and take much greater effort to kill.

By and large I don’t have any complaints regarding the difficultly of story missions. I agree that they are generally more difficult, but I don’t mind. The only things so far I’m having lots of trouble with are risen, cause they dish out an extreme amount of damage, move way too quickly, travel in large packs that like to swarm you, seem to completely ignore all my illusions, and take a ridiculous amount of damage before dying. These guys are the only things I’m learning to hate in GW2, cause it just becomes irritating instead of fun.

Now I’m not calling for a global nerf to story difficulty, but I do sometimes wonder if we’re getting the event versions of critters instead of the normal ones.

tenebreoscure.9386:

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 second the issue with Soure Doomsday. He just swims around never attacking. Meanwhile, once the others start attacking, they won’t break off and retreat which ends with them dying over and over.

I don’t think this issue is as cut and dry as ’It’s too hard, fix it.’ I think it goes much deeper than that because for some classes it’s incredibly easy, where for others it’s near impossible. This was true for most of the personal story quests for me. When I ran through with different characters I discovered that they can be -very- class bias.

That in mind, it COULD be a class balance issue and some classes needing abilities to counter those situations. I could totally see a viable addition of PVE only skills here to help counter this issue like they did with GW1.

I simply gave up playing my engineer and went back to my guardian. Dying all the time is no fun at all. They really need to space out the mobs so you can take them on individually, and that goes for the pve world too. Three or more mobs and its always a fight to the death, especially if they use conditions on you.

IF you can get it to load, bringing a friend or two is a good idea for any content in a MMO that feels too hard.

It’s all very well for people to give advice like ‘kite around in circles’. Unfortunately, as has been pointed out before, some of these personal stories involve operating in confined spaces and it’s not quite so simple as it’s made out to be to kite in these situations, especially with some of the close up camera stuff being VERY confusing to look at.

I wonder whether an earlier comment hit the nail on the head. It seems that the missions might be fine and balanced if you’re a guardian or warrior, and just possibly most of the evaluative feedback came from people playing these classes? If you play a primarily ranged character (eg elementalist – yes I KNOW that they have close up skills but a wave of mobs getting close to you normally spells big trouble if you 1) Have low hp and 2) have light armour), let’s say that you are not at an advantage compared with melee specialists in heavy gear!

There may be story line quests in which guardians or warriors are at a disadvantage compared to other professions and it would be interesting to hear any examples which people may have. I’d be prepared to bet, though, that most quests are designed in such a way that these classes don’t have as many problems as some of the others. And, of course, this presents a difficulty. If a quest is no more than a fair challenge to a warrior or guardian, it may very well be extremely difficult for a mesmer or thief, for example. The ideal solution would be to scale the difficulty according to profession, although I fully understand that this might be very difficult to implement.

Bringing a friend, as various people have suggested, seems to make a nonsense of the quests being part of a ‘PERSONAL Story’

I have noticed that enemies in story missions seem harder than in the open world. Maybe it has to do with scaling, aren’t stories scaled to exact levels (ie if you’re level 60 and go into a level 54 mission, you’ll be scaled to level 54), while the open world is a bit softer (like if the area you’re in is intended for level 54s, you’d still be level 55 or 56?).

There’s also an issue that some enemy types are just harder than others, like Destroyer Harpies are harder than regular ones, and story missions often introduce enemy types that you might not have faced in the open world yet, or they come at you in numbers and patterns that you wouldn’t see in the open world, or that you’d at least have back-up for.

I think part of the problem, apart from the levelling aspect, is that in a personal story you’re being forced to take on large groups that most people probably wouldn’t attempt to solo out in the normal PvE world.
When you have mobs that can take you down in two or three hits when it takes you upwards of 20 to seriously affect them, and there are four or five of them, it starts to get a bit tough!

Hardest one I faced was the Skritt and Destroyer mission where you have to set the bomb off. It was in my friend’s story and I went to help him, we were both about ten levels “over” it and it took about six tries.

When we did win, I had to put it down to our tactics and the way I was trying to play it, but it seemed to be overtuned.

My main is an Ele and I have found that the overall difficulty of some of the story missions is too hard. Making something hard doesn’t make it fun. Most of the AI dies too easily, and on your own it takes so very long to rez someone when you are on your own.

I get the feeling that on some of the harder missions, we are experiencing a CoD system, where you have allies that go with you through the story, but in CoD the allies don’t drop dead with a couple of hits. If this is the idea behind the story missions, then maybe the AI allies should be able to withstand more hits, or that we should be able to rez AI allies in Story mode missions, much quicker than in the world.

I have found that some of my characters experienced missions much easier than others, so it might be characters that need some work also.

Asura Guardian Priory and I solo’d all of my missions without dying once. The difficulty of the missions for a guardian I thought was a bit underwhelming.

Seeing as how you can have people join you in story missions I don’t see how any of them could be considered to hard.

Archer Orant.6381:

My suggestion to those having difficulty:
1.) Make sure you are geared to your level.
2.) Try different weapons, skills, and traits.
3.) Attempt to find a guide online of how to finish the mission.
4.) Ask questions in /map as many people will gladly answer.
5.) Change up your tactics, many problems can be fixed this way in a video game.
6.) Spend the coin and buy signets, runes, etc….
7.) Take a breather as sometimes getting frustrated at a mission will only cause you to make more mistakes.
8.) If all else fails and none of the above solved the issue then ask a friend to come help. After all this is a MMORPG not just a RPG.

I think that this is great advice. The problem is, make it too easy, and it’s boring. Make it too hard, and it’s frustrating. And becomes boring. And how do you pitch it just right for everyone?

I know I’m not a good player. I’ve played WoW for 4 years and always been a lousy dps. This game is different, and I enjoy it, but I’m still rubbish at combat, my reaction speeds are slow and I forget to do things that I should do (like using certain special abilities). I’ve levelled a ranger and an elementalist to 30 and done the storylines appropriate to the level, died some of the time but managed. The mesmer I’ve got to 20, same again, done the storyline up to 20. I had some initial problems but it was easier once I got a better grasp of the mesmer abilities and chose which weapons I liked best. The thief? Well I just can’t do the level 10 part of the story, sorry can’t remember the name of the quest, but I have to go and rescue someone, I have a couple of npcs with me including Rylock Brimstone. Now that is too hard for me. I’m surrounded by enemies and it seems when I die and res at the entrance point I res with the enemies surrounding me each time and just die and die until all my armor is broken and I give up.

I went out, got some improved armour and weapons, tried again, defeated the first big wave of enemies, but then got another, same problem. I do agree that the npcs you take with you die way too easily. Maybe that is part of the problem.

I think my main problem is that I can’t get my head around the thief and it’s abilities. The thief seems quite melee based and I do prefer ranged. Yes I know that the thief has ranged abilities too. I’ve been using pistols a lot, for the ranged abilities. My next tactic will be to ask my partner to help me, he’s much better at combat than I am and will probably tell me it’s “easy” (he always does). He has a level 55 guardian and has not complained about the story at all. He said he only really had problems with one mission and he changed his tactics and did it.

I know it’s supposed to be a “personal” story, but surely taking a friend is no different to having a bunch of npcs with you? A friend won’t die so quickly!

I play a Sylvari Ranger (mainly use a longbow and my 2nd set of weapons is a sword with a war horn), most of the personal story lines are either easy or middle of the road. I am level 64 or 65 and playing Durmond Priori story line. Also I am playing at the level I should be, in other words if the instance says recommended level 55 then I play either at 55, 56, or 57, or 58 . Whether it be up close and personal or ranged I really don’t have a problem. I just look at who I am fighting, and make a guess should I try to pull that enemy to take him on alone, or should I just go to him. If I get overwhelmed because I got agro from to many enemies then I just run. Enemies basically will only chase so far. Have I died, yeah a few times, is it just killing the enemy through : go in hit, die, rez, go in hit die, rez, etc? No. My crafting classes are leatherworker and cooking. I almost always have a piece of food active on me (usually for gaining power per kill or reducing the amount of time a condition will last on me). I also almost always have a Boost on me, I seem to have a lot because of drops and completing world events and what not.. don’t really remember where they come from though… Sometimes it is for magic find sometimes it is for health regen or what ever I feel like using at the moment. I wished I knew how to make a video of what I do and how I play so I could upload it and show you what I do and how I do it.

In My opinion the hardness level should not be reduced.

And since I know this is coming up, no I am not an elite level gamer, if I went up against the great gamers I wouldn’t even be lunch I’d be a simple, cheap, entre.

The main skills are set because of my weapons , but the skills on the right side are Healing spring, Flame Trap, Frost Spirit, Seed Turret, and Summon Druid Spirit

There was a previous poster who thought maybe those who were giving feedback about how easy the game was, might be warriors but I actually find warriors and much more difficult to play then a ranger. Stand back and let the stuff fly, then if one of the enemies get close, either swap to my sword and war horn or if there are to many just run in circles. Or if you have to, run away so you can fight another day. That is easier in story mode since the enemies normally won’t respawn, but out in the open world that can get deadly fast, since running means getting more and more agro lol. Which I have done a couple of times. But normally if I run I loose the agro from the problem guy and pick up agro from a lesser creature..

Not sure if this helps but hopefully someone can work with it.

If found that a about 20% of the missions were pretty hard, and 20% way too easy which balances things out imo.

I have to agree with the OP. Even though I only died once on the Vigil quest where Claw Island falls to Zhaitan it was insanely difficult. I don’t mind creative difficulty (jumping puzzles are good example of this). However, just throwing unending waves of mobs at the player is just lazy.

Referring back to the Claw Island quest, there is a point where you need to go rez an NPC, I think her name is Mira. Unfortunately, she is down in the middle of a bunch of Risen and no matter how many you kill, they keep coming. That part took me a good ten minutes of: clear enough Risen, partially rez the NPC, reposition as the next wave comes in, rinse repeat. Thank goodness I was Engineer with decent survival stats and gear else it would have taking much longer to finish if at all.

blueraja, i agree unending waves is silly, but sadly on that particular mission there is an easier way. Instead of going down the ramp through the enemies, go left along the wall and then jump over the short wall behind the enemies. you basically don’t have to deal with any of them. I am a ranger so just before I jumped over the wall.. to go down to mira, i stowed my pet, and then made sure that when i jumped my agro circle wasn’t close to the enemies. then ran rezzed her and ran back away from the enemies and then up a short hill. then turn and ran back towards the door and just made a made dash for the green star. didn’t die once

kateuk.7538:

I think my main problem is that I can’t get my head around the thief and it’s abilities. The thief seems quite melee based and I do prefer ranged. Yes I know that the thief has ranged abilities too. I’ve been using pistols a lot, for the ranged abilities.

Dual pistols aren’t very good.

Grab a short bow, it’s easily one of our top three weapon sets.

Thieves become very strong in pve it’s just the first few levels we struggle with. I’ve had no problems doing story quests 6,7 levels higher than me on my thief.

Personally i would suggest going Dagger/Dagger + Short bow. Trait for initiative regeneration(20 Critical strikes; Signet of power, Signet use. 15 Trickery; Thrill of the crime).

Signet of malice, Signet of shadows, Assassin’s signet and Roll for initiative as utilities. And as your elite either pick Thieves guild of Blade storm. I prefer guild’s for when i’m in trouble.

You run in and spam death blossom, While rolling around gaining might then pop steal when you’re low and continue to pop signets at your will to regain initiative while spinning around bleeding large groups of monsters to death.

I very rarely die. But this build did not come into it’s own until around level 30 or so. On the rare occasion i run out of initiative(Very rarely) all i do is use my daggers number 4 skill which slows large groups of mobs and kite them around for a bit untill either they all drop from bleeding to death or i have more cooldowns/initiative for more bleedings.

One of my other favourite pastimes is to run into large groups of nasties with my short bow and spam cluster bomb in melee range while detonating it for massive aoe bleeding and damage.

The only problem i have is with the nasties who put condition damage on you, they really mess up your day, but this is easily fixed by swapping Malice for Hide in shadows.

Hope this helped.

Zethe.8651:

kateuk.7538:

I think my main problem is that I can’t get my head around the thief and it’s abilities. The thief seems quite melee based and I do prefer ranged. Yes I know that the thief has ranged abilities too. I’ve been using pistols a lot, for the ranged abilities.

Dual pistols aren’t very good.

Grab a short bow, it’s easily one of our top three weapon sets.

Thieves become very strong in pve it’s just the first few levels we struggle with. I’ve had no problems doing story quests 6,7 levels higher than me on my thief.

Personally i would suggest going Dagger/Dagger + Short bow. Trait for initiative regeneration(20 Critical strikes; Signet of power, Signet use. 15 Trickery; Thrill of the crime).

Hope this helped.

Well I was using dagger/pistol but I changed to shortbow for the personal quest, the AoE attacks really helped. I don’t like too much AoE normally as it can pull too many mobs but it does help if the mobs are pulled anyway. by the way I forgot to mention I’m a charr thief. I think maybe it’s the charr storyline having huge numbers of enemies that makes it hard. I got my partner to help me, with his help it was done easily and I didn’t die once. He carried on helping me with the next part, again an insane number of enemies but we did it relatively easily. I suspect that he actually did most of the work!

Anyway thanks for the advice.

I came here to add to the chrous: Personal story “difficulty” does not fit the GW2 manifesto. It is a horrible experience, especially on cloth wearing classes.

I just did “The Floating Grizwhirl” quest (level 12) on my mesmer, 3 spiders spawned and after I killed those 3 human mobs formed that had daze….and it took me forever to kill them. No I did not die, but that is because of my superior skill, I can only imagine how a “casual” will fare in this quest.

This is ridiculous and unacceptable. I actually noticed that the mobs self heal if you don’t kill them fast enough….when you have 3 mobs on your kitten and you are running around pressing keys and TAB furiously, you dont have the flipping time to kill the mob dead…..and it heals 50% of its HP ….

Just awful.

Awful.

Uchi.2419:

TL;DR
Spread your traits around. Go for damage, but also for some toughness/vitality. Pay attention, and most importantly, Learn to play.

I had almost forgotten that most MMOs are filled with losers, thanks for reminding me.

Maybe instead of wasting time on a stupidly designed quest, I can get off the internet and learn some kills, advance my career etc.

The most irritating thing about the personal story is that if I am too high level for it, I will be reduced to a level below the mobs’ level and then they cream me. It seems particularly sadistic.

lunawisp.2378:

I think part of the problem, apart from the levelling aspect, is that in a personal story you’re being forced to take on large groups that most people probably wouldn’t attempt to solo out in the normal PvE world.

I think you nailed it. The game basically teaches us right off the bat that charging into half a dozen enemies is not a bright idea … then it throws twice that number at us in a story mission. It doesn’t make much sense.

My guardian has finished Battle of Claw Island as Vigil, and I have a warrior and elementalist who just joined the Vigil and Priory, respectively. Some of the missions have been a bit hairy, and some (like saving Mira on Claw Island) are just badly designed, but for the most part I had great fun and hadn’t yet hit a mission that made me swear at the screen.

Until last night. Defending the Keep as a charr helping the Vigil. One moment I was firing a cannon and thought things were decently under control. Then … BAM! Risen horde at six o’ clock. “Fall back!” yelled my Vigil contact, and boy I was falling back all right. The NPCs died in moments, including my poor warband-mate. And then there I was with over a dozen risen on my tail. Kiting? Forget it, they’re too fast. Sword & board for some defense? Dead. Longbow AoE? Dead. Stomp to give me breathing room and Signet of Stamina to cleanse the poison they inflict? That helped for all of three seconds. And every time I respawned, they all homed in on me again. The cooldowns on most defensive and utility abilities feel too long in general in this game, IMO, especially in a situation like that. I think I died three or four times, it was just frustrating. There wasn’t any real time to ponder changing weapons or skills either.

I have two accounts and am playing all 8 classes through as many of the storyline quests as I can, and in general I can get through the storyline quests when my char is at the intended level with level appropriate gear (maybe a little better than typical, because of hand-me-downs and drops from the other chars which are sometimes a few levels higher).

But there have been two missions which have just been impossible for me, and the OP is talking about Armaments (level 22), which is one of them. The other was The Championship Fight (level 19). And the character I was having trouble with was also a Thief. I haven’t tried these missions with other chars.

A lot of the advice being given here is good general advice that doesn’t work in these two quests.

Take kiting. In armaments the boss is a golem that spawns dredges, 3 at a time. You can kite, and eventually you can separate the dredges from the golem, but you can’t separate the dredges, they’re linked so if one aggros they all do. If you perhaps can kill 3 dredges that are higher level than you, when you return to the golem you’ll find he’s summoned 3 more. Kiting flat out fails.

In The Championship Fight the guy you have to kill has a warp-to-enemy-and-smack-him skill that recharges in a couple seconds. I wasn’t able to kite successfully there either, even with speed boosts.

As for whittling down, that’s out for these two quests also. The golem summons 3 more dredges faster than I can whittle.

To get past The Championship Fight, I went out and surfed for Thief PvE builds, and the best thief advice is the dagger/pistol + shortbow build that OP is using. I switched to that and still had trouble with The Championship Fight, so I posted in the Thief forum and asked for advice and was basically told “everyone has trouble with that, other professions too”. So I just went off and leveled my thief up to level 30 before coming back. That got me the elite Thieves Guild skill, and with that I got past The Championship Fight because the boss whittled the minions while I took him out. I also partly got lucky, because I was able to backstab him. Usually he turns around so fast you can’t get behind him, but combined with Hide in Shadows I managed it.

I haven’t gotten past Armaments yet but I can improve my armor a bit so I will and try again before I say its totally impossible.

Also I don’t have a rebuttal for the point about dodging. I admit I’m not good at dodging, I’m over 50 and my reflexes aren’t the same as when I was 20. With a pile consisting of my character, two shadow thieves, the golem, 3 dredge and my Wurm all throwing stuff around, I can barely see the golem let alone catch when he’s winding up and get my dodge off in time. And the guy is taking all the minions down really fast and then taking me down in about two shots. He seems way overpowered for level 22 characters.

So I think the thief is just very (maybe totally) reliant on dodging, and if you aren’t great at it, hang it up and reroll, or wait for them to buff some skills or something. I think anet is faced with the problem of trying to make the thief not too uberpowered in PvP while not making him too underpowered in PvE where it’s many to one against you. Unless they go the way they did with GW1 and have separate skills, its going to stay a non-competitive PvE class for many players.

I’ll just say “ditto” to the personal story quests being far too difficult for their expressed level to complete solo and players should not be forced to beg for partners or groups to do a one minute story line quest instance which they will eventually not be able to get anyway the longer the game is out and the more scare lower level players become.

Having to constantly rez and “win by attrition” if possible is not only utterly frustrating it totally destroys story immersion enjoyment.

I really don’t see how it is too hard. I might be a slightly above average player, but I pretty much breezed through the whole story, solo, first try. And the lvl 1 – 60 story quests I even did while I was a few levels below recommended. To give an outline of my story: I play sylvari warrior, chose for the vigil, and direct assaults whenever they were possible

Tbh I would be sad if they made the story quests I played through any easier. Only a bugfix here and there would be nice.

Just did Level 16 “Accusation” and another WTF. 7-8 mobs hitting on you and your only choice is to die or leave the story instance.

So what’s the intention of this design? Make sure you always die? Make sure you get the frustration? Make sure that if you want to stop some sort of violence, you always get punished? It is like you get a fist on you from a shopkeeper the moment you enter a shop. Nightmare mode for everyone … sure you get a very decent response from your customer.

@Veldan, I think its just a few of the storyline quests that are too tough. I have been getting through almost all on the first try with all my characters — except this thief on the two quests I mentioned. One thing in particular making Accusation hard for thieves is that the mobs are immune to blindness. Since I wrote my post above I got all level 30 gear, maxed out runes and jewelry for Toughness, swapped my Dagger/Pistol for Dagger/Dagger (since the Dagger/Pistol has two useless blind skills), swapped for more quest-specific utility skills and I still got pwned. As in after the golem had taken down all my summons he two-shotted me, with the first hit doing 3/4 of my health. What’s really sick is Accusation is a chosen quest, I could have taken the alternative, but I’d already done that with my ranger (and breezed through it). Too bad I can’t go back and re-choose. In most MMOs you can abandon a quest, but not in the storyline.

I also noticed, I think, that the golem got some healing somehow, I think had him down to 1/4 and then he was full again, but maybe that was not the golem. Whatever, Accusation is just abusively difficult, for thieves. Btw, in this face-off you’re in a small cave with no room to kite. You can kite out of the tunnel, but you run out of real estate quickly that way too as all you have is a thin strip of land to kite in.

I found most of the personal story (for a human mesmer) had acceptable difficulty, with it getting actually easier with the 50-80 steps. Only one I considered very difficult ( beatable solo but I did die twice) was the one in Divinities reach about stopping the grizwhirl. And that one was tuned down later on.

Alot of the early difficulty comes from not being familiar with the class and the game mechanics (one shots you can avoid with dodge etc). I’m happy with the difficulty in general as experienced so far.

If the concern is about specific missions its probably best to single them out in a seperate thread instead of this general complaint about difficulty. That way people that did them can chime in on their experience with that particular mission.

As I have suggested elsewhere, because of the high difficulty in completing the storyline quests, the Devs should give us some Bot Heros that can actually fight as in the Guild Wars original, or at least a good healer.
Playing characters without good healing buffs must struggle all the time. About time ANET for all their good points gave credence to the complaints about the storyline quests and their imbalanced difficulty.
Games are supposed to be FUN not a labour of torment

Put a longer post in this forum last week. In the main I agree. Three main points:
1)Those that feel balance is fine probably play an easier profession. Just an observation.
2) The difference between my warrior/guardian/ranger and my elementalist on personal story missions is a night and day. Geared relatively balanced regardless of mission, my elementalist will die much more
3) The personal story missions with gimmick mechanics are a problem. If you give a player a gimmick device to use for a mission it can be fun IF that gimmick makes the player feel more powerful than they usually do. As an example, there’s no reason getting a fire golem suit that my cohort tells me is specifically for fire in the volcano mission on the priory line should lose half it’s health from a flame wave while trying to dodge the multiple lava grub spawns and a suit that ‘misses’ the thing in front me half the time. It’s a personal story mission, it doesn’t affect balance out in the rest of PVE. If you make us use something it shouldn’t feel like a chore. That feels like bad design.
3) Downleveling is a great idea most of the time. However, if feels off when a player is downleveled many levels below mobs just hanging out in a zone (not bosses or champions). I was running through the charr 50ish zone last night to get to a personal story point on my 65 guardian and had to go well around an area where the mobs were 59 and I was being downleveled to 51. It really seemed odd.

Overall, love the game. Just that it shouldn’t feel like a struggle to enjoy my profession of choice on personal story.

Animok.2789:

3) The personal story missions with gimmick mechanics are a problem. If you give a player a gimmick device to use for a mission it can be fun IF that gimmick makes the player feel more powerful than they usually do.

This is a good point, yes.

And don’t get me started on the various transformations and disguises, which cripple the player from the get-go because you can’t attack on the move while wearing them. In a game that emphasizes movement so much, that is a huge problem.

I’d also like to add that we should have some time to read the gimmick’s skill descriptions and try them on on mooks before having to use it in a serious battle.

I can’t speak for others, but as a human guardian the personal story has been quite easy with only a few road bumps here and there.

I finished both instances of Claw Island solo, and on the first try with no checkpoints, and no walkthrough. I wasn’t over-leveled for either instance.

I can say that if you’re fighting more than five enemies or two champions at the same time, you’re doing something wrong. You’re either out of position or over agroing mobs. In the instances where you have to fight a dozen or so warriors, you usually have a dozen or NPCs you can use as meatshields while you nuke down the mobs with AOE.

I hate to say it, but it could just be that you need more practice at kiting/evading. That or you’re not changing your build/weapons to manage enemies effectively.

There are some personal storyline quests where it is almost impossible to kite/evade because of the limited space available. And the NPCs get downed fairly quickly. This is especially apparently when playing a non-AoE profession such as mesmer and mobs have to be whittled down one by one instead of taking massive spread damage. By the end of some of the missions, I was the only fighter left alive and had to fight slow battles of attrition.

For the record, I have completed the personal storylines on both a human mesmer and an asuran engineer and the difference is quite remarkable, with the engineer in grenade/bomb build wiping out the waves of spawning mobs with ease. For fights with a vet or champ, the mesmer really shined.

(For the record, this was before the mesmer greatsword fix, which greatly improved our “AoE” capabilities; and before I realized that power/prec/crit or burst damage is king in pve)

I have played 3 different classes, a warrior, a thief and a mesmer and I can say from my experience there are definitely certain part of the story where there is a problem with the difficulty. It’s not about fighting mobs with champions or multiple mobs, it’s because certain part of the story you have no choice since you are practically thrown into the fight, right after a cutscene, etc.

In one of my warrior story I was thrown right into a fight with multiple abominations and a boss, in the end all the NPC died and I was the only one left, luckily I was over-level by a lot so I took care of them using range and kitting.

On the Claw Island story itself, I have seen multiple Vigil trying to take down lesser number of Risen and fail.

On my thief, during the circus storyline, you have to fight 3 carnies that if you are not careful can permanently keep you stun, so you had to kite them. The fight actually starts in a small room, so if you fail to leave the room good luck killing them.

The main problem to me is the NPC are practically useless, in an early story with my mesmer, where me and Logan suppose to ambush the White Mantle, Logan and all the Seraph died, seems like the ambush went the other way around lol. When you think about it, how can Logan a hero died so easily from a few White Mantles and how can when both the Seraph and White Mantle have the same amount of soldiers but the Seraph got wipe instead.

I can see how it came be very annoying and frustrating to some players when you story become a series of frustrating fights, rather than something you can enjoy.

A couple of notes from my experiences:

1. The storyline missions seem to get a lot easier after about 65. In fact, some of the missions in the 70’s range are ridiculously easy.

2. The biggest problem I see is that the storyline missions don’t take into account class or character builds. Some missions I found incredibly difficult as one class but walked through it with another.

3. There are still TONS of bugs, particularly in the 60+ missions. Some of them are down right funny (a big death and mourning scene for a character THAT DIDN’T DIE, and was sitting there fighting right along with us as he was being mourned). Part of the problem is that the storyline missions are just not finished. If many of them just don’t work I would guess that most of them have not been balanced.

4. I agree that during most of my missions the NPC’s all took dirt naps while I had to do all of the work. Oddly enough this was either fixed recently or the NPC’s in the level 60+ missions are much better than lower level missions, because the problem mostly went away after level 60 or so.

The NPC was never fix, since I was playing my lower level alt as well and they all die very fast on early story. Yeah story after level 60 the NPC get a big boost, they become very useful, too useful in some that one of my guild mate was saying he was having trouble getting kills.

I am not sure how the story is tested but definitely it was not tested on all classes. A story quest that is cake walk for 1 class can be hell for another. I think a simple fix to the NPC to be more useful in early story would be good.

Veldan.4637:

I really don’t see how it is too hard. I might be a slightly above average player, but I pretty much breezed through the whole story, solo, first try. And the lvl 1 – 60 story quests I even did while I was a few levels below recommended. To give an outline of my story: I play sylvari warrior, chose for the vigil, and direct assaults whenever they were possible

Tbh I would be sad if they made the story quests I played through any easier. Only a bugfix here and there would be nice.

And there’s your answer. You were on a warrior. Warriors and Guardians have the easiest survival rates in the storyline. Try doing them on a thief or elementalist, ROFLOL.

The personal stories are not very hard. its quite possible to do it under lvl by 3 or so. A problem i dont like is that there are too many monsters that are very buff. takes too long to kill and gets boring and frustrating.

you cant nerf the difficulty just because there are people finding it difficult. an easy mode would be really nice though so all can get through.

I finished my personal story a couple weeks ago. As most have said many of the personal stories are currently imbalanced. A large amount are very hard, and some include a large number of mobs coming at you at once that are much stronger than you expect, and you basically have to die and rez, kill one, die and rez again, until you can proceed. On these missions it can be extremely frustrating, but I never found one that was impossible to finish, it simply took time and attrition (and a big repair bill) to complete. Later on at higher levels there are a couple rare missions that are so easy you simply shake your head and wonder why they weren’t all made that way.

Right now it seems to me the approach they are taking is to look for specific complaints for particular missions and evaluate those for balancing. Eventually they will get to them all, but it may take a while using this method, and frankly I find it very disappointing. I really think the entire story system needs to be re-engineered. At the very least, you should have your home instance recognize your accomplishments during and after your story conclusion, so there is some meaning to the entire thing and you have some permanence to your efforts.

In regards to implementing an “easy” mode, the problem they have with this or even trying to have an option like a “Personal Story Difficulty” setting is that the last mission is actually a group dungeon that you can’t solo (can’t tell you how much this bugs me), so that wouldn’t work. They kind of painted themselves into a corner with that decision unfortunately.

I’ve done a few personal story quests on my thief (up through lvl 52-ish) and I didn’t find any of them impossible, just tedious and difficult. I have two major complaints with personal story quests:

1. Useless NPCs. Claw Island was irritatingly hard (in the OOW storyline) because Tybalt and Trahearne did almost no damage. They would also happily charge off to add more unnecessary Risen to my conga line of kited mobs. By the end of that mission, I would have happily punched Trahearne in the face.

Evidently, my NPCs were also amazing at dropping aggro. More often than not, I was running around trying to kite 4 or 5 Risen with a shortbow. I would also regain any dropped aggro immediately after resurrection or appearing out of stealth.

2. No prep time for special weapons. The quests with unique weapons just don’t give you the necessary time to read the skills, and (usually) you don’t have any trash mobs to experiment on before a major boss battle. You just have to ram your face right into the boss’s fist and hope you can recover quickly enough to beat them.

On a less-related note, whoever said that thieves were disadvantaged underwater: lol. Just lol.

I’ve noticed that NPCs vary greatly in strength. In some missions, they’re useless. In others, three or four of them can drop minions and tank champions all on their own.

Hey all. First post and likely last post. I just uninstalled the game over the difficulty of a personal story mission.

I first tried the level 10 “human street rat” personal story mission “Breaking the Blade” as a level 12 Thief. I had relatively little difficulty with the previous missions, but on this one I died six times in a row. Doc Howler crushed me every time – I killed everyone else, but couldn’t get her below ~25% health. I tried different weapons and different utility skills – nothing got me any farther. So I abandoned the personal story and played the rest of the game.

This morning I returned to “Breaking the Blade” as a fully-equipped level 27 Thief. Green weapons, blue armor, all on-level. I expected to do somewhat better, but… no. Again I was killed over and over by Doc Howler, never getting her below ~25% health.

So I give up. I’ve got less frustrating games I could be playing.

I know. Whine-whine, call the waaaambulance. Normally I’d leave without saying anything, but they asked which personal story missions were unbalanced. It’s only my opinion.

This past week I did Battle of Claw Island and Killing Fields with a friend. Both were frustratingly difficult. We both had characters over level 60 and I have no idea how a single player would be able to do them. Especially since these missions had ZERO drops from mobs, dying so many times and incurring that much repair cost was very much not fun. Then upon completion (after we looked up where we had to be killing things for Claw Island) we got crap items and 5 bags at the end of the mission. So we lost money doing both missions -.-

So yeah, exploring areas out in the world? lots of fun, enjoying the dynamic events! missions? really dreading having to do more of them to get to the high level areas.

stormwaltz.5368:

Hey all. First post and likely last post. I just uninstalled the game over the difficulty of a personal story mission.

I first tried the level 10 “human street rat” personal story mission “Breaking the Blade” as a level 12 Thief. I had relatively little difficulty with the previous missions, but on this one I died six times in a row. Doc Howler crushed me every time – I killed everyone else, but couldn’t get her below ~25% health. I tried different weapons and different utility skills – nothing got me any farther. So I abandoned the personal story and played the rest of the game.

This morning I returned to “Breaking the Blade” as a fully-equipped level 27 Thief. Green weapons, blue armor, all on-level. I expected to do somewhat better, but… no. Again I was killed over and over by Doc Howler, never getting her below ~25% health.

So I give up. I’ve got less frustrating games I could be playing.

I know. Whine-whine, call the waaaambulance. Normally I’d leave without saying anything, but they asked which personal story missions were unbalanced. It’s only my opinion.

As bad as the story missions can be, you’re missing out. The story mission are literally once every 2 levels and the gameplay between them (read 80% of the game) is fantastic.
I’m not going to sit there and tell you, you need to like the game or play it, but thankfully, the personal story is a very small part of it. Outlevel each by even one level and they shouldn’t be too bad. The game is a lot of fun though.

My advice is to stick with it. But it’s your time, play what you enjoy.

stormwaltz.5368:

Hey all. First post and likely last post. I just uninstalled the game over the difficulty of a personal story mission.

I first tried the level 10 “human street rat” personal story mission “Breaking the Blade” as a level 12 Thief. I had relatively little difficulty with the previous missions, but on this one I died six times in a row. Doc Howler crushed me every time – I killed everyone else, but couldn’t get her below ~25% health. I tried different weapons and different utility skills – nothing got me any farther. So I abandoned the personal story and played the rest of the game.

This morning I returned to “Breaking the Blade” as a fully-equipped level 27 Thief. Green weapons, blue armor, all on-level. I expected to do somewhat better, but… no. Again I was killed over and over by Doc Howler, never getting her below ~25% health.

So I give up. I’ve got less frustrating games I could be playing.

I know. Whine-whine, call the waaaambulance. Normally I’d leave without saying anything, but they asked which personal story missions were unbalanced. It’s only my opinion.

I did Breaking the Blade with my thief when she was at the same level as the story, it was surprisingly easy. I can’t really remember how I beat Doc Howler, but I do remember I was using dual pistol and the other weapon set should be sword/pistol.
Probably lots of dodging, smoke, stun, pistol whip. Quinn died early in the fight, though since Doc was focusing on him early on, it helps a bit for me to unload some damage first.

For my thief, I did not have any difficulties on my personal story, she’s now on level 47-48 story and I always do my thief story at the same level or when she’s 1-2 level above.